Meet By The River

"Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered."

Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University

No more London. This is a song about another city...

We flew into Berlin in the tail end of December 2010, the plane dipping beneath the cloudbank just a couple of minutes before coming in to land, giving us time to see what Christmas really looks like; pine trees and Hansel and Gretel houses with their roofs covered in snow, snow and more snow.

Coming in to Schönefeld airport soon set us straight on that score.

Berlin doesn’t shut down under snow like Britain does, it just reverts back block by block to the cold war. Dark and thundery apartment blocks under ice lockdown, people scurrying off the streets to find warmth in the nearest bar. The river Elbe not quite frozen over but massive sheets of gray cold across its surface. Walking along the route of the Wall in the middle of the day with visibility zero, bikes frozen in place and temporarily abandoned to the darkness.

Me and Melissa arriving at checkpoint Charlie like spies coming in from the night, hoping that every rumour we’d been spreading turned out to be true as the border police checked our passports.

...

So somehow I wrote this song about that holiday. Most of the verses are from about 2 years ago and written in a warehouse in Manchester, and I finished it off when I moved to London last April. When the Berlin Wall finally comes down I like to think that someone like David Hasslehoff might sing it as West Germans joyfully throw off the oppressive yoke of capitalism.

Peasouper

She stayed with me until
She moved to Notting Hill
She said it was the place she needs to be
Where the cocaine is fair trade
And frequently displayed
Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD

The Light at The End of The Tunnel (Is the Light of an Oncoming Train) - Half Man Half Biscuit

I haven't lived in London for long but quickly realised that it's one of the only places in England that you can reference in song and feel pretty good about doing it...

This always bothered me about living in the North (and let me admit straightaway, it's a song writing fault rather than a fault with the North!). I was listening to music like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt and I think what I liked about country music was how rooted it was in place. No matter whether the women left you or you were drunk and miserable in a bar, that's not what the songs were about to me, they were about Highway 61, the streets of Baltimore or the T for Texas and the T for Tennessee. Places that seemed to be able to exist in song in a way that Rochdale probably couldn't.

It's hard to conjure a mythology for England.

The easy answer to why is that the country is too small, it’s been mapped out; if God wants this killing done out on the M61 then it’s all too easy to wonder just where on the M61? That farmhouse that it forks around, or the stone that says highest motorway on Britain? It’s easy enough to go past and see Abraham isn’t there and pretty much never was.

I don't know though... Maybe the things is that country hasn’t been mapped out enough. When Tom Waits sings “I wish I was in New Orleans, I can see it in my dreams”, it’s the second clause that counts. It’s the imaginary city that has been there for decades in a hundred Dixieland Jazz songs, Louis Armstrong and Doctor John.

So who has mapped out England in song? One or two songs isn’t enough. The Smiths aren’t enough. You need more magical surveyors, people to go and set down their theodolites and tape measures and make something of a place that didn’t exist before, old songs and pop songs, famous songs and half-forgotten songs so that when someone sings about a place you’ve already seen a few of the sights. My Las Vegas is the Las Vegas that is no place for poor boys like Grams Parsons, but has a thousand pretty women waiting for Elvis Presley. I’ve been to Nashville, but that’s a different Nashville to the one on my mum’s vinyl copy of Nashville Skyline that I picked out of a pile in the loft to take to university with me. 

Is London different? I think it is, I think there have been more magical surveyors laying down the city below the city. You’re never too far away from another marker (or a rat), you can find your way through books and songs. Maybe there are hints of a folk tradition to this, though there’s nothing folk about the song below; some of it just happens to take place near another, hugely better, song. In Robinson there’s something about the villain of the piece chewing over his thoughts on the Northern Line that wouldn’t be there on the Metro in Newcastle. I’m a white man living about 10 minutes from the burnt out Hammersmith Palais, westway to the world, and a short cycle ride from the war rooms of GK Chesterton’s Napoleon and where Jerome K. Jerome’s three men (and a dog) started their journey. I DO get rudely awakened by the dustman on a Wednesday and Alan Moore has drawn pentagrams around my workplace to unexplain who Jack the Ripper wasn’t.

I would imagine that this post actually says more about my cultural reference points than anything else.  I hope you enjoy the song a bit, and next time I’ll try and make a bit more effort with the video – i.e. change out of my cycling clothes.

Robinson

"If England ever has a revolution it will come dressed up as a garden fete"

Iain Sinclair - Lights Out for The Territory*

This is going to be a collection of songs that I’ve written, songs that will otherwise get forgotten and songs that eventually lose their meaning and end up somewhere entirely different from where they started. Hopefully I can tell you a little bit about where they come from and sometimes that might take you to interesting places.

So I’m going to start with this, Robinson.

Do you know Robinson? I first came across him in a book by Iain Sinclair, and from there found my way to Patrick Keiller’s London (1992). London is a monologue delivered over a series of static camera shots, recording and documenting the life of the city from the point of view of its narrator, in conversation with “his gay friend, Robinson”. I don’t think of 1992 as very long ago ( I was alive, and just starting secondary school) but watching this evokes an old looking England. Old police cars. Old McDonalds. Old Tories fighting and winning an election. London is an amazing film, when I moved here it was one of the things that helped work out what the city might be about. I cycle past the London Stone every day as I go to work, I don’t think many people notice it.

It will become clear from this blog that I’m a terrible thief, so I took Robinson to put in this song. He doesn’t talk much, but it matters when he does.

Of all the songs that I’m going to post, this one is probably the easiest to write about. In the wake of a bunch of people forcibly endorsing JDsports, Krissi Munson in the Guardian complained that bands weren’t political enough, that they didn’t have enough to say about contemporary events, so I thought “Yes. You are right and it must be easy to write a song like Ghost Town or White Riot or Do they Owe Us A Living or National Shite Day” and this is what I came up with... A song about going to the pub with an imaginary homosexual from an early 90s arthouse movie. Steadfastly and self-pityingly avoiding anything going on around us.

One thing I do worry about is how much things need to be explained. Do you need to know about Julia Martha Thomas and her grisly demise? The net huts on the beach in Hastings? The lady on a boat fending off rioters with an airgun as they dodged police helicopters in Hackney marshes? Now you know who Robinson is you know that he’s not mine, that everysosatisfying three syllable descending rob-in-son fall off the tongue name to say is someone else’s. I hope that’s OK. I hope that he doesn’t mind being pulled out of the screen to cameo in a folk song.

*flicking through this book I now can't find the actual quote, apologies for any inaccuracy.

Trial. By Witchtrial.