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HOUGHTS ON "TIGER FLIES" (Joel)
This record was put together between February and July 2001, using a completely different working relationship within the band than we'd tried before.
Alex and I would write the material (with help from Ian, if we got stuck) and record it immediately, working straight into a home recording set up, so that first takes could be retained. We were trying to capture a late night, woozy, ambience that's impossible to fake if you've just sung a song forty times in an antiseptic £200 a day studio.
Most of the singing was done flat on a bed, usually a little drunk, a working practice that gives things more warmth than a million studio engineers fiddling with faders. We'd record our parts and then pass the songs over to Ian, who'd put the rhythm parts on with Chris and then add whatever additional effects he felt would work. The tracks would then come back for final adjustments, before Ian did the final mixing. This meant that there was no loss of feeling or atmosphere from first take to finished product. I'd say that about 70% of the vocals are first takes, recorded moments after the words had been written.
Lyrically, I tried to make everything as simple as possible. Most of the songs only have a couple of verses. Once the idea had been got across, we'd stop the song. We'd never really tried writing emotionally honest music before (I used to play a lot of games, and do songwriter tricks). Working in an unfamiliar form, I didn't want any of it to outstay its welcome.
Influences wise, we were listening to a lot of Sonic Boom / Spacemen 3, some English Folk Revival (John Renbourn, Sandy Denny, Incredible String Band), plenty of Harry Nilsson, Grandaddy, Boards of Canada, 1970s Beach Boys, John Cale's "Paris 1919", Brian Eno's pop records, the usual diet of Bubblegum, and a quite terrifying album of 1940s Suffolk field recordings of folk singers in pubs that Alex picked up in a bargain bin.
I'll run through the album, track by track, and see what occurs to me.
AVALANCHE
Alex's song. That's his first ever lead vocal. He recorded it after we challenged each other to write and record a one-minute-or-less-song. Mine didn't make the record, but his did, because it was infinitely cooler and only about 30 seconds in total. I took his fragment and tripled its length, eventually by playing it back through the headphones I had been using to add backing vocals.
TALK ABOUT TROUBLES
This song has got a really neat structure, in that the chord loop can never stop (it's too short to resolve properly), and keeps eating its own tail, echoing the lyrics. It's supposed to sound like one of those days where you're just resigned to being in a foul mood. At least it's honest in admitting that, no matter how bad you're feeling, it shouldn't really be anyone else's concern. We originally had three choices of drum machine loop on this, but, after weeks of arguing, Chris rightly pointed out that it needed all of them, all playing at once. Good call. The really big, noisy crashes in this are one of the few bits of electric guitar on the LP, so they sound louder than they actually are, in comparison with all the delicate fingerpicking.
LIGHT THROUGH STONES
Seeing a photograph of some old friends and thinking how, if things had turned left, rather than right, you'd probably be married to one of them by now. A beautiful bit of guitar playing from Alex, and some gorgeous Sandy Denny harmony singing that made us both punch the air in delight when we stumbled upon the note. The flute sounds on this are two £1.50 tin whistles, both played by Alex to School Recorder standard. Ian's bass station throb is the one concession to the 20th Century, otherwise this would be a perfectly acceptable addition to The Wicker Man soundtrack.
HAWAIIAN POLICE
Alex constructed the fantastic backing track for this, with its conscious nods to Avalon-era Roxy Music in the guitars. Ian's mellotron strings just set it off perfectly. The lyrics were written about the first morning of the twenty-first century where everyone woke up, found The Sound Of Music was on the TV and that the earth hadn't boiled away into space. There was this terrible realisation that nobody had made any plans for the next thousand years. It was scary, but the feeling of release and possibility was wonderful. Our friend Alex Donohoe, ex of Delila, sings on this one. We wanted to have a female singer on a couple of tracks in tribute to Giant Sand's "Ramp" album, where Victoria Williams lifts the record to glorious heights every time she turns up.
HONEY
This was the first song we got finished for the album, and it set the tone. It was a big move up for us in terms of songwriting. The lyrics are stupidly simple, and it's a first take vocal. I spent ages hedging round writing a straight, regretful love song, since it's been done to death, but the more I tried to make the lyrics political or social, the more they refused to do as they were told. So, it seemed stupid to fight it. Alex D's on this one as well. The harmonies at the end are the trims from her first four takes at the vocal. We just pushed the faders up and found that she'd improvised four different tunes that harmonised perfectly, in a lovely Emmylou Harris way. The wurlitzer piano part (which Alex wrote) is played gorgeously by Jason Hazeley, from Ben and Jason, who'd wanted to play on one of our songs for ages. We let him stay for two.
CACTUS JACK
This was my favourite thing on the album for a while. It was written by taking some jazz guitar backing track tape loops from a Mellotron, cutting them up, rearranging them in a random order, then learning the tune they were playing. We then played the song ourselves, and faded the original Mellotron cut up back in halfway through, so it sounded like we had a guest session guitarist from the 1960s on the song. It came out sounding a little "Beach Boys meets Swordfishtrombones era Tom Waits", so I added a boozy barfly lyric over the top, and we covered the whole thing in tape wobble so it keeps speeding up and slowing down. It's the only way to follow "Honey".
BURN LOW
One of several two chord songs on the album (we got obsessed by nursery rhymes, hymns, folk songs and making everything as simple as possible). Lyrically, it's inspired by the story of how Rita Hayworth, after she got Alzheimer's disease, had plastic surgery so she'd still look good for the paparazzi. Her mind had gone, but the world still wanted her to look perfect on the outside. Like Nico in decline, touring Europe in desperate pursuit of heroin, there's something heartbreaking about the collapse of an icon. Chris' drumming on this is really great. The horn part is almost stupidly Julian Copesque. If we could have got Kate St John in, we would have done. The sample at the end is from the Padstow Mayday song, and is designed to lead into the next track (on side two).
HANGMAN'S WALTZ
There seems to be no end to people's taste for simplistic mob justice. This is a straightforward waltz pop song, whose arrangement stayed pretty much unchanged throughout the recording. It's based, in feel, on some of the songs off John Cale's "Paris 1919", and was called "John Cale" until almost the last minute. We had several guitar pop songs slated for this album, and this is the only one that made it, once we'd decided to go in a different direction. Its off-kilter rhythm and choice of sounds lifted it above the rest. It's also one of only a few "political" (as opposed to personal) songs on the record, which is unusual for us.
HEAD TO TOE IN WHITE
This started life as one of those guitar pop songs, but was refitted to suit the album, and became infinitely better for it. It's probably my favourite track, and feels like a devotional folk hymn. The harmony singing is delicately done and really warm. The gigantic 1978-vintage Crumar Multiman S synthesizer that Alex found in a junk shop makes another appearance here (it's everywhere on this record). We use the twin penny whistles again, and they wheeze out of the synthesized mire. Lyrically, this is a celebration of a wonderful summer, when the planet just seemed a little bit fresher. An attempt to drag the mythic from the everyday.
THE HOLE
A beatbox and stoned guitar rewrite of "I Will Survive". After getting praised for the lyrics on our records, I thought it would be worth trying a song with about six words, like Can's "Yoo Doo Right". Halfway through, the song seems to step out of the hole of the title, like a tall man stepping gladly out of a tunnel, and emerges into only the second rawk-guitar workout of the record. Alex's Stonesy Wurlitzer part on this was left on by mistake when we were warming the keyboard up, waiting for Jason to arrive for the "Honey" session. The discordant horns were arranged by Ian as the only sensible way to finish the track.
THE WRECK OF THE BREEZE
The number of modern people who insist on thinking like cavemen sometimes astonishes me. Surely the world's miraculous and wondrous enough, without making stuff up? Anyway, a sweet acoustic guitar and Wurlitzer duet (Jason again) that finally manages to put into words something I've been trying to say in a song for years. By disguising it as another sea shanty (qv: Silver Boats on the first album), I think I might have got away with it.
MEDICINE BALL
I wrote and demoed this in a couple of hours to see whether the album needed another upbeat song. We decided we liked the demo enough to just add drums and bass, mix it and put it on. The sound in the background is some kids playing football against a chainlink fence outside the recording room. The lyrics are an attempt to write a literally uplifting song. A variation on "faith can move mountains". I liked the image of raising heavy objects through force of will.
THIS IS THE WAY
Alex's favourite track. He wanted to construct a two chord song that just kept building and building, wringing every possible variation out of the notes available. The synth backing is a deliberate nod to Sonic Boom. Ian did a great job arranging all the dozens of parts so the song starts tiny and ends in a roar of fanfare guitars and horns. The lyric is a short story set at the end of the world. What would happen if the end of everything were not a huge Hollywood apocalypse, but a numb, disengaged action? One that left the man responsible sitting on a hill, watching the sun go down, strangely unmoved by the whole thing? A sort of companion piece to the "What do I do now?" powertrip of "Leader", hence the counting-the-days verse structure, echoing "Leader"'s 1-2-3-4 schtick.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE WAR
The perfect way to close the album. The swoop of analogue synthesisers reminds me of a camera pan across wrecked buildings. The key line is "The dreams we had were too hard to explain to the world" which has a political overtone or a personal one, depending on what mood I'm in. Enoesque, this one. |
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