Category Archives: Music

#736: Radiohead – Life in a Glasshouse

Continuing their run of awesome album closers, ‘Life in a Glasshouse’ is the last track on Radiohead’s album Amnesiac and, in a way, put an ominous end to their remarkable reinvention era of 2000/2001 when they wowed critics and confused listeners with the aforementioned album and Kid A eight months earlier. Obviously Radiohead always reinvent themselves in some way, but in this period people really questioned what the band were trying to do with this new anti-rock route they were going with.

‘Glasshouse’ is probably the group’s most unique track. There is no other song in Radiohead’s discography that is like it at all. And that’s not me trying to say that it differs in just a minor area from their other material. The track is this sad-sounding, jazzy funeral dirge complete with clarinets, trumpets and a huge big band section. I seem to remember lying in bed, half-asleep, listening to Amnesiac for the first time in late 2012. Though I thought the rest of the album was alright (an opinion I still hold today, it’s probably one of my least favourite Radiohead albums) this track stood out to me as a highlight while also bringing a downer to whatever dream I was having. The track itself is inspired by an incident where a wife of a famous actor covered her windows with newspapers to prevent paparazzi and the tabloids from getting any proper photos of her. But Thom Yorke’s delivery on ‘someone’s listening in’, especially at the end, is very creepy. Makes me feel like I’m being watched. We are all being watched in some way.

Because the jazzy instrumental was provided by a specific band, led by musician Humphrey Lyttelton who passed away in 2008, the band have never performed the song live. Except for that one time that they did in 2001. Below is Lyttleton’s band and Radiohead on Later with Jools Holland performing the track.

#735: Billy Talent – Lies

1 Reply

From the age of ten to about seventeen, Billy Talent was my favourite band. It’s a long story that I could go into. I may have already done so in a previous post of a song by them. I’ll probably save it when I get to ‘River Below’ because that’s the first song I ever heard by them. I’ll gush all about them then. To put it short though, every time Billy Talent put out a new album I thought they could do no wrong. Dead Silence was the last new album of theirs I’ve listened to in full, I’ve never had the urge to listen to Afraid of Heights. I think my interest has obviously dwindled a bit. It’s their first two albums, though, that I can still play in full today and still feel the same way I did when I was younger when listening to them.

‘Lies’ is the fifth track on Billy Talent’s first album and is probably the hookiest one on there, with a very memorable and repetitive chorus that is also mimicked by Ian D’Sa’s guitar playing. The one aspect of Billy Talent that impressed even when I was ten was how D’Sa was able to use his guitar in a way that sounded like there were two guitarists playing at the same time and that is on show here, as he plays the song’s main riff while also keeping rhythm on the lower pitched strings.

Since I was ten years old when I heard this song for the first time, I’ve been singing along to it for all these years without really taking into consideration what it’s about. The melody of the chorus is so earwormy, it’s like one of those teasing ‘you can’t catch me’ taunts that schoolchildren sing. Not as annoying though. A quick look through the lyrics will more or less show that the track is about how lies can be disguised and come in all shapes and sizes, how they are essentially a part of life, and how they can come back to bite when someone finds that liar out. I don’t know what other Billy Talent fans think of this song. I’m not sure if the group have ever had the will to perform it in recent years. I think it’s a great album cut though. I feel like it could have been a clear single for a lot of other bands, but that would have been the easy route for this lot.