I was
reading an interesting thing the other day on how to write a hit single (which
I obviously then copied out by hand, annotated and tucked away in my homework
folder for reference to later on) especially regarding the bit where they talk about the
structure of the common-or-garden boy band hit generally being “…verse,
chorus, verse chorus, middle eight/bridge, double chorus with a possible key
change…” which, as any fule kno, is how it’s supposed to be. I was reminded of this old saw during some online correspondence
between myself, Mr Wendell and The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley regarding a
get-together at someone’s house in order to do some songing, make a few
tentative plans regarding public performances and generally act in private like a latter-day
hipster Peter, Paul and Mary (although to be fair, they were pretty hip at the time, and I’m sure it won’t be long before Puff the Magic Dragon is the sound track
to the consumption of a thousand skinny mocha lattes out of old marmalade pots in
pop-up Wagon Wheel bars - but I digress).
As well as
the two-stools-facing school of composition that the various combinations of writers in the band had long employed, we also favoured the
bang-it-down-on-a-cassette*-and-hand-it-over-to-play-on-repeat-in-the-car
method, by which means we had curated a great deal of the preceding Too album. The tracks Then There Was Sunshine and the
award-winning Waste of Angels had
clearly been cut from the same cloth and this re-lifed outtake was clearly also a result of the vehicle-bound creation
process. Not since the alternate version of Racing in the Streets had turned up on The Promise had I been so astonished that you could take one whole
slab of writing or composition and drop it almost seamlessly into something
else. I was also intrigued that either I’d completely forgotten about this version's very
existence or that I had completely blanked it from my mind – it had effectively been
coldly Stalinised. With the forthcoming challenge of completely re-interpreting the song foremost in my mind I considered
how best to avoid what would effectively consist of playing the old version in new pyjamas. After some thought I concluded that this was clearly going to take more than eschewing counting
bars in my head and an E flat-creating capo placement. Summoning my offspring and
heir from his iPad-related avocation further up the sofa I adopted my best stentorian tone. “Fetch
me the bouzouki…”
*latterly
superseded by the compact disc and then MP3. I understand that even as I write
those Google guys are working on a literal earworm. Like in Star Trek II.
