Listening to the sound and feel of The Man Who Stayed in Bed All Day, one is tempted to think that said man is Blur guitarist, Graham Coxon having a wet dream over the direction he would try and push his band in, four years down the line from January 1993. However, Fly Ashtray were not morose Essex boys, but morose New Yorkers instead and having spent a seven year apprenticeship honing their sound and firing out the occasional release through the late 1980s, they attacked the 1990s with a burst of releases, beginning with 1990’s cassette album, Nothing Left to Spill, with The Man Who Stayed in Bed All Day as track 1, side 1.
Anytime anyone writes a song about another person’s lethargy, it’s tempting to view the inspiration through three possibilities:
1) They’ve been reading Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov.
2) Drugs
3) Depression
In the main, I go with number 3 as the driving theme of the song, especially in relation to the way that the lead character has dreams about the world crumbling under his feet. Combining that with the angular off-kilter riffs conjures the sense of a depression so thick and enveloping that even unconsciousness provides no respite. However, another possibility comes to light in the last two lines:
And he can’t wake up/Can’t seem to make up his mind.
What his girlfriend said/About him, getting out of bed.
Which had me wondering whether the theme of the song was about fear of commitment or making hard decisions. In which case, Oblomov could be seen as the principal inspiration.
Video courtesy of Augusto Fabio Cerqua
Lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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