Sunday, June 29, 2003
Part 3
And so we continued but by this time I’d “found a nice girl to calm [me] down” (wise words, Pollyanna, wise words) and I wasn’t in the midst of it anymore. Too much water, too many bridges. And fuck me if that opening track wasn’t just far-and-away the best thing you’d done, a towering albatross, and behemoth, and not ungainly this time, actually infused with that baroque grandeur and catharsis you’d been chasing so hard. And I remember that misty morning when I got on my bike and peddled out to the end of the Warren and I was the only man in the world, mist and water on all sides, and I remember that first listen, thinking you’d maybe done it… No. No. You messed up “Redemption”, for a start. You took the looped piano hum out of “Make It Last”. You played everything a little too smooth, too plain. It’s the Coldplay fucker’s fault. You had so much more humanity and joy and grace and playfulness than he would allow you to express. Or maybe than you would allow yourselves to express. Pleasure is never a guilty pleasure.
And then that morning in January. In The Guide, of all places. Damascus never came out of something so deliberately irreverent. I forget the words now, of course. Did they mention Paul’s Boutique or was that me? “We want this and this and this and what’s more we can do it…” And I believed you. And you tried. But you couldn’t. Nobody ever made truly great record by trying to make a truly great record. What’s great anyway? The punctum is, you fule… An epiphany? I felt like I’d been sleeping with someone for four years and just woken up and realised they weren’t the person I thought they were, the person they said they were. Did I feel cheated? No… I felt bewildered and a bit stupid. It’s alright. It’s alright. I’m still waiting for the next record.
HA! HA!
And you know what the really funny thing is? It’s that she said this, about me, all those years ago. Oh for fuck’s sake. Not enough mystery… Well I tell you baby, there ain’t enough time in all creation to find what’s inside me. Cos there’s nothing there… Not enough mystery.
The other funny thing is that Steve, of all people, once got it and said it. That thing about Lyra and Will and losing yourself in something, in the task, finding the magic, the secret, by accident and as soon as you try and control it, you lose it. So you have to become it. And guide each other. And Steve told us this about “I’ve Been Running”. If only you’d read those three books then, maybe it’d have all been OK…
Because it’s nothing personal. It’s just me. Isn’t it. You’re all fine people. Good people. And we had a time, didn’t we? A mad one. And yes, I always went to the toilet during the slow ones. But there was that one time when the other bloke pissing in the trough was whistling what was being played outside. And that worked.
Don’t get me wrong. I love yer. I just don’t… It just doesn’t… Ah… I’m still waiting for that next record.
Unfortunately the all-new, more efficient and effective Blogger seems to be unable to handle posts of more than approx. 1,000 words. Hence I've had to cut up this second Epiphany piece into small bits and posted it across three posts. Rest assured I've had a bitch at them.
6/29/2003 03:40:00 pm
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