You and Me V.

On a Borrowed Emmelle

Amethyst Twist

Wembley Singles

W E M B L E Y    S I N G L E S 
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There's a shortcut.
Count your steps to the corner
past the rumour and murder,
off the bus to your door.

They're waiting
like a rag tied to railings;
a shot that echoes off buildings
and is too loud to ignore.

    And looks deflect off where the upright meets the bar
    into the corner where you find out what you are.

    What you are, what you are.

He singled,
singled you out from the rabble
with fists like bramley apples
that never sweeten to feel.

You said,
you said "Can I have another?"
Oh, do the words give you cover,
hide more than they reveal?

    Cause words that come in haste are slow to be undone
    so think on, brother, you can hide but you can't run.

    You can't run, you can't run.

Brothers,
of a common Cheshire brick,
quarried
to be cast rudely on the tip-
toeing
down the Bollin we were put,
growing,
cramped at shoulders that abut.

Jamie,
you and I were of a chalk,
gamely,
the lime would quicken where we walked,
plotting,
kick an apple at a car,
rotting,
they're stuck here but you'll go far.

Far be it
from the backpedal of my turn,
see that
they lay me heavy in the ferns.
Lay me,
lay me heavy in the ferns.
Lay me,
lay me heavy in the ferns.

Factotums is the working handle of songwriter, Jack Gain. Raised in Macclesfield, after graduating he returned to his hometown and suffered several fitful bouts of employment before finding work at a library. There he took to composing songs silently in the stacks, recording his arrangements to tape in the kitchen of his flat.

    The resulting series of demos tread a line between upbeat, mid-60s guitar pop and British social realism. A sunny oeuvre, combining back bedroom dreaminess with a narrow-eyed wit, and tethered to the doleful, northern romanticism of Shelagh Delaney and Alan Sillitoe. Sweet, but salted with vernacular.
    The songs are short and neat. Flecked with chirruping guitars and impelled along by low, keening vocals. Chiming leads echo Nico and the Byrds, while wandering, tape-chorused bass parts evoke their C86 disciples. Occasionally, the springs shudder and the songs thrum with the three-chord urgency of Jesus and Mary Chain and Nuggets-era American garage.

    Here, Factotums enters into a fine European tradition - that of mimicking American cultural forms only to create something inadvertently new. In this case, the product is a kind of ersatz, California jangle pop steeped in the experience of being young and bored in small English towns, where "West coast" means Crosby and Bootle. Lovelorn and moneylorn, it speaks from a callow wisdom founded on split shoes and long afternoons. Of cheap fun savoured in the most austere settings: the library, the workplace, the rented room.

    These influences are brought together with some cunning. Makeshift, kitchen counter percussion (featuring tambourine, Jew's harp, spring-bound sofa cushions and wooden spoon castanets... less a "wall of sound" than a bright, melamine partition) is a nod to Spector pop and '60s girl groups. As is Gain's own flat-vowelled croon.

    The sense of amateur enthusiasm here recalls such lo-fi luminaries as Beat Happening and the young Beck Hansen. This is not the lo-fi of Instagrammed nostalgia, but rather of a live sound captured on the hoof, by cramped means, before it disappears.

    It is from these cramped quarters that we can catch a glimpse of a wider picture: that of the "graduate without a future". The songs evoke a sense of anomie and placelessness - of a youth poised between promise and disappointment, tested on the fraying rub of the adult world. And of the unlikely bonds of kinship that adhere amid the moil. It is an insight which will resound beyond the kitchen tiles.


DC