Listening back to This World Could Be So Much Fun – our fourth LP, which we made in 2021 and the early months of 2022, I can hear a lot of post-decisional anxiety; the unsettled state of mind that exists in the aftermath. Back then, the lockdowns were intermittent but for most of us the panic was receding. In Brighton, Alison and I had had our jabs, had had our baby. It felt a little bit like the world was waking up from a long vivid dream. I think I was drinking a lot of coffee.

These days when I watch my kids play, it occurs to me that everything is madly in the present. Any time Laurie, who is 4, remembers something we did, even if it was just a couple of days ago, he describes it as happening “a long long time ago”. That’s a feeling which I hope lasts long into his future. For my youngest, Lydia, life is just a parade of moments to be snatched at: “mine!”.

In deep adulthood, though, we don’t live in the present, we live in the aftermath. In the pockets of time which follow the decisions or actions that changed our life. How we approach the aftermath feels like the big subject, to me. There is something inescapably sad about getting older, after all – the idea that the road to our past might stretch out further than the road to our future.

This World Could Be So Much Fun is mostly an album about resolving this sadness. ‘The Ballad of Assistant’ places upfront a desire to dispense happiness: “I’m so happy, so happy for you / but I need you to be happy, too”. In Tarboro the narrator is “looking for a way to get clear again of complicated times”.

‘I Wrote You A Letter’, like a few Assistant songs, is concerned with the aftermath of a relationship, preoccupied with making amends. “I hope I’ll redeem your once-high opinion of me / and you’ll invite me to come and see you again”.

It’s a song in search of the same clarity and peace which Leonard Cohen attains in ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, where he speak-sings “And thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes / I thought it was there for good, so I never tried”, or the equanimity Lou Reed conjured in his startlingly great late-career highlight ‘Baton Rouge’:

“So thanks for the card, the announcement of child
And I must say you and Sam look great
Your daughter's gleaming
in that white wedding dress with pride
Sad to say I could never bring that to you - that wide smile”

In life, I’m not sure that personalities change that much. But experience accretes and the past catches up with you (“Count up your heart / It’s been with you from the start”). In German there is a word, “Weltschmerz”, which means world-pain, a feeling of melancholy and weariness. It’s our job, if we don’t want to go mad, to address this feeling and tidy it away, but the anxiety can hit hard in the midnight hours – in this case, in the breathless moments waiting for a baby to wake up and yell down the house.

The songs on this LP were not written at 3am, but they were mostly written and developed in the aftermath: sunny mornings on the step, after a coffee, feeling jangly and excited after three, four hours of sleep. The lyrics are, consequently, those sometimes messy and formless ideas which have to be thought about before they can be dismissed.

‘A Stitch in Time’ and ‘Sugarcane’ both have an eye on high summer: ‘dreaming, scheming’ of butter-rich afternoons and fields of sugarcane. But they are inescapably borne of 3am thoughts, too: “I clutch your hand at night / I think about that time in Spain’.

So many songs about beds! 'Ghosts' voices a kind of passive mortal-terror: vaguely Hitchcockian, it sees two people asleep in their bed as a precognition of the end, like Larkin’s sculpted lovers in ‘An Arundel Tomb’; noting the sharp, tender shock of their entwined hands. “Down among the ghosts / I hope you'll be with me / What signals ending / more than sharing sleep?"

The desire for a serene and settled state flows through the songs we wrote for this record. ‘Never Gonna Lie’ is a love song that starts with a snatch of conversation and ends up trying to capture the moment where clarity of thought precedes decisive action. “I just want to get on. I just want to get on with you”. I remember the deep excitement of meeting my wife being enriched by a sudden Blue-Lake lucidity, a determination to make it work. At first that manifested itself in a kind of mad yearning caution, lest mistakes were made: “Never gonna lie / Always gonna keep my powder dry”.

The album’s most expansive song is the six minute ‘Remember Me’, which is really a whole life recounted in a single lyric, imagined as a winding path to the sea which starts at childhood (“I don’t remember Daddy sunken to his knees”), deals with loss and grief (“If I wrote you a letter, would you just let ring?”) and fear of memory-loss (“I used to know your family tree / now I just love thee”) and, lastly, of being forgotten.

I sometimes, lying in bed at night, think how odd it is that if you cut through all the houses in my town you’d find, time after time, these pairs of people, tidied two by two into their beds, lying motionless alongside one another, like figurines in a doll house. The same is true of this album – cut it in half and you'll find a record preoccupied with the worries of couples in their beds, seeking clarity, reassurance and companionship.

“And when you sleep”, ‘The Ballad of Assistant’ asks, “will you ask me to stay with you?".

It also speaks with the hope and expectation that the jangly worries of the early hours can be resolved. I'm sure that they can.


Between the bed to the step, I thought to myself "this world could be so much fun!"