A Traveller’s Guide to Lost and Later Songs #6


For those who may appreciate some background detail, I offer below my workings.

#6 What You Came For
(11/08/2018)


The first of the Later songs. The initial melody came to me whilst on a jolly through to Edinburgh for the festival, somewhere in between Kilderkin and the Waverley Bar. As I recall, I was temporarily between drinks and loitering outside a newsagent whilst a friend bought tobacco. https://on.soundcloud.com/N8fVy

Ideas tend to come to me when my guard is down, maybe when drifting in or out of sleep, or sometimes, as in this case, when in a dreamlike state. A cool summer breeze eased down the Royal Mile, calming my fevered brow. I must have started singing to myself. Tum-te-tum. Tourists milling by occasionally glanced at me, the singing jakey; perhaps thinking I was one of the local characters, a little bit random but harmless enough. “Hey”, I wanted to say, “I’m a tourist here myself”. There must have been some presence of mind still functioning as I recorded the tune on my phone with the title “Yeahyeahyeahs” (it reminded me a little, at the time, of their song “Turn Into”- I always liked that one). The tune must have been rattling around in my head for a while after that as further developments of the song can be heard on subsequent phone recordings made, by the sounds of it, on trains, waiting on buses and first thing in the morning after dreaming about an idea for the middle eight- https://on.soundcloud.com/SAaj7

The last recorded sighting was 24/09/18; a live take of a rehearsal by the band but by then the Dark Carnival was rolling into town and everything went supernatural for a while.

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