Notes On ‘Music For Winter Vol. 1’

Portable Paradise

and if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
that way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
and if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
and if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room — be it hotel,
hostel or hovel — find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

Roger Robinson

I found myself staring at this poem on the underground at the beginning of the pandemic, travelling to work on what I didn’t know would be my last day. A man coughed openly into the street, parting the crowd like an ocean.

Most of us never have time to stop and really think about what we’re doing, or why. While key workers were forced to work even harder, some with high-risk health conditions they weren’t allowed time off for, others of us observed our industries brought to their knees and found ourselves in sudden time windfalls.

As a band, we were forced to completely transform the way we approached music. Each of us sat in our own rooms, isolated, ready to work with our limitations. Now time felt endless and we could step back and examine the system we’d been making music in, we began writing music again for the same reasons we started as kids; for enjoyment, catharsis and just because we could.

After the first lockdown eased around August, we revisited some music we’d written early on as a band. The opening track on our EP, ‘Pieces’, was originally sung by Naomi back in 2016. I tried to rewrite the lyrics a few times, thinking I couldn’t speak for Naomi or adopt her story as my own, but nothing came close to the emotion conveyed in its original version.

Our bassist had been struggling through years of secrecy and emotional torment, but in lockdown, she finally had enough time and space to come to terms with everything that’s happened to her. Naomi grew up Christian. She began a relationship with a woman and experienced a lot of rejection. With an increased push for the world to atone for its oppression of the LGBT community and acknowledge the lifelong psychological damage people face, as a band, we finally felt bold enough to add to the noise.

Writing from conversations instead of pulling words out of my head felt like something from one of those Brian Eno oblique strategy cards. It felt completely alien, but if the key to writing novels is to listen to what people actually say and capture it, could it be the same for lyrics? Could the most honest storytelling come from real-life conversations?

The band is collaborative, so why couldn’t this aspect of it be as well? Naomi had just completed a course of therapy where she role-played what she wanted to say to the people who were angry at her because of her sexuality. With the idea of art as therapy in mind, we sat in our studio and wrote lyrics from an imagined conversation with someone telling Naomi she was going to hell. Naomi laid on our studio’s sofa as I sat with my back straight on a chair, pen and paper in hand, which we joked was like counselling. I asked questions and deciphered lyrics. Some original lyrics remain (“pieces of me falling out”).

We opened up Youtube to watch the Christian musician Vicky Beeching talk about how she completely lost her career after coming out. Suddenly, Naomi said, “isn’t it so weird that homosexuality is considered the mental illness? when surely homophobia, and any form of hatred, is?” and out came;

the illness is in you.

A part of me still feels wrong singing Pieces, despite the parallels I can draw with my own life. It belongs to someone else. This is Naomi’s story. But sometimes being a performer means being a conduit for other people and acknowledging the multiple universes that exist within one song.

Maybe one day I can convince Naomi to sing it. I remember watching Naomi perform back in 2016, covered in face paint. I always thought it was a nod to David Bowie, but she tells me years later the makeup was because she wanted to hide. She sang songs about being in a secret relationship with someone in front of her parents who were none the wiser. One lyric of hers has always stuck in my head,

“one love for you is a hundred lost”.