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’.

Before some diehard fan I didn’t know existed calls me out on this, I’ll admit it myself: this is not the original version of Take It Apart. That version is lost in a real-life parallel universe: the world of old hard drives. Strewn inside the drawers and cupboards of people who treasure memory enough to backup all their music, photos, ideas, and pirated films in the first place is an entire Earth of lost information, never to be recovered. When I started this project I found school essays from the age of 14, poems written to exes, a play my friends and I had attempted to write when drunk, and so so many Photo Booth pictures with that effect on that makes you look like a pop art print. But having scoured my house for a few days testing every old box that looked vaguely electronic, I was unable to find Take It Apart 1. In fact, I wouldn’t have known this wasn’t the original version unless it was helpfully labelled ‘Take It Apart NEW’ on my old iTunes.

Before we continue, I’m going to use this opportunity to preserve the memory of one more song that could never be found: Take Me With You. My memory would put this as maybe my 6th song ever, so I really wanted to find it. But it had disappeared. I bring it up because it has one good memory attached to it. In science classes pre-6th form I sat next to a friend who would not allow me to talk about my music without interrupting me by singing the last chorus of Take Me With You. He especially enjoyed singing the ‘oooh’ at the end of: ‘Take me with youuuuu, oooooohh’. He has continued doing this ever since – it has been 9 years. In fact, I had completely forgotten the song even existed until one day he told me ‘I’ve always preferred your early works’ and sung it again. RIP Take Me With You.

There are a few clues that Take It Apart is actually a newer version of the original: The drumming has been redone, and is a bit more in time than I would expect from a song of this era. The piano entry may or may not have been in the original, I suspect it wasn’t. The strings seem a bit lush compared to what you’ve heard before. There’s an effect on the vocals in the bridge. The singing I’m sure was redone, although it’s still pretty poor. There’s some programmed percussion.

But the main part of the song is the same. It’s got some catchy bits. The big harmonies at the end almost work and remind me vaguely of The Lighthouse Family. The lyrics are typically non-sensical:

‘Just take it apart, just take it back home.
Bring what you want, just bring it back home’

sounds like classic Oasis to me:

‘We’re singing things that sound big, but you’re not sure why,
and the sun shiiiiiiiinnneees’.

In fact, listening to this song now I had the sudden realisation that the ‘It dies if you don’t water it’ line was literally inspired by a plant with a smiley face attached to it that a friend of mine bought me at the time.
Needless to say, it died.

The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear 21 times in this song. There are only 104 words in total, and 11 of those are ‘oh’. I am currently writing about myself singing a song written by me, which constantly references myself. I guess it’s not so unusual, people continually focus on themselves when talking about most things, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for those lines in the 2nd verse:

‘Oh, I tried to see what I could learn easily,
And what else there could be, apart from me.’

Well, I didn’t try hard enough. The song presents itself as incredibly self-obsessed, although I know that the lyrics had no meaning in terms of my real life, beyond the fact that I am a top-class worrier. Mainly, I was clearly just struggling with the ‘ee’ rhymes. The temptation when you can’t think of a theme is to think in and of the 1st person. If that doesn’t work, you talk about having nothing to say (look to the bottom of this post for a song that does this, very effectively). Sometimes trying to come up with anything is like looking into a hall of mirrors. You see your own blank face reflected endlessly around you in various states of distortion. I was definitely trapped there when writing this song.

On the subject of self-reflection, listening to this song I had a sudden vision of myself leaving school in summer, walking to the first road crossing where the lollypop lady would be waiting, as she had done every day for thousands of years, taking out my headphones, a specific kind of on-ear job that wrapped around the back of your head, rather than the top, thereby making you look like a loser (‘yeah, but, I’m not a loser, so I don’t care’ I suppose I would tell myself) and selecting one of my own songs to listen to. This song, probably. I know that I liked listening to this one a lot. I also know, because I still do, that I liked listening to my own music in general a lot. Depending on my mood, this activity would provoke different emotions. On this particular occasion, with the sun beating down on my stuffy black uniform, and my rucksack forming strap-shaped sweat patches on my shoulders that were uncomfortable but also kind of comforting, you know? I would probably have been feeling overwhelmingly positive. School is over, it’s sunny, I can produce songs all on my own, I’ve got a new guitar (did you hear that the guitar suddenly sounds nicer in this recording?), I’m good at music. At other times, I would look out the rain-streaked window of the bus, dark outside, and think about the homework I had to do when I got home, and hear every single mistake immortalised in the song, not least the fact that I cannot hit those top notes in the chorus at all, and I would denounce all my work so far in one fell swoop. It’s all shit.

Most of the time though, the feeling would be somewhat colder – a sort of steely determination that one day, I’ll be better, and people will know. They’ll know who I am because I will be too good to not know. Standard egotistical fantasy fare really, except that I would obsess over these old songs to an unreasonable degree. I knew it was unreasonable, because if anyone glanced at my iPod, I would subtly but rapidly tilt the screen away from them so they wouldn’t know I had been listening to myself, even if the stranger on the bus couldn’t be realistically expected to link the name with my face. I would feel ashamed that I kept putting on my own music, but it was a strong compulsion. I know every mistake in every song I’ve made by heart. I know it’s coming when I’m 30 seconds away from it, and I clench my teeth in anticipation. And I know every bit that makes me glow secretly with pride. And I listen to those bits more.

I still do all of this. But now my listening is more useful. A mistake I hear in an old recording will not reappear in a new song. Ok, fine, maybe it will. But I’ll go back and fix the mistake when I hear it. Sometimes.

On a road near my house there lived an old man who was a bit mad. The only noticeable symptom of his madness was that he’d cheerfully say good morning to you as you passed by. Maybe it’s sad that we live in a society where that could be a sign of madness… Maybe it was justifiably odd that he’d say it at 11pm.

So I wrote a song about him. And then I put ‘Good Morning’ as the tagline on my Nike iDs, but that’s a different story. Well, actually it’s quite relevant: I must have liked this song a lot. So let’s start with the good points:

1. The chorus could be anthemic. As evidence, try singing Coldplay’s ‘God Put A Smile Upon Your Face’ over the top. It works. The chords are basically the same. I didn’t copy this one deliberately. I remember saying proudly to a friend when we realised they were similar: ‘my one has one more chord in the progression though’.
2. The lyrics are not bad, and more importantly, in terms of my early standards, they have a consistent theme.
3. It used to go down well at my band’s gigs. There’s a terrible video of us playing it in a bar when only one friend had come (the person filming), and every other audience member was sitting at tables trying to have a quiet one. My voice sounds mangled and shaky (it often was when we played live, on account of me moving my arms quite quickly at the drums). I realise that story doesn’t suggest it went down well, but I think it did, generally.
4. The second version is the first recorded song which includes the fourth member of the band – the keyboardist. One day during band practice my doorbell rang, and I answered to find this friend (he lived very close) shifting nervously between feet. DRAMATIC REENACTMENT — ‘Oh, hi.’ ‘Oh, hi’. ‘I’ve got band practice on at the moment.’ ‘Yeah um, so I was just wondering if I could be in the band as well..’ ‘Oh, right. Um, yeah, on keys?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘Oh. Umm, I guess yeah, I’ll have to ask the others but that would be fine yeah I guess.’ ‘Yeah, alright.’ — DRAMATIC REENACTMENT OVER.

Re: point 4 – this friend would prove to be my most enduring musical companion, out of the 3 in the band. Our alliance started a bit inauspiciously- he was a singer, a good songwriter, competent at jazz piano, confident on the violin, rhythm was not his strong point. I wanted him to basically stab out a few chords in a couple of below average indie-pop songs (in time).

The first version of Good Morning I’m Not Mad was recorded on my own though, maybe a year before the band version. It is worse. There are a couple of terrible rhythmic mistakes (I especially like the one in the 2nd chorus where I hit the crash cymbal immediately afterwards as a blatant attempt at covering up the mistake). The singing is, I would say, more out of tune than in the 2nd version, although it’s a close contest. The jazzy bit at the end is cooler in version 2, mainly because of the nice bass and piano not played by me. Oh and also the first version has a completely wrong chord strummed once near the beginning of the outro. Couldn’t I have spent 2 minutes fixing it? Yes. I could have.

However, there is a vibe that I like to the original. It’s more exposed and wiry. It has a bit of grunge to it. The band song sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick cloud. The instruments blend into each other. There’s no definition. I never spent much time mixing tracks in those days, the instruments came out pretty much as recorded. And I never spent much time recording them either…

Until next time, good morning.