Songs: Hills And Hollows

notes / gigs / releases

We called them The Hills And Hollows
But they were mountain ranges to us
When you come from a land as flat as the fens
A hill's anything above sea level

Kerb Vertigo
Hill starts on a bridge
Waiting for trains at Tallington
A footpath by a ditch

Some yearn for cliffs and valleys
Or landmarks miles high
But I love a land where the spirit's level
And the skyline's full of sky

On the road from Deeping to Glinton
The steeples and trees and the dykes
Pass by along the horizon
In an orderly beautiful line

On the train into Peterborough
My heart soars at Stevenage
As the land lies low in my soul I know
It doesn't get bigger than this

Some yearn for cliffs and valleys
Or landmarks miles high
But I love a land where the spirit's level
And the skyline's full of sky

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

This song had a road to recording as long and Not Actually Interesting as a road across the fens. The words were first written for a poetry competition - the wrong poetry competition, in fact! I thought I'd entered the competition to be Peterborough's Poet Laureate but later discovered I'd entered the John Clare poetry competition by mistake! I eventually entered The Peterborough All-Saints Wide Game Team (group B) for the Poet Laureate competion... and came second!

Anyway, not being one to waste a lyric, I then tried this out on a tune the Validators had written during one of their me-free jam sessions. It didn't really work, and that tune became Burn It Down And Start Again instead, so these words were free once more.

Now, whenever we record an album Mr T Pattison will always say "ooh ooh, can we do a jam in the studio please can we please?" and, as he'd been very well behaved, we gave him his wish and worked up an extremely long thumping tune that nobody thought much of. However, when I listened to it again a few weeks later I thought a bit of judicious editing could make something of it, so when I was next up at Snug Studios we sat down and cut it up. I added my vocal and it seemed to work, though something still seemed to be missing. "Can we try a single beeping noise?" I said. It wasn't the most exciting overdub I've ever done, but it seemed to work!