What I was alive for

11: North Star

Recorded May 2000, Magic Garden Studio, Wolverhampton
Performers Rob Harris (lead vocal, guitar, piano), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass, backing vocal), Chris Green (drums), Pete Green (tambourine, backing vocal)
Producer Gav Monaghan
Released 7" vinyl (B-side of 'Lie Down and Fight') July 2000; Effortless cd album January 2004

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

After The Regulars finished I barely saw anything for ages of the three members whose departure split the band. I still wanted us all to be friends but I was mad at them and too proud and hurt to make the first move, while they probably felt bad about the break-up. It all seemed unspeakably awkward. (Yeah, it sounds just like the end of a relationship. Yeah, it's a cliché. And yeah, it's true.)


But I would see Paul and Rich at other bands' gigs and sooner or later we cleared the air (they ended up coming to see a cracking solo gig I played at the Sunflower Lounge in December 2006). I never saw Rob though, so I never got to make my peace with him. Sure, we could've phoned, but that'd have been even more awkward and difficult, so it just drifted and never got resolved. This is sad because we were pretty close at times.

The sudden absence of these three was a loss both emotionally and musically because, had we collaborated on compiling Effortless rather than the whole thing being done by me, the input of the other Regulars might well have averted the blunder that was including the instrumental version of 'North Star' instead of the proper version.

Rob sings lead vocals on 'North Star' and at first glance it might look like I was exacting on him a sort of revenge for betraying our songwriting partnership by cutting out his singing from the album. I've been worried that people might think that. But it wasn't the case (if it was, then I wouldn't have included Rob's other lead vocal opus, 'Try'): my reasoning was actually that everyone who would buy Effortless would already have the 'Lie Down and Fight' single, so I would offer them different versions of the two songs on it: a live acoustic version of the a-side and the unreleased instrumental version of the b-side, 'North Star' (which the producer Gav Monaghan told us we'd need in case anyone ever wanted to use it as background music on the telly).

(This reasoning is a bit undermined by the inclusion on Effortless of both tracks from the 'This is The Sound' seven-inch in the same form they appeared in on the single – but we didn't have any alternative versions of these that were worthy of release. Honest!)

Anyway, I'm putting this right at last, and the version you're downloading here is the proper one, with Rob's singing, which appeared on the single. As well as taking the lead vocal, which he did far better than I ever could on this tune, Mr Harris wrote the song, and "It wears me out" are the only Regulars lyrics I didn't write: the line belonged to the placeholder lyrics Rob used to hang the melody on when he first wrote the music, and when I wrote new words for the rest of the song I decided to leave the chorus as it was because it worked so well.

So what are they about? It's a variation on the theme of 'University of Rain': rootlessness. Towards the end of the 1990s the things that attracted me to live in Birmingham were starting to disappear. All the pubs that had any character were being turned into loud townie vertical drinking establishments. As necessary as some regeneration was, the city centre was losing its soul; corporate, airbrushed, homogenised. Birmingham had promised me an escape from the smalltown sameness I grew up with, and now it was welching on the deal. And although I never grew desperate enough to contemplate a move back to Grimsby, I felt some sort of a pull back northwards. I started to notice the way my jokes would fall flat because midlanders wouldn't get my sense of humour, and the way I'd have to repeat my order at the pub because the bar person didn't get my accent.


I like the idea that the North Star appears never to move – that all the other stars in the northern hemisphere sky appear to rotate around it as the year goes by, but Polaris holds steady. I also like it that you can be sure of facing north if you're facing it. It's like a reminder of home while you're away – maybe like the "northern voice" who turns up in 'University of Rain' – a memento for the exile.

As with 'Try', I had some input into the arrangement of the song despite not being the writer, and this time I chipped in with some of the little embellishments as well. Paul's billowing lead guitar in the pre-choruses (the first is at 0:50) was mostly my idea, and I seem to recall throwing something in to the bassline and the plinky harmonics that run through the verse. I played tambourine on the pre-chorus too, and sang a backing vocal in the chorus as well; on stage I could never hear it through the monitors and always had to stick a finger in one ear like an old folkie stereotype so I could hear it inside my head instead. It seems to have gone altogether from this version, though I definitely recorded it (maybe it came out badly and the other Regulars secretly asked Gav to wipe it out of the mix). We've got one of Stu's few bits of singing though, for the ending (starting at 3:55), so that's something.

And there's a little bit of my singing in the second verse. It's the same Regulars trick you heard in 'October We Take it Back': vary the arrangement a bit by bringing in some new stuff just after the first chorus. In this instance it's just a single note of singing and a distorted but delicate little figure from Paul's guitar (which begins at 2:04 if you want to listen).

When we recorded this at Gav's studio in Wolverhampton, with 'Lie Down and Fight', Rob added a couple of things we'd never played on the song before. Both were in the chorus. One was a set of block chords on the piano. The other was a slinky little bit of acoustic guitar towards the end (1:53), which he wrote at home that morning while he was waiting for Paul, who had overslept, to drop by in his car and pick him up on the way to the studio. Serendipity pop!

And is it a good song? Yeah. It's not exactly indiepop – Rob's weakness for Radiohead is to the fore here, not least in the fact that he borrowed "It wears me out" from one of their songs in the first place – but not everything can be and it's more than made up for by the idea that he came up with the main little tinkly minor chord guitar bit in the verse while he was trying to work out the riff for Kylie Minogue's magnificent 'Confide in Me'. When we first wrote the song we used a cassette recorder (remember them?) to make a sort of live demo version with just the singing and acoustic guitars. And then when Stu's mom Val listened to it the next day it made her cry.


We were all fond of Val and respected her taste in music and that so, without wishing to be callous, this seemed a pretty good indicator that we'd hit on a decent song. There were some Regulars fans who thought it was our best. I wouldn't go that far, but it feels good to be able to put right the wrong I did to it five years ago by sticking the instrumental version on the Effortless cd. If you're reading this, Rob, then I'm still on the same mobile number. If you like, you can thank me for putting it right and I'll buy you a pint to say sorry for buggering it up in the first place.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
An account of the recording from The Regulars' website
Polaris on Wikipedia
'Confide in Me' on last.fm

posted by Pete Green @ 01:31