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.
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