What I was alive for

04: Try

Recorded December 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Rob Harris (lead vocal, guitar), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums), Pete Green (backing vocal, tambourine)
Producer Mat Webster
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 5.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


When I fell in love with pop music 20 years ago it was because Morrissey was explaining what I was feeling. First of all, he quite clearly ascertained the precise contents of my soul using some sort of spooky witchcraft mojo. And then he transcribed it all – again, quite obviously using some kind of supernatural powers to choose exactly the words and phrases that would stop my heart for a moment, drain the colour from my cheeks and leave me gasping for breath in the shock of recognition, the deep, deep, visceral shock that there was at least one other person among the billions in the world, despite all impressions to the contrary, who Knew How I Felt.


Then Morrissey started writing about East End gangsters and whining hypocritically about immigration so I found something better to listen to. But songs like 'You Just Haven't Earned it Yet, Baby' left me with an enduring love for those lyrics in the second person, where the narrator is seemingly addressing some troubled teenage type who feels the whole world is against them, who has a great deal of love if they can only bestow it, who yearns for independence and freedom and is very often trying to escape from the rubbish small town where they live, and all of that. It's a form that maybe has its roots in things like Billy Liar, and outlives Morrissey (come on, he's effectively been dead for years) in songwriters like Stuart Murdoch.

'Try' was my attempt at contributing to this venerable genre of lyrics. I hope that hasn't ruined it for you, because it's not quite as calculated as all that, and the section that rhymes 'anachronistic' and 'masochistic' (ha!) isn't just showing off. It derives from the feeling I sometimes get that the notion of actually giving a shit about anything seems to many people a little quaint in the ironic, post-ideological, Channel 4 culture of the Anglo-American 21st century. That said, it's always hard to tell whether, despite lots of things in the world being better now than they were when I first listened to The Smiths, things are getting worse in some other ways – or indeed whether nothing ever changes very much at all and one simply becomes a mardy old bastard.

Either way, and far more importantly, 'Try' is a cracking tune which sounds as irresistible and fresh to me now as when Rob 'Chopper' Harris wrote it in 1999.

There were a few different ways The Regulars would write songs. Sometimes I'd do the whole thing and present it at practice as a finished article. Sometimes Rob (or, very occasionally, Paul) would write a guitar part and I'd make up a melody and words while he played through it in the practice room. And at other times, Rob would write a guitar part and a melody with placeholder lyrics and record them on a tape to give to me, and my only contribution would be to write new words and then sing them. The latter was mostly the case with 'Try', which Rob working-titled 'The Cradle Song' before I came up with the lyrics.


I did end up writing the call and response vocal melodies in the chorus as well, but I was too rubbish even to sing the lead vocal here – somehow I just couldn't get my voice round Rob's melody – so all I'm doing on this recording is the backing vocal in the chorus and a bit of tambourine. Rob put me hugely to shame here by not only singing lead but, when we played it live, doing a fiddly bit of lead guitar at the same time. As those of you who are musicians will know, this is not an easy trick to pull off.

Where I didn't write much on a Regulars song, though, I would often put in a bit of work on the arrangement and structure. And blow me, there was a lot of work done on this. From what I can piece together out of the old website, there were at least three distinct arrangements of this song. Go to the links section below, then download and play the earlier live version: there's not just totally different instrumentation and arrangement but an entirely rewritten chorus.

Then listen to the intro on the full band version – hear the way Paul's guitar plays on its own for two bars, then Rob, Chris and Rich come in for two bars, then it's Paul on his own for two bars, then the full band again. I didn't write any of the music here, but it was my idea to arrange it that way. This feels as satisfying now as it felt exciting then. When we played it live, at those moments when the full band kicked in I would start to whirl and wheel across the stage bashing my tambourine, and I felt thrilled and electrified and, after the long, dark weeks of lonely work between popshows, alive at last.

(If you've got an mp3 handy of 'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks, incidentally, listen to what the instruments do when the vocals kick in at 0:21 – it's the same two-bars-in two-bars-out pattern, and it's quite lovely to dance to. If you haven't got an mp3 handy of 'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks, what are you doing with your life?)

Also, wrap your ears round the middle eight (it starts at 2:43) and cast your mind back to the other week when I was talking about 'October We Take it Back' and the way music makes me think of a picture sometimes (is that a sort of musical synaesthesia, or am I just endearingly quirky?). When we were working up 'Try' in the practice room I used to call this part "the toy factory bit" because that's what it gave me a mental image of. Chris's cowbell – which developed a small cult following in its own right and followed him to The Motive – is probably much of the cause. Again, I didn't write any of it, but I did suggest where everyone should come in and drop out, gesticulating to each member of the band as they all played through the toy factory bit, like I was conducting the Dudley Road Symphony Orchestra, using a tambourine instead of a baton.


The middle eight is really a middle 16, because everything in this song takes twice as long as it would in a conventional quick indiepop or punk track. There are songs that compress a whole verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus structure into less than two minutes; 'Try' does the opposite, expanding the same conventional structure over nearly five. Maybe I'm biased, but it somehow seems to keep the feel of a three-minute song, despite the longest fade-out in the history of indiepop, and, miraculously, doesn't get boring. If you agree then I'll take a bit of credit for the arrangement, but an awful lot should go to the rest of the band for writing and playing parts that are fresh and bright and inventive, and sound as full of hope as the unworldly 'you' character in the lyrics.

But, while it's not a dispassionate song, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't a little cynical of me to have just identified a lyrical genre and said, "hmmm, I reckon I'll have a go at that next" – as if the whole thing were some sort of exercise in songwriting – rather than just writing what I was feeling. This would be a harsh conclusion, though; it's not like we had a plugger paying DJs to playlist it on Radio 1 or anything – I know; it's unbelievable, isn't it – and if the 'you' of the lyrics wasn't based on anyone specific who I knew at the time from the Birmingham indie scene, I've always been drawn to and inspired by people like the one in the song; and maybe the lyrics, ultimately, are informed by the memory of teenage Smiths fan Pete, moping in his dingy Grimsby bedroom every night instead of sitting in the park getting trashed on cider like any normal 1980s adolescent, so that effectively perhaps I'm singing back in time, to an earlier, sillier, terribly fragile version of myself who'd have been glad to know that things all turned out OK.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Earlier arrangement on a live version of the song (mp3, 3.3mb)
A news report thing from the Regulars website about the rearrangement
'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks on last.fm

posted by Pete Green @ 21:30 3 Comments Links to this post

03: From a Dark Room

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

Download: mp3, 5.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


The way men treat women very often sickens the hell out of me. It seems to me that discrimination at work, domestic violence, Nuts magazine and rape ultimately have a common source: the terrible, poisonous think-habit of seeing a gender before seeing a person – and, from there, the mindset of very many men that sees women as insurmountably 'other' and, ultimately, somehow less than their understanding of human.

Ten years ago a fair chunk of my songwriting was to do with this sort of stuff. 'From a Dark Room' is a song about a woman or a girl who's being harassed and menaced by a man who she's recently ended a relationship with. She's scared to leave her house or do anything, but ultimately she musters the strength to phone the friends who he made her drop, and she overcomes her fear with their support and love. (The love of friends is the central theme of the final track on the Effortless cd, 'Today at Last', and also of a new song, 'Where the Music Still Plays', which I played live for the first time last weekend.)

I don't know whether it's cack-handed or clumsy or anything like that, you know, like it's always supposed to be when a man writes a first-person female narrator, or a white writer inhabits a black character, say. But I'm not sure that assumption is fair, and Jonathan Coe proves that men can write brilliantly about women. I guess this isn't too bad an effort – not exactly The Rain Before it Falls, but it doesn't make me shudder with embarrassment. (What do you think about all this stuff? Write a comment below if you like – I'd be interested to see.)

My girlfriend, incidentally, has always thought 'From a Dark Room' one of my best songs, but listening to it again just now has left me a bit cold. Maybe it's just too worthy and earnest to make for a good popsong. Or maybe it's an OK song but the recording is a bit lifeless. It's taken from the first of our three visits to Paul Savage's home studio in Shropshire, towards the end of 1996, when we rushed six songs down in two days.

The demo tape that resulted was called – well, nicknamed more than anything – Touched by the Hand of Nod: a sort of rubbish in-joke about our semi-ironic worship of Slade. There's a photo somewhere – possibly in an envelope in a box in my attic unopened since 2004, or possibly in someone else's house entirely; I've no idea – of me and Stu doing the we're-not-worthy thing in front of a mural of Noddy Holder painted on the wall at the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath, where we played our first gig in November 1996, not long after we recorded this. My old flatmate Dan had some friends in a band called The Ladykillers and we managed to get a support with them. There's a tape of the gig somewhere – possibly in the same box as the photo of me and Stu praising Noddy. I was dead nervous and couldn't play guitar too well because my hands were shaking, but it was a lovely night. Much the same as now, then.


It was the only Regulars gig when I played guitar, though. The original line-up had the rhythm section of Stu and Chris in place straight away, but with a front two of me and Shelley Merchant, both on guitar and with Shelley singing harmonies too. She left the band before we could play another gig, but this was the line-up that you're hearing on 'From a Dark Room' (two other Hand of Nod tracks, 'Saturday Song' and 'Into Your Bloodstream', made it on to Effortless too).

Shelley and Chris come to the fore in the best part of this song: the extended ending, which starts at 2:55. Chris's drumming is thoughtful and sensitive and, like Shelley's vocals (which start to fade in at 3:45), helps to create the sense of hope and triumph around the song's happy ending. But my singing is a bit hesitant and doesn't do it justice; these days I'd fly through that melody but as a much less practised singer 12 years ago I seem to have found the higher notes a bit intimidating.

In all, though, the recording demonstrates our naivety as much as my songwriting (like everything we did before Rob joined the band, 'From a Dark Room' was all my own work). We put some backwards effect on the drum intro just because we could, really – it doesn't run at all smoothly into the following section – and I remember getting enormously excited when I came up with the really very simple little lead guitar fill at the end of each verse (it first occurs at 0:43). Bless my youthful soul and everything, but it's hardly the best thing ever.

Like the song as a whole, really. It isn't awful, and it was an important step for me to take in terms of writing lyrics. But you'll just have to trust me for now when I promise you that Effortless has greater moments than this, and you'll have to indulge the four nervous and inexperienced musicians responsible if it sounds a little stilted here.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
The Hare & Hounds
A Google map showing the Hare & Hounds

posted by Pete Green @ 10:06 4 Comments Links to this post

02: October We Take it Back

Recorded February 2001, 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; A Layer of Chips fanzine cover cd November 2008

Download: mp3, 4.7mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


This is a song about shagging. Specifically, it's about shagging in October. It's sort of meant as a counterblast to all those songs that equate summer with sex – because there is nothing sexy at all about hot weather. Now I'm not being a filthy goth or anything. I don't mind a bit of sunshine. But the summer is for beer gardens, and cricket, and Indietracks. Not shagging. Because you're all sweaty and sticky already from the heat. Yuck. And there's so much flesh exposed to begin with that you can't really have fun, y'know, peeling off layers and that. Give me the autumn any time, just as the weather's turning and you get that first fresh tingle of winter in the air, enough to bring a little flush to the cheeks of your loved one, and a little breeze to tousle their hair a tiny bit...


But I'm getting all English and embarrassed now so that's enough with the rude. I like the autumn better than any season, regardless of rumpy-pumpy, and when I hear this song I think of living in leafy Handsworth Wood in Birmingham in 1993 and 1994. It was my second year at university and, rather than take the number 16 bus down to the corner of Handsworth Park and then the number 11 across to Perry Barr, me and my housemates used to walk over some playing fields to Old Walsall Road and go one stop on the train from Hamstead station. The fields were covered by a wind-rumpled carpet of golden and crimson leaves, and Hamstead station was a beautiful, cosy, humble little joy of a thing, with a gas fire in the ticket office and the air of a village station but ten or fifteen minutes from the city centre. (I'd be amazed if it's still staffed now.)


The whole year was a short-lived illusion of living city life from a dreamy suburban retreat: the only way we could afford to live in Handsworth Wood was in a draughty house with mice, dodgy locks and a leaky roof. But I liked it a lot, and this was where I met the future Regulars bassist Stu Fletcher in the autumn of 1993. (This photo is Stu at a gig at the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading in March 2001.) He was round the house a lot as he was seeing a mate off our English course who was also round the house a lot; he introduced me to the Black Country and I introduced him to The Orchids, and then we watched the '94 World Cup in the USA from the sofa. If we were watching one of those appalling and wilfully stupid Two Pints of Coupling Behaving Badly sitcoms on BBC3 it would probably be called 'male bonding'. I prefer the term 'making friends'.

Anyway. Like I was saying last week, 'October' was gonna be our second single until I persuaded everyone to put 'This is the Sound' out instead (and I wish I hadn't, because I love 'October' much better). If we'd stuck with plan A then you'd now be downloading a better-produced version than this. Half of the Effortless cd comprises demo tracks we recorded with Stu's dad's mate Paul Savage at his home studio in the middle of nowhere (well, the middle of Shropshire) and this was from our third and final visit in February 2001. Like a lot of the stuff we recorded out there, this sounds a bit thin and reedy to me now, with the bass unfathomably low in the mix. Not that we'd blame Paul Savage for this – we were an inexperienced band and found analogue recording pretty hard – but I'd have loved to have heard a recording of this song with a warmer, rounder sound (like we got at our brilliant final session with Mat Webster in Redditch in December 2001, when we recorded 'Try', 'Today at Last' and 'Pop Box 9:30' – you'll get to hear all these later).

A trawl through various archived versions of the Regulars website (which have followed me through the hard drives of several computers in the intervening years) reveals that we were writing 'October We Take it Back' in August 1999. Its live debut was exactly nine years ago, on 11 November at the Jug of Ale. I didn't write much of this song, mind you. Apart from the words, the only bit I contributed was the vocal melody; the song is built around Rob's lovely, poised riff which introduces the two verses. Another thing worth listening out for is Paul introducing an extra guitar line for the second verse (starting at 1:26), which wasn't there in the first – a good illustration of how we liked to make little changes to the arrangement to keep things interesting. Paul's guitar is what brings the chorus to life, too – a fiery little swish down the fretboard like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes' Night.

But listen to the bridge, because when I stop singing it's the best bit of the song. The first part of it, from 2:24 to 2:38, in particular. When we recorded the song Rob double-tracked his guitar here, so the same bit of tune is played once on an acoustic and once on an electric, over the top of each other, and sometimes I get these images in my head of what a bit of music looks like, and here the acoustic guitar has always sounded to me like the look of a yellowing autumn leaf while the electric has sounded like the look of a faint touch of frost along the leaf's edges and veins. I love how our Chris's double tom tap, after four bars, wakes up the rest of the instruments and beckons them back in. The second half of the bridge has a blustery, yearning sort of feel which works well too (thanks in large part to some more clever drumming), but that first half, those first eight bars – that's one of my favourite bits in the whole Regulars songbookography, that is, and it paints brightly what an effortless creative genius Rob could be.

Now, if you'll excuse me again, the autumn leaves are swirling below my window once more and there's a distinct nip in the air, so I need a cold shower.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
An account of the live debut of 'October' from the Regulars website
Bearos Records free downloads page including this song
A Google map showing the locations referred to above
Hamstead station on the excellent Rail Around Birmingham site

posted by Pete Green @ 21:34 1 Comments Links to this post