And neat turns of phrase: Less a nightmare, more a dream gone wrong if you-ask-me. The lyrics throughout the album are great: full of lovely old expressions like ‘ Who’s ‘she’ the cats mother?’ More modern ones: Post-It Notes with Life-affirming quotes. Then we were on a roll and he asked me to write a verse which I’ve never done on anybody else’s song before and it felt dead weird… Then all these old guitar riffs I’d played years ago but which I’d given up on cuz I could never make them work, sort of popped out. Weirdly as with all the stuff of his he’s given me, when he jammed it through I instinctively harmonised on it even though I’ve never thought of myself as a harmony singer. Starkie grew up in Blackrod, which, all I know about is his take on it. There are four Winter lyrics and six by Starkie but he told me “Hazel wrote the lyrics to the verse she sings No Ghosts In Blackrod and I wrote the lyrics to the middle eight I sing in Flaming Car.”īlackrod is a place in Bolton it seems, I asked Hazel about the song: There is a fair bit of melancholy and less of the black humour that runs through Flux Capacitors songs. They work well together and the songs are fascinating, beautiful and strange. Hazel varies between fast-paced semi-spoken narration and folky harmonising. He has a fantastic singing voice – clear and tunefully enunciated. Gerards songs seem more lyrically vague, descriptive but non-specific. All told with a wicked sense of gallows humour. Hazel Winter is pretty much an open-book because of her previous artistic output: Solo albums, ‘Bleak’ Blogs, poemsand her Flux Capacitors songs tell the stories of her life: from suicidal thoughts ( Telephone Triage Assessment) to tales of touring and support slots where they nicked other bands riders… and everything in between. I wandered through, the collected memories of you ….sings Starkie at one point. It’s more the couple telling each other stories about their pasts and jamming until they become fully fledged songs. Despite having a now full-grown cat still-called The Kitten of Love, this isn’t a lovey-dovey relationship album. They live together, make music both together and separately. They were both guitarists in Blue Aeroplanes at one time or other.
They haven’t been together for that long – despite having known each other for some time. Hazel and Gerard are a couple as well as a musical unit. Great songs but some tough subject matter and odd detours… Genre-fluid (Alternative blues, skiffle-folk, bohemian art-pop …?) It’s a difficult album, which takes a few listens. Forget what I said in that bar / I think I must’ve gone too far / but the cat got the cream / and the kid got an electric guitar
0 kommentar(er)
