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.