Coming in at Number 23 on The Phantom Fifty, Good Morning, Captain was the closing track of Slint’s second and final album, Spiderland.
This is the first Slint track that I’ve heard, and I see now why Colin Murray cited them as an example of the music he might play when he took on the Peel slot in late 2006.* In the event, like Keir Starmer, he promised the faithful one thing, and then once he got his prize, he compromised everything to buggery. I’ve no idea whether Murray ever actually played anything by Slint in his 3 years hosting the 10pm show - I stopped listening to him after the first couple of weeks when it became clear that Peel show and OneMusic listeners were not the demographic he was targetting - but I’m sure that if he did, they were tucked well away after his plays of Snow Patrol, Elbow and his favourite Family Guy clips.
That being said, any of Slint’s tracks from Spiderland would have fitted well on Murray’s show as a lead in to the best part of it. In the final minute of his programmes, at 11:59pm, Murray would sign off with the line, In a minute from now, today will be over, and this would lead to a chopped-up, bitesized collage of clips from that day’s news stories. The tone was usually downbeat, faintly ambient, slightly trippy and gently haunting. Slint’s music would make a perfect match to this.
Good Morning, Captain is a ghost story. I’m not saying that because of Brian McMahan’s quietly spoken delivery, which is a feature of nearly every track on Spiderland, but rather, it’s the creepy bass riff that serves as the foundation of the song - and which is subsequently supported by some spidery guitar work - while McMahan tells the story of a shipwreck survivor haunted both by the memory of his lost colleagues but also by the child who arrives at 5:07.
I’ve seen a couple of theories floated about who the child is. The line, I want the police to be notified led one Reddit user to posit that the Captain was face-to-face with his childhood self and that the promises that I’ll make it up to you, were the adult self promising the child self, that he would make up for things suffered during childhood. It’s a persuasive thesis, especially if the shouts of I miss you! during the final minute are a lament for lost innocence.
For myself, I still go with the ghost theory, and I think that the shipwreck may not necessarily be set during the age of the galleon ship, but could be a family sailing trip gone wrong, with the Captain being the family patriarch, attempting to outrun his responsibilities only to find grief and guilt catching up to him, once he’s behind the door of his beach-house.
Video courtesy of rasalinga.
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
*I have a clear memory of seeing this quote on a brilliantly written article (which appears to be missing now) which lamented that this kind of promise wasn’t being delivered by Murray and that his 10pm show was a musical dead end for listeners who expected a broader range of music at that time of night. With the passing of time, I’ve come to see that the model for Murray’s 10pm show wasn’t really John Peel at all, but rather Mark Radcliffe’s Graveyard Shift from the previous decade. The principal difference being, as the list from Murray’s In the Company Of feature shows, he was a wretched starfucker in a way that Radcliffe wasn’t.
DISCLAIMER - I make no bones about the fact that I regard Colin Murray as pretty much my least favourite DJ in the 20 odd years that I listened to Radio 1. However, on Five Live, I think he’s tremendous. As a speech radio host/interviewer, he’s one of the best around. It’s only when he has to play records, that I get impatient and unkind about him.
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