Guys and Dolls: Trumans Water - Sun Go Out (9 April 1993)

 

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Looking at the lyrics to Sun Go Out - and if I hadn’t done so, this post would be even shorter than it is - they appear to be a continuation of the theme of alienation/disenchantment with authority figures that was evidenced in Speeds Exceeding. But where that song felt like a debate between the generations, here the malaise is more deeply set and implacable. Sun Go Out takes swipes at “stars” and politicians for being all surface and no feeling, but does with a shrug of the shoulders and an internalising of the contempt and disgust that they feel.  Early 90s ennui drips all over lines like: 

We know there’s channels where we could register our comments and complaints.

But it’s just as fun to fall back laugh the thing to scorn.

And hey presto! Trumans Water invented social media.

As the song progresses, it starts to make uneasier listening to 21st Century ears. In 1993, the sentiments expressed sounded like classic slacker talk. Even the title of the song sounds like a pun on exhortations made by stressed dads to their surly, couch potato offspring.  But in subsequent verses, the vibe sounds, in 2025, less slacker and more MAGA. This is especially true once the kids do get off the couch:

…we’re just violent, not angry.

And we’d sooner tip things over as watch them topple by themselves.

You aspiring public servants are long on vision and short on spine.

Here’s to spewing thicker drivel and digging deeper graves.

After a final verse which declares that anyone trying to have an original thought should keep it to themselves, the song ends with eight guitar notes which toll like a bell declaring the death of…. hope? Idealism? Public spiritedness? Any number of optimistic qualities that one used to be able to attribute to the United States of America with a semi-straight face. And a look down the list of titles on Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox & Ass reads like a MAGA checklist of grievances against authority or their supposed betters: Bludgeon Elites & Stagger, Lo Priest, Our Doctors Think We’re Blind etc.

Scarily prescient, as they say….

Video courtesy of Trumans Water Topic

All lyrics are copyright of their authors.

Guys and Dolls: Eric’s Trip - Listen (9 April 1993)

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This was a borderline inclusion, because it piles by in a bit of a rush, and I’ve had to take a number of listens to it in order to find any kind of angle that would make it worth keeping. But what’s ultimately retained it is a mixture of what it’s trying to be, and my belief that it’s a lot more optimistic and innocent than I initially thought it was.

Sonically, Listen comes across as a kiddie-pop take on the verses in You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine, albeit that it tempers this with quieter moments between the noise squalls. 

Lyrically, I initially thought that the song was about someone preparing to kill themself. This was because of the chorus refrains of Soon I’ll be gone. But repeat listens and further scans of the lyrics have now led me to believe that this is actually a love song, and that the title, Listen, refers to that nascent moment in love affairs when emotions burst forward, the internal editor checks out and we blurt forward to the object of our affection both our most profound and trivial thoughts, simply because this is the moment when we can be sure that they will really listen to and value what we’re saying.

Stick around, for a while.

Listen to my thoughts.

It makes you smile.

Hold my hand, my life.

Thinking quiet down, make me right.

It’s a plea for love which really could save the singer’s life.

I have the film critic, Antonia Quirke, to thank for this insight. I’ve just given up on her 2007 memoir, Choking on Marlon Brando. The book combines Quirke’s portraits on various actors alongside the highs and lows of her love life through the 1990s. Quirke writes brilliantly about movies, she occasionally writes brilliantly about love, but by the time I reached page 150, I realised the problem with reading about real people’s love lives - the emotional highs are too difficult to read about without cynicism and misanthropy crowding in and willing on the fall. And that’s no way to live life or experience culture.

Also, just as when confronted by a social media picture of someone’s delicious looking pub lunch, the elation of an individual’s love affair is precisely too individual for anyone else to really care about, especially when it’s spread over 310 pages of a book.* Eric’s Trip manage to convey these sensations in two and a half minutes, so they trump Quirke’s ability to get them across, albeit I’m grateful to her for making me look at Listen in a way that I might otherwise have missed.

The upshot of all this is that I’m setting up the first giveaway in the history of The Smell of the Greasepaint and the Sound of John Peel. If you would like a copy of Choking on Marlon Brando before it goes either to my local second hand bookshop or the charity bookshelf at Chieveley Services, please send me a DM on bluesky  (greasepaint.bsky.social) by April 30. First come, first served.

*I know that I’m guilty of writing about my romantic elations on this blog every so often - and when we get to the show week of Guys and Dolls in the first week of August ‘93, you’d better be ready to see me go full-on Quirke - but at least I try and attach them to a beautiful piece of music.

Video courtesy of mynameisasuka

Lyrics are copyright of their authors.

My thanks to the John Peel wiki for identifying the title of the track, which Peel did not give on the 9/4/93 show.