Annotations: Looking At My Hands

This song is mainly the result of glaring into the harshly lit mirror in our toilet at work on several mornings and thinking "oh God but I look rough." That mirror's like the infra-red lights at the disco I reckon, it highlights grey hairs. One day I looked down at my hands, back up at my face, and forced myself to remember that I wasn't just a near cadaver stumbling close the edge of doom, actually life was pretty good.

The song from then on is a selection of some of my favourite Things I Say In The Pub. For instance, I've always liked the idea that The Validators look more like a bunch of parents lurking at a barbecue than a stereotyped ROCK band. Also, as so many of my friends have passed into their thirties there's been much discussion of how being old enough to have a clue what you're on about enables you to have lot more actual fun than being clueless in your twenties. Similarly you've usually got a bit more cash and less debts by that point, so can actually afford to do the things you could only hope to do before.

Most of all is the fact that these days I'm extremely grateful to have such an excellent bunch of friends. I've got to the point where everyone I hang around with is someone I really WANT to hang around with, rather than someone who I just bump into down the pub or at gigs, where we tolerate each other. It's fantastic.

The final verse is generally the sort of thing I tend to bellow outside the pub after a particular good night talking about the above with the aforementioned excellent friends.

The song arrived at a Validators practice sounding pretty normal and then was significantly roughed up by the band. Wherever possible we try to find a better way of playing it than the indie chug which is my default setting, but we were all especially thrilled to come up with the forceful strum of this one. "We've never played anything like this before!" we remarked, for LO! we hadn't.

I especially like the stops after each chorus. When we first started playing together Tim refused to do these, largely because we couldn't do them properly, so it's nice to know we can carry them off, and I especially like the one after the middle bit, where our esteemed producer slipped in what I believe is called a "Clearmountain Pause" in production circles. I think it's me complaining about cocking up the vocals, played backwards, but I'll leave that for you to check yourself.