Reimagined B-Sides (Volume 3)

This was quite a romantic song. It was originally written for someone but they never heard it – I changed the lyric and the sentiment and it became the title track. Quite a nice little thing actually. At the beginning of 1998, everything was being written on piano – hence this piano ballad.

(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)

I was sprinkling oboes into everything at the time but in order to reimagine this song, I had to step away from the big orchestral production of the original. I’m not a fan of acoustic versions of anything but I think in this unique case, it was the only thing I could do with it. I didn’t want to miss it out of these albums because it’s such an important song so I just stripped it back to classical guitar and vocal. It’s another very romantic song but as the next two albums were rolling around, the romance disappeared.

(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)

Jake was my cat and I wrote this the day he was put down at the vets. It’s devastating when you lose a pet but one that had so much personality and character, well it was double that. It was very hard to reimagine because the original was probably the first song chronologically that actually hit the mark for what I wanted. It’s the first that didn’t seem like a demo that could be improved upon. Just with better playing, singing and production – so that’s what this reimagining is, with a bit more orchestra and energy added.

(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)

Crazy to think I remember talking to Doug after he wrote this lyric and lamenting how quickly the years were flying by. It was 1998 – we were 23. Here we are another 26 years later, re-imagining this and the sentiment somehow feels exactly the same. The lyrics are just as relevant.

(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)

I’ve never been sure what I was trying to achieve with this song. I can’t rap, clearly, but I do like the chorus and the verses never really lent themselves to a specific melody. It’s the same with ‘World for our Children’ and ‘Voicemail (God is Unavailable)’ – and ‘Uncle Jack’ as well I think. Another that should really have been sung by someone else.

(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)

There were three empty piano ballads on ‘Lessons in Believing’ because my world at the time was empty. Absence, loneliness, regrets, fear, confusion and unhappiness – all were poured into these songs. They’re all very similar if different tempos and time signatures so instead of reimagining all three, I took the first verse and chorus from each and stitched them together. They’re important songs but they’re not very good ones.

(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)

Just the title of this song summed my life up in 1999. I was unemployed for a while and when I finally got a job, it was in the worst area of town and it was near the end of the year so everything was grey and cold and bleak. There was a street behind the building where I worked, it was mainly Biffa bins, litter, graffiti and stuff dogs had left behind. There was a pub there and a cafe a bit further down near the bottom. This song reminds me of that dreary old cafe – this is a Doug lyric so it’s not actually about that cafe but, I always think of it when this song comes round. It’s another grey song and one with very little hope, like everything I was writing that year. I guess this volume of the re-imagined project was going to reflect the journey through life somewhat – thankfully, in 2000 and with the album ‘The Little Ghost’, things started to brighten up and the songs became grander and more outwardly accessible. Maybe this volume 3 collection should be quietly shoved into the VIP section of our Bandcamp page.

(Lyrics : Douglas Hunter, Music : Peter Nuttall)

I’d written 205 songs in little over five years so, I wrote a song about writing songs. Another piano ballad but thankfully, the end of the dark moribund and desolate music – volume 4 should be a lot more enjoyable to reimagine and ultimately, listen to.

(Lyrics & Music : Peter Nuttall)