Reminisce Part 2 (19/6/13)

6 Music is currently playing Bowie's 'The Next Day', the brilliant title track from his brilliant comeback album - album of the year by some distance.

But you're okay, I'm not going to bang on about Bowie again. I'm going to bang on about me again.

And the reason? The song that they played immediately before Bowie was The Style Council's paen to unity and the strength of the power of the people, 'Walls Come Tumbling Down' which we kind of, sort of used to do live back in the misty days of our time in pop. Back in them there eighties.

We had a song called The Wall. Nothing to do with the Pink Floyd concept album based around loss of identity caused by the pressures of fame, childhood trauma and loss. Where their album was about grand schemes, theories and ideals ours was about.....well, about two minutes long to be honest. At least it was until it grew a little bit.

It was a two minute, two chord thrash, ( E minor to D for the verse should you wish to replicate it whilst reading, the chorus moves to E MAJOR instead of the minor. Daring chordal shift)  infinitely enjoyable to play. No idea what it was like to listen to, I've never asked anybody.

Anyway, we were slightly, somewhat, influenced by The Bunnymen (my fault basically) and they had this song called 'Do It Clean' that had started as a two minute long B -side but had grown to be a ten minute long set closer containing a medley of other people's work, most notably Nat King Cole's 'When I Fall In Love' and James Brown's 'Sex Machine'

If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery then we flattered The Bunnymen big style on this. We headed toward the ten minute mark, we put a breakdown in the middle of the song, an ebb and flow, some dynamics, a quiet/loud/quiet/loud/quiet/loud arrangement that predated Nirvana's technique by over half a decade.

(Give me long enough and I can happily prove that I invented everything)

We chose the songs that we would insert into this breakdown very carefully, based on the idea that they were 'wall related' in some way. So, The Teardrop Explodes' 'Tiny Children' for its opener "Half the time as I sit in disarray, I am thinking of a dream I never had" then jump a few lines forward in their song as the guitars rose in ours to "I close my eyes and turn and face the WALL" (see what we did there? This is how the magic works guys)

And there was The Human League's 'Empire State Human' for its chorus of 'Tall, tall, tall as big as a wall, wall,wall" which worked for both them and us significantly better than you would expect from seeing it written down as coldly as that)

Obviously, most pertinently to whatever point I'm making was The Style Council's aforementioned 'Walls Come Tumbling Down'. Ignore the bit where Weller rhymes 'have and have not' with 'dangle jobs like the donkey's car-rot' and the odd echo/stammer effect on 'public enemy n-number ten' because, apart from those blips, it's a bloody great song. So we stole this;

"Governments crack and systems fall, 'cos unity is powerful. Lights go out, Walls come tumbling down.'

I could make the point that simple, basic political points in songs are incredibly powerful when you're in your early twenties, that the first half of that lyric still sums up my political standpoint very neatly, that the unity of people should always win out against the corruption of government, that we can see that in the Arab Spring, in Turkey, in Brazil; unity is powerful, we could do with some of it in this country. I could make those points but I'm talking about me. I'm talking about a song. (Yes, I know what I've just done)

So it grew, and it became the set closer and one night at the Fire Station in early 1986 we took it over the 10 minute mark by inserting a completely different song in the middle. A song of Mally's called 'Caught' that was on the first demo that we ever recorded but we hadn't played live for a while. We got away with it. Job done. Played The Fire Station again a week later, opened with a two minute version of 'The Wall' and laid it to rest forever.

BUT. I have this really nice Ibanez Artcore. Big blue hollow bodied guitar with a proper old school whammy bar. Crank it up loud and it doesn't half feedback. Going from a rumble to a scream to thrashing out the chords would sound wonderful. Would? Who am I kidding? Obviously I've tried it (when J was out, I'm not soft)

It sounds sodding great.

And IF I get round to this idea of a one off gig (and lets be honest, I'm fast running out of time) and IF anybody else is up for it then I'm doing The Wall.

THEN we'll see if it's as much fun to listen to as it is to play.


A postscript;
The first two lines of the song, "Think I'm becoming confused again and the same old song keeps playing in my head" - written by our kid. His only co-writing credit to my knowledge. Something for posterity.