Annotations: Down The Narborough Road

This was originally written after a particularly miserable afternoon spent by Tom and I in Birmingham New Street Station on a Sunday after a gig. New Street is a HORRIBLE place, and this song was deeply heartfelt, but some of the original words made people WINCE (rhymining "Horses" with "Irish", for instance) so I RECYCLED one of the verses for Holdalls Is The New Name For Midland Mainline Lost Property and left it at that. Just after it was written I'd recorded a session version for Cambridge University Radio (although I actually recorded it at Kev's as normal) and left it at that.

CUT to several years later at the Indie Tracks festival in 2007 when I was talking to Mr Pete Green about TRANES and BIRMINGHAM, him having lived there and, well, TRANES being very much in evidence at the festival. He mentioned this song and I thought "Hmm, someone with the QUALITY CONTROL of Pete remembers it..."

FAST DISSOLVE to me sitting at work on August 1st 2007, a couple of days later, looking through my lists of Songs Not Properly Released to find some for the solo album, when i was REMINDED of this. I thought I'd have a quick go at REPLACING the missing verse which seemed to work out quite nicely, and when I got home i re-wrote some other bits so that when I FINISHED (at 7am next morning, 2/8/7, SPRINGING out of bed with a Good Idea for the Pinochet line) it was approx 40% BRAND NEW.

Recording was a BREEZE - it was one of the first I did, i think, and hadn't got the hang of the drum machine yet, which is why the bits between verse and chorus are a bit longer than they would usually be, I couldn't work out how to make them shorter!

This is one of the few songs I ended up doing TOTALLY solo - my favourite bits are the WHISTLING, put on because I kept thinking i could HEAR it on the song, which usually means it SHOULD be there, and the GUITAR SOLO. I am frankly AMAZED at my own RESTRAINT in having only two guitar solos on this album, although i can't help but notice that they're ONLY on the two songs I did on my own!