What I was alive for

08: It Isn't Him

Recorded July 1997, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

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When you start writing songs, the chances are you'll just use three or four chords and some very basic, derivative lyrics, and then gradually become more adventurous as you develop as a songwriter and gain confidence. When I started writing songs I was a 14-year-old Smiths fan starting to read poetry, so it was a point of principle that every tune needed the chord dictionary of Johnny Marr and the metaphorical and spiritual depth of the English Romantic poets. Here's 33 chords and the collected works of Shelley: now form a band.

To unlearn all of that stuff took me many years and several Ramones albums. Fortunately for The Regulars, the music half of that process was well under way by the time the band formed (though I tried to push it as far as I could later on, with songs such as 'Pop Box 9:30'; we'll come to that next week). But my lyrics could still be a little overambitious and 'It Isn't Him' is a good example.

It's not that any subject is out of bounds for a songwriter – it's just that you have to think about whether the words will be effective and sound cool when you sing them, as opposed to working as a piece of poetry read from a page. The two aren't mutually exclusive, as Michael Stipe perhaps proves better than anyone (or used to, before his band ran out of ideas). But it's all too possible to write a poem instead of a lyric. And when your first line is "Stingless the mirror's razored face", it's a pretty safe bet that you're coming down on the wrong side of the line.

'It Isn't Him' is about being a man and the tension between your actual, true identity and the male persona that you have to present to the world, with all the contours of your personality flattened out, all the vulnerability and uncertainty and joy buried away deep. This is a good thing to write a song about. And I like the tune. The lyrics even work pretty well as lyrics in some places, like the "Every day that he tries to get through" bit. But mostly they just function quite effectively as a poem and really badly as a song.

So the face in the mirror and the cloud (sorry – the "nimbus": God forgive me) in the sea – are flat, two-dimensional images – reflections of external surfaces which can't reflect Inner Things, y'know, like Feelings. When I wrote the second verse I might even have been thinking of some lines from Sylvia Plath ("I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand"). Yes, I am cringing while I type this. Quite a bit. "So summer's less encumbered limbs" is a pretty line and it would be nice in a poem. But it doesn't work at all in a popsong. And a popsong should never, ever talk about "a sartorial shield". They really ought to teach you this at GCSE.

Anyway. You want to know about misheard lyrics, don't you? I can't remember who it was, but someone once had the chorus of this down as "and the lover who sold you catalogues". So near, and yet so far.

Do you want to know about the music as well? I wrote the lot this time and I still think it's decent. The chord sequence from the verse (D, B minor, E minor, A) ended up recycled five years later as the middle eight of my first solo single 'Everything I Do is Gonna be Sparkly' (albeit in the key of E). I quite like the way the middle eight (starting at 2:43; it's a middle four really) is just one chord: an F sharp 7th, which at least to these ears has a bit of the eeriness of early R.E.M. – maybe like something off the second side of Reckoning. When we recorded it I double-tracked the vocals in the chorus; for non-muso types this basically means just singing the same thing twice, one over the top of the other, so that it sounds a bit stronger. I use this technique quite a lot now when I'm recording; this was the first time ever. Stu's bassline is brilliant, don't you think?

Still with us? Let's grind another axe then. 'It Isn't Him' was the first track on No Lights For Miles – the second of the three demos we recorded with Paul Savage out in Shropshire. 'Slow 25', which we looked at here the other week, was the second track. I sent a copy of the tape to the The Beat, which used to be called Brum Beat, and was a local rock magazine purporting to be a local music magazine. I often talk about what a hard time The Regulars had as an indiepop band during the UK's indiepop dark ages and in the least indiepop of the UK's major cities: in giving No Lights a predictable panning, The Beat's demo review section began by saying that 'It Isn't Him' and 'Slow 25' were the same song. That is what we were up against.

Back to the lyrics now, because if this were someone else's song I'd be curious about that sartorial shield, even if it's a clumsy piece of writing. At this point in the song the speaker, like the one in 'Paint in Black', is looking on darkly as the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes but, unlike any character in any Rolling Stones song I know, is thinking how nice it might be to wear a light cotton dress on a hot day instead of simmering in heavy jeans. And at this point in the blog you might be wondering exactly how autobiographical all of this is. I know I would be, if someone I knew was writing about the same stuff.

Well, it is a bit personal, yeah, but not specifically autobiographical in every detail. I worked out at some point that, although I'm drawn to and sometimes inspired by people who are trans-this, cross-that and androgy-the other, I'm probably not really trans-anything – just a bit girly and very ill at ease with, and critical of, macho behaviour. When I wrote 'It Isn't Him' I was still working all of this gender gubbins out and shared the anxieties of the boy or the man in the song. One day I was watching the Mariners play away at Watford, and midway through the first half all my alarm at Tony Gallimore's defending was forgotten in the sheer panic of discovering that there was still some glitter on my face from the Regulars gig the night before.

These days I'm much more at ease with myself – not because I've given in and lost myself and become the persona, but because I'm just happy with who I am, and the rest doesn't matter. But I will still rail against gender stereotyping on others' behalf: I've typed half of this with my month-old son asleep on my chest, and the thing I want most of all for him, as he grows, is to be free from it all. Before too much longer we'll be buying him clothes and all the nice colours will drain out of the boys' sections in the shops, all the prettiness and liveliness and vibrancy, our gendered culture constraining him to navy blue and khaki and grey clothes and thoughts and actions. Not that it hasn't already begun: the blue clothes we're given as presents are stacking up and in his first week of life we were surrounded by congratulations cards saying BABY BOY. Why spotlight his gender the moment he's born? Why spotlight his gender ever? Let him be a human being above all else. Let us all be.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Morning Song' by Sylvia Plath
'Pink Boy, Blue Girl' by Aerospace: a beautiful song which does the same subject matter much better

posted by Pete Green @ 23:31