Please take your partner’s hand
Position your bodies for the lifelong dance
Please take your partner’s head
On intimate manoeuvres in the conjugal bed
Morphover and curl
Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl
Morphover and curl
Ticker tape religion in a changing world
Please take your partner’s eye
Examine every detail of that little white lie
Please take your partner’s feet
Retracing every step now until we meet
Morphover and curl
Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl
Morphover and curl
Ticker tape religion in a changing world
Please take your partner’s breath
An iron lung together now from birth to death
Please take your partner’s life
Always forever now man and wife
Morphover and curl
Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl
Morphover and curl
Ticker tape religion in a changing world
Morphover and curl
Snipping paper clippings of your favourite girl
Morphover and curl
Ticker tape religion in a changing world
This started life as a slow doom laded number with a simple bass line, and gravity defying Shepherd Tone. There was a touch of TG’s “Persuasion” about it. Coming back to it a couple of months later I tried doubling and then quadrupling the bass line in frequency and overlaying all three parts – a ‘trick’ I’ve been employing for 40 years. This produced the main plucked sequence you can now hear. Guitar, drums, brass and vocals later – much later, and you have the track.
Lyrically the idea of each verse starting with a dance instruction “please take your partner’s hand” came with the first hum over, but what these instructions were to be only took shape after some wrangling. Every time I sang “dance” the Men Without Hats song came to mind and to counter any such tendency the dance instructions became ever more macabre. The lifelong dance ending with the sharing of an iron lung. The obligatory Bolan reference comes in the line.
Please take your partner’s head
On intimate manoeuvres in the conjugal bed
Which is a reworking of a line from “Dreamy Lady”
Night is the right time
To get acquainted with my head
In my bed
So what of the chorus? The lyrics here are tangential to the verse not reinforcing the death spiral narrative but offering a respite by way of a collage of cut-up and processed lyrical imagery. Musically the rising Morphover & Curl was meant to lift and hang slightly suspended rather akin to the way the line in the 1970s Martini advert did 'It's the bright one, the right one. It's Martini'. Hinting at some sort of take off – in the advert it was a balloon here it segues to the Shepherd Tone.
I experimented with autotuning the chorus to accentuate the dynamics of the lift off, and it did have that nice yodelling aspect especially on the word Morphover, but it was a little too much and in the end I left just a touch of it in the final chorus.
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