Tiger Lily

Dawn has come and you still haven’t been kissed. You’re wrapped in someone’s words but want to be wrapped in their arms. Whatever happens it’s worth the wait.

“Tiger Lily” is one of the very best examples of the fantastic results of Science & Nature’s expansion of the band’s sound and range. Its tale of repeated, lengthy 4am phone calls from the title character is at heart a little slight. Given a more typical treatment it could easily have slipped into the ‘fun but inessential’ column, although it does contain the most fantastically bitchy throwaway line of their whole career (‘Take a look at your peers/Stretching out all their half-arsed ideas/Into half-arsed careers’, where the ‘your’ is surely ‘our’!).

The jazzy, double bass shuffle that underpins the whole song instead gives it a buzzing nervous energy, furtively looking for an escape route the whole time while resignedly pretending to listen to insults and irrelevancies. The biggest wonder, though, is the instrumental flight of fancy that divides the song in two. As the previously almost unnoticeable organ hum of the mundane slowly fades away, the newly bare and cavernous bass is like a reminder of how things are always a bit stranger in the dark, half awake world. It’s joined by spaced out (in both senses) guitar licks and then overtaken by a brisk harpsichord that takes us to a whole different place than unremembered, dutiful phone calls before being abruptly snapped back to reality with a conclusive, echoing crash.

It’s difficult to reconcile the two, but the inlay song-key (see top of this entry and here, does suggest that magical diversion and the wistful sigh of ‘love can change, maybe today’ that drifts over the end of each section do hint that there is some hidden devotion there too. There must be a reason to keep picking up the phone.

Slack Jaw

'You're walking down the street you've walked down a million times before. But this time you're in a musical. These trees and houses are too beautiful to be real. This pavement seems built for dancing on.'

I was thinking of doing all the rest of Science & Nature in one go. But on balance it makes more sense to spread it out. It will balance out all of the 'meh' new album entries nicely in tone and ease of writing, for a start.
'Cos I sure love Science & Nature. I got Expecting To Fly first and related to its dumped dejection a lot more easily at the time, but it's still Science & Nature that I've always liked best, that is the one album that I most often (secretly) think it makes no sense that anyone can not love this. The fact that so few do, even among the band's fans, was a pretty crucial factor in making that secretly, getting me to the realisation that taste is not some objective criteria where I'm right and those who disagree have all missed the memo.

I don't even just love the music. Those lines at the top of this entry aren't lyrics. They're from the long, touching stream of consciousness like poem that sits underneath the CD in the album case, which I love as much as everything else about this album. The story seems to follow the sequence of the 11 songs, though where one ends and the next begins is blurred at times. And here it's going to do half my job for me. It nails what the song does perfectly, in that in its short three minutes not much actually happens (at least in narrative terms) but it feels like an enormity.
'It was a month and a day, It seems a lifetime away, When we first met in town and spent a night. We drank and we talked until the music was stopped, And the barman came and turned back on the light We arranged again to meet And as I walked off down the street I swear that I felt ten feet tall'

That's all there is to it as far as the happy side goes. But delivered with a grin that's practically tagible, and backed by the build up of a heady, folksy hoedown, it captures the buzz and elation of love first realised perfectly. The steady, simple shake at the beginning of the lines is rejoined by the drum thump of the songs intro and then an increasingly complex rhythm that's like the backing dancers from that personal musical stepping into place behind.
And somehow, even the twist in the tale, the girl not returning his calls, does nothing much to change that buzz. Even the bitter jibe within ('One day when you're ancient, preparing for another lonely night') seems infected by the warmth of memories. Trying to hide it just brings it through louder - "Slack Jaw" believes in 'better to have loved and lost' with all its heart and makes it bloody difficult to argue with.

mp3: Slack Jaw (Evening Session version)

Keep The Home Fires Burning

'There's a silver lining
Through the dark cloud shining
Turn the dark cloud inside out'
"Keep The Home Fires Burning", Novello/Ford, 1914

This is where it all begins, for me. A winter evening watching Top Of The Pops on a slightly battered old television (screen scratched, a little too quiet because if you turned the volume up you had to turn it off and on again to the turn it back down), heart bursting at the enormity of feeling that the little song at number 13 suddenly brought.

In these days where everything I listen to comes with more information and knowledge than ever, with all accompanying expectations and presumptions, it's weird to think how free of context I once heard this song. I hadn't heard of the wartime song from which it takes its title. I barely knew anything of Britpop and certainly didn't know of The Bluetones' links to it (I thought that they were Canadian initially, for reasons which now escape me), nor of the NME's allegations of racism that centred around this single and may well have helped finish off their mainstream career. We'll return to those second two later, as they don't really have much bearing on the song itself.

The other "Keep The Home Fires Burning" certainly does though, even if I didn't get it then. In fact looking it up again and thinking about it for this entry has brought that home even more. I was all set to write that the shared title and references are there for black humour only as the Bluetones song has nothing to do with 'gallant son[s] of Britain' or the war. But then, there it is in the third line. 'My home is a warzone'. It's in fact an inversion of the whole original song, turning the silver lining inside out to find a black cloud. It never gets too explicit about what it is that Mark Morriss is running away from, beyond that line and the chorus of 'Home fires burn/scorching a hole through me'. Neither does the sprightly music ever really push home a sense of violence or conflict but the massive sense of betrayal in finding that reliable, safe home is nothing of the sort squeezes through very clearly nonetheless.

And even if, like me then, you miss all of the ironic contrasts in the lyrics then the beautifully arranged nostalgic brass (Hovis! Coronation Street!) of the intro and outro manages to convey exactly the same thing. A neat trick.

Since I've never suffered anything like the implied home situation it wasn't relating to that that made the song grab me so hard back then. I think, beyond the economic phrases weilded so effectively as to make for their best lyrics ever, and music now so ingrained that I find it almost impossible to even think about it to write, it was the sense of putting a brave face on everything that got to me the most. I'd been spending days at a time listening to Travis (The Man Who, obv) turning almost nothing into grand displays of emotion, and despite superficial musical similarities this was in many ways the opposite. It still does something to me now.

YouTube: Keep The Home Fires Burning video, not the most serious of affairs.
mp3: Keep The Home Fires Burning (US version), minus the brass and plus a country tinge.