I put down a rhythm guitar first, for groove and vibe the next thing to go on, oddly perhaps, was the multi-tracked ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’ vocal - it was a clear idea I had in my head and defined a certain part of the character of the song, so it went in early, as did the brassy synth part, which picked the bones out of some of Barry’s keys from the improvisation to make a hook. As is a fairly standard practice for us now, - WFH veterans that we are - I sent Martyn some edited clips from the jam which he used to build a drum track which formed the bedrock to develop the song (no change there, then). Like several tracks on the album, Unholiness began as an improvisation in a writing session at Echo Zoo i October ’20. Barry’s first take on it was full-on Berlin/Paris cabaret, which was a hoot but unfortunately didn’t quite work with my melody, so we got it down to the verse/chorus you hear on the record. Which we hadn’t done for a long time… if ever, come to think of it. So the next day I sang it to Barry as we sat around the piano, old-school stylee. Yippee: demo vocal recorded on phone, job done.Įxcept… I had no guitar or keyboard with me that night, so I couldn’t hack out the chord progressions. I ended up with this big, torch-songish thing where each verse surged unstoppably towards a cliff edge where our overwrought narrator would fall off… or through… what, exactly? I had no idea what that would be until I realised - either through desperation, luck, synergy or the benevolence of the Shriekback über-spirit - that, with a minor tweak, ‘Space Blues’ could become ‘the space in the blues’ and I could fall through that. It took a few hours in my hotel room in Eastbourne to get the three melodic/lyric parts to sit together as a unified verse/chorus and then expand the lyric to three verses.
However, by the time we were in the rehearsal room in May 2021, I still wasn’t sure where the song was going - I had three distinct sections evolving, all quite promising, but not really unified lyrically or melodically: it sounded like there might actually be two separate songs there. That was soon stripped out I asked Martyn to send me a cleaned-up version of the drum groove and I started structuring the song over that. The improvisation had been given the working title ‘Space Blues’ because it was, well, spacey and bluesy, with a fair bit of Dave Gilmour-esque echoey guitar noodling. Listening through the 20-30 grooves we’d spawned in our 2-day jamming session in October 2020, I think there was only one candidate with the required 6/8 feel, and, luckily, it fit - sometimes it’s great when there’s no choice: it saves so much time.
So I clearly needed something pretty epic, quite downtempo, dramatic - or even melodramatic - and, the lyrics seemed to be suggesting, something in a 6/8 or ¾ rhythm. In this case, I had a few lines, including ‘be not afraid of beauty / do not avoid the light’ and ‘I am shimmer and glare / I am vanishing rare’, both of which made it to the final draught, and the over-arching - and, indeed, over-arch - working title, ’the sum of all our follies’, which didn’t, though it kinda tells you where I was at. Very often - well, almost always, actually - my first step in building a Shriek song is injecting lyric fragments from a notebook into a sympathetic host groovelet.