New single - The Unexplained

Breaking off from the extremely occasional updates of our thoughts on the Protect & Survive album tracks, here's a new song. We hope you like it. Download from the usual Hidden Music website via the 'Music' link over on the right.

The Unexplained was a partworks mag produced in the UK in the early '80s. Ghosts, UFOs, Kirlian photography, out-of-body experiences, the Cottingley fairies, spontaneous human combustion... A monthly fix of paranormal paraphernalia tagged "Mysteries of mind, space and time".

Being far too young for it, but also being far too phoney-brave to tell my parents to stop having it delivered because it was scarring me deeply, I went through a long phase of trying to sleep with the light on and my eyes wide open, listening for things under the bed. Wonderful food for the imagination, terrible for attention span at school the next day.

Worst were the reader letters on the back page. The anecdotes, with their sign-offs from provincial towns, seemed more plausible for their intimacy. I remember a story about the ghost of a haggard old man sitting in the bath which made me terrified of going into the bathroom without reaching around and making sure the light
was on first...

Now I'm all grown up and sensible and sceptical, I miss the part of me that could be so profoundly affected by this kind of stuff. The song is a sort of tribute to those mysterious formative forces - and more...

2. Firem

Firem is the name of a planet in Nintendo DS puzzle game Meteos - which inspired me to swipe an online computer simulation of Earth being hit by a meteor and use it for accompanying visuals. So there's definitely some kind of album-themed, interstellar, apocalyptic angst type-thing going on...

That low-slung seven-note riff has more than a whiff of Black Sabbath about it. That's because Black Sabbath were one of my formative musical influences. Growing up in a dog-rough, drafty old terraced house, alive with creaks and clunks and fleeting shadows (I later found out it was overdue for slum clearance) led to a spooked-out obsession with 'the paranormal'. So, Mr Tony Iommi's growling, reverb-drenched doom-rock was the ideal soundtrack to those twilight trips to the outside toilet.

By glamorous contrast, the remixed version, on the 'Stay At Home' EP, was partly written in downtime in a posh hotel room at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

1. Square Leg

John Carpenter, really. His movie soundtracks always had that ominous, pulsing, relentless feel - something wicked this way comes and there's nothing you can do about it. Pretty much how I felt about nuclear weapons in the '80s. I used to speculate on where would be the best place in the world to hide from a nuclear war. I thought Patagonia (after reading Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia') but my pocket-money could never have covered flight and accommodation.

The samples are from Barry Hines' extraordinary Threads. My favourite horror films - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Halloween... - they're all 'horrible' in their own twisted fantasy-worlds, but Threads is the horror of the possible; the thought of all those cosy provincial mundanities - milk bottles on a doorstep, the local pub, factory chimnies - being incinerated in an instant.

'Square Leg' was a "home defence" exercise in 1980 that calculated the result of an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. The (conservative) estimate was 53% of the population killed, with a further 35% short-term survivors and 12% suffering serious injuries. Obscene enough, but we'll get to Mr Oppenheimer later...

Protect and Survive - Side Two

Up now.

Individual track blah in a bit...

Protect and Survive - Side One

All that stuff below is my increasingly non-cryptic way of saying Redpoint's debut album, Protect and Survive is at last out in the wild.

Well, one half of it. Side 2 to follow, next week.

Go here to download.

From my perspective, P&S is an attempt to recall/resolve all those hopes, fears and churning paranoias that squatted on my shoulders from childhood up to early adolescence (that's the shabby simplicity of the mid-to-late '70s and the Cold War cold-sweats of most of the '80s).

Mashed in with that is the psychological uproar of fatherhood and how my kids rewired me to certain messy but enriching emotional realities.

Once the whole thing is out there, I'll post some thoughts on individual tracks.

I'm sure Ian will pop in soon to offer his take on the album.

Hope you like.

"But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable."

"Our lives are woven together in a fabric."

"Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others."

"In an urban society, everything connects."