Sometimes you badly need to hear again something you listened to for a while
a long time ago, and haven't heard for ages since.
At uni, as everyone my age who went to university calls it, I listened a lot
to Come's "Eleven Eleven" album, which I bought on CD. I don't remember
buying it, or why I thought I might like it - probably a review in the NME
or something - but it was an amazing experience listening to it the first
few times, aged eighteen or so, really raw and secretly rather terribly
afraid of the world my educational ambitions had pitched me into. Along with
American Music Club's "Mercury", that album was one of the places I lived
when I wasn't at home in my own skin.
There was a solo track by Thalia Zedek, Come's singer, on the cover CD for
the UK music mag "Uncut" the other month, and when I listened to it I
remembered what an amazing thing her voice was. Infinite dyke-sadness is a
powerful affect, and it made perfect sense for me to identify totally with
it when I was a lot younger and hadn't a clue about anything.
Now I have all those songs from that CD in my head every five minutes or so,
I pick up a guitar and I start trying to figure out one of the guitar parts,
I try singing like that and of course I can't and it's ridiculous, and I
suddenly want to get hold of all the other Come CDs and listen to them too,
all the time.
Gonna scratch you a letter
just like you did to me
was on one of them I got out of the library once;
I don't remember being born -
I'm not from where my mother's from
is from "Fast Piss Blues" on Eleven Eleven. Or there's
It's just a
power failure.
and it's a matter of time -
why don't you hold me
and find the switch? Why don't you
hold me
and feel the switch?
from "Power Failure". So the lyrics could be pretty good, too. But you have
to hear them in the right voice. I couldn't sing that stuff, which really
annoys me but there you go.
- Dom
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