Winterman

Give us back our sunshine!

It’s winter again! It’s not, it’s the middle of May. But this week in London - it’s been like freezing weather. There’s a north wind. The heating’s back on, the coat is back on! This is ridiculous.

This is week two of Smash!

Last week, I played two songs, from the forthcoming Smash LP. ‘Living Day To Day’ and ‘All I’m Saying Is…’ Short, sharp, joined at the hip. They were performed as one song. Actually, when I listened back, I realised there were four songs hiding in there! The opening verses were one idea, the couplets kept circling the same thought from different angles. Too-ing and fro-ing between London to Los Angeles was relentless and disorienting.

The bridge was another section, saying ‘It’s half past time!’ I’m brimming with ideas and I can’t catch up!

The song ending was supposed to be a vocal harmony section descending into the next song. I just kept playing guitar accidentally. In the moment.

Listening back later, I realised I’d stumbled into an impression of the intro to ‘Hotel California’. That unplanned guitar figure summed up my entire cultural impression of LA. The shock of being there, the scale, the sunlight, the mythology, and then being back at home in the mundane domestic tea drinking life of a grey skied Londoner. So it stayed in.

And the next song, ‘All I’m Saying Is… ’ The lyrics are self evident.

And now here’s a new song! ‘Winterman’.

‘Winterman’ somehow carries the same tension as the first two. The California sun against the London winter rain and wind. The blanket of grey that descends with the darkness of the evenings and won’t go. The memory of warmth lingering somewhere out of reach. The same sun Brian Wilson built his songs around.

When I recorded the song I played the Rickenbacker 12-string. It was my guitar sound and it sounded right for the part I had imagined to play. Now I hear it differently. It signifies California. Not just because of the Byrds, or the intro to The Beach Boys’ ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, though both are in there somewhere. The shimmer itself is the metaphor.

I’m singing about the rain in England while the 12-string plays the California sun underneath it the whole way through. That’s not an arrangement detail, that’s the tension of the entire record made sonic. I left California but California didn’t leave me.

‘Winterman’ is the penultimate song on Side Two.

‘Hey! Mr. Winterman, give us back our sunshine if you can!’

If you’ve seen the Beatles film A Hard Days Night, or accidentally launched a football over the neighbour’s fence, and had to nervously walk up to the house and ask the grumpy old man if you could have the ball back, you’ll know the songs beating heart.

There’s no point me trying to explain what the lyrics mean, they will mean something different to every listener on first listen. But forty years after the event, in the gap between writing and understanding what I wrote, I can hear two themes running through the record.

There’s a yearning for something out of reach and out of your control.

And there’s the concept of Smash itself. As an event. Something that lands before anyone can see it coming. Disruption that creates a new future.

It can be Smash as a 1960s pop culture world, the hit record, the cultural moment. A Roy Lichtenstein pop art comic-strip universe. The word is enough. Smashing Time, the chaotic anarchic film where everything goes wrong in the most generative way possible. It’s the whole mid-60s mod aesthetic of sensation as impact.

But also Smash as physics. Forward velocity. Irreversible impact. The sound arriving after the event. You cannot reverse-engineer a smash. It happens in motion. Meaning appears during the act itself. The process doesn’t contain the outcome beforehand. The consequence cannot be undone.

I’m reminded of the Who film Tommy and the sequence ‘Smash The Mirror’. It’s ritualistic violence - breaking that mirror. What you thought was destruction is actually liberation.

Behind the shattered glass is the open window to a real world. The mirror wasn’t a wall, it was a false surface mistaken for one.

And that is Smash! A sensation!

For me, the sensation is rediscovering this record. The record exists as evidence of a moment that shattered into a before and after. The term demo was an imposed narrative, not a sonic description of fact. And it’s rediscovery is a revelation.

‘Winterman’ is also a sensation. And you want to smash through to the other side. You know the sunshine is there.

But you have to want it hard enough.

Here’s the song.