Funk The Night Up (Last Night On Earth) is an INXS type funk-rocker celebrating the joys of a BIG NIGHT OUT!
The song started out as a riff Joe had recorded on his laptop. Henk took this riff and added the melody, theme and words. Siljan Panovski produced the first demo.
In April 2020, Steven Separovich (aka column:inches) took hold of it and totally reworked it. This is the result. I particularly like the INXS style call-and-response theme.
This is a song about anonymous British grafitti artist "Banksy" whom both Joe and I are big fans of.
Joe lives in Swansea (Abertawe), Wales, and a lot of our stuff is recorded down there nowadays. Around Christmas 2018, a new Banksy mural appeared on a garage in Port Talbot, Wales, and Joe and his younger daughter Lily went to see it.
Excited by this -- and leveraging an existing guitar riff Joe already had -- we wrote a song about Banksy.
After a few iterations, he and I got together at his house in Swansea in February 2019 and completed the song. We hope you like it.
'Cos after all, there's always hope...
A completely straightforward ska / calypso tinged celebration of a very simple theme -- going on holiday!
This dreamy, "Richard-Hawley-meets-the-Smiths" jangle fest is a rumination on suicide and takes it's title from the famous Stevie Smith poem.
A jangly pop jaunt through one of the most volatile flashpoints in any relationship -- navigating whilst driving!
My wife Juliet and I get on famously (which is why we are married in the first place!) and rarely fight.
But on two recent holidays -- one driving up the Oban coast in Scotland and one in the Ardeche, in the south of France -- we found ourselves *politely* disagreeing...on which direction to take!
As the song says, Juliet is "analogue", preferring paper maps and her natural sense of direction; whereas I am definitely "digital", relying on GPS and satellite positioning systems.
But rather than focus on the negative (our silly fights about directions) I wanted to pivot these episodes into a positive realisation:
"...If Juliet v Satellites costs us twenty minutes time
What's that compared to the love we share
For our entire lives?
If Juliet v Satellites is the worst fight of our lives
Then I think we'll be alright
We'll be just fine...".
Indeed!
If a silly squabble about left versus right is our biggest issue, then we're probably in a very good place together, generally!
So...this is ultimately a love song. I hope you like it. More to the point, I hope Juliet does! :-)
A piano led ditty that recalls a trip to Paris in November 2014, when Joe and I walked for hours through rainy Montmartre in the early hours, looking for shelter and peace from spectres of ghosts past.
A jangly, poppy, straightforward love song. Almost everything that can go wrong does go wrong in the protagonist's life...but he just doesn't care because he is "in love with a girl".
"I Want It" is a synth and guitar driven meditation on addiction. Although the exact addiction remains unspoken -- drink; drugs; sex; food -- the underlying desire is addressed; throbs in unison with the ominous beat.
A jangly condemnation of busybodies who invade one's privacy with intrusive questions. Written about a neighbour I once had.
"Baby, When You Leave", is a 1940s era crooner song written by Joe and his oldest daughter Anna (15 at the time). For one track only, "The Third Space" do Sinatra.