Track 1 – “3 Letters”
This is about computer games. The last real upbeat song for two years as the rest of this album and the majority of the next three were very moribund. The three letters in the title is what you get to put your name into a high score table on arcade games.
(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 2 – “Foreign Dreams”
I wrote the lyrics for this in Wilhelmina Park in Utrecht. I was sitting under a tree, sheltering from the blazing sun, Saturday 7th June 1997. I was watching some people playing football between verses. I wrote another three or four lyric sets until the sky broke. A crack of thunder and the most rain I’ve ever seen at one time fell out of the sky.
The song is really about how confused everything was at the time.
(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 3 – “Autumn (I Sing)”
There were a few songs on 1997’s ‘Transfection’ which I wrote to try and capture a mood – an atmosphere. ‘Dawn’ & ‘Autumn’ which were ballads and ‘Autumn 2’. Lyrics like ‘Autumn is leaving me, Winter is tonight’ reflecting my realisation that I’d made some recent bad decisions and ‘darkness fingers hide under my skin and tear me inside’.
The song ‘I Sing’ was subtitled ‘Autumn’ but it was a much more upbeat number. It was written a week after ‘I Will Be There’ and they became the final two songs in Phase 1, when I upgraded the Pss-790 for Roland E-500.
(Music & Lyrics : Peter Nuttall)
Track 4 – “This Road I Chose”
Doug was having a conversation with an old school friend who was asking the common question ‘What are you doing now?’ and the answer threw up the phrase ‘that’s the road I chose’. The music I wrote, I guess didn’t really fit the lyric because it’s not such a melancholic one. It’s such a sad sounding song but it’s actually a solid lyric of acceptance and positivity.
(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 5 – “Old Friend”
The old friend is memories. Bad English I know but ‘turn round and face the future’ sets the tone as the song is about treasuring memories but not dwelling on them, not regretting anything and focussing on now. How I wrote something like this at age 23, I’ll never know.
(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 6 – “Mr. Toldyouso”
Feeling like I hadn’t made the best choices in my life by mid-1998, this song was about regret, what if (as if I’d said to myself, ‘If you do this, that will happen’, hence the ‘Told you so’ in the title. It was also massively anti-marriage and anti-having children. 98/99 wasn’t a great time really and it came out in the dark tones of this album ‘Lessons in Believing’ and the following one ‘Predilection’.
(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 7 – “Carbon 12”
I had a whole theory that memories of past lives could be stored as electrical charges in carbon atoms – in this case, carbon 12 atoms. It’s really a homage to the Madness song ‘Baggy Trousers’ as it’s about school days mainly.
(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 8 – “No Hurry, No Worry”
The songs on parent album ‘Lessons in Believing’ had no theme or direction really. It was a doldrum album filled with the dross that was filling the gaps until some proper songs came along later. This song was the attempted ‘single’ – it’s poppy I suppose and has a driven rhythm about it but beyond that, it’s fairly sterile fare.
(Music : Peter Nuttall, Lyrics : Douglas Hunter)
Track 9 – “On The Way Up”
‘On the Way Up’ was written as a signature song but it never really got there. I liked it a lot at the time but it faded into time as we wrote better songs. This re-imagined project has made me think it’s worth digging out and re-recording. It’s kind of an update of 1995’s ‘Someday’.
(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)
Track 10 – “Moonlight and Neon”
One of the first songs we wrote in 12/8. It has a Bryan Adams twist to it but because we weren’t guitarists, this song never really got it’s intended sound. This re-imagined version should rectify that.
(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)