Hooray for Everything

based on the song the happy clappy band at Duff gardens (a thinly veiled Disneyland) nearly sing in the Simpsons. Except you don't get to hear it -so I filled in the blank. The Mighty Simpsons have been so much a part of my life over the years, I feel I have an understanding with them which goes beyond small minded litigation over breaches of copyright. No, I do, I really feel that. And it's karmic -Disney didnt sue them so they shouldn't sue me. Having a children's choir on the end was a first on a Shriekback song, but, I sense, probably not the last -there's something deeply unwholesome about it which pleases me immensely. This song opens up one of the big themes of the album: 'happiness'. What is it, in these ironic, hedonistic times? How do you know when you've got it? As Dave Allen would sometimes ask, in the depths of our old Road depravity: ''Are we having fun yet?'.

The Bride Stripped Bare a relationship power-struggle song (Elvis Costello's savage, brilliant first album was an influence) conflated with Mssr. Duchamp's famous sculpture -and sculptural concerns generally. Made me want to get my old MIG welder out.
Burying the Bunny started life as an attempted Monstrance remix (when such a project was briefly mooted) and you can hear the original loop plainly. I thought it would be a big, messy New Orleans style funeral for all the little tendernesses and sentimentalities which accompany love and which you have to relinquish when love is gone. I was thinking of the scene in 'Look Back in Anger' when, after all the raw abuse and brutal honesty of an attempted break-up, Jimmy Porter and his woman go back to playing cute 'bears and squirrels'. Can't do it kids: humane slaughter and dig a big hole in the pissing rain. A friendly brass section helps of course. Oh and the Punk resurrection at the end -zombie bunny rising again. So it's not all doom n' gloom.

Oh hang on, maybe it is- Bittersweet more end-of-the-affair Faded Flowers miserable shit. I play drums on this -rather brilliantly I must say -you cant fake that hesitant rubbish drummer quality I have -see Mart -something you CAN'T do. Hah!
Amaryllis in the Sprawl I'm very fond of this one -clearly in the Big Night Music area but with a twist. I guess living in London for so long you can start to think that the Modern World looks like Soho or Camden or Brick Lane. But it doesn't -most of it looks like Swindon which looks like America, actually -ring roads and industrial estates and retail parks. I had an experience a couple of Xmases ago drunkenly wandering around all night in the Sprawl near Bristol airport with all my Xmas presents (long story) and sleeping fitfully in the car park of Toys-R-Us. Such experiences are bound to leave their mark. So I thought that perhaps there is a bleak -nascent and refined aesthetic to such places (laughable now as the 'beauty' of a crumbling industrial landscape would have been to our parents -'that rusty old engine shed's a listed building? -do me a favour'). So Amaryllis -my slighly demented psycho-drifting babe -takes us through it. There is a story by Richard Jeffries -local swindon 19th century nature writer- called 'Amaryllis at the Fair'. Just so's you know.
Mahalia quite a straightforward 'girl's name' song. Hey, I can do traditional. Nothing whatever to do with the upstanding and soulful Ms Jackson in case you were wondering (or anyone else living or dead, obviously..sorry getting paranoid now)

Glory Bumps again, began as a Monstrance remix. Social satire innit. Bloody Christians drive you up the wall with their nonsense. Take THAT fundy nutbar. Still, not sure that i've got what it takes to be a polemic songwriter; as happened in Salt Lake City with the Mormons on my solo US tour, I always find the phenomena of religion (that human thirst for meaning however fucking weird) more fascinating than apalling. And the gospel thing is great. Lawd have mercy.
Squanderer a tricky little devil to produce morphing as it did a number of times before our very eyes. And then no-one who heard it could resist offering: 'the Wanderer' as an alternative. It was Nick, who was rendering the outside of Stuarts studio -and became, of course 'the Renderer'- who raised the banner of Portugese Rockabilly, this, and Andy's big retro guitar shlangs eventually nailed it's character. Incidentally the only song in the Shriekback ouevre to contain the 'c' word'. Because swearing IS big and is undeniably clever.
Devils' Onions with Dylan's best 'big' songs as inspiration (Idiot Wind, Desolation Row, Visions of Johanna) I thought I'd try and take on the -'bloody hell not ANOTHER verse, oh go on then, why not'- challenge. And deliver an ambiguous dreamlike panorama of Modern Life into the bargain. No sweat. A lot of fun to write especially the verse where I ennumerate some of the neologisms of Sprawl(qv) analysis: 'BoomBurb, Pork Chop Lot, Snout House, Mall-Glut. Words trying to keep up with reality. Fantastic. The length of the thing meant that we did a lot of work trying to keep textures changing to maintain interest and I think it works. Catherine's melancholy arches of woodwind on the chorus though make something strange and sad happen which balances the freakish modernity out.
Yarg 7 in the great Shrieky traditonal of tiny instrumental aquaria here's this rather monastic biosphere. I like the way people always tell you about pictures they see when they hear it and there's something in it, I think, that's beyond happy and sad. Like: yes you live you die and it's all totally futile and that's ok. And Yarg is a Swiss cheese (Mart plays a swiss instrument called a 'hang' not particularly cheesily though) and it's in 7/4 time.