Lyrically, the subject matter of [The God Machine’s debut album, Scenes From the Second Storey] is one of angst, anguish, a raging against a likely non-existent deity or a condemnation of those who claim to speak of such a being… Taken from The God Machine’s Scenes From the Second Storey Revisited 25 Years On by Ned Raggett, The Quietus, 26 February 2018.
Raggett’s article, which I first saw when The God Machine last featured on this blog, achieves what great music journalism should do, namely encourage the reader to seek out the music. Having listened to Scenes From the Second Storey today, there are at least half a dozen tracks featuring either Robin Proper-Sheppard encouraging people to take responsibility for their decisions without passing the buck to God, or characters that he meets blaming their actions on God and absolving themselves because He orchestrated their lives. The album resounds with a broad conviction that God is illusory, and that those who do believe in Him are deluded at best and dangerous at worst.
In I’ve Seen the Man, it feels as though Proper-Sheppard, as an American transplanted to Britain, spent time wandering around Speakers’ Corner where he would have heard political, civic, scientific and religious points of view put forward to the passers-by. On one side, he finds himself listening to a preacher proselytising for his God. On the other side, he hears the case being made for atheism. But in this song, Proper-Sheppard finds himself confronting the void at the centre of his own spirit. He doesn’t believe in anything and this lack of belief compared to the contrasting convictions of the two speakers torments him. The twist is that Proper-Sheppard ends up following the lead of some of his characters and cursing God for the way that he feels.
I’m with Raggett on the merits of Scenes From the Second Storey. It’s a wonderful record, though its intensity and seriousness would have made it a hard sell to mainstream audiences. While researching this post, I discovered that Proper-Sheppard had subsequently formed the band, Sophia, whose 2006 song, Pace, stood out to me as one of the few decent tunes I heard Colin Murray play during his uninspiring late Noughties stint in the 10pm-midnight slot.
Video courtesy of tehf00n.
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