can’t sleep
Sooo, here I am, awake at 3am, without much excuse for insomnia except a few pints of normandy cider some hours ago and a moderately involving, if essentially tedious, book. And it’s funny how tunes pop into your head and won’t let go at this time of night. I’m sure some people sit down during normal office hours and make themselves write music, forcing it out like cold porridge, to the delight of listeners and publishers everywhere. But when I try that it actually sounds like cold porridge. I find the approach of a new song is a stealthy one. It sneaks up behind me, shouts in my ear, provoking a rush of adrenaline, but leaving me to fret over the resulting mess. The sneaking frequently occurs in the shower, much like in the film psycho (without the big knife and the violins), but it’s just as likely to arrive while shopping or loading the dishwasher as in an arena of contemplation and cleanliness. Not that I wish to brag about my shower, you understand. What I do know is that it’s pretty much guaranteed that, if it’s late and I should have been fast asleep hours ago, some indistinct, incomplete, frustratingly fractious fragment of a musical idea will cling to my conscience and consciousness with the insistent lyric “Get up! Write me down! I’m it, the GTB number one, your ticket to TOTP!” before vapourising into a mist of mediocrity the moment I physically apply pencil to manuscript.
Sooo, here I am, awake at 3am, with a tune that consists of a two note bass line, a catchy refrain and a steadfast refusal to yield any more than four bars of melody. First of all the bass line: imagine Dick Dale playing Billy Bragg with a wah-wah pedal on low E-string only. Imagine swamp-blues drums, in a swamp. Imagine horn melody jumps (unison trumpet and saxophone) in short, staccato patterns, like a small, dangerous-looking but essentially amiable bee. This ends with an unexpected repetition of the concluding phrase. It follows this (and this is where it starts to get vague) with a change of key, with the melody shifting to the bass, drums shifting to toms and horns playing a rising line before… Before my ideas gradually peter out as I realise the time… Ah well. With luck it will have something of the energy of Cake Hole and Einstein Action Figure about it, something sparklingly bop in the melody, and maybe something Vampire Weekend in texture too. Which gives me an idea for an intro… And maybe I should throw caution to the wind and embrace cold porridge as a valid musical approach?
But here’s the big question: is it just me or are the new Daleks just genocidal teletubbies with vocoders?