What I was alive for

17: Today at Last

2009-05-18T22:17:00.009+01:00

Recorded December 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal, keyboard), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Mat Webster
Released Bearos40 compilation cd album September 2003; Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 4.9mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

This song is the final track on Effortless.

This song came out of a very low time.

It's kind of about taking the best from a really rubbish situation.

By the late 1990s I wasn't working in crap temp jobs any more: I had a job as an editor with a publishing company. It was better in some ways but worse in others. For the first time ever I had work that was stimulating and creative, where I could actually use some of my abilities, but a lot of things about the company were wrong and made me ill with stress. At one point they were giving me grief about my magazine being late; the reason it was late was that the designer, who was a freelance, couldn't get in to the office because the company hadn't paid him and he couldn't afford to put petrol in his car. When my dad died the company told me one of the two weeks I was away had to come out of my holidays (even despite my contract making provision for extended leave). "We don't want to set an example!" the human resources manager told me. "We can't have everyone thinking they can have two weeks off when one of their relatives dies!"

You get the idea. These are specimen charges. I'm not even exaggerating.

I was living on Gladys Road (there's a curious pattern whereby clusters of streets in Bearwood and Smethwick are named after old ladies) and I used to walk up to Bearwood Road to catch the 82 bus. The 82 pushed its way through Cape Hill and along the Dudley Road, and past the road up the side of City Hospital where The Regulars' favourite practice studio Arcadeia was located, then stopped at the bottom of Newhall Hill, which was only five or ten minutes' walk from the Jewellery Quarter, where I worked.

But that walk up to Bearwood Road was a grim experience, a perennially spirit-crushing start to the day. Especially in winter. There are few things as miserable as leaving your house to go to a stressful job in the winter when it's still dark outside. And for some reason, for about a year, I nearly puked my guts up every morning as soon as I left the house (I was drinking too much but not every single night, so it was no hangover). And that walk became a sort of emblem of all that was rubbish in my life.

This song was the sound of those darkest mornings.

This song was my defiance of those darkest mornings.

This song was my love song to my friends. There aren't enough love songs to friends. Maybe some people can limp through life without really having any intense or enduring friendships. But I can't.

The Regulars were at the centre of a big group of friends. Stu, Rich, Rob and Paul all knew each other before they were in the band: I can't remember the exact details but some of them were at Warley College together, and the Group, as some of us called it, extended to a lot of other people from around Warley and Oldbury who'd known each other at least since sixth form. There was a regular thing of going to the Dog on Tuesday nights, and just about every Friday there'd be a flurry of phone calls and emails to establish whereabouts in town we were all going that night. Saturdays and Sundays were similar and we'd often all end up back at someone's house after the pub. The Flapper & Firkin and Sputnik could be nice; the Trocadero, the Green Room and Snobs were pretty horrible, but with the right people it doesn't quite matter sometimes, and these were the right people. It's not that these friendships were really intense for me, but friendships don't always need to be. The easy company of the Group was a lovely and life-affirming thing and I genuinely loved all of those people.

When the band split up it all became difficult and complicated and fragmented. There were unspoken tensions and I started to part ways with the Group. People seemed less ready to include me in whatever was going on and I was increasingly looking elsewhere for company; it's unclear which of these was cause and which effect, but it became chronic. "You've hardly been out," said Stu, who remained as central to the Group after leaving The Regulars as he'd been before the band existed.

"I've been out loads!" I retorted, trying too hard to stress the point that I was building friendships and a life outside our circle. Partly this was my weekends in Sheffield, but I was spending a lot of time down the pub after work with my friend Ian (who is sort of in the Sneaker Pimps), and nights with my two closest friends. The three of us had a crazily intense, drunken intimacy of shared disaffection with work and Birmingham and shared love for the Delgados, Bis and Belle & Sebastian. We would start in the pub after work, and our evenings were a miasma of pop music, vodka, pretty plastic bracelets, glitter on our faces and talk, talk, talk for hours, taking comfort in the commonality of our troubles, determined to remain sparkly through the valley of death and Snobs, and to defend each other with love as the playlist stretched to infinity.

It was kind of about taking the best from a really rubbish situation.

This song commemorated these friendships: both the straightforward companionship and good times I enjoyed in the Group and the furious, incandescent devotion of my two closest friends.

Perhaps the greatest of all the nights of sparkliness with my two closest friends was in November 2002, a couple of months after The Regulars split up. I had a cheap digital camera in my bag and snapped some dark, blurry images. One of these ended up on the front of the Effortless cd. It was perhaps the most pertinent creative decision I've ever made, or at least the closest I've brought art and life.

My two closest friends, incidentally, knew who the girl with the extraordinary legs was when I mentioned her once. The girl who waited for the same 82 bus as me every day and stood next to me in Snobs when the DJ played 'Lie Down and Fight'. They called her Dances On Her Own Girl because... well.

This song has three verses and, as the lyric sheet shows, they correspond to three distinct moments: Saturday morning, Sunday night and Monday morning. Work casts a lengthening shadow over the weekend but friends keep the light alive. Even as the wage slavery resumes on the Monday morning, the knowledge that the narrator's friends will be there again that night, or at the weekend, is enough to get them through.

"Time means this intimacy might disperse" is one of the best-sounding lines I've ever written. My favourite poet Louis MacNeice said if he were forced to choose between sense and sound, he'd have a slight preference for sound. I chose 'might' ahead of 'will' or 'could' to continue the alliteration of the 'm' sound, but the narrator knows it's inevitable: this intimacy will disperse. (The narrator was right, although the experience might have made him more determined that it shouldn't end that way again.)

So the passing of time looms off camera as a potential counterblast to the triumph of love over work (and there's a sentence I never thought I'd write). But the greatest act of resistance to the passing of time is not, in fact, Oil of Ulay: it is to ignore it. And – as banal as it sounds – to live in the present as far as possible. That's how the song ends up anyway.

(It's kind of a shame that standard English doesn't have a plural for the second person pronoun in the way that some dialects have 'y'all' or 'yous' or 'you lot' and French has, um, can't remember, sorry. It's a shame because the 'you' in the third verse of 'Today at Last' is a plural – it's addressing all my friends – and it would have been good to have been able to make that clear, because the 'you' in love songs is usually a singular. When I wrote another love song to my friends in 2008, 'Where The Music Still Plays', I went as far as saying "and you all know", just to make it as clear as I could.)

This song is dead simple musically. There are only three chords in the whole thing, and it's a very basic chorus-verse-chorus-verse structure, although the chorus has no lead vocal to begin with. Perhaps it's the final leg of that journey I talked about earlier, from writing over-complicated music to writing pop songs. With 'Today at Last' I wrote the chords, the melody and – first of all – the main guitar riff in the verse. And then the rest of the band added bits around this dead simple outline, which perhaps make it appeal to people who find three-chord pop songs too simple for their sophisticated musical taste. Even some of these bits that they added are dead simple – like the way, starting from the second verse, Paul (that's Paul in the picture, just there) plays a chord as if it's going to ring out for two bars only to suddenly chop it off (listen at 1:13) – but add texture and variation and keep it interesting.

Then there's the instrumental section at the end, which I think is pretty wonderful. At 3:49 the sparse drums and guitar, easing off for breath before the big finish, always reminded me of early New Order. A little later the big, sky-wide chords made me think of Galaxie 500, and the final stretch of two guitars thrashing away into the blue would always put me in the mind of some early Wedding Present. The jabbing guitar rhythm that comes in at 4:27 got me dancing every time when we played it live: I would jump to one side and push the mic stand the other way, and on the next beat jump to the other side and pull the mic stand back across me the opposite way, and back and again, and back and again, on every beat, with the strange energy that filled me only on stage and nowhere else, giving vent to all those demons, ultimately costing the band the fee we should have had for playing the Custard Factory at the Bearos Records second birthday gig in September 2000 because the mic stand was knackered by the time I'd finished with it.

Then there's the swirly noise that fades in at the start of the track; I'm afraid I can't tell you for the life of me how we got that sound. It was the middle of December 2001 and what turned out to be our final recording session, back at Smallwood Studios in Redditch with Mat Webster. Before we trundled back up to Birmingham in Rob's Fiat Panda doing 30mph all the way because the swirly, freezing fog had reduced visibility to practically zero, it was quite easy to lose track of what other people were doing, because Smallwood was a Proper Studio, with different rooms and everything – a kitchen, a little room with a telly and a Playstation (or whatever it was in 2001), and a games room with a pool table and a dartboard. The dartboard only had one dart and the pool table, similarly, the same number of balls as Hitler, but it's easy to get distracted in a studio when you're not actually needed to do your bit, so I'm not sure about the swirly noise.

But I can tell you that Mat used a cheaty digital autotune effect on my vocals in this song, because of the big intervals in the melody: it steps down an octave or something at the end of the second line in each verse ("today at least the daylight's" – big step down – "known"), which made it tricky to get exactly the right note every time – although, rarely among Regulars recordings, it's a vocal performance that I'd be pretty happy with today. I can tell you that we added the cheesy chimes (which begin at 2:27 and run right through the chorus after that one) because it was nearly Christmas and we were feeling giddy and probably had too much Jack Daniel's. I can tell you these two days were the best studio time we ever spent, and 'Pop Box 9:30' and 'Try' came out sounding great as well. And I can tell you that the guitars on this song sound bloody fantastic turned up loud.

This song gave me a sort of fulfilment because it commemorated those important friendships I talked about earlier, because it felt like a huge act of defiance in itself against the dark arsenal of circumstance and economics that seemed to be trained against me and my friends, and also because it achieved a sort of mini ambition which I'd set myself as a songwriter. At one point, maybe about 1999, 2000 sort of time, I remember wanting to write Regulars versions of a short, ultra-melodic popsong like 'She Loves You' and a longer, longing popsong with an instrumental chorus like 'Superstar' by Superstar (who were a great band in the moments when they didn't sound like Queen). And I remember thinking later, after we'd written these songs, that 'Pop Box 9:30' was the Regulars version of 'She Loves You' and 'Today at Last' the Regulars version of 'Superstar'.

This song commemorated those friendships, but in the end, when I compiled Effortless, it also seemed to commemorate a complex reciprocal pleasure that existed between me and the small but devoted group of pretty people who loved The Regulars. This comprised the pleasure they took in our songs, and the joy that I took, in turn, from their enjoyment.

Though it didn't end well, and it often felt like a thankless, fruitless, slogging piss in the wind, being in The Regulars was one of the greatest and most thrilling things I've ever done. So this post goes out with love and thanks to Richard Banner, Stu Fletcher, Chris Green, Rob Harris, Shelley Merchant, Paul Roach and Sarah Spilsbury. I'll be in touch soon about that pint, Rich.

Being in The Regulars also opened the way to the incredible popthrills I've enjoyed since, playing solo and with The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut, and will continue to enjoy. I've made a lot more great friends along the way. And now it feels rewarding at last too, because a few more people are listening.

This song seems a pretty apt closing chapter.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
A brief account of the recording from the Regulars website
The 82 bus route on Youtube – part 1
The 82 bus route on Youtube – part 2
An excellent Google Map with the 82 bus route and important locations
'Birmingham' by Louis MacNeice
Tasty fanzine's review of Effortless, with a good bit about 'Today at Last'

16: Lie Down and Fight (live, acoustic)

2009-03-06T19:06:00.010Z

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

15: Smart Dress Only (live)

2009-02-26T00:18:00.003Z

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

Download: mp3, 3.3mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

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

14: Yesterday's Birthday Girl

2009-02-19T00:31:00.001Z

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

Download: mp3, 3.7mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

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)

13: Lincolnshire Skies

2009-02-12T00:15:00.006Z

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

Download: mp3, 4.0mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

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

12: 35 Hours

2009-02-04T01:21:00.004Z

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

11: North Star

2009-01-28T01:31:00.005Z

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

Download: mp3, 5.7mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

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

10: Into Your Bloodstream

2009-01-14T00:43:00.002Z

Recorded c. October 1996, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal, guitar), Shelley Merchant (guitar, backing vocal), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 4.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

I don't know whether the authorities or the dopeheads are right about drugs: I distrust them just about equally. Everyone knows they're not as uniformly dangerous as government wants us to think, but at the same time they're not at all as benign as the advocates of drug use make them out to be.

Whatever the truth is, it's going to be as messy and complicated and elusive as the truth always is. Take cannabis alone: there are people with multiple sclerosis and glaucoma and all sorts who are helped by it, and there are people with no medical conditions at all whose lives are reduced by it to a kind of numb, self-centred blur. In between, of course, there are people for whom it's as innocent and harmless a means of just loosening up as a few pints are for me.

So I don't have an opinion about legalisation. Some kinds of harm, for some users, might justify keeping the laws. By keeping prohibition at the centre of the debate, though, we overlook some other kinds of harm which are too intangible or subjective to frame laws around. You can't have something banned just because it caused a group of friends to break up, or it made somebody boring. But I reckon this aspect of the drugs thing must affect a lot more people than serious addiction and death. And it's hardly ever talked about.

And I think that's why I talk about it in 'Into Your Bloodstream'. Well, that's what the second verse is about, anyway. In particular it explores the idea that after the spinny head/grinning like a loon/dancing for 27 hours/eating four giant bars of Dairy Milk at 5am kind of effects have faded away, there are some other effects that remain. These comprise a personality change, and it's too gradual for the user (or the people around the user) to perceive it until it's too late to intervene.

The first verse is about the use of drugs as a stimulus to creativity and the idea that they offer the artist a truer and deeper insight into the nature of reality – all that doors of perception bollocks, basically. I don't like it because it's cheating. If cyclists get chucked out of the Olympics for taking drugs to enhance their performance, why does HMV still sell albums by Jim sodding Morrison? (Although if those performances were enhanced, I'd hate to hear what The Doors would have sounded like straight. Yes, James, Mr Mojo Risin' is an anagram of your name. Aren't you a clever boy. No, James, it isn't poetic, transcendent, visionary truth, even if you drawl it over and over again until everybody wants to gouge out their own eyes with a 2B pencil to break up the tedium.)

This is one of those very early Regulars songs where I wrote everything and which were only ever played live about once, sacrificed to that ugly imperative that nearly everything done on stage be fast and loud. There were a couple more pretty songs from this time called 'Always a Ghost' and 'If We Had Words', which I might have written before The Regulars even formed, and which suffered a similar fate. But this one didn't go to waste entirely. The other week, you might remember, I recalled The Beat magazine savaging one of our demo tapes. According to its review the first two songs, 'It Isn't Him' and 'Slow 25' were rubbish and sounded exactly the same. Things had changed a little by 2004, though. It took me forever to compile Effortless and prepare the booklet (it was heartbreakingly final; I guess I just couldn't face admitting we were finished) and when it came out it was about 15 months after the band had split up. By this time it seemed safe to speak fondly of The Regulars, and The Beat reviewed this album very kindly, hailing "such delights as Try, University of Rain, the jangly Saturday Song, It Isn't Him" and "the lovely Into Your Bloodstream".

And at least with 'Into Your Bloodstream' we've got this recording. As much as the drums are too high in the mix again, it came out quite well. The removed and distant and slightly mournful feel that imbues these recordings that we made miles from civilisation in darkest rural Shropshire might not entirely have suited, say, 'Saturday Song', but it works a treat with this one, I reckon.

So I'm gonna take the credit for some of this, because I like the shifting twilight chord changes in the verse and the trickling lead guitar figure in the chorus. But if the song sounds good here, its life was attended by some stunning serendipity. Stuck for a middle eight when I was writing it, I asked my girlfriend to throw out some random chord names, played the ones she said, and it sounded perfect. But best of all I like the way mine and Shelley's singing melt together in the chorus, and our idea to leave these vocals in at the end while we faded everything else out. There's a little flutter as the two harmonising voices converge on the same note for the word 'wind' which almost suggests leaves trembling on branches. Oh, I'm being daft now. But there are moments when you're trying to write songs and be in a band when all alleys seem blind, and the only way forward is a moment like this, when you stop pushing quite so hard, and you certainly don't need to get off your face to force it, because the chords and words and bass and drums all slip quietly together, almost without you trying at all, and you think, oooh, maybe I'm getting the hang of this.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)

09: Pop Box 9:30

2009-01-06T23:26:00.006Z

Recorded December 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Mat Webster
Released GoJonnyGoGoGoGo compilation cd album February 2002; Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 3.9mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

After the end of Sarah Records in 1996, I made the mistake of believing that indiepop was finished. It could never happen now, but back in those parochial, pre-broadband days, it was easy to miss what was going on elsewhere in the world. Indiepop, in fact, was thriving in parts of mainland Europe and the USA – as I eventually discovered when Steve from Tempest Records in Birmingham persuaded me to buy Montecarlo, one of the finest and most cosmopolitan indiepop compilations ever released (get yourself a copy from somewhere, anywhere, if you can). And by 2001, when I wrote 'Pop Box 9:30', indiepop was starting to resurface in Britain as well.

It was partly the bands Alan Farmer was bringing to Birmingham for Bearos Records gigs: people like Saloon (pictured), MJ Hibbett and the Validators, and The Chemistry Experiment. But for the first time I was becoming able to see out there beyond the midlands. I was looking northwards to Sheffield, where I could dance to my favourite old indiepop bands at Offbeat and hear new ones and buy their records at Forever Changes the next day – discovering a section in their racks labelled 'new indiepop underground' was a turning point in my entire life – and to Leeds, where Jonny Ackroyd was starting up the Strangeways night and the GoJonnyGoGoGoGo all-dayers. And I was looking south to London, where there was a fantastic label called Track & Field which did an amazing all-dayer in Camden every Easter Sunday. The same names and faces were starting to crop up at both ends of the country: Airport Girl, Ballboy, Milky Wimpshake. The scene was inchoate, fragmented and tentative, but the dots were starting to join up, the connections to be made.

And my God, I was so in love with the Action Time album. For about 18 months I used to put 'Rock and Roll' on every mix tape I ever made anyone. Am I the only one who remembers them?

It was a breathtaking, exciting, horizon-widening time – the start of all the fulfilment and joy of the last couple of years – but a bleak chapter for me in other ways, because I was also having a total and absolute nightmare with stress at work making me ill and drink too much, and a lot of difficulty and loss in my personal life. The beginning of the UK indiepop resurgence is worth an article in itself, and some other time maybe I'll turn those last paragraphs into one. But I had to tell you about it now because that's where 'Pop Box 9:30' came from. I wanted us to make the sound of all those incredible nights I was starting to have; I wanted to tell Birmingham about what was starting to happen in other places. The song ended up including a lot of the dark background that these brief flashes of fantastic light were set against.

One way of getting through the working day, I figured, was to bring into it the best thing from outside. So when I got back from the (then) ace record shop Tempest one lunchtime with Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like a Peasant in my bag, I took the poster out of the sleeve and put it up on the wall. And then I started ordering loads and loads of indiepop records and CDs from Pennyblack Music and getting them delivered to my work address. So, at least one day a week, at half past nine in the morning, just as sleep was wearing off and the grim demands of the day beginning to bite, the post would be brought round to everyone's desk and, in among the marketing leaflets and the dreary press releases, there would be a little box of pop. A secret stash of bliss. An escape capsule.

Last week I talked about how the lyrics in 'It Isn't Him' worked quite well when you read them from the page but fell flat when I actually sang them. I realised this by the time I wrote 'Pop Box 9:30' and it's the other way round: the lyrics here look completely rubbish when they sit silently in black and white and were written entirely to sound good sung out loud. This despite my mispronunciation of "Aislers" when I'm banging on about The Aislers Set: we were still emerging from the UK's indiepop dark ages and I'd never met anyone else who'd even heard them, let alone had a conversation about them, so how was I to know the first 's' is silent?

I might not have known how to say their name but I couldn't stop listening to them. The Aislers Set (right) were the soaring highlight of the Track & Field all-dayers when they played in 2001 (I think the death of Joey Ramone happened either while they were playing or very nearly) and The Last Match is still one of my favourite handful of albums ever. The guitar riff I wrote to introduce and run through the verse in 'Pop Box 9:30' is a sort of homage, as they say, to the Aislers' 'Been Hiding'. Just as the lyrics were written to tell people about all the fantastic bands I was listening to, so was the music.

I don't know whether that worked or not, really. Everyone loved Saloon when they did a Bearos single, and everyone who came to see The Regulars would turn out to see Ballboy when I persuaded Jackie, Rob and Eddie who put the gigs on at the Flapper & Firkin that they should be worth a go (it never occurred to me to try DIY promoting, so I did a short stint as a go-between, asking proper promoters if they'd put on indiepop acts from other cities). But the punters didn't really follow it up by beating a path to Tempest the next day and demanding everything they'd got by The Starlets or the Wimpshake or The Blue Minkies.

The first time we played 'Pop Box 9:30' live was 15 September 2001. It was a short set on an outdoor stage in Chamberlain Square, as part of the annual Artsfest event promoted by Birmingham City Council. I was upstaged by a weird old geezer dancing a jig right in front of the stage. One other time when we played it in Birmingham, there were nods and smiles and whoops. The other times, I seem to remember giving it everything I had and being a bit deflated by the lack of response. Maybe it's just not that great a song. But it must have done something right to get played at England's coolest indiepop disco in 2008. Hee.

Three months after its first live airing we recorded 'Pop Box' in The Regulars' last studio session, with Mat Webster in Redditch: it was a heroic endeavour in attaining as rough and dirty a sound on the guitars as we possibly could. I wanted something that would make 'This is the Sound' sound like Abba. Mat showed us a beat-up little practice amp thrown into some forgotten corner of the studio. It was pretty good for getting a fuzzy, filthy, spluttering old sound, he said, and we could do what we liked to try and mess it up even more. So we all lined up and took turns to kick the shit out of it. I like the result and it shows how much better guitar effects can sound when they're not done digitally.

The samples right at the beginning and just before the end come from Glengarry Glen Ross. I asked my filmhead friend Simon Wilson if he knew any film quotes along the lines of "what are you gonna do – fire me?" and sure enough there was one that said exactly that, and we managed to find some clips on some web page. I just downloaded them as .wav files on to a floppy and gave it to Mat when we rolled up at the studio. I've never even seen the film, so I guess I really should watch it sometime. (I'd never seen Spinal Tap either when people used to ask me if that was where we'd got the name of The Regulars from.)

Yay for Chris's cowbell!

I wonder sometimes whether 'Pop Box 9:30' blew wide apart the narrow cracks in the band, like water freezing and expanding in a fissure through a rock. When Paul, Rich and Rob announced they were leaving to form The Will to Rally there was talk of wanting to do something "more rock". I always thought there were more than enough guitar solos and six-minute songs in The Regulars, but they were probably alienated at least as much by my banging on and on about pop in lyrics and interviews than by my actually writing pop songs.

And, while Paul was as zealous as me in knocking seven shades out of that knackered practice amp, Rob wasn't too pleased with the rough-arse sound, as it turned out. He never really said as much – that wouldn't have been his style – but he was glad at my odd decision to add the words 'demo version' to the title when it appeared on the CD that was compiled for the first GoJonnyGoGoGoGo all-dayer in Leeds in February 2002, when we played at that (picture below right, backstage just before we go on). I guess this was as vehement a criticism as anyone ever articulated in The Regulars.

GoJonnyGoGoGoGo seemed to me to widen those cracks in another way too, or at least to expose them. Rob went AWOL from the venue until dangerously near our stage time, looking round shops with his girlfriend rather than immersing in the nascent indiepop scene. For shame! At the end we had to leave after the bands but before the blessed DJs had finished – because someone or other "had to get back", for some reason or other – and I ran back from the exit to the dancefloor for one final joyful thrash to 'Deceptacon' before we consigned ourselves to the motorways back to the glum popless midlands. "What was that?" asked Rob when I got back, breathless and euphoric. I think it was pleasure rather than horror that had attended his first experience of Le Tigre, but I'd already danced to it a hundred times at Offbeat. Hadn't I told him about them already? We were slowly but clearly diverging.

There's an irony in all of this – a circularity which ends in paradox. I've been telling you how The Regulars were cheated by circumstance; that in a different city, at a different time, we could have been contenders. Not quite The Beatles, as Rob and I told each other we wanted to be in our feverish late nights of creativity and ale, early on in our partnership, but – I dunno... Camera Obscura, maybe – that sort of level. If only the indiepop scene had been then what it is now; then we'd have had not the world at our feet but certainly 6Music. But it was my headlong dash into the very beginnings of the new indiepop underground, perhaps, that ultimately split the band, forcing the issues that had stayed below the surface until then.

The fact that I'm sitting up at midnight on a Tuesday several years later typing up these thousands of words should tell you how much I loved being in The Regulars and how much these songs meant to me. I bear years of bitter regret that all the sweat and passion poured into these compositions was utterly wasted as The Regulars failed dismally to get beyond our own backyard. But fuck the lot of it. Because the indiepop movement we have in 2009 is way beyond anything I imagined possible back then. And if that loss was the price I paid to be a part of the indiepop movement we have in 2009 then it's the best deal I've ever made.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Rock and Roll' by The Action Time (mp3, 2.4mb)
'Been Hiding' by The Aislers Set on last.fm (streaming full track)
The first live performance of the song described on The Regulars' website
A review of Effortless on Pennyblack Music

08: It Isn't Him

2008-12-30T23:31:00.006Z

Recorded July 1997, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 5.4mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

When you start writing songs, the chances are you'll just use three or four chords and some very basic, derivative lyrics, and then gradually become more adventurous as you develop as a songwriter and gain confidence. When I started writing songs I was a 14-year-old Smiths fan starting to read poetry, so it was a point of principle that every tune needed the chord dictionary of Johnny Marr and the metaphorical and spiritual depth of the English Romantic poets. Here's 33 chords and the collected works of Shelley: now form a band.

To unlearn all of that stuff took me many years and several Ramones albums. Fortunately for The Regulars, the music half of that process was well under way by the time the band formed (though I tried to push it as far as I could later on, with songs such as 'Pop Box 9:30'; we'll come to that next week). But my lyrics could still be a little overambitious and 'It Isn't Him' is a good example.

It's not that any subject is out of bounds for a songwriter – it's just that you have to think about whether the words will be effective and sound cool when you sing them, as opposed to working as a piece of poetry read from a page. The two aren't mutually exclusive, as Michael Stipe perhaps proves better than anyone (or used to, before his band ran out of ideas). But it's all too possible to write a poem instead of a lyric. And when your first line is "Stingless the mirror's razored face", it's a pretty safe bet that you're coming down on the wrong side of the line.

'It Isn't Him' is about being a man and the tension between your actual, true identity and the male persona that you have to present to the world, with all the contours of your personality flattened out, all the vulnerability and uncertainty and joy buried away deep. This is a good thing to write a song about. And I like the tune. The lyrics even work pretty well as lyrics in some places, like the "Every day that he tries to get through" bit. But mostly they just function quite effectively as a poem and really badly as a song.

So the face in the mirror and the cloud (sorry – the "nimbus": God forgive me) in the sea – are flat, two-dimensional images – reflections of external surfaces which can't reflect Inner Things, y'know, like Feelings. When I wrote the second verse I might even have been thinking of some lines from Sylvia Plath ("I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand"). Yes, I am cringing while I type this. Quite a bit. "So summer's less encumbered limbs" is a pretty line and it would be nice in a poem. But it doesn't work at all in a popsong. And a popsong should never, ever talk about "a sartorial shield". They really ought to teach you this at GCSE.

Anyway. You want to know about misheard lyrics, don't you? I can't remember who it was, but someone once had the chorus of this down as "and the lover who sold you catalogues". So near, and yet so far.

Do you want to know about the music as well? I wrote the lot this time and I still think it's decent. The chord sequence from the verse (D, B minor, E minor, A) ended up recycled five years later as the middle eight of my first solo single 'Everything I Do is Gonna be Sparkly' (albeit in the key of E). I quite like the way the middle eight (starting at 2:43; it's a middle four really) is just one chord: an F sharp 7th, which at least to these ears has a bit of the eeriness of early R.E.M. – maybe like something off the second side of Reckoning. When we recorded it I double-tracked the vocals in the chorus; for non-muso types this basically means just singing the same thing twice, one over the top of the other, so that it sounds a bit stronger. I use this technique quite a lot now when I'm recording; this was the first time ever. Stu's bassline is brilliant, don't you think?

Still with us? Let's grind another axe then. 'It Isn't Him' was the first track on No Lights For Miles – the second of the three demos we recorded with Paul Savage out in Shropshire. 'Slow 25', which we looked at here the other week, was the second track. I sent a copy of the tape to the The Beat, which used to be called Brum Beat, and was a local rock magazine purporting to be a local music magazine. I often talk about what a hard time The Regulars had as an indiepop band during the UK's indiepop dark ages and in the least indiepop of the UK's major cities: in giving No Lights a predictable panning, The Beat's demo review section began by saying that 'It Isn't Him' and 'Slow 25' were the same song. That is what we were up against.

Back to the lyrics now, because if this were someone else's song I'd be curious about that sartorial shield, even if it's a clumsy piece of writing. At this point in the song the speaker, like the one in 'Paint in Black', is looking on darkly as the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes but, unlike any character in any Rolling Stones song I know, is thinking how nice it might be to wear a light cotton dress on a hot day instead of simmering in heavy jeans. And at this point in the blog you might be wondering exactly how autobiographical all of this is. I know I would be, if someone I knew was writing about the same stuff.

Well, it is a bit personal, yeah, but not specifically autobiographical in every detail. I worked out at some point that, although I'm drawn to and sometimes inspired by people who are trans-this, cross-that and androgy-the other, I'm probably not really trans-anything – just a bit girly and very ill at ease with, and critical of, macho behaviour. When I wrote 'It Isn't Him' I was still working all of this gender gubbins out and shared the anxieties of the boy or the man in the song. One day I was watching the Mariners play away at Watford, and midway through the first half all my alarm at Tony Gallimore's defending was forgotten in the sheer panic of discovering that there was still some glitter on my face from the Regulars gig the night before.

These days I'm much more at ease with myself – not because I've given in and lost myself and become the persona, but because I'm just happy with who I am, and the rest doesn't matter. But I will still rail against gender stereotyping on others' behalf: I've typed half of this with my month-old son asleep on my chest, and the thing I want most of all for him, as he grows, is to be free from it all. Before too much longer we'll be buying him clothes and all the nice colours will drain out of the boys' sections in the shops, all the prettiness and liveliness and vibrancy, our gendered culture constraining him to navy blue and khaki and grey clothes and thoughts and actions. Not that it hasn't already begun: the blue clothes we're given as presents are stacking up and in his first week of life we were surrounded by congratulations cards saying BABY BOY. Why spotlight his gender the moment he's born? Why spotlight his gender ever? Let him be a human being above all else. Let us all be.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Morning Song' by Sylvia Plath
'Pink Boy, Blue Girl' by Aerospace: a beautiful song which does the same subject matter much better

A Christmas break – with two Christmas songs

2008-12-23T22:27:00.007Z

The Effortless blog is taking a Christmas break – but so you're not left without a new Regulars song over the festive period (well, not a new one, but you know what I mean), here are two live recordings of Chrimbo tunes played by The Regulars in successive years at the Jug of Ale.

In the Bleak Mid-Winter (2000)
Ding, Dong! Merrily on High (2001)

One of the nicest things about being on Bearos Records was getting to play at the special Christmas gigs the label put on every year at the Jug. Even the year Baxxter got nekkid on stage, it was still great. Actually, that probably helped. Like everything decent in Birmingham, though, the Jug has recently been closed down, further vindicating my decision to do one.

In 2000 the gig was the same night as Chris's work Christmas do – in those days we used to have no end of arguments about his priorities – so we had to play without drums. We decided to make a proper acoustic set of it all, partly because it sounded great when we played that way at the city council's ArtsFest thing three months earlier, and we all played sitting down and I borrowed a synth to add a bit more texture. 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter' is my favourite carol so I worked out some chords, wrote a little in-betweeny instrumental bit, and bingo. I love Stu's climbing bassline and there's some really pretty, wistful guitar in there from Paul too.

The following year Chris was back on board so we decided to go the opposite way with a daft version of 'Ding, Dong! Merrily on High'. The verse is laced with drunken slide guitar and the chorus sounds like an oi! band. It sounds absolutely dreadful but it was a lot of fun to do!

Even after The Regulars disbanded the Bearos Christmas gig had a lot of significance for me. In December 2002 I asked if I could play a little solo set at it. I wasn't really prepared, but I was still reeling from the band's recent split and I wanted to do something vaguely defiant and show everybody I was still there. (For my festive tune I covered 'Stop the Cavalry', with Stu doing the "shub-a-dub-a-dub" bits; under-rehearsed, we stumbled badly, but it was dead funny. If anyone wants to hear it, shout up and I'll dig out and rip the CD.) So that was my first ever solo gig. It was ages before I did another one, but if I hadn't done this one then I might not have carried on at all.

Thanks for sticking with the blog so far, and for all your comments. It surprises and sometimes disturbs me how much these songs still mean to me, so it's good to get the chance to talk about them after all this time. Have a great Christmas and I'll be back soon with the next track!

07: Slow 25

2008-12-17T00:01:00.003Z

Recorded July 1997, 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

Download: mp3, 3.3mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

This is a song about taking your time over the big decisions that shape the course of your life, letting things fall into place in their own way and at their own pace, standing back from the breathless rush of the world so that your fate flows leisurely and naturally into its proper channel and with all the sweet slowness you need to savour and apprehend the full import and grandeur in every moment of your precious and miraculous existence. It crams two guitar solos, two verses, three choruses, an intro and outro, and a bridge into less than two and a half minutes.

My later, solo song, 'Take Your Time', pitches up on similar ground, and is also pretty short, but its simplicity and slow tempo mean it avoids the conflict that arises in 'Slow 25' between the subject matter and the form. Does this conflict undermine the song? Not terminally, because at one point it was in the running to become The Regulars' debut single: our website reported in February 1999 that Alan 'The Doc' Farmer of Bearos Records had suggested a double A-side featuring 'Slow 25' and 'North Star'.

The thing about the first single, though, was the preposterous length of time it took us to sort out a producer and actually record the thing – it was getting on for two years after Alan asked us to do a single when we actually handed over the recordings to him. (This was mostly our fault, but not always: in February 2000, about 18 months into the whole saga, we'd booked some studio time only for the producer, Paul Glave, to break his leg less than a week before we were due to record, and by the time he got out of hospital he was going on tour to do the live sound for Broadcast and King Adora.) Given the subject matter of 'Slow 25', it's a cute twist that, by the time we got into the studio to record the single, we'd written 'Lie Down and Fight' and decided to release that instead.

If a lot of my songs – with The Regulars and on my own – have run through similar subject matter to 'Slow 25' (including 'Lie Down and Fight', as you'll see here in a few weeks' time), I don't think any of them has taken exactly the same position or emphasis as another. 'Take Your Time' is unequivocally, perhaps sentimentally, positive about the merits of the idler's approach to life, while 'Slow 25' is entirely non-committal. This is what I'm like, it says, without expressing pride or regret, or elaborating on whether it's a better or worse way to be.

This is probably because, at the time, I wasn't really sure. You know. Sometimes you question yourself. And in the long sleepless night of self-doubt, it can be scary to have hit your mid-twenties watching your peers working diligently through the Game of Life checklist – get a proper job, buy a car, buy a house, get married, have kids – while you're still more concerned with catching trains to popshows and wondering which label might put your next single out.

Hence the image, in the chorus of 'Slow 25', of "standing still on a timelapse backdrop", which is meant to be a sort of cinematic visual effect where the speaker in the song is, um, standing still while a city rushes about its business behind, in speeded-up film, clouds and headlights whizzing by, shadows briskly shortening, rotating and lengthening and the sun swinging from nadir to zenith and back in the space of a few scant seconds.

(The milestone thing is, of course, a nonsense. When you're 18, you think 21 seems really old; when you're 21 you think you might as well be dead as hit 25; and so on. I was mortally terrified of becoming 30 when I was 28, but by the time I actually got there I didn't feel any different so I didn't give a stuff. It's all just so clichéd, anyway, don't you think? Just get on with doing what you want to do!)

What would I do differently now? I'm not sure it works having two different guitar solos: the one in the middle (1:35), like most of the music, was written by me but the intro one at 0:17 was Rob's, and I'm guessing that because this was quite an early Regulars song, and he and I wouldn't have been acquainted for long by then, we were too cagey to say no to each other. So if I were arranging it today, maybe I'd choose one solo and just have it played twice with variations. I'd make Rob's vocal higher than mine in the chorus. I'd point out to the rhythm section how you can actually dance properly to the shuffly beat they're playing in the verses and ask if we could maybe try more beats that you can actually dance properly to (the only other one I can think of is in the pre-chorus of 'Lincolnshire Skies'). I would probably send more demo tapes out to promoters and labels and leave fewer demo tapes in a dusty box on the top of a bookcase. But I would surely still say no when Chris says we should try and sound more Britpop. And I would almost certainly still not learn to drive.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Take Your Time' on last.fm

06: Saturday Song

2008-12-08T23:07:00.007Z

Recorded c. October 1996, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Shelley Merchant (lead vocal), Pete Green (guitar, backing vocal), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 6.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

When life isn't too hard, one day can seem very much like another. But when most of your week is really quite rubbish, the parts that aren't take on a hallowed and glowing aura of precious inviolability and you cling to them harder and squeeze out every drop of joy that you can.

Yeah, I guess I'm talking about work. Because most work is rubbish, and when you have to do rubbish work it casts a shadow over your whole life.

Early in 1996 my girlfriend and I rented a flat on Sandon Road in Bearwood. We got broken into twice, and the second time they nicked my stereo with a Sugargliders album still on the turntable. The kitchen was too small to turn round in. The couple upstairs were fighting all the time. The furniture was horrible and chintzy and the storage heaters were rubbish so it was freezing cold. I had a shit job at a council depot in Nechells which took ages to get to and it was always snowing on the way, and the strangely quiet, insular Brummies who worked there thought the word 'student' meant anyone who had ever been a student, so to them I was still literally a student even though I'd finished university and got a shit job.

But it was the first flat I rented after graduating, so it felt a bit special, and it was still in Bearwood and I loved Bearwood (even when I later grew to loathe Birmingham). And, as I was finally having to be self-sufficient and do shit jobs to earn money and pay the rent, Saturdays were becoming an increasingly vital escape from the grey drudgery and slush of the working week.

In '35 Hours' I sketched out how work very often saps the life out of people, leaving no energy or inspiration or empathy left to enjoy or create or love. In 'Lie Down and Fight' I set this in a wider context of different lifestyles and aspirations, worldviews and countercultures, and think-habits and that. 'Saturday Song' is essentially another song about work being shit, but without ever actually mentioning work. It enumerates some of the joys of the weekend, and the return to work looms sadly but silently in the background.

So we would get up on a Saturday morning and watch repeats of Grange Hill and have a big breakfast and roll around in the Guardian. We were shivering but happy, and it was a job cooking scrambled eggs on the electric hob, but the Guardian was really quite a good paper at that time. Then, after Football Focus, we might go out and cross the road to catch the number 11 bus down to Harborne – the nice suburb down the road where nobody we knew could afford to live – and potter round the sort of little independent shops that the word 'pottering' was invented for, buying fruit and second-hand stripy tops and things, and at quarter to five I would stand outside the Radio Rentals shop and watch the football results coming in on the BBC videoprinter (the Mariners were being mismanaged by Brian Laws at the time, but two divisions higher than where we are now). Finally we would go home and have some tea and watch it get dark, and then meet our friends and my fellow Regulars for a Saturday night out, perhaps in town or perhaps just down the Dog in Bearwood. It was a day of humble glories.

(The number 11, I was once told, is the longest urban circular bus route in Europe. The 11A goes anti-clockwise as it appears on a map; the 11C, clockwise. It takes two hours to get back to where you started, or probably more at rush hour. The 11 route threads together a lot of the scenes from my time in Birmingham: pottering round Harborne; my old university in Perry Barr, where I also had my first ever balti; the two flats and three houses I lived in around Bearwood; my girlfriend's old house in Erdington; the Hare & Hounds down in Kings Heath; an even worse shit job in Winson Green; and any number of one-off visits to fleeting friends, obscure pubs and distant suburban branch libraries. I bet anyone who lives in Birmingham and uses the buses has a similar collection of memories threaded together on the big circular 11 route like beads on a necklace.)

So you might have noticed that it's not me singing. I met Shelley Merchant when I made a big career leap from my shit job in the postroom at the council depot to a slightly less shit job typing at a security firm. I had now demonstrated conclusively to my temping agency that I could type like a demon, which was good, because in these typing jobs I could earn £4.50 an hour instead of £3.72 and I was always surrounded by women and I guess it was enough of a nice novelty for them to have a young man in their office that they always looked after me very well and sometimes we would swap recipes and haircare tips.

Shelley said she sang and played guitar so one night me and Stu went to see her doing karaoke at some grotty pub on the Hagley Road (the north side, between the Plough & Harrow and Portland Road; can anyone help me remember the name of it?). We stood at the bar nodding and saying, yeah, she can sing, let's do it! It felt less like a band getting together than a film about a band getting together, though when you're young it can be hard to tell the difference. Shelley played at the first Regulars gig at the Hare & Hounds in November 1996 but that was the only one, as she left to pursue a creative calling that spoke louder to her than indie pop: ceramics. We stayed friends for a while; Chris ended up in a house-share with her down in Stirchley, and in between one of our eight gajillion moves me and my girlfriend lived in their conservatory for a month (it was November 1997; I remember writing most of 'I'm Gonna Stay With Her', the first track on my new EP, at that time). We lost touch later though – if anyone's seen her, shout up on the comments!

As with all of these early Regulars songs, I wrote the whole thing, and the recording is a bit rough. The drums came out too high in the mix again – sometimes you can't hear the chord changes properly because the crash cymbal drowns them out – and it doesn't help that, despite my guitar mostly sitting out the second half of the second verse (2:25), the arrangement isn't varied enough to keep a five-minute song from flagging and dragging a little. The performances are just lacking a bit of verve as well, really.

I do quite like that stately tempo though, and Stu crafted a bassline that sits nicely with it and makes itself some breathing space. If there's too much of Chris's drums, then it's too much of a good thing: when I said his tippy-tappy hi-hat in 'Saturday Song' sounded like angels tap dancing on ice, I may have been trying to impress a girl, but that doesn't mean I didn't mean it. And the guitar part in the verse puts quite a fresh spin on the three-chord trick – so much so that I decided to have a whole instrumental verse at the start of the song, just to show it off.

Do you know 'Standing Here' by The Stone Roses? It's a song in two parts: the first is the bog-standard dreary Mancwank sound that ruined everything but the second is a pretty sort of extended ending with draw-you-in descending guitar lines and Ian Brown briefly remembering how not to be a monotone monobrow monkeyboy. At some point after I wrote this song, I saw a similarity between the pretty sort of extended ending in 'Standing Here' and the one in 'Saturday Song' which starts at 3:34. This is where night falls and the long shadows of the coming Monday begin to loom across the weekend (an idea taken further in 'Today at Last', the final track on Effortless, where the three verses depict Saturday morning, Sunday night and Monday morning). I love the words and I love the music and I love the way the words and the music go together. It's still one of the best sections of a song I've ever written.

We gave this song to Shelley to sing because we couldn't find a key to play it in that suited my voice at the time. I can't decide whether it was asking a bit much of her to bring her voice down this low – but there wasn't much scope for change because the main guitar line couldn't be played lower than the 12th fret. In the end I put a capo at the second so it was in F sharp instead of E; any higher than that and I'd have struggled to play it. At 1:19, meanwhile, there's a lesson in why it's best to sing your own lyrics yourself: I wrote "Danny Kendall/knowing the end'll come soon" and it's ended up as "knowing the end will come soon", losing the rhyme. (In 'North Star' the line "constellations sweep a circle through the year" always seemed to be a tongue-twister for Rob, too.) It's no big deal, mind: Shelley made a better job of singing this than I did of singing the other five Touched by the Hand of Nod tracks.

Trivia bit: for my first band, Conversation Fear, I wrote a song called 'Danny Kendall's Dead'. I guess he was kind of an icon.

As all the other songs I've mentioned in this post were to demonstrate later, there was plenty more work-related pain awaiting me before I managed to get out and go freelance. And for all the happiness and mental equilibrium I've eked out since then, I still nurture a quiet terror that I will have to return one day to the nine-to-five (or even, like many unfortunate workers, the 8:30-to-six or something worse) – a terror that lingers behind and overshadows every day of my current freedom, in the same way as the fear of the approaching Monday morning is already creeping in by Saturday afternoon and instils a dull nausea in the reveller chasing down denial on Saturday night. God help me and my loved ones if I do, because I would surely fall to pieces all over again.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Elevenbus.co.uk – an ace psychogeography project
A short piece from the BBC about the 11 bus (with funny comments)
'Standing Here' by The Stone Roses on last.fm
A Google map showing some of the locations mentioned in this post

05: University of Rain

2008-12-03T01:57:00.009Z

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

Download: mp3, 4.0mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

During my gap between graduating from the then University of Central England in 1995 and getting a publishing job in 1998, I did a load of rubbish temping jobs, signed on the dole for a bit, formed The Regulars and spent a year as a postgraduate at the University of Rain.

Although it is known to most people as the University of Warwick, it isn't even in Warwick: it's in Coventry. But Coventry is an industrial city with a massive ring road and Warwick is a posh historic town with tea shops and a castle. That's the sort of university Warwick is. They had a PR disaster the other year when they considered refusing places on their courses to anyone who couldn't bring a laptop to lectures. That's the sort of university Warwick is. The lecturers reluctantly commute up from London on the days when they can't avoid the tiresome duty of actually doing some lecturing; in stark contrast with the friendly and approachable staff of UCE, you got the feeling they would sooner die than have a pint with you after a seminar. That's the sort of university Warwick is.

The campus is on the very edge of Coventry, surrounded by nothing at all, with shops and banks, and a large students' union building with a cinema and a venue for arts and music; if you live on campus you could quite conceivably pass a whole term without leaving its boundaries. Not that any reasonable person would want to. For all its pretensions to dreaming spire rarefaction, its buildings are aggressively functional, and it may be a first port of call for Oxbridge rejects but it feels like a hospital. (I used to say a prison, but that was exaggerating. A bit.) And yes, it seemed that every time I arrived there, after a two-hour journey from Bearwood involving a train and two buses, it was absolutely pissing it down.

And then there were the people.

These days I think nothing of spending 40 quid on train tickets and hurtling through the country to a popshow or an indiepop club in some city somewhere, in the sure confidence of a sound bank balance and a sofa to sleep on. Actually, it isn't true to say I think nothing of it: although it happens all the time these days, I always think it's an amazing thing, a little miracle. Maybe this is because until I moved to Birmingham in 1992 I was tethered to Grimsby like a goat to a post. Even if I'd known anyone anywhere who was remotely connected to the indiepop scene, I barely had enough money to do anything.

It was remarkable to meet people at Warwick, then, who had clearly grown up in much more affluent surroundings than I had, but whose lives had somehow been all the more limited. "My band's playing a gig in Birmingham this weekend!" I might say to them excitedly. "Do you fancy coming to see us?"

"Your band?" they would repeat with alarm. "Oh... I don't know... I've never been to er, a 'gig'. What are you supposed to do?" They might have visited 20 different countries before their 21st birthday, but they'd never been to a popshow. Or even just a gig.

They weren't all as dull as that, though. In writing this blog I'm perceiving a theme in my songs that I'd never been aware of before: the redeeming power of having amazing friends. It's the central theme of 'Today at Last' (the final track on Effortless) but only lately have I realised that it threads through the ending of 'From a Dark Room' and into 'University of Rain'. The other "northern voice" in this song, and the "you" addressed in the fourth verse, was my friend Dan Wilson – not just the only other northerner for miles around but seemingly the only person at Warwick who liked a few beers and a natter, and had actually heard of football. He supported Barnsley and he drove us all the way to Cleethorpes in his Mini one freezing night in January 1997 to watch them beat Grimsby 3-2. If he hadn't been around I'd probably have given up on the University of Rain on the induction night, because when I got fed up of the red wine and mineral water there'd have been nobody to slink off with for a pint of Beamish in the union.

What about the song, then? Let's start in muso corner this time: I wrote this one, and it uses quite an unusual chord for me. In the main sequence in the verse, it starts on B minor and then the note on the top string of the guitar goes up just one fret and everything else stays the same, so I think that means it goes on to B minor augmented. Woooo! This must be the only augmented chord I've ever used in my whole life. I'm sure I must have discovered it when I played something wrong.

If you listen very closely halfway through the verse (0:37) you can hear Rob doing a brilliant Rob thing: amid all the up-front racket of the two electric guitars, he introduces a layer of very subtle finger-picked acoustic. If you don't know it's there, you don't consciously notice it – but it has a potent effect just below the surface, subtly magnifying and clarifying notes where its course across the fretboard coincides here and there with the other guitars, illuminating each one for an instant at a time, like light reflecting off a disco ball. Wonderful, and pretty, and barely noticeable. Am I suggesting enough of a metaphor for The Regulars yet?

Trivia section: the lyrics for this song were frequently misheard, and the first impression of Stu's mom Val (in the West Midlands they refer to their female parents in the American style) was that the chorus actually began with the words "social bias, solid 'A's". We were all fond of Stu's folks and Val was a big Regulars fan, so I tried to sing much more clearly after that. To be fair to her, as well, it's a highly educated guess given the subject matter of the song.

I like the last verse as well (starting at 1:53), especially the way the broken-down arrangement of the same chords gives a bit of pathos at just the right moment in the lyrics. I like the stop-start thing at the end of it, because it's not quite a conventional stop-start. It's more of a sudden dwindle than an out-and-out stop, and Chris's snare brings it back in with a satisfying smack.

Chris's drumming, in fact, may be the best thing about this song. I like that you can hear it pretty well. 'University of Rain' was written in 1997 and recorded during the second of our three visits to Paul Savage's rural studio, over the weekend of 22 and 23 August 1998. Paul Savage was a man of rock, and as such he believed that drums should always be prominent in the mix. With some songs – 'From a Dark Room', for example – I felt this was less successful. With this one, however, it's great, because of the way the drumming builds up and up and somehow still stutters as it climaxes with the machine-gun rolls of the coda (from 2:31, while I'm making a brief attempt with the vocals to out-Morrissey Morrissey). It's just a shame that the snare drum that was used for the recording gives a sound like a chopstick hitting a copy of the Radio Times.

(Margin note regarding drums being made very loud: indiepop often suffers a similar fate at provincial gigs where there's a house soundman attached to the venue. These, too, are very often vintage men of rock, who deem that drums are the emperor of all music, and every other instrument must bow down low before them in the mix. It works pretty well for Shrag, say, but is less appropriate for a band like Electrophönvintage. These men will always, without fail, also make any keyboard or synth very low in the mix; unless the keyboard or synth is being played by a girl, in which case they won't actually bother plugging it into the mixing desk in the first place.)

Of course, there is something inherently ridiculous about a song with loud distorted guitars protesting angrily about the terrible, gruelling conditions some people have to endure in the course of their postgraduate studies. But really, 'University of Rain' comes from the same place as 'North Star' and 'Lincolnshire Skies'. It's the fourth verse that gives it away ("I never understood where I was from/until I went away"), and that daft bit at the end about red wine and mineral water. Ultimately it's a song about the insecurity of a working-class kid moving through a middle-class culture – an insecurity that's never fully gone away and probably never will. It's a song about looking for somewhere to belong. And any similarity between the endings of 'University of Rain' and 'The Ace of Spades' by Motorhead is entirely intentional.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
A Google map demonstrating the position of the University of Warwick relative to Warwick and Coventry
A short unpublished piece I wrote for a fanzine after Barnsley beat Grimsby 3-2 (pdf)
A review of Effortless (scroll down about two thirds of the page) citing 'University of Rain' in an explication of the tweecore sound

04: Try

2008-11-24T21:30:00.007Z

Recorded December 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Rob Harris (lead vocal, guitar), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums), Pete Green (backing vocal, tambourine)
Producer Mat Webster
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 5.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

When I fell in love with pop music 20 years ago it was because Morrissey was explaining what I was feeling. First of all, he quite clearly ascertained the precise contents of my soul using some sort of spooky witchcraft mojo. And then he transcribed it all – again, quite obviously using some kind of supernatural powers to choose exactly the words and phrases that would stop my heart for a moment, drain the colour from my cheeks and leave me gasping for breath in the shock of recognition, the deep, deep, visceral shock that there was at least one other person among the billions in the world, despite all impressions to the contrary, who Knew How I Felt.

Then Morrissey started writing about East End gangsters and whining hypocritically about immigration so I found something better to listen to. But songs like 'You Just Haven't Earned it Yet, Baby' left me with an enduring love for those lyrics in the second person, where the narrator is seemingly addressing some troubled teenage type who feels the whole world is against them, who has a great deal of love if they can only bestow it, who yearns for independence and freedom and is very often trying to escape from the rubbish small town where they live, and all of that. It's a form that maybe has its roots in things like Billy Liar, and outlives Morrissey (come on, he's effectively been dead for years) in songwriters like Stuart Murdoch.

'Try' was my attempt at contributing to this venerable genre of lyrics. I hope that hasn't ruined it for you, because it's not quite as calculated as all that, and the section that rhymes 'anachronistic' and 'masochistic' (ha!) isn't just showing off. It derives from the feeling I sometimes get that the notion of actually giving a shit about anything seems to many people a little quaint in the ironic, post-ideological, Channel 4 culture of the Anglo-American 21st century. That said, it's always hard to tell whether, despite lots of things in the world being better now than they were when I first listened to The Smiths, things are getting worse in some other ways – or indeed whether nothing ever changes very much at all and one simply becomes a mardy old bastard.

Either way, and far more importantly, 'Try' is a cracking tune which sounds as irresistible and fresh to me now as when Rob 'Chopper' Harris wrote it in 1999.

There were a few different ways The Regulars would write songs. Sometimes I'd do the whole thing and present it at practice as a finished article. Sometimes Rob (or, very occasionally, Paul) would write a guitar part and I'd make up a melody and words while he played through it in the practice room. And at other times, Rob would write a guitar part and a melody with placeholder lyrics and record them on a tape to give to me, and my only contribution would be to write new words and then sing them. The latter was mostly the case with 'Try', which Rob working-titled 'The Cradle Song' before I came up with the lyrics.

I did end up writing the call and response vocal melodies in the chorus as well, but I was too rubbish even to sing the lead vocal here – somehow I just couldn't get my voice round Rob's melody – so all I'm doing on this recording is the backing vocal in the chorus and a bit of tambourine. Rob put me hugely to shame here by not only singing lead but, when we played it live, doing a fiddly bit of lead guitar at the same time. As those of you who are musicians will know, this is not an easy trick to pull off.

Where I didn't write much on a Regulars song, though, I would often put in a bit of work on the arrangement and structure. And blow me, there was a lot of work done on this. From what I can piece together out of the old website, there were at least three distinct arrangements of this song. Go to the links section below, then download and play the earlier live version: there's not just totally different instrumentation and arrangement but an entirely rewritten chorus.

Then listen to the intro on the full band version – hear the way Paul's guitar plays on its own for two bars, then Rob, Chris and Rich come in for two bars, then it's Paul on his own for two bars, then the full band again. I didn't write any of the music here, but it was my idea to arrange it that way. This feels as satisfying now as it felt exciting then. When we played it live, at those moments when the full band kicked in I would start to whirl and wheel across the stage bashing my tambourine, and I felt thrilled and electrified and, after the long, dark weeks of lonely work between popshows, alive at last.

(If you've got an mp3 handy of 'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks, incidentally, listen to what the instruments do when the vocals kick in at 0:21 – it's the same two-bars-in two-bars-out pattern, and it's quite lovely to dance to. If you haven't got an mp3 handy of 'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks, what are you doing with your life?)

Also, wrap your ears round the middle eight (it starts at 2:43) and cast your mind back to the other week when I was talking about 'October We Take it Back' and the way music makes me think of a picture sometimes (is that a sort of musical synaesthesia, or am I just endearingly quirky?). When we were working up 'Try' in the practice room I used to call this part "the toy factory bit" because that's what it gave me a mental image of. Chris's cowbell – which developed a small cult following in its own right and followed him to The Motive – is probably much of the cause. Again, I didn't write any of it, but I did suggest where everyone should come in and drop out, gesticulating to each member of the band as they all played through the toy factory bit, like I was conducting the Dudley Road Symphony Orchestra, using a tambourine instead of a baton.

The middle eight is really a middle 16, because everything in this song takes twice as long as it would in a conventional quick indiepop or punk track. There are songs that compress a whole verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus structure into less than two minutes; 'Try' does the opposite, expanding the same conventional structure over nearly five. Maybe I'm biased, but it somehow seems to keep the feel of a three-minute song, despite the longest fade-out in the history of indiepop, and, miraculously, doesn't get boring. If you agree then I'll take a bit of credit for the arrangement, but an awful lot should go to the rest of the band for writing and playing parts that are fresh and bright and inventive, and sound as full of hope as the unworldly 'you' character in the lyrics.

But, while it's not a dispassionate song, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't a little cynical of me to have just identified a lyrical genre and said, "hmmm, I reckon I'll have a go at that next" – as if the whole thing were some sort of exercise in songwriting – rather than just writing what I was feeling. This would be a harsh conclusion, though; it's not like we had a plugger paying DJs to playlist it on Radio 1 or anything – I know; it's unbelievable, isn't it – and if the 'you' of the lyrics wasn't based on anyone specific who I knew at the time from the Birmingham indie scene, I've always been drawn to and inspired by people like the one in the song; and maybe the lyrics, ultimately, are informed by the memory of teenage Smiths fan Pete, moping in his dingy Grimsby bedroom every night instead of sitting in the park getting trashed on cider like any normal 1980s adolescent, so that effectively perhaps I'm singing back in time, to an earlier, sillier, terribly fragile version of myself who'd have been glad to know that things all turned out OK.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Earlier arrangement on a live version of the song (mp3, 3.3mb)
A news report thing from the Regulars website about the rearrangement
'Don't Stop' by Pocketbooks on last.fm

03: From a Dark Room

2008-11-19T10:06:00.005Z

Recorded c. October 1996, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal, guitar), Shelley Merchant (guitar, backing vocal), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 5.5mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

The way men treat women very often sickens the hell out of me. It seems to me that discrimination at work, domestic violence, Nuts magazine and rape ultimately have a common source: the terrible, poisonous think-habit of seeing a gender before seeing a person – and, from there, the mindset of very many men that sees women as insurmountably 'other' and, ultimately, somehow less than their understanding of human.

Ten years ago a fair chunk of my songwriting was to do with this sort of stuff. 'From a Dark Room' is a song about a woman or a girl who's being harassed and menaced by a man who she's recently ended a relationship with. She's scared to leave her house or do anything, but ultimately she musters the strength to phone the friends who he made her drop, and she overcomes her fear with their support and love. (The love of friends is the central theme of the final track on the Effortless cd, 'Today at Last', and also of a new song, 'Where the Music Still Plays', which I played live for the first time last weekend.)

I don't know whether it's cack-handed or clumsy or anything like that, you know, like it's always supposed to be when a man writes a first-person female narrator, or a white writer inhabits a black character, say. But I'm not sure that assumption is fair, and Jonathan Coe proves that men can write brilliantly about women. I guess this isn't too bad an effort – not exactly The Rain Before it Falls, but it doesn't make me shudder with embarrassment. (What do you think about all this stuff? Write a comment below if you like – I'd be interested to see.)

My girlfriend, incidentally, has always thought 'From a Dark Room' one of my best songs, but listening to it again just now has left me a bit cold. Maybe it's just too worthy and earnest to make for a good popsong. Or maybe it's an OK song but the recording is a bit lifeless. It's taken from the first of our three visits to Paul Savage's home studio in Shropshire, towards the end of 1996, when we rushed six songs down in two days.

The demo tape that resulted was called – well, nicknamed more than anything – Touched by the Hand of Nod: a sort of rubbish in-joke about our semi-ironic worship of Slade. There's a photo somewhere – possibly in an envelope in a box in my attic unopened since 2004, or possibly in someone else's house entirely; I've no idea – of me and Stu doing the we're-not-worthy thing in front of a mural of Noddy Holder painted on the wall at the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath, where we played our first gig in November 1996, not long after we recorded this. My old flatmate Dan had some friends in a band called The Ladykillers and we managed to get a support with them. There's a tape of the gig somewhere – possibly in the same box as the photo of me and Stu praising Noddy. I was dead nervous and couldn't play guitar too well because my hands were shaking, but it was a lovely night. Much the same as now, then.

It was the only Regulars gig when I played guitar, though. The original line-up had the rhythm section of Stu and Chris in place straight away, but with a front two of me and Shelley Merchant, both on guitar and with Shelley singing harmonies too. She left the band before we could play another gig, but this was the line-up that you're hearing on 'From a Dark Room' (two other Hand of Nod tracks, 'Saturday Song' and 'Into Your Bloodstream', made it on to Effortless too).

Shelley and Chris come to the fore in the best part of this song: the extended ending, which starts at 2:55. Chris's drumming is thoughtful and sensitive and, like Shelley's vocals (which start to fade in at 3:45), helps to create the sense of hope and triumph around the song's happy ending. But my singing is a bit hesitant and doesn't do it justice; these days I'd fly through that melody but as a much less practised singer 12 years ago I seem to have found the higher notes a bit intimidating.

In all, though, the recording demonstrates our naivety as much as my songwriting (like everything we did before Rob joined the band, 'From a Dark Room' was all my own work). We put some backwards effect on the drum intro just because we could, really – it doesn't run at all smoothly into the following section – and I remember getting enormously excited when I came up with the really very simple little lead guitar fill at the end of each verse (it first occurs at 0:43). Bless my youthful soul and everything, but it's hardly the best thing ever.

Like the song as a whole, really. It isn't awful, and it was an important step for me to take in terms of writing lyrics. But you'll just have to trust me for now when I promise you that Effortless has greater moments than this, and you'll have to indulge the four nervous and inexperienced musicians responsible if it sounds a little stilted here.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
The Hare & Hounds
A Google map showing the Hare & Hounds

02: October We Take it Back

2008-11-10T21:34:00.011Z

Recorded February 2001, 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, 4.7mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

This is a song about shagging. Specifically, it's about shagging in October. It's sort of meant as a counterblast to all those songs that equate summer with sex – because there is nothing sexy at all about hot weather. Now I'm not being a filthy goth or anything. I don't mind a bit of sunshine. But the summer is for beer gardens, and cricket, and Indietracks. Not shagging. Because you're all sweaty and sticky already from the heat. Yuck. And there's so much flesh exposed to begin with that you can't really have fun, y'know, peeling off layers and that. Give me the autumn any time, just as the weather's turning and you get that first fresh tingle of winter in the air, enough to bring a little flush to the cheeks of your loved one, and a little breeze to tousle their hair a tiny bit...

But I'm getting all English and embarrassed now so that's enough with the rude. I like the autumn better than any season, regardless of rumpy-pumpy, and when I hear this song I think of living in leafy Handsworth Wood in Birmingham in 1993 and 1994. It was my second year at university and, rather than take the number 16 bus down to the corner of Handsworth Park and then the number 11 across to Perry Barr, me and my housemates used to walk over some playing fields to Old Walsall Road and go one stop on the train from Hamstead station. The fields were covered by a wind-rumpled carpet of golden and crimson leaves, and Hamstead station was a beautiful, cosy, humble little joy of a thing, with a gas fire in the ticket office and the air of a village station but ten or fifteen minutes from the city centre. (I'd be amazed if it's still staffed now.)

The whole year was a short-lived illusion of living city life from a dreamy suburban retreat: the only way we could afford to live in Handsworth Wood was in a draughty house with mice, dodgy locks and a leaky roof. But I liked it a lot, and this was where I met the future Regulars bassist Stu Fletcher in the autumn of 1993. (This photo is Stu at a gig at the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading in March 2001.) He was round the house a lot as he was seeing a mate off our English course who was also round the house a lot; he introduced me to the Black Country and I introduced him to The Orchids, and then we watched the '94 World Cup in the USA from the sofa. If we were watching one of those appalling and wilfully stupid Two Pints of Coupling Behaving Badly sitcoms on BBC3 it would probably be called 'male bonding'. I prefer the term 'making friends'.

Anyway. Like I was saying last week, 'October' was gonna be our second single until I persuaded everyone to put 'This is the Sound' out instead (and I wish I hadn't, because I love 'October' much better). If we'd stuck with plan A then you'd now be downloading a better-produced version than this. Half of the Effortless cd comprises demo tracks we recorded with Stu's dad's mate Paul Savage at his home studio in the middle of nowhere (well, the middle of Shropshire) and this was from our third and final visit in February 2001. Like a lot of the stuff we recorded out there, this sounds a bit thin and reedy to me now, with the bass unfathomably low in the mix. Not that we'd blame Paul Savage for this – we were an inexperienced band and found analogue recording pretty hard – but I'd have loved to have heard a recording of this song with a warmer, rounder sound (like we got at our brilliant final session with Mat Webster in Redditch in December 2001, when we recorded 'Try', 'Today at Last' and 'Pop Box 9:30' – you'll get to hear all these later).

A trawl through various archived versions of the Regulars website (which have followed me through the hard drives of several computers in the intervening years) reveals that we were writing 'October We Take it Back' in August 1999. Its live debut was exactly nine years ago, on 11 November at the Jug of Ale. I didn't write much of this song, mind you. Apart from the words, the only bit I contributed was the vocal melody; the song is built around Rob's lovely, poised riff which introduces the two verses. Another thing worth listening out for is Paul introducing an extra guitar line for the second verse (starting at 1:26), which wasn't there in the first – a good illustration of how we liked to make little changes to the arrangement to keep things interesting. Paul's guitar is what brings the chorus to life, too – a fiery little swish down the fretboard like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes' Night.

But listen to the bridge, because when I stop singing it's the best bit of the song. The first part of it, from 2:24 to 2:38, in particular. When we recorded the song Rob double-tracked his guitar here, so the same bit of tune is played once on an acoustic and once on an electric, over the top of each other, and sometimes I get these images in my head of what a bit of music looks like, and here the acoustic guitar has always sounded to me like the look of a yellowing autumn leaf while the electric has sounded like the look of a faint touch of frost along the leaf's edges and veins. I love how our Chris's double tom tap, after four bars, wakes up the rest of the instruments and beckons them back in. The second half of the bridge has a blustery, yearning sort of feel which works well too (thanks in large part to some more clever drumming), but that first half, those first eight bars – that's one of my favourite bits in the whole Regulars songbookography, that is, and it paints brightly what an effortless creative genius Rob could be.

Now, if you'll excuse me again, the autumn leaves are swirling below my window once more and there's a distinct nip in the air, so I need a cold shower.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
An account of the live debut of 'October' from the Regulars website
Bearos Records free downloads page including this song
A Google map showing the locations referred to above
Hamstead station on the excellent Rail Around Birmingham site

01: This is the Sound

2008-10-26T10:10:00.022Z

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). Group vocal by all of the above plus Richard Banner
Producer Mat Webster
Released 7" vinyl (A-side) August 2001; Effortless cd album January 2004

Download: mp3, 4.3mb
(right click and select 'save target as' or 'save link as')

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence

In April 2001, the day before we were going into the studio to record the second Regulars single, the members of the band gathered in the Dog, the pub on Hagley Road West where we made all the important decisions. A month or two earlier we'd decided that the second single was going to be 'October We Take it Back'. We sat down with our pints and it took me about ten minutes to persuade the rest of the band that, when we got up early the next morning and drove two cars the 20-odd miles down to Redditch to record, it should be 'This is the Sound' instead. 'October', as you'll discover when it features here next week, is a much, much better song.

'This is the Sound', in fact, is a long way from being the best song we did, or even making the top five. The singing isn't great. It goes on too long (the first of the two instrumental sections, which runs from 1:54 to 2:12, time fans, shouldn't be there). To these ears at least, there's something not quite fluent about the way the verse, pre-chorus and chorus fit together; something unsatisfactory, something a bit synthetic and forced. And, though the song always went down a storm at gigs, I felt at the time that, by just making a great big noise, it was winning that applause cheaply. There were (are still are) multitudes of bands who drew loud (but short and shallow) cheers from their audiences by having loads of guitar pedals instead of decent tunes, and I wanted The Regulars to stand apart from that.

So why make it the single? First, it was sort of an act of sonic defiance in the face of the anonymous slaggings-off that the band was then receiving on the internet (the Birmingham 'scene' of the time could sometimes be as bitchy and childish as it was friendly and supportive). This was ridiculous, because I seem to have forgotten several years ago whatever little I knew about these slaggings-off in the first place, whereas 'This is Sound' is never going to stop being The Regulars' second single. A wholly disproportionate use of force, then, to shoot meself in the foot!

Second, I'd just been reading about The Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in David Cavanagh's book about Creation Records (My Magpie Eyes are Hungry For the Prize) and, for the first time since I'd heard Shadow Factory, thought: yeah, actually, maybe it's not such a bad thing to make a bloody great racket after all. So we arrived at Smallwood Studios and had a talk with the producer and I asked him to make 'This is the Sound' sound like four punk bands playing in the same room, with The Go-Betweens practising next door. I dunno why I said this: I don't even like The Go-Betweens.

Our bass player and founder member Stu had sort of left the band already when he recorded this with us. His last gig was on Good Friday, 13 April 2001, which was a riot. The audience invaded the stage wearing photocopied Stu masks (check my write-up from the time and some ace photos). So it felt kind of strange and happy/sad that he was still there in the studio with us a couple of weeks later. His replacement, Rich, came along as a sort of induction exercise (although he'd been our mate for ages already; that was how it worked in The Regulars), and ended up joining in with the group vocal that you can hear below my lead part in the chorus. I think this must be the only song recorded with six Regulars.

The recording came out pretty much how I wanted it to. The first single, 'Lie Down and Fight', sounded great but just a tad too clean, so with this one we banned the use of digital guitar effects and got Zinedine Zidane lookalike sound engineer Mat Webster to produce it, because he did our live sound really well when we played gigs at the Flapper & Firkin. I'm not crazy about the distorted Fall-ish spoken bit halfway down the mix at 2:30 – it's a little pretentious, in a way often resorted to at the time by those big-noise-big-deal bands that I hated (as the spoken bits go, I vastly prefer the accidental-but-left-in-on-purpose one at 0:32 and my brother quietly counting us in at the start). But the guitars get down and dirty in all the right places, and all in all Mat did a fine job on a limited song.

But whatever its shortcomings as a piece of songwriting – and those are all down to me, as this is one of the songs where I wrote all the chords and melody as well as the words – I was excited by 'Sound' as a single because it said something that I thought needed to be said. What was it? Um. Actually, one thing it says is "people who like indiepop are nicer than people who like horrible music". This was partly inspired by my Christmas job at Andy's Records in 1995 (after I moved back to Grimsby for six months), when all the people who came in to buy the Elastica album were really sweet and lovely, while everyone who came in to buy bang-bang-wibbly-woo dance music seemed really unpleasant and rude. It's still a massive generalisation, obviously, and I'm sure it must be grossly unfair, but fuck it – that was genuinely my experience, and in any case, it's only a pop song, and there isn't the time and space to add in a load of qualifying statements and exceptions to make yourself sound more reasonable.

Bloody hell, I'm writing loads. Please stay with me if I don't manage to update this every week!

Then there's the Offbeat thing. Offbeat, in case you don't know, is an indiepop night at the University of Sheffield; when I first saw the playlist on their website my jaw dropped, and seconds later I was cross-referencing it with the train timetable to find out how quickly I could go there. I think this was 1999: so in my mid to late twenties I became part of an indiepop community for the first time, even if it was in a city 80-odd miles from home. The music was great and the love was greater still. 'Deceptacon' or 'Who's Got the Crack' would start up and you'd suddenly find yourself entwined with a bunch of glittery-faced popkids you'd never met before, in a manic and intense half dance/half group hug, and it would be the hardest rush of happiness you'd ever felt. I couldn't figure out why the bang-bang-wibbly-woo dance music scene needed drugs to get that; our love was naturally occurring, and I wanted to commemorate it in a song. DJ Chris Stride was quite chuffed – the song still features on the front of the Offbeat website to this day.

But what I most wanted to say with this song was "indiepop is still here, despite the best efforts of the NME and what have you to stigmatise and destroy it". You know all about that, of course, and some phrases remain in my head from a particularly hate-filled and badly written grave-dancing piece that appeared when Sarah Records ended. This is what I wrote in the insert that came with the single:

There are those who would like you to believe that a certain kind of pop music doesn't exist any more, or that nobody wants to hear it.

I believe them for far too long, and formed The Regulars expecting nothing.

I wrote 'This is the Sound' when I found out they were wrong.

A few years down the line, with a vibrant community supporting a worldwide indiepop scene that is stronger than ever – and the NME in steep decline – you will have to forgive me for feeling quite vindicated and insufferably smug about the whole thing.

Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
Download the insert from the 7" single
An account of the recording on the Regulars website
Bearos Records news archive from 2001
An amazing review on rock-city.co.uk ("The Beatles were pop, The Ramones were pop, Nirvana were pop and now The Regulars are pop")
Another nice review on Losing Today (scroll down a bit)

A bit about The Regulars and this blog and stuff

2008-10-20T22:18:00.000+01:00

"The only band in history who formed seven years too late and were seven years ahead of their time when they broke up" – Dunc Vernon, The Autumn Store

Formed in Birmingham in 1996, split up in Birmingham in 2002, The Regulars achieved very little and went absolutely nowhere. We did, however, write and play some songs which I thought were really good. Some of these were released on two singles for Bearos Records. Seventeen of them were released on a very limited posthumous compilation album called Effortless.

Since then I've played as a solo-type person, releasing a couple more records and getting a few new listeners (of which you may be one) who never saw The Regulars. I've just done an interview for A Layer of Chips fanzine, which is going out with a free CD with some of my new stuff and some Regulars stuff on it (order one from the Caramel distro) and it strikes me that some of these new listeners might enjoy the songs on Effortless, but you can't buy it any more.

Hence this blog. I'll try and post a song from the album up here every week for 17 weeks, with a new commentary and maybe the lyrics too. So bookmark or subscribe to this blog, download the songs, and by sometime in spring 2009 you should have your very own copy of Effortless in glorious mp3. Without ever needing to visit Birmingham.