Bright Eyes
Lifted or The Story is in the soil keep your ear to the ground

Fopp has closed down now. Sometime (May? June?) all the shops in Bristol (and there were three of them) and presumably all over the country (even if Bristol feels like all of the country now) ghosted themselves out of existence almost overnight. Jack and I pressed faces up against the glass in horror, at the same time kind of marvelling at the beauty of the empty shelves. I had read in the newspaper that HMV had taken them over, but only for the internet sales.

Somewhere on the first visit to Edinburgh when we were searching for flats, or somewhere in the first week or so when we were searching for meaning, we all wandered up Cockburn (pronounced “co-burn”, we were disappointed to learn) Street, the cobbles etc; Veronica pointed it out to us (she knew Edinburgh better than we did) and said that it would be our new favourite place. And yes, we went in (together? Separate?) and it did become certainly an important place. I poked around in there at some point and saw a new member of staff being shown around the shelves. The manager was explaining the deal behind having certain albums at £5 each; “If you don’t have these in your collection, there’s something wrong and we can help”. I fell in love with Fopp. I became infuriated with the Bristol one when they started to reorganise the CDs into categories like “alternative pop”, “singer-songwriter”, “pop” and “alternative rock”. Although I would love to have sat down and worked out precisely who was where, and what, and why.

I was in Edinburgh Fopp one day and this album was playing. The first track is nearly ten minutes long. It’s incredible and remains so. I do get tired of the idea of the troubadour, but it is delivered with so much spite and innocence (and really, really, really, because I’m aware of how those are pandered around…). It’s difficult to describe what he sings about, but I’m fairly sure he’s standing on the seashore. The madness is prevalent and he means every word, but it’s more real than it sounds, especially when he sings “It’s cool if you keep quiet but I like singing”…it isn’t quite the silliness of ‘yes I’m mad but I have more inner truth than you’, and the way it stops abruptly, he is a fish lifted, pulled and plucked to the sky, you can almost feel the hook going into the side of his mouth and ripping him way from what he knew.

There is something of the valley in his voice, and I mean the idea of the American one…he does sound like something of a spoiled California child…he was very young (his name is Connor…?) when this came out…22? There is an urgency to it, this second song. Soon, I will disappear. He skitters his voice unevenly around the stresses and patterns of what should be spoken – that maze of memories…when he sings about being on a swing…I can’t not imagine feet dangling in the corner of a screen as the camera pans away from the empty and tragic room. Are singer-songwriters trying to be beautiful and sad? Give me all your pity and your money now; all of it.

They retain a mistake…how realistic is it? He tells us in the second song they need to keep a record of their mistakes as well as their love…but the trumpet glissando that runs down before the recording stops and a female says “Oh., I’m sorry” and that’s ok, and 1-2-3 1-2-3 it begins again…does it sound too false? How false would it be to falsify a mistake?

I saw them play in King Tuts in Glasgow with Dan. It was a January or February, it was 2003 and we caught the bus from Edinburgh. I’m sure I got in trouble for saying the wrong thing on the way back, but it was an amazing gig. I understand King Tuts is quite an established venue in Glasgow. We went in, I remember only the back room now. It opened further, darker and deeper than I thought it would…I’m sure we only thought it was a tiny venue…there were trumpeters and cellists there within the Bright Eyes band (is a band? Are they session musicians? Is he the brains? The beauty? Is there a difference?)

You Will? You will? Such a callous love song…I completed you and that’s why you’re here, how awful that must feel…you are the reoccurring kind. A boomerang, they say…you do wonder about love, about the nature of eternal return, the nature of taking people granted, the nature of exploitation and love and the difference between the two (it took so long to figure out). It sounds like a Scottish Christmas, when all the happiness floods the room, and for that reason, I feel the cold air and see the bright lights all at once. What is it that’s so comforting about that? A statement becomes a question becomes a statement. And then sinister of “I want a lover I don’t have to love” – and we’re back to those sad singers who “play sad”.

I learned “A bowl of oranges” for those early Bristol gigs…there’s something breezy about it that worked well with the wooden floorboards, excitement, summer and fireworks of that time…each person I encountered, I couldn’t wait to meet. Some have gone now but I feel a different emotional connection to this album now, and to that time. When the song finishes, with glorious words about loves uneven remainders being the fractions of a whole, and the story told from the fault-lines of the soul, there’s a weird meandering piano line with “noise” and wash, funny little guitar licks in the acoustic vein…I missed this part off when I put the song onto a compilation (to be played in the orange kitchen of John Street, to be followed by Annie Di Franco, discussing gasoline, 9/11 and the train-lines)…Dan always said that it was the most important part of the song…I’m not too sure. Rather like the end of James and the Cold Gun, I thought it was just adding a kind of “look, this is serious” to a thing that was serious anyway.

Something happens in the next song…he whines about meeting his friends in a bar, about selling his soul for a bag of gold, which one of us would be the foolish one? I lose patience with him here. Sounds far too much like a teenager storming off to his room, bleating and calling his Mum a fascist. Screaming instead of meaning, calling in the marching drums to bolster up his complaint.

How much of music is sadness? Whenever I hear these kind of anti-folk, “underground” (and well-beloved by the surface) things, I wonder about the permanency of music. I love watching music videos when I go to the gym…watch the videos and dissect, analyse…I saw one involving a car, a toy car, a man, a toy man. When they were making it, did they consider it an archaeological piece…did they hope in years to come it would be plucked out of vaults and held up as “classic” – maybe no-one tries for classicism anymore. Bright Eyes is singing about varying tableaux of lives, made of paint (they remind me of cars in motion, watching people as if they’re within a zoo) – this will not last…there is something of the confessional here, all his art is a waste of paint. It is becoming rather like Eliot’s grim warning of pure self-expression being heralded as art, when anyone, the madman, the fascist, the football hooligan, the miserable can stand screaming on the street corner and legitimately call it “art”.

I do like the list of “my wrinkled map, my chart of stars and that compass crap”… it’s like Bob Dylan with 25% added extra music.