In prepping this post, I’ve spent most of the morning listening to the music of Gosport band, Action Painting!, who put out 3 singles on Sarah Records between 1990 & 1993. By quite some distance, Sensation No.5 is the least distinguished and interesting of the tracks I heard. In it, Action Painting! replace their usual acerbic storytelling style, with a simple count-up of sensations from No. 1 to No. 10, before rounding the lists off with 2 separate tag-lines. It doesn’t seem as though the band rated the tune much either, given that they left it off their 2018 compilation, Trial Cuts (1989-95).
So why have I included it? In large part, down to assumptions that I made while browsing the photos on the Classical Music EP, which Sensation No.5 was part of.
To my eyes, the band all looked like they were barely out of school when they recorded it, with several of them parading ferocious early-90s fringes, which disprove the theory that nothing has changed in English grooming over the last 30 years. With these images in mind, I heard the count through the sensations ending in the respective taglines of All the girls around you scream to me and then All the boys around you smile at me suggesting one of two things for what the song was about:
a) A tour through a drug trip, with there being 10 levels of sensation/consciousness to go through. The girls can’t hack it; the boys just feel blissed throughout. The song ends on Sensation No.1, which suggests everyone has reached the comedown point.
b) The more interesting interpretation is that the sensations refer to burgeoning sexual experiences and the progression from kissing to touching and then the building senses of intimacy that end with sexual intercourse and orgasm. For the girls this leads to screams of pleasure (or pain), for the boys it leads to smiles of pleasure.
It’s also possible that the singer is supplying these sensations to both genders, thus lending the song a bisexual subtext, or it could be a treatise on puberty and the move from childhood to adulthood. For the girls, this includes menstruation with all its physical and psychological pains - hence why all the girls scream. For the boys, this leads to masturbation followed by more masturbation and for the lucky ones, sexual experience with another person. No wonder they’re smiling.
I suspect it’s actually drug related, especially given that this 2018 Louder Than War Interview with frontman Andy Hitchcock suggests that the band members were well past puberty by the time they started their work as a band. Nevertheless, the fact that something which sounds like nothing more than a band-warmup could provoke so many theories in my mind as to what it was about suggests that there was genius at work, even in Action Painting!’s offcuts which would deserve to be preserved on any metaphorical mixtape.
Lyrics copyright of their authors.
Video courtesy of Nicolas.
No comments:
Post a Comment