Songs: BBC2 (A New Hope)

notes / gigs / releases

Every magazine
I happened to read
In WHSmiths
Seemed to scream at me
"It's big and bold and it's new!"
"And it's coming soon"
"To a screen near you!"

And in order to inflame us
They showed a million trailers
Packed with special effects
I guess I ought to have guessed
But I'd hoped it would be
A romantic comedy
Until a round-table discussion
Late night
On BBC2
Changed my point of view
BBC2

And when it finally arrived
It nearly lived up to the hype
And what we got
Was a mis-directed epic
Packed with action
Explosions and disasters
Shame about the actors
They were cast against type
We stayed up all night
You should have seen the queue
It was on BBC2
A static picture of perfection
Me and you
On BBC2.

And though I got over-excited at the time
And bought the merchandise
It didn't take me very long
To realise
That though it's very flash and fancy
It'll never be a classic
Now my tie-in t-shirt lies unwashed
Unwanted
At the bottom of the basket

And I don't want to see scenes previously unseen
Widescreen
On the DVD


And in a year or two
On a Sunday afternoon
You'll see it there
On BBC2
It warrants two or three lines
In the Radio Times
Not even a photograph of you
On BBC2

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

This was written not long after seeing "The Phantom Menace". I remember going into WHSmiths and rooting through all the film magazines to find ANY new information or new pictures about it, DESPERATE and EXCITED for news. I also remember seeing the queues of people outside the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood who waited WEEKS so as to be the first in to see it , and feeling jealous. Actually I mainly remember seeing crowds of Star Trek fans GOADING them, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that it was a MASSIVE occurrence looming on my personal horizon for AGES, and then when it came it wasn't even vaguely as spectacular as I'd hoped.

MEANWHILE I was also starting to get over the Ghastliness surrounding the end of the Unpleasant Relationship mentioned variously elsewhere, and was beginning to see that, actually, it wasn't the end of EVERYTHING after all, that life was perfectly capable of carrying on again, and in fact it was slowly becoming just a memory that, in the course of a lifetime, didn't really matter much at all.

Much like (AHA!) a film that was a really big deal at the time, but now gets shown on BBC2 in the afternoons. To be honest, the main event I was thinking of was long before the original Star Wars trilogy got rereleased, when ITV showed "A New Hope" at 2.00pm one Sunday afternoon, as if it was Just Another Film. ALSO noticing that "A Matter Of Life And Death" (which is one of my favourite films EVER) was being shown on a weekday MORNING on BBC2 with no fanfare, again being a film that was massively popular at the time, but now sat alongside all those long forgotten black and white b-movies they used to fill up the Summer Holiday telly with.

The recording was quite unusual for us, as it's one of the few songs that started off with a click track. I had a GRATE Pub Idea about doing reverso sampling, having most things LOOPED but putting LIVE DRUMS on top, but in the end the only loop we used was the backing vocals. Yes, I'm afraid it's true, we cheated MASSIVELY. Tom and I (for this was before Emma had joined the band) spent a very pleasant couple of hours TOILING over the harmony arrangement, which I'd worked out at home but... er... got wrong, and had to be FIXED by Tom. We sang four bars each of all three parts, then chopped it in two, put the first half on one side of the stereo, the other on the other, and HOLA! An ANGELIC CHOIR!

The violin part got practiced in a MASSIVE ROOM. For some reason I booked the really really big room at Stayfree for a pre-recording practice, in the corner of which Tom and I sat one sunny evening working out what he'd play. I used to sing "BBC2" on the very last line, but one time I forgot and found that it sounded DEAD CLEVER to have the line "sung" by the violin instead. We were extremely pleased with ourselves, but this WAS a long time ago, so we were young and excitable, bless. Tim and Rob GRITTED their teeth and played along with the pre-recorded rest of the song, Rob did a LOVELY trumpet solo, and that was it done. Peasy!