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

Download: mp3, 5.4mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


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 3 Comments Links to this post

A Christmas break – with two Christmas songs

The Effortless blog is taking a Christmas break – but so you're not left without a new Regulars song over the festive period (well, not a new one, but you know what I mean), here are two live recordings of Chrimbo tunes played by The Regulars in successive years at the Jug of Ale.

In the Bleak Mid-Winter (2000)
Ding, Dong! Merrily on High (2001)

One of the nicest things about being on Bearos Records was getting to play at the special Christmas gigs the label put on every year at the Jug. Even the year Baxxter got nekkid on stage, it was still great. Actually, that probably helped. Like everything decent in Birmingham, though, the Jug has recently been closed down, further vindicating my decision to do one.

In 2000 the gig was the same night as Chris's work Christmas do – in those days we used to have no end of arguments about his priorities – so we had to play without drums. We decided to make a proper acoustic set of it all, partly because it sounded great when we played that way at the city council's ArtsFest thing three months earlier, and we all played sitting down and I borrowed a synth to add a bit more texture. 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter' is my favourite carol so I worked out some chords, wrote a little in-betweeny instrumental bit, and bingo. I love Stu's climbing bassline and there's some really pretty, wistful guitar in there from Paul too.



The following year Chris was back on board so we decided to go the opposite way with a daft version of 'Ding, Dong! Merrily on High'. The verse is laced with drunken slide guitar and the chorus sounds like an oi! band. It sounds absolutely dreadful but it was a lot of fun to do!

Even after The Regulars disbanded the Bearos Christmas gig had a lot of significance for me. In December 2002 I asked if I could play a little solo set at it. I wasn't really prepared, but I was still reeling from the band's recent split and I wanted to do something vaguely defiant and show everybody I was still there. (For my festive tune I covered 'Stop the Cavalry', with Stu doing the "shub-a-dub-a-dub" bits; under-rehearsed, we stumbled badly, but it was dead funny. If anyone wants to hear it, shout up and I'll dig out and rip the CD.) So that was my first ever solo gig. It was ages before I did another one, but if I hadn't done this one then I might not have carried on at all.

Thanks for sticking with the blog so far, and for all your comments. It surprises and sometimes disturbs me how much these songs still mean to me, so it's good to get the chance to talk about them after all this time. Have a great Christmas and I'll be back soon with the next track!

posted by Pete Green @ 22:27 0 Comments Links to this post

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

Download: mp3, 3.3mb
(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 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 1 Comments Links to this post

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

Download: mp3, 6.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


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 1 Comments Links to this post

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

Download: mp3, 4.0mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


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 3 Comments Links to this post