Remember

Music & Lyrics : Peter Nuttall

Date Written : 8th October 1991

Album : Fear (Released September 1994)

I'd never written a song before. I'd written lyrics, albeit, plagarised ones which used themes and sometimes full sentences from songs I liked.  I had a book I took everywhere with me in my school bag and used study lessons (those lessons in 6th Form where you sit in a silent room and pretend to do homework) to write poems, comedy sketches and scribble some drawings of what was going on in my imagination at the time.  It was in one of these lessons that I was listening to Tears for Fears' album 'The Hurting'. I used the melody of the opening track, the title track, to write some lyrics.

TFF's original is 'Is it an horrific dream? Am I sinking fast?'.  My re-write was 'No it's not alright to stay; am I seeing this at last? From the truth I run away, from the echoes of the past'. Apart from the terrible grammar, I had no echoes of the past. I didn't have the kind of childhood Roland and Curt had which prompted 'The Hurting' either.

Another lyric from the first verse, 'Open wounds dripping with fear', what does that even mean? I don't remember being a pretentious teenager but I probably thought I was being poetic and profound with this.  On the original recording above I ran out of lyrics so I had to improvise. The result in the second half of the second verse is 'I've got a life in my life'. It's accurate if nothing else.  That's followed up with something that sounds like 'I know what I'm not called what I wanted to be'.  Bit disastrous really.

The recording was made using a Yamaha PSS-790 running a mono output to a twin-tape deck. The 'backing track' was recorded then a second tape captured the playback while I sang over the top.  Although this backing track was produced in 1991, I didn't actually record the vocals until 1994 - after I started writing a song every few weeks and had nobody to sing them.  I couldn't sing - still can't really - although I sound a lot better than this 1994 vocal now - it was the only way to get these songs committed to tape until I could find a vocalist.

The backing tape/vocal dub using the twin-deck was the set up until September 1995, which we'll get to later.  The PSS-790 didn't have a huge memory and 'Remember' used a factory-installed drum rhythm with five sequenced keyboard tracks saved in the 'arranger'.  A bass track and a few synthy tracks which were barely discernible under the hiss and mud. I only had probably 20 keyboard voices to choose from out of the 99 that were installed. You could mix four sounds together to get a new sound but you couldn't save it or record it, so you had to play that voice live as the sequencer did the rest. When it came to writing another song, I had to wipe the memory so the only access I had to the backing track was on the original cassette tape. That soon either got recorded over or went missing so the recording you hear above is the first and only take of the original version which made it onto the first album.  It wasn't meant to be polished - I was just so excited that I could get the bare bones of a song on tape which sounded like a half-decent attempt at being a one-man Erasure.

In the penultimate chorus, the 'microphone' cuts out. This was a mic I bought from the Greenmarket in Newcastle's Eldon Square (which is no longer there) and it was probably £2.99 and made of the cheapest components money can buy. The digital age was a long way off.  Another thing about recording this way - I had to do the entire song in one vocal take. No punching in and out, no backing, no harmonies, no balancing or effects or EQ - I had to sing the entire thing start to finish. And this was the case until we purchased a four-track desk in 1997.

I was proud of the chorus to 'Remember' though. Whilst I had to disguise the fact I copied the melody of 'The Hurting' in the verses by making up a not-very-convincing tune (improvised), the chorus was all mine. I liked it a lot. I used to play it on the piano a lot too after I'd written it.  At the time it was just me with a vector-synth keyboard and a twin-tape hi-fi. The sound was awful and I couldn't sing so it wasn't until eleven months later when I was made aware of a huge collection of lyrics that Douglas Hunter had in his possession, that I became a kind-of songwriter. The time in-between was spent re-creating backing tracks of Erasure songs for the first incarnation of Urban Fox (though we weren't called that at the time) which consisted of a bass player (Stew Johnson), a guitarist (Chris Barber), a drummer with no drums (Graeme Reid) and me trying to get everyone to play songs off the new Erasure album 'Chorus'. That didn't last long but the realisation that Doug was a damn fine lyricist led to us recruiting another guitarist (Darren Spark) and future bassist Ian Forbes (who came to rehearsals at the time to play the belt, shout things at appropriate times and press buttons on the tape recorder). The first rehearsal was set for Saturday 5th September 1992, when the next song in this list was written.

In 2010, I decided to re-record the whole of the Fear album. The result is the version above which has full Timpani backing, rhythm guitar, polished lyrics, harmonies and solo in the middle 8. It's quite jolly actually.