mp3: Wickerman

I’m a big fan of Pulp; always have been. There’s something about Jarvis Cocker’s intelligence and need to tell a story that I’ve always admired, his easy wit and the fact he can descend into self parody sometimes absolutely shamelessly just makes me like him even more. Anyone who can sing in a magician’s whisper, “Nouga-a-a-at! And…caramel!” and still move me more than almost anyone else I know is worth knowing.

I’ve written before, ages ago, about why David’s Last Summer from His N Hers is one of my favourite songs, it reduces me to bits if I think about it too much, how they capture so beautifully a change in your outlook, your life, your existence, when you first take steps away from what you’ve always known and have to face up to responsibility, becoming an adult, even though you haven’t really got a clue what any of that means - the utter joy at the fact of existence, with that itch of sadness, a tinge of guilt, even, at how it’s just really a series of endings, one after the other. And Jarvis does it all the time. That line in Dishes from This Is Hardcore, banal in itself as read but so warmly delivered, you feel he’s singing only to you: “And I know I’ll never touch the stars, cos stars belong up in heaven, and the earth is where we are…” and finding total peace in that admission, rather than more boringly seeing it as being a moment of defeat, is perfect. It’s one of those lines that somehow manages to mine down under my skin right into me, I find myself mouthing it when I hear the song, it pricks through the, as Liz Phair called it when she was still good, on Nashville, “slick divide”. But Nashville’s a whole other story.

So I stumbled across Wickerman from We Love Life. I like that album, in the main - there’s some dull stuff on it, but it’s got Weeds, Sunrise and Trees on it, all lovely, and it’s more muted and contented, a perfectly good ending to a great group. I would hear the first line of Wickerman when it came on at random on my mp3 player - “Just behind the station…before you reach the traffic island…” and it never really engaged me before. But on the bus in from the airport a month ago, I bothered to leave it and let it carry on - “..a river runs, through a concrete channel. I took you there once, I think it was after the Leadmill. The water was dirty and smelled of industrialisation… Little mesters coughing their lungs up, and globules the colour of tomato ketchup. But it flows. Yeah, it flows.” And the images keep pouring in, as he takes you underneath the city, following the dirty river; it reminds me of how I feel about my home town.

Walking around my old home town, the quiet of it, the fact you could be in all sorts of places there all alone; you forget that sometimes, when you live in a big city. You can be somewhere and be alone. Just you, a stinking and barely moving brook, a motorway and railings. Or going back to childhood haunts and seeing how they compare when in miniature, almost, because you changed, you grew up, you saw things you could compare it to, while it did nothing but just stay there. Whether it’s the sugar-soil-sulphur hills we used to go and play on, with our own versions of dramas involving bigger boys, adults behaving strangely in places they thought we couldn’t see them, falling down hills, climbing, bikes, fishing; the parks and overgrown places you weren’t sure you were allowed on, but went anyway, or the safer confines of front gardens and front rooms. I went back to the park area where we used to play about a year ago and as expected, it was smaller, but lay pretty much as it had when I was a kid. The hills were still there but even calling them hills was pushing it; the brook next to the canal was a lot nearer than I remembered, the route out of the park that [info]mrstevie and I would take when going on insane mile-after-mile walks was a lot longer than I remembered. There were dedicated benches each with a bunch of plastic-wrapped flowers sitting as though thrown on, in the middle of a clearing. And…single men everywhere. The place I used to play’s become a cruising ground, it seems. A quite paltry one, but one nonetheless. I walked up to the Nine Arches, texting [info]megazoid, and watched people walking along the railway tracks from the ground, one waved at me, I waved back. I stood under the arches and read the graffiti about all the people whose names ended in Z and were 110% Fit.

In the other end of the town, you walk out of a small wood adjoining the lake straight into a cornfield, then within seconds you’re under the motorway, someone seemingly, from the subject matter, in the correctional facility down the road, has written a pornographic story in large marker pen on the railing top next to another stinking and stagnant stretch of water which somehow has graffiti on the other side, despite there being no means of getting over there. And then you’re out the other side and up a hill, watching golfers move between the trees in the distance, hearing the motorway, completely impassable, and ending your journey before it’s started, right above you, and I distinctly remember hoping no-one else was coming under that low, dark, smelly bridge; the country’s most boring lake and busiest motorway separated by a dirty story that must have taken hours to produce in the dark. Seediness, greenery and solitude always seem to go together in small towns.

I don’t have memories of romance in my home town like Jarvis does, of the “child’s toy horse ride that played such a ridiculously tragic tune”; opportunities were always more imminent and even brutal than romantic. There wasn’t really room for it in Newton-le-Willows, and I didn’t have the courage to embrace romance there, and courage would certainly have been what you needed. But there’s something about this song, the yet-again joyous sadness and the wonder at things you have literally lived with for so long, your whole life, that they seem just like a low hum in the background. I love how certain songs suddenly turn up that volume on that hum and reveal it to be so much more rich and tuneful and varied and surprising; it just pulls me back to it all the time.

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