Saturday, July 31, 2004
Bing Zhong
Bing Zhong is a scientist and he has the best name ever. I intend to write a novel about him.
SG#10-DH7489DG
NJS
7/31/2004 09:41:00 am
Friday, July 30, 2004
More fucking idiots
Watched Elephant last night, fantastic film, so low-key and ruminatively shot (the autumnal New England colours are wondrous, green grass, bright red trees, yellow fallen leaves, empty azure skies), plus John Robinson is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen (Emma still prefers Scarlet Johansson, but says they look alike – their babies would either be the most beautiful things ever or else nasty angular alien spawn with enormo-lips and cheekbones like jet-engines). Anyway, I thoroughly recommend it.
The fair is on in Dawlish, and every year on the Thursday of the week it’s here the people who run it put on a fireworks display, sealing the beach and firing rockets from Boat Cove. As I was driving back from my girlfriend’s house at about ten past ten, a couple of thousand people, locals, grockels, kids, pensioners, chavs (not keen on this word, but everyone seems to know what it means), indie kids, doctors, smack addicts, chipshop owners, dieticians, alcoholics, tee-totalers (actually, in Dawlish, there probably were no tee-totalers – this is a BIG drinking town); basically all of human kind, with the exception of blacks, gays, Asians, stylish people and foreigners in general, were walking away from the beach, arcane display of gunpowder trickery over and done with, and heading back to their homes/caravans/squats/etcetera. But pissed locals + pissed grockels = aggro. In fact, the pissed grockels don’t even need to be there; pissed locals + fireworks + crowds + stormy weather (it’s cleared this morning into a beautiful day in Dawlish AND MY OFFICE HAS NO NATURAL LGIHT OR AIR DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL but still I’d rather be here than sweaty, stinky, toxic Lahndahn today) = violence, and as I drove past the chipshop by the seafront and the crazy golf, there was a scuffle involving a group of local kids whom I vaguely recognised from around town. At a guess I’d put them at 18-20. One bloke (bloke? – kid) had his finger in some girl’s face, effing and blinding at her, and she seemed happy to stand there and be indignant and aggravational back at him, just like you see people on Jerry Springer’s show being aggro back at angered spouses or whoever. Mates were goading both parties on. The atmosphere was heavy. Cans of Carling were in hand. Burberry caps were in place (they actually were, too, sadly). So what does young man in sportswear do? Lamps her. Punches her. In the face. Fist. Face. Girl. Straight away about four blokes from the immediate vicinity waded in and started kicking the shit out of this boy, both him and the girl on the floor, half-cut pillars of the community (in their own minds) standing and watching because what the fuck else do you do? And then traffic lights changed, people stepped out of the road ahead of me, and I had to move on, leaving the incident, like the fireworks, spent and in the past. Bizarre.
Marcus Trescothick was out for 105 yesterday. Regular readers will know that, despite the fact that my dad played cricket for Yorkshire school boys in 1887 or whenever, I have almost no interest in cricket, although I do quite like the fact that you can play it and legitimately drink Pimms at the same time, but Trescothick said something very interesting after the match. (I’m paraphrasing from hazy, half-listening memory) “Batting just after you’ve got a century is the hardest time, because it’s not often you get to do it.” That’s the thing, just there. You’ve got a century, 100 runs, a landmark amount – is it enough or do you want more? If you get a magnificent hundred, does it not then sully the achievement to follow it with a paltry, lousy five? Which is to say, don’t get caught up in taking the first hurdle like a winner, lest you catch your knee on the second and end up eating running track. 100 is good, but 200 is better, and 300 better still. It’s fucking hard to go much past that first barrier if you stop to think about it, but if the momentum is there then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t carry on. YES THERE’S A MESSAGE IN HERE IF YOU HADN’T GUESSED LIKE WHATWHAT CRAZYHORSE.
Played football last night for an hour, scored a few goals, hit the bar with some force, warmed up properly, was called a “faker” re: groin injury when I steamed a left-footer past the keeper. Played Wednesday night too, couple of goals, several good passes, couple of important interceptions (hammering past my brother, took it on my chest, laid it off to the keeper, satisfying – he’s meant to be quicker than me, even if I am stronger than him). The groin is OK. Still tight, I know something has been wrong with it, but two nights on the trot after nothing (bar the drunken Dublin thing) for seven, eight weeks even. I was so scared in case it didn’t stand up to the strain, in case it went again; the relief when I first hit a ball hard with my left foot was incredible, and whilst I’m not quite turning as well yet as I should be, or jumping & stretching for high balls, it’s definitely much improved. A couple of weeks and I’ll be back to proper utility, I hope. Being able to play football is very important to me. “I think we’d all be… much happier… if we just… played more sport…”
Also, visit here and have a play around. “Conquistador” is only the 86800th most commonly used word in the English language.
NJS
7/30/2004 01:45:00 pm
Thursday, July 29, 2004
More fucking Yorkshire...
This Is Part Five Of The Enormous Embrace Exercise
A song-by-song directory and exegesis of my in-and-out-of-love affair with The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band On Acid
And so onwards and upwards we go, barely stopping for breath, but occasionally pausing to cry, both in abject frustration at all these wasted hours and miles, and in sympathy for those we lost along the way and also in relief that it’s almost. fucking. over. And so! And so…
Gravity
This is the weakest track on the album. I’ve grown to quite like it in its context there, as a lull, a sweet moment, a pause in the headiness. The production is lovely, the guitar to close spiralling and messy and bright. But it’s not the main event. It does sound like a Coldplay song because it is, and they are much simpler and less good than Embrace. But they did a job with it. People currently hyping this tune are going to pass out when they hear the rest of the album. It’s like Coldplay rewriting “Wonder” for people who don’t think enough and Embrace then seizing it and giving it balls again (the thing “Wonder” sorely lacked). If I was sitting on a railway station I’d now describe it as having a “simple, warm spirituality”. Which is Nickspeak for “it’s nice but it doesn’t excite me”.
The Shot’s Still Ringing
Starts abruptly, Standard Embrace B-Side style (not worked on long enough to create a proper intro? -they didn’t even leave a “1-2-3-4!”: they never do), standard 4/4 time signature, standard chugging guitars. But what’s this? An abundance of melody, and a host of lyrical nuggets (sinking ships [a recurring theme], noise, crashing cars, rubbernecking) just waiting to be devoured and chewed over and ruminated upon and cried too, probably. My favourite moment? “All this noise / I’m 19, I’m 22 / In between I’m blessed with you” – the first album having been released when I was just 19, a few months before university, and the third having been released when I was 22, a few months after university (“Hooligan” being slap-bang in the middle of it). Of course this song isn’t about me, don’t be daft, but it’s one of those tiny moments of oddness when your turn your head and think “was that…?” and realise that it was. The tune itself doesn’t do much for me, but I know at least two people already who love it (KARIM AND J LOVE IT). It wouldn’t make my mythical b-sides compilation, but it would probably make most other people’s.
Waterfall
The opening bars of this assure it a place on the legendary CDR though. Chopped-up strings, probably summoned from a sampler or synth, float out of the right-channel, stuttering like tears being desperately held back. Apparently it was recorded in one take, a la “I’ve Been Running” and “I Can’t Feel Bad Anymore”, and it has that same, lighter-than-air, easy feel to it, almost as if it’s been made up on the spot. The monochrome, aquatic stillness also give it a connection to “Satellites”. Halfway through it suddenly dawns on you that the verse has contorted itself into a chorus, and that everything has become much louder (it starts VERY quietly); there are some backing vocals which are endearingly, affectingly clumsy. Richard starts playing a guitar solo, well, less a solo than just a lovely fill, and after a couple of bars of perfection it’s as if he misses a note and then forgets where he is and what he’s doing, thinks “oh well, the others are still playing” and heads out of the room for a cup of tea. It’s lovely, there’s no other word for it (at 3.16 it’s especially beautiful, innocent and totally unaffected). Then some more singing (another chorus, easy, supine, like Marvin Gaye were he from Yorkshire and afraid of cows). And then those strings and that chiming, charming guitar to close. Oh those strings. Staggeringly beautiful. This would easily have fitted on IYNB, and what’s more been the second or third best track there.
Too Many Times
This would NOT have fitted on IYNB. Or any of their albums, including the new one. This is what it’s all about. This is savage, and one of the best things they’ve ever done. It’s like Timbaland producing The Verve circa 1995, when they were at their noisy, fucked-up, howling best. Apparently Youth was told to make the percussion at the start “sound like Manitoba”; thankfully he fucked that up, and what we get is much more powerful and intriguing as a result (indie goes laptop-glitch done to death: spacerock goes psycho-r’n’b not done at all). So what we get is an impossibly jerking rhythm, fucked-up handclaps, a banged-to-fuck piano, lots of distortion on the vocals and reams of evil, snaking, histrionic guitar. “Gravity” isn’t for me. This is for me. This might just be my favourite Embrace song.
Wasted
This surfaced a few years ago as a scratchy bootleg titled “Logical Love Song”. It was pretty good then and is pretty good now. This is re-recorded. It wont get on the mythical CDR but it is good to sing. There are some really great, shitty-synth horns, and some crunchy guitar.
And that’s the end of part 5. More to come… soon…
NJS
7/29/2004 11:07:00 pm
MI5 on the way
Read this site fast before it gets deleted, because apparently it will be soon. Fucking governments.
NJS
7/29/2004 02:08:00 pm
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
FUCKING BLOGGER
Jesus Christ will this fucking thing ever just work properly?! Blogger has eaten my template approx a quarter of the way through my links at the bottom, meaning the sitefeed, the "I Power Blogger" thing, a load of the links and THE MOTHERFUCKING ARCHIVE have vanished. I have no idea why. Using the 'back' button on the browser took me back all the way to when I last altered the template the morning (linking Todd's blog) but no avail. I HOPE I have, somewhere at home, a Word doc. with the template (in a MUCH earlier guise) saved, so I can just c&p it and republish and all will be well. In the meantime FUCK YOU, BLOGGER, AGAIN.
EDIT: I found an old template here at work (thank God) so have c&p'd that into here, menaing links and archives are back. However, the sitemeter button is not. The "I Power Blogger" button can FUCK OFF for a while. Sodding thing.
EDIT: The upside of this is that I've finally updated the links at the bottom. They're still not in any kind of order (bugger that for a laugh), but there are lots more and the dead ones have been corrected etcetera. Site Meter are shite at emailing you back with your code so you can get yr counter up again, so I've put a Stat Counter in instead (Site Meter to be added again once they sort their shit out / I figure out wtf happened).
NJS
7/27/2004 09:28:00 am
My back still troubles me...
I’ve started reading Midnight’s Children as of last night (20 pages in thus far, 20 dence, prose-filled pages composed of non-sequiteurs and half memories and fabulous imagery and flights of fancy about people with big noses and tangential stories about grandfathers and doctors and boatmen), and the book mark, which has been its bookmark, unmoved and unmoveable, for, not four years since I bought the book in Northampton Waterstones, but just over one year, since I bought Fictions and The Dice Man in Exeter University bookshop, is the receipt for these two later books, revealing that they were bought on the 5th of the 5th 2003 and cost me some £16 (but I did not mind because I was sure I would enjoy and benefit from both), and upon this receipt are scribbled two words conjoined into one word, brokensaints, and I do not for the life of me understand what this means even though it is scribbled in my own hand, which is a hand that can only scribble and never scribe because it is unseemly and messy and distracted and presses down far too hard upon the paper it is marking, as if it wants to rip apart the pulp, because I always held my pen wrong as a child, and despite the gift of triangular rubber sheath after triangular rubber sheath to envelop my pens and pencils as a schoolboy in order to try and make me clutch the pen or pencil as a pen or pencil should be clutched, I could never grasp how to grasp as one should grasp, and even though I was a better childhood draughtsman than my peers no one was ever satisfied with how I held my pen, least of all me, because writing for any length of time would cause my hand to cramp: thus I was very pleased to begin writing on computers, because, although I use only three fingers and am about as far from normal or standard touch-typing as possible, I am still a faster typist than most people I know. (The ending of that sentence is long overdue.) But this note has me confused, as does another scribbled on the back of a train ticket, exclaiming banana fish, and another which says something I cannot now recall and which was scribbled somewhere else and hastily shoved into my wallet or a book so as to exist as an aide memoir for some future point when I would understand what this biblical reference or quote from someone or description of something meant, and it would inspire me to write something beautiful and slightly odd and place it here for you to read, only as often as not I throw away the train tickets and sandwich receipts without ever scanning the rear of them for scribbled pointillisms of everyday life waiting to be fleshed out into panoramic vistas: either that or, when I do find them, I have no recollection of what they mean.
Little recollection now exists of the panic that has stricken my darker moments for the last six weeks, because I am able to stand without contorting before walking, able to step into the bath in order to shower without an ominous pull-pop, able to contemplate the action of kicking a football again, and soon, maybe even this week, even if, occasionally, during that form of intercourse in which I am dominant (envelopment by a woman rather than penetration by a man being generally favoured), there is, as I move my hips, the slipping in-and-out-of-position not of sex but of my, well, it seems trite and punning to say it but say it I shall, fucked hip/pelvis/groin/thigh, sharply on the left side, as if a muscle is being pulled out of position and then pushed back into position, only the pops or clicks never actually returned it to the right place because in the right place there was little short of agony: but even if that disjoint and rejoint exists during intercourse, it is touch wood (oh please, please, don’t be wrong, don’t be wrong) only existing there and even there it is much less pronounced than it was 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks ago. The bruised shin/foot/ankle, the twisted knee, the sprained ankle, the vicious, still-pink-purple-after-all-these-years Astroturf scars covering my knees, the elbow in the face, the bloodied nose or lip: these injuries are nothing as compared to the panic that beset me when a simple pulled muscle, in my groin, reaching, jumping, stretching for a ball in flight to trap it in mid-air with my left foot after already feeling a twinge, began to *pop*, to pull, to make sitting and then standing a fearful experience lest it would never recover, after two days and then continue to do so for nearly six weeks. But it is not popping anymore. And I am going to be able to play football again soon, and it makes me feel like crying because it is such a simple pleasure but I love it so, and the thought of being fucked at 25 and never able to play again was too much to bear. The relief, when combined with the relief of that other thing two weeks ago, is, literally, a weight being lifted, and I promise now to take better care of myself, to lose that extra stone that causes strain upon my knees because I will insist on playing in the same manner as I did when I was nine years younger and 42 pounds lighter (give or take, actually just take, a few pounds, because I am not quite thirteen stone, and can still probably run harder and longer than you, and be complaining when other people want to stop kicking and running despite them being fitter than me [I never smoked, you see], and maybe this fucking crazy dietbook will work, eh Orkle?) and could run forever, so much so that my brother bought me a fantastic football which was black and named the curfew ball because I would have to come home and stop playing when it got dark (but this just forced us to be ingenious and [I kid you not] I insisted that we carry torches and play on past twilight and nightfall even though it was both insane and invisible). But yes, my hip is almost fixed. I shall warm-up even more thoroughly before playing every time now. Lest it happen again.
That song-by-song thing you wanted, some of you? A couple more weeks. I am being consumed by the [hype] machine. But rest assured that each day it is a different tune that I am having running through my head when I wake up. Rest assured that The Bends and A Northern Soul come to mind, but bigger, and more full of love, and more tuneful, and that this is both a breakthrough and a realisation.
NJS
7/27/2004 09:05:00 am
Monday, July 26, 2004
Fucking Blogger's bringing advert pop-ups now, you cunts. Oh you cunts!
Bark Psychosis 1.
Bark Psychosis 2.
This is part of the reason why I've not had time to write about much other than Embrace and getting pissed on here lately.
NJS
7/26/2004 08:31:00 am
Sunday, July 25, 2004
4 Todd
"Will flash gash for cash."
Go away and get married again, Britney. When come back bring technopop.
NJS
7/25/2004 08:23:00 pm
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Not enough people leave comments
NJS
7/21/2004 09:31:00 pm
Monday, July 19, 2004
I now pronounce you Leprechaun!
So this flying thing, frills (or is it thrills?) or no frills, it’s not bad, is it? Ryanair from Bournemouth to Dublin, 40 minutes late, arrived at half past six or so on Friday evening.
Take-off is like going over a humpback bridge without coming down on the other side; if you look out of the window without thinking as the plane banks in order to turn you might lose your lunch the first time, but just close your eyes and lean your head back and it’s fine. The second time and third time and every other time afterwards it becomes a fascinating experiment on spotting what it is below – is that a river or a road? I shall rue the day when flying is so commonplace that gasping at the clouds (you can step out onto them and walk around, surely?) and scenery becomes second choice to closing your eyes and drifting off for the duration.
Landing, the plane shakes and grinds as the brakes shudder under the immense weight (Boeing 737 200 series, I believe) and speed (cruising @ 500mph and 25,000 feet on the way there – 33,000 feet on the way back and trimmed ten minutes off the flight time, for which I am grateful and concerned). I’d be worried but the steward with the big nose who did a chicken impression (you try and signal to a colleague that you need 2 chicken soups in a noisy and cramped plane) seems relaxed so, you know, sit back and relax yourself. So yeah, I enjoyed flying, and I’m pretty keen to do it again. (James leaps for joy, Todd stifles a groan in case I hit New York [how does October sound for a weekend?], everybody else says “how the fuck did you not manage to go abroad for the first 25 years of your life?”, Nick shrugs and smiles.)
The gap between Dublin Airport and Dublin proper was like Britain but fucked. The roadworks were grubby and untidy and looked to be being carried out with impossibly basic equipment, and the traffic lights were old and tatty. Plus the taxi driver appeared not to care about stopping at the lines, going so far forward as to not be able to see the red light anymore and thus having to judge when it was green by whether any of the other cars were moving. Already I both liked and disliked this place. There were some horses and a knackered barn that appeared to be hundreds of years old.
Dublin itself… well, I don’t know what it was like one year ago, or five years ago (pre-Euro) or ten years ago of fifty years ago, but now it is… like being in Any City, Any Where. Sure, the river is cleaner and clearer than London or even Bristol, but Temple Bar could be part of Soho, Grafton Street could be Manchester, if you replaced the leprechaun tat with fake plastic tits then the gift shops could be in Blackpool. Sure, the thing about the Guinness being different is true (it tastes more like the bottled stuff than the draught that we get over here, but with the creamy texture, and by golly is it cold! I always shunned the Extra Cold stuff in pubs here because it chills the taste off [all comes from the same barrel, the EC stuff just comes in the lager cooler pipe], but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Ireland) but we still had a couple of dodgy pints first thing on Saturday morning. (The fact that it was 11am and we were hungover like dogs might have contributed…) You can pay extortionate prices for beer in any city (and Dublin is expensive if you stay in the centre; whether it cheapens as you move away I can’t say, but I can only hope so for the sake of people who live there), and as a result Dublin didn’t seem like a different culture particularly. People get wankered everywhere. Sure the escapology act at 11pm in Temple Bar Square was great (so great, in fact, that everyone else in our party had gone by the time I broke my attention away from it – as Best Man was it my prerogative to make sure no one went missing? Yes, so of course I go missing for two hours myself) and the buskers were great and the beer was great, but Irish accents only made up about 50% of the voices I heard, the rest being Czech or Asian or Swedish or Lahndahn (anywhere in Britain barstaff are Irish or Australian – in Dublin they’re all East Asian, HOW DOES THAT WORK oh of course, silly me…).
The best bit about Dublin is either the grounds of the university in the city centre (grand, granite, hermetically sealed from the outside world, hiding an enormous sunny field and stacked-on-steps pavilion bar like UCN done properly) or else the Spire, which stands incongruous in the middle of the road, 250, maybe even 300 feet tall, chrome, unreal and bizarre and maddeningly constructed, tapered and gleaming in such a way that you can’t tell if it narrows to a point or just recedes into the distance with perspective – is it 300ft or 100ft or a mile high? (We stayed 100 yards from it, and it was good to navigate by when lost.)
The stag do… There was some nonsense, of course. Some public nudity and a leprechaun costume and a book of druidic lore and a chant and some runes drawn on a groom with pink highlighter and LOTS of drinking and Eggs Benedict for brunch washed down with three cups of tea and a three-hour game of football against some Swedes (including a girl who was better [possibly because she was less pissed] than the groom and who spoke English with the best Irish accent I heard across the whole weekend) and a lapdancing club- WAIT. omglolwtf?! A lapdancing club? The least sexy place I have ever been. Sweaty, dingy, overpriced (60 Euros for a bottle of piss white wine or am I mental?! Not as mental as Gavin – he paid it). I’m looking at my watch and seeing the date is now July 17th because it’s past midnight and all I can thing about is the fact that it’s now my girlfriend’s birthday and what the fuck am I doing in here when I love her? Take your cunt out of my face please. Can I have some ice with my water please? It’s wine? I wondered why it was in a funny glass. One chap opposite is almost foetal, coiling himself away from the women, seemingly all Eastern European (no nice Catholic girls in here), in some kind of terrified Oedipal shiver, the weight of Christian sexual guilt too much to stand. Eventually they drag him off to the curtained area for a 30 Euro dance (two men, bred from bulldogs and hippos, stand and watch for ‘funny stuff’, men on either side have Czech fanny shoved in their faces and pay an extra 10 Euros to be able to go into the side room and use a tissue, I presume, HOW ON EARTH IS THIS SEXY, the girl is gazing into the mirror behind your head as she clockworks through moves, aware that there’s no hope of response or extra cash from this guy because he keeps looking at his watch and mumbling, so she calls it quits and the men on either side are still getting off on this charade) but the fat man who is trying to call all the girls over is not led by the hand because even money is not worth that. Dave tries the psychology gambit – “you’re far too nice to work in a nasty place like this; why do you do it?” “oh no!” and the girl walks away, not another moralist, what are you doing here and frankly Dave doesn’t know either (the next day Dave will break his wrist, I will wrench my groin again, Gavin will fuck his knee, Terry will do likewise and Matt will hurt his back and face and nose - drunken football is bad, kids).
We nearly missed the flight back because Matt read 15.25 as 5.25pm. We did the Guinness brewery tour for 13 Euros but skipped to tour to go straight for the Gravity Bar and the free pint, making it the most expensive pint of the trip. Two idiots tried to murder us by driving stupidly on the way home. As soon as we’d got inside sign-distance of Exeter Mickey flew past us in his Audi (he’d been waiting ages).
The wedding is in August. I ought to write a speech.
NJS
7/19/2004 04:38:00 pm
Seven Years?!
It’s always been about movement, you see, onwards and upwards and never stopping. Just go back to that first song, the one that convinced them it was worth bothering with – “my girl is just a retread / I lost her when I hit the brakes” – as soon as you try to stop, try and halt momentum, things fuck up, things break. What’s a retread? A tyre that’s been used before. Hit the brakes too hard when you’re moving too fast, try and regain control, and it explodes. When you’re moving that fast you have to let go, ride with it, trust your- your what? Instinct? Soul? Fuck it. Yeah. That’s why “Come Back…” didn’t work, because it was a lie, it was about stopping, returning. If you turn away you can’t turn back. That whole first record did it but did it wrong, it was all fucked up, and then the second went for something else entirely and did it properly but by then nobody cared, except us.
Yesterday I went walking, and on the way out I saw a fat couple on the seafront, and the man was holding the woman’s hand up to his face and kissing her chubby fingers. It’s fair to say they’d never grace the cover of a magazine, but for that instant they were making each other beautiful. I smiled.
I’ve been waiting more than seven years for this record. The day it arrived I took the afternoon off and raced home. I closed the door and put it on and inside three minutes I was sobbing. Not crying; sobbing. Big, gulping convulsions rippling up from my guts and through my chest, coming out of my eyes and mouth. And not because this is a down record, far fucking from it. I was sobbing with relief. Sometimes it’s been so fucking hard being a fan of this band, seeing other people take the piss, write off what they are. Every time someone said they were shit it fucking hurt, and by 2002 I was spent, completely and utterly spent. I couldn’t deal with it anymore so I walked away. The time and effort and care and love invested in this band just doesn’t stand thinking about. Fuck knows how they must feel themselves. I always hoped they had it in them, believed, I had to believe, because what else is there otherwise? But I always knew they’d never done it. No one can deny it now. It’s impossible.
Seven years. Fucking hell. This record is a huge vindication. I was right, you were wrong, fuck off now, go away, leave me alone. Everyone else can go home again, they were never needed, never wanted, didn’t fill the void.
It’s a record about a record, about all the songs that came before it, about it’s own gestation which isn’t just three years or even seven years or even ten, but thirty and then some and then some more. All my years plus all your years plus all their years = centuries. “Glorious Day” might be about a girl or it might be about a song but it’s actually about Youth (Youth I kiss you, I write you love letters thanking you for smashing this band into tiny pieces, breaking their backs and shattering their spirits and seeing the pieces coalesce into what they always should have been). “Ashes” isn’t about… whatever you think it’s about. It’s about everyone who ever said they couldn’t do it, everyone who beat them down and fucked them over; it’s about itself. It makes me cry. It makes me cry and it’s a four-to-the-floor, four-minute fast-as-fuck piece of upwards dynamism, not some pussy weepy ballad shit. It makes me cry because it’s so fucking good. “Someday” had me sobbing on the train at half past seven. There’s a moment, in between the gospel mayhem, when everything dips out, and someone, maybe that singer, says “… [yeah]!” and the gospel mayhem cuts back in with ruthless, joyous abandon, and all those promises about feeling ten feet tall are fulfilled. “Near Life” is the band spiral, the conviction, the verge of breaking through, the sonic overload, widescreen and technicolour and composed entirely of abstracted shots of the sea, of the moors, and you realise that in the distance, on the verge of the horizon, tiny people are moving, tossed about by the waves, waving not drowning. The last thirty seconds of “Out of Nothing” sounds like Fennesz for heaven’s sake. Attention to detail. Enormous detail.
The thing is, and I think this is why I keep sobbing, that it’s over now. It’s like supporting a shit football team your whole life, going to every game, loving them, seeing them do amazing things in training and willing them to do it on the pitch but they never quite do, they just do OK, promotion one year, struggle with relegation the next, innocuous mid table nothingness after that. And then they go and win the FA Cup. What the fuck?! And after that you can’t ever go back. They could win the league the next season and the season after that too and every other fucking season for ever but it will never mean as much as it did to win that first FA Cup, to first break out, that unbearable release after all the struggle. You can’t ever go back. And you know, everyone’s going to want a piece of them in a few months. They don’t do fame very well. They’re not a young band. I think one more record (and when I say ‘I’, I mean ‘we’), done quickly maybe, most of the songs are written I gather (they always were, in their heads and hearts, in my mind’s eye), and then who knows what happens next. But for now they’ve done it, and for the next two months we can relax and enjoy, because after that everything is going to be different.
I’m not sure there’s much left to say. At the moment. But there will be. And fucking lots of it.
NJS
7/19/2004 11:12:00 am
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Ruination Graduation Day
Sunday Bested parents rush from champagne picnics on the falling lawn to take shelter by a folded, yellow-steel sculpture, trying to carry chairs, holding hands over wine glasses. Barefoot girls, twenty-two and gowned & gartered (I like to think) with tiny sods between their toes, suddenly taken with shivers, blue sashes over shoulders – HALT; an excitable and gay Chinese man has just beamed at me about Peter Cushing’s death (can sci-fi fans be gay?), it was like Big Gay Al in some alternate dimension where it’s acceptable to wear green khaki shirts open over black t-shirts, keep pushing yr glasses up yr nose and say sassy and effusive and camp things like “Hiya! Got an exciting project for you! On August tenth – no, maybe eleventh – the sci-fi society is… OK! Brilliant! Thank you! That’s great!” (where the fuck did this come from?) – and little brothers, dressed by mothers, in tow (you can age a man by how high he wears his trousers – mine are around my arse but I think I must’ve lost weight – pity the ten-year old with flies stretching up beyond his belly-button).
Graduation Day was weird last year, and this year it is weird again. A band play bad 60s covers on the lawn behind the union bar.
I never went to mine.
NJS
7/15/2004 02:04:00 pm
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Fucking Drugs Man
Sick Mouthy says:
they recorded this in the most amazing manner
you blew me away says:
did they record it using the brains of baby seals?
Sick Mouthy says:
recorded hours and hours of improvisations ina darkened church, with oil lamps all around
you blew me away says:
mm
Sick Mouthy says:
and then mark hollis 9singer/guitar guy) and the producer used the first digital msuic editing kit to put it all together
Sick Mouthy says:
they had 45 HOURS of music
Sick Mouthy says:
and distilled it to 45 minutes
you blew me away says:
that's a bit gay
you blew me away says:
ooh
you blew me away says:
twinkling this time
Sick Mouthy says:
apparently they left out this huge choir arrangement on one track cos it was 'too beautiful'
Sick Mouthy says:
is the harmonica wailing?
you blew me away says:
mmm
you blew me away says:
its finished now
Sick Mouthy says:
on the record it runs staright into what i'm sending you now
you blew me away says:
ooh
Sick Mouthy says:
the first three tracka ll flow into each other
you blew me away says:
interesting
you blew me away says:
a girl with some kind of hypochromia
you blew me away says:
porphyria
Sick Mouthy says:
??
you blew me away says:
no pigment in red blood cells
you blew me away says:
i think
Sick Mouthy says:
wtf?
you blew me away says:
accumulation of porphyrins
you blew me away says:
which are a precursor to haem
Transfer of "02 Eden.mp3" is complete.
Sick Mouthy says:
WHERE DID THIS COME FROM
you blew me away says:
the telly
you blew me away says:
bbc1
Sick Mouthy says:
oh right
you blew me away says:
sorry
you blew me away says:
i am a frik
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
you blew me away says:
i need medicine
Sick Mouthy says:
PLAY THE SONG
you blew me away says:
my endogenous pyrogens are causing me problems
you blew me away says:
and making my head hurt
you blew me away says:
i am
you blew me away says:
hang on
you blew me away says:
going to get some prostaglandin/IL-5 inhibiting drugs
Sick Mouthy says:
ok
Sick Mouthy says:
ASPRIN
you blew me away says:
not aspirin
you blew me away says:
i am mildly allergic to it
Sick Mouthy says:
PARACETAMOL
Sick Mouthy says:
JUNIOR FUCKING DISPRIN
you blew me away says:
it aggrevates B2 receptors on bronchiole smooth muschle
you blew me away says:
muscle
you blew me away says:
the more stuff i learn
you blew me away says:
the worse i kan spel
Sick Mouthy says:
THE MORE DULL YOU BECOME
you blew me away says:
haha
you blew me away says:
you watch out
you blew me away says:
or you'll get a monkey heart
NJS
7/14/2004 10:51:00 pm
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Wanted: Chiropractor
All these kids I was almost at school with, who dropped out at 16 to get a job in a shitty office or whatever, work locally, whatever, shit shit shit, think they've made it cos they've bought a fucking Peugeot, bollocks, bollocks, they'll never see the things I've seen and never walk to where I've been. They've no idea. Saw a fat man kissing a fat woman's fingers, saw an ugly family ugly eating chips, smiled at how beautiful the world is, sobbed my fucking heart out. STOOD ATOP A CLIFF.
Here we go.
NJS
7/13/2004 07:07:00 pm
For fuck's sake!
Seven years! How am I meant to walk around with this?
NJS
7/13/2004 03:18:00 pm
Friday, July 09, 2004
Ten thousand words and counting
The Enormous Embrace Exercise Part Four
Gravity
As marketing departments go it’s quite tuneful… There’s a certain melancholy to it, which is almost entirely down to Danny singing it. The piano line sounds like it’s nicked from a soap opera, like Chris Martin, vegan tee-total rockstar son of a life-long Conservative who bankrolls corrupt Tory MPs (hello Patrick Nichols! Eat my fuck please!) and tries to build houses on sites of extreme natural beauty and can’t deal with the publicity because he’s essentially a self-preserving cunt, thought, halfway through writing it, “that’s pretty enough now” and stopped, exactly the same as he did with “Trouble” and that one that sounds like it was commissioned by the BBC for between-programme incidental music. The guitar at the end is ace. The lyrics are abysmal everyman claptrap, no sense of personality in there at all, no real life experience, no observation, just virginal melancholic faux-yearning. This is the dumbing down… Simple, obvious but unfamiliar metaphors are something Embrace have done very well – fireworks, satellites, hooligans – CM can’t manage to concoct a metaphor about gravity properly (he has a very good degree from a very good university, he went to a junior school where they make the boys wear shorts READ INTO THAT WHAT YOU WILL – his biggest song is not “the fireworks in me are all gone” or “shining stars light the heavens / we satellites hope to reach” it’s “everything was all yellow” FOR FUCK’S SAKE). I hope it goes massive, I really really do. But I HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHAT THEY CAN DO, what they will do, what they have done and this IS NOT ENOUGH. It’s an advert, a favour, and nothing more. I’m worried that they’ll always compromise at the last minute, that they’ll never actually put their best 10 or 11 songs on a record together and leave it be. REALLY GOOD RECORDS, and I mean really, really good records, records of undeniable quality… it doesn’t matter if they don’t have adverts and thin ends of wedges to lever them into position. They get the recognition they deserve. If they just were brave, once, took the risk… people wouldn’t be able to deny.
It’s nice enough. Maybe I’m drunk, and I am a little. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe it’s that it’s only running at 64kbps. Maybe I just need time to settle into it. Maybe (gosh, maybe) the B-SIDES ALONE WILL BLOW IT INTO KINGDOM COME. I wish it wasn’t on the album. Right now.
NJS
7/09/2004 11:13:00 pm
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Part Three
This Is Part Three Of The Enormous Embrace Exercise
A song-by-song directory and exegesis of my in-and-out-of-love affair with The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band On Acid
Silly of me to think I could get all this done quick sharp in one go, eh? Even two goes defeated me. I must confess I feel as though I’m suffering from Calderdale Fatigue. Oh well… Come ‘ere, come ‘ere, there’s more… I have to finish this now, otherwise what’s the point?
Over
They did two new songs live at the Brixton gigs in December 2000 (I left one before Embrace had even been on – the acoustics at that place are shocking, I was drunk, J & Karim weren’t coming due to a written-off car; there didn’t seem like much point), “It’s Gonna Take Time” and this. IGTT was nice enough, big chorus, clanking guitar, blah blah yadda yadda, but this… this was something else altogether. Thinking about it now the only thing I know that does a similar thing this, this drawn out, dramatic, (dare I say it?) gothic overload, is Disintegration. Again this is in waltz time (and again it took Karim to clarify this for me IT SEEMS SO OBVIOUS NOW), but it’s huge and hollow and plaintive and free flowing in a way that nothing which came before it had been. I love this. It seethes, gathers itself from nothing and rolls forward, a soundworld in and of itself, never climaxing, never reaching a refrain, fading in parts and then coming back, huge swathes of sound crashing into and over each other. This is the BIG sound. How the fuck can Starsailor have a career when this exists? Hidden at the end is a tiny string sweep, delicate and quiet and beautiful. The overdriven peaks when guitar and synth collide and you can’t tell where one sound ends and another begins… Why do I love this band? Perhaps I should give you this song? Only it’s not a song…
I Hope You’re Happy Now
IYNB hit me fast and then drifted away slowly over the next six months. The way the chorus emerges from nothing, just a twist of the melody line and a hop and a jump and it’s away, carries on what I was saying earlier about Danny running lyrics past the end of lines (I’ve just put Rufus Wainwright on and while Danny’s not a patch on him at doing it, there’s a different purpose to the trick’s utilisation between the two; Rufus is basically doing show tunes, he’s got nothing in common with The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel or Motown in his arrangements – it’s total Broadway). IHYHN is sweet and (I believe) anti-industry (tellingly?), accomplished and easy, and I haven’t listened to it by choice in two years. Which says something.
Many Will Learn
Whereas this, along with “Satellites”, “Over” and the (sort of) title track, made it onto the iPod. It’s almost as if that’s become the acid test; very rarely do full albums make it on there, it’s all favourite songs – 25 by Blur, 10 by Oasis, fucking 60-odd by Orbital (they do have full albums on there…), etcetera. This starts almost clumsily, not Richard’s guitar, maybe the opening melody? It doesn’t really prepare you for what’s coming, for the opening up, the falling harmonies, that sense of oceanic warmth… and yet IYNB is a very cold, chilly album, just after twilight, wrapped in mist. Again this isn’t a song so much as a feeling, an impression of a feeling (I always thought it was “you’re as honest as a comet” until I saw it written down), caught on tape. It’s luscious, in a word, but almost seems… not quite fully formed? It followed DFM very quickly, as if to try and capture the creative and emotional momentum of that period, and I wonder if songs didn’t quite get chance to breath and live properly. In the case of “Many Will Learn” this sensation probably grounds the song in a good way though – left to itself for longer it might have become too otherworldly and remote, as it is the balance is effective, perhaps accentuates the song’s more beautiful and transient qualities without over-egging them. Another thing about this album as a whole is that Mickey’s keyboards often sound too small and cheap, as if they tried too hard for ‘understated’; another sign of the band being rushed? Danny talked a lot of this album’s genesis as being about capturing a feeling of being ‘lost at sea’, which I think reveals a lot about the band’s mindset. It may have resulted in some beautiful music, but I don’t think it was healthy.
It’s Gonna Take Time
This is alright. Nice clanking bass towards the end. Never fully gets going though, does it? Mooted as a single, but Hut were so lax with marketing at this point that there was no fucking point. I’m interested to find out just how the lack of record company attention and care affected the band’s mindset at this point; recent words from the band about new material suggests they were disheartened during IYNB and didn’t even realise it at the time, hence the ‘lost at sea thing’. One things for sure – on this album they were MUCH better at the fluid, impressionistic moments than the straight-ahead ‘songs’. Barely any guitar on this, which is a shame; because Richard would rather be a drummer, he makes a very good guitarist – it’s about not overly respecting the instrument, I think, seeing it as a tool for making a song or a noise rather than as a wankboard. All the good guitar lines on this record got used up in “Over”, maybe.
Hey, What You Trying To Say
Really nicely arranged, especially the end. Danny wanted to get Neil Young in to play harmonica; unsurprisingly the crotchety old bastard never made it. The lyrics are about how clumsy we are with words, which is ironic because the lyrics are pretty poor, and the melody errs on the wrong side of cheese. Like I said, really great arrangement, subtle and tuneful, but I don’t ever listen to it. One friend who’s not particularly a fan said, on hearing IYNB, that this was their worst song (he said “Many Will Learn” was one of their best).
If You’ve Never Been In Love With Anything
More hooks than a convention of one-armed pirates. Beach Boys, Jim’ll Fix It, Spiritualized, etcetera. This grabbed me hard for a while but these days I’m less impressed. It’s not… mad enough? WAAAAY back when they said they wanted to sound like The Beatles circa Sgt. Pepper if Brian Wilson had joined, and maybe this is a stab at that? The end is great. A certain Mr Chappell said the main body of the song sounded too much like a demo, not properly balanced or full enough. I disagreed heartily at the time but I can see what he means now, I think. This still ended up on the iPod. I need to hear it again, maybe. This should have been a hit. This should have been massive. GLORIOUS. It never got released. wtf went wrong?!
Make It Last
Heard an early live version of this from a bootleg of that gig in a cave (no I don’t still have it, so don’t bother asking – I hate bootlegs, and after listening once I destroy them), and it had some weird keyboard trill running through it like The Flaming Lips doing Delakota’s “The Rock”. Second single. My least favourite on IYNB after HWYTTS. Minor-to-major is better than major-to-minor. I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT HERE BUT KARIM UNDERSTANDS. It’s about looking at the stars rather than you’re navel – “you know we coulda” goes up and then “made it last” comes down and it’s horrible – like all those post-Flips bands with vocalists who really can’t sing, who can’t hold a breath enough to carry a melody line so they cut them all really short. Keep Going UP>>>
Happiness Will Get You In The End
Minimal acoustic nothing with a really nasty (in a good sense) lyric. I don’t like this song but I can appreciate it. I remember saying to Karim (he didn’t like it at all) that it was perhaps a song you could only get if you knew you were (emphasis on past tense) a cunt. I think in many ways I have a lot in common with old Danny; I just don’t worry about things like he does.
Satellites
I veer between a mild distaste for this, because it isn’t what it was, and loving it helplessly because it is what it could be… It opens up slowly… You can’t listen to it except in the dark. It is the dark. Storms are brewing but far away and for now you can still see the night sky… Why do I love this band? This is (for now?) the most sonically beautiful thing they’ve done, cold and empty but, as I said, opening up into something warm. Before that fucking thing on the train station they gave a CD away to the people who were going, along with a map and a ticket. The CD had lots of songs by various people to set the mood. This came last and it surprised so many… I remember the morning the MD of IYNB landed on my door mat, and although it was still technically summer it was a cold day, and as misty as you like. I cycled out to Dawlish Warren with my walkman, parked the bike up and walked to the point. You couldn’t see more than 30 feet, the entire world was sheathed in vapour, hidden, vanishing, and I traversed the sand listening. That’s why IYNB hit me so hard so fast, and then faded. The start and the end are such absolute peaks, they hold up the middle but also make its weakness apparent. “Satellites” was like the culmination of so much stuff. I don’t listen to it often, and after it I can’t listen to anything else by anyone for a good while.
Fight Yer Corner
This was held back from the DFM sessions too, and consequently has a much more colourful sound to it than IYNB and especially it’s b-side contemporaries (all the DFM stuff is painted in bright oranges and yellows for me, vibrant and detailed). It’s nice enough, but, as I’ve said before, I don’t own it and I don’t miss it.
It’s You I Make It For
Can’t remember anything about this other than the fact that it was another song recorded with a cold on Danny’s part. I can’t remember whether it was a messageboard post or an email, I think the former, but it was mid-2002 and I expressed my falling-out-of-love with Embrace fully and in no uncertain terms. I said there had been too many hesitations, too many mistakes and missteps, hurried judgements in the wrong places, that I was still waiting for the next record because the three so far had all been compromised and that now I was worried it would never come and I couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for it. I stopped visiting the site for some time. When I did go there it seemed as if it was populated by people who neither understood nor cared about what this band was about, what they stood for, which I thought I understood much better than anybody else. Maybe I do? Who knows. Danny emailed me back after that message and… I can’t quite recall? Apologised? I know he said the stuff they were working on had the scope and attention to detail “of Peter Jackson”. The thing is that this band are almost hopelessly misunderstood by so many people who aren’t aware of the bigger picture, who don’t understand that the statements way back when weren’t arrogance, they were ambitions, and yeah it is about feelings and soul (and I don’t believe in ‘soul’) but it’s also about music and songs. You can’t help who you fall in love with and you can’t help who you fall out of love with. Well maybe you can, but you probably shouldn’t. Sometimes a band just gets you… Just the way the drums fall makes you feel taller, fitter, better able to cope. And I don’t have problems coping in the first place. And I don’t stand at the back looking cool, not at things like that. I go down the front and lose my shit. I might not these days because I’ve done it too many times, because my hip’s fucked, because now I just want to listen and watch other people lose it (it’s their time after all now, I had mine) and soak it in, see what they’re capable of as a band because it’s still so much. It’s not about sitting on the steps and looking at the gutter, it’s about standing in the porch and looking at the stars. It’s not about hitting notes it’s about pulling strings. Yeah they’re clichés and platitudes and hokum and so fucking what? What’s a cliché but a truth that’s become horribly, laughably, uncomfortably apparent? Music doesn’t have to be a reaction to what’s gone before it in order to be ‘good’, it doesn’t have to be made by people interested in the same art as you or by people with the same education (I know art students and I know educated people and I know people in bands and I know people who actually craft things and I know people who are caught in traps and they’re all different and you can’t say some are worth more than others as a categorical fact because Dougie might be an alcoholic but he’s still a better carpenter and joiner than you are a whateeverthefuckyouare, the things he makes are actually beautiful and have a purpose). All music has to do is touch you. The best music doesn’t come from the city. The best music comes from people, whether they use sticks and stones or to make it or ProTools or trumpets and double-bass or a sampler. It picks you up and makes you see things differently and that can be Disco Inferno or Britney Spears or Underworld or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Charles Mingus or Embrace or anything that moves you in some way or another. Robin said “I was awake last night at 2am and I put the tele on and what the fuck were you doing there, Nick?!” and Robin might be bankrupt and dead now, massive heart attack brought about by being an alcoholic, debt-ridden scammer, huge swathes of things might have happened since then, whole new worlds might have been born in between but Jo can turn to me and say “the second one is still my favourite, I think” in that room, looking out of the window onto those people while J played records and I absently filmed stuff and it makes sense. I didn’t know in 1997 that I was going to be doing this. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in September. I don’t know what “It’s You I Make It For” sounds like and I don’t care and I’m allowed not to care, because I still care more than most.
Giving Forgiving And Giving In
Heard an early version of this that was just acoustic. It was nice enough. This rocks a bit more. It’s alright.
What You’ve Never Had You’ll Never Have
Didn’t like this at all. Cannibalised from that albatross. Had enough now.
what happens next?
And this is the End Of Part Three. There will be a Part Four, someday.
NJS
7/07/2004 02:19:00 pm
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Part 2
The Enormous Embrace Exercise Part 2
A song-by-song directory and exegesis of my in-and-out-of-love affair with The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band On Acid
On, on unto the breach dear friends or close this blog up with our Britpop dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility, but when the blast of war blows in your ear then imitate the action of a tiger- Oh, fucking hell.
MORE SONGS…
Don’t Turn Your Back On Love
Feelings I Thought You Shared
It just dawned on me that I completely neglected to include these two songs in Part 1, where they should, by rights, be. This is because they’re both pretty rubbish, to be honest; Richard even apologised to me for them at one point, saying they’d done them in a rush. One of them has some quite nice horns and the other has some noisy guitar, and that’s all I can remember. Oh well, onto the real part 2.
The Love It Takes
November 1999 and this was played on the radio when Danny (and Richard? who knows) made a trip to the BBC around the release of “Hooligan”. Blank tape, here we go… Starts with nothing, an electronic burble which is still different every time I hear it, and the drums are in a weird triangle, and and and and… The lyrics are clumsy, admit it – “there’s reasons you can’t SEE / you will be the end of ME / with the feelings I can’t FEEL” – but it doesn’t matter. The chorus is massive and comes from nowhere and everywhere at once BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER – electric hyperglide technicolour explosion, break for the skyline! It’s like Zappa and The Stone Roses on turbo, it’s not the greatest break ever, far fucking from it, but it doesn’t matter – the point is that this isn’t Santana or Zappa or anyone – it’s Embrace and they don’t didn’t do things like this, it makes you hold your arms out wide and look upwards, it’s like a big orgasm that took a long time coming, like lots and lots of things that you hoped for and never really expected. Like getting CASTLE GREYSKULL for Christmas, aged 6. It may have been shit and plastic and too small compared to how you imagined it, it may have had NO BACK to it but it’s still fucking CASTLE GREYSKULL and therefore it is great and you have to love it despite itself.
Save Me
The ‘funk’ one with loads of mad widdly organ solos scattered across it (Simple Minds, I hear you say – I WOULDN’T KNOW, I DON’T OWN ANY SIMPLE MINDS, I’M NOT A CUNT) the first time I saw this live two things struck me. 1; it’s got about three tunes (and all done with only two chords, so I’m told), and 2; how the fuck does an acoustic guitar make SO MUCH NOISE? It’s big and brash and daft and layered stupidly OTT and should have been a massive hit. Live it goes on for about 7 minutes, because “Bunker Song” is the coda. It shows Danny’s knack for making up daft words – plastiscenic this time, to go alongside engulfaphobia from “Blind”. Two remixes appeared on the single – at the time we (‘we’ being J, Karim and me) preferred the garage-y schizonutsness of the Reverend Bass mix (Reverend Bass being a guy with a magnificent worm-wig and a poorly back) which went at 1000mph, but playing them back a few weeks ago, after not hearing either for maybe three years, the Perfecto Remix stood out as having more focus and control, turning it into a big clanking dub thing. Have Oasis ever been remixed? Then shut up. Happy Mondays, the ghost of baggy, Sly Stone etcetera – did I mention that “One Big Family” sounds like “Only Shallow” gone dub-punk-terrace-chant? It does, you know.
Drawn From Memory
My opinion on this varies wildly. At one of the Blackpool gigs Danny moaned that people always go to the toilet during the slower songs, which are invariably his. He can’t possibly have seen me from the stage (with a couple of exceptions I always stand at the back looking cool at gigs) but I was one of those people who toodled off to make a piss during this song that night. In the bogs everyone was silent, except one chap who whistled the melody perfectly in time. It made for quite a magical slash. In the blue corner; it’s SEVEN MINUTES LONG, there’s only piano, a bit of bass, and some subtle atmospherics, Danny really doesn’t (didn’t) quite have the pipes to carry a tune so simply arranged, blah blah yadda yadda. In the red corner; it’s really pretty beautiful. Verdict? Acquitted on a technicality.
Bunker Song
This is the end of “Save Me”. One minute forty of cheesy kinetic thump funk, fucking great fun.
New Adam New Eve
Back at the start the band were fond of saying things like “only Chemical Brothers and Prodigy are making music worth bothering with at the moment, everyone else is rubbish”, and that attitude excited me more than almost anything else, because it hinted at the promise of Embrace trying to be everything, it showed they weren’t stuck in some Golden Age Of Rock where Noel Gallagher can say ludicrous things like “a bassline doesn’t make a song good” and “a really great song can be played on just an acoustic guitar and still sound great” and lots of other hokey boys-club workaday “it’s about soul, man” BOLLOCKS. This song blows it all away. (J – “I was never that keen on New Adam…”) Layers of winding psychoschizo noise twisting too fast, drop some scratching in as a nasty hook, feel that fucking BASS for heaven’s sake, talk about “Airbag”, bugger off, this is absolutely savage, Danny’s best spite lyric – “the awful weight / spread across me when I wake / is your loving arm around me” – and the chorus is just do-do-do like Lou Reed did years ago, like some technorock Motown fuckjob, absolutely on the edge of chaos, as solid as a rock, visceral and daft, layers and layers and layers, the organ underneath playing all these tiny sweet hooks but smashed so utterly by the force of that bass and those drums (double-whack, always a good sign) and those guitars that it becomes evil too. Richard doesn’t solo here he just fucking hits it cos what’s the point in playing it properly, that’s no fun. And this tune, after the stuff that barely even used electricity, meant that that thing they said about Prodigy made sense, in a roundabout way.
Yeah You
And this is the same but cute, isn’t it? “We free-dinners-kids with the big ideas”, a great line, everything about the band summed up, the Nirvana fandom making sense but euphoric not misanthropic. Metallic grating to close – by this time I was squirming like a kid, what have they done? What have they done?! What have they done!!!
Liar’s Tears
It seems really incongruous after all that, this little acoustic nothing, this apology set to tape. You can hear a chair creak and that makes it, but… It’s nice enough. Prettier than most. I guess I just don’t like the minimal ballads.
I Wouldn’t Wanna Happen To You
This could be my favourite song by them, this cantering little psychedelic thing, all flurries of leaves in summer and tiny melodic fills, circular guitar and horns and just… Danny said this album was their Paul’s Boutique, that it was about magic moments, little bits of sound that jump out at you, and it is. IWWHTY is one long buzz of gorgeous hooks. The rerecorded version for the single was lighter but lost, for me, that buzz of so much great stuff happening at once by paring it down a touch. Why do I love this band? Perhaps I ought to just give you this song.
I Had A Time
Or maybe this one? It’s trying too hard for that brief-encounter profundity, but fuck me if it’s not absolutely beautiful, vacant and intangible, slipping just out of view, the melody so slight as to almost vanish if you try and grasp it, some clarinet courtesy of Mike and shimmering keys from Mickey, guitar falling away… You don’t need a orchestra to break a heart. Beautiful.
Get On Board
This is just great, a slow-burner, laidback pop sung by Richard, undulating Byrds bass, sliding guitars to close, so understated and gorgeous and warm and weightless but not stuck in the past. Why do I love this band? Perhaps I ought to give you this song.
Still So Young
Mike wrote this. It’s pleasant enough, but never did anything for me. I’ve probably only listened to it three times.
The First Cut
Velvet Underground damp stomp, indecipherable, a firm favourite of The Fans Who Know, DOES SOMEONE IN THE BAND LIKE ARCHERY, DO THEY? ROFFLE.
I Know What’s Going On
Two-minutes, clapping, a guitar solo, a singy bit. Magnus at university (Magnus was a great man but I can’t remember his surname – married to a lovely woman named Bea, with a son who was the most ENORMOUS BABY EVER and who couldn’t say ‘Nick’ so used to gurgle something that sounded like ‘god’; should you ever happen across this, Magnus, get in touch!) said he thought this was the best thing they’d done because it was weightless and honest and open to the sky. He was a good man. He could tell you what a record was like by looking at the grooves. Before he became a dad we used to smoke huge amounts of ganja and listen to drum n bass and talk about music. God those days are so far away now. So long ago. How have years passed?
Top Of The Heap
A nice enough little tune, sounds good, but nothing to it. Won’t ever make the Perfect B-Sides Compilation.
Three Is A Magic Number
Live cover from a Radio 1 session – they dragged Bob Dorrough to do this with them at a Brixton gig – hey kids, De La Soul DID NOT COVER IT, they sampled it which is a totally different thing. Necessary irreverence here. THIS IS THE BIT WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE SECRET GIGS. From 19 to 22… That’s the timeline of the release of their first three albums for me. One just before university, one slap-bang in the middle, one just after. From Northampton everywhere in the country (except Devon) is easily accessible, especially London. And people would pick me up and drive me anywhere, pick me up at 11am in Manchester and drive me to Blackpool and feed me beer for breakfast because I was fun to have around (allegedly) YOU CAN’T DRINK WARM CANS OF GUINNESS IN A MOVING CAR, KARIM, YOU MENTALIST and I hate to get soppy and talk about times in my life or whatever, all that shit, because these songs don’t bring back memories (I don’t associate songs with things beyond colours and shapes and whether I enjoy them, they don’t really act as emotional batteries for me, this is why I like weird shit – I’m in space looking at music, as young Tom says; it’s about the point of contact, which is why things have to sound good on record, otherwise what’s the point? It’s what people still have in the future) but good lord, I will never have a time in my life like I did from January to December 2000. And thank fuck, because it was mental; I couldn’t do it again and I don’t remember much. I remember getting to SG3 slightly late (we got lost), and shouting “HIPPIES!” at the band because they had flowers and candles around them and Danny replied “J and Nick must have arrived then!” The gig was in a forest glade next to the lake where they tested the bouncing bomb – apart from the midges it was beautiful – Jo brought us cans of beer that had been cooling in a stream and I’m almost welling up remembering it, it was so great, Danny’s then girlfriend was talking about setting me up with her mate, wtf, we went for Thai at some point, maybe a few days later, or was that another time altogether, J’s birthday, back in time to May and the two Blackpool gigs, across to Leeds, down to Surbiton, across to London, drinking port (they had no Guinness!) and flashing my arse in some hotel at midnight on a Sunday after walking across Shepherd’s Bush Green shouting lines from Withnail with J and Richard, buying pornography and chocolate from a petrol station because it was funny, the guy in the booth making me laugh and me kissing the concrete in thanks, before the gig standing on a table in the pub next door and screaming at a wizard’s shoe, eating lots of burgers, fucking hell was this all real? The Wolverhampton thing, getting lost in Brixton, 15 pints of Guinness (allegedly – I wasn’t fucking counting), someone tearing curtains down (or not) in the name of rock n roll and sleepy friends… the lost goes on and on. It’s no wonder I burnt out a bit, moved back home, found a girl, settled down, got a 9-5 job in an office (admittedly a fucking mad office full of records and films and Bark Psychosis white label promos just casually laying around in the corner)… As for this tune, well, you know, it’s about MATHS and is quite good FUN to SING.
Wonder
It’s a great title for a song, in the sense of “wide-eyed”. I recorded the first play off the radio onto MD and was nonplussed. I played it on repeat for 45 minutes, trying to get to grips with it. The guitar streaming under the gospel bit was good, and it’s a good song… but it never took off, it was never big and bold enough. Spiritualized released “Stop Your Crying” at almost the same time, and that seemed to trump “Wonder” at it’s own game. But you have to take things on their own terms to an extent; you have to understand what their point is… There is or was a simple charm about this… but… not really feeling it.
Anywhere You Go
This is a hangover from the DFM sessions – the shimmer to production is a dead giveaway. It’s pretty, but the trumpet at the end would be better if a; it was real (it might be, but I seriously suspect it isn’t), and b; if it did something other than just follow the rigid melody line it’s given. What this means is that I want Embrace to go jazz. Which is not going to happen.
Everyday
Recorded with a cold on Danny’s part. Not good.
Today
Same with this. Which leads me to the conclusion that, by this time, Hut didn’t give a fuck about Embrace because they were collapsing (the label, not the band), which led to the band being both rushed into things and also hideously neglected. Coupled with the fact that I was no longer going to gigs, that I was on the other side of the country again… burn out. Loss of interest. Impending doom? Maybe, nearly, not quite.
Caught In A Rush
This either has a brilliant and unexpected dynamic leap, or sounds like two songs held clumsily together with sellotape, depending on your perspective. As there doesn’t appear to be any organ or piano on this, and the guitar wasn’t typical Embrace guitar (remember Richard only has two solos!) some people wandered if maybe it was Mickey playing guitar, and Richard was absent being father? Unlikely seeing as it was probably recorded in his garage (so to speak). Like the other IYNB era b-sides, I don’t own this anymore, and I don’t really miss it.
And that is the End Of Part 2. Part three in about ten years…
NJS
7/06/2004 09:03:00 pm
Part One
The Enormous Embrace Exercise
Or; reasons to be woeful
Or; the most misunderstood band in the world
Or; what the fuck were you thinking, N1ck S0uth@ll?
Or; shut the fuck up and listen to my song
Or; a song-by-song directory and exegesis of my in-and-out-of-love affair with The Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band On Acid
How the hell does one even begin to do this? To distil seven years of love, antipathy, excitement, disappointment, idiocy, gigs, travelling, psychosis, drink, tears, people, shouting, singing, falling over in Irish theme pubs, starting fights (nearly) in Wolverhampton and, most importantly, songs, into mere words on a page? Well, if it’s good enough for a depressive Beatles fan then it’s good enough for me. Embrace are better than The Beatles anyway, The Beatles never used a kazoo. I can prove this by SCIENCE.
Song-by-song, eh? It’s a big job. It’s pretty stupid. You’ll be revealing precisely where you stand on EVERYTHING here and you might upset people.
Oh well.
You have to understand that I’m not one of these people who unquestioningly likes every song in any given artist’s catalogue (you know who you are, you fucking fools – what’s the point in it?), and, when it comes to Embrace, there are probably as many songs that I dislike as there are ones I love. How could it be any other way? I’m in an almost unique position regarding this band; it wasn’t by accident that I ended up sitting on that fucking train station platform (I drove to that gig!) answering benign questions and talking shit (stop me if I’m wrong, stop me if I’m wrong). “N1ck S0uth@ll; professional Embrace fan” – well I actually fucking am now, now that I’ve taken their (new) record company’s coin (in a roundabout way [on the verge of indecision]) in exchange for seven years of built-up stuffness in my brain, congested into no less than 7x400 and 3x1000 words. Well, that was for money; this is for love, such as it is.
Take into consideration that this has been written both in a single day and over the course of seven years – these are thoughts as held in my head RIGHT NOW and I reserve the right to change my mind at any given second of any given day, ever and ever, amen.
Song… by… bleedin’… song… here goes…
All You Good Good People
NME live review, London Oxford Street 100 Club, January 1997; looking for the new Stone Roses, blah blah yadda yadda, you know the drill; “the width and whoosh of The Verve” etcetera. The Fierce Panda version is, frankly, pretty lousy; Danny’s lost his keys and it’s as muddy as all fuck. But there’s a stateliness and an ambition apparent. And, you know, they kept comparing it to Barry Manilow, and that’s cool. The best version is the album cut, produced by Youth – it’s faster, livelier, there are more guitars – but even that never caught what it was like live. Fucking hell – the noise, especially at the end when Rick would spiral off into nowhere, jumping around and squalling reels of sonic shit out of his instrument; it was absolutely awesome, but they never caught that rigidity-devolving-into-chaos properly on record. It still sounds like rolling back into home in a beaten-up old car after a long time away, though.
My Weakness Is None Of Your Business
The Fierce Panda version of this was even more muddy and unsure and off-key than AYGGP, if possible. But at the same time it was absolutely glorious watching this wretched little thing unfurl into something so desperate to be beautiful, so vainglorious and pleading. By the time they redid it for the album it was too solid and workmanlike, almost, the fragility and, haha, weakness had almost been worked out of it. Overdubs are bad, kid. Like much of the really early stuff, it was badly realised on record, which is a shame, cos the seed is beautiful.
The Last Gas
This is more like it. Turbo-shoegazing! And more NOISE! Sheets of the stuff, and nonsensical lyrics, all held down by a clumsy, slow, malevolent groove, clattering and bashing. The video was so exciting; crap, but exciting! The band crashed a party, or something. I always used to segue from this to “This Is Music” by The Verve on mixtapes. The guitar solo is like being punched in the face or an electric shock. Parts were rerecorded for the album, the vocal cleaned-up and the synth-trumpets got rid of; both decisions, in my oh-so-humble opinion, a mistake, because it lessened the NOISE.
Now You’re Nobody
They’ve still never done anything else which sounds quite like this. It shifts and floats with an assured delicacy just wasn’t evident anywhere else in Embrace’s music. I can’t remember whether I read it or hypothesised it myself, but the way Embrace’s (early) songs were put together almost seemed as if they’d deconstructed the very building blocks of how to write a song and put them back together again from the bottom up. At it’s best this manifested itself in a sense of craftsmanship and instant familiarity that was both comforting and made the songs seem incredibly strongly focused. At it’s worst it was like the songs were built of Lego and you could see all the joins. Or I could, anyway. I never felt as ‘located’ within a song as I did with certain early Embrace songs, and I’m still not entirely sure how this affects me; I like being ‘lost’. During the calamitous periods of university and such they gave me a bedrock to cling on to, but if all a song is useful for is getting you through the bad times (and it wasn’t the stereotypically weepy numbers I was clinging to) how are you ever going to listen to it after you’ve got through to the other side? The music needs to have it’s own worth outside of your associations with it. The inability of most Embrace fans you encounter on their messageboard to disassociate their affections and memories from the songs (and this happens a lot with ‘indie’ fans in general) pisses me off because it demeans the art by reducing it to a painkiller, to a subjective beta blocker; “this only has worth when I am in pain; only has worth because I have pain”, and that is, I believe, selfish and wrong.
This doesn’t feel as if it’s made of Lego at all. It doesn’t feel like a song in the way that, say, AYGGP does - “this is the end of the verse; this is the start of the chorus; this is the blah blah yadda yadda” – I never got that with “Now You’re Nobody”, and that sense of topographical dislocation within the actual song was great, because the destination and momentum of the song becomes unimportant, and all that matters is the point of impact of each second on your eardrums, as the sound waves touch the hairs that sense the vibrations and turn it into information in your brain, with no sense of expectation or history, no past or present, just how the song makes you feel now. And that’s why I love “Now You’re Nobody”; because it sounds beautiful now.
Blind
Whereas this is just overload. Rumour has it (and rumour is true, I know cos I’ve been told) that Johnny Dollar made them record it in the wrong order; verse-chorus-verse-chorus-shoutyguitar, when it was meant to be verse-verse-chorus-shoutyguitar-chorus, because “you can’t do a song in that order”. In return for this they blew his eardrums and gave him tinnitus. SUCKS! “Blind” actually finds the middle ground between Oasis, The Pixies and MBV by overloading on guitars and shouting. JD’s production may be in the wrong order, but it sounds absolutely fucking fantastic, especially during the middle section when Rick’s guitar slips from speaker to speaker with wilful, noisy abandon. Also Steve’s bassline starts like a motorbike revving, which is a great thing to sound like. They rerecorded it for the American release, in the right order, but the sheer weight of guitars was gone. I remember one Radio 1 live thing (probably April 1997) when, during the climax of this song, the broadcast cut out for a coupe of seconds. “Blind” – Too Loud For The BBC!
Fireworks
This is weightless and delicate and came out BEFORE “The Drugs Don’t Work” which is the same song with flashier guitar. Supposedly someone in the band who plays guitar and had dreadlocks for a while doesn’t like this song much because it’s “boring”. I’ve got nothing to say about it, really. It’s lovely, but I’m not the same person I was seven years ago.
One Big Family
Seek out the Perfecto Mix by Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osbourne (I’m not sure how much Oakenfold would have been involved though) which dubs this out to incredible lengths; by the later gigs in 2000 they were performing it live in that manner. When I first saw the band in Bristol in 1997 they encored with this, and the ba-ba-ba’s went on forever – a much more satisfactory end to a gig, in my opinion, than the finale that would become traditional in 1998. There are little tweaks to the production of the EP and album versions (they are different – Karim informs me they’re in a different key, whatever that means [nb. the tardy Arab fuck now says he never did say this = he’s a LIAR]) by Steve Osbourne that elevate it above some of their other material from this era, which, despite the often lavish strings, were generally produced in a very basic a fashion. As a dance kid since the age of 16 (not that I ever go out dancing, you understand), those little soundworlds in the production mean a lot to me; sometimes they’re almost the only reason I listen to music.
Dry Kids
This is a lovely little tune, and I like the way it echoes a lyric from “Blind” (that kind of self-referential cannibalism blurs authorial lines interestingly) but I still don’t quite understand the massive level of affection most fans have for this.
You’ve Only Got To Stop To Get Better
Layers and layers of scree and noise (but not quite NOISE) almost drag this into greatness; the opening riff is classic, the lyrics meaningless enough to be shoutable without feeling like a prick, but the groove and sonic mayhem aren’t… quite… there. Turned loud enough, the rolling finale is quite something, but not the full-on, malicious lock-groove it should have been. Better than those two… things… on the album though. This is also a perfect example of their knack for RIDICULOUSLY LONG SONG TITLES. “You’ll Never Fit A Family Of Five In A Ford Cortina”.
Butter Wouldn’t Melt
Again, this is sweet enough, with a touch of bitter (or is it sour?) to start, but… ‘pretty’ is about all I can say. Finding their way I think here; the ringing piano is perhaps the best bit, the way it interplays with the guitar to almost sound like a different instrument, which is what Mad Brian Wilson was trying with Pet Sounds, placing microphones equidistant between guitars & pianos to make a new sound.
You Don’t Amount To Anything – This Time
Interesting guitar over the chorus-bit, but this is a total Lego song otherwise. Country-ish strum to open always reminded me of that Oasis one from Be Here Now with the screaming and the Johnny Depp.
The Way I Do
This is great though; my personal theory is that it’s Richard’s proposal to Jo given musical form. It’s totally pure, an unabashed Love Song, something Danny doesn’t quite seem able to write (or didn’t? – thus far his have almost all been at least touched with bitterness, negativity or spite). People always mention Lennon as a comparison/inspiration, but I’m not so sure (and only partly cos I have no solo Lennon) – I’d suggest Otis was perhaps more important to this. The pianos to close, swirling and sweeping like ripples in a pond, are magical, stately and grand and warm
Free Ride
I really really really dislike this song. A; it’s made of Lego. B; it’s a nasty, selfish, self-pitying little thing that bleeds selfish spite, reminds me of who I was at my worst and most adolescent and lacking in vision. C; it pampers to the meme that “slow & quiet = profound and moving” which is Not The Case. D; there’s fuck-all going on.
Come Back To What You Know
Embrace In The Gym. My dislike of this song stems from… from Danny telling me of it’s existence in December 1997, saying it was “pop” and me hoping for “She Bangs The Drums”. And then it’s… there’s nothing to it beyond form, and the form is not that special. Youth on production made it sparkly and shifted the dynamic into just the right shape for it to go massive. And I’ve no problem with that, but it painted Embrace in people’s minds as this Anthem Band, and, as you can see here, there’s more to them than that. Plus the sentiment is nasty! How retroactive and unadventurous can you get? Go away from what you know! Embrace the new! (Pardon the pun.)
Love Is Back
The NME review suggested the b-sides to CBTWYK “descended into 70s singer-songwriter hell” and I’m pretty close to agreement. This is… nice. But completely inconsequential. The hummed refrain is very pleasant and the drums light enough to suggest brush-work (it’s not though), but after things like “Blind” and the OBF remix I was hoping for something more dynamic (or just plain weird), and all I got was a load of pussy ballads.
If You Feel Like A Sinner
This is better; the organ/piano interplay reminds me of the instrumental from Automatic For The People, the lyric is cannibalised from all over the shop, and the melody moves with much more ease than you might at first think. Danny’s very good at running a lyrical conceit across too much melody line, carrying his train of thought into odd places, areas where it should not reside; lyrics don’t always finish at the end of a line, he often carries them on over the beat. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work (the title track of the first album, maybe) and other times it’s wonderful. Many of the early songs contained melodies that repeated themselves almost too rigidly (which I think contributes to the locationism I was talking about earlier), and while this is fine on the rockers (magnificent on OBF) you want something more fluid and wandering for the softer numbers, I feel. This does it right.
Perfect Way
Closely recorded vocals, doom-laded sentiment, minimal acoustic guitar = YAWN. “Liar’s Tears”, “Happy & Lost” and “Happiness Will Get You In The End” all pull the same trick – if you’re going to do minimal you need huge swathes of unsettling space; this is certainly the most unsettling of the guitar+voice songs they did, but I was never much into guitar+voice anyway.
Intro
40 seconds of orchestral manoeuvres in the hall – I’m still convinced you can hear (Richard?) say “fucking hell” in the background.
Higher Sights
In one of those Radio 1 live things Richard miss hit the chord going into the chorus and BAM I fell in love. Unfortunately neither that nor the glorious live piano part made it onto record, although the 3/3 waltz time did. Karim insists the alternate version, produced by Youth, from the US release did it better. I can’t remember (the drums sound like they were recorded in a big CAVE; the horns are a touch reedy; it doesn’t move easily enough). The song itself is great, powerful, but, as ever at this stage, badly realised.
Retread
Just where the fuck is the bass in this song? This should be almost physically unbearable by the climax but it isn’t because there’s no bottom end, wtf? It makes me wonder if they mixed the album at too high a volume, like The MC5 did with Back In The USA, making it sound thin and ready unless played through an enormous PA. Again, this is a great song, one of their best, but not done properly. THIS ONE TIME, AT BAND CAMP- sorry, on that goddamn Radio 1 live thing (again!) it was incendiary and searing and so on and so forth and live at the tail end of 1997 it almost made me cry (inasmuch as I ever do cry which is not a lot because I’m one hard muvva). Where’s the NOISE? And also what’s the point in recording stuff for an album in exactly the same manner as you’d play it live, only not quite as good? The studio is your friend. Boxes and buttons are to be cherished. This, along with a handful of others from the first LP, was rerecorded at Abbey Road live for the BBC and released later via the internet only, and that session caught them much better. The best it’s ever been was live at Blackpool in 2000, when an extended intro opened the whole song up and made it seem much less hermetically sealed from the outside world. (Also Danny once said “Retread” was about blowjobs. Not entirely convinced, myself…)
I Want The World
This and its partner in crime were meant to be “like the worst excesses of MBV and The Jesus & Mary Chain”. They weren’t. They were Lego. This at least had a serious attempt at bluster and chaos, but the noise was too neat and the mess too organised (and yet not meticulous enough), the groove not harsh enough.
You’ve Got To Say Yes
Whereas this had a clumsy attempt at a groove and a should-have-been-great-but-actually-ended-up-wretched horn-laded middle-8. America deemed the word “fucked” too nasty for people to hear, and so swapped this for the rerecorded “Blind”. The very first tracklisting I ever saw for the album had “Blind” running straight after AYGGP. I still think that’s how it should have been. But I digress… To achieve real NOISE post Loveless you need to produce it properly, which is why the EP take on “Blind” worked, why later stuff works, why MBV works, why Fennesz works, why Boredoms and Bark Psychosis and so on and so forth works, because the NOISE is layered to hell and intricate as well as ferocious.
That’s All Changed Forever
Live this rolled in awesome, sweeping circles; on record it had the exact same sound as the b-sides. Another great song badly- oh, you know the drill by now. In my head it was “This Is The One” gone gospel. Just imagine! A lot of people find this to be a sad song, but for me (and others, eh Muzzy) it was one of the most positive things they’d done – again, slow & quiet does NOT necessarily equal sad, and sad does NOT necessarily equal more profound than happy.
The Good Will Out
Whereas this… Well. Danny had said “wait till you see what we’re holding back for the album” and… they were holding back two bad rockers and a “Hey Jude” rip-off. This is the song in which the joins are most clearly visible. It’s practically coming apart before your eyes. And yet… saying this song is anything less than amazing in earshot of an Embrace fan will get you lynched. The album came out on the day I was diagnosed with chickenpox, three weeks after my 19th birthday. I had myself convinced it was great before I’d even heard it (which was two days before, when my brother winger a blue fabric promo to me) and then when I did hear it I couldn’t listen, because the spots in my ears HURT. Sure, singing along with it live was nice, but that’s not enough. Plus, on record, it lacked the harmonies and energy and spontaneity it had live. Karim and I were talking about it last night and he suggested the singalong would have been better tacked onto a reprise of one of the album’s other songs, and I in turn suggested AYGGP’s orchestra+noise explosion would have been perfect (stick both the Beatles steals together for maximum po.mo. frippery!).
Hooligan
I’ve said it before and doubtless I shall say it again, but this song was a complete epiphany for the band, it opened up a world of possibilities. Even though it was simple there was no trace of this being made from blocks like some of the earlier material; its progression through itself seemed totally natural. Plus kazoos! Prior to the launch gig for Drawn From Memory some idiot was running up and down Regent Street with a handful of them bought from the Early Learning Centre, giving them to random strangers so people could toot along. That idiot was me, unsurprisingly. I remember writing a huge spiel on the messageboard about how “Hooligan” reaffirmed the band’s identity by allowing them to step outside themselves and alter who they are, Nietzsche style; Danny replied, saying if I wasn’t in a band inside six months he’d come and beat me up. It’s been almost five years and we’re both still waiting… James heard it before me, on Simon Mayo’s show I think; he told me there was a kazoo and I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. READ HIS BLOG, HE’S MENTAL – COULD YOU TELL? I’m glad he wasn’t lying. Everyone said “Gomez” or “Beck” but it was actually sourced from Delakota (burbling samples) and Bob Dorrough (the actual tune).
I Can’t Feel Bad Anymore
The opening sounded like the sun coming up, and as soon as he opened his gob I remember thinking “he’s found his voice!” and running around telling people. It was like Marvin Gaye saying he sang best when he was laying down; Danny sounded relaxed and easy and it suited him. Strong chorus here seemed (we’d discover later) to steal from “The Love It Takes”. The whole feeling was one of assured ease, confident comfort, and while the lyric may have wandered around clumsily (“I wont take another trip / on that lonely ship”) the spontaneity of the tune made up for it.
I’ve Been Running
This was recorded in one take, as was its predecessor, during a seemingly magical period at Batsford. We know this because back in the day the band would post to the board too (RICK DIDN’T KNOW WHERE CAPSLOCK WAS), and Steve told us about the genesis of the pair. Starts from nothing and builds through proper Motown keys into something really special, horns and rolling guitar and a big surge, but gentle. Again there was a confidence and ease about this, a fluidity that hadn’t been there before. Richard reveals, at the end, that he only knows two guitar solos – here he nearly plays BOTH (first solo goes widdle-diddle-dum-twiddle-diddle-dum-dum and the second goes GAKKA GAKKA GAKKA). More Otis influence too – this so consciously echoes “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” that in anyone else’s hands it would be pointless, but here it was a sweet homage.
Like A Believer
The prettiest thing they’ve ever put to tape in terms of the actual balance of sound and the production, this fluttered in out of nothing and never quite solidified. Guitar falls in thin layers like smoke, slightly country, slightly psychedelic (my fault? – Richard said in one of the video feeds on the site that whilst recording DFM he’d stumbled across an old interview in the site’s archives, wherein he and Danny had promised the interviewer the second record would be “psychedelic… Sly & The Family Stone mad”, and that had prompted him to think “shit, we’d better make it psychedelic then!” That interview was with me, from my old fanzine, and was conducted backstage in Bristol after a gig in December 97).
With The One Who Got Me Here
This was completely deconstructed, not in terms of the blocks of the song but the entire substance of its sound. I gather it was recorded normally with guitar and piano and so on before they stripped away everything but the rhythm section, and replaced it all with electronics and swathes of synth – the result is odd and compelling and strangely beautiful; it always reminds me of “Kangaroo” by Big Star, fractured and distant and obtuse. The rolls of sound to begin and end always remind me of breaking waves. NOT the work of a stodgy ballad band with no ideas – because Embrace are NOT a stodgy ballad band with no ideas.
You’re Not Alone
Motown-tastic! The Boo Radleys were an influence on this (as they had been on AYGGP – horns = “Lazarus”); it was recorded after the DFM sessions with Hugo Nicholson, stuck on the album at the last minute and picked as the single, something the band seem to do quite often (“Gravity” anyone?). Best bit? The elastic-bass + organ + guitar + falsetto to finish. It’s a pop song! Richard was absent from the band’s performance on CD:UK because of a short stay in hospital (not lung cancer or pleurisy or a heart murmur but posture problems because he holds his guitar weird had caused his chest pains! – I was having chest pains at about the same time too, but this is because I was essentially functioning as an alcoholic – the entire band [except Danny, a committed non-smoker {he has to sing!}] gave up fags in sympathy, and it was funny as piss watching Danny lay the law down every time one of them went near a cigarette; no more atmospheric, smoky rock’n’roll photographs by Mary Scanlon for the band). It’s all about the horns and the singing-along. Yeah, it’s a cliché, but it picks you up; a friend at university (the one with the pierced clit) was never into Embrace until she borrowed my MD walkman one night for the walk home – she kept it and the MD inside for another three weeks, and at the end of it she commented, simply, that “they write songs for singing.”
Brothers And Sisters
MONSTER! Should have been on the album? Possibly. “I’m not saying I think we’ve written a song as good as ‘Love Me Tender’, I’m saying we want to write one that’s as good. I don’t think we’ve done a song as good as ‘Gratitude’ by the Beastie Boys”; you fucking have now, you really have now. The guitar starts too fast, too eager and then the bass drops in like a handbrake turn, completely shifting the momentum of the song. Nuts lyrics about dogs and submarines and bombs and nonsense; in the middle everything drops out, there’s what sounds like bongos (they’re not – it’s Danny with a microphone in his mouth, slapping his cheeks), and then everything drops in again, ferocious, with a huge PUNK SCREAM. People say “why do you love Embrace?” and I ought to just give them this tune. They do the heavy stuff so well (once they’d sorted out the density of sound and fluidity of momentum) because they’ve got an ear for melody at all times…
Happy And Lost
This is an acoustic nothing; quite why the pre-eminent fansite is named after it I don’t know. Two minutes long; two minutes is all it deserves. It’s nice enough, but once you’ve heard it once what possible impetus could you have to go back to it?
Come On And Smile
This is great fun – especially when the drums cut at the end, dugga-dun dugga-dun, duggaduggadugga-DUN – crunchy and overdriven and daft, with a nice, inaudible, mysterious and positivist lyric, but it’s got b-side written all over it. In my quest to construct the Perfect Embrace B-Sides Collection (iPods have made me so happy…) this misses out because there’s just not quite enough tune. But it shows off Embrace as a band rather than just as songwriters and journeymen – Mike & Steve & Mickey (organ sounding like a Theremin) are absolutely key to making this tune work. The DFM sessions saw them learn how to play as a band properly, and it was key.
A Tap On Your Shoulder
This is sweet and interesting, a reggae hangover from Richard’s honeymoon, distorted to hell in the name of… well, making it more interesting. The lyric seems to be about a boy having problems with an older girl, and the narrator is imparting some affectionate, fraternal advice.
And that is the END OF PART ONE.
Part Two will commence when I’m good and ready.
NJS
7/06/2004 11:00:00 am
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