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Alan Bean CD1 (PURE118CDS1) 2 CD's Released on 27th August 2001 on Too Pure Alan Bean, Horror Show, A Better Man Seven inch (PURE118S) has two remixes by Rothko and Munit |
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| Alan Bean Ever felt like giving up? Horror Show Not to be outdone, Not to be unrewarded. I put my best foot forward, It went straight in my mouth. She came in looking like a horror show, I said 'sit down sweetheart and let me tend your wounds, A Better Man I saw flowers by the side of the road,
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Other Information
The lyric went through so many revisions, it was incredibly hard to know at what point to tell the story from. Although I 'd written character based songs before like 'The Librarian' and 'She Can't Sleep No More' this was really where I started to write in this way almost exclusively. For me they are my better songs, though many disagree. I cringe a little when I hear me howling away about myself on the early songs, where as here I think I manage to convey something much more adult , whilst retaining some emotional weight. Photos on this page are all from the We Love the City tour and were taken by Rainford Bowley. The guy in the last picture carrying the guitars is Papa our roadie. |
The first single from Dead Media. This song really doesn't sound like anything we'd done before. As far as I remember it pretty much only features me and Jack, Antony does a little backing vocal but that's all.
I felt strongly that after We Love the City we should once again try something different. I knew that I would have felt uncomfortable going any further in the big pop production stakes but it was a surprise even to me as to how far we swung in the other direction. I was listening to Joe Meek and Raymond Scott at the time. I was interested in the sound of people discovering instruments. A lot of people misunderstood our intentions with the Dead Media album, it was supposed to sound naive. Theses songs weren't made on Pro-tools, they were made with cranky 70's synths and a rickety 8-track.
This is perhaps the most naive song of the bunch the rythmn track is from a crappy Casio keyboard going through a moog filter, and lots of buzzy keyboards going though guitar amps. I was flabbergasted when Too Pure chose it as a single, but was also delighted, I knew if I'd thought of it as a single whilst making it, it would have sounded completely different. At the very least I would have made sure more of the band appeared on the song.
Alan Bean was the fourth man to walk on the man, and I'd wanted to write a song about him for ages. I though of him as the Ringo Starr of astronauts. What makes his story even more song worthy is that he gave up being an astronaut to become a painter, the irony being he only paints pictures of himself and other astronauts walking on the moon.
You see I've always been interested in little stories. I'd much rather sing a song about someone feeling a small twinge of regret than someone who was suicidal, I guess because that's what life is about most of the time. Melodrama comes too easy to most songwriters, where as they flinch from a little bit of detail or any specifics. I've always wanted to tell stories that strike a deep chord with a small amount of people, rather than songs that mean only a little to a lot of people. I might be richer now if I'd done it the other way around but there you go.
Horror Show's a goody. We did so many songs for Dead Media and I'm not sure that we made the right choices in the end. Horror show was supposed to sound a bit like Missy Elliot's 'Supa Dupa Fly', oh well. Horror Show features only me where as A Better Man features a new line up of the Hefner big band, with Amelia on vocals and James Topham from Whistler on viola. One of the last songs we recorded together and something of a homecoming as we recorded it at Cafe Eric where we recorded our first single. If it's not obvious to you, than it is to me that on lot of these songs I'm singing about giving up music, but I'm still here.