Not Even My Closest Friends - sleeve notes – Day For Night

Day for Night 

The sunken features of a satellite 

The moon tide turning as two stars collide

And love ignites            

Depth of field 

An image caught inside a Catherine wheel 

Rotating, turning now you can’t conceal 

Just how she feels 

 

The day is dressed, but still unlit 

The benzy buzzing of fingertips 

That spark a thought into a sound 

As the motorcade drives underground 

 

Edge of frame 

Peep through the curtain to that other plane 

Rewind forwards, and then backwards again 

In a looped refrain. 

 

Fade to black 

The film is over, and the screen retracts 

We leave the theatre in our stove pipe hats 

As the stars collapse 

 

The day is dressed, but still unlit 

The benzy buzzing of fingertips 

That spark a thought into a sound 

As the motorcade drives underground

 

This track is the closest to the small group of songs I recorded at West Square almost 40 years ago with Naomi. Back then it was a simple VCS3 pattern over which I laid vocals and vibes before then asking Naomi to sing them as her vocal style seemed more suited to the tongue in cheek cinema inspired tales of “mixing drinks and aeroplanes”. 

 

Here the first phrase that came to mind whilst singing over a synth pattern was “day for night” a film term that describes a now largely redundant technique of shooting what are ostensibly night time scenes during the day, but underexposing them.  Rather like back projection, day for night is far from convincing, but has its own charm. The phrase itself is perhaps more evocative than the technique. 

 

Having chosen the first phrase I decided to begin each verse with some kind of film term. As with the Naomi tracks the lyrics are mini melodramas - they could be outlines for 1980s pop videos in which lots of stylised action takes place with a performative vacuousness. There are plenty of nods to that and this, “the sunken features of a satellite takes in Bowie, Bolan and Reed in one go, “caught inside a Catherine wheel” is “Windmills of Your Mind” and so on.     

 

Musically it went from a simple backing, vibes and vocals to a full on orchestration, so much so that I had to start cutting back the velveteen layers to make any kind of sense of the mix. Vocally I tried to keep the delivery as unmannered and plain as possible, you can have too much chocolate in your box.  

This is the last track proper to be covered from the album which leaves "Bye", suffice to say it is not my dad speaking.