What I was alive for

10: Into Your Bloodstream

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

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I don't know whether the authorities or the dopeheads are right about drugs: I distrust them just about equally. Everyone knows they're not as uniformly dangerous as government wants us to think, but at the same time they're not at all as benign as the advocates of drug use make them out to be.

Whatever the truth is, it's going to be as messy and complicated and elusive as the truth always is. Take cannabis alone: there are people with multiple sclerosis and glaucoma and all sorts who are helped by it, and there are people with no medical conditions at all whose lives are reduced by it to a kind of numb, self-centred blur. In between, of course, there are people for whom it's as innocent and harmless a means of just loosening up as a few pints are for me.

So I don't have an opinion about legalisation. Some kinds of harm, for some users, might justify keeping the laws. By keeping prohibition at the centre of the debate, though, we overlook some other kinds of harm which are too intangible or subjective to frame laws around. You can't have something banned just because it caused a group of friends to break up, or it made somebody boring. But I reckon this aspect of the drugs thing must affect a lot more people than serious addiction and death. And it's hardly ever talked about.

And I think that's why I talk about it in 'Into Your Bloodstream'. Well, that's what the second verse is about, anyway. In particular it explores the idea that after the spinny head/grinning like a loon/dancing for 27 hours/eating four giant bars of Dairy Milk at 5am kind of effects have faded away, there are some other effects that remain. These comprise a personality change, and it's too gradual for the user (or the people around the user) to perceive it until it's too late to intervene.

The first verse is about the use of drugs as a stimulus to creativity and the idea that they offer the artist a truer and deeper insight into the nature of reality – all that doors of perception bollocks, basically. I don't like it because it's cheating. If cyclists get chucked out of the Olympics for taking drugs to enhance their performance, why does HMV still sell albums by Jim sodding Morrison? (Although if those performances were enhanced, I'd hate to hear what The Doors would have sounded like straight. Yes, James, Mr Mojo Risin' is an anagram of your name. Aren't you a clever boy. No, James, it isn't poetic, transcendent, visionary truth, even if you drawl it over and over again until everybody wants to gouge out their own eyes with a 2B pencil to break up the tedium.)

This is one of those very early Regulars songs where I wrote everything and which were only ever played live about once, sacrificed to that ugly imperative that nearly everything done on stage be fast and loud. There were a couple more pretty songs from this time called 'Always a Ghost' and 'If We Had Words', which I might have written before The Regulars even formed, and which suffered a similar fate. But this one didn't go to waste entirely. The other week, you might remember, I recalled The Beat magazine savaging one of our demo tapes. According to its review the first two songs, 'It Isn't Him' and 'Slow 25' were rubbish and sounded exactly the same. Things had changed a little by 2004, though. It took me forever to compile Effortless and prepare the booklet (it was heartbreakingly final; I guess I just couldn't face admitting we were finished) and when it came out it was about 15 months after the band had split up. By this time it seemed safe to speak fondly of The Regulars, and The Beat reviewed this album very kindly, hailing "such delights as Try, University of Rain, the jangly Saturday Song, It Isn't Him" and "the lovely Into Your Bloodstream".

And at least with 'Into Your Bloodstream' we've got this recording. As much as the drums are too high in the mix again, it came out quite well. The removed and distant and slightly mournful feel that imbues these recordings that we made miles from civilisation in darkest rural Shropshire might not entirely have suited, say, 'Saturday Song', but it works a treat with this one, I reckon.

So I'm gonna take the credit for some of this, because I like the shifting twilight chord changes in the verse and the trickling lead guitar figure in the chorus. But if the song sounds good here, its life was attended by some stunning serendipity. Stuck for a middle eight when I was writing it, I asked my girlfriend to throw out some random chord names, played the ones she said, and it sounded perfect. But best of all I like the way mine and Shelley's singing melt together in the chorus, and our idea to leave these vocals in at the end while we faded everything else out. There's a little flutter as the two harmonising voices converge on the same note for the word 'wind' which almost suggests leaves trembling on branches. Oh, I'm being daft now. But there are moments when you're trying to write songs and be in a band when all alleys seem blind, and the only way forward is a moment like this, when you stop pushing quite so hard, and you certainly don't need to get off your face to force it, because the chords and words and bass and drums all slip quietly together, almost without you trying at all, and you think, oooh, maybe I'm getting the hang of this.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)

posted by Pete Green @ 00:43