Total Abject Paranoia Lyric Blog

Somebody did a podcast with me recently when I was asked about “the next prediction” of doom to emanate from a Little Comets song. After calling the UK riots in 2012 in The Isles (not really but let’s push it …

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Somebody did a podcast with me recently when I was asked about “the next prediction” of doom to emanate from a Little Comets song. After calling the UK riots in 2012 in The Isles (not really but let’s push it for dramatic effect), and then of course being responsible for predicting the shitstorm of the last 12 months in The Sneeze: we are obviously the prescient Geordie Nostradamuses for the 21st century. Whey aye man, watch oot for that iceberg ya dafty!

It did make me think back a bit… I mean, not only are we soothsayers of doom but are also basically the BBC Sound of Poll for the last 10 years – Hippocampus, Catfish, The 1975, Sam Fender – of course we alone can take the credit for all of these massively talented groups’ international successes, having all graced the stage with me, Mickey and of course Matt HAAAAAAAAA.

So yes, I would say that we are therefore clearly Simon Cowell-meets-oracle – what a thought. And what does all this mean?

Well 1. Next time we tour we can charge the support act to play (this actually happens – when we supported The Noisettes our old label PAID their label £500 a gig for the privilege…!) and 2. You should really listen to our new song TOTAL ABJECT PARANOIA and use it as the inspiration to build a vehicle to escape our planet. We’re calling it. The Earth years are over. Humanity is cooked. But we’ll still charge the support act next time we tour…

Despite that… I should probably talk about the song a bit, because even after the world as we know it has imploded (again), there may still be some intelligent being left to read this lyric blog… (although more likely a eugenics inspired despotic billionaire sitting in an underground cave revelling at the destruction)..

I don’t think that it is a rant in the same way that 3 Minute Faltz is, but it is definitely related to that song in a lyrical sense – the first is a list of problems for which it becomes clear there is no solution (wooo, upbeat lyrics – just what we need at the moment!!!), the second is from the viewpoint of acceptance, and almost becomes a sort of perverse romanticising about where we’ve arrived.

But look, the lyrics are really quite self-explanatory for this one – pretty sad in places and bleak but I think that (title aside) the soundscape saves it from being an absolute pit of desolation.

The demo for this (which we will hopefully release at some point, just for the context and so you can see more about our process) was patched together by me whilst Mickey was doing something else – lots of synths, backing vocals and a bit of guitar. I remember saying to Mickey that I really like the “Peter Gabriel effect” I’d put on the vocals (I say “put” but it was achieved by a process of basically getting a penguin to dance about on the keyboard to select the settings) – his response was typically withering “what effect? It just sounds shit” hahahaaaaaaaaa. Thanks.

Anyway despite that the demo was dreamy, synthy, and slightly removed from reality but I knew that it needed a bit more thrust in a percussive sense (we love a bit of percussive thrust…) – most of the lyrics were there so the only stress became moving it from the sketch book to the canvas…

Luckily I think Mickey pretty quickly realised the intention of the demo and filled in the gaps – it builds really nicely and I love the guitar parts he added. We recorded the bass and rhythm guitar together as well which I think sounds good and gives it a bit more vibe.

My favourite parts are the flourishes that came pre-vocal – the piano part in the middle 8 was just improvised so I didn’t have the fear of a “part” to learn and play – I think on the acoustic version you can see this fear in the middle 8 “aaarrgghh how do I play this”. I know we talk about it a lot but trying to replicated and learn bits of improvisation is a downfall for us in the studio, we need to record a better fidelity in the early stages in order to not have to do this.

And the second part that I love is the counter melody behind the second chorus (“on the cliffs…”). I don’t know why but I just feel that it is the true melodic voice of the words (if the words were a bird who could sing like a violin while flying this is how it would sound…) – this might sound crazy but it is almost animalistic – it conveys the emotion for me of the lyric. I think it is quite a hard concept to explain but I definitely feel that in this part of the song the synergy between that melody and lyric is perfect – again in a totally accidental, FELT way.

I read an article ages ago about a songwriter who only wrote hits… (imagine….) and he stated that he couldn’t understand why anyone would ever write a song that wasn’t intended to be a massive, successful hit. Other than being totally ignorant of any other intention or process for writing a song, it struck me that this was the opposite of my preset conditions for writing – in a song-writing and performance sense I live purely for the moments in which everything is irrelevant except for the pure feeling of the situation, regardless of consequence. I don’t often have these moments – in fact I can probably pinpoint them they are so infrequent – but in playing that melody I was totally inside the song and it was a pretty crazy feeling….

Hopefully it comes across, hopefully you like it, but if not, at least I got something out of it.

 

Total Abject Paranoia artwork.


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Baywatch Lyric Blog

Often Mickey will chuck me out of the garage (studio). I get bored quite easily and when he is busy checking the triple resonance loop of an equated reverb dynamic echo thruster (or something like that, I don’t tend to …

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Often Mickey will chuck me out of the garage (studio). I get bored quite easily and when he is busy checking the triple resonance loop of an equated reverb dynamic echo thruster (or something like that, I don’t tend to pay attention) for 2 HOURS I will start fiddling with anything I can find.
Unluckily for Mickey the garage is full of instruments and so he often bites his lip for a bit before telling me to 0121do-one. So, I trudge around the back of his house, trying to avoid his carpet of a next door neighbour, go in the kitchen and have a cup of tea – if I can get his induction hob to work (who has these?!?!? What’s wrong with BRITISH GAS FOR BRITISH PEOPLE—oh shit, I let the veneer slip there..).

Once I’ve got my tea I’ll usually find a quiet corner, slip half a bottle of vodka into my tea and cry myself to sleep at the thought that we’ve never headlined arenas or been to a sauna with Sting (bucket list, #2 after swim with dolphins/Bono) BUT on some particular days I’ll pick up a guitar and have a strum…

That’s how Baywatch came about – I must have been in a good mood as it is quite a positive song.. Mickey had left an old guitar lying about (it’s got quite a big sound, so lends itself to strumming rather than picking) and I was really going for it, trying to evoke who knows what, and I started singing this line about “watching television, Baywatch should’ve taught me better than that”. The words didn’t really fit and clattered together but I really like it – it was fun to sing and I thought it was a really good image.

Mickey came in half way through a chorus and was like, what’s that? We pretty much demo’d it straight away… I played Mickey’s son’s toy drum kit, which actually songs pretty good – we kept some of it for the final recording…

Most of the words for the verses came quite easily – there is quite a melodic contrast naturally and the chorus line is so grand in intention that the job of the verses seemed obvious – to fill in a bit of the detail about why I was singing about Baywatch…

Initially the chorus evoked a lot of memories of 90s evening TV – boundless energy, anything is possible, in your face nonsense a lot of the time, but with a sinister edge… pretty similar to now in lots of ways, just transported for the next generation of pliable young minds… I mentioned Gladiators, John Fashanu, Jim Davidson (tosser) but it didn’t really get to a point…

Even though the demo was quick and painless there were a couple of big struggles when it came to recording the song properly – we couldn’t recreate the energy of the initial recording, this is often a problem for us – in the bass and in the drums it just wasn’t there, plus the constant chugging got a bit annoying – hence the change in soundscape between chorus and verse. We solved this by Mickey leaving me alone in the studio for 10 minutes (this is normally really bad), but I used my only three tricks – mute stuff, change the key of some vocals, and reverse some guitar shit. I felt like a momentary Brian Eno… That solved one conundrum but then I couldn’t get the last line of the chorus… for months..

I felt like the chorus had a great first and last line – Baywatch should’ve taught me better than that, and What kind of message is that to send out? – and I had a coherent message – the idea of having a platform and choosing to inundate people with inane, pretty sexist content, reinforcing stereotypes, and not saying anything… but I had no set up line – what is the message I was talking about?!?… an initial line I had was in reference to Jim Davidson – So if you give a job to a wife-beater.. but it did not sit comfortably with me – I didn’t want to trivialise domestic violence by using the phrase wife-beater – which is not right on so many levels, and by its normalisation into everyday vernacular in an almost light hearted way, undoubtedly undermines a debate on men who assault their partners.. I know some people turn off when the debate on intricacies of language crop up but words are powerful stuff that is linked to behaviour and attitude in my mind – I often find myself questioning my own use of certain words and actions, all part of my own conditioning and learnt attitude… ah!!!!!!! I mean well….

So yes, eventually I found a line and it stuck and we could finish Baywatch and let you hear it. As is the norm with a Little Comets song it is probably not as deep as we think it is and quite a crass portrayal of a complex issue… but at least we are trying eh!?

I saw something the other day that I think relates to this song, and it bothered me enough to mention it. I was watching the sports news and an article about the return of the Women’s Premier League Football came on, even though my team are down the divisions I was interested to see the scores and some action, so imagine my dismay when the one goal from the one match they focused on wasn’t a thirty yard screamer or an outrageous dibble and finish, but a “comical” goalkeeping error – why?…  Small this may seem, but this is every second of every day, drip drip drip drip..

Anyway..

Morally Outraged in Sutton Coldfield.

LYRICS

The kind of person I want to be
Was crystallised in 1993
When staring at a oblong screen
The world got bleaker
Transfixed upon a culture of men
How easy now for me to pretend
That I was not infected at all
It runs much deeper

Saturday evening watching TV
Baywatch should’ve taught me better than that
See the endless possibilities
Get lost in the swimsuits
A shoreline filled with vacuous words
Repeated on every channel I turn
Get underneath the waves until you feel nothing
What kind of message is that to send out?

I fear that this is happening again
Our children become women and men
They tap at an implacable screen
Their will gets weaker
A life in which you have to pretend
I hope they break before they can bend
The tireless self-erosion goes on
and on
and on
and on

Saturday evenings watching TV
Baywatch should’ve taught me better than that
See the endless possibilities
Dissolve in the swimsuits
Then after that the channels I turn
More dubious lessons for me to learn
I’m underneath the waves and I feel nothing
What kind of message is that to send out?

Underneath the waves until you feel nothing
What kind of message is that to send out?
Covered by the waves until you feel nothing
Get sicker
Self-loathing in the bathroom mirror
Real people
No fear
Same message
Can it get much clearer?

Saturday evening watching TV
Baywatch should’ve taught me better than that
I see the endless possibilities
Dissolve in the swimsuits
There are no longer channels to turn
There are no longer lessons to learn
Underneath the waves until you feel nothing
What kind of message is that to send out?


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In Search Of Elusive Little Comets Live 12″ vinyl

So…. we’ve actually been trying to get you all a vinyl of In Search of…. for a long long time, but unfortunately despite several emails and phone calls to our label of the time (Dirty Hit), nothing was ever sorted. …

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So…. we’ve actually been trying to get you all a vinyl of In Search of…. for a long long time, but unfortunately despite several emails and phone calls to our label of the time (Dirty Hit), nothing was ever sorted. They own the copyright of the recording…. long story short – if they don’t press copies we can’t get them made.

In true Little Comets style we decided that why not just do it ourselves, so after pulling the old recording contract out of the filing cabinet (emails) I noticed that after 7 years of the release date we were allowed to re-record the album ourselves…. hahaha… somehow I persuaded Matt and Mickey that this was a good idea. I suppose it is the equivalent of getting to a mountain and instead of digging a tunnel through it for about 10 metres, we should instead build a road around the mountain….

With this in mind we managed to finally find space in the diary and booked a studio Mickey liked the look of (The Motor Museum in Liverpool) for a week to attempt the monumental task of recording an album which took 2 years and LOT OF STRESS to make (think running battles with labels about who should produce it, micing up the van so the door closing sounded good for the start of Isles, working on Isles for months before randomly coming up with keyboard part that knitted it together, stressing over the lyrics, going on strike in the studio because Columbia wouldn’t return our calls, getting fat on croissants da da da, and other moments that will be in the autobiography [working title: Being in a Shit Band])… in five days… live…. yeah…

We had the attitude of being pure unemotional about it – get in, set up, put down the parts and mix it quick – easy… we’d revised our playing from the initial recordings so we all knew what we were doing, it shouldn’t be too hard we thought… but what a can of emotional worms we ended up opening, and what was supposed to be a project to complete a diversion around an obdurate record label’s reluctance to countenance a vinyl pressing, turned into us reliving and rekindling some (mainly) happy and amazing memories, and reconnecting with songs that we’d really forgotten the stories of.

With the help of Loic (the in house engineer and absolutely top person) we quickly got set up – Mickey being a living metronome had all of the settings written down from the original records and having researched the equipment in the studio, knew exactly how to get close enough to the sound of the originals.. however, at the same time the “live” nature of both the sound and the playing was important – we wanted to make it special and different enough from the (sometimes) clinical nature of the studio album… and (hopefully) we managed to achieve that…

The instrumental tracks actually came together pretty quickly – we grouped the songs into those that were sonically similar (Mathilda, Dancing Song, Joanna, October, Adultery and Lost Time for example) and tried to limit ourselves to 8 takes on each – stopping when we felt like we had 2/3 really good run throughs on each song… then came the emotional bit for me….

Doing the vocals was fine, by and large – as I had to really concentrate to hit some of the notes (my voice has changed so much from the yelping-trying-too-hard-to-be-different sound of the first album) but comping the takes (picking the best lines), really hit me hard – songs like Her Black Eyes took me back to the midnight vocal take outside in a French courtyard, mixed with thoughts about how the last 10 years have been…. we’ve changed so much as people = we’re all dads living in houses haha for one… but just how much our priorities and hopes have moved on, mixing with twinges of what if – we had so many running battles with Columbia over strategy and ideas, I can’t help but thinking how different things would have been for the band – but then the upshot is that we wouldn’t be here today writing this, with our beautiful families and (by and large) happy lives… plus, they’d have never let us release A Little Opus, which is something to be fair to Dirty Hit that they never even questioned… although I did want Bayonne as a single… but that’s a story for when we re-record Life is Elsewhere, when the re-record provision on that lapses in about 2 days time haha!!!!!!!!!

Hope this isn’t too rambly, hope you got to the end, hope I covered everything I wanted to, hope is just a state of mind.

PRE-ORDER THE VINYL – http://smarturl.it/InSearchOfElusive


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Three Minute Faltz Lyric Blog

Listen while you read? Stream it now – http://Smarturl.it/3MinuteFaltz Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I think I might explode when we play this live. It’s as close to the sound you’d get if you plugged my brain into a system that translated thoughts into …

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Listen while you read? Stream it now – http://Smarturl.it/3MinuteFaltz

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I think I might explode when we play this live. It’s as close to the sound you’d get if you plugged my brain into a system that translated thoughts into music as you can get. I’d had this idea ages ago of doing an updated version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” but when I read into it I discovered that the song wasn’t the lyrical anti-bucket list I assumed – it was from a conversation Billy Joel had with someone who basically said nothing had happened in the last fifty years so Billy went through every year of his life and catalogued the major cultural and political events – total genius… but I shelved the idea because it therefore didn’t fit in with my original interpretation of the song…. Either way it must have festered for a while and re-emerged in the form of Three Minute Faltz..

I remember writing this one with Mickey in the garage early Autumn last year (I’ve got the original voice memo phone recording if anyone wants a laugh)… but it is interesting to listen to the first iteration of the song – it came together in about 20 minutes and was full of beans – I felt lifted singing it and it became one of those songs where I couldn’t wait to solidify the lyrics – I had so much to cram in… it was intentionally like a stream of angry consciousness because let’s be honest when you list all the stuff that is wrong with the current human world you realise that we are completely ferked…. So you might as well pore the beauty left into something creative…

The lyrics were quite quick by my usual standards as I had certain lines to hang on and build off – toxic masculinity is now a fragrance on aisle three… whales have eaten all the plastic… duty to the screen in your hand eventually will destroy ya… so it was just  case of filling in the gaps with things that piss me off – some seriously, some massively, some personally, some in a totally omnipresent sense.. it’s like a passioned rant.. but one which if you look into the detail hopefully you can see that it is actually quite nuanced. Headlines in papers by nature are almost poetic as they have to encapsulate a story in under a sentence, but if you alter the words a little then you can have real fun and make a point. I suppose every line in this song is like that – it could be a headline in some sort of paper.

Recording wise this one wasn’t too tough although – as usual – we got a bit of demoitis… we spent a day recording it and it sounded great but far too rough in a playing sense… I had played the drums using only my hands on Mickey’s son’s drum kit so although it had good vibe the timing was a little suspicious… but there were lots of elements to love – we didn’t use a click so the tempo had a really natural flow to it (I wish the finished recording was more like the demo in that sense) and all the production parts – backing vocals, piano, percussion – worked instantly… it’s just a shame we didn’t spend a little more time on the demo as it would have been the final recording. Going forward that’s something to look at haha…

But yeah, all in all we are pretty happy with it – it’s a fairly good summation of what we feel as people at the moment, which is always a good starting point for a  Little Comets song.

Three Minute Faltz - Cover Artwork

Stream it now – http://Smarturl.it/3MinuteFaltz

LYRICS

Total sexist adoration spills across a stilted nation
All the males that are equipped with shoulders made of oven chips
Overeating, exercising, diet fads and those denying
Climate change is in abundance, building homes on frozen tundras
Texting while you should be driving, Earth is flat but you’re surviving
Eating only steaks and hoping global warming’s some sort of hoax

And now you’re feeling European, I wish you were a human being
Whales have eaten all the plastics, fill the sea with geriatrics
Solve the ills of social care until they wash up everywhere
Cos I’ve always told ya they put things in the water
And toxic masculinity is now a fragrance on aisle three
We spray it on ourselves without the slightest hint of the irony

Everyone’s dead but that was in the future
While you’re alive just contemplate your duty to the
Screen in your hand eventually will destroy ya
Is this au fait or just my paranoia
Saying something about nothing?
Slip me a pill to kill this familiar
Feeling that I’ve been out on a limb, yeah

Everything is overrated, axioms of grief conflating
Sentimental throngs of people mourn for things
Designed to keep them blithely pining God’s attention
Look around you, who should mention
Clearly it’s intended to make you feel dependent
And sugar is the new religion, pile it in to all your children
It’s ok, relapse, repeat, get ripped you know and whiten your teeth

Seeds in the clouds and drugs in the water
Sun in the sky to give you melanoma
Stay in the house and irrigate your cuticles
While outside the boys build another death star
And you say something close to nothing
Because you thought you were on top of it
And now you realise nothing’s stopping it
Maybe I will, maybe I won’t
Go for the throat, humanity needs another sick note
Fight in the aisles consuming hallelujah
Exist on your own terms, else they’ll sock it to ya.


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The Sneeze Lyric Blog

So Matt sent me a message saying – do you want to do a lyric blog for The Sneeze – and I was bit like – hmm I don’t really want to do a lyric blog for The Sneeze. The …

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So Matt sent me a message saying – do you want to do a lyric blog for The Sneeze – and I was bit like – hmm I don’t really want to do a lyric blog for The Sneeze. The last few weeks I’ve just shut down from the noise – overbearing and intense, incessant chat about Brexit and bullshit, which is almost designed to get you to the stage where you just retreat and need a break from it – so they can get on with plucking the turkey. I really used to like going away to University because, for 8-10 weeks you could detach from reality and live in a bit of the bubble away from the real world, and that is what The Sneeze represents really – the cloying nature of intense modern life where you are constantly bombarded with a combination of Huxley and Orwell’s fears and this intensity grows to the point where you just feel the punctuation ebbing away and the quiet nagging panic turning into an acceptance that you know what maybe we deserve our human engineered fate so bring it on because it has to be better than this monosyllabic uncaring greed based out for me world and I kind of think that when you look at time travel that has the answer of where we are headed because with the exponential growth of technology in the last fifty years then we obviously would have gotten there eventually unless of course we DESTROYED OURSELVES FIRST AND NOWI’MSHOUTINGANDREALLY THIS IS WHY I DIDN’T WANT TODOA LYRIC BLOG ABOUT THE SNEEZE

But I did go out and play football last night and the unattached exercise of being the dog that chases the ball cured me a little and I came home and talked for an hour about how much and why I love my children and the world felt a little better, just concentrating on the beautiful and shutting out that noise and making a different one instead. Anyway, the tea is burning so….


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SAD NEWS

It is with a very heavy heart, feet and hands that after 10 years, 4 albums, 200,000 miles, many tours, gigs and countries, people and songs that we have to sadly announce that myself, Mickey and Matt, collectively known as …

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It is with a very heavy heart, feet and hands that after 10 years, 4 albums, 200,000 miles, many tours, gigs and countries, people and songs that we have to sadly announce that myself, Mickey and Matt, collectively known as Little Comets, have decided to….

SELL

THE

VAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(For £600 to Matt Saxon’s dad – apparently he was a very tough negotiator – get him to get you a home insurance renewal quote before it’s too late, is the word on the street).

Hahaha. Sorry about that – no doubt there will now be some relief/disappointment that the sentence didn’t carry on as suggested but hey ho…….. Really I should be ashamed as the van should not be taken lightly, underestimated or used as bait.

Our little van “Des Zapp” has been in action ever since one unseasonably warm February morning, still high on the quixotic readiness of Major Label Bullshit we skipped down the A19 to Bell’s Van Emporium of Vehicular Wonderment to collect our prize – a badly converted little White Mercedes Sprinter, since described by an International Touring Artist as “the most uncomfortable vehicle I have ever been in”.

This van had none of the trappings of International Touring Vehicles – it did not have (and these are all things that come as standard in International Touring Vehicles) wifi, cruise control, leather seats, carpets, a DVD player (this is starting to sound like a Feeder song), a screen of any sort, aircon, a bunk, comfort, a decent clutch, blacked oot windows, a bigger living area than a loading area* (*so… most vans-for-bands stack gear vertically in the back to make the use of most of the van for stretching out legs/having some privacy/smokin’ weed maaaaaan/livin’ the dream; but not our van… whilst our gear could stretch out horizontally in the back, we were as cramped as atoms, sitting on seats made out of what felt like teeth filled sack-cloth).

What our van did have though was character in abundance – abusive sun-shades, a removable table – a removable flipping table!, artwork, a Canadian flag, wallpaper, piss-proof flooring, many mechanical issues, a dreamcatcher, a CD player, a wall of apparent fame, curtains, a Mark Harle set top speed of 96 mph, a bullshit detector, napkins, Little Comets’ Embroidered Blankets, a kettle, bin bags, 2 fire extinguishers, a glass hammer and a full selection of shattered dreams.

But as in life, the most important aspect of our steel accompaniment was the stories of those who sailed in him…

THE NIGHT SOMEONE WEE’D IN THE VAN

“One night I was sleeping in Des after we’d been hoyed oot of a Travelodge for makkin too much noise like hoo!” said a voice from behind Matt Hall’s facial hair. “It was ser cold that one of General Fiasco had put on all of their merch T-shirts just to keeps warm. Anyways, I woke up at 2 a clock in tha morning to the sound of what could ernly be described as someone pissing on the floor of the van.” Coughed the hirsute bassist: “A turns roond and w’tour manager Steve Lewthwaite (now a respected International Tour Manager) was literally weeing on the floor. A sez: Steve man, ya pissin on the floor! Steve said: nar, I’ve erpened the door man like hoo. A sez: nar yer haven’t like hoo. The next day we both agreed he hadn’t and he bought a proper big bottle of toilet duck. On cold nights I can still hear the sound.”

THE DAY THOM YORKE SAW ME WALLPAPER

“Whey it must have been Latitude Festival in 2009 like” muttered Rob looking up from a pint of opprobrium. “The funny thing is we played it when we were a proper not-really-saying-much-aboot-anything indie guitar band like – y’knar like how the Kaiser Chefs would sound if they swallowed a dictionary and some pride, y’knar before we developed a sercial conscernce. The irony is that now we are a bit more leftfield they won’t book us cos we’re “not a Latitude Type Band”. Whateva that means… not that am bitter or owt like hoo”.

“Anyways” stuttered the singer “w’driving oot of the festival with the door open as y’do when you are young and daft and wiv just put some wallpaper on the new van, like the nice textured stuff from Binns in Shields when I see’s this blerk looking in the cab and I shouts “here man, luk at w’waalpaper”. Then Mickey shouted “ar nar it’s Tom York off Radioheed”, so we shut the van and bolted, cos ye divvent want to look like a muffin in front of Therm Yerke cos we mightn’t have got that Radioheed tour support ya kna. If twitter had been a thing a would have gone on it and apologised to him like but it wasn’t so I just put Amnesiac on and felt even worse about mesell.”

LOOK WHO’S TORQUE-ING NOW

“My favourite memory of the automobile denominated thusly occurred when I read aloud the technical specification manual upon delivery.” proffers Mickey. “I was surprised at the level of torque such a vehicle could produce given the rather large discrepancy in the load-mass base particle ratio. Stunning engineering. Also, I genuinely liked the fact that the white hue of the paint would slightly improve my personal albedo with regards to the amount of solar radiation I reflect on a daily basis, something I feel VERY strongly about” mused the sonically obsessed string picker.

THE DOG AND THE BAG OF DRUGS

“Back in the day, when I was still TM’ing for LC, I was in charge of sorting the PDs for the MD, the lampy, and the backline tech; the wedges and ears, the trips, the plus ones, the bus call for the AM, patch the rack and the DIs. But one story always stuck in my mind” said International Tour Manager Leve Stewthwaite, formerly the band’s fashion stylist, security guard and fixer. “We were getting a ferry from Stranraer to Belfast for a gig when a port police man notices our vehicle – he immediately clocked us as a BAND and was looking to make a BUST! Now most of the boys in the band are clean living guys – except for Matt Hall who at the time was a *se-ri-ous* stoner. Any chance he got he would hammer home a little bit of ~the weed~ you know. But I knew that even Matt wasn’t stupid enough to try to smuggle contraband in his baggage… how wrong was I?!” Leve asked to take a break at this point for reputational purposes but we agreed to change his name for the sake of anonymity. “Anyhow” continued Leve “the officer waddles over to the van with his drugs spaniel and asks us to open the door: “which band are you then?” he says as his dog is clearly aroused by a smell from our bass player’s bag. “Er Little Comets” I say. By this point the dog is basically saying: “There are drugs in this rucksack”, nuzzling Matt’s bag. “Ah class”, the officer sprouted “if I go home and get my albums would you sign them…?”. The band nodded nervously, looking at the dog: “Ah don’t worry about him” said the PC, “he does that all the time!”.. To be honest I don’t know if the band were more surprised at his reaction or the fact that a random member of the public had actually heard of them AND OWNED some of their music – more than one copy at that, I have to say I was quite shocked by that myself.”

So that’s it really – we’ll put up some pictures, maybe a video and occasionally share a story of Old Des and his 200,000 miles (which could have hit 300k if the plan to SHIP Des to the USA for touring while we recorded an album on the boat had come off….). Mickey is going to play The Last Post at the start of the next gig, so we would ask if you could remain respectful throughout most of that. And if you ever see DE57ZPP driving/broken down in a layby near you, make sure you give Matt Saxon’s Dad a friendly toot, or just shout “Up the Spartans!” out of the window.

Bye bye Des and thanks for the memories.

Des would like to thank:

Peter Coles – his caretaker and friend, Rob, Mickey, Matt Hall, Mark Harle, Steve Lewthwaite, David Greene, Nathan Green, Matt Saxon, Darren Purves, Anis Finn, Matt Walch, Rich Robinson, Louisa Gladwin, Paul Winton, Matt Lewis, Christine Coles, Hockey, The Noisettes, The Twang, Darwin Deez, The 1975 (The Big Sleep, The Slowdown, Drive Like I Do), General Fiasco, Catfish and the Bottlemen, just Delphic, Deastro, The Crookes, Model Aeroplanes, Eliza and the Bear, Hippocampus, The Pigeon Detectives, Gomez, High Tyde, Mattie Vant and the rest..


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M62 Lyric Blog

This is one of those songs that doesn’t really need a lyric blog because it lives in the Baked Bean aisle of Asda. I mean it is pretty basic – about four chords, quite a relaxed soundscape and an easy …

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This is one of those songs that doesn’t really need a lyric blog because it lives in the Baked Bean aisle of Asda. I mean it is pretty basic – about four chords, quite a relaxed soundscape and an easy narrative without any peculiarity… but this was still a real challenge for us because we had to fight the urge to complicate it.

When I first played the song to Mickey he liked the riff but didn’t really get the chorus lyric “as I ride across the M62 to get to you”. I had originally just written it with an acoustic and that line popped into my head because I liked the way the t’s rumbled into each other – the phrasing was quite nice. It was only after I explained to him the story of the song that he like it – person A gets up and travels to see person B, but upon arrival person A realises person B has done the same thing and so the journey has been fruitless. Alongside the idea of mentioning the towns and landmarks of the M62 along the way, he thought it was a good one to work on.

It took a while to finish the lyrics as there is so much going on round and about this road – I wanted something that was accurate in geographical order but also reflected aspects of that journey and those towns and cities. I had to reject lots of lines about the isolated farm, Milnrow, Shaw, Rochdale etc etc.

As you can imagine we have played many gigs over the years around the M62 and have travelled that road so many times – in summer, winter, autumn, spring; at day and night; in good times for the band and bad, plus we have an affinity with many of these places – the amazing people of Merseyside who remind us of home; the crowds and diverse audiences of Manchester who at first used to scare us with their apparent “we are Mancunian, what can you give us that we haven’t already seen” attitude (that we subsequently learnt was just pride in their amazingly creative city); Club NME in Oldham to 4 people; our two gigs in Huddersfield; discovering Bingley live; Leeds – possibly the best crowds in the UK; house parties in Pontefract; driving past the Goole water tower on the way to Hull with its cracking bridge (I love a good bridge), Howard Nicklas and venues like The Welly and Fruit.

We have spent a lot of time on this road and it is in a way a homage to our travels and maybe a bit of a love song for this stretch of Northern England – it’s proud, hard working, beautiful (in both an urban and rural sense), has true heritage but also dynamism.

In terms of recording it we based a lot of it on the sound of the demo, keeping the original acoustic guitar as the base – it had such a good vibe to it that we didn’t want to lose. As a template we used George Michael Faith, which is such a great sounding song – and ridiculously confident in its application of tone and parts. I don’t think the idea was to get near it sonically but just to use its overall energy to capture something of our own.

So it really is just a simple bash – I was a bit worried at first that it wasn’t very “Little Comets” – it doesn’t really say anything about anything, but then I really told myself off for thinking that way. I mean it is just a song that we liked, recorded and shared with people. The simplicity of this statement is really what drove us before Little Comets, during Little Comets and will continue to sustain us long after it has gone.

 

Lyrics

Wake up Bootle and out my gate
I clear Huyton by half past eight
Ignore the war in Warrington
I’m up early to see my woman

Kiss the rains of Manchester
She’s the city that I prefer
Oldham looms like an older brother
I want Bury to be my lover

As I ride across the M62 to get to you
Coming right across the M62 to get to you

Speed past fields and abandoned mills
As Halifax peaks through the hills
I want you to be my human shield
But just like Huddersfield you won’t yield

As I ride across the M62 to get to you
Coming right across the M62 to get to you

Liverpool to Hull
Never seems to get that dull
As I ride across the M62 to get to you
Coming right across the M62 to get to you

Steam through Goole and the water tower
I’ll be at yours in half an hour
But under Humber I get your text
Telling me that you feel vexed

Because I’m hers and she’s at mine
A one-way ticket but I’m not buying

And so it’s back across the M62 to get to you
I’m coming back across the M62 to get to you
Coming back across the M62
The trucks, the lines, the lights
The boys in blue
I’m coming back across the M62 to get to you.


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The Man Who Wrote Thriller Lyric Blog

Our old drummer Greenie has got such a tremendous knowledge of music history and would always have great random facts and one he mentioned was that Rod Temperton – this really unassuming fantastic songwriter who wrote Thriller – came from …

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Our old drummer Greenie has got such a tremendous knowledge of music history and would always have great random facts and one he mentioned was that Rod Temperton – this really unassuming fantastic songwriter who wrote Thriller – came from Cleethorpes. I love this mental image as it defeats the picture in your head about the composition of that song. Plus he wasn’t someone you had heard of unless you wanted to – it wasn’t his bag, he just wrote songs – no bluster or bullshit. So I had this idea in my head.

 Sometimes when we write songs I am in quite a dark place – I don’t know why as I am quite a happy person but this song is a mixture of the two mindsets. I love the implausibility of life sometimes as it can give you great confidence – if you can be truly confused by a situation then there is no point worrying about factors that you can’t control, you just need to deal with what is in front of you and not get disheartened or carried away with yourself. Haha, you know what is daft though – most people don’t need to ruminate about this, they just know it. I need Rod Temperton’s story to teach me about it. What a dafty.

 I think this song is as true to the contents of my head as any song (except maybe Little Italy): it is me. We were writing it and the line came out of me (after the dark chords resolve) and Mickey was like “eh? What are you on about?”. I dismissed it for a bit as being too crazy a line: I mean firstly, he DOESN’T live in Scarborough (at the time of writing the song Rod Temperton was still alive which was another weird aspect of the song which was finished and mixed almost on the same day of his death) and I DON’T KNOW if he has a dog or has ever been to Whitby – but I thought it was ok to embellish massively because the image fitted perfectly what I wanted to say…

 When Mickey left me in the studio one day I did a demo of it with a keyboard and LOADS of harmonies and we both thought I had lost my mind but after a couple of days it had stuck and we knew it would be on the album.

 Recording it was hard as we had to cut a lot of things from it to make room for drums and other sounds – peeling back the vocal layers was tough and it had a 30 second spoken word section which was just really crap haha – but I think sometimes you need to go there to come back in.

 I think again, the accidental addendums really make the song – there is a transposed vocal part which sounds like a synth and an ad lib (haha ad lib, as if I do ad libs….) at the end that goes “I don’t want to go” and I think at the time I really was sad about the idea of dying (as infantile as that sounds) or life moving forward – sometimes (especially as William grows up) I just want to pause time.

 The whole process with this song was fluid, we never hit a wall with it – it just had flow and I think for that reason it is the one that I have the biggest soft spot for. It also has the air of total irreverence which is where I really am with song writing…. I just don’t mind if anyone likes it or not…

 So daft that I nearly reacted to the people with the manifold action who don’t see life as a body of water so please bless me with a son or a daughter.

 It is that complicated, simple and nonsensical all at the same time.

Picture the instant
When it dawns in your mind
That the things that you wanted
Were never so kind
How will you react
To this seminal moment?
To be down like a soldier
Left to pick all the fights

So many nights,
When I’m wound up so tight
I just cling to the thoughts
That the man who wrote thriller
Lives in Scarborough
With his dog,
Getting on with his life
There’s hope in my bones
(My emotions will not tire)
While the man who wrote thriller
Lives in Scarborough

Those several moments
That threaten to
Define your life completely
They devour like chips
From a cheap foam cup

On a beach in Whitby
If I ever get majestical
And grow perfunctory eyes
Just wind in my neck
And hope that I will be wise.

So daft that I nearly reacted to
The people with the manifold action
Who don’t see life as a body of water
So please bless me with a son or a daughter.

Pre-order WORHEAD in the UK here – http://found.ee/WORHEAD 
Outside of the UK here – http://found.ee/WORHEADint


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