NOTE - Submarine’s Peel Session has not been made available yet, so the videos of the tracks are all taken from studio versions.
There’s an old joke about a little boy who joins a marching band. One day, the band is part of a parade in their town and as they march through the main street, every member of the band is leading off on their right foot, except for the little boy, who is leading off on his left foot. As the band goes by, the little boy’s mother turns to the person standing next to her and says, Well look at that, my little boy is the only one marching in step.
I’m reminded of that joke as I consider the work of Submarine, whose work over the early to mid-1990s met with very little in the way of commercial success. Having already released one of the singles of the year in Dinosaurs, this three track Peel Session, which included two songs that would feature on their eponymous 1994 debut album, shows that they were marching in one direction, while we were all marching in a different one. Our failure as an audience to follow them is a greater indictment of us than it is of them.
It’s debatable though whether Submarine would have been comfortable with mass adulation. Singer/guitarist Neil Haydock was once seen furiously berating a punter who told him that they had enjoyed a Submarine concert given to an unresponsive audience in Aberdeen. I can also see how easy it would have been for people to fall into the mindset of thinking that the band were trying to rip off The Verve, whose work at the time also leant heavily into dream pop and atmospherics. But, Submarine appeal to me more - and would have done then, as well - because they’re both more concise in what they do and more emotionally direct.
Take session opener, Fading, which has me hoping that - at the time of writing - I continue in the happy state of not having suffered a direct family bereavement, until the addition of more posts to this blog causes me to forget about Fading (though I suspect it will be a contender for a place on my 1993 Festive Fifty, when the time comes.) Its elegiac and heart-rending guitar riff leads us into a place where Haydock has been dreaming about someone he loved. The intensity of the dream is so strong, that even after waking, he can feel their presence and see them in the stars. In the Peel Session, the line I couldn’t stop myself is followed by the word, crying. But the problem with dreams and starry skies is that time causes them to fade. If the subject of the song has died, it feels like Haydock is going through the stage of grief where they are trying to keep the memory of that person alive; a process which, in the words of the actress Natascha McElhone, feels like …blowing air into a balloon that deflates faster and faster each time.* The louder moments in the track suggest precisely that struggle. The Peel Session version didn’t include the brass section, which on the studio recording did a good job of diluting the sadness and suggesting that it is worth keeping memories alive as a way of providing comfort and happiness, as opposed to it being simply a form of life support for the one left behind.
Another reading of the song is that it’s inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth, with Haydock singing from the perspective of the alien, Thomas Newton, abandoned on Earth and unable to rescue his family on their dying, drought-ridden planet. The cover of Submarine’s album, features a drawing of a family of aliens walking together hand in hand across a landscape with their heads starting to catch fire. At the end of both the book and the film, Newton has recorded a message (in the book) and an album (in the film) which he hopes to broadcast back to his home planet for his family to hear. Fading could easily stand as an example of what Newton would want to tell his family.
Let’s move to Junior Elvis and find a place to die: Well when you phrase it like that, how can I refuse. It’s not quite so easy to get a handle on Jnr. Elvis in either of its versions, though as Haydock makes clear I’m half awake, so it follows that he may be talking in the non-sequiturs that we do when talking in our sleep. The bicycle’s shining on me knees as Jasper Carrott once put it, so If it ever stops raining, let’s buy an old car makes perfect sense in that context. However, If the sun keeps on shining, let’s find a place to stay speaks a much more universal language of love and a need for somewhere to call home.
The final song of the session, Tugboat, was a cover of a song originally recorded by Galaxie 500 for their debut album, 1988’s Today. To my ears, Tugboat sounds like a preppy reworking of Bob Dylan’s, All I Really Want To Do, with Dylan’s original list of verbs replaced with a list of collegiate activities that the narrator would be happy to miss out on so that they can provide emotional support to their friend, just as real tugboats help move larger vessels in the right direction. For their performance of the song, Submarine were joined by their Ultimate label mate, Claire Lemmon, who provided the female backing vocals, in the same manner as Naomi Yang had done on the original recording. Submarine’s studio recording of Tugboat wound up as a b-side on a live version of Jodie Foster, a song about obsession.**
*In 2008, McElhone’s husband, Martin, died suddenly from a heart attack. He was 43 years old. The quote comes from Elizabeth Day’s review of Natascha’s 2010 memoir, After You: Letters of Love and Loss to a Husband and Father.
Videos courtesy of South Coast Shot, simonx49 & jtl25.
All lyrics copyright of Neil Haydock.
