What I was alive for

05: University of Rain

Recorded August 1998, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

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During my gap between graduating from the then University of Central England in 1995 and getting a publishing job in 1998, I did a load of rubbish temping jobs, signed on the dole for a bit, formed The Regulars and spent a year as a postgraduate at the University of Rain.

Although it is known to most people as the University of Warwick, it isn't even in Warwick: it's in Coventry. But Coventry is an industrial city with a massive ring road and Warwick is a posh historic town with tea shops and a castle. That's the sort of university Warwick is. They had a PR disaster the other year when they considered refusing places on their courses to anyone who couldn't bring a laptop to lectures. That's the sort of university Warwick is. The lecturers reluctantly commute up from London on the days when they can't avoid the tiresome duty of actually doing some lecturing; in stark contrast with the friendly and approachable staff of UCE, you got the feeling they would sooner die than have a pint with you after a seminar. That's the sort of university Warwick is.


The campus is on the very edge of Coventry, surrounded by nothing at all, with shops and banks, and a large students' union building with a cinema and a venue for arts and music; if you live on campus you could quite conceivably pass a whole term without leaving its boundaries. Not that any reasonable person would want to. For all its pretensions to dreaming spire rarefaction, its buildings are aggressively functional, and it may be a first port of call for Oxbridge rejects but it feels like a hospital. (I used to say a prison, but that was exaggerating. A bit.) And yes, it seemed that every time I arrived there, after a two-hour journey from Bearwood involving a train and two buses, it was absolutely pissing it down.

And then there were the people.

These days I think nothing of spending 40 quid on train tickets and hurtling through the country to a popshow or an indiepop club in some city somewhere, in the sure confidence of a sound bank balance and a sofa to sleep on. Actually, it isn't true to say I think nothing of it: although it happens all the time these days, I always think it's an amazing thing, a little miracle. Maybe this is because until I moved to Birmingham in 1992 I was tethered to Grimsby like a goat to a post. Even if I'd known anyone anywhere who was remotely connected to the indiepop scene, I barely had enough money to do anything.

It was remarkable to meet people at Warwick, then, who had clearly grown up in much more affluent surroundings than I had, but whose lives had somehow been all the more limited. "My band's playing a gig in Birmingham this weekend!" I might say to them excitedly. "Do you fancy coming to see us?"

"Your band?" they would repeat with alarm. "Oh... I don't know... I've never been to er, a 'gig'. What are you supposed to do?" They might have visited 20 different countries before their 21st birthday, but they'd never been to a popshow. Or even just a gig.


They weren't all as dull as that, though. In writing this blog I'm perceiving a theme in my songs that I'd never been aware of before: the redeeming power of having amazing friends. It's the central theme of 'Today at Last' (the final track on Effortless) but only lately have I realised that it threads through the ending of 'From a Dark Room' and into 'University of Rain'. The other "northern voice" in this song, and the "you" addressed in the fourth verse, was my friend Dan Wilson – not just the only other northerner for miles around but seemingly the only person at Warwick who liked a few beers and a natter, and had actually heard of football. He supported Barnsley and he drove us all the way to Cleethorpes in his Mini one freezing night in January 1997 to watch them beat Grimsby 3-2. If he hadn't been around I'd probably have given up on the University of Rain on the induction night, because when I got fed up of the red wine and mineral water there'd have been nobody to slink off with for a pint of Beamish in the union.

What about the song, then? Let's start in muso corner this time: I wrote this one, and it uses quite an unusual chord for me. In the main sequence in the verse, it starts on B minor and then the note on the top string of the guitar goes up just one fret and everything else stays the same, so I think that means it goes on to B minor augmented. Woooo! This must be the only augmented chord I've ever used in my whole life. I'm sure I must have discovered it when I played something wrong.

If you listen very closely halfway through the verse (0:37) you can hear Rob doing a brilliant Rob thing: amid all the up-front racket of the two electric guitars, he introduces a layer of very subtle finger-picked acoustic. If you don't know it's there, you don't consciously notice it – but it has a potent effect just below the surface, subtly magnifying and clarifying notes where its course across the fretboard coincides here and there with the other guitars, illuminating each one for an instant at a time, like light reflecting off a disco ball. Wonderful, and pretty, and barely noticeable. Am I suggesting enough of a metaphor for The Regulars yet?

Trivia section: the lyrics for this song were frequently misheard, and the first impression of Stu's mom Val (in the West Midlands they refer to their female parents in the American style) was that the chorus actually began with the words "social bias, solid 'A's". We were all fond of Stu's folks and Val was a big Regulars fan, so I tried to sing much more clearly after that. To be fair to her, as well, it's a highly educated guess given the subject matter of the song.

I like the last verse as well (starting at 1:53), especially the way the broken-down arrangement of the same chords gives a bit of pathos at just the right moment in the lyrics. I like the stop-start thing at the end of it, because it's not quite a conventional stop-start. It's more of a sudden dwindle than an out-and-out stop, and Chris's snare brings it back in with a satisfying smack.



Chris's drumming, in fact, may be the best thing about this song. I like that you can hear it pretty well. 'University of Rain' was written in 1997 and recorded during the second of our three visits to Paul Savage's rural studio, over the weekend of 22 and 23 August 1998. Paul Savage was a man of rock, and as such he believed that drums should always be prominent in the mix. With some songs – 'From a Dark Room', for example – I felt this was less successful. With this one, however, it's great, because of the way the drumming builds up and up and somehow still stutters as it climaxes with the machine-gun rolls of the coda (from 2:31, while I'm making a brief attempt with the vocals to out-Morrissey Morrissey). It's just a shame that the snare drum that was used for the recording gives a sound like a chopstick hitting a copy of the Radio Times.

(Margin note regarding drums being made very loud: indiepop often suffers a similar fate at provincial gigs where there's a house soundman attached to the venue. These, too, are very often vintage men of rock, who deem that drums are the emperor of all music, and every other instrument must bow down low before them in the mix. It works pretty well for Shrag, say, but is less appropriate for a band like Electrophönvintage. These men will always, without fail, also make any keyboard or synth very low in the mix; unless the keyboard or synth is being played by a girl, in which case they won't actually bother plugging it into the mixing desk in the first place.)

Of course, there is something inherently ridiculous about a song with loud distorted guitars protesting angrily about the terrible, gruelling conditions some people have to endure in the course of their postgraduate studies. But really, 'University of Rain' comes from the same place as 'North Star' and 'Lincolnshire Skies'. It's the fourth verse that gives it away ("I never understood where I was from/until I went away"), and that daft bit at the end about red wine and mineral water. Ultimately it's a song about the insecurity of a working-class kid moving through a middle-class culture – an insecurity that's never fully gone away and probably never will. It's a song about looking for somewhere to belong. And any similarity between the endings of 'University of Rain' and 'The Ace of Spades' by Motorhead is entirely intentional.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
A Google map demonstrating the position of the University of Warwick relative to Warwick and Coventry
A short unpublished piece I wrote for a fanzine after Barnsley beat Grimsby 3-2 (pdf)
A review of Effortless (scroll down about two thirds of the page) citing 'University of Rain' in an explication of the tweecore sound

posted by Pete Green @ 01:57