Blog: Panic Writing

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As mentioned last week, we are planning to INTERVENE in the forthcoming General Election by releasing our song You're A Tory Now as a single, thus awakening the nation's latent Anti-Tory good sense and sending Labour/Lib Dems/Greens (delete as applicable to your own prefernces) surging into Parliament on a wave of delight and happiness. Nothing can go wrong!

OR CAN IT?!? Last Monday Mr FA Machine sent me the latest mix of the song, which sounded GRATE, and I thus played it that evening to The Sounds In My Tune, purely for her information and not at all as a way of SHOWING OFF. We were both happily bopping along to it until the final line, which says "But if you voted Brexit/You are dead to me."

This has always been FINE in the live environment, when shouted at a room full of people who basically KNEW me, and also were already on-side, and appreciated what the song was all about. HOWEVER, as the aforesaid Ink Of My Newspaper pointed out, somebody hearing outside of those circumstances, especially during a possibly FRAUGHT general election campaign, might think that I genuinely want all Brexit voters to be KILLED.

We discussed it again in the morning and I was gripped by DREAD. Quite apart from the above, I actually know, like, and indeed love SEVERAL people who for their own (admittedly somewhat KRAZY) reasons voted Brexit. ALSO, obviously, someone was actually MURDERED for their political beliefs in the last election, and I could see that that lyric could VERY EASILY be taken out of context. ALSO ALSO there was an argument that the lyric could even mean that I could happily forgive anybody for being a Tory, but could NEVER forgive ANYBODY for voting for Brexit, irrespective of their usual choices.

As I say: PANIC! I put forward these points to The Vlads and so began one of the DISCUSSIONS that make me PROUD of the way we operate, mulling over the points and then engaging in a LENGTHY discussion about what we could do instead. In general I would not RECOMMEND this as a way of writing song lyrics, as a group of people emailing each other with suggestions is NOT necessarily the most free or creative way to do it, but along the way I did learn many things, including the fact that "airing" is a Young People's Description of that thing when you send someone an instant message and they do not reply - leaving "air", in fact. That bit of lyrics came courtesy of Validators with children!

Eventually, after much TO and also FRO, I had about five variations on the closing couplet, which I recorded for Frankie to SPLICE into the track. I then discussed it further with our INTERNAL COMMS TEAM, whittled it down to TWO and then came up with ANOTHER one which I duly recorded and sent off to The Vlads for further thinking. These ideas were all NON-political, swerving the song towards the sort of gags which said "Yes, I can cope with your political views but will NOT abide you saying 'these data'", for instance.

The consensus that evening (and by the way, NOTE the SPEED with which the mighty Validators machine works in these instances!) was that these were all Jolly Amusing, but lacked the power and point of the original. More suggestions weere made, and further discussion was had on-sofa, which led to a FINAL couplet which now leaves the last verse as this:

Of course we are both adults Friends can disagree But please God, do not tell me You admire the ERG

I was very happy with this and, PRAISE BE, so were ALL of the STAKEHOLDERS, and thus on Thursday I recorded it in my HOTEL ROOM - I was up in Leeds for a conference (more of which to come) so had to take my mini four-track with me to get it done. I wish I'd taken my GTR with me too, then I could have recorded a whole album about Being On The Road!

The new line has now been successfully inserted and we're moving towards a final mix, which means that we're nearly ready for the next stage: sending it out to people!

posted 11/11/2019 by MJ Hibbett

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