Brian talks about the fifth track on his recent album, Something For Everyone.
Clearly this is an attempt at early 80s synthpop song, or at least it’s clear to me. I may well have had a track like Yazoo’s ‘Don’t Go’ in mind or maybe Depeche Mode’s ‘New Life’, as I started to put this track together.
I’ve just realised that Vince Clarke is the common factor in both bands. I saw him in a take away in Shepherds Bush once, some time in the very early 1990s. We didn’t speak.
I wear my influences on my sleeve in this track. We’re talking very clean synth parts – some mono, some arpeggio’ed in an early-80s style. But no drum machine sound – we’re talking regular drums, as influenced by Hot Chip. Gives a kind of more human and broader feel to the music.
The shimmering keyboard part was intended to reflect some of the instrumentation that New Order used to use in their tracks in the early 1980s. New Order are an amazingly influential band, whose sounds I gravitate to time and time again … particularly now I can kind of re-create them.
Then there is a section with the semitones – I do love a ‘run’ of semitones – and that was influenced by a track by The Specials. I guess The Specials also prompted my use of a trumpet sample.
There’s a key change for the chorus, to keep the music interesting, and then a full out attempt at a catchy chorus. The chorus features some acoustic guitar strums – not very keeping with the genre. But, as I’ve used an Ovation, it’s true to the era I’m recreating.
There’s a long outro. Successfully or not, the idea is to allow for prolonged dancing. My head was in a nightclub in the 1980s.
What about the lyrics? They are pretty much snippets about me in the 1980s. “Stare at our shoes”, like members of an indie band on stage. “Get home in the morning and wonder just where we’d been.” Ahem – just like when I had to crawl back into the block of flats I was living in at the time through the rubbish chute – this because I wouldn’t take the block key to go out as it would look unsightly in my jeans.
There’s quite a lot about not worrying about the future or getting old and that, when “everything’s ok”. I liken it to a feeling of flying and the song yearns for feeling like that again. Except, actually, I wasn’t massively happy in my 20s.
The song started off as It’s Not The Way It Started, but I decided to make it more more positive.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy This Is The Way It Started. To hear it, type in my name to any major music platform, such as Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music, and find my album, Something for Everyone. It’s song number five.
And why not check out the rest of the album while you’re there?