A Coming Of Age Track By Track Part 12 of 12

12. Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere

Well, it’s been a while coming but here is the last installment of my guide to ‘A Coming of Age’, our second long-player.

The closing track, ’Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere’ (to be said in the style of Bob Dylan) took some careful attention to get right but I always felt it was very important to the feel of the album. It’s a song in three parts: there’s the Sam Cooke ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ style opening with saucy Stax horns, the Edif Piaf / Scott Walker/ Gainsbourg over the top middle section where the key shifts quite dramatically, and finally the psychedelic-weirdo-wig-out end section.

Lyrically I suppose it’s an acceptance of outsider status and as ever, I really love a jaunty song with painful words, so the second verse is completely nihilistic. “Without you I’m nothing, alone I can’t win, without you I would probably do myself in”. It makes me laugh when I hear the desperation in there and it’s a fine line between melancholy and maudlin parody but one I hope I don’t cross too often. I think these sort of feelings need to be treated with a little humour, otherwise it just gets too dense and well, impenetrable. Even though this record is, overall, lyrically dark, it does end with a line of hope too.

The end section only existed as an idea until we hit Lynchmob Studios. For a while it was really difficult to convey what I imagined. I wanted a hint of the orchestral crescendo at the end of The Beatles ‘A Day In The Life’ but without the crescendo, Quite difficult to describe and to do in practise. It’s hard to keep movement in over a minute of rolling thunder menace, certainly the longest Lucky Soul have ever gone without having any vocals over the top, I think we recorded about 2 and half minutes of it, so there was some heavy editing needed. Ivor and I had a whale of a time down in The Dairy, Brixton just letting the delay pedals loose. It was really nice to just let go and see what happens for once as most of our stuff is so meticulously planned and heavily demoed.

When I was writing the strings it all got a bit intense listening to this unease over and over and over again, late at night with the headphones on. At one dark moment I ripped the headphones off and threw them out the door, convinced it was sending me mad. On reflection I realise that it was getting as powerful as I wanted it to, but I recommend that you not listen to it for 24 hours in a row!

The voice you can at hear at the end is a 1938 recording of a woman called Lucy Bigalow talking to (I think) the East India Broadcasting Corporation about The Theramin, a hand movement affected, electronic, oscillating instrument made famous in The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’. She is imagining hundreds of Theramin players, each one “like a dancer making patterns on the stage”. I had to find a place for it and it’s a nod to The Smiths ‘Rubber Ring’. Oh if I got halfway there…

One reason I like this track is that it has almost everyone who played on the record on it and was recorded in every studio we used (see previous posts). A nice way to finish. It’s maybe the least obvious thing we’ve done and opened up a lot of avenues to explore. I think it ends with a big “to be continued” cliff hanger sign. What happens next? Well wait and see but rest assured you won’t have to wait three years this time.

I hope you enjoy the album, I’m not gonna lie and say it was easy to make, it took a lot of stamina and stubbornness to get it done, but I know we tried our best and came back with the warm, rounded, album we set out to make. We’ve received some lovely messages from you telling us how our music has got you through break-ups, exams, long journeys etc. and it’s amazing to know we can have that effect. That’s what we wanted when we started out. Thanks for sticking with us.

Andrew

Could Be I Don’t Belong Anywhere by Lucky Soul