#1382: The Libertines – Time for Heroes

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Maybe I should approach this post like I’m writing about a song from Up the Bracket for the first time. I mean, I’ve covered ‘I Get Along’ – the last song on the album – but it wasn’t too long after doing that post that the song would come up in the shuffle list, the clunky riff would start, and I’d think to myself, “I’m not sure I like this song all that much anymore.” Got me heading for the skip button quite regularly. But that post will still exist as a reminder of a time when I used to like it a lot. But ‘Time for Heroes’? That’s a whole different story. After the band’s initial split in 2004, music videos by The Libertines would make their occasional appearances on MTV2. It just so happened that ‘Time for Heroes’ had one, being a single and all. I probably saw it once, twice, maybe three times, but that was enough to like the song. Then my sister got Up the Bracket as a loan from a school friend of hers. She ripped that onto the old, old, in-a-landfill-somewhere XP computer. Now I could listen to the song anytime.

I don’t know if there’s some kind of unwritten rule in Libertines fandom. Like you’re not meant to compare Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, you’re meant to like them both equally, or something. I’m not the biggest Libertines-head. But for me, Doherty’s always been the more interesting vocalist out of the two. The main attraction of the band is hearing them in a song together, that goes without saying. But if it’s just one of them throughout the whole thing, I feel Doherty’s usually the one who brings a different element to the proceedings. Like on ‘Time for Heroes’, he’s kind of got this drunken, slurring quality to his vocal delivery. Maybe he was drunk at the time of recording it. He sounds like he could mess a word or line up at any moment. But he still manages to hit every note needed and belts out those passionate “Oh, how I cherish you, my love” lyrics at the end of the verses. Or is that line the chorus? I don’t know if this song has a chorus. Feels like Doherty just sings one long verse over some great chord changes, on and on until the instrumental break comes in with a minute left to go.

‘Time for Heroes’ is Doherty’s observational take on the riots that took place in London on May Day 2000. I think he took part in them himself. I was barely a human being at the time, so I don’t know what the specifics of what happened. But this article on the events can clue us all in. Doherty addresses the listener with the first lines, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot / Shoveled up like muck, set the night on fire”. Good opening lines by the way. Doherty continues on, shouting out the rioters known as the Wombles who dressed up as the characters of the same name. He references Bill Bones from Treasure Island. Just small things to look out for. Overall, I think the song’s acts as something of a tribute to all of the people who were caught up in the riots that day. Not the police, but the public fighting against them. I feel like they’re the heroes the song’s title refers to, and his ‘love’ is the thrill of being involved in places where he probably shouldn’t be. Least, that’s what I get from the song. It’s a good one. Better to listen to than to read about.

#1381: Dananananaykroyd – Time Capsule

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Here’s another blog subject to go in the list of “the last song from albums I’ll never be covering again on this place”. I feel like there’s been a lot of those recently. If this is your first time reading up on a song from Dananananaykroyd’s There Is a Way here, the short story of my experience with it is I downloaded the album a few days after its release, after finding out about the first single from the album on – I’m pretty sure – the morning after my last GCSE exam in 2011. There Is a Way got very, very minimal coverage, both commercially and critically. Pitchfork reviewed the band’s debut album. I thought they’d review There Is a Way. They did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if millions of people didn’t know this album exists. But I at least hope that writing about nine of its 11 tracks on this site gives you incentive to check it out and make your own thoughts on it. For me, the album still sounds as fresh now as it did… 15 years ago. Jesus. My favourite album of theirs out of the two they made.

Finally getting a physical copy of There Is a Way only a couple years ago really opened my eyes as to what the songs on it were about. Up until 2024, I was singing along, but only with words that I thought I was hearing or mildly comprehensible. I’ve probably made a point in previous posts about how the Glaswegian accents of Gunn and Baillie Jnr come through strongly in their singing numerous times. And that’s only because the point is true. Lyrics sites had no idea what was going on. There are only a couple which now have the right lyrics, and that’s because I uploaded them myself. I mean, the song was always obviously about a time capsule, but I can make a strong deduction now that one of the bandmembers dug a capsule up – most likely John Baillie Jnr ’cause he wrote the lyrics – found a diary in it and was inspired enough to relay its entries and the overall time capsule-finding experience into the form of a song. Baillie Jnr finds a delightful interest in the trivial things his ancestors got up to back in the day and puts it on himself to carry on the family name, tributing his hometown of Glasgow in the process.

‘Time Capsule’ is a track on There Is a Way that I remember liking from the first listen. I once threw out a comment on a post the band made on their Facebook page, requesting the song be the next single. My comment probably had no relation to what the band posted. It wasn’t to be, because the band released ‘Think and Feel’ as the second single and then broke up not too long afterwards. It was a sad, sad situation. The split, I mean, not that my request got “snubbed”. But I honestly thought ‘Time Capsule’ had everything that the public would enjoy. It had the “Time Capsu-all” hook, sang in unison by vocalists Calum Gunn and John Baillie Jnr, that quick-fire scale-demonstration guitar riff on the right-hand side by guitarist David Roy. Paul Carlin’s working those drums, makes the track’s momentum feel very busy, always moving forward. There Is a Way is a ball of energy up to and including ‘Time Capsule’. You think the band have to let up at some point. And they do. After ending the song with a climactic finish where the band go into half-time, hammering the aforementioned guitar riff home until the song collapses in on itself, a bubble pop transitions the listener into what I’m guessing is a field recording outside the studio that lasts for about a minute. Just to let you have a little breather, I think. A great way to close out the album’s first half.

#1380: Supergrass – Time

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Ah, the last time I’ll be writing about a tune from I Should Coco on here. It’s been a good run. I’ve tried to be a champion of Supergrass whenever I cover something of theirs on this place, and I’m gonna keep on going. While you may be listening to Blur, or Pulp, or Oasis, you should all really be listening to Supergrass instead. I Should Coco usually gets recognised as the classic album of the band’s. It was released in the midst of Britpop and it has ‘Alright’ on there. But its overarching infectious energy, brilliant melodies and underlying humour has helped the record stand the test of time. When it comes to me, …Coco was the third Supergrass that I physically owned after getting it for my 13th birthday and having In It for the Money and the X-Ray album in my hands already. And I can remember that first listen and thinking at the time, “Yeah, this is just another good Supergrass album.” Those guys had done it again. And this was just their starting point. They only got better.

‘Time’ is the 11th song on …Coco. It was released alongside ‘Alright’ in a double A-side single format in 1995. The two songs got to number two in the charts, but ‘Alright’ got all the popularity. I don’t think I’d ever heard ‘Time’ before I got I Should Coco in 2008. At this point, I can’t remember the last time I willingly listened to ‘Alright’. ‘Time’, I could put on at anytime. It’s the band’s country, “Home on the Range” type song, anchored by a delightful guitar lick and a swinging rhythm. Got a big appreciation for the groove it possesses, punctuated by the bass line by Mick Quinn. There aren’t many words to analyse in this song. It leaves a lot to interpretation. What I’ve felt is it’s about a person acknowledging that it’s time to leave their loved one as they go away for a little while. If it’s based on personal experience, someone’s going on tour. But the narrator wants to know that the love they still have never leaves when they look their partner in the eyes: “I know what I see / Have it all, you” as it says in the chorus. It doesn’t sound right on paper, but the feeling’s there. Sounds much better with the music alongside the words.

I think what also makes the track so great is the way Gaz Coombes the thing. “The tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime’s on the way”. It’s those long-drawn out notes that ring out into the studio. Such an emphatic way to get things rolling. In fact, the vocals all the way through are probably my main highlight. Particularly how Quinn mirrors Coombes’s melody, but an octave higher. Adds that little layer on top of everything. So when they sing together during the choruses, it makes the song all the more catchy than how it initially started off. Cap it off with a simultaneous guitar and harmonica solo, you get some good listening returns. Coming after what’s probably the silliest song on …Coco, ‘Time’ lays down a real sense of warmth and endearing sincerity, providing a moment to “feel” as the album gets closer towards its end. Yeah, I’m a big fan of this one. It’s not the final statement on the album. But as a representative of it on this blog, it is. Couldn’t be more appropriate.

#1379: Pink Floyd – Time

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So I went and looked on the old family Windows Vista computer to see when I downloaded The Dark Side of the Moon onto it. Results showed that I did so on Christmas Eve 2009. I’ve always thought I’d heard it much earlier in that year. I’m still a bit sceptical, to be honest. But if I did hear it properly for the first time then, I think it was to listen to another album that was considered to be the greatest of all time among all the Beatles stuff I would have been getting into during that period. I apparently went on to download Abbey Road a few days later, so that shows where I was at in those days. A year later, I listened to Wish You Were Here. By then, I think I was into ‘Time’ quite a bit. I somehow figured out that parts of ‘Have a Cigar’ mixed quite well with ‘Time’, and I made a mashup of the two with ‘Helter Skelter’ by The Beatles. Why did I do that? Mash-ups were quite the thing in 2010. If I’m making things up and I wasn’t feeling ‘Time’ then, I certainly was at that point.

‘Time’ is the fourth song on The Dark Side of the Moon, the first one in the long-duration, meaty section that makes up the middle of the album’s sandwich-like structure. Bass guitarist Roger Waters wrote the lyrics. From what I can recall from an interview I watched, he was inspired to write it when he was about 28 or 29 and realised he need to stop waiting for something big to happen to say ‘Life is starting now’, because life was happening with each second that passed him by. If anything, ‘Time’ acts as a warning. It touches on the dangers of wasting time, procrastination, how time goes quickly, how death approaches with each tick of the clock. A read through of the song’s words isn’t likely to brighten anyone’s day. And then there’s the music. ‘Haunting’ is the word that gets thrown around on web comments to get upvotes and make things scarier than they are, but you can definitely see ‘Time’ being the soundtrack to a very bad trip, or at the very least a nightmare of some kind.

No one starts singing until two minutes and 30 seconds into the song, but even those chiming clocks, ringing alarms and that long, long introduction is essential to the proceedings. You’re waiting in anticipation as those long notes ring out and those muted bass guitar notes keep clicking on, and the emphatic drum fill by Nick Mason fulfills your wish. The notable feature for me is the contrast between David Gilmour’s raspier vocal, which you hear in the groovier verses, and keyboardist Richard Wright’s softer delivery in the spaced out choruses – accompanied by the ooh-aahs of the lady vocalists in the background. The two guys sing their melodies perfectly. And then there’s the damn ripping guitar solo in the middle. Man, this is a song of vast proportions. It comes to an end with a reprise of ‘Breathe’, and I’ve always thought of the “softly spoken magic spell” mentioned in the last line as referring to the vocals in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Thinking about it, there’s nothing softly spoken about them. But there’s a kind of spell-like quality about them, if spells were something that existed in reality.

#1378: They Might Be Giants – Till My Head Falls Off

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‘Till My Head Falls Off’ is the second song on They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album, Factory Showroom. That album’s most known for being the band’s last on major label Elektra Records before they left quite acrimoniously and went on to make their own record label to release their material on. I got ’round to listening to the album myself in late 2010 or so, when I decided to properly get into They Might Be Giants’ big, big discography. Back then, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ was another TMBG song that was high in the song ratings list on the band’s Wiki website. I heard it probably the once and understood why. Album opener, ‘S-E-X-X-Y’, was the only track to be released as a single. And it’s not like a song’s designation as a single is meant to signify its greatness or anything, but ‘…Head Falls Off’ seems like the very obvious single choice if you were to compare the two. Though maybe the band knew this and went with the more unconventional option, anyway.

After ‘S-E-X-X-Y’ begins things on a funky, ’70s-spy sitcom kind of deal, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ arrives as the faster power-pop number. Emphasis on the word ‘power’. The track’s essentially a live take, with the two Johns and the band behind them going at full blast, and what we got was the last recording of the band going the fastest they could until the recording equipment couldn’t stands no more. The track concerns a neurotic narrator who, in the first verse, has a bit of a freak-out about some missing Advil tablets, and then wonders about their misplaced notes in the second. Despite their tendency to succumb to anxiety at times, look at themselves in the mirror and think about what they see, they seem to take great pride in the person that they are. The person’s gonna keep on going until the day they die, or till [their] head falls off, as John Linnell sings in the massive choruses. A song of self-assurance for the worriers out there. Sometimes I think Linnell may be singing about himself subliminally on how he’ll be doing this songwriting stuff until he’s gone. If that’s the case, makes it all the more endearing.

I guess another notable thing about Factory Showroom is that it was the first album of They done where the band had a second guitarist in the group. Alongside John Flansburgh now (then) was Eric Schermerhorn, in the role of lead guitarist. Flansburgh provides the anchoring rhythm in the left channel, while Schermerhorn gets the freedom in the right to provide some guitar feedback, those string bends during the choruses and the frantic guitar solo during the break. Here was the new band configuration at its rawest, and they were giving the goods thick and fast. Being the John Linnell composition it is, there’s melody abound, very memorable, easy to get stuck into your head even if the words he fits in them are arriving at a mile a minute, all culminating in those wide-open choruses where – you’ll see in the live video – he practically opens his jaw at its widest to deliver the jubilant high notes. It’s just another good They Might Be Giants song, I don’t know what else to say. I think we’ve reached the end here.