Late Night Laments: Track by Track

1. Northern Rain

To an extent, this is about a person seeing their partner slowly descend into the fog of dementia, reflecting on their happy life together and coming to terms with their powerlessness and eventual demise. I’m more of a ‘rage against the dying of the light’ person, but this is a song of blissful acceptance; a song about coming to terms with ever-shifting change and being replaced.

It’s a sort of companion piece to the Bowness/Peter Chilvers song Sleeping Face (which has a similar scenario, but deals with a ‘malcontent’ closer to myself) and was influenced — in the abstract — by the difficult experiences that my dad and step-mum and (co-producer) Brian Hulse’s parents have been going through over recent years. There was also an echo of their lockdown experiences in some of the lines. The ‘You’re laughing; a laughter close to crying’ phrase was inspired by seeing a seriously ill friend.

The music has its basis in a wonderful Hulse piece written at the dawn of the 1990s, but the arrangement, lyrics and performances are from early 2020. Brian rightly felt that this was a perfect fit for Late Night Laments and as soon as I wrote the melody and lyrics, it felt like a key song for the project.

Evan Carson’s restless percussion, Tom Atherton’s vibraphone and Melanie Wood’s backing vocals breathe life into the predominantly electronic arrangement and Brian’s synth solo provides an unexpectedly powerful blast of hope amidst the ruins.

3. Darkline

More late-life regret! The title was inspired by a Warren Zevon quote where he said — when he was dying of cancer — that he wanted to live in order to write ‘that last dark line’. The feel of the lyric was partly influenced by Margaret Atwood’s magnificent Hag-Seed (which in turn was based on Shakespeare’s barmiest play, The Tempest).

As good as the demo was, I could hear a Richard Barbieri shaped hole in it. After much deep contemplation, I came up with the extraordinary idea that there was no-one better to fill that particular hole than Richard himself. Luckily, the great man agreed. RB’s lead and textural synth lines were exactly what the piece needed and greatly enhanced Brian’s existing electronic pulses and atmospheres. RB has rightly been recognised as an exceptional sonic architect, but his ability to create astonishing solos (a synth equivalent of Robert Fripp or Adrian Belew?) has been greatly underestimated in my opinion. The Hulse / Barbieri combination of ‘woozy’ electronic textures is a delight.

4. We Caught The Light

This was written in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day 2020. I had a strange sense of foreboding and a strong feeling that the year ahead was going to be significant and not in a good way.

Concerning generational divides, part of the idea behind this is that a Boomer (the currently most hated demographic) is trying to convince both themselves and a younger person that their history was revolutionary, their intentions were good and that they had a meaningful impact on the world.

The 1960s was a great era for civil rights protests, artistic innovation, environmental awareness and feminism, yet the ‘progressive’ generation responsible seem to be the main object of the current revolutionary generation’s ire. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this, it struck me as an interesting culture war between two tribes who might actually agree on more than they disagree on.

This started off as a purely solo T-Bo demo featuring a fleet of ukuleles and primitive rhythms, and was the first outing for my electric ukulele. An odd fact is that I was brought up pretty much round the corner from where Britain’s ukulele / banjolele king George Formby spent most of his childhood and early youth (London Road, Stockton Heath). Clearly, it’s in the blood!

5. The Hitman Who Missed

I visualised this as being about someone who was expected to succeed in life (a school ‘jock’, a failed a pop star, a real hitman?) ending up adrift from the world around them.

There are shades of John Cheever’s The Swimmer — a favourite story and film — in this.

Brian’s backing is evocative throughout, but my favourite sections are where the song explodes into colour near the end with the unexpected entrance of Bacharach & David ‘ba bas’, Colin Edwin’s double bass, Tom Atherton’s vibraphone and Alistair ’The Curator’ Murphy’s home-made beauty, The Dianatron.

7. The Last Getaway

This is a song about the children’s author Harry Horse and I partly wrote the lyric in the sentimental style of his books (the ‘Dear child’ repetition is a device he uses and his main books begin with ‘The Last’ in their titles).

Harry Horse was an award-winning author who used to be a political cartoonist. I read a couple of his books to my young son, who loved them. I thought it was strange that these best-selling books of the 1990s were so difficult to find less than 30 years later, so I looked into why that might be the case. What I discovered was far removed from what I expected.

Horse and his wife moved to an idyllic spot in Scotland and were living a happy life until his wife was diagnosed with a degenerative disease. Soon after, reportedly, Horse went mad, stabbed his wife to death, killed all the family pets and then committed suicide. However it played out, I found it a truly harrowing story, and the contrast between his sweet children’s books and truly dismal end provided the inspiration for the song.

Musically and vocally this has a deceptively light and soulful quality and once more the Hulse / Barbieri team works wonders in the textural department.

8. Hidden Life

This is almost a lockdown scenario. Someone looks out of their window as the world passes them by.

The original demo (made with Pete Morgan and Peter Chilvers) didn’t feature the final fifth of the song (a Hulse contribution), which I feel brings some warmth and hope to what initially seems a bleak and lonely scenario.

Once more, I go into spontaneous Bacharach & David ‘ba ba’ mode near the song’s climax. My parent’s record collection has a lot to answer for!

9. One Last Call

The subject is ideologically motivated terrorism, but the scenario is intensely personal. This — like ‘I’m Better Now’ — is about someone finding a (dangerous) sense of purpose in a seemingly indifferent universe and committing a heinous and destructive crime in the name of a supposedly greater cause. I wrote it in an ambiguous way that almost suggests it could be a love song.

With its atmospheric textures, vibraphone patterns, double bass and mood of contemplation, this provided the sonic and emotional template for Late Night Laments.

The beginning became the end.