STAY ALERT
When I wrote the Finding Me EP earlier this year, it was all about figuring out who I was after too many years feeling like I was losing bits of myself to work, to grief, to life. For those who bought it from Bandcamp and read the exclusive liner notes there, you’ll know the songs kind of tell a story. In The Things We Do To Pay The Bills I discuss the strange feeling jobs bring of doing battle with the life you want to live, the person you want to be, and the demands of those paying you. In To All My Almost Friends I share the alienation of never quite feeling like I fit in anywhere, and sing probably the definitive line of my creative life: “I show the world who I am, it never asks for an encore”. Then in Searching For That Scene I return to the childhood me who found a sense of self in a punk rock underground that may have existed only in my mind and to which I continually strive to return. Bursting From The Grave is about those moments of finding myself, but acknowledges that the world is determined to bury that self alive again at any moment. However the self that is discovered is one who finds “myself when I refuse, when I raise two middle fingers at the world” and who is “myself when I am ill at ease” and holds a secret power: “my power to say ‘no’”. In other words, I remain the angry punk I always was, searching for that scene, not changing for acceptance, and angry at the world. Closer, Congratulations, returns to the idea of jobs: the necessary evil. “Bills paid, hope void” … “what happened to the you you used to be?” … “Congratulations: you got a job!”
As soon as I was done writing it, I knew it was the end of a chapter. Strangely Shaped By Fathers began as a band to work out some personal issues: grief. The death of two parents and an unhappy childhood never really dealt with. An experiment to see if I could produce full “band” music entirely by myself and if I could turn the raw poetry I was writing into punk songs. The 86 album was cathartic, but it also re-awakened the joy of playing this kind of music I have always loved. Before writing Finding Me, I recorded two old songs I’d had lying around for a while that were supposed to be for Academy Morticians. We’d recorded Pick A Side years ago - 2016 I think? - and the original plan had been to record more songs the following year, but it never happened. When starting Strangely Shaped By Fathers I thought political songs would be off limits, but I wanted to see if I could record a decent version of End of the World (Today) and Congratulations. I did, and I was happy with End of the World, but Congratulations sounded like I was on meth it was so fast! (I wasn’t, I just programmed the drums to a ludicrous tempo and couldn’t be bothered to change it. I also liked the challenge of trying to keep up!) I realised as soon as I released them, however, that by doing so I had cracked open a door: political songs couldn’t be off limits now, because I’d just recorded some!
The next SSBF song, I Will Look Back On This Fondly, was an attempt to return to the “proper” SSBF fodder: mental health. A song about anxiety - and incredibly prophetic now as I genuinely do look back fondly on a world where travel was once so easy and Covid-free, even if it also gave me panic attacks.
But alone at home, playing my bass, alongside the Strangely Shaped By Fathers stuff from 86 and the singles, I was playing a lot of old Bullet of Diplomacy and Academy Morticians stuff. Political stuff. And as I wrote what would become Finding Me and I found myself, what I found was that I missed writing angry political songs. Especially when the world was so fucked up.
Bear in mind - this was before Covid 19, before George Floyd. The Tory victory in December, the continuing terror of Trump. I couldn’t stay silent.
As lockdown began, I wrote and recorded a quick song in a day: Social Distance. It was really about mutual aid and the failings of government - “can we all come together now, alone, and recognise that when we needed help we always had each other to provide while the powers that be wrung their hands” - but was a bit too oblique for my liking. It didn’t fit with the theme for Finding Me, but I found myself playing it a lot as I played my other political songs, and once Finding Me was done, and I had some time again, I decided it was time to stop navel-gazing with songs about poor old me and my problems and get back to things that mattered.
Then Boris Johnson changed the clear and safe message of Social Distance - which was to stay home so we don’t cause community spread - to the vague stay alert. An empty slogan which opened the doors for many unsafe returns to work and put the wheels in motion to prioritise the economy over our lives. I was furious, but also busy. I wrote some cool music and a few lyrics, recorded it roughly on my phone, and forgot about it.
Cut to July and I decide it’s time to write some of that new angry political stuff I keep wanting to do now I have some time after finishing up the school term, promoting a book and writing an academic paper. I wanted to capture the mood and almost justify to myself what could be seen as stepping backwards: writing yet another song about how awful the world is. The words for With Burning Anger poured out of me and the song was written in about an hour. I loved the concept of self-referencing so many of my old songs: Capitalism Sux, Profitganda, Same Ideologies/Different Hairstyles, Progressing Ever Backwards, Junk Food News, Culturally Dead, Fear For The World, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, There Must Be More Than This To Life, Too Lazy To Live, and We’re Not The Good Guys are all old Academy Morticians or Bullet of Diplomacy songs and I enjoyed the challenge of fitting in as many as I could. I loved even more being able to play the little bass bit from Too Lazy To Live, one of the first songs I ever wrote, in the middle!
I decided rather than wait a year and write a whole album I would release the songs as and when I write them. Then, just as I was about to record With Burning Anger, I found the demo I’d made and forgotten of Stay Alert. Once I remembered how to play it, got it in a key I could actually sing (the original key blew my voice out so bad my throat hurt for two weeks!), and finished off the lyrics, I was ready. This week I recorded them both and decided to release them today on Bandcamp (they’ll be out everywhere else next Friday). Today is the tenth anniversary of my dad’s death. I might as well release some music to commemorate moving beyond grief (or at least being able to better live with it). If that isn’t symbolic of SSBF’s transition from the personal to the political, I don’t know what is!