What I was alive for

15: Smart Dress Only (live)

Recorded July 2002, live at the Flapper & Firkin, Birmingham
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer n/a (live recording taken by Alan Farmer)
Released Effortless cd album January 2004


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Where do all the lost songs go? Because the ones that actually get recorded, so that you can listen to them after the band has gone – those are a tiny minority of all the songs that are written. And when a song is written and performed by a band but never recorded, and then the band splits up and the song's never played again, that song can't just disappear forever. It has to go somewhere. It has to. Somewhere in the stars, in some teeming hypothetical dimension, there’s an ethereal record shop that stocks every lost song ever written.

They've got a Regulars CD, of course. The final track is a brilliant song called 'Don't Refuse Me': an intense, slow-burning 4am vision thing, which Paul wrote most of the music for. There are a couple more fabulous tunes we were working on at the time of the split, which never got as far as having titles, one of which would've been our best song of all, a beautiful soft sparkling jangly shower of hope and sadness, with me playing harmonica on it! And there's 'They Built Over The Traino', a shouty, spiky, 90-second thrash lamenting the construction of Peaks Parkway over a section of the former East Lincolnshire Railway – yeah, that old chestnut – which we improvised at a practice in April 1998 when I was still drunk after the Mariners won the Football League Trophy at Wembley the day before. The first 100 copies of the CD also feature our cover versions of 'Matthew and Son', 'Back in the USSR' and the theme music from Channel 4 News.

Were it not for a few ropey live recordings of The Regulars, a few more of our songs would have been consigned to the lost record shop in the stars. 'Smart Dress Only' is one. And as ropey live recordings of The Regulars go, this one rests towards the slightly less ropey end; hence its appearance on Effortless. That and the fact that it said something that mattered to the small but passionate knot of fans who applauded us through the UK's indiepop dark ages and were there at the Flapper & Firkin in July 2002 when Alan Farmer from Bearos Records switched on his minidisc player and recorded the live set this track appeared in.


One of the problems I had with Birmingham was its vast preponderance of pretentious bars and shit townie troughs at the expense of decent pubs. Both tend to operate strict dress codes: the absurd 'Jam House' at St Paul’s Square once refused to let my trainer-clad girlfriend back in to join her mates after she'd just stepped out to make a phone call. And I don't understand how dress codes, as a kind of blatant cultural discrimination, are even legal.

These days, of course, I would never dream of going near one of those places, but in Birmingham the only alternative was staying in, and I would also struggle to understand why people put up with being treated with utter contempt by an organisation they are giving money to. Even when you get let in at one of these places, you're still herded around and scowled at by the bouncers and generally regarded as something less than human.

Other cities have their strips of shit bars but manage to retain good pubs as well. Birmingham had its townie hell in Broad Street (and still does) but failed grandly on the latter score. And me and that small passionate knot of Regulars fans, we felt the effects of all this. Because there was nowhere for us to go, and everywhere was being either tarted up for the >£30k-a-year bosses who made our lives hell at work all day or marketed down for thick-necked thugs who snarled at us and in gangs chanted "Student scum!" at us in the street (years after we finished university, of course). Places like the Ship Ashore – our places – were being demolished and places for these people were replacing them. And they somehow seemed strengthened by this. It validated them and diminished us. It informed the aggression in their swagger. It supercharged their snarl.


So what do you think of the music? It's one of those where Rob wrote all the guitar stuff and I just chipped in the melody. After a really excellent, tense, restrainedly rumbustious verse and pre-chorus, I reckon the chorus lets it down a bit, gets messy with the two vocals doing different stuff. But I like the brevity of it all, the way each verse is only eight bars long, the way it just stops, comfortably short of three minutes. Rob's abrasive guitar riff (in as much as you can hear it on this recording) finds just the right tone of menace and neon paranoia. The whole thing has quite a Smiths-like feel, I think: partly the urban (with a small 'u') diceyness of the subject matter, partly the guitars, partly that it's the same shuffling 12/8 rhythm used in 'Panic' and 'Sheila Take a Bow'.

The first time we played 'Smart Dress Only' live was at the Flapper & Firkin in November 2001 – which was probably when the Regs were at the height of our popularity. You know when you go to a gig and the promoter sometimes asks you on the door which band you've come to see? They used to do that at the Flapper, and that night 65 people said they'd come to see The Regulars and we got paid over a hundred quid! More importantly, for the first time, I was playing around a bit with how we looked and what we did on stage. We opened with 'Today at Last', which (as you'll find out in a couple of weeks) has a long instrumental at the start, and I sat off stage until just before the vocals began, which gave rise to one of my favourite moments in The Regulars: I was barefoot, with a blue silk shirt on, wearing a hairclip, and glitter on my face, and the packed and sweaty Flapper let loose a big old cheer when I walked on stage to start singing. Sweet!


These moments were rare, of course. But they were intense. That small passionate knot of fans were few and nearly all local, but they cared enough for a group of them to adopt the name 'the Irregulars' and dress up as Audrey Hepburn at the Jug of Ale one night, and we experienced regular stage invasions (as much as the indiepop movement in 2009 is vastly more exciting than what we had then, you have to be physically collared by Pocketbooks for anything like that to happen now). Sometimes there actually was a lot of love in that room.

And here's a thing that illustrates all of that. One Saturday night in July 2005 – a year after I moved away from Birmingham, and nearly three years after the band split up – thousands of people were evacuated from the Broad Street area after a bomb alert. The scant smattering of applause at the end of this track betrays a typically indifferent response to The Regulars, but the little flurry of jocular text messages I received from Birmingham that night asking if I'd planted the bomb suggested that, if the song had only made a small impression, at least it was a lasting one.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
The first live performance of the song, as reported on the Regulars website
The evacuation of Broad Street reported by the BBC

posted by Pete Green @ 00:18 3 Comments Links to this post

14: Yesterday's Birthday Girl

Recorded July 1997, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (vocal, guitar), the wind (wind chimes)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

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This might be the truest love song I've ever written. No, scratch that – plenty of it is still made up. But it came from a very real situation: it was the day after my girlfriend's birthday one year and I was just mucking about on the guitar, and when I playfully asked: "What should I write a song about?" she said: "Me!" An hour or two later I'd come up with this.

Being yesterday's birthday girl struck me as a bit sad: one minute you're the centre of attention, the next it's all over. That turned out to be the source of a little river flowing with other sad things. I ought to point out that my girlfriend really isn't sad all the time any more, and probably that she doesn't like being the centre of attention anyway. The latter, at least, is one thing we don't have in common.

We tried arranging this song for the full band quite a few times; nothing ever quite worked though, so in the end we left it as it was, with just guitar and vocals, and me returning to the guitar. I've played it a few times at solo gigs, but in The Regulars' time it was only ever played live in the acoustic sets we did for Birmingham's annual Artsfest event (the audience's 'has it finished?' silence just afterwards being broken on one occasion by our friend Mr Richard Southall calling out: "Pete Green, you sex ma-chine!").

This was recorded at Paul Savage's place almost as an afterthought to the No Lights For Miles demo tape in the summer of 1997. The other Regulars went out into the farmyard to play football while Paul and I were recording and we shut the windows tight against their voices and the bright July sun. And the version you're listening to now is digitally remastered! I've just cleaned a bit of the noise off the version that appeared on Effortless and compressed the track a bit so you can hear the quieter bits better. Yeah, I know it still sounds crap. That shows you how crap it sounded to start with.

I really like the words and music though. I just want to leave this one here and not say anything else about it. See what you reckon.


Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)

posted by Pete Green @ 00:31 1 Comments Links to this post

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 9 Comments Links to this post

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

Download: mp3, 4.6mb
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


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 4 Comments Links to this post