The original intention in this post, following on from Moosh’s tweet about love:

… which immediately reminded me of:

I walk along the street
I look into your eyes
I’m pleasant when we meet
I’m there when you go home

… which is New Order’s Lonesome Tonight, B side to whatever, just as Rain was the Beatles’ B side to something else. In both cases, there were many comments online about how the B side was the better song, even majestic, comparatively, to the A side. In a similar way, I prefer so many B movies to As, the latter which seem more contrived to my mind.

I was going to offer that song to Moosh but then read through the lyrics … yikes … far from being a love song, it was about human emptiness, so I dropped the idea and good thing too, as when I tried to work out what the song was about … twernt easy. Appears it wasn’t for others either:

*This is one of my favorite songs. No idea what its about but it has the best melody. I can’t believe more people don’t know about it.

*It’s about an attempt to relinquish a relationship from youth, where one person left the other. It seems like the person who wanted it was constantly wronged by the other in previous attempts at the relationship, so now when the other person wants it, they don’t. Perhaps they thought they did, and then realized that time doesn’t always take away the pain, and just couldn’t deal with it. Stuff like this never works, so I’ve gotta say I definitely agree with the idea of this song.

*It started probably around the time of the Republic sessions and got worse with every record since. “Hey you, you’ll be okay, do what you do…” became Sumner’s new-found mantra for over twenty years. WTF?! We are punks, we don’t care. We don’t want to feel okay or to be told what to do to feel okay. And that’s what he tells us in every song since 2001. 

*I mean, there’s no humor here […] What happened was is that, I think, Prozak really cured our hero because ever since then we have all these happy go around songs about nothing. “Two step forward, one step back…” Is it a group physical therapy class? Sure, it has a nice beat…

*Barney’s lyrics have always been shite. I don’t care. I’m 100% a “sound” person, and his voice is just another instrument in the mix to me. I still don’t know all the proper lyrics to songs I’ve listened to thousands of times.

*I always viewed Barney as having a certain mystery, and his lyrics were an attempt to get across his feelings. Does that make sense? Maybe he wasn’t so articulate and was struggling to get across the things he needed to express. Everything else about them was so unlike their peers, I could excuse the occasional clunky lyric, because you got the feeling it was sincere.

JH: Very much so … I mean, it was my (relative) youth too so methinks I have a right to criticise that youth … in fact, two lines of the song mention that:

Do you believe in youth
The history of all truth

Truth is, youth is not a time I wish to return to, vibrant as it was. It was also a time of soaring highs and plummeting lows, everyone around concerned primarily with him or herself and there was an incident when I visited a friend’s place … all housemates were at each other’s throats about stealing one another’s food, not paying his or her part of the rent etc. I just had to get out of there.

My working life was spent with yoof, by definition, so the prevailing mindset I had to hang onto was that it’s just mental expecting anything profound from what is virtually a child, at a time of finding out, finding themselves etc. Especially in herds. No thanks … I reached an age when I had to tell the head of dept that I’d gradually lost “the calling” and it was better for them that I moved onto pastures new. I still loved the things they came out with, was concerned with their concerns etc. etc. But it was time.

Another memory was as a 19 year old myself in the woods with a year level of our course, and a girl brought out her guitar and started playing “in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, I want to be …“

Immediately we all went all gooey and lovey but why? Just as with Lonesome Tonight, it was the heartfelt music, rather than the lyrics which did it. Similar was driving that French girl home from Yorkshire to south of Paris (as one does) and it hardly mattered her French lyric songs and my English lyric (to an extent), such as the one above … the lyrics were hardly the thing.

I mean, let’s face it … young men are fairly emotionally retarded, as Christie gets Mr. Satterthwaite to think below in the book about Mr Quin:

“It was New Year’s Eve.The elder members of the house party at Royston were assembled in the big hall. Mr. Satterthwaite was glad that the young people had gone to bed. He was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting and crude. They lacked subtlety and as life went he had become increasingly fond of subtleties.

Mr. Satterthwaite was sixty-two– a little bent, dried-up man with a peering face oddly elflike, and an intense and inordinate interest in other people’s lives. All his life, so to speak, he had sat in the front row of the stalls watching various dramas of human nature unfold before him. His role had always been that of the onlooker. Only now, with old age holding him in its clutch, he found himself increasingly critical of the drama submitted to him.”

I’m less critical of the kids themselves because of my working life. The purple haired girls and wimmin with tatts, nose rings and torn jeans are a product of, plus a reaction against, their upbringing at home and school. The new feral yoof (male) needs avoiding for personal safety reasons … it’s globopsycho which needs taking out.

……

What’s the point of all this above? No idea … seemed a good idea at the time, before this site started playing up fifty minutes ago. Fifty minutes just to compose one post.