YOU SAID WHAT? ON PAPER? THE INDISCRETIONS OF A WANNABE LYRICIST

I SUSPECTED WHAT THIS PACKAGE was as I felt its contents, and the alarm bells were ringing when I turned it over to see that the sender, via my old friend and current emptier of his attic/basement/wherever he hoards, John, was allegedly “Bearnest Zuel of 40 years ago”. Oh shit.

Opening it I pulled out a bundle of paper-clipped pages, the top page looking almost sepia – jeez, I’m not that old am I? -  but in fact merely a thick brown notebook sheet next to mostly white ones. At the top of this page it said Who Am I?, followed by four crossed out lines, four intact ones – presumably considered worth keeping – then two more (in red) crossed out, before we were back with another Who Am I? Was this confusion, ignorance or denial? Hmm.

Some of the pages were regular reporter notebook size, some foolscap, and some, titled Office Memorandum, from a pad clearly “borrowed” from a Tax Office stationery cupboard which may or may not have made its way home. (Or maybe actually was used in the office, just not for Tax Office purposes. Either way, I’m saying nothing officer on the advice of my solicitor.)

One office memo page was titled Open Ground (dated 4/12/84 because, of course, history-in-anticipation needed to be acknowledged) and began “Well I might be wrong/But it’s too late to argue”, and truer words were never scrawled. There was no denying what this was, and even more tragically, no denying who had done it – that chicken scratching masquerading as writing was as incontrovertible as a fingerprint, as damning as DNA.

Bundled up here were the remnants, the scraps, the overthought afterthoughts of the years I was writing lyrics. Lyrics which were at times taken by John and set to music for one of his bands – The Flies and Smelly Tongues, some may remember. If you don’t, I can recommend; the bands at least, if not necessarily the lyrics.

(Not that this is automatically some “aw shucks, not me” false modesty shtick, because I reckon some of the things I wrote back then, not included here, were pretty good actually. Some still hold up too alongside the excellent music. But where’s the fun in talking about that?)

Now I’ve briefly written about the lyric writing business before: those days of pining for one woman obsessively, passing through a few other states of being that came in rhyming couplets, and half-hoping I might be the Hal David to John’s Burt Bacharach, the Leiber to his Stoller, the Goffin to his King, the other Bernie to his Elton John, or – if the Michael Moorcock novels and right drugs had hit at the right time – the Robert Hunter to his Jerry Garcia.

What the hell was I writing about? At least when not writing about Her?

[Deep sigh] Life, man, Life. The life I could see even if not everyone else could, the insights I had that others were missing. Take this, from Open Ground: “Second hand people with too many problems/Look for solutions; what’s wrong with a problem?” People, my people, hark to my warning! Don’t make me the Cassandra of this age. “No one is happy, what’s so surprising?/If everyone lives, then everyone’s dying/Singing with hands on their hearts.” Yeah! Take that shallow Halls everywhere. I told ‘em, I did, and they stayed told.

Yes, even without hearing any of my attempts at Elvis Costello wordplay (“Her heart is less than a fraction of what she says aloud/He waits for some distraction, but nothing is allowed to be said”) I was, quite obviously, putting the earnest in Bearnest, wanting to be seen, needing to be noticed. Like in Take This Situation – which John did write music to as his notations above the words confirm – where I sobbed “I said I’d die for your love/And now you hold me to my promise”, before revealing yet another attempt at being Temu Elvis with “Cold comfort or a cold compress/To starve the cold or feed the fever/My word of mouth is out of place/I turned from doubt to a firm believer”. Sigh.

(This at least was ’84. The stuff I was writing four years earlier, like the turgid dismissal of capitalism in What Do I Write? – rhyming “much sense” with “dollars and cents”, and not, you’ll be shocked to hear, painting it positively – and the faux savoir faire in Imaginary Lovers, where I explained that at least the imaginary ones saved you from “qualms of conscience to stand in your way” as if I had an option anyway, what of them? Trust me, they do not bear a second visit. Dear god, no.)

Influence pedlars of the first (holy) order

I tell you what seems to have imprinted on me more than sex – or the lack thereof, for what now, to anyone sane, would seem very clear reasons – and certainly more than politics or business, and that was the bloody Catholic church.

How else to explain Open Ground boasting references to the slaughterhouse call, salvation being a hot and cold dish, a place where nothing is sacred and nothing is free; how Patience Is A Virtue (“falling due too often” apparently) begins with “She asked for directions to an early grave/He asked only to be saved”; the soul in danger in Obsession; and Pornographic Eyes, while rhyming disguise and lies with eyes, opines on religion being “where pious men tell of deeds from long ago” and wait til they can “turn off their libido”?

Libido? I know, I know.

None of these sheets show any of the attempts John and I made at the Burroughsian cut-up method of lyric writing, or as we might have put it, the get pissed, write lots of lines and then amuse ourselves putting them together in new order method – a name which, admittedly, does not have the brevity of Burroughsian – and I am probably grateful for that. And he tells me that he kept several more lyric sets that ended up as unrecorded songs, which presumably means they didn’t completely stink. Which is nice. Plus I do have the records of the songs that made it that far, so even better.

Still, to borrow a line in Take This Situation, “I’ve never been here before but the faces look familiar”. And given that familiarity breeds if not contempt then at least equal parts amusement turning to mockery and shame, I don’t know that I can actually thank him for sending me this package.

It may be time for me to bury these deep, deep, oh so very deep, in a memory hole to spare me ever being tempted to take them out, show them to someone and hear one of my own lines back at me: “But I don’t want to hear the stories anymore.”

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