I was going to include this song in the bike post I wrote the other week but it didn’t fit in with the tone of the piece, being rather more wistful and melancholy than that was and it’s such a lovely tune I wanted to ramble on about it a bit longer.

The Clientele always remind me of London, not just because they’re from there (though curiously I think they’re more popular in the States) but their records sound drenched in fog and drizzle with a blurry, impressionistic quality which evokes those fleeting moments that are so hazy and intangible they barely qualify as memories but still give you a nostalgic ache. Listening to them makes me think of shimmering reflections in the inky black pavement after a rainstorm, the half-light inside a smoky pub during the day, steamed-up cafe windows, clouds hanging low in a slate gray sky, a beautiful girl seen for only a second on a crowded tube train who you’ll think about all day, the musty smell of a tiny second-hand bookstore, a neon sign flickering above a doorway in a dark alley, dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming through net curtains, long shadows cast by the trees in Hyde Park at the end of a languid summers day, Chelsea Bridge all lit up at night seen from inside a train crossing the Thames into Victoria Station.

The lyrics of “Bicycles” alone are enough to set me adrift on memory bliss:

Bicycles have drifted through these leaves still wet
with rain
August now has faded in the silence of the rain
I remember one Sunday, riding in through the gate
Three balloons in a white sky, 1978

Playgrounds where we spent our days
Return within our dreams
What it is, it isn’t up to me
I’ve been driving in my car
On Sunday in the rain
And my life is slipping so away

But they sound even better when they sing them…

Download: Bicycles – The Clientele (mp3)
Buy: “Suburban Light” (album)

I can’t write my way out of a paper bag at the moment. I must have half a dozen new posts on the go but I’m incapable of finishing any of them off. Either it’s because:

1) I’m too busy
2) I’m too lazy
3) What I’m writing is a load of bollocks anyway
4) I’m having an existential blogging crisis and can’t see the point
5) I’ve lost my mojo

What do you think, Graham?

Download: Don’t Ask Me Questions – Graham Parker & The Rumour (mp3)

You don’t hear this track much these days, do you? Not that I listen to the radio anymore, just a feeling I have that it’s sort of slipped off the radar. Whatever, a really great single from 1978.

In the meantime I’ve done some blog housekeeping and added a whole bunch of new links at the right. I especially like Another Nickel In The Machine which is the sort of blog I’d give my left nut to be able to write if I only could find the time, wasn’t so lazy etc. etc.

Download: I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have – Primal Scream (mp3)

“This is where England most truly excels: in all the characterful shabbiness of its drizzled parks, soiled launderettes, frayed tailors, abject chemists, sparse barbers, bare foyers, dun pubs, weary Legion halls… and cowed solitary cafes.”
Britannia Moribundia

One of my favourite Simon & Garfunkel songs is “America” especially the part where it builds up to a crescendo and they sing “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America” which just sounds incredibly romantic and makes you want to jump into an open-top Chevy and drive off into the sunset looking for your dreams. The thing is, I’ve driven on the New Jersey Turnpike and it’s just a pot-holed, congested stretch of motorway the same as any other, the only thing I saw people looking for on it was the right exit. But even knowing that the line still sounds wonderful and makes my heart sigh.

But if the song was set in England and they sang “counting the cars on the North Circular” instead it just wouldn’t have the same effect, would it? Whatever the truth is, Americans romanticize their reality in a way that we don’t. When you think about Route 66 it isn’t just some road that goes to California, it’s a life-changing journey of freedom and discovery. But when Billy Bragg uses the same tune to take the “A13 Trunk Road To The Sea” the English locations just sound dismal and pathetic in comparison — which I guess is the point of the song, but it’s still sad that it is funny. Has anyone ever had the urge to quit their job, hit the road, and go chase their dreams in Shoeburyness? The one English “road” song I know that tries for that classic American sense of freedom is the lovely “Driving Away From Home” by It’s Immaterial which almost manages to make English motorways sound romantic, but even they can’t resist being terribly British at the end and burst their own rose-tinted bubble by singing “I mean, after all, it’s just a road.”

Download: America – Simon & Garfunkel (mp3)
Download: Driving Away From Home – It’s Immaterial (mp3)

The truth is, we (Brits, that is) don’t look at life and see endless bright horizons and dream big dreams, we’re a gloomy, glass-half-empty kind of people and who find idealistic American positivity a little embarrassing and phony. Americans, bless their hearts, do still say things like “you can be anything you want to be” and believe it (despite evidence to the contrary) because they’re happily unburdened by history while we’ve had way too much of it and frankly can’t work up the enthusiasm for anything anymore as a result. We built an empire and won a bunch of wars and now we just want to put our feet up and enjoy England’s plucky failures.

Our pop laureates prefer to pick at the scabs of England than construct some romantic fantasy, looking at the dirt under the carpet and the gloom behind the net curtains, singing about miserable people living on dead end streets waiting in the rain for a bus that never comes. So while Bruce Springsteen makes the seaside resort of Asbury Park seem like some mythological eden of golden boulevards teeming with a rich tapestry of life, the English equivalent (Southend maybe?) only makes you think of grey, rainy Bank Holidays and Morrissey’s coastal town they forgot to close down. The kids in Brucie’s Little Eden might be working class good-for-nothings but he still makes them sound movie-star glamourous compared to the feral adolescents in a song like Pulp’s “Joyriders” — if Springsteen wrote that he’d give them romantic nicknames and treat nicking cars as some metaphor for glorious youthful rebellion. In Jarvis Cocker’s hands they’re just petty nihilistic criminals “so thick we can’t think of anything but shit, sleep and drink.”

Download: 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen (mp3)
Download: Joyriders – Pulp (mp3)

These days the stubborn refusal to “have a nice day” feels like a defiant poke in the eye of today’s noisy, amped-up consumer culture (created by America, of course) which bangs you over the head with its global franchises, useless gadgets, trashy television, and blinged-up celebrities. In the face of that, being miserable old bastards may be the last thing we have to hold on to that’s truly ours.

Download: We’ll Let You Know – Morrissey (mp3)

“I gulped down several Heinekens. I felt drunk. Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music stood at the back, watching the show. I went and introduced myself. He was puzzled, and polite. He said he was in Los Angeles to make a record. He was living in the Malibu colony house which had once belonged to Fritz Lang. I told him a story about a friend of mine, a film-maker who loved Lang’s work and came to Los Angeles to interview him. This was in the 1970s, not long before Lang died. Somehow my friend never got round to the interview. He felt the city had robbed him of his will.
Ferry smiled. I told him I thought “Can’t Let Go”, a song he’d recorded when Jerry Hall was dumping him for Mick Jagger, was one of the best things written about LA: ‘They said go west young man that’s best, it’s there you’ll feel no pain, Bel-Air’s okay if you dig the grave, but I want to live again.’ I told him I thought the song was very good on the experience of feeling rootless in a foreign place. He looked embarrased. I told him I was an Englishman, having a bit of woman trouble myself.
He smiled again. He obviously thought I was wrong in the head. But the judgement of a man who had once appeared in public wearing toreador pants was not to be trusted.”
Richard Rayner
Los Angeles Without A Map (1988)

Download: Can’t Let Go – Bryan Ferry (mp3)
Buy: “The Bride Stripped Bare” (album)