Buckle up

02 - I GRATED MY THUMB

This is one of the tracks on the album that’s mainly me, or at least me on Logic instruments with the addition of bass guitar by Dan Hawkins. It’s a fairly literal account of a lunch prep injury that happened on a bright September day in 2023. I remember the sun streaming through the kitchen window and lighting up the big blobs of blood accumulating on the granite worktop following my zesting injury and I thought, ‘I think I can get a jingle out of this. Maybe even a song’.

03 - DOING IT WRONG

File under ‘Social Media Songs’. In 2018, a producer called Emily Knight got in touch to ask if I would present a show for Radio 4 about alternate ways of living our lives. Her original title for the show was We're Doing It Wrong, but someone at Radio 4 changed it to the more judgemental You're Doing It Wrong. I warmed to the phrase when I thought of it as a parody of the prevailing tone of the internet, where I'm regularly informed that everything I thought I knew about the world is wrong.

A lot of my musical efforts begin as attempts to imitate other artists. This one was an attempt at making something that sounded like a track on Remain in Light by Talking Heads.

When I interviewed the actor Paddy Considine on my podcast, we talked about his favourite band, Ohio alt-rockers Guided By Voices. It made me go back and immerse myself in their music in all its endlessly inventive, home-made oddness. Because a lot of GBV songs are little more than home demos, I thought it would probably be quite easy to make my own reasonably authentic-sounding Guided By Voices song. So I picked up the guitar, selected a scratchy effect in Logic and slid up and down the fretboard while I tried to do an impression of lead singer Robert Pollard. Turns out it's not so easy.

The fan at the end is the one in our bedroom at home. I like sleeping with a soothing noise at night. I imagine I'm in an airship above the clouds as the sun sets. The sides of the cabin are open, and I'm sitting with Sarah and the children as the warm wind blows over us and the engines roar. The sound of a fan is also handy for covering the sound of snoring and farts.

01 - INTRO

I thought I’d play the middle class micro-problems card early on, hence the mention of ‘Waitrose’ in first line. Joe Mount thought it would be good to create this mini overture to start the album and knocked up the music on one of the little synthesisers he has scattered around his garden studio out in Kent where we worked on the album in six or seven sessions lasting two or three days each, every few months from September 2021 to April 2024.

04 - PIZZA TIME

I recorded the demo for this in early 2022. My son Nat was 18 at the time and was supposedly revising for his A Levels at home but as far as I could tell he mainly wore a bathrobe, ate pizza and watched the Sopranos. Whenever we’d nag him about revising he’d say “It’s going to be OK, trust me”. In fact he ended up doing better than we feared, and Pizza Time was partly about reminding myself to get off his case a little bit in his indolent months/years. After all, I had been exactly the same at his age. And after his age.

It was a relief that he no longer acted as though his family were the stupidest, most boring people in the world, as he had done from around 14 - 16, and in our gratitude, we'd agreed to let him enjoy a few months of doing more or less what he wanted before getting a job and figuring out what was next. For Sarah and I, this presented the constant challenge of picking the right moment to nag when he spent whole days watching box sets, playing Fortnite, drinking beer and eating only pizza. Actually, that isn't entirely fair. Sometimes, he drove to McDonald's, too. 

On a couple of occasions when I found Nat standing by the oven in a bathrobe waiting for a pizza to cook at 11 in the morning, I failed to resist the impulse to remind him that this way of life couldn’t last much longer. Helplessly, I recited the same script my dad had recited to me when I was Nat’s age. In those days, I, too, was happy to let weeks evaporate in clouds of spaghetti bolognese, Pepsi and VHS rentals from the corner shop. That was the guy who made The Adam and Joe Show. Now that I was in my 50s, could I say for certain that the way I spent my days was so much more worthwhile than the way Nat spent his? Well, yes, I could, but it was hard to ignore the hypocrisy in my admonitions.

The rest of the lyrics came over the next day or two. Fairly literal stuff about trying to prevent your teenage child from making the same mistakes you've made while keeping in mind that your lectures will only influence the person they eventually become up to a very limited point. It would be a shame to burn down that last carefree outpost of indolent teenage joy before the adult world takes hold and life turns into The Counting Song.

Recording that first demo of Pizza Time was pure happiness, and when it was finished, I went back over to my studio after supper and spent an hour listening to it over and over. There's a thin line between post-creation euphoria and smelling your own farts, but by the time I closed my laptop and headed up to bed, not only was I thinking about my speech for the Grammys, I had emailed my Pizza Time demo to Radiohead's guitarist and instrumental genius Jonny Greenwood.

I had seen Jonny in January 2022 after a performance by the other band he's in with Thom Yorke, The Smile, and when I told him I'd been working on music for an album, he said that I should feel free to send him anything if I ever wanted a second opinion. In the haze of the creative afterglow, I had fantasised that within 10 minutes of receiving Pizza Time, Jonny would write back something like, "Wow! This is great, Buckles. A proper song! Don't think you need to do anything else to it." 

When two days had passed without a reply from Jonny, I started to feel a tickle of regret at having sent over the song so impulsively. Then I listened to Pizza Time again. I wondered if there was something wrong with my speakers. It didn't sound like the song I'd played on a loop just a couple of nights before. That song had been so jaunty and tuneful, so charmingly simple, so movingly direct. This one was stodgy and embarrassingly inept. No wonder Jonny hadn't replied. What had I been thinking? He didn't mean I should actually send him my demos; he was just being polite. 

I tried to get some perspective. What did it matter what Jonny thought anyway? Just because I like him personally, I respect his opinion, I love the music he makes, and he's one of the most talented musicians on the planet; why should that change how I feel about Pizza Time? I shouldn't. But it did.

After a week had passed with no reply from Jonny, I never wanted to hear Pizza Time again and wondered if it wasn't too late to return my advance from the record company. Then Jonny replied:

• Adam! Musically - harmonies / bass line all very nice. Quite 1988-like. I didn’t ever listen to much Monochrome Set, but in my memory, they sounded like this. I think you're double-tracking the main vocal. I'm not sure that helps. Feels like you’re trying to hide one voice behind the other same voice. No need. Lyrically feels a bit like you’re in the uncanny valley between funny and sincere. I’m not sure anyone’s ever made that work….. Wild card opinion though: you should make electronic music - all your jingles in the world have been really strong: I know they are often apple-based / library loops etc. but still. I think you’d free up your imagination being liberated from guitar chords. Hope this is more motivational than not. I don’t doubt your musical ability, but it’s sounding a bit hemmed in by the instrumentation at the moment. You did ask. Can we still be uneasy friends?

Jonny clearly hadn't loved Pizza Time, and I was still embarrassed to have put him in an awkward spot to service my craving for validation, but these were good notes, and I was glad he'd replied. I wrote an email to say thanks, waited a week, and then sent it. 

'The uncanny valley between funny and sincere'. That was the note that stood out. I changed some of Pizza Time's lyrics to nudge it somewhere a tiny bit funnier and less cloying, and I recorded a new vocal. Jonny had correctly identified that the original had been double-tracked, ie, two versions of the same vocal layered together, a trick I often use to beef up my voice. But he was right; even with the limitations laid bare, the single vocal is usually better and more direct.

I kept thinking about the 'uncanny valley'. Was my album doomed to turn out like We're The Jimi Hendrix Experience because I didn't have the skill to be sincere and wasn't content with trying to be funny? At supper that night, I outlined my quandary. "Dad, I think you need to get a grip", said Hope. "Anyway, no offence, but who's actually going to listen to this album?"

05 - DANCING IN THE MIDDLE

06 - STANDING STILL

Not much to this one. Joe did the beats and some of the synths towards the end. I provided the lyrical angst. It’s a fever dream about entropy written in the grip of grief madness, obviously.

07 - SPIDERS

An instrumental I made one September for all the spiders that live in my nutty room and the sadness I feel when I walk through their threads and get a webby beard.

08 - TEA TOWEL

A sort of tribute to João Gilberto. Joe Mount played all the instruments on this one. I did the squeaky plate percussion.

09 - SHORTS

10 - SKIP THIS TRACK

11 - FALLING TO PART

Another ‘getting old’ song/jingle. Pete Robertson played most of the guitars on this.