This started out life as 'Flip Top Town' with different lyrics but on the same subject ie rubbish. I thought it was fitting to redo it as a christmas number seeing as it's probably the busiest time of the year for bin-men, who have gone unnoticed for too long, especially at this time of year.

 

I came up with this riff and melody after having an unbelievable urge to do so and not knowing why, I was working for a printers in Glasgow at the time and I was far from enjoying it, this acted as some kind of release from the tension of the working day.

I hadn’t written anything new in about a year and I was beginning to think I had had my chips so I was determined to come up with something I felt was decent. Like buses though, when this came it was shortly followed by another two new songs.

 

Carrying on the theme established in ‘The Sneeze’. The moment of contact with the ground is the point at which I disappear - as if entering a portal to a different place/time/dimension? who knows... what I do know is hanging around the woods half naked while making this was a tad risky.

 

An escapist, that’s what I am. I guess I’ve always been, some of my earliest memories when finding myself in a tricky situation, I would shake my head violently until I would ‘wake up’ safe, in the knowledge that it was all just a lousy dream. I occasionally feel the need to do it now in adulthood and most of the time i aint dreamin’. The Sneeze takes the idea of moments of weightlessness like those when you sneeze as ‘portals’ to another reality. A quick bit of editing later and I’m gone.

 

Developed from a riff I’ve had for years Man, The Machine combines some seriously reverby guitar with a beast of a beat. Vocals are deliberately mixed down and not so audible, purposely to build up texture. I’m picking and strumming the chords simultaneously throughout. The second part of the song combines the vocals and guitar which follow the same melody, I was hoping to achieve a climax of orgasmic proportions. A main influence for this is definitely ‘We’ by Brad. - the second half of that