Tag: Normal Town

The Oxfordshire quintet’s first in a decade, with The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society as a conceptual touchstone, Normal Town takes its title from a study that pronounced Didcot (brothers Robin and Joe Bennett grew up in nearby Steventon) the most normal (as in boring) town in England. As such, the lyrics all by Robin, the album, their first without a jangling 12-string Rickenbacker, explores themes of home, nostalgia, alienation, escapism and the paradoxical luminescence and drudgery of the everyday.

Putting me in mind of early Bee Gees, the slow walking title track with its ringing guitars, tumbling drums and echoey vocal opens proceedings on a downbeat note of being trapped by the mundanity (“it’s a normal town, not a blade of grass/in the new high street and the underpass/where we used to meet and pretend to smoke/yeah there used to be hope but that’s all in the past/it’s like you’re telling a joke and nobody laughs when the punchline arrives… I dream of running away but there’s nowhere to go”), the despair and resignation oozing out of the final verse (“in this normal town, though it’s changing so fast/if you try to remember you get stuck in the past/yeah there used to be fields, we’d walk next to the tracks/Yeah I know it feels to slip through the cracks/though they’re rusted with age, I guess nothing much lasts/no I don’t want to die…in a normal town”).

And from normal to the chiming guitars and circling chords of ‘Normalisation’, McGuinn and Springsteen linking musical arms for a more upbeat outlook with its call to take stand against the sociopolitical climate that, coming timely in the wake of the flag flying epidemic, sees “the normalisation of the hate in this nation” with its reference to the encroachment of AI (“you may have an opinion that the working man’s dead/they replaced us with robots without a thought in their heads”) and the declaration “We are the protectors and they shall not pass we’ll stand this ground til we breathe our last” because “we can never go back, we can’t live in the past/but we can work for a future a little better than the last”. As Bruce Cockburn said, “the trouble with normal is that it always gets worse”.

There’s a very specific local reference with the bass-weighted, slow walking ‘Cooling Towers’, inspired by the now demolished power station for which Didcot was once famed (Bennett having done a painting of it as a boy), the lyric mentioning how three men (it was actually four) were killed in 2016 when part of the turbine hall collapsed. Beyond that, it’s a nostalgic song about a home to which you can never really go home again number (“I’m catching a train back to where I was born/The tall cranes sway like a field of corn/Paddington basin rises up to the sky/ain’t it strange what you miss – when you’re gone too long”), another reflection of changing times (“they’re turning this place into a garden town… the cooling towers cry invisible tears and the rest will be gone in a couple of years/soon the whole line will be electrified/we’ll forget all the names of the ones who died”), and the desensitisation of communities (“people brush past, they won’t look you in the eye”), again with that desire to hold back the years (“maybe we’re not the ones to hold back the tide/but I want to be able to tell you we tried”).

Inspired by Bennett’s experiences of working a soulless distribution warehouse job in nearby Milton Park, the breezily strummed and catchily poppy ‘21st Century Light Industrial’ again speaks of escaping a life-draining environment (“Got to get away from this stale situation/Tired of looking out at the same old view/Working every day in the same old place with the same old faces staring at you”) and the desperate cry that there’s “Got to be more than this. Cos we barely exist/When we’re working at the 21st century light industrial park”.

Again with an autobiographical connection, the chugging ‘Stolen Car’ (the title itself tells you there’s Springsteen DNA in there) is a slightly exaggerated outlaw on the run account (it was his own vehicle) of how a friend got chased by the police but that’s just a springboard for a song about how, when the dice never roll your way (“He works long hours but there’s little reward/o he took out a loan that he can barely afford/They sold the house right from under him”) music can be a lifeline (“got a worn out soul but I’m still on my feet/give me that rock and roll, I want to feel my heart beat”).

The theme of escape returns with the echoed vocals and vague ELO hints of ‘Faraway Blue Skies’ (“Grey clouds making strange formations/Hide the fading sun from view/Find your way to your own salvation/It’s all that you can ever do”) before midtempo, Dylan-inflected warbled ballad ‘Linescapes’ picks up the thematic baton, the title taken from a book written by an ecologist friend about the different industrial lines that we create across landscapes, some harmful and some beneficial to the ecology and the song about crossing these often invisible barriers and divisions (“I know there’s no time to waste if we’re going to turn this ship around cos we’re playing for high stakes, can’t hide from this heartbreak/still believing in blind faith cos we’re standing on holy ground”), the railway tracks (“like scars from an ancient injury”) referenced in “cold steel snakes across the landscape/in every bridge and every tunnel/though you believed yourselves immortal/you may cross them at your peril” alluding to how, when he was 12, he walked the railway line from his house into Didcot.

The twin themes of division and bittersweet escape also inform the Lennonesque organ-based, steady rhythm ‘Bitter Pill’ (“generations come and go, must we be divided so/We were dreaming of escape, we were guided by the faith searching for the beat divine… debts of sorrow you must pay/When you try to pierce that veil”), giving way to the folksy ‘Coming Home’ with a persistent siren, hollow drums and nods to Lauren Canyon days, a restless rolling stone track inspired by how drummer James twice relocated to L.A., but always came back to Didcot. Again it combines music as an escape from a dead end life (“You were never gonna be the king of this town/Things are changing in the corridors and hallways/You were never really gonna have it your way”) with the lure of home calling you back to an anchor you can rely on when your dreams “drain away like the sands in an hourglass”.

‘Where I’m Calling From’ takes a tonal shift into spacey Sgt Pepper territory, a call beamed from the future about the need to make change (“Look back and wonder how/You know that’s not the way/So you learn to live today”) with a lyric that references both Louis Armstrong and 20s Harlem nightclub Connie’s Inn, the line about the Carter Family staring from their rocking chair an allusion to how while it featured Black musicians, the audiences were strictly white. I don’t think it’s hard to read the message between the lines.

It heads to a close with the five-minute, gradually building ‘These Days Will End’ which plays like a summary of the running commentary as they sing “changes come through sliding doors/Creep up on you ’til you can’t ignore/What happened then still echoes down the years/Isn’t it strange the way we change from day to day/The way we feel?/Underneath we’re still the same/The problems day to day are hardly real….I close my eyes and breathe right in/And I’m right here with you again/These days will end, I don’t know how/I don’t know when”. And end they do with the stripped back warbling balladry of ‘Real Life’ as it sounds an epiphany about not chasing changes you don’t really want and finding that carpe diem moment with the closing “All I want is the real life/I don’t care about the high life/I don’t want to waste my life/Cos the real life shines clear as the daylight/If I could just get today right/Just want to make things clear/There’s only one life, so don’t wish it away”.

Bennett says the album is about the fantasy of escape and the contrast between home, about coming to terms with everyday life while still holding your dreams close. If that’s what living in normal town means, then get me a mortgage.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.thedreamingspires.co.uk

’21st Century Light Industrial’ – live: