What I was alive for

13: Lincolnshire Skies

Recorded April 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Mat Webster
Released 7" vinyl (B-side) August 2001; Effortless cd album January 2004; A Layer of Chips fanzine cover cd November 2008

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Well, now. This might just be the best Regulars song ever. I don't know if that's what I think but it's got a pretty good claim.

Listening again to all these songs after a few years, I notice things that should've been written or recorded differently. There's a section too many in 'This is the Sound' or the lyrics are too highly wrought in 'It Isn't Him' or the bass is too quiet in '35 Hours'. 'Lincolnshire Skies' is the first track we've come to where I wouldn't change a thing. I feel as happy with it tonight as I did when we stepped out of Smallwood Studios after we recorded and mixed it, on a balmy and expectant Sunday night in April 2001, and plotted our course back to Birmingham for a celebratory curry.

I like it that this song was a proper team effort. It began with Rob's guitar riff, the first thing you hear, and he wrote all the chords, but the melody is mine, and this is probably the best singing I recorded with The Regulars. Perhaps several of us peaked at the same time here: the lead guitar throughout this song was written as well as played by Paul, and it must rank as one of his finest moments in the band, as rangy, airy and expansive as them there big wide skies. The ingenious, unexpected breakdown at 3:17, where the chorus repeats but with only the drums and vocals, was a rare arranging contribution from Chris. And Stu even gave me a bit of coaching on how to sing the chorus without going out of tune.

If the song as a whole is a bit special, there are several small details I like too. In 'University of Rain' Rob very cleverly added some subtle sparkle to the sound with a quiet underlay of acoustic guitar beneath the main electric bits; he does it even better here with some arpeggios in the pre-chorus (the first one is at 0:50). There's a bit of organ playing I improvised in the studio to add texture in the second and third verses (it starts at 1:06) and the chorus. Then there are Rob's gorgeous vocal harmonies on the last line of each verse (first appearing at 0:44) and the catch in my voice in the last verse on the word 'always' (2:30). I love it when singers get a catch in their voice – I think my favourite example is when Caroline Crawley does it in 'Mr Somewhere' by This Mortal Coil, which damn near makes me cry every time – and I was thrilled that it happened here because it can only just happen: you can't plan it or do it on purpose, or I can't anyway. And the pre-chorus of this song is also the only thing we ever did that had a properly danceable rhythm.

And there was something like a feverish atmosphere in the studio as we were getting this down. If you've ever recorded in a studio with a band, you'll know that most of the time you spend there is pretty dull as you're just waiting for other people to do things. I tried to get a bit of team spirit going when The Regulars were recording, giving encouragement to whoever was doing their bit at the time, but most of the time through 'This is the Sound' (the A-side of the single that 'Lincolnshire Skies' backed) we were just playing video games, tapping a cue ball round a broken pool table, throwing a single dart into a dartboard. But we steadily gathered in the mixing room while this one was coming together, with a growing sense of excitement, slowly becoming aware that we were reaching a standard we'd never reached before.

And the production is brilliant.

The lyrics were inspired by a phrase I read in a magazine article; I can't remember what the piece was about, but the author had visited my home county for at least part of it and remarked on the "huge Lincolnshire skies". That's so true, I thought; I don't know if it's the flat ground or what, but yeah – it's hard not to be struck by the sheer immensity of the heavens when you travel through Lincolnshire. I started to write something vague around the dislocation/belonging theme of 'North Star' and 'University of Rain' but, as the words took shape, I realised they were very specifically telling the story of the autumn day in 1992 when my dad drove me down to the midlands with all my stuff at the beginning of my first year at university.

My parents were late to pass driving tests and never did much travel by car, so I think my dad's lack of experience at motorway driving was the reason he chose a backwater route. We reached Walsall (where I lived for my first year) on the A461 from Lichfield; before that we'd taken the A38 from Derby. The previous section is a little hazy: I remember driving through Newark, but not Nottingham, which would have been the obvious thing to do (maybe we did and I just slept through it). Before Newark it's clear that we'd have taken the A46 all the way from Grimsby – past Swallow Woods, where I built a shelter from branches and leaves on a Cub Scout expedition many years before; past Caistor and the exact field where I lay just a couple of years previously with the ex-girlfriend I was still getting over, reading Brian Patten poems from a book we'd just bought in the village... my memory was being turned over, exposed to the air and made fertile, like the soil of the freshly ploughed fields that stretched out flat for miles every way we looked.

My dad died in January 2002, ridiculously young, suddenly, without even being ill; I wasn't there to say goodbye. Instead I said goodbye by giving him a couple of precious things. One was my Grimsby Town shirt from 1998, when I'd met him down at Wembley twice, for our best times in 20 years of watching the Mariners together. The shirt was cremated with him; and a couple of hours earlier, during the funeral service, I said a few things about him in front of everyone and then I played a CD of 'Lincolnshire Skies' over the church's PA system.

It sounds like a towering act of vanity, but I just wanted to give him the things that meant the most to me. Being in The Regulars was the best thing I'd ever done, and 'Lincolnshire Skies' was maybe the best song we'd ever done, and it was the song that commemorated a strange spot of time which turned out to be a turning point, because we always got on better after that misty difficult day motoring to Walsall, and we ended up like mates. I'm glad I had this song to lay like a wreath.

If it was maybe the best song we'd ever done, it never really became a highlight of the live set – perhaps because it wasn't the sort of thing people wanted to hear, or perhaps because the fragility of this recorded version was just too elusive for an underpractised band to reproduce on stage, with all the imperfections of live sound. Not that it was completely unappreciated: at one very late Regulars gig I dedicated it to my friend Kat Kennedy, who was about to leave Birmingham to study at Cambridge. It meant a lot to her and she mentioned it again in the wonderful piece she wrote about the band for the Effortless cd booklet.

Here and there I've thrown the odd Regulars song into my solo live set. Mostly this has been a shortened (and quite pretty) version of 'This is the Sound'. At the last gig I played, the Indiepop All-Dayer in Nottingham in November 2008, I did the b-side instead. The first live performance of 'Lincolnshire Skies' since Kat received her dedication more than six years earlier, it was inevitably a poor, diminished thing, down in a lower key, much simplified and still played badly. This time it went down a storm (which is why this blog is here, of course). I don't know whether I'll do it again or not but it's good to have a say in whether something stays alive.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Kat's tribute to The Regulars from the Effortless cd booklet (pdf)
The obligatory Google Map of me and my dad's route to Walsall in 1992

posted by Pete Green @ 00:15