Songs: The Stores Of Not To Be

notes / gigs / releases

Nobody else at the Rugby Club
Had any idea that he wrote books
He was afraid they would laugh so he kept it to himself
But he poured his heart into every line
And he kept on going for his whole life
He had them all stacked up on secret shelves

He wrote a whole library of his own
And it came as some surprise
When his children finally discovered it
In the month after he died

When they clambered up the ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where he hoarded all his stores of not to be
He would clamber up that ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where he hoarded all his stores of not to be

The singer didn't really want the band to stop
But the drummer had to leave because he'd got a new job
And the keyboard player wasn't hiding his relief
But the bass player looked like he was going to cry
And after their last gig I found out why
He'd just paid to press up 500 CDs

It was another album that nobody would listen to
Another sealed up cardboard box
That he'd stack with the others that were gathering dust
In the corner of his loft

And he would clamber up the ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where he hoarded all his stores of not to be
He would clamber up that ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where he hoarded all his stores of not to be

She flew across the field like a Bunty Heroine
They even called her The Princess Of The Left Wing
But in the county semis when she twisted her knee
She had never felt such pain
She was determined not to go through that again

She'd worked in Smiths to buy that stick
Every Saturday for a year
And she couldn't bear to look at it
When she ended its career

So she clambered up the ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where she hoarded all her stores of not to be
She would clamber up that ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where she hoarded all her stores of not to be

In another Universe that's not far from here
He went and bought a drum machine
Him and the singer had a Top 10 hit in Greece
She represented her country in the Olympics
She even won a bronze medal with that same stick
And you can study his novels for your GCSEs

All those records that nobody will listen to
All those books that no-one reads
They're never gone they're only put
Somewhere just out of reach

So lets clamber up that ladder through the hatch into the roof
Where we hoard all of our stores of not to be
And let's bring them down the ladder and let's see if they still work
And shake off the dust of years of not to be

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

This one came together quite quickly, but there was a LOT of work involved in writing it. The original idea came from seeing the band Scarlet Tuesday doing their last ever gig at The Buffalo Bar last year. It reminded me of all the other times that I'd seen bands finish, often with some members more keen to keep going than others, and the PATHOS of the situation, especially when they've still got STOCK that they're now never going to shift. It also made me think about all the songs that people toil over for AGES which will never ever EVER get performed again, and how sad that is, and how it MUST surely be a METAPHOR for something or other. I think I even wrote down some THORTS about it at the time, but then left them behind in the pub.

The idea sat in my head for a while, then I guess i was REMINDED of it by reading "Get Back: The Beatles Let It Be Disaster" which is a) ACE and b) a bit geeky, as it chronicles - not minute by minute, but SECOND BY SECOND - every SINGLE moment on ALL the tapes available of The Beatles writing and recording "Let It Be". It is ACE, also REASSURING, in that it turns out that the biggest band in the world EVER still behaved like every other band that has ever been formed. It was lovely.

So yes, the idea came back into my head just recently when I was gently unbunging myself and writing a few new songs, and I wrote a first verse all about a band doing their last gig, then thought it might be a bit BIGGER than that, so decided to call it "The Books The No-One Reads" and do it all about the OTHER types of creative NESS that has energy expended on it then just disappears - including "the DVDs that don't get re-released on DVD, the comics no-one collects". In the WAKE of Christmas, see, I had BOTH The Complete Hamish MacBeth AND Judge Dredd Case Files to read through, so these things were on my BRANE.

The tune I was using at this point, however, turned out to be EERILY similar (i.e. THE SAME AS) to Family Wedding 2021, so i needed a NEW TUNE. HANDILY i had a CD of several such things that I'd been given by Mr Francis Albert Machine as part of our experiment to see if i could use some of HIS tunes with MY words, and the fifth and final song turned out to fit nicely. I then wrote a SECOND verse (the one about the old guy writing books) and after CONFERENCE with The Grass In My Field that night, about what ELSE i might write about in this song, she came up with the idea of a Hocker Player. GOOD ONE!

Next day I got the CHORDS from Mr Machine so's i could play the song myself and got the final verse written. At this point the chorus went "Take down the stairs - the retractable stairs!" which, as The Posts Of My Goal pointed out, wasn't TERRIBLY good, so I returned once more to the corner of the bedroom and worked out the whole OTHER chorus which it now possesses and, in a FLOURISH of ACTIVITY swapped the first and second verses around (so it's clear from the beginning that it's NOT another song just about bands), wrote the last verse and came up with the TITLE - until that point the chorus had gone "So he clambered up the ladder through the hatch into the roof, where nur nur nur, nur nur nur, nur nur nur nur". I think the version i finished with is a bit better.

So there you go - as I say, it didn't take too long once I get going but it was a TWISTED ROAD of many TURNS and U-TURNS along the way!