What I was alive for

07: Slow 25

Recorded July 1997, 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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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


This is a song about taking your time over the big decisions that shape the course of your life, letting things fall into place in their own way and at their own pace, standing back from the breathless rush of the world so that your fate flows leisurely and naturally into its proper channel and with all the sweet slowness you need to savour and apprehend the full import and grandeur in every moment of your precious and miraculous existence. It crams two guitar solos, two verses, three choruses, an intro and outro, and a bridge into less than two and a half minutes.

My later, solo song, 'Take Your Time', pitches up on similar ground, and is also pretty short, but its simplicity and slow tempo mean it avoids the conflict that arises in 'Slow 25' between the subject matter and the form. Does this conflict undermine the song? Not terminally, because at one point it was in the running to become The Regulars' debut single: our website reported in February 1999 that Alan 'The Doc' Farmer of Bearos Records had suggested a double A-side featuring 'Slow 25' and 'North Star'.

The thing about the first single, though, was the preposterous length of time it took us to sort out a producer and actually record the thing – it was getting on for two years after Alan asked us to do a single when we actually handed over the recordings to him. (This was mostly our fault, but not always: in February 2000, about 18 months into the whole saga, we'd booked some studio time only for the producer, Paul Glave, to break his leg less than a week before we were due to record, and by the time he got out of hospital he was going on tour to do the live sound for Broadcast and King Adora.) Given the subject matter of 'Slow 25', it's a cute twist that, by the time we got into the studio to record the single, we'd written 'Lie Down and Fight' and decided to release that instead.

If a lot of my songs – with The Regulars and on my own – have run through similar subject matter to 'Slow 25' (including 'Lie Down and Fight', as you'll see here in a few weeks' time), I don't think any of them has taken exactly the same position or emphasis as another. 'Take Your Time' is unequivocally, perhaps sentimentally, positive about the merits of the idler's approach to life, while 'Slow 25' is entirely non-committal. This is what I'm like, it says, without expressing pride or regret, or elaborating on whether it's a better or worse way to be.

This is probably because, at the time, I wasn't really sure. You know. Sometimes you question yourself. And in the long sleepless night of self-doubt, it can be scary to have hit your mid-twenties watching your peers working diligently through the Game of Life checklist – get a proper job, buy a car, buy a house, get married, have kids – while you're still more concerned with catching trains to popshows and wondering which label might put your next single out.

Hence the image, in the chorus of 'Slow 25', of "standing still on a timelapse backdrop", which is meant to be a sort of cinematic visual effect where the speaker in the song is, um, standing still while a city rushes about its business behind, in speeded-up film, clouds and headlights whizzing by, shadows briskly shortening, rotating and lengthening and the sun swinging from nadir to zenith and back in the space of a few scant seconds.

(The milestone thing is, of course, a nonsense. When you're 18, you think 21 seems really old; when you're 21 you think you might as well be dead as hit 25; and so on. I was mortally terrified of becoming 30 when I was 28, but by the time I actually got there I didn't feel any different so I didn't give a stuff. It's all just so clichéd, anyway, don't you think? Just get on with doing what you want to do!)

What would I do differently now? I'm not sure it works having two different guitar solos: the one in the middle (1:35), like most of the music, was written by me but the intro one at 0:17 was Rob's, and I'm guessing that because this was quite an early Regulars song, and he and I wouldn't have been acquainted for long by then, we were too cagey to say no to each other. So if I were arranging it today, maybe I'd choose one solo and just have it played twice with variations. I'd make Rob's vocal higher than mine in the chorus. I'd point out to the rhythm section how you can actually dance properly to the shuffly beat they're playing in the verses and ask if we could maybe try more beats that you can actually dance properly to (the only other one I can think of is in the pre-chorus of 'Lincolnshire Skies'). I would probably send more demo tapes out to promoters and labels and leave fewer demo tapes in a dusty box on the top of a bookcase. But I would surely still say no when Chris says we should try and sound more Britpop. And I would almost certainly still not learn to drive.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Take Your Time' on last.fm

posted by Pete Green @ 00:01