Faint Footsteps

Sometimes it's best just to let the songs speak for themselves...

... and that's the last of my comments, for now!

What I Would Do

What I Would Do is a song which I was pretty proud of, for a long time. And then along came Flight of the Conchords, and they spoilt the whole thing.

In fairness, their song was a lot funnier than ours could ever be.

Well, anyway, this actually started life as an homage to Douglas Adams, and dates back to around 2004. Somewhere along the way, it all got shifted around, rejigged and rewritten, and ended up being a harmless but ultimately meaningless pop song. Which we both like, I should probably add.

... and I'm afraid that's all I can think of to say about that one. You'll probably find the comments get shorter and shorter from now.

Running with the Wind

A common theme with the b-sides for Dusk seems to be that they were started around the time we were completing Empires (well, I suppose we had nothing better to do). Running with the Wind is yet another of these. It's a pretty simple song about throwing everything away and biting the bullet, but I got stuck half way through, with one verse and half a chorus. I handed it over to Simon, and he did all the hard work on this one.

Musically, it owes a lot to the Dutch duo Sylver, and they should think themselves pretty lucky given the number of song titles they've stolen from us in the past* - In Your Eyes; Summer Solstice; Turn the Tide... (actually we may have borrowed that last one off them). Because of this, it rumbles along at over 130bpm along with slightly clichéd fills, bass and filters.

And so that was Running with the Wind. More tomorrow.

* This does not constitute an accusation of theft.

Point of No Return

This takes us into our last week of comments from Dusk. You're probably relieved to hear that; I know I am.

This was another track I started just after Christmas 2002. The person singing the song is basically saying that they wish they had taken things a bit more slowly.

It somehow got overlooked when we put together Empires, which is possibly a shame, as it probably would have been on there if we hadn't forgotten about it. Then it very nearly made it onto Dusk as well, but in the end, it was dropped because the album was looking way too down-tempo as things were.

It's quite a powerful song really (in a very laid back kind of way). The only other thing I want to point out is the not-entirely-intended reference to the Rail Riders comic strips I vaguely remember reading as a whippersnapper: "By quirk of fate..."

Lose Control

Around the time Empires came out, we went through a brief spell of experimenting with guitar-based songs. Inevitably, some of these were more successful than others. The first has still to be released; Not a Million Miles went straight onto the album; and this one ended up taking a bit longer.

According to Simon, Lose Control was originally inspired by Simple Things by Dirty Vegas, but clearly went on quite a long journey before ending up how it did.

It's a song about losing control... obviously. I think at one point I was actually genuinely envious of people who run around naked on the streets at night. Now I think I could have put some more work into the lyrics, but I think I thought they worked pretty well at the time.

General verdict: quite good, but we've done better.

Moving On

Moving On started life in Autumn 2002, and like so many songs of that era, took a very long time to be finished. Ironically, it almost got considered for Dusk at one stage, but was finally dispensed as a b-side, purely because it was a little old-fashioned.

The original chorus, which is the first chorus in the finished song, was written by Simon, but everything else was rewritten at some point along the way. At some stage it was merged with a song of mine called Yesterday Forever. It's actually gone through several incarnations, but the basic themes were always the same.

It's actually quite a deep song for us. The first verse was at one stage a comment about the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, whilst the second was about the Germans dealing with their war guilt. Around 2006, I went back in and took all the direct references out and made everything a lot more subtle, and I think it works a lot better for that.

Ultimately, it's about how we deal with our history - how do we decide which bits to ignore and which bits to remember? How can we ever begin to understand the evil things our ancestors did, and why do we commemorate them as heroes?

I think I'll leave you with that thought.

Never Wanted This

Guess what? This one's really, really old.

In fact, it dates back to about 2000, and somehow took seven years or so before it got released. Perhaps even more surprisingly, we both really like it.

It's been on a very long journey. The lyrics have been completely rewritten on several occasions, and it's gone through a couple of very different sounds as well. The original was very dark and analogue, but at the end of 2005, Simon re-recorded the whole thing on my MicroKorg, and made it sound less dark but still very analogue.

The song is about bullying. It started life as a song about being bullied, and ended up almost being a song about doing the bullying - which perhaps isn't as much of a transformation as it might seem. Generally, I think a lot of discontent went into the lyrics over the seven years it took to write, which led to some wonderful lines, such as "All my life, I've never looked back / But now I'm only human", and of course the eternal question "Why waste all of these years out in the autumn rain?"

House of Cards

Hello.

Previously in my very long and rather dull series of comments about tracks, I have told you rather more than you actually wanted to know about things that you probably weren't very interested in anyway.

I lost track of what I wanted to say during that sentence, so if you can tell me what it was about, please do get in touch. The next sentence is quite improbable, as well.

So around 1997, both of us wrote songs about helium. We mangled the two together very badly, and ended up with an appallingly bad track called Free Helium Balloon. This is one of those highly improbable coincidences, which you might think would only happen the once.

Until early 2002, when I wrote a song called House of Cards. Which is exactly the same name of a song which Simon had started four years earlier, and had never told me about.

This time, we learnt our lessons and sensibly kept the two tracks entirely separate.

Anyway... this is a song about the state of the world in early 2002, and it tells a true story. Like all good students, I spent many a whole night talking complete nonsense about the state of the world until the sun started to rise.

In retrospect, the time between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war was a slightly strange period. Some people agreed with the Afghanistan war; others disagreed, but at the time there seemed to be some degree of hope: a country had been liberated from an appalling regime; and terrorists were being rounded up across the country. In the UK, we still had some civil liberties, and everything seemed reasonably hunky dory.

All of this comes across quite nicely in the lyrics: there are lines such as "The sand is washed away, and who is right today?" or "... you wonder who is right, and why they fight". There's a wonderful line about the way we view history: "The faces of tomorrow stare like people who were there"; and there's even a little dig at what we were doing: "Sitting in comfort, we fought for freedom and peace".

As with many of the older Dusk b-sides, it is a song which has been through several different phases: it started off life sounding almost appallingly 80s; we tried to remix it to sound less dated, but failed entirely; and eventually ended up with the version which would appear as a b-side on the Bulletproof single.

So all in all, this is a song which I'm pretty proud of. It sounds like something from our Empires era, and honestly I have no idea why it took so long to get released, but I'm pretty proud nonetheless.

Broken

If Someone Else's Dream was a relic from the turn of the century, then Broken is most definitely a relic from the Empires era.

This one was originally started around Christmas 2002, around the same time that we were working on Here We Stand. Somehow it missed out on being on Empires, entirely failed to be on Dusk, and failed to be on any of the seven singles that we released in the meantime. And then we recorded and mixed it, saw that it wasn't that bad, and eventually put it on The End.

That wasn't really a terribly exciting story, so here are two more facts, which may or may not be of interest...

1. It uses lots of sampled sounds from a Korg Prophecy


2. It contains a siren sound that is suspiciously similar to the noise from Visage's astonishingly good Fade to Grey*

* If any lawyers are reading this, we would like to make it clear that this doesn't mean it was stolen, because it wasn't. Your honour.

Someone Else's Dream

I imagine psychologists have field days with people's songwriting. Or maybe it's all just a shade too easy for them? Either way, I don't think they would get much out of this one. Even so, there is a story behind it...

Between 1999 and 2001, our songs changed gear completely, both literally and metaphorically. Where previously we had done everything on one or two keyboards, suddenly we were using "synthesisers". But perhaps more to the point, where previously we had taken influences from pop music, we started to look at literature, books and politics.

But this song is not an example of that. Instead, it is something of a relic of that inbetween period, where songs seemed to be about something very profound, but actually weren't. In fact, it was as simple as having a list of good words and phrases, and working them together into a song.

Which is not to say that it's without its interesting references. You'll find references in there to a song by U2, a book by Susan Cooper, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Kalihari bushmen (actually, we wrote a whole song about them once).

The song first acquired some music in early Autumn 2003, but somehow didn't get released until the end of 2007. One verse got ditched, and then reinstated; and a whole album got released while it wasn't looking.

And so that's the story of Someone Else's Dream, which I haven't sold very well, but you can find it on the back of our single The End.

King for a Day

The story you are about to read is very long, and extremely dull. If you think you might get hungry, I'd advise you to have some nibbles by your side before reading any further, just in case, you know?

Established history says that we started making music in 1992. This is not actually entirely the truth, as we had actually been messing about unsuccessfully with keyboards from some time in the mid-late 1980s, and would continue to do so right up until about 2000, when we finally started to have some success at getting decent noises out of them (basically, we bought a sequencer, which finally meant that we could actually play the right notes, at the right times, and in the right order, all things we'd been struggling with up until that point).

Our first album, or more accurately, our first tape, was completed in 1992, and would later come to be called Schizophrenia. Sadly (I say this now with some sincerity), the original recordings were lost in the following year or so, but most of it has at some stage been re-recorded since then.

One of the tracks on the album was called Spud! (Yes, the exclamation mark was part of the title. OK. Before you say anything, we still had a lot to learn at that stage.) The final version was pretty typical of our early output (bilge), but it originally started life as a cod-reggae track, which for some reason at the time I thought was a good idea.

But it wasn't an idea which ever really went away. In 1997 I wrote another cod-reggae track called Fruit on the Tree, and shortly afterwards Simon wrote a track with the working title (the previous one had been called D; you can probably work out some of the other titles from that period). The tracks were merged, and, perhaps fortunately, that idea stopped there...

... for a little while. Four years later, Simon picked the track up yet again, this time ditching the frankly dire lyrics to Fruit on the Tree, and replacing them with the distinctly half-baked lyrics to King for a Day (as I recall it was a poor chorus; an even worse verse; and that was about it). And then, yet again, it reached a standstill.

Then in 2004, Simon had been listening to The Human League's Best Of album, and had been particularly struck by Empire State Human, so tried putting an electro beat and a 6/8 rhythm onto the track, and was very pleased with the result. But the next barrier was the lyrics.

Finally, three and a half years later, at the end of 2007, I decided enough was enough. I'd been dipping into the lyrics on and off since 2001, and still couldn't quite get them to work. Finally, I thought, there was no shame in just throwing it out in whatever form it currently was. So I made a few minor changes, recorded the vocal the same day, and that was that.

The final mix wasn't quite ready for The End, and so we were left with this historical oddity. When the idea of the iDusk EP was first floated, it seemed to be an obvious candidate, and so there you have it. After ten years of cod-reggae, and ten years as a rough demo, what are we left with? Superficially, an inoffensive track about nothing in particular, but somehow I don't think it's an understatement to say it's also one of the most important tracks we've ever written...

If, after all that, you want to download the track in all its gory glory, click on these words.

iDusk EP

Ooh ooh, news!

OK, so a couple of weeks ago I wrote something very mysterious and dull. I'm now happy to announce that I'm in a position to explain what the heck I was on about.

Well, we were feeling a bit bored, so we decided to make our iTunes debut.

So anyhow, it's called the iDusk EP (although it may actually be called Idusk due to a slightly overzealous spell checker), and it can be downloaded from iTunes in the UK, Europe, and the USA on or shortly after the 5th of May 2008 (that's today, for those of you not too clear on dates and the like).

1. Consequences
2. Signs of Life
3. King for a Day
4. The End (Ostkreuz mix)

For those of you with iTunes installed, here's the magic link.

For those of you who haven't, tough cheddar for the time being. There are very good reasons why we went down an Apple-only route, but if that annoys you, please email us; the address can be found on our main website.

It has one of our favourites from Dusk; one of our more low-key tracks; and one of our favourite remixes. Oh look, it's got an exclusive new track as well! Comments will follow.

Why have we done this? Hmm, not sure, really. We thought it would be worth a go, if nothing else. If you want to, download it; if you don't, don't worry too much - we won't be too offended (you might not get Christmas cards for a year or two though).