'Urbane' track by track - 01_Welcome to the world of spirits...

This one dates from my time on the buses. I drive now, so there's a lot less inspiration on the way to work. Maybe there's a 'cars and girls' LP in me somewhere though - we'll see. Probably more 'Autobahn' than 'Highway 61 revisited', but you never know... I like the spooked, husky-blue-eyed-soul-voice-put-through-a-fuzzbox, auto-out-of-tuned effect on the vocal. It's the noisiest vocal on the LP but I think any quality issues are worth it to get the effect I was after - a dirty, grizzled tramp with a drunken jazz saxophone, fizzing away in the corner of the underground - playing a song that no one knows anymore, nor cares about. It's typical me really. This is one of the first things I recorded with the lovely new Audio-Technica microphone my other half had got me for my birthday. The first thing I do with the lovely clean ne vocal sopund? Drown it in effects! It catches the desolate mood of the narrator though, I think. He's just come back, perhaps, from a tour of duty somewhere and doesn't recognise the London he sees. There's an echo of 'The Wasteland' - 'a crowd swarmed over London Bridge...death, death, I never knew death had undone so many...' Yes, we've all come undone, post 9-11 I suppose. And now the soldiers from both sides are returning, spooked, shell-shocked, bitter and disconsolate. We're in for a few more years of disorientation it would seem. There's a video of this one too that I'll post up soon. It's a visual counterpart to this song's musical debt to Byrne and Eno's 'My life in the bush of ghosts' - still a touchstone, still breathtakingly fresh nearly 35 years on. 01 - Welcome to the world of spirits