He returned to the flat to find her sat on the sofa with her arms crossed.
“I’ve killed the fish,” she said.
He put the shopping on the table and walked over to the tank. The little blue-and-gold fish were floating bloated on the surface like capsized boats.
A wire or pipe he didn’t recognise trailed into the water.
“Don’t touch it,” she said from the sofa.
The wire was connected to the toaster, which rested perfectly upright on the floor of the tank between the coral and the sunken pirate ship. It was still plugged in at the mains. He disconnected it.
“I’ve just spent £4.20 on tank-cleaning products,” he told her.
“And the fish weren’t cheap either,” she said. “I found your receipt.”
He poked one of the Red-top Zebras and watched it drift. “I suppose they wouldn’t give us a refund now,” he said. “We might as well throw that away.”
Increasingly, it seems to me, people are rejecting the humble bathtub in favour of the more modern and chic showerhead. Showers, they claim, are faster, more water-efficient, allegedly more hygienic. I will not deny that showers have a few practical advantages over baths– particularly their speed– but these, I believe, come at the expense of the proper cleansing of one’s inner self (I do not mean colonic irrigation). Allow me to explain.
Get this: defenders of the shower are tragic victims of today’s hectic lifestyle. This is the same hectic lifestyle that sells people cereal bars and instant rice. When there is no pressing need to bathe with haste, the shower appeals only to our diminished, YouTube-addled attention spans, the torrent of pressured water jets providing an instant fix of sensory overload. There is no opportunity to submerge oneself completely in the bathing experience, to relax, reflect, luxuriate. Each day the stressed and overworked office employees of the world stand beneath pummeling showerheads when they should be alleviating their anxieties in a lovely hot bath with an Adrian Mole novel and some stolen hotel toiletries. No wonder Wall Street has crashed.
Showers lack, too, proper opportunity for the nurturing of the intellect– for the bathtub is the best place in the world to read. I have developed excellent one-handed shaving and even shampooing techniques for this reason, turning pages with my thumb, and can proudly claim to have only ever dropped a book into a bath once. (It was hastily rescued with surprisingly little water damage sustained; thank God it wasn’t a hardback, which would have sunk like a stone.) I am sure that my lifetime of dedicated bath patronage has broadened my mind’s horizons far beyond the curtain of any narrow shower cubicle. The best an intellectually-minded showerer can hope for is a few stolen minutes of Front Row with Mark Lawson on one of those waterproof bathroom radios, which is admittedly not a bad catch, but nothing any person in a bath couldn’t also enjoy for the full duration of its broadcast with a copy of New Scientist in one hand and a gin-and-tonic in the other. You’d have to get out before Woman’s Hour though.
I have heard more than one critic declare shudderingly that in a bath one is merely “sitting in a pool of your own filth”. Of these people I ask: where do they think this filth resides the rest of the time? They don’t sit in cars and living rooms and workplaces each day frantically scrubbing their hair and skin with steel-wire brushes and bleach, do they? I admit that if one is particularly dirty– I mean greasemonkey dirty, mud-wrestling dirty– a shower is the remedy of choice, but none of these critics are car mechanics or strippers. They are well-dressed twenty-somethings with facial cleansing products and cereal bars. Besides, the charge is clearly beside the point: even if I were luxuriating in a bucket of my own slime for half an hour, I always manage to emerge from the tub mysteriously silky-skinned and smelling of Head & Shoulders. It must be all that water and soap.
But the pool-of-filth people look close to vomiting when I go on to tell them that my family often share bathwater. (I should clarify: not at the same time. If nothing else, there isn’t enough room.) I find no shame in this, though one person I told this to responded as though I had said my mother still breastfeeds me. The sharing system means that whoever has to hose down the tub with the showerhead afterwards tends to have a grisly time of it, but it is merely sensible, and handily undoes the claim that showers use less water. As long as you have a big family.
I hope that the bath manages to reclaim its once-noble status. Have we forgotten that the citizens of the Roman Empire, the civilisation that invented sanitation– bringing with it plumbing, flush toilets and sodding great aqueducts– spent half their time arguing about epistemology and gladiators in steamy public baths? I understand that Japan maintains some version this tradition today, having seen some slightly erotic videos on YouTube demonstrating as much. And the enlightened population of Iceland, my other favourite-country-I’ve-never-been-to, also enjoys public spas, no doubt when relaxing between intense sessions of recording cutting-edge electronica/post-rock rock albums. We should look to these wise countries for guidance in these uncertain bathing times (perhaps disregarding some of Japan’s ideas about appropriate YouTube content).
The fact is that baths are cradles of spiritual and intellectual refreshment. They also get you nice and clean. The next time I have a bath I may never get out. I invite you to join me.
Sarah, from Coventry, asks on the BBC swine flu Q&A: “Is there a risk that if the emerging swine flu H1N1 virus comes into contact with the established bird flu H5N1 virus that the two could mix and cause an even bigger pandemic risk?”
Belle and Sebastian nowadays make glossy chamber-pop records, but their previous albums are, I think, early examples of what has now developed fully into the twee, hand-stitched “indie” aesthetic, I’m sure influenced by Velvet Underground’s less completely perverse songs thirty years before (After Hours, Stephanie Says). The whole indie thing has become rather sickly and cynical since then— sod off, Juno— but Belle and Sebastian do it with ragged charm and gentle wit. Their music sounds naïve, but Stuart Murdoch’s lyrics are anything but, his softly-accented observations (with just a hint of a lisp) leaving plenty of room between the lines, sometimes enough to fit entire other songs into. His words are like old and trusted friends, disarming in their matter-of-fact honesty, never judgemental but full of sensible truisms. They will tell you the truth over a cup of tea and a piece of toast while the romantics of pop music wail melodramatically outside about true love and self-sacrifice. The good news is that, with Belle and Sebastian, the truth isn’t really that bad. In fact, it is often very gently funny.
My favourite B&S tune, Seeing Other People, is built around a strange, graceless piano melody, fumbling around the verses like an awkward teenager in the back of a steamy-windowed car. Which is a rather convenient metaphor considering the subject matter; that is, young lust: “We lay on the bed there / kissing just for practice,” go the opening lines. (Can you tell I look for music-lyric relationships yet?) The joke is the narrator’s unconvincing self-delusion: “If I remain passive and you just want to cuddle / then we should be okay and we won’t get in a muddle,” he rationalises hurriedly, “‘cause we’re seeing other people / at least that’s what we say we are doing.” And here’s my favourite: “Could we be please objective? / ‘cause the other boys are queuing up behind us.”
If You’re Feeling Sinister is a notoriously badly-produced album, or at least that’s what various professional reviews tell me. (The band even issued a live version of the record to make up for it, whose rendition of Seeing Other People is, to my ear, far too hurried.) I know little of the technical details of music production but this claim, stated always as if it is so obvious as to be hardly worth bringing up, has always mystified me. Yes, the arrangements are ramshackle, Belle and Sebastian being one of those bands with seemingly dozens of members whose instruments— like Seeing Other People’s xylophone— join in and wander off apparently at random, as if distracted by a cup of tea or a slice of toast, but isn’t that part of the charm? By the end of the song the tempo has (I think) sped up a bit, presumably because the band was playing without a metronome. (I’ve wondered before why, left to play at their own pace, musicians tend to speed up during performances rather than slow down; I’m sure there’s a fascinating psychoacoustic reason, but it isn’t in This is Your Brain on Music so I’m none the wiser.) Even if unintentional, the effect— only really evident if you go back and listen to the beginning again immediately after the song has finished— subtly conveys the quiet urgency of what has to be the band’s most beautiful chord progression.
These days I guess Belle and Sebastian does use a metronome, because their last two albums have been recorded in new, shiny, high-fidelity sparkle-sound and it all checks out pretty much on-beat as far as I can discern. I liked this new understanding of modern recording techniques on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, but lost interest with The Life Pursuit, whose shiny pop aesthetic fell rather flat with me, though I appreciate that album retains every bit of Murdoch’s characteristic lyrical wit. For me, Belle and Sebastian endures in awkward, clumsy, sincere love-letters like Seeing Other People. (Of course, that was before Belle upped and left Sebastian, taking her cello with her.)
There is a certain response some music evokes in me that I can only describe as relief. I cannot hear the opening bars of These Days without feeling this, as if a weight I wasn’t aware of has lifted from me suddenly. No guitar tone has ever sounded sweeter. Certainly no other piece of music can raise my mood so reliably. Somehow it always takes me by surprise. I exhale, every time, as if sliding into a warm bath. (I am reminded of a Maria Taylor lyric: “There’s just a time when we must / all let go / of the breath that we hold”.) In that sense I suppose These Days is literally breathtaking.
The song, written by a teenaged Jackson Browne and recorded first and most famously by Nico on her 1967 debut album Chelsea Girls, was introduced to me and the rest of my generation through Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums. Since then it’s slowly becoming a bit of a cliché, the number of YouTube (and professional) covers growing steadily each year. (I can’t scoff: I performed it myself at an open mic recently.) I’m told Daniel Radcliffe named it as the song that would play at Harry Potter’s funeral. I have no sensible response to this statement.
Despite its recent popularity the song yet divides people. Many I’ve shown it to maintain that Nico cannot sing. I’m not sure they really mean that— I mean, she’s on-pitch, she holds the notes, you can more or less hear the words all right even through the clipped Germanic accent— but I presume it’s her unusual timbre people struggle with. Her voice is low and sombre and androgynous and very obviously foreign, and I guess some people think that’s ugly. (Or, in at least one case, “retarded”. She’s not retarded, she’s German.)
I don’t agree. Nico’s mannered but pained delivery, older than her years, makes me ache with empathy. None of the numerous other versions I’ve heard over the years, including Jackson Browne’s own (rather tedious) solo recording, has held a candle to Nico’s perfect capturing of the song’s character: this proud woman is facing her life’s regrets with dignity and quiet resignation, but sounds as if she can barely admit this, can barely face the vulnerability of her own confession. It is the saddest, sweetest thing in the world. “Please don’t confront me with my failures,” she politely requests of the listener in the song’s final line. “I had not forgotten them.”
This politeness is, I think, important. I learnt to fingerpick by imitating Jackson Browne’s careful, ornate guitar work (and as far as I’m concerned it competes with Nico’s voice as the star of the song); meanwhile, the strings, politely insistent but never intrusive, attend to the melody like a patient but disapproving butler, careful not to offend. This is all arranged with thin and delicate precision, like china teacups balanced on a tray. You fear at any moment the whole arrangement will topple and shatter.
I think this is These Days’ hidden tension. The song is so precisely and exactly pretty you fear for its life. The urge is to cherish it, to protect it. It seems absurd that so many people now know and love the song, for this is not some brash rock anthem to be tossed around, manhandled; it’s breakable. Handle with care, YouTube.
Nico was unhappy with the finished Chelsea Girls album, the label having covered it with strings and flutes and all manner of cheerful baroque-pop things that went against what I suppose was her preference for simple, raw arrangements. She recorded a lot of icy, witchy, frequently abstract songs afterwards, with harpsichords and screeching feedback and deathly moaning, and I adore much of this, but it troubles me to think that Nico may have gone to her early grave hating These Days. I know, at least, they didn’t play it at her funeral.
Pyramid Song comes from Radiohead’s “experimental” Kid A/Amnesiac era, which for my money is still the most exciting period of what has turned out to be a very exciting career indeed. Pyramid Song is a dark, slow, heavy thing, like the shape of a whale moving beneath the waves. The rotating piano chords never quite resolve, monolithic and immutable, moving in a rhythm that’s obscure without feeling unnatural; until, halfway through, Phil Selway’s loose swing-time drumming reveals it to have been in common time all along. (This is a trick Radiohead later developed further with the 2006 version of Videotape, but that’s another story.) Wavering strings and snatches of half-heard conversation hover over the mix from time to time like bits of decaying memory— “all the figures I used to see”, sings Thom. There’s a feeling of continual movement and fluctuation, a sense of transcendence, of transition, of passing. Appropriate, considering the song’s lyrical theme: the title is a reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
I appreciate that the lyrics (not to mention music video) reference water— rowboats, rivers, swimming black-eyed angels— because to me there is something weirdly aquatic about this song. Not aquatic like bubbles and snorkels, but like sunken ruins, silent ocean depths. In fact, to me (and at least one other person I know) Pyramid Song sounds like drowning. Or what I imagine the sensation of drowning to be like, after the panic’s gone and you stop struggling and the black-eyed angels appear swimming beside you to take you off to heaven in their little rowboat.
So, yes, characteristically of the band, it’s dark, but in a way most of Radiohead’s work isn’t. Pyramid Song has nothing of the frantic paranoia and bitter swagger that defines most of the band’s darkest moments. (Compare the same album’s Knives Out, with its line “if you’d been a dog / they would’ve drowned you at birth”: for my money the nastiest lyric Thom Yorke ever put on a record.) Most of these songs are about being trapped in some way, in a bunker or a payroll or pretty house with a pretty garden, but Pyramid Song, to me, is about freedom. This is a poem of acceptance, absolution, release. The sweeping drama of the strings in the song’s closing moments signals the end of some final conflict, and then: calm. For all the drama of the music and lyrics, it is this resolute sense of calm that I find so life-affirming: “There was nothing to fear / nothing to doubt.”
Since Pyramid Song is my favourite work by my favourite band, I suppose I might have to claim that it is the best song of all time. I do so only very cautiously, with full knowledge of everyone’s fondness for Paranoid Android.
