What I was alive for

16: Lie Down and Fight (live, acoustic)

Recorded September 2000, Flapper & Firkin, Birmingham
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal, tambourine), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass)
Producer n/a (live recording taken by Alan Farmer)
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 5.2mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


Extra download: original single version
Recorded May 2000, Magic Garden Studio, Wolverhampton
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass, backing vocal), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Gav Monaghan
Released 7" vinyl (A-side) July 2000

Download: mp3, 3.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


The first line of '35 Hours', you might remember from a couple of months back, is "Take your guitar to the office" – as if you could without getting at least a written warning. But a year or two after I wrote that, I actually did take my guitar to the office. The result was the song that became The Regulars' debut single and, perhaps more than any other song, came to define the band. Our principles and our whole reason for being.

It was at another temp job. Earlier in this blog I talked about rubbish temp jobs but in many ways this one was brilliant. It was with a pensions and investments company which had seriously downsized its Birmingham branch, to the extent that there was only one person working there. He was a nice bloke, and very pleasant to work for (although he took his Daily Mail a bit too seriously, proving that even nice people can). He used to commute down from Bolton, I think it was, and arrive at 10 or 10:30 at the very earliest. Most days he'd be out seeing clients before he came in, so it was usually more like noon.

So I'd get to work and type up four or five letters from a dictation tape the boss had made after I'd gone home the previous night – letters telling people how many gajillions of pounds their pension funds were going to be worth based on this, that and the other earnings projection – and then I'd put a few folders back in the filing cabinets. This took about half an hour. After that there was nothing to do all day – it was just before offices got the internet – except make coffee for the boss, when he was there, and pick up the phone twice an hour. (The posh, old money bourgeois clients from rural Worcestershire were as nice as pie to me and infallibly polite; the Black Country men who'd 'started with nothing' and grown rich selling burglar alarms or second-hand cars were utterly and relentlessly obnoxious beyond my powers of description.) Sometimes I'd try and use the time to write lyrics, but it is constitutionally impossible to use one's spare time at work to do something creative (don't you find?), so most of the time I would play Minesweeper or, when alone, just take a snooze.

Another fine thing about the boss was that he liked a drink. Every couple of weeks he would take me to the pub at lunchtime, where I would struggle to keep up but somehow just about match his total of five pints of Banks's bitter in two hours or so. We would talk about the football and our families and nice things like that, and when we got back to the office he'd get me to make some extra strong coffee to sharpen us both back up. One day we were in the pub and I was talking about The Regulars and how it was tricky to find the time to write songs sometimes. "Bring your guitar to work if you like," he said, so that any time I was there on my own, I could have a sneaky strum.

And that was how I came to write 'Lie Down and Fight'. In an office about 12 floors up in Calthorpe House, looking out over the huge Five Ways roundabout and the congested city end of the Hagley Road.



At the end of the working day I would slope down the lift and out, and wait for a bus at Five Ways as the traffic piled up and up, counting the cars that carried only one person, counting the ways I had to change the world.

And at the end of the week I'd go and get drunk again.

So I guess that explains most of the lyrics (with this song more than most, they really should be read alongside this commentary). But it was at an earlier temp job, again around Five Ways, where they actually did ask me why I wasn't driving in – from Bearwood, two and a bit miles down a straight busy road with buses every ten minutes! – and they actually did look at me funny when I mumbled something vague about the environment. Even less enlightened times, I guess, though I suspect Birmingham's car culture is so deeply rooted that the same people would be looking at me funny for the same reason even today.



When I compiled Effortless I decided to include this live acoustic version of 'Lie Down and Fight' – recorded when we played 'unplugged' in 2000 at Birmingham's annual Artsfest event (pictured above) – rather than the version with the full band which was released as our debut single. This was for the same reason I included the instrumental version of 'North Star' rather than the vocal one: to give something new to the people who were buying it, because they'd already have the single that both songs had first appeared on.

From a point of view relating to this recording – in particular, to the first three seconds of it – it's significant that Artsfest coincided in 2000 with the UK's first mass protests against petrol and diesel prices (which were handled well by Tony Blair: the first and, I think, only time he led the country rather than being led by it). This turned out to be a marvellous piece of serendipity because of what 'Lie Down and Fight' is about. Which is what, exactly? It's about abstinence, protest, principle, integrity, idleness, non-conformity, being yourself, thinking for yourself. If I'd just managed to chuck a train in there then it'd have covered just about all my favourite things.

I like what I achieved with these lyrics because they're political without being preachy – OK, without being too preachy – and they're personal and playful, and these qualities can make for good songwriting. My politics and the way I see the world haven't changed a whole lot since I was 18, really; what's changed is the emotional and personal aspect of it – how I process what I see and how it makes me feel (and I know this is a badly individualised, 'atomised' way to look at it all, but we've got to get our heads right). When I was a kid it was anger and despair; now I'm twice that age it's anger and hope. And that sort of wistful exasperation you can hear in 'Lie Down and Fight' – that's the sound of my journey from the one place to the other.

And how was I to know mobile phones would turn out to be quite useful after all?

This is a bit of a long and rambly one, I'm afraid. Sorry!

The last thing I need to mention about the lyrics is where they alter in the live acoustic version from the single version. In the line "All we've got is The Regulars, we've gotta make this count", I've replaced my band with The Starries. The Starries made a big, chaotic, discordant bloody racket; it was fun and compelling to watch live and brilliant because it pissed off a lot of boring dadrock types (and believe me, there were a lot of boring dadrock types around who needed pissing off). They were nice people and we liked them, and everyone was sad when they said a few days before Artsfest that they were splitting up, so I namechecked them in the song as a sort of tribute. It didn't matter that they reformed about a month later.



I'd really like you to download the original version of this as well as the Effortless version, because it's a belting track. It also served the stellar purpose of putting an old friend back in touch with me. Between 1992, when I moved to Birmingham, until 2001, a few months after the 'Lie Down and Fight' single came out, when The Regulars received an email asking whether that Pete Green was the same one who used to wear a Sarah Records T-shirt at Gulliver's nightclub in Grimsby, Sam Metcalf and I had lost contact with each other. (He gave it an ace review in Tasty fanzine and us a gig at the Rose of England in Nottingham in the summer of 2002, two or three months before we split.)

It went through a few changes when we wrote it. In the absence of a UK indiepop scene to speak of, I was listening to a lot of 60s psych-pop/garage at the time (whatever you want to call it – you know, the Nuggets stuff), and an early version of 'Lie Down', with the same lyrics, had a much busier vocal in an effort to sound like The Sonics or something like that. It didn't really work, as it very seldom does when I make a conscious effort to make a song sound like something, rather than just letting it happen, so we changed it completely. The song was more or less an equal collaboration between Rob and me, though I can't remember exactly who did what other than that the melody was mine.


The biggest challenge in adapting the song for the acoustic line-up was the instrumental section (which starts at 2:56 on this version). On the full band version it's pretty much led by the drums; here we ended up letting Stu's bass take it on, which works pretty well because it's a pretty marvellous bassline. The bar of deep, buzzy feedback starting at 3:04 was a bit of luck: it harmonises just fine and almost sounds like a cello or something.

The big omission from the acoustic version is Stu's shouty backing vocals in the chorus. It's Rob doing the main "Liiiiiiie down and fiiiiight" part and me taking that "Lie down now, gentle listener" thing underneath. And on the full band version (for the first time at 1:20) Stu does a sort of call and response thing with Rob, sort of semi-shouting the same words in between. (At the first gig we played after he left the band, Geordie from The Starries guested on stage with us for 'Lie Down' to sing Stu's old part, to impressive effect: see picture below.) We used to take the mickey out of Stu – very gently and affectionately, I must stress – for singing with a slight American accent (and for other things, like the ostentatious agonised expressions he would pull on stage when he hit a bum note), but his shouty backing vocals really did a lot to give 'Lie Down' the reluctantly anthemic quality that made it a good choice as our debut single.


Foreground: Geordie doing Stu's old shouty backing vocals at the Jug of Ale in 2001. Background, left to right: Chris, Paul, Rich, me, Rob

Having gone on to release another single with The Regulars, then the Effortless album, and more recently two solo singles (or EPs if you like), I wouldn't say I was blasé about getting proper releases, but there is something special and uniquely exciting about your first one. Rob and I spent a long, long evening up in Walsall at the home of my friend and work colleague Al Stewart, who had taken the photos for the sleeve just along the road in Bloxwich, drinking whisky and crouching over Al's computer as we collaborated on the design. Jim, the landlord at the Dog, The Regulars' favourite pub (on Hagley Road West, of course), responded to the release of 'Lie Down and Fight' by laying on a celebratory supper for us one night at the pub after band practice. Chris suggested quietly that Jim might have thought we were a proper band and about to get dead famous and all that, but it was a lovely thing to have done, and it's not every night you get to guzzle champagne and really posh pizza for nowt.

It was to get better still. There is something truly jaw-dropping the first time you watch people dance to your own record in a club, as I did one night at Snobs (and standing next to me by the edge of the dancefloor as I watched was a girl with fantastic legs who was at my bus stop every morning – I'm not even a legs man, but these legs really were spectacular – who I always wanted to speak to but never did; I figured "hey, this is my record!" would probably have been a little too bold). And, given the origins of the song, it was quite fitting to get in to work one morning and seeing a copy of the record for the first time, sitting on my desk. My closest friend and work colleague Kerrie had bumped in to Alan Farmer from Bearos Records at a gig or a club or somewhere the night before, while I was staying in, and he gave her a copy to give to me. So she'd left it on my desk when she arrived before going off to her own office. The sleeves hadn't even been printed, so it was just the record in the plastic outer sleeve thing. But it was enough to send me leaping around the room in seizures of delight, proclaiming that my whole life had been worthwhile after all.

It's a good job it was only half past eight and I was the only one in the office.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
An account of the recording from The Regulars' website
Five Ways on Google Maps
Richard Burke, former Starries frontman, playing lovely solo stuff
A review of the record which talks about the Hagley Road a lot

posted by Pete Green @ 19:06