For Those About to Pop

April 2007 sees the release of Real PD's new album 'For Those About to Pop'. Here's our track-by-track guide:

Seclusion ¯

Alistair: We were definitely going for the ‘Wall of Sound’ here. It’s meant to be quite epic. Mark was insistent from the outset that this would be a straight, as in serious, song. If you’re a group who are normally known as a bit of a lighthearted proposition it can have more of an impact when you occasionally do something serious. A bit like Blink 182 doing ‘I Miss You’. Er, or something.

Mark: Of course compared to Phil Spector, despite Alistair's best production efforts this actually sounds more like a wall of rubble, but to me fantastic, unique and very Real PD - reaching for the stars and creating a lo-fi epic to rival anything by The Magnetic Fields.  The 4-to-the-floor section before the final choruses is my favourite moment on the album - in my opinion so wonderful it could almost be ABBA.  I wish I had long hair to swish or at least a very floppy parting to flick when I sing this song.  Given that expectation is that I am largely likely to write a song about plastic bags or something, this is a definite departure as it is more or less based on a true experience.  Alistair praised the passion in my vocal as, I think, a way of not dwelling too much on its overall quality but I wasn't really channelling my feelings so much as concentrating on trying to hit the right notes and not sounding too much like I was impersonating David Bowie.

Claire:  A showcase for Mark's vocal talents and some excellent lyrics too, cf. "I'm tired of beating round your bushes". Although I have to turn it down when it crashes into the first chorus, every time. Perhaps that will come with practice.



Ethics Girl {hear this track over at www.myspace.com/realpduk}

Alistair: I worried for a bit about whether the opening lines of this song were metereologically accurate, after it dawned on me that actually it's tornados and not hurricanes that spin around in big funnels. But then the Killers did a song about a hurricane which started turning when you were young and that put my mind at rest. 

Claire: One of those songs that sounds better on the album than it did when we made it- and it sounded good when we made it. I feel duty bound for some reason to point out that hurricanes (also known as cyclones) do in fact swirl round and round. On a very large scale. I make no secret of the fact that I am more of a fan of the electronica PD does than the other stuff, so this is one of my top tracks on the album- a synthy treat.

Mark:  A 'Ballad of Barry & Frida' for the 21st Century which you might have heard on Karaoke if you're not familiar with Victoria Wood's mid-80s musical output.  This sounded fantastic on the demo and then went sonically, er, supersonic when programmed on the new synthesizer.  I'm not sure how much of this I wrote but I am definitely responsibe for the 'wrong' delayed chords in the chorus that sound so right after a couple of listens.  An attempt to marry electro-disco with a metal riff and not sound like Electric Six. 

Alistair: Musically I love those house records with very angular choppy strings on, like 'Strings of Life' or even 'Lola's Theme' and I wanted this track to have some of that. Strings which are not polite and which shake things up a bit.

Unobtrusive (If I Get Close to You) ¯

Alistair: The ‘woman in Sweden’ in the first verse is Agnetha Faltskog. Around the time when she went a bit bonkers and had bought a fish farm she was stalked by this guy, whom she ended up dating for some reason.

It’s all about the bassline for me, this song. And Claire’s vocal. This one is more like a rock song in terms of its dissonances and structures than the pop songs we normally do. I could imagine P!nk or Kelly Clarkson having a pop at this one.

Mark: I don't know if anybody else would like to tackle this point, rendering this webnote obselete, but this song caused the greatest controversy within New Real PD so far in that it seemed to have been possibly suggested that the lyrics were written from the point of view of the person who was originally to have sung the song.  Have I said too much and reopened old wounds?

Alistair: Yes, you have. I've got another one called 'Overbearing (If I encroach on you)'. But no one to give it to, naturally. 

Claire: It felt good to use my acting skills to portray the character singing this song :-) I do not like my vocals on this (although apparently that is something which is restricted only to me and no-one else has a problem with them- I think I am suffering with answer-phone syndrome) although I do on all the other ones I sing on.

Mark: I love the pitchbend solo - obviously we actually do have guitars these days so it's nice that we haven't lost one of our old trademarks.

Donald is Drawing ¯

 
Claire: I wasn't involved in this song at all but I really like it. An excellent example of Alistair picking unusual themes to inspire him (and there is another one coming up later). The "eastern" feel of this song contrasts with the subject matter nicely- this is a song very much in the mould of "Delia" from Burn Your Flag With Pride which is one of my favourites.

Alistair: It's a kind of slightly surrealistic tribute to Donald McGill, the legendary ‘saucy seaside’ postcard artist, who was famously convicted of obscenity for a postcard that was actually completely innocuous, nay, positively chaste compared to typical artifacts of modern pop culture such as, say, the average Christina Aguilera video. McGill was already an old man when he was sent to prison and this was a terrible thing to do to someone whose only crime was to give millions of people a gift of laughter. He really helped to define the mood of the British seaside.  In the song’s final verse all the characters from the postcards come to life and appear alongside him in his prison cell to give him moral support and artistic encouragement. I had a lot of fun writing this one with Richard. When he came up with that drone figure you hear in the verses on the acoustic guitar I think he thought it would be about a harem scene in the desert somewhere – he was conjuring exotic and sensual music and wasn’t prepared for all the ‘grannies hiding behind windcheaters’ nonsense!

Mark: I didn't know who Donald was and knew nothing of his trial.  I expect Alistair has been watching BBC4 again.  Since I had no input into the music I feel I can almost review it as somewhere between a sinister Nick Drake and what may or may not be a Middle Eastern Dirge (ie a funereal song; I'm not passing comment there!)

Alistair: Listen and learn, Shopping Channel Boy!

Bullet for My Chemical Toilet

 
Claire: In a parallel universe, we are in the top 40 with this track, Smash Hits still exists and they've tried to print the "lyrics" to this. Pee-ow pee-ow prrrrrpttttttt tush...etc.
 

Mark: I came up with this title after Steve said something very dismissive about MCR.  Real PD are not fans of theirs although we are still trying to get over being depressed teenagers but we had The Smiths and Nirvana instead.  In retrospect I think the original title 'Osmolagnia' is more appropriate as it means... oh, go and look it up or just get on with your algebra.

Alistair: One of two great transitoires Steve came up with for this album. This sounds like the inside of Giorgio Moroder’s head in 1974 to me, full of tickertape unwinding dramatically…

Vitamin P  ¯

 
Claire: This song is very simple compared to most of the others on this album. It makes little sense, which works and is basically about how great we are. There is also a reference to a cave full of Smarties which is apparently a reference to a Smarties ad from the 70s which I cannot remember.

Alistair: After Top of the Pops was taken off the air, we finally relinquished the dream of appearing on the show, the dream that all bands with someone over the age of 30 have. So I decided we had to write a song that would get us invited on Jools Holland instead. In my mind this is the kind of funky little number which Joss Stone would sing on ‘Later’. I tried to do a Stevie Wonder bassline. Mark said something almost unspeakably bitchy about this track which, months later, I am still recovering from. It involved the words ‘Beautiful’ and ‘South’. Damn. 

Mark: Indeed, nor now will we ever get a John Peel session although I somehow doubt he would have played this anyway, even if it was by Stump or The Boards Of Canada.  I was supposed to have done a backing vocal on this but decided to have a 24 hour nervous breakdown instead (the best kind) which resulted in Seclusion.  What with E, K, even H and Quaaludes having actually having been been known as Vitamin Q I just hope that Alistair and Claire are not encouraging the abuse of new designer drugs.  I cannot believe I would mention The Beautiful South in connection with this track. Jamiroquai, yes, maybe.

Alistair: Owwwch. Honey, if you ain't got the funk, there ain't nothing a brother can do...

Principles  ¯

Alistair: When synchronicity happens you should run with it. This song is a very rare example of where three people had the same musical idea, namely combining the Adam and the Ants ‘sticks’ percussion sound, that whole Burundi thing, with an electro-glam thing in a kind of Goldfrapp-y vein. Sean and I wrote the music in early 2006 but it was very much along the lines of something that Mark had been dreaming of doing too. I’d been listening to Mark Bolan at the time – his juxtaposition of that insidious electro-boogie with that laconic delivery is so very appealing and exciting, even now.  

Mark: I made the mistake here of telling Alistair we should write a pro-illegal-downloading song over Bow Wow Wow style beats as an updating of C30-C60-C90 Go! which celebrated the joy of taping songs off the radio (it was 1980!) and how cool it was to be able to be able to carry your music collection on your back.  It was banned by the BBC obviously for that reason although later in the track she does go on to threaten people who have a lot of records and a policeman with a bazooka.  The huge disappointment about legal downloading to me was that you simply don't get given the option of that rare Japanese-only B-side which would have cost £27 to import on CD single - largely it's just what you can buy in the shops (albeit now a few weeks earlier).  I love our song but the lyric is a little ambiguous and I don't think it sounds illicit enough.

I suspect the real inspiration for the music to have a connection to the story Alistair told me of the day Sean turned up brandishing a Rachel Stevens album and also, mercifully with no apparent influence, Best Foot Forward - The Best of REO Speedwagon (Which incidentally has the worst album cover of all time - go on, look it up on Amazon, in fact I'll save you the bother - here's the link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Foot-Forward-REO-Speedwagon/dp/B000026H04/ref=sr_1_2/202-).  Should you be suffering temporary insanity and actually buy it please tell Amazon how you were directed there and maybe they will sponsor the link.

Possibly the reason why Principles is the only track not rerecorded on the new synth from last year's sessions (apart from it being brilliant and beyond improvement) is that the handclaps are real (as you might notice from the odd accidental beat I threw in here and there) and we -particularly Claire - risked repetitive strain injury by er, repeating the performance.

We really should change the lyrics and send it to the High Street store of the same.  You know: 'Come to Principles/It's all at Principles' etc.  I'd have no shame anyway.

Be Who You Are ¯

Alistair: ‘Be who you are’ is the most loving thing which you can say to anyone you care about. Even if it means losing them in the process.. Discuss!

Mark: This is a completely Alistair solo effort.  If we ever played it live the rest of us would have to just leave the stage.  Or we could stand behind his back and pull faces.  And as a solo performance the track is the closest to Alistair's 1-man-band Scores On The Doors - oh yes, between the disbanding and rebonding of Real PD, Alistair has produced over a dozen albums under that moniker and there are some utterly fantastic songs lurking here and there in his oeuvre waiting to be unleashed on the wider world some day.  This is certainly a very good song.  You don't get to find out exactly what the situation is until very near the end and I'm not ashamed to say I cried the first time I heard it.  I know I sound like a complete wreck but it has actually been said of me in the past that the most emotion I'd ever shown was once when one of my nostrils flared so it's got to be an improvement.

Love is a Lizard  ¯

Alistair: It’s a very 80s title. You always got lizards in those gloriously over-budget Duran Duran type videos with people wearing face paints and dayglo swimming costumes. There’d always be some salamander peeping out from behind a rock to cast a beady reptilian peeper over the whole shenanigans, clearly signifying something. If there’s one song on this album which sounds exactly as I had envisaged it, except even perhaps slightly better, it’s this one.

Mark: And are you any the wiser now as to exactly why love is a lizard?  I know this wouldn't win an Ivor Novello for best song musically and lyrically (though you never know - they dish them out to some right toss) but it was wonderful fun to record so hopefully that comes across and it has a great, really well realised overall 'sound' with a variety of fantastic noises cropping up, which I guess we can put down to Alistair's production.  The opening chant was supposed to give it a Village People type feel but I think now it sounds more like an intro to a song from a musical (in a good way).  Unusually you can hear clearly hear Adrian leading the chorus and this turns out to be Not a Bad Thing.  After a namecheck on Vitamin P, Kim Wilde is definitely referenced again, this time in the style of some of the bvs so obviously that is a Good Thing too.  It could have been a single but it 'leaked' onto the net too long ago already.

Eye Contact

Alistair: I love Claire’s singing on this. She comes over all Sharleen Spiteri. 

Right Up My Street

Alistair: This song is dedicated to my friend Adam who nearly had his website shut down by the Daily Mail for posting something mildly satirical about the paper…

I spent most of my twenties living abroad, and I would travel back to the UK for my holidays. It’s that moment when you come out of baggage reclaim after landing at Heathrow and you’re back in the UK, and the first thing you see is a little WHSmiths with all the tabloids waiting to greet you and poison you with their twisted account of what life in the UK is all about, and who’s where in the pecking order of pointless celebrity and self-promoting politicians. By the millions we invite these insidious things into our lives every day. They are parasitic by nature. Yes, this is a rant! Musically I so wanted this to be like a Ray Davies song. And I guess the bridge bit (‘paperboy’s wheels’) does sound a bit like him. But the rest of it predictably sounds for all the world like the bloody Pet Shop Boys, sweetie. I’m hoping Malcolm Arnold’s estate doesn’t sue over the middle bit, which is nicked off one of his English Dances, the one which is used as the theme to ‘What the Papers Say’. I transposed it to make it fit, which I don’t think you’re supposed to do with classical music. The choice of key is everything in classical music, isn’t it, each one having a particular mood or emotion associated with it. Well, I rode roughshod over that rule in the name of expedience and thievery, ha ha…  

The Banshee Wailed and Nothing Happened

Alistair: Steve wrote it late one evening - he cooked it up, wizard-like, like a spell out of nowhere. It's the kind of piece that takes you places in your mind... 

Catsuit ¯

Alistair: Do ‘cat burglars’ actually wear catsuits? I’m beginning to doubt this and it is the central metaphoric premise of the song’s lyric! Adrian imagined this as something really pervy, (surprise!) and suggested it would have a video with lots of ladies in skintight bodysuits doing saucy dance moves. I was appalled. It is a spiritual song to me, in the same vein as ‘The Whole of the Moon’ by the Waterboys; it’s about feeling like a fake and admiring someone who seems utterly genuine and at ease in their skin, totally transparent and with no side to them. Authenticity is such an attractive characteristic. On a less high falutin plane, the breakdown section is my homage to the now-defunct and much lamented shouty-lady band Mis-Teeq. 

Dress Code (part II) ¯

Alistair: This started life in its embryonic stages as a Dust Reunited (Alistair’s side project with indie folkster Martyn H) song until Martyn decided he didn’t like it. But the Real PD suit R&B. The original single version had a strange kind of log-drum thing going on, not dissimilar to what you hear at the start of ‘Stripped’ by Depeche Mode: it was kind of a bass doubling up as a drum. For the album remake I decided to make the rhythm section more identifiably hip-hop. Someone actually mistook this for Beyonce and Jay Z. This deluded listener must surely have been inebriated at the time, but nevertheless…! 

Hypnotised Kids Dance ¯

Alistair: I’ve never been hypnotized and I sometimes wonder what it would be like. But I certainly wouldn’t let the character in this song do it. It’s just a little comic study of a morally dubious situation where everyone is exploiting everyone else. The stage hypnotist derives power from exploiting his victims but at the same time he’s earning a pittance and everyone perceives of him as some kind of saddo Vaudeville throwback. The whole deal is quite grubby: he’s essentially a comedy grotesque. I’m really satisfied with the way this one turned out.

I Reserve the Right to Change My Mind

Alistair: It’s not often you receive a demo of a song as a video file of someone playing a piano in an empty house stripped of furnishings. But that’s what Adrian sent me for this. That basically set the lyrical agenda to a certain extent: it had to have some reference to time passing and the transitory nature of things. I was going for something not depressing, just philosophical. Of all the songs on the album, I found this the hardest to sing as, although it is a ballad, it rattles by at quite an unforgiving pace and so thinking about phrasing, for example, becomes difficult. It isn’t quite in the ‘Windmills in your Mind’ league though, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.  

Mark: Strange that the final 2 tracks are the closest in tone and sound to our 80s output.  This clearly is a track which bar a bit of tape hiss we were clearly capable of producing back in the day - maybe the lyrics might be more mature and the piano a little more retro-sophisticate but in essence this is old-skool PD.  The title comes from my disclaimer on the 'Stuff We Liked In 2006' page of this site, but I think it's a good philosophy to remember and an unspoken truth when somebody makes you a promise they might not be able to keep forever.  Actually now, I would like to remove The Gossip from my top 10 as it has become a hit since on the back of a TV advert and thus is no longer cool enough and replace it with 'Monster Hospital' by Metric with its fantastic refrain of 'I fought the war/and the war won'.  The MSTRKRFT mix is particularly fine too (Monster Hospital that is - I Reserve The Right To Change My Mind doesn't have any remixes to my knowledge).

 Downsizing Pluto ¯

Alistair: I remember reading that some children in America were so distraught that their favourite planet was about to lose its planetary status that they tried to petition NASA to have a rethink and grant Pluto a reprieve. That was the initial inspiration for the song. The song revealed itself quite slowly, and turned out to be about the gradual loss of the comforting certainties of childhood as you grow up to discover that the universe, as well as the emotional terrain we travel, is fluid and scarily unpredictable and ultimately unknowable... >gulp<. Despite all that, this song has something of a carnival atmosphere. A dark and chaotic carnival...

Mark: When Alistair had starting writing this track he asked me what I thought it might be about from the title and I guessed it might be a metaphor for reassessing the value of a relationship.  Apart from this being a little similar in content to 'Mistake Party' from our last album, it is quite a Neil Hannon way of signalling what the song might be about  - best example ever of this is Alexis Strum's 'Bad Haircut (that won't grow out)' - so Alistair went away and endlessly reworked the lyrics and music, possibly spending so much time he lost enthusiasm and perspective to the degree that before the recording was finished we were already talking in terms of it being a B-side. 

Alistair: ...weeeeell, that's kind of true: I was actually quite chuffed with the lyrics; I just remember thinking the music was a bit too drummy and feeling like I'd tried to do a Trevor Horn job on something which perhaps didn't suit the bells 'n' whistles approach! Aaanyway...

Mark:...only on returning to the track did we realise how like a brilliant finale it sounded (I'm sure you will agree - or maybe you'll have to give it time as well) despite probably the most awkward and unwieldy chorus in Real PD history.  If it sounds like several people are singing several different songs at once by the end this is because it might be true - it just kept evolving, including individual interpretations of what the melody should be (this is the official excuse anyway).  So stylistically-like-it-fell-off-1986's-Paranormal does it become that you can hear the spectral return of Guy (see Photo archive) in a strange noise - although it is in tune and on the beat - which transpires to be Steve. In our parallel universe of unreality I can see this being a single in Japan and Germany led by popular fan choice with a luridly coloured video using early 80s effects like CSO (a cheap ancestor of CGI) - think of old hip hop videos but more sci fi.  Actually, we might just be capable of that.....