What I was alive for

06: Saturday Song

Recorded c. October 1996, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Shelley Merchant (lead vocal), Pete Green (guitar, backing vocal), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

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When life isn't too hard, one day can seem very much like another. But when most of your week is really quite rubbish, the parts that aren't take on a hallowed and glowing aura of precious inviolability and you cling to them harder and squeeze out every drop of joy that you can.

Yeah, I guess I'm talking about work. Because most work is rubbish, and when you have to do rubbish work it casts a shadow over your whole life.

Early in 1996 my girlfriend and I rented a flat on Sandon Road in Bearwood. We got broken into twice, and the second time they nicked my stereo with a Sugargliders album still on the turntable. The kitchen was too small to turn round in. The couple upstairs were fighting all the time. The furniture was horrible and chintzy and the storage heaters were rubbish so it was freezing cold. I had a shit job at a council depot in Nechells which took ages to get to and it was always snowing on the way, and the strangely quiet, insular Brummies who worked there thought the word 'student' meant anyone who had ever been a student, so to them I was still literally a student even though I'd finished university and got a shit job.


But it was the first flat I rented after graduating, so it felt a bit special, and it was still in Bearwood and I loved Bearwood (even when I later grew to loathe Birmingham). And, as I was finally having to be self-sufficient and do shit jobs to earn money and pay the rent, Saturdays were becoming an increasingly vital escape from the grey drudgery and slush of the working week.

In '35 Hours' I sketched out how work very often saps the life out of people, leaving no energy or inspiration or empathy left to enjoy or create or love. In 'Lie Down and Fight' I set this in a wider context of different lifestyles and aspirations, worldviews and countercultures, and think-habits and that. 'Saturday Song' is essentially another song about work being shit, but without ever actually mentioning work. It enumerates some of the joys of the weekend, and the return to work looms sadly but silently in the background.


So we would get up on a Saturday morning and watch repeats of Grange Hill and have a big breakfast and roll around in the Guardian. We were shivering but happy, and it was a job cooking scrambled eggs on the electric hob, but the Guardian was really quite a good paper at that time. Then, after Football Focus, we might go out and cross the road to catch the number 11 bus down to Harborne – the nice suburb down the road where nobody we knew could afford to live – and potter round the sort of little independent shops that the word 'pottering' was invented for, buying fruit and second-hand stripy tops and things, and at quarter to five I would stand outside the Radio Rentals shop and watch the football results coming in on the BBC videoprinter (the Mariners were being mismanaged by Brian Laws at the time, but two divisions higher than where we are now). Finally we would go home and have some tea and watch it get dark, and then meet our friends and my fellow Regulars for a Saturday night out, perhaps in town or perhaps just down the Dog in Bearwood. It was a day of humble glories.

(The number 11, I was once told, is the longest urban circular bus route in Europe. The 11A goes anti-clockwise as it appears on a map; the 11C, clockwise. It takes two hours to get back to where you started, or probably more at rush hour. The 11 route threads together a lot of the scenes from my time in Birmingham: pottering round Harborne; my old university in Perry Barr, where I also had my first ever balti; the two flats and three houses I lived in around Bearwood; my girlfriend's old house in Erdington; the Hare & Hounds down in Kings Heath; an even worse shit job in Winson Green; and any number of one-off visits to fleeting friends, obscure pubs and distant suburban branch libraries. I bet anyone who lives in Birmingham and uses the buses has a similar collection of memories threaded together on the big circular 11 route like beads on a necklace.)


So you might have noticed that it's not me singing. I met Shelley Merchant when I made a big career leap from my shit job in the postroom at the council depot to a slightly less shit job typing at a security firm. I had now demonstrated conclusively to my temping agency that I could type like a demon, which was good, because in these typing jobs I could earn £4.50 an hour instead of £3.72 and I was always surrounded by women and I guess it was enough of a nice novelty for them to have a young man in their office that they always looked after me very well and sometimes we would swap recipes and haircare tips.

Shelley said she sang and played guitar so one night me and Stu went to see her doing karaoke at some grotty pub on the Hagley Road (the north side, between the Plough & Harrow and Portland Road; can anyone help me remember the name of it?). We stood at the bar nodding and saying, yeah, she can sing, let's do it! It felt less like a band getting together than a film about a band getting together, though when you're young it can be hard to tell the difference. Shelley played at the first Regulars gig at the Hare & Hounds in November 1996 but that was the only one, as she left to pursue a creative calling that spoke louder to her than indie pop: ceramics. We stayed friends for a while; Chris ended up in a house-share with her down in Stirchley, and in between one of our eight gajillion moves me and my girlfriend lived in their conservatory for a month (it was November 1997; I remember writing most of 'I'm Gonna Stay With Her', the first track on my new EP, at that time). We lost touch later though – if anyone's seen her, shout up on the comments!

As with all of these early Regulars songs, I wrote the whole thing, and the recording is a bit rough. The drums came out too high in the mix again – sometimes you can't hear the chord changes properly because the crash cymbal drowns them out – and it doesn't help that, despite my guitar mostly sitting out the second half of the second verse (2:25), the arrangement isn't varied enough to keep a five-minute song from flagging and dragging a little. The performances are just lacking a bit of verve as well, really.


I do quite like that stately tempo though, and Stu crafted a bassline that sits nicely with it and makes itself some breathing space. If there's too much of Chris's drums, then it's too much of a good thing: when I said his tippy-tappy hi-hat in 'Saturday Song' sounded like angels tap dancing on ice, I may have been trying to impress a girl, but that doesn't mean I didn't mean it. And the guitar part in the verse puts quite a fresh spin on the three-chord trick – so much so that I decided to have a whole instrumental verse at the start of the song, just to show it off.

Do you know 'Standing Here' by The Stone Roses? It's a song in two parts: the first is the bog-standard dreary Mancwank sound that ruined everything but the second is a pretty sort of extended ending with draw-you-in descending guitar lines and Ian Brown briefly remembering how not to be a monotone monobrow monkeyboy. At some point after I wrote this song, I saw a similarity between the pretty sort of extended ending in 'Standing Here' and the one in 'Saturday Song' which starts at 3:34. This is where night falls and the long shadows of the coming Monday begin to loom across the weekend (an idea taken further in 'Today at Last', the final track on Effortless, where the three verses depict Saturday morning, Sunday night and Monday morning). I love the words and I love the music and I love the way the words and the music go together. It's still one of the best sections of a song I've ever written.


We gave this song to Shelley to sing because we couldn't find a key to play it in that suited my voice at the time. I can't decide whether it was asking a bit much of her to bring her voice down this low – but there wasn't much scope for change because the main guitar line couldn't be played lower than the 12th fret. In the end I put a capo at the second so it was in F sharp instead of E; any higher than that and I'd have struggled to play it. At 1:19, meanwhile, there's a lesson in why it's best to sing your own lyrics yourself: I wrote "Danny Kendall/knowing the end'll come soon" and it's ended up as "knowing the end will come soon", losing the rhyme. (In 'North Star' the line "constellations sweep a circle through the year" always seemed to be a tongue-twister for Rob, too.) It's no big deal, mind: Shelley made a better job of singing this than I did of singing the other five Touched by the Hand of Nod tracks.

Trivia bit: for my first band, Conversation Fear, I wrote a song called 'Danny Kendall's Dead'. I guess he was kind of an icon.

As all the other songs I've mentioned in this post were to demonstrate later, there was plenty more work-related pain awaiting me before I managed to get out and go freelance. And for all the happiness and mental equilibrium I've eked out since then, I still nurture a quiet terror that I will have to return one day to the nine-to-five (or even, like many unfortunate workers, the 8:30-to-six or something worse) – a terror that lingers behind and overshadows every day of my current freedom, in the same way as the fear of the approaching Monday morning is already creeping in by Saturday afternoon and instils a dull nausea in the reveller chasing down denial on Saturday night. God help me and my loved ones if I do, because I would surely fall to pieces all over again.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Elevenbus.co.uk – an ace psychogeography project
A short piece from the BBC about the 11 bus (with funny comments)
'Standing Here' by The Stone Roses on last.fm
A Google map showing some of the locations mentioned in this post

posted by Pete Green @ 23:07