At first, I was pleasantly surprised by these lyrics. I thought they were maybe trying to say something. Then I inspected closer and realised that they should belong to three completely different songs.

Song 1: Teenage boy complains about how everyone just wants to be cool these days. Vague descriptions of house parties. The despondency when the high (probably induced by too many fizzy drinks) ends.

Song 2: Nondescript song about a doomed relationship. ‘Don’t ever wait for me’. I’m no good for you. I’m a lost cause. Classic gender normative fare really, cf. pop music.

Song 3: Vague motivational message song, coming in at 2.34, akin to 90s dance music that tells you to live your life, be yourself, stay real, reach the top.

Song 1 has the most potential, and could almost be quite good if the guitar riff wasn’t performed so terribly. And the singing too. The bit where that other guitar comes in at ‘Your lights are all out’ is nice. It brings an image to my mind, somehow. Lying on someone’s floor I don’t know very well, at the end of a party. Feeling that strange mixture of tension and freedom you get when around lots of people who don’t know you. You want to impress, but can do so in ways you wouldn’t feel able to when surrounded by the people who know you well enough to trap you in your own personality. At one point I was sat on a staircase, with others around me at various levels, when a very fat guy, maybe 5 years older than us, came out of his bedroom. He was the host’s older brother, and it turned out he had been there the whole time, in hiding. He moved first to the living room, where he discovered his Xbox and tv had both been stolen. Then he came to us, and started complaining. He wasn’t very confident, and the constant loud noise that had been the party seemed to have subdued him sufficiently that he couldn’t bring himself to shout at us, or blame us for what had happened. After a while he sat down at the top of the stairs, and told us he had a party trick. We judgmental 15 year olds nodded enthusiastically, sensing the opportunity to take the piss, to assert our feebly flickering egos. Cue sarcastic ‘Oh yeah?’s from all around. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘I can do an impression of Thom Yorke singing Mary Had A Little Lamb’.

That was enough to get everyone laughing before he’d even had the chance to embarrass himself. But there was something about that time of the night, everyone tired-drunk and faded, the party refuse littered across the floor, that made his claim seem kind of appropriate, maybe even significant. We all went quiet. ‘Go on then’.

What followed was honestly the most incredible 20 second vocal performance of my life. Everything about it was right. His voice was unmistakably Thom Yorke, with just enough comedy exaggeration to make it fun, but the best thing about it was the way he changed the tune of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ to make it sound exactly like a Radiohead song. It was beautiful, and we were spellbound. This was pre-smartphone era, so no-one filmed it. But I’ll aways remember watching this fat, shy boy, still suffering from stolen-Xbox bereavement, win the eternal support of ten drunk teenagers with the strangest, most ethereal 3am impersonation of my favourite singer.

This event almost definitely didn’t inspire Five Years On. But it’s the image that the lyrics in the verse bring me. I’m sorry that the song doesn’t match up to the story.

It was the first proper song I wrote based on a riff, rather than a chord sequence, and it proved to be a riff that I couldn’t stop playing when I picked up my guitar. So much so, that it will appear again in another song five years on.

Re: song 3’s theme, try this:

 

Ok, it isn’t 90s, but it is motivational in vague ways.

I especially like ‘Anything you’ve been thinking of’. It’s like ‘if there’s anything uplifting we’ve missed, just insert it here’.