I was born in
Brighton, a seaside town on the South coast of England. Despite this beginning and several later visits to then-still-resident grandparents, I grew up getting to know an entirely different place -
Cardiff, the city I got my schooling in.
As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in the form of a college place, I found my way back to Brighton - delighted to get out of Wales and having a fixed idea in my head of Brighton as some kind of escapist oasis amidst all the mundanity of the rest of Britain.
It was there that I wiled away my twenties. I somehow made it through my University years and racked up over a decade back in the place of my birth, wading through loves and losses, rock 'n' roll bands that came and went, and all matter of limits explored. It's the kind of place that people escape to from whatever is getting them down in their own part of the country and then reinvent themselves as something new. It can also become a certain kind of trap - a great place to explore an idea but rarely to make a success of it.
After about 15 years of trying, my musical ambitions reached a certain zenith point when
The Zamora had their moment in the national spotlight. To my surprise, just as the band's star was in ascent, I was rather unceremoniously booted out of the line-up.
I had to come to terms with the fact that the future I'd spent years carving out for myself had been taken out of my hands. Given that I wasn't really going anywhere career-wise either and with an ultimately disastrous relationship topping off my seaside downfall, my time in my 'home town' drew to a natural end.
Although it took a while to come to the decision, I ultimately decided that I wasn't going to wallow in misery but would do something about it instead - as big and radical a challenge as I could give myself - and throw myself into somewhere as crazy and far away as Tokyo to see what happened.
By the time I left Brighton, I was seeing ghosts of my former past all over the city. Ex-flames with new beaus, those I'd once rocked with, workplaces I'd had to put up with in the absence of something better, on every street corner. This song began as an expression of that feeling and was originally written in the present tense - the place that was haunting me. The melody came naturally with the words - a kind of melancholy waltz-y feel - and has changed little since being written.
Songwriting is often an exorcism in itself. Once I wrote the song, I felt a little better about things, that was that. I didn't really expect to see it ending up recorded and released on an album, least of all produced in Japan. However, when it came to writing the material for '
Best Before End', this was a natural to pull out of the bag.
Of course, by the time it was exhumed, the feelings had changed and the ghosts I'd spoken of belonged to another very distant world. I'd also become more reflective about Brighton and what I'd actually gained from my time there, so the song was adapted slightly with a change of tense suggesting that my haunting was over and I'd learned from the experience.
Telling the above tale explains most of the song, but there is just a little more imagery in it that might require some background.
Woody Allen, when asked why all his films were set in
Manhattan, once commented something along the lines that as the whole world was there, it provided all the inspiration he needed to make movies. Unwilling to leave the town for many years for related reasons - my whole world was there - I felt the same about Brighton at one time. In time however, my perspective on it changed and I realised that there was a whole world outside of my seaside shelter. Woody Allen now also makes films in locations other than Manhattan - a natural progression, I feel.
'
All India Radio' came to me from
Salman Rushdie's
Booker-winning novel '
Midnight's Children', one of my favourite works of fiction. Along with many of the other characters in the book, Saleem Sinai (the protagonist) is born with a certain set of special powers. All children that are born on or after the stroke of midnight on the moment that India is declared independent from British rule are endowed with certain powers and the closer they were born to the striking of the clock, the stronger their powers. Saleem is born as the clock hits 12:00, so his unique abilities are that much more pronounced.
Each gift that the children have been endowed with is unique to them, with the protagonist's being a telepathic ability. As this develops and as he ages throughout the novel, this ability becomes very useful to the rest of the children, who convene in great conferences in Saleem's head. Rushdie had his character comparing the feeling of all these competing voices in one space to All India Radio, the nation's radio broadcaster and home to the hundreds of languages contained within the country.
Prior to the point of my departure from Brighton, I found myself juggling a profusion of multiple identities drawn from the various activities I'd engaged in during my time there - rock singer, teacher, student, manager, unemployed, hedonist, shop assistant, lover, loser, volunteer, bus driver, the list goes on. All these different voices, different versions of myself vying for attention, began to drown each other out, leading to a feeling of like listening to All India Radio.
The song was recorded and released by
Shelf Life, staying as a slow-paced and reflective tune. At the time of writing, it doesn't appear on the band's MySpace page but is available for purchase from
.
Ghosts
That city’s streets,
And all its heartbeats,
Got me wherever I turned.
The riffs and the pages,
The loves through the ages,
Hit me like children and burned.
But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.
I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.
There was a time,
When that place was mine,
Like Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
Now it’s just a shell,
A lingering smell,
I’d done all I could have done.
But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.
I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.
Voices went round in my head.
Games once played out, now dead.
It felt like All India Radio.
Bodies piled up on the floor.
Couldn’t take it no more,
It felt like All India Radio.
But when I stopped to think for a minute,
Of how much I had grown,
And used the eyes in the back of my head,
To look at what that city’d shown – me.
I laid dem all to rest.
Yeah, I laid dem all to rest.
