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Long song titles, Daniel Day Lewis, the Scottish cringe
I said on this website a while ago that I was going to write a separate blog about every song on our album The Regional Variations, talking around the subject of each song in what was hopefully a reasonably entertaining way. I wrote five (about The Fakester Genocide, Drowning Nightmare 1, A Petrol Pump in the Cradle of Christianity, The Dark Ages and Regional), then I got bored with the idea. Possibly nobody has even noticed that they have stopped but, well, they have.
I realised recently that I have a guilty conscience about the unfinished song-by-song blog project. Maybe it’s because I have a bugbear about leaving things incomplete, regardless of their insignificance. Maybe it’s because, for personal reasons that I won’t go into, I’m trying to distract myself with trivial thoughts at the moment. Anyway, I’m going to rattle through the rest now, in a rapid fire way. Think of it as a Jive Bunny-style blog megamix medley. If you like, you can pretend that the following are extracts of longer, individual blogs. Or blog demos, fragments of blogs that could have been smash hits if only they’d been completed and properly produced. Or trailers for imaginary blogs, the way David Holmes used to write soundtracks for imaginary films.
Perhaps I will finally write up the remaining blogs properly in 30 years, if there is a demand for it, like Brian Wilson did with Smile. By then I will have probably declined into drug abuse and mental breakdown and I will have to get some young enthusiastic people who grew up with my blogs to help me finish them. Thus they will feel oddly out of time, not like actual blogs from 30 years ago, but like a sanitised facsimile of the past, like a shiny BBC costume drama. People may still enjoy the finished blogs, of course, but their enjoyment will be tinged with sadness, because they won’t be able to help wondering how the blogs would have read if I had written them, with a clear uncluttered head, in 2007, instead of through a fog of unreliable memory in 2037.
(Why can’t I write blogs like normal people? We were in the studio today, we laid down some tracks, chorus sounds good, here’s a picture of my favourite guitar pedal, I really like crispy cakes, I was so wasted last night that I woke up in someone’s bath and can’t remember how I got there, that kind of thing. Possibly because I have never woken up in a stranger’s bath. Or because, even though I am quite often in a studio, I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it. I sang into a microphone for a bit. We wondered whether the bassline was bassy enough. I ate a sandwich.)
Anyway…
Largs Hum
Aka the song we always start our live sets with, mainly because it’s so funny watching people at the bar jump out of their skin at this gruff Scottish voice suddenly saying ‘STORNOWAY!’ really loudly. I really like Largs Hum. It’s one of our strongest songs, although it’s also about the only one of our songs that is very identifiably Scottish. I’m never sure whether this is a good thing or not. Hamish and I frequently find ourselves discussing what it is that makes a piece of art Scottish, and the various assumptions that people make about what kind of art Scots should make. Those assumptions have changed a lot over the past ten years, I think. Scottish culture is far less parochial, far less concerned with its own national identity, far less beholden to what usually gets called the ‘Scottish cringe’. The National Theatre of Scotland has conspicuously made hardly any work about Scottish identity, for example, preferring to address global concerns but from a Scottish perspective, which is a very different thing - one is outward-looking, the other is inward-looking. Scottish visual artists make very international work, which is often appreciated more abroad than it is at home. Our best bands recently have often been the ones who could be from anywhere - I remember the 1990s saying a while ago that they deliberately sing in an American accent because they’re sick of the expectation that Scots (and northerners too) should sing in their own accents, or talk in an authentic way about their own lives. They’d much rather use music as escapism. Which was an interesting thing for a Scottish band to say - it’s not that long ago that people were astonished to hear the Proclaimers, or Arab Strap, singing in a Scottish accent. Gosh, the novelty.
It’s interesting reading outsiders’ reactions to Largs Hum - only rarely does anyone pick up on the fact that we wrote it as a joke, which I had kind of thought was obvious. It’s very deliberately preposterous and silly, and yet several reviewers have talked in a very po-faced way about how it’s an exploration of Scottish identity, or something. It isn’t. We have no interest in doing that, because we are completely comfortable with our own identity. We write songs about the things we see. They are not Scottish songs, particularly. We just happen to live here.
National Theatre
Warning: rant approaching. I was reading a Daniel Day Lewis interview today. It slightly annoyed me. The writer made a big point of remarking on how ordinary Daniel Day Lewis’s house was, ‘just like any other large, modern family home - children’s toys lying about, holiday pictures, coats, caps, scarves, boots, cats, all the paraphernalia of a ‘normal’ existence.’ This baffles me. What exactly was he expecting? Gold statues? A cave? Why would Daniel Day Lewis’s house be anything but normal? Kate Bush gets a very similar reaction - she is constantly painted as a recluse and an eccentric, mostly because she has no interest in talking about her life to the media. Clearly, the assumption goes, she is hiding, whereas all she is doing, like Daniel Day Lewis, is not participating. Both are passionate about their work, and very meticulous about the details of it, but they don’t see the need to bang on about it to journalists for the sake of selling something or plumping up their ego. This, surely, is as normal as it is possible to get - it is exactly how countless hard-working professionals from all sorts of walks of life live their daily existence. But then, increasingly, that’s not seen as normal. Normal is living your life in as public a way as possible, whether it’s appearing on reality TV shows or just making profile pages on the internet where you share pictures of yourself and intimate details of your life with, potentially, the entire world. B-list celebrities are now normal. Yes, they are condemned frequently and self-righteously as self-obsessed, attention-seeking fools, but they set the news agenda, they are constantly the subject of conversation among intelligent people who should know better, and, without us even realising it sometimes, they set the standard of what is perceived as normal. This is, roughly, what National Theatre is about. ‘We are better off here in our heads with no audience watching the bed. Why’s it strange not to want a display?’ Why IS it strange, exactly?
But My Heart Is Broken
When someone leaves you, everything joyful that you associated with them suddenly becomes sad and tainted. The happy song that you listened to together becomes a sad, hurtful song. Things that felt deep suddenly feel shallow. This also happens with pop music. When your youth leaves you, exuberant and youthful pop music suddenly sounds sad. This song is sort of about this.
For ages we couldn’t nail down a title for it. I wanted to call it The Planet is Dead Except For The Part That You’re On, but Hamish felt we already had too many long song titles (see mini-blog about Whatever You Do, Don’t Go In The Basement, below). We thought about calling it My Heart Is Broken, but that seemed too obvious, too much of a cliché. So we added a but. I like the but. It makes it seem more desperate, somehow, even a little petulant. But my heart is broken. But it’s NOT FAIR.
Drowning Nightmare 2
I can’t actually think of much to say about this one. It’s a description of a nightmare I had once. I don’t really know what it’s about (note to self: see a psychologist about disturbing dreams involving watching people die and doing nothing to save them) but it seemed like a good companion piece to Drowning Nightmare 1 (which was originally called Underwater Chat Show). One song is about other people watching you while you drown, the other is about watching someone else drown. In both, the drowning becomes entertainment, a spectacle. Both are saying something about the morality of turning real-life suffering into art, although I’m not entirely sure what.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Go In The Basement
I’ve always liked long, slightly unwieldy song titles. The Pet Shop Boys write them all the time - ‘I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore’, ‘This Must Be The Place I Waited Years To Leave etc’. Recently my new favourite band the Twilight Sad have been helping to keep the tradition alive - ‘That Summer A Home I Was The Invisible Boy’ being a personal favourite of mine. Although for my money the Twilight Sad ruin it a bit by making ALL their song titles ridiculously long, which is slightly tiresome over an entire tracklist. The daddy of the genre is, arguably, ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ by Pink Floyd, although I have always thought that was just silly. To me, preposterously long song titles work best when they are faintly silly - too silly to be taken entirely seriously, or to sound pompous - but also have a meaning and a seriousness of purpose. Hence ‘Whatever You Do, Don’t Go In The Basement’, which is a slightly silly, B-movie phrase but has a serious meaning - it’s about not delving too deep into the recesses of someone’s mind for fear of what you’ll find there. It’s a song about repressed memories, unspoken horrors. About child abuse, possibly, although that’s only hinted at. Since it’s a song about what’s unsaid, it’s better that its meaning stays ambiguous. I was not abused as a child, for the record.
Which just leaves…
The Balance Company
But this is going to be our next single, so I’ll probably write more about it at that point. I’ve written about making the video in another blog, so that sort of counts. For now.
I do talk an extraordinary amount of rubbish.
Andrew
