So, we’ve just had quite a day – a dichotomy of our lives within a pretty silly industry….

Simultaneously we’re announcing a release of a single, alongside a video, complemented by a bit about the song in question (as it happens to be next in our long drawn talk about what the album is to us…).

Violence Out Tonight: I’ve never been affected by the issue of this song – a grim, despicable and weak act, so hope upon hope that the portrayal is apt… If not then I sincerely apologise: I feel that women’s rights are often forgotten in what is still a blatantly sexist society and I wouldn’t want to unwittingly add to this tumult, however neither do I want to adhere to the omertà….

The song came together very quickly, with many versions of verses having to be consolidated into three.. It was a song that after it was finished I just wanted to sit and play in a room for hours on end… The percussion track is a mixture of heavy claps, a washing machine door and a bin lid recorded in Mickey’s kitchen. It really feels like we’ve watched this song grow up and flourish: from being written on a acoustic (rare for us), to being an addendum to Jennifer, onto an album track, before finishing up as a little single…

The lyrics speak for themselves and can be viewed here: www.littlecomets.com/lyrics/

As does this video by Fern Berresford: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytJ2rrKEM8

We chose this song to release because we really love it: this is the way we choose things – not to second guess tastes or to get on the radio or to sell tickets to gigs but because we are proud of what we’ve made… Romantic? Delusional? It would appear so….

The exquisite contradiction of the music industry taught us another poisonous lesson today, which is unfortunately intertwined with our above desire for passion above strategy. Our little label Dirty Hit has the dubious honour of releasing albums through Sony Australia… Today they informed us that they aren’t sure they want to involve themselves in “Life is Elsewhere”… The reason: a lack of UK plot…. A little part of me died, again. Whatever happened to being involved with music you love and wanted to share with other people?

Now that the quality of our music, the poignancy of our lyrics and the rigour of our productive pronunciations are seemingly of lesser consideration than a Radio 1 playlist, an NME two week love affair or a tweet from a minor celebrity we really do despair about the people inherently making decisions as to what music you should hear.

But we carry on, unabashed.

That we are still choosing to release a song we admire, makes me even more fervent about continuing to make music for the sake of being expressive rather than other soiled diluents.

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Sorry about the interminable delay and the cessation of these lyrical posts before Christmas but I think the year just caught up with me. I suppose it is quite fitting that the next song for the treatment is “…Shadows”.

2012 was a pretty wild year emotionally for me and Mickey – we both became fathers and both stopped being grandchildren. As we were especially close to our maternal grandma we really felt this shift of two steps up the generational tree. Parenthood meanwhile has brought with it a new realm of love, trust, pride, gratitude and concern.

This song is intended to be quite personal and lyrically delicate, exploring a relationship with loss – me and my partner will one day have to part in very final terms. One of us will witness the other’s death and have to put together the pieces after this emotional investment suddenly disappears. Trying to imagine this is not possible, but I still get quite strangled thinking about it…. So I thought I’d write a song about it….

Mickey had the most wonderful riff which I wrote a chord progression over. This underpins the song staying in place whilst Mickey’s part drifts in and out… We love playing this song live and me and Matt always make a point of standing next to each other when Mickey’s playing takes hold for the first time. He’s a very bashful player which sometimes belies his musicality so by staring at him intently we get to enjoy his playing and place the visual focus on him…

The final verse deals with the idea of mortality – the sustenance of your being through a memory, through being talked about, through influencing, through a photograph. I have a strange theory that it is thoughts, language and gestures that are the actual living beings – we are just the mechanical host through which they transverse. That’s another song though.

I suppose loss is inevitable, but at least it makes you think and feel – and to feel is to live….

It’s like barbed wire
This crucial touch
That holds me near
Expects so much
No disregard
Will tie me down
I will be waiting
Waiting for ours

In fifty or sixty
She’ll leave me
Completely
And one of us
Will coldly hold
The other’s hand
No metaphor for this
That I can understand
Show me

I’m like barbed wire
This crucial touch
That holds me here
Expects so much
No disregard
No guileless charm
I will be waiting
Waiting for ours

I will be waiting
In the shadows
In the dead of night

So hold me
And sway me
Remember
Me daily
For all that will
Remain of us
Is photographs
No metaphor for this
That I can understand
Show me

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Hey everyone,

Obviously on our last tour there was quite a bit confusion regarding some venues as to what the actual age restrictions were for some gigs. This time we’ve decided to take the underage/overage bull by the horns and get total clarity for you early doors. Only Exeter and Dublin gigs haven’t got back to us yet but we thought we should crack on regardless…. Here is the nearly definitive list….

London and Cambridge are ALL AGES shows (under 14 w/ adult)

All other shows are 14 plus with the following exceptions:

Wolverhampton (16+)
Preston (16+)
Belfast (18+)

That is it… Hope to see you there…

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Hey up,

After a night of little sleep (at a mix of slight excitement about this announcement but mainly due to a baby who appears allergic to zzzzz), we’re delighted to make tickets available for our April tour. The dates are as follows and we hope that many of you can attend. Our last tour in October was the most heart-warming experience we’ve had to date as musicians so hopefully this one can be as lovely.

Click on the date for the ticket you want and it will whisk you away! #HYPERLINKKKO.

APRIL

TUE   09  //  NOTTINGHAM  Rescue Rooms
WED 10  //  LONDON  O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
THU  11  //  CAMBRIDGE  Junction
SAT  13   //  WOLVERHAMPTON  Slade Rooms
SUN  14  //  OXFORD  O2 Academy
MON 15  //  BOURNEMOUTH  Old Fire Station
TUE  16  //  EXETER  Phoenix
THU  18  //  BRISTOL  O2 Academy
FRI   19  //  CARDIFF The Gate Arts Centre
SAT  20 //  DUBLIN  Academy 2
SUN  21  //  BELFAST  Auntie Annie’s
MON 22  //  LIVERPOOL  Masque
WED 24  //  GLASGOW  King Tut’s
THU  25  //  YORK  Fibbers
FRI   26  //   PRESTON  53 Degrees

Also, the machinations of various things mean that this tour doesn’t include some staples (Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Brighton etc.). We really wanted to make a concerted effort to play in some cities that we haven’t been to in a while and unfortunately we had to make a few geographical sacrifices. Both Rob and Mickey have young families and so we have to take time away from home into consideration when planning a tour. Don’t worry though, we will be back before the end of the year…. thanks again.

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Ah Bayonne…. This was one of the more accidental songs on the album which I wanted to release as a single (before being told it wasn’t a single, whatever on earth that means: “don’t get me wrong I think it’s a great song, but just not a single” – I’m flummoxed by the illogic of the music industry sometimes, this took the biscuit almost as much as the radio plugger [a job which is entirely fictitious in nature anyway... like a radio station should care WHO brings them a song, let alone someone who is being PAID to tell them they think it is "aamazing yah"] who told us to change the drum sound on Worry…. Yeah, think we’ll just leave it as it is haha).

It all came about suddenly, a little groove that meandered more and more as me and Mickey added the guitar layers. Just before calling it a day for the evening I had this idea for a vocal part – high and breathy, the syllables Bay and Onne being nominally attached – it was only on the walk home from Mickey’s (we live at opposite ends of a hill, a handy metaphor for our relationship in a optimist v pessimist sort of way) that I thought…. Bayonne is definitely a place in France, I can look it up on Wikipedia and write a song about it (any excuse to get on Wikipedia)… When I got in, I discovered Bayonne was quite a non-descript (in the loveliest possible way) place…

We asked George from a band called The 1975 to record the drums in Mickey’s kitchen… we’ve recorded quite a few tracks for them so knew his style of playing would really suit this song – laconic, behind the beat, lovely hi hat work etc etc and it ended up working very nicely.

After that it was onto the lyrics…. normally when I sit down to specifically work on a song through necessity it can be a real chore and the lyrics come slowly but painfully – with Bayonne the experience was very different…. It took a solid week but I really enjoyed the process – it was time consuming but not a task I recoiled from…. I wanted to incorporate three strands into the lyric, which would fit into an overarching story of a young couple in a state.

Firstly, the idea of a relationship in which emotions are beyond intense: I remember at the time there seemed an inordinate amount of tragic stories abounding regarding fathers and mothers being found dead along with their children due to some unknown circumstance, but all inflicted by family members. This made me really think about the fine line between total love, devotion and complete destruction… I mean, to be able to do something like is beyond thought really…. the line: “fate dances on a pliable line that keeps love apart from all that enmity could bear” tries to encapsulates this amongst others…

In the story of “Bayonne” the reaction to this extreme is to escape… I’ve always thought that to truly escape you’d have to head somewhere beyond the reach of linguistic influence: I don’t speak French (without wanting to paraphrase a Girls Aloud song) well enough to be able to understand passing conversations when I am there, so I adopt the romantic notion that every person is involved in precise dialogue involving a subject of great importance… not like in this country where the understanding of the language depicts (largely) a society obsessed with the banal…. To truly escape, ignorance is bliss… “and so I carry on, to Bayonne”…..

Sorry if this sounds a bit anal, but I really want to try and explain what this song means – it took me a long time to craft it so I suppose I am particularly passionate about the subject matter.

The final part is the middle 8, which we really love playing live – because the time signature changes it feels like a real release and the harmonies are nice to sing…. plus lyrically it is quite a personal line. We often get told by people we don’t know that they are delighted to see us, this fakery can be quite a drawback to our industry so it is nice to reference it in a song which concerns honest emotions laid bare.

Haha, that’s it. Sorry for the bizarre length of this explanation and the first paragraph but I’ve just been for a run so the endorphins are circling. Also, we’re just going to leave the chorus out of the following lyrics…. You can guess it, REM style. Michael Stripe et al.

He wears commitment
Like a coat of arms
A fragile weight
For him to bear
It’s in the stricture
Of her nascent charm
That hangs between
Them everywhere

You slip

Fate dances on a pliable line
That keeps love apart
From all that enmity could bare
He feels the ache of her effulgent heart
And so resolves to disappear
And so I carry on
To Bayonne Bayonne Bayonne
Where my anatomy
Can sooner find alacrity
To set me apart
From it all
For feeling far
Too much
Too young

You slip

Always be suspicious
When they put their
Arms around you
And they tell you
They’re delighted
To see you.

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I know the lyrics for Jennifer have long been up for perusal but it seems remiss to not talk a little about it, whilst also satisfying my urge to work chronologically through the album…

The song is kind of accidentally in 3/4 which is strange as it doesn’t sound like it is, but it tends to just quite laconically follow the riff which we wrote in a rehearsal one day. Instrumentally the song was very easy to demo and then record: me and Mickey tracked everything very roughly in about a day before revisiting later to re-record the bass with Matt (this added plenty of energy to it) and the drums with Greenie. We really like the zip that it had especially the who-be-dab-a-dab-a vocal parts…

The lyrics were a different story, we couldn’t settle on subject matter. Even though I’d nominally sang “Jennifer” when working on an acoustic guitar I really didn’t want to write another song about some fictional woman haha…. It just seemed like a total cop out……BUT with a little gravitas added to the subject matter it just did not work. We couldn’t reconcile this outrageously happy melody with a dour lyric and so ended up with the first lyrics that were written in anguish…. This process took an inordinate amount of time and paper until we stopped trying to make the song something it just wasn’t. I suppose we realised that it is ok to make a song that is just nice and doesn’t try to comment on the state of life, plus the words do collide nicely into each other… OH and it has my first ever guitar solo on it so it can’t be all that bad.

Right, here are the lyrics anyway for the misanthropes amongst you. I’m off to pre-order my souvenirs for the royal baby ahhhhhh?

It’s a shame that
I don’t love you better
Fateful words emblazoned
on your sweater
Made to move him
From a distance
Every line to outline
Your resistance

Jennifer
Why do you
Have to be
So taciturn?

Fortunately
He tries to placate her
Tying notes to
Broken kitchenalia
The way the ink blots
On the sink stops
Him from carving
Thoughts into the work tops

The knots she ties
In almost all her clothes
Are growing greater by the day
Her April showers
Will have soon devoured
The alacrity of May.

It was always
Going to end
Like this…..

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(The explanation / back story is at the bottom… Mix it up a bit and that)

The words are….

David David abrogate it
Turning nurses into wine
Your Barbour jacket missing dimple
Beautifully combine
Criminality pure and simple
Drips from every trenchant sigh
It’s like your tense and empty boys
Were thatched by such design.

You’ve been getting away with it all these years
Putting backs in the corner making the most of all our fears
You’ve been getting away with it night and day
Hushing backs into corners making the most of words to say.

Every morning each a teacher
Meets a certain type of fate
The cut of cloth like slow elastic
Bends until it breaks
This early set resentment
Can and will not settle down
The words that drip from token lips
Just amplify the sound.

Don’t demonstrate with disregard
Don’t live your life with dreams
Of torment in your sullied heart
Don’t give a kiss, don’t settle down
If all you need, is to break a vow.

We wrote this song quite accidentally over a long period of time. Mickey had cut up and created a loop out of an old recording of some drums played by Mark (for a totally different song which we’d forgotten about). He’d then gone about writing the chorus while I was away…. when I arrived I stole a guitar line of his for the lead vocal part and wrote the verse on my tele. It sounded just too weird so we left it for quite a while before recording a bass part one day in June which brought the whole song together… My favourite bits are the intertwining guitar parts over the verses, just because they actually make us sound like we can really play when in fact they are more of a happy accident, same goes for the washing machine / bin-lid percussion.

The lyrics come from a David Cameron quote during the riots. He tried to explain the whole thing as “criminality pure and simple”. Following on from the social abrogation overseen by his government, the expenses debacle and rampant illegalities within banking and the media, I thought that this was hypocritical on top of being a gross over-simplification of events. They were originally meant to be for Jennifer but didn’t scan so I kept them until they became appropriate, which they did for Tense / Empty.

The rest of the album isn’t political so rest easy….

Honestly hope this is informative, please just say if you want it to stop.

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So… as lots of people have been asking (and as some crazy website has misquoted them to sound like deranged ramblings…) we’re going to put the lyrics from the album up over the next few weeks. Rather than just adding them as a glut of copy and pasting though, I thought it might be nice to try to contextualise them or just mention little bits about how they were written or recorded… Everyone loves an anecdote…..

A Little Opus is a good starting point probably>>>>>> I heard an interview a couple of years ago with David Lammy in which he took to task the very safe state school selection policy (if at all….) of top universities… Very few people from certain areas are admitted to these institutions: they don’t even bother looking. Combined with my own educational experiences this got me thinking… When I fumbled across this report by the Sutton trust (http://www.suttontrust.com/research/the-educational-backgrounds-of-mps/1MPs_educational_backgrounds_2010_A.pdf) talking about the make up of cabinet and parliament it became pretty clear that our executive, judiciary and parliament are very skewed institutions populated by other very skewed institutions: it is a closed self fulfilling prophecy that surely does not bode well for decision making on a social policy level… Da da da da. Anyway, this bothered me so I wrote about it… Plus michael gove is surely an android designed to be a glib wrecking ball to the welfare state.

You feel the weight of imposition
Bear heavy on your own decision
Fate to face they multiply
The crush of language
And the cedent school ties
The subtle angles of tradition

Eton for portent
St. Paul’s for context
Oxbridge for vision
No need to make this popular
One man for progress
One man for past tense
One man for vision
No need to make this popular

With your school cap
Blowing in the breeze
It’s about time
That we made education
Not a funnel but a wide line
Youth to NEET
As Gove to tact
A million faces that are
Staring straight past
This mix of ignorance
And fission

I’d rather starve then
Become a member of
Your old boy’s club
Sooner depart than
See the ascension
Of the Bullingdon
Because I want to
Make a breakthrough
A tired addendum
To working hard….

As for the time signature haha, the chorus is a fast 9/4. Haha simple… Keeps you on your toes anyhow….

Hope that helps, hope you aren’t bored. Any questions, just ask.

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