Tag Archives: own

#1272: Graham Coxon – Standing on My Own Again

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I know for sure that an official music video exists for this track. It’s just that it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube and seems to be wiped off the face of the internet. By seeing it what felt like every day for a period in 2006 on MTV2, I became very familiar with Graham Coxon’s ‘Standing on My Own Again’ very quickly. It was released as the first single from his then forthcoming album Love Travels at Illegal Speeds. As I write to you, I’m starting to wonder whether this was the first song by him that I had ever heard, or if it was ‘Freakin’ Out’. Maybe I answer that question in the post for that track. To keep things mysterious, I won’t go and find out. But I do know for sure that I didn’t know who Blur was, and so for a bit I just recognised Coxon as this solo artist who was just doing his thing. Doing it well too.

In Coxon’s words, the song builds a scene where the narrator’s standing on a grey and muddy beach looking out at a ship that’s sinking and likening its situation to a relationship where neither person involved are enjoying themselves anymore. You think of that and hear the lyrics, or read ’em, and it all makes perfect sense. It’s much better watching Coxon explain it all himself. Combine that with a charging performance led by striding guitars and a wailing vocal performance, it makes for some very cathartic listening. Coxon performs with what was his usual live band in the music video, but I didn’t find out until quite recently that in the studio he played all the instruments himself. I always knew him to be a great guitarist. He ain’t to shabby on the bass guitar and drums as well.

Yeah, listening to this song will always take me back to those days in 2006 when I was pretty much sitting in front of the TV all day watching music videos and seeing this song on a regular basis. I seem to remember this and ‘All These Things I Hate’ by Bullet for My Valentine were usually played within a video or two of each other. And looking at the Wiki pages for both songs, they were both released in February of that year. At least my memory’s still somewhat kicking. Love Travels at Illegal Speeds will be out for 20 years in 2026, so hopefully the videos for ‘Standing…’ and fellow single ‘You & I’ show their faces for the anniversary. Until then, here’s the making of the video for the former, just to show you I’m not going crazy about a magical video that may or may not be real.

#1269: They Might Be Giants – Stand on Your Own Head

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Nearing the end of They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln, the band’s second debut album released in the September of 1988, comes the song ‘Stand on Your Own Head’. Now, I’ve always thought it was a good one, and I’m sure there are a lot of Giants fans out there who feel the same way. You wouldn’t find it being regarded as a major highlight, but it’s appreciated all the same. My view, it gets a bit of a raw deal being sandwiched between two of the album’s most well-known tracks in ‘Shoehorn with Teeth’ and ‘Snowball in Hell’. I’d go for this one over the former any day, and maybe you could tell because I’m writing about ‘Stand…’ and haven’t done a post on ‘Shoehorn’.

This one here is another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell. I’ve come to think of the lyric as some kind of wordplay exercise, taking idioms and everyday phrases and then turning them upside down. Or “on their heads”, you might say. And you can go through it line by line. At least, almost. “I like people, they’re the ones who can’t stand”, I guess is a turn on “I hate people, they’re the ones I can’t stand”. It’s a bit of stretch on my part, seeing as that’s not really an everyday phrase. But what’s more obvious comes in the lyrics for the chorus, “Stand on your own head for a change/Give me some skin to call my own”, which calls to the “Stand on your own two feet” phrase and provides a combination of “give me some skin” and “a home to call my own”. And then there’s the “You’ve made my day, now you have to sleep in it” in the second verse, a reference to making a bed and lying in it. The other parts about smoke signals and suing for custody, I’ve still not been able to pin down. But they sound good nonetheless.

The main musical highlight in this tune is the prominent feature of the banjo, which is rarely used in any other They Might Be Giants song, if it even is at all. The band’s Wiki side credited its playing to John Linnell. I never thought much of it. I listened to a podcast one day that questioned whether this credit was correct. There are TMBG songs that have Linnell playing guitar and he isn’t all that proficient in that, so it did make me wonder whether the credit was true too. But then a few years ago, a TMBG live performance from 1988 was released on YouTube, and right there in the thumbnail was Linnell with banjo in hand alongside John Flansburgh. Though whether he’s playing the intricate part during the choruses is still up for question. If you were somewhat displeased with my own take on the song, luckily I found this track-by-track breakdown of Lincoln while writing this. Linnell’s recollection of the track might just be more useful than mine.

#979: Blur – On Your Own

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Similarly to, I think, all of the singles Blur released up to their initial split in 2003, ‘On Your Own’ was a track I came across when its music video played on the TV. Large chance it was probably on MTV2. That channel had a knack for just randomly showing Blur music videos out of the blue for no particular reason. Not that it’s anything to complain about. I’ve known ‘On Your Own’ for so long now that I couldn’t even begin to tell you what I felt when I first heard/saw it. Would have been about 10 years old or around that age. But I can at least describe what about it has endeared it to me for all this time.

As the third single released from the band’s self-titled album in 1997, ‘On Your Own’ was unlike the crunching band-in-a-room performances of its two predecessors. This track included strange phasing synthesizers and a drum machine, comically performed by drummer Dave Rowntree in what is essentially a hole in the ground in the music video. On top of that steady rhythm comes Graham Coxon on the guitar, pulling off these jagged guitar lines and noises using his pedals which sound like those you hear when your video game freezes, but even more absurdly brutal in its tone. It’s like he’s trying to completely throw the song in the wrong direction, but ends up adding a whole other dimension to it. Then eventually comes Damon Albarn over the top, spouting these surreal lyrics that are provide some interesting imagery. The first verse may or may not be about ordering drugs while the second describes a bad trip/overwhelming reaction someone has to these drugs while on a night out. The chorus doesn’t make much sense at all, but the band sound like they’re having a great time when they’re belting it out. With all this though, the song still manages to pull off this existential bit, reminding us that in the end (death), we’ll all be alone – presumably in our coffins.

The quote most attributed to this track is Albarn’s who considered the track to be “one of the first ever Gorillaz tunes.” Now, I always took that quote to mean that it was an archetype for what would follow on the first Gorillaz album, rather than it being an actual track that he had with Gorillaz in mind but performing it with Blur instead. But I think a lot of people actually think that it was meant to be for Gorillaz just because of that quote. I don’t really see it myself. Albarn sounds too lucid on this track. The lyrics on here seem like they have no meaning to them, but they really do. Well, except for maybe part of the chorus. A lot of lyrics on that first Gorillaz album don’t make much sense at all. You really have to read those ones to try and get something. You want a proto-Gorillaz song? Check out ‘I’m Just a Killer for Your Love’.