Thursday, August 21, 2003

Now that I’m packing, it’s making a dent on my psyche and I’ve discovered that I’m having a lot of lasts at the moment. The last walk along the Thames to Tescos. The last of the year’s ducklings. The last of the first ripening chestnuts. The last patch of white and grey feathers where some pigeon met a violent end. The last scrap of freedom. The last of my autonomy.

I don’t like lasts. I prefer firsts. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any firsts lurking in my immediate future. I can’t think of anything to come that I’ve not done before. The scurrying home with my tail between my legs. The grovelling to the bank manager. The credit card bills I’m almost too scared to open. The change of address letters. The packing. The throwing out. The fear.

Somewhere, there has to be a first. A nice first. A first I’ll always remember and be proud of. A first that will turn my life around. A first that I can smile about. A first I can look back on with warm fuzzy feelings.

Please?

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It’s been a good year for music both new and simply new to me. Aqualung, Athlete, Blur, Hot Hot Heat, Jeff Hanson, The Shins, Rob Dougan, The Thrills, Tom McRae, Turin Breaks. And that’s only a small sample. It’s been a vintage year, and the best of the them? I wonder.

Years ago, it would have been in 99 i guess, I heard this song. It stuck in my head, plagued me, tortured me, beautifully anguished. That song was Sunburn. I did something I hardly ever do – I bought a single. Showbiz was a great album. Raw. Pained. Beautiful.

Then two years ago came Origins of Symmetry and it stole away the breath from my lungs. I spent the Eisteddfod playing it to friends until they recognised its greatness, its genius. Bliss, what an aptly named song. The video I would sit and watch again and again and again and again. Matt Bellamy, pillar-box red hair, falling into oblivion whilst my heart beat out of my chest.

Now… now we have Absolution. We have Time is Running Out, we have Falling Away With You, we have Hysteria. And we have 53:36 of beauty, anguish, pain, love, loss and some seriously overblown megalomanic rock-operatic melodramatic gorgeousness.

I don’t know how Matt Bellamy does it. This is the most overdone album I’ve ever listened to, overwritten, overplayed, overthetop, crawling over every inch of my skin, getting under it, getting in my blood, in my veins, in my brain and turning me into something I rarely get to be. Here, now, I am spirited away, made whole, made new, made beautiful. And it’s not due to the rare treat of JD and Coke, although that adds a certain something to the proceedings, (but for reasons different than you might imagine, reasons that have to do with synaesthetic memory rather than alcohol content).

It must be the chord changes. Maybe it’s the strings. The riffs. The timbre of Bellamy’s voice, so mournful, so full of so many lifetimes of hurt, so beautiful it could make you cry. Maybe it’s the distorted guitars, the fuzz bass, the vibrato that tremors though his plaintive tones.

However lonely, lost and isolated I’ve ever been, Matt’s felt worse. However deserted, isolated and despairing I’ve been Matt’s been worse. However much I’ve lost, thrown away or has slipped through my fingers, Matt’s lost much, much more. I can tell. I can feel it. I know it. And it’s beautiful.

But more than that, there’s something more to this album. To Muse. They do something that few bands can do. They achieve something with their music which is more powerful than any book, any movie, any poem. Time is Running Out elicits a very real, very physical reaction. To say it gets under my skin doesn’t communicate the half of it.

It makes my skin tingle, makes my lungs starve for air, makes me gasp and fight for breath. I can feel my heart in my chest, feel the shape of it, feel the music wrap around it as if Matt is holding it in his hand, squeezing, keeping it beating when instead it wants to stop. It’s like when you catch the eye of that really gorgeous person on the far side of the room, and they stand, smile, walk over and ask you to dance.

I think I'm drowning
asphyxiating
I wanna break the spell
that you've created

you're something beautiful
a contradiction
I wanna play the game
I want the friction

you will be
the death of me
yeah, you will be
the death of me

bury it
I won't let you bury it
I won't let you smother it
I won't let you murder it

our time is running out
and our time is running out
you can't push it underground
we can't stop it screaming out

I wanted freedom
but I'm restricted
I tried to give you up
but I'm addicted

now that you know I'm trapped
sense of elation
you'll never dream of breaking
this fixation

you will squeeze the life out of me

bury it
I won't let you bury it
I won't let you smother it
I won't let you murder it

our time is running out
and our time is running out
you can't push it underground
we can't stop it screaming out

how did it come to this?

ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeaha yeaha yeah
ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeaha yeaha yeah
ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeah-eh-eh

you will suck the life out of me

bury it
I won't let you bury it
I won't let you smother it
I won't let you murder it

our time is running out
and our time is running out
you can't push it underground
we can't stop it screaming out

how did it come to this?

ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeaha yeaha yeah
ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeaha yeaha yeah
ooh ooh ooh, yeaha yeaha yeah-eh-eh

Elliott Smith can make me cry. The Super Furry Animals can make me a Cymraes. Muse make me want to make like bunnies. I don’t know what it is. Gruff’s more gorgeous. Elliott more delicate. But when Matt sings, oh dearie, dearie me…

If I pursue this train of thought any further I could end up somewhere that we really don’t want to be going in public.

hopelessly I'll love you endlessly
hopelessly I'll give you everything
but I won't give you up
I won't let you down
and I won't leave you falling
If the moment ever comes

When I was in a band a couple of years ago, I really wanted to be in Muse. I wanted to be Matt Bellamy. I wanted to pour my heart out to the world, to make people feel how he makes me feel. I wanted to make people want to cry, want to make like bunnies, want to take the world by the throat and kiss it til it swooned for air.

Eventually, I concluded that music wasn’t my medium, no matter how much I tried. No amount of hard work and practice would make me a songwriter like Matt. No number of industry contacts could place in me the talent I didn’t have.

Instead, I turned to words to do the same thing. When I wake at night, it’s not melodies that haunt me, but words, swarming through my head like monarch butterflies, everywhere, obliterating everything else in a fluttering storm of wings. I know where I am with words.

But no matter. Muse’s Absolution is going to be one of the great albums of this year. I am not surprised, just grateful that such a thing of beauty exists in my life when Kansas is waving bye-bye.

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Well, it's been a couple of weeks since I posted the first draft of my script, Tag up on Zoetrope for review by my fellow screenwriters. The passing comments I've had on it have all been very encouraging and positive. Now the reviews proper have started to come in and I have to say that the reaction to it has been quite surprising.

When I posted the screenplay, I expected to have it if not mutilated then certainly dissected with intent. After all, I may be a fairly experienced writer when it comes to features and interviews, but this is my first script. When I started it, I didn’t have a clue about structure, format or anything. I wrote, I read one book about screenplays, and I finished. Naturally I expected it to be crap and to be torn apart by more experienced writers.

Instead, I’ve been surprised by the comments that have come back. Although many of the review have pointed out weaknesses, which is all for the good as that will help me rewrite, they’ve also included compliments. Yes! Actual compliments!! And my average rating is ‘very good’, which is equivalent to 7 or 8 out of 10.

Now, because this is my blog, and I’m chuffed as a small horse about what people are saying, here are some extracts from the five reviews I’ve had:

“Your pacing was good but your progression was fantastic.”
“Mathonwy’s past with Dev was incredibly done. A great montage.”
“Very tightly written.”
“This is definitely a script worth recommending for production.”
“You’re in the game. Your story and presentation are way beyond most other efforts I’ve seen here.”
“You have good dialogue skills. You’re a natural at movie talk.”
“Having bacon and eggs for lunch is much strangers than some of your monsters to North Americans.” (ok, not actually a compliment, but it made me laugh.)
“It’s a damn good screenplay.”
“It shows all kinds of promise.”
“The structure of the work is well laid out and the dialogue has a spark all it own.”

I don’t normally pat myself on the back in public. In fact, I don’t normally pat myself on the back at all. But, with my life in the godawful messy state it’s in right now, I need some light at the end of the tunnel to move towards. Rightly or wrongly, this is my light. This is my future. And if I can’t talk about this in public, there’s the risk I may not follow through on what I have begun because it would be all to easy to put it on the backburner and leave it there to rot.

I encourage you to nag me about this if you see no further posts on the subject in the near future.

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