Happily Ever After

“The 1st duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it” Abbie Hoffman

We are really pleased with this album. I think it complements “Once Upon a Time” nicely, being generally a happier set of songs. Initially, we recorded sixteen songs and decided to release them in two albums:  the first, “Once Upon a Time”, to have the more negative songs, and the second, “Happily Ever After”, to have the more positive, life-affirming songs. But then the first album seemed a bit short, like it lacked a song, so we moved “Feast of Fools” from the second to the first album. That left the second album with only seven songs, so we decided to record three more songs in November on our way to a benefit for the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham. I wanted to include “Dreams”, “Rupert Says” and “Tottenham”, which I’d written over the summer. The album is darkened a little perhaps by having “When Tottenham Burned” on it. Thematically, that probably belongs on the first album. But then again I hope “Happily Ever After” always has an undertow of irony and qualification about it, so perhaps the songs just adds to the complexity.

Although I know that what I do is often thought of in terms of being political and/or lyric-based, I have also always enjoyed very much playing electric guitar in noisy bands at gigs where complete strangers have a good time and get up and dance, which is what happens with the Irregulars. Some people complain that they can’t hear the words, and it’s true that more people laugh when I play “Rupert Says” acoustically than when I play it with the band, but then that’s why I do both, because more people dance when I play “Rupert Says” with the band….

BACKSTORIES

Roll This Stone

I wrote this the morning after a really lovely gig in a really lovely pub, The Square and Compass in Worth Maltravers. I stepped out of the doorway of the pub, and there was this song waiting for me. I finished the first draft of it over a very nice vegetarian breakfast in the Little Chef at the St Leonard’s roundabout just before you get to Ringwood.

Hey Abbie

Abbie Hoffman – inspirational. I read his books when I was researching my bit of the Yoko Ono biography. The film about him is definitely best avoided though.

When Tottenham Burned

We were at Broadstairs Festival. One day suddenly all the newspapers have bright orange front pages and headlines like “Anarchy in the UK”.

It was …. interesting … to see how the events of that weekend were presented and understood in the media and by the politicians, how “society” and those people who preen and pride themselves on being “our leaders” fell over themselves to accept no responsibility whatsoever for the obvious fact that large sections of society feel so alienated. No-one seemed to want to acknowledge that, to quote Martin Luther King, “a riot is the language of the unheard”. I spent a lot of time on this song. At one point it was supposed to be very loud, and it had a riff that sounded a lot like “Gimme Danger” by The Stooges, but then I thought that it would sound better if it was a little more like a tragic, narrative ballad.

Rupert Says

I actually wrote this in 2011, when Rupert got custard-pied, and here we are in 2012, and the Leveson Inquiry rumbles on, and surprise surprise we actually do have a Sun on Sunday (vast numbers of which seem to lie around unsold).

Dreams

I started to write this on an aeroplane from Seattle to San Francisco. It was based on a dream I had, about coming home to my family, then a couple I saw on the train to the airport finished off the first verse. I was looking down at the planet, and thought about all the dreams going on, little dreams of people like me, big dreams of people like Martin Luther King. I was reading a fine book about Johnny Cash’s commitment to Native American Rights, and which set this against the wider civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and that’s how Rosa Parks came in to finish off the second verse.

Cinderella

This is sort of a companion piece to “Prince Charming” from “Once Upon a Time”…. the Wall comes down, but nobody quite lives as happily ever after as they thought they would.

All I Wanna Do

We played at the Dunkerque Festival, which starts off as a lovely cheery family event and then evolves into a lovely cheery beery with much urinating in the streets event. There are lots of different stages for different bands. We’d noticed that our audience had been somewhat transient, a steady stream of people coming, watching, then moving on. Only a small group of Bangladeshi seafarers stayed for most of the set. Was it us? No, the same thing was happening at all the stages. But we did notice that the sort of music that held people’s attention the longest had a very steady four-square beat and encouraged clapping along. So, in the event of ever being asked back, I decided we should have that sort of a song in a repertoire, just in case we needed something inebriated French people could obviously clap along to.

Takeaway Girl

Another fairly cheerful song, that sounds like it’s a simple three chord trick, but actually there are four chords and it doesn’t start with the chord I’d normally start with.

The Rendezvous des Artistes

I wrote this in one of my favourite Paris bars, Au Rendez-Vous Des Artistes in the Place de Clichy (and I’ve just realised I’ve been spelling the name wrong all this time). I like it partly because of where it is; it’s a good place to sit and watch the night fall all the way along the Boulevard de Rochechouart (indeed the song did once have a middle eight to that effect, but when we did it with the band, a middle eight just seemed to hold it up rather than add anything), but also because of its pinball table, and also because of its traditional “Turkish” style toilets. When I first started going to Paris, both these were standard features in the vast majority of bars. Sadly, last time I was there, the pinball table had vanished. Next time I’m there, I shall check the plumbing with no little trepidation…

Happily Ever After

Another dream kick-started this. I dreamt I had stopped off at a motorway service station, which may well have been Heston Services on the M4, and there was my old mate Huggy Harewood, who’d played bass in the band I’d worked with for most of the 90s. Instead of his usual battered old transit full of battered old band gear, he was standing next to a small family car, which was full of his family. Special mention should be made of John Forrester’s splendid vocal harmony at the very end. “It’s a bit Westlife,” he said when he first came up with it – but it does sound rather lovely, so we kept it anyway.

Lyrics from the album

Cinderella 

Cinderella lives in East Berlin
It doesn’t matter what state you’re in 
What have you got to lose now? 
All those gorillas in their urban zoo
Every Baader needs a Meinhof too 
What have you got to lose now? 
Stop the music, stop the clock 
Change the jackboots, change the locks
Cinderella’s burning cars in East Berlin

Mirror, mirror on a Berlin Wall 
Who was the ugliest after all? 
What have you got to lose now?
We closed the mines down, the buttons factory too
Left all those little men with nothing left to do 
What have you got to lose now? 
There’s your answer, change the question 
Let the poor watch cheesecake on television 
Cinderella’s burning cars in East Berlin 

Hansel & Gretel went & never came back 
Punkrock & metal bands covered their tracks
What have you got to lose now?
The Prince was married, his nose was plastic
The Ugly Sisters got a Polish domestic
What have you got to lose now?
Change the wallpaper, change the law
Move the furniture, move the goalposts
Cinderella’s burning cars in East Berlin 

Belgian chocolates & holidays in Spain
Let’s not go through the last century again 
What have you got to lose now?
It’s way past midnight, how lucky we are 
Park your pumpkin in this corner bar 
What have we got to lose now? 
That’s the story, here’s the joke 
The rich stayed rich & the poor stayed broke
But Cinderella’s burning cars in East Berlin

All I Wanna Do 

I don’t believe I’ll go to heaven
I don’t believe I’ll go to hell 
If I could choose, I’d choose forever like this with you 
Ringing them bells 

All I wanna do is a little bit of post-punk rock ‘n’ roll with you 

I still don’t want to go to Chelsea
I still don’t want to go to school 
I still don’t buy the things they sell me
Golden chains & plastic jewels

Mondays always come too soon 
Meanwhile, let’s go howling at some moon 

Give me the word, give me the moonlight
Give me the curve of a black guitar
Down very dark street I hear your heartbeat
I turn around & there you are 
It’s magic

Takeaway Girl 

It was the 1st day of Spring
You put your sunglasses on 
You stepped out of the car 
& you were gone
I watched the way that you walk 
The way you half turned your head 
I watched you walk round that corner 
& you were gone 

Takeaway girl… 

Who’d have thought things would work out 
The way they actually did
To cut a long story short
Several years & 2 kids 
Later on here we are 
& it’s the first day of Spring 
It’s not all happy ever after
But it’s the next best thing 

Takeaway girl, 
You put your sunglasses on 
You step out of the car 
& you’re gone 
I watch the way that you walk 
The way you half turn your head
I watch you walk round that corner 
& you’re gone

Cos when you walked round that corner
You took my breath away too
You took my heart away also 
& you know what?  You still do

The Rendezvouc Des Artistes

We learned to dance together, we learned to play guitar
I thought we’d dance forever round & round the stars
But you wanted to be grown-up, your gravity increased
But I stayed playing pinball in the Rendezvous des Artistes

The age of art was over, the journalists had won
Now everybody votes for their idea of having fun 
It’s all done by computers in factories out east
But I’m still playing pinball in the Rendezvous des Artistes

But I’ll meet you come whatever, I’ll meet you come what may, 
the last old Turk forever & I got this to say 
2 fingers to the masters, 
2 fingers to their priests, 
I’m still playing pinball in the 
Rendezvous des Artistes

All I got to show for playing for so long
Is a pocketful of thumbtacks, some half-remembered songs
But no matter hoe much rain falls, each time I get released
I’ll be playing pinball in the Rendezvous des Artistes

Happily Ever After

I met you at this service station
I recognised your silhouette
You had a brand-new 2nd hand Astra
but that same old cigarette
We’d been up & down the motorway
10,000 times in your old van
How long can you keep going nowhere?
You get more money in a covers band

You’re with someone I don’t remember, but I pretended that I did
Then you opened up that Astra & out tumbled all your kids
When I woke up the dream stayed with me, like a song goes round & round
Sometimes I think that it’s the dreaming more than the coming true that counts

For all that going nowhere between the darkness & the lights
We all lived happily ever after tonight.