What I was alive for

12: 35 Hours

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; A Layer of Chips fanzine cover cd November 2008

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I'm having a hard job getting started on this one, because I've been at work all day and I feel too tired to concentrate. How very apposite that is.

The work ethic, as enacted and held sacrosanct in most of the capitalist world, is extremely damaging both to individual people's well-being and to the Earth. True, people who have no work at all can go to pieces psychologically as much as financially, but a large part of this is surely down to the way we are conditioned to work – and to think our lives are meaningless without it. Certainly we need a bit of stuff to do, but the working week is a strange, arbitrary measure, a historical accident, which has long since ceased to bear any relation to the amount of work that needs to be done to keep us all healthy and happy. It's not so much the cart before the horse as the cart plunging downhill at 900 miles an hour while the horse is quietly stolen away to the glue factory.

(There's a good quote from me about this on my friend Howard's blog, by the way.)

You don't have to look too far before the assumptions that the work ethic rests on start to fracture and contradict. Someone who works for 50 years and then spends the rest of their life on benefits is called a pensioner. Someone who works for 15 years and then spends the rest of their life on benefits is supposed to be lazy. But where's the cut-off point? Someone who works for 15 years, has some kind of lucky break and then retires is supposed to be some sort of genius to be admired.


In the Effortless sleeve notes for this song I quoted a passage from my favourite novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, which sums it all up perfectly (it's a book that sums up everything that matters perfectly; I could have quoted other bits to relate to some quite different songs). Here there's a bit more space, so here's a slightly longer bit from the same part of the novel. A young girl, Mick, earlier discovered a love of music and a talent for writing it, but since she's grown a little older and taken a job after school she finds it hard to access her 'inside room' – the spring of creativity within her where the songs come from:

But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go – but she never went into the inside room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time. Woolworths wasn't the same as school.

When she used to come home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always tired. At home she just ate supper and slept and then ate breakfast and went off to the store again. A song she had started in her private notebook two months before was still not finished. And she wanted to stay in the inside room but she didn't know how. It was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her. A very hard thing to understand.

Such a huge loss in so young a character is a devastating thing to witness. But '35 Hours' isn't meant to be elitist; an artist's lament of the world's indifference to their talent. Its concern is meant to reach outwards. In the song it's not just some people's ability to write songs or weave baskets that's withered away by work: it's everyone's humanity, everyone's ability to empathise with everyone else and to care about the world around them. Even people who might have the insight and energy to challenge publicly and actively the crazy assumptions that the work ethic rests upon. Even those people have to earn a living. So the work ethic even has a built-in defence mechanism, because it saps the life out of its dissenters. I'd like to explain that this horrible Catch 22 is symbolised in the lines "You had to drink to forget the work/you had to work to earn your drink". I'd like to but I don't think I can, because those lines are probably just about getting shit-faced.


Another good parallel in art is Albrecht Dürer's beautiful and harrowing Praying Hands. You might know the image, but if you've never read the story then you ought to.

I guess there's a sort of parallel between drugs in 'Into Your Bloodstream' and work in '35 Hours'. I dunno if that goes anywhere though.

Anyway, I think this is a deliciously good song – easily one of the best we wrote – and before the emergence of 'Lie Down and Fight' it was in pole position to become The Regulars' first single. It was also as close a collaboration on one song as Rob and I ever had. He wrote all the guitar stuff and I wrote all the singing stuff, which sounds quite separate and clinical on the face of it, but we kept changing and adding bits in response to the other, and we did a lot of it together during a single session in the sitting room of my old house in Park Road in Bearwood (the same road Rich lives on now, funnily enough).

There is a bassline in there somewhere, honest! It seems utterly lost in the mix (though a bit more audible through earphones), and once again with an early recording the drums sit too high up: listen to how over-the-top that cymbal sounds through the second verse (starting at 1:02 – although I wonder if Chris is playing a crash there when it ought to be a ride; or maybe it's just a rubbish cymbal). The guitars come out well though, which is good, as Rob's playing is quite brilliant here: the best thing about a very good song, showing how adroitly he could turn his hand to a pure pop song. The solo starting at 3:19 is exquisitely poised, one of the best things he ever wrote. But throughout the song the guitars strike a perfect balance between resignation and defiance. They're the reason why it sighs but with hope in its eyes.

The song's key moment comes at 2:30, where my singing comes back in to join Rob's and Stu's, and the guitars and drums gently start to pick up the pace towards the sad climax of the song. For some reason I clearly remember once telling some of the other Regulars, perhaps at a practice, perhaps at the pub afterwards, that I'd seen audiences look up at that key moment with excitement and anticipation on their faces; that our whole live set, in fact, hinged upon it – the latter being the kind of extravagant flourish I was fond of making to get a point across – and I remember Paul looking up, his attention duly grabbed, taking the point, also smiling to indulge my rhetorical excess. Small points in time like these sometimes fall randomly into your hands when you're rummaging through the bag of your memories.

Is there an ending to the story? Not yet. I've found more freedom in freelancing but the struggle goes on. I like the way McCullers (pictured) leaves Mick:

Maybe she would get a chance soon. Else what the hell good had it all been – the way she felt about music and the plans she had made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good.

All right!

O.K.!

Some good.

It sounds very ominous but who can really say? I've lost a hundred glorious songs which have drifted into my head and then drifted out again while I've been too distracted earning a living to reach a guitar or write anything down. But there are those that remained. There are always those that remained.

Strangely enough, some time after I wrote '35 Hours' I really did take my guitar to the office – but that's another story for another time...



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on Google Books
The story of Dürer's Praying Hands

posted by Pete Green @ 01:21