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What’s Drowning Nightmare 1 all about then?

The next few blogs on this site are going to explain what the 11 songs on our album, The Regional Variations, are about. I know, isn’t it exciting? There’s going to be TEN more of these! The summer is just going to fly by! This one is about Drowning Nightmare 1. Sort of. Be warned: lengthy tangent approaching. If you really can’t be bothered with the extensive preamble that follows, skip to the end.

At a show we played at Metro in London last year, I got talking to a woman in the audience who seemed very surprised and disappointed to discover Hamish and I aren’t lovers. “I just assumed!” she said, with a look of absolute shock on her face. Not that I mind particularly, but why would someone make an assumption like that? It interests me for general as well as personal reasons. Sadly, though, the woman was far too out of it to explain, and I haven’t seen her since. So instead I’ll have to make some educated guesses. Here is a list.

1. We are an electronic pop duo, and the widespread assumption is that electronic pop duos are gay. (Hamish, I should add here, always tells me off for describing us as an ‘electronic’ pop duo, mainly because people might lump us in with lots of other electronic pop bands who are trendy but not very good - Ladytron for example. But the fact remains that our act, to date at least, consists of two people, a computer, and a synthesiser. Hamish does have a guitar, which is a little bit rock. But given the rest of the set-up there’s no getting around it, really, is there? We scream ‘electronic pop duo’ from the rooftops.)

The odd thing about this is that most electronic pop duos, regardless of whether they’re gay or not, aren’t romantically attached. The Pet Shop Boys never were, as far as I know, although their image is inspired to some extent by Gilbert and George, who are, although they’re obviously not an electronic pop duo. Erasure are certainly not (Vince Clarke is as famously heterosexual as Andy Bell is famously gay); Soft Cell weren’t; OMD weren’t; the Associates weren’t. Goldfrapp aren’t, I don’t think. The only exception to this rule that I can think of is the Eurythmics, who were partners for a while. Do they count? They went a bit soft rock later on, after all, which wasn’t pretty. Perhaps people just WANT these duos to be couples - we see a couple spending lots of time together but conspicuously not having sex, and we wish they would. It’s called ‘sexual tension’, I believe.

2. Some people think I’m quite camp on stage. David, the singer from our London friends Luxembourg, called me ‘the feyest man ever to have a girlfriend’. David is gay, but on stage he reminds me more of Jarvis Cocker or Pete Doherty than Andy Bell. I would never have assumed that he was gay if it wasn’t for his openly gay lyrics (‘I want your handsome thighs’ etc). It’s an odd thing – how camp you look on stage often depends on the campness of what’s going on around you. Neil Tennant, much to his irritation, is sometimes described as camp, when he isn’t remotely camp – the word is only used at all because he’s gay. I do wonder whether if I did exactly what I do on stage, but in a guitar band, people would assume I was gay half as often as they do.

3. The lyrics of a couple of our songs, in particular How Could Something Like That Be Love? (“I know what they say around here, he’s nothing but an old queer, who got up to all kinds of stuff, how could something like that be love?”). But I passionately defend the right of any writer, gay or straight, to write from perspectives other than their own. Rufus Wainwright wrote a very perceptive song, The Art Teacher, about a middle-aged straight woman pining for a teenage crush. Rent, one of the Pet Shop Boys’ most moving songs, is also about a straight woman in a masochistic relationship with a sugar daddy – and was, of course, later sung very effectively by a straight woman, Liza Minnelli. How Could Something is our humble contribution to this genre; it’s about a gay celebrity of some kind (I was vaguely thinking of Michael Barrymore) hiding out in a countryside retreat after some tabloid-generated scandal. I deliberately wrote the lyric so it has a completely different meaning depending on who sings it – if it’s a man, it’s the celebrity himself; if it’s a woman, it’s his long-suffering wife. We recorded two versions of it for this reason, one with Cora Bissett singing the lead vocal; in a sense they’re two different songs.

4. The picture on the show’s programme (yes, our shows generally have programmes; there isn’t nearly enough of this in pop, I feel), showed Hamish and me holding hands. Now here’s an interesting one. We’re using this same set of pics to promote the album. They were taken on Portobello beach, near Edinburgh, our first proper, professional photo session (by Martin Gray, who did the cover art for the Trashcan Sinatras’ last album).

We spent much time fretting about what to ‘do’ in the pics. We didn’t really want to dress up or do anything gimmicky (for our first ever photo session we’d worn goggles, and ended up looking slightly silly). So we decided to hold hands, partly because it’s not something you see very often in photos – at least, not in the music press. It also mirrors the album artwork – two flowers, joined by the same stalk. I think the pictures are quite sweet, the hand-holding representing a bond between two people. It could be a creative bond, or a bond of friendship. I’ve never thought of it as a particularly gay image.

‘Where on earth is this going?’ you may ask. I was beginning to wonder myself for a wee while, so fair enough. My point, I suppose, is that there is a complicated dynamic between two people in any close relationship that has nothing to do with sex. There is also much more to any person than their sexuality. And yet we live in an age, in the UK certainly, where discussion of people’s behaviour is constantly reduced to discussion of their sexual urges, the implication always being that it shapes everything else they do in life. (I’m not accusing the woman at the gig of this at all; she simply made an assumption that was probably fair enough given everything I’ve said above. It’s just been on my mind since).

This reductive thinking is a hangover, I’ve often heard it suggested, from Victorian morality. Freud is a huge factor too, obviously. Wherever it comes from, for me it usually makes human relationships seem smaller and less interesting, whereas you’d think the media’s endless focus on it would make the opposite true.

Drowning Nightmare 1 is based loosely on a real dream I had, in which a couple (one of which is me, I think, but I’m not sure) are trapped on a television chat show, which, for some reason to do with dream logic, is being filmed on the Titanic. The water is rising over the stage, the couple are desperate to know where the exits are so they can escape, but the host just keeps on asking them banal and intrusive questions, and the audience is far too busy anticipating salacious answers to notice that they’re all going to drown. The host is in a pretty extreme state of denial about all this. He can see that the water levels are rising, but he is so absorbed in the world of the show that all he can focus on is getting the couple to confess all about their sex life, even in the face of death. ‘If you don’t survive the ratings will go through the roof for this,’ he says. The fact that he’s going to die too doesn’t seem to occur to him.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, it’s a metaphor for our times. Outside, climate change is inching us towards an imminent global catastrophe that, in its worst case scenario, makes the human race virtually extinct within 100 years. Switch on the television or read a magazine, though, and you get a barrage of trivial details about famous people’s sex lives, pretending to be insight. The two things just don’t seem to exist logically in the same world, and it’s very strange and disorientating. And ironic – sex is the thing that ensures the survival of the species, after all.

It’s quite deliberate that this song is the first one on the album. The Regional Variations, as a title, is an attempt to describe the endless, fascinating differences between people – cultural, racial, political and, yes, obviously sexual – and the complicated reasons why certain people are drawn together. The cover is a metaphor for this. Two flower heads in full bloom, they’re like two lovers with their sexual organs on display, and yet we wouldn’t generally think of them that way – we think of them as exotic, and beautiful, and fascinating. These particular flowers are very well travelled too – the image is from India, painted by a long-forgotten artist in Bombay, but now lives at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. We particularly liked that fact, given the number of Asian people who have emigrated to Britain. The flowers are like 21st century people, globe-trotting creatures, full of rich detail.

Drowning Nightmare 1 says ‘there has to be more to us than fucking, otherwise we’re doomed.’ The rest of the album tries to paint a picture of what that ‘more’ consists of. I really don’t know if we’ve managed to do it with the richness and colour and detail of the cover painting, but we’ve given it our best shot.

Andrew

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What’s Drowning Nightmare 1 all about then?

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