Sure, I'd lived in terraced shitholes in Liverpool when I was a student, building mouldering totem poles of dishes and filling every one of the house's orifices with roaches and dog-ends, but they weren't proper houses. They were digs to be treated with the disdain that only a student who isn't really paying for them can muster.
My first proper house [out of a whole two!] was on Whipcord Lane in Chester. It was an end of terrace shithole. I had moved up in the world.
The greatest freedom of having my own house [well, my girlfriend who found the house and paid the mortgage with her proper job had a claim to it being her house, but she got to marry me, so she won the real prize...] was that I could bring friends back from the pub.
I'd drag pissed mates home from Telfords and treat them to Welsh oddities on the portable Aiwa stereo in the kitchen, if it didn't mangle the tape while rewinding. It had a psychopathic hatred of BASF Chrome tapes, that stereo. Or a psychopathic hatred of Welsh oddities...
Once, a very bemused mate endured an hour of Tystion -- hardcore, politicised Welsh language hip hop -- before he made a polite excuse and fell over the wall and into the next door neighbour's garden.
My most long-suffering compadre was Rich. I think he would have put up with anything for a free bag of Wotsits and a few after-hours bottles of Safeways Alsace beer. He would gurgle platitudes and lager bubbles in reaction to most of the stuff that I played him. But he liked Murry the Hump. He liked them so much, he would occasionally rewind my tatty copy of their demo tape [which had Phil Collins' No Jacket Required on the other side -- you could hear its ghastly ghostly presence during the gaps and quiet bits] so that he could hear 'New Deal' again.
And again.
And again.
'New Deal' was the one that we liked the most, see.
It had an insouciant and effortless shimmer to it. That was due, in part, to Gwion's vibrato'd chords in the introduction and a melody that could bring colour and light to all the world's dark places. Some music has a heart to it that makes you yearn for it like a lost love, even after just one listen. 'New Deal' is like that.
I still don't know what it's about. But my reading of the lyric is that it touches on resignation, simple pleasures, frustration, a love that is fading, the realisation there is no order to life. I don't know. It seems to fit any yearning feeling I have, which is probably why it still resonates with me.
Musically, it's got a classic, retro feel to it, more Hollies than Beatles, though; with echoes of a slightly countrified Byrds playing Hatful of Hollow.
And they sound like a proper band.
Bill and Curig are one of Welsh music's great lost rhythm sections [neither lasted very long for reasons that I suspect had nothing to do with music.]
But it's Matt's autumnal voice [all melancholy shades of brown and orange] and the wonderfully chosen notes that cascade from Gwion's guitar that provide the real ear candy.
This song fills me with joy and tears.
The version that they recorded on the album is okay, but like most of Songs of Ignorance, it's not a patch on the wonderful and intimate original demos.
It's one of the great missed opportunities, that album. Murry the Hump had the songs. They had better songs than anyone. But there's a smug bombast to the album's arrangements that kills the magic, rather than serving it. It's not bad. But it could -- and should -- have been a masterpiece.
Plus, it didn't have Phil Collins intoning backwards chants during the gaps and quiet bits.
'Songs of Ignorance' is available on iTunes and eMusic, and elsewhere too, probably.
Sara Weale, who used to curate Murry the Hump's website, has made all of their demos available, but I don't want her bandwidth to get a twatting on my account. So, I've nicked 'New Deal' and stuck it on my own webspace.
Let me know what you think of it.
http://adamwalton.co.uk/music/murrythehump_newdeal.mp3
©Adam Walton
2010
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