It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written anything about Hot Club de Paris around here. The last time I did, I was a bit of an arse about them. Very dismissive. You know how it is when you’re 18, you think you’re smart ’cause you’re an adult on paper and you think everyone wants to know your real opinion about something. It’s a time of my life I don’t miss. What I’ll say now about the band is that, even if I haven’t listened to any of their albums in full, the three songs I got to know by them whenever their videos showed up MTV2 got stuck in the brain usually at an instant. Those videos may have played only a few times, and that was almost, almost 20 years ago. The third song will get its own post soon.

But for now, here’s the second, and it’s the song that opens the trio’s debut album. It’s the second on the linked video, but that somehow includes the pregap track that was hidden on the CD copies. ‘Shipwreck’ was released as the second single from Drop It ’til It Pops in about early 2007 or so. Saw the video on the TV in the morning one day, saw that it was by the band who made another song I liked a few months earlier, the third song I was talking about earlier, and was into it right away. Compared to their previous video that had a stop-motion thing going on, this one showed the band actually performing, and as an 11-year-old kid in grammar school who wasn’t going to gigs anytime soon, it was quite exciting to see.

All the time I’ve known the track, I’ve never stopped to think what it was about. I’ve always been a more “music first-lyrics later’ kinda guy, I can’t help it. But looking at the words briefly, I think it’s about a group of lads – maybe referring to the band themselves, who knows – being rowdy on a night out at a club, but it’s all told with the inclusion of nautical/pirate-themed lyrics and imagery to cleverly make things that little more difficult to gauge. Paul Rafferty, the bassist, and guitarist Matthew Smith both take lead vocals on the tune, as demonstrated in the music video, usually amidst rollicking “woo” and “yo-ho-ho” chants in the back, with both pulling off melodic licks that drive the track along. Sections of the song are also played in 7/8 time, kind of a math rock thing going on but not really. It all sounds good to me. Wouldn’t hurt to actually listen through their discography one of these days.