National Express I like it and it's always a hoot when I've been able to see it live, but it doesn't move like the absolute best of Neil's songs. 3.5/5
Thanks for posting all of these, that's super! The opening to this really reminds me of Sit Down by James (another band I used to love but have forgotten...). Really like the thundering guitar in Thrillseeker. (Love that its from glamorous Camber Sands! I have fond memories of windswept childhood picnics there, huddled in rain coats trying not to get too much sand into our Marmite sandwiches... I'm sure its lovely on a hot day... )
Yes, thank you @Radiophonic_ ! This set is from a festival organised by Belle and Sebastian called the Bowlie Weekender. I’ve got it somewhere on a CD, as well as Belle and Sebastian’s excellent (but less polished) set... The live version of “Europop” from a cassette single in 1999 is also from this show but seemingly wasn’t included in the radio broadcast.
I’m pretty sure there will be more scores to come for both our weekend songs; but for now, “National Express” scored 60.4 from 14 votes, for a jolly hostess rating of: 4.31
Today’s song is: Life on Earth One of the other songs I’d consider a bit “forgotten” (by Neil, I mean, not necessarily by the fans!), nestled in the album between two singles and one of its more sombre moments. It also marks the first of what I like to call Neil’s “French resistance accordion tango songs”, of which we will have several more before this thread is through... Luckily for me, because I need to do some work, there is nothing about this song in the new liner notes, or in any interviews that I’ve found. So here it is!
For today’s alternate versions, we can start with this instrumental “early idea” from the 2020 bonus disc:
And then its only other appearance is in this live version from the 2001 tour. Recording from Oxford Brookes University like the Sweden live track from the other day, and its only release was on the 7” single of “Bad Ambassador”. Unless I am much mistaken, this new transfer was done by forum member @happysunshine , and is much better than previous attempts! I absolutely love the vibraphone and spooky keyboard in the middle instrumental bit - not sure how I feel about the even more sombre pace...
Life on Earth I think I'd like this one more if it was a bit jauntier. As it is, it plods along rather aimlessly. It's not awful, but to me is rather the definition of middling. The military drum pattern and French accordion make it sound like a second WW relic. It certainly doesn't help that, like most of the album, it's overlong. I hadn't actually noticed that "National Express" is longer than 5 minutes, but that simply confirms that that is a better song. 3.4
Life on Earth I like the tune, I like the lyric, I love French music... so why have I always regarded this as one of the weaker songs on the album? Listening to it this morning (ahead of hearing the alternative version), it was clear to me for the first that time that, for me, it's the arrangement that holds it back. That rat-a-tat military march drumbeat and general lumbering instrumentation. I would love this song in a more flowing version. That live version linked above is along the right lines with its sparse first verse but as soon as many other instruments start to come in it begins to fall into the same trap. I'm not saying a lush, fully orchestrated version can't work - I'm sure it would have been child's play for (e.g.) Brel collaborator François Rauber - but they didn't manage it this time round. This is the song that contains the line "To thine own self be true, not to fools like me, who'll change their mind for the sake of rhyming schemes" which I've always regarded as the master key to understanding Hannon's lyrics. A strong 3/5
It's interesting, that's a line that's always bugged me, feeling a bit too meta / self-referential. (and "Too Young to Die" takes this even further...) But you are absolutely right, he is telling us right here that it is futile to engage in Flan-style in-depth analysis of the slightest nuances of what he means by what he writes, because he's basically making it up as he goes along, depending on what sounds good.
It's a funny one, especially in this seemingly very serious, heartfelt song. On the one hand, it undercuts or undermines the point the song is trying to make (which, is unnecessary), but at the same time, it skewers the song just enough to stop it seeming over-pompous. I think I'm a bit out of step with the prevailing view on Life On Earth - perhaps it's not a genuine album highlight, but I really like it, arrangement and all, though I don't have anything particularly clever to say about it. I also think it works a good moment of quite reflection before the bold and dramatic final three tracks. Also a big fan of the live version, and the way the arrangement shifts to suit the on-stage band setup of the time. It's another song that I think could have been resurrected for the Office Politics era - thematically, it would be a good fit. A very solid 4/5 from me.
Nevertheless, here's another analysis by The Flan in The High Castle (only four left now), which of course also includes that line: The next song is “Life on Earth”. The most stately and sober track on Fin de Siècle, it’s also the most conservative, functioning as a manner of abstract cautionary tale – atypically for Hannon, it’s a warning against mad dreams and escapism. Like Casanova‘s “Middle-Class Heroes”, the title plays on that of a better-known song by another artist: David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”, which Hannon and Yann Tiersen would record a cover of later in 1998. This is the song that sounds most like advice – even more so than “National Express”. The narrator, it seems, is an aged or dying man, attempting to pass on some words of wisdom to his heir. Like “Commuter Love”, the song begins with the contemplative sounds of an accordion, but here it continues throughout, merging with the song’s military drumbeat to create an obliquely French-historical tone. Hannon sings: “Build your coffin of balsa wood / Spend all that you earn / When you go, you are gone for good / Never to return”. In other words, “Life on Earth” is based on exactly the same idea and dramatic conceit as “The Dogs and the Horses”, the final track of Casanova. It’s similarly elegiac and – once it gets going – Scott-Walkerish, though the lyrics venture into some interesting new thematic territory. “Always to thine own self be true / Not to fools like me / Who’ll change their minds / For the sake of rhyming schemes”. These are perhaps the most quietly amazing lyrics Hannon has ever written. In the space of these few lines, Hannon undercuts himself, quietly casting double [sic] on every lyric of every Divine Comedy song. In art as elsewhere, the belief in the role model, the hero, the great man, is of course misguided – symptomatic of a failure of critical thought. A tolerance – indeed an appreciation – for imperfection, and indeed the occasional ****-up, is necessary for a healthy relationship between artist and audience. While “Life on Earth” has other themes, the message here is exactly that of Eminem’s “Stan”. As an example, Hannon highlights one particular artistic failstate: the way that the constraints of the songwriting medium can cloud the artist’s true beliefs. Another layer to the joke is that he’s saying this through song – could it be that even these lines were twisted to fit the rhyming scheme, and fail to represent his intended meaning? As he sang on “Generation Sex”, we should know better: it really doesn’t matter what you say. Lest we think Hannon has gotten the Scott Walker influence out of his system with Short Album, he delivers the chorus in his well-honed Walker-epic style: “Au revoir joie, bonjour tristesse! / Good times come and go / Life owes nobody happiness / Only pain and sorrow”. In the next verse, the song slips back into gentle, military percussion, and Hannon resumes his soft recitation, as if eulogising at a soldier’s funeral: “So, don’t rely on the starry skies / Screw the universe / You ought to try / To live your life / On Earth”. If the narrator in “National Express” was encouraging a younger person to shake off depression, the narrator in “Life on Earth” is doing the opposite: teaching his young listener to accept that there are no easy answers, to accustom themselves to misery, and to prepare for it to grow as they age. Don’t be distracted by utopianism: snatch what transient moments of happiness you can in the here and now. The instrumental bridge features an introspective piano melody – reverberating into distortion, almost as if the recording has been reversed – set against the ethereal backdrop of the Crouch End choir. This is the song’s doomed fantasy – just like those of “Commuter Love” and “Sweden” – tempting the narrator towards ruin. The choir builds to an otherworldly, tantalising fever pitch, but at the last moment the narrator finds the strength to resist, and Hannon tears into a triumphant, realist final verse: “So, au revoir joie, bonjour tristesse!” Goodbye joy, hello sadness! In the closing words of the song, the narrator quietly states his aim to follow his own ethos: “I’m gonna try / To live my life / On Earth”. Given the song’s deathbed tonality, we get a sense that he’s cursing himself for an idealistic youth, trying now to take control, to commit to a better philosophy in his final days. Connecting to the album’s wider theme, “Life on Earth” also serves to indict the science-fictional response to existential danger. One common response to the impending apocalypse is to trust in technology, kicking the can of responsibility down the road of the future – the classic example being that, should climate change destroy the Earth, we can “simply” escape to Mars. Indeed, it seems Hannon might be criticising science-fiction music here – he admits that his own ironic, self-contradictory songwriting can be opaque and frustrating, but the fact that he’s saying this within one of those songs makes it quite clear that he still thinks his approach is the way to go. Is Hannon saying that his world of Forster and Wordsworth, populated by figures such as Aphrodite and Holly Golightly and Lucy Honeychurch, is richer than Bowie’s Martian landscape, realer and more meaningful than Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom and the Glass Spider? Possibly he has a point. But still, a song which essentially warns us against trying to immanentise the eschaton can’t help feeling a little narrow-minded by Hannon’s standards – it’s something of a philosophical let-down after the transhumanist ascension of “Tonight We Fly”. If we ignore the Martian intertext and focus instead on the song’s funereal quality, another reading suggests itself: perhaps “Life on Earth” is simply an atheist tract, stressing the importance of living mundanely and not seeking comfort in the hope of an afterlife. This would be more in keeping with Hannon’s work – it’s like the smouldering aftermath of the fiery “Don’t Look Down”. “Life on Earth” almost feels like it should end the album, as “The Dogs and the Horses” ended its own – but perhaps that simply demonstrates the difference between the romantic-elegiac Casanova and the anxious but ultimately forward-looking Fin de Siècle.
Life on Earth This is one of my favourite TDC songs, so I'm going to go a bit Flan on it (although I have yet to read The Flan's analysis) I really like this live version having never heard it before. It has an almost hypnotic feel to it, very different to the original. The instrumental section is gorgeous. (I find live performances of older songs during the Regeneration period a bit hit and miss vocally as Neil sometimes seemed to slip back into crooner mode, then remember he's not supposed to do that any more, which can sound a bit jarring. Completely understandable though!) I think you've given a pretty accurate description here of what I really like about this song! Yes I've thought this too. I really like what @LivingForever described as Neil's French resistance tango songs - this one and the later ones. I'd always heard the opening line as 'build your castle of balsa wood', until I heard a live version a few months and checked the lyrics. (I did think it a little odd that Neil had seemingly developed a lisp for that one word...). In my version, this meant that accumulating material things in life is pointless as we all end up the same in the end. Coffin doesn't have the same resonance for me and changes the meaning of the whole thing a bit! On that basis, the following is my long standing opinion of it, where the word is castle While I don't think the arrangement is particularly stunning, especially compared with others on this album, I do think it fits the song well. It plods along, like life on earth, breaks into the instrumental section in the middle (which perhaps indicates some sense of wonder or mystery about life on earth, or maybe the starry skies we shouldn't rely on), then returns to plodding along again. For me, it has a simple message about trying to accept life's joys while understanding that they won't last forever, and embracing the inevitable sadness and tragedy of life without leaning on religion or horoscopes etc for (potentially) false hope. I think its a little bit like Do You Realise, by the Flaming Lips, if there is a message beneath its foolish rhyming schemes My only problem with this song is its a little bit preachy in directly telling someone what they 'ought' to do, but it only says they 'ought to try', so its not too terrible! In some ways, this song is the key to tying together the major themes of the album for me. Its better to live in the here and now, on earth, and take our pleasures where and how we will, as we will all have to face tragedy in life, and ultimately death. Worrying about the millennium and consulting horoscopes won't help - we're still just part of the continuing cycle of life no matter what numbers on a calendar might say. In the end we all meet the same fate - beneath the ground like Julius Cesar in Eric the Gardener, the Thrillseeker, Princess Diana in Gen Sex and far too many people, on both sides and none, in Sunrise. Incidentally, I think the accordion at the end exactly mirrors the start, so you could on repeat and have it going on forever like the cycle of life on earth... (I have never done this!). I'm sure I've said too much, especially given Neil's statement in the lyrics, but again, he is nothing if not contrary, so who knows, a song in which he says its all a load of nonsense is quite likely to be one where he is being vaguely serious...! Score 4.5/5.0
Okay, I'm going to try and be a bit more clever after all having let the song settle in my head a bit longer. It's the chord sequence, I think - that's why I like this song so much. It sounds (from the intro) like the song is going to be in the key of C minor, then when the guitar comes in, it starts on an Eb before dropping through a Dm to Cm before landing on a G Major. Then it shifts to a G# before slipping to a G#m before moving back to a G - but a G minor this time. And that's just the first half of the verse. Then, in the chorus, you've got an Am followed by an Em (twice) before it shifts back up to an F major (on "life owes nobody") than an A major ("happiness") then a Dm ("only pain") then a Bb major ("sorrow") before returning to the verse sequence again. The whole song is constantly shifting from major key to minor key through a cycle of unexpected chords, and that's why it turns from joyously affirming to heartbreakingly sad from line to line (or ever within line). That's why it's so good.
Thanks Glad to give you a laugh (I always imagine Neil wrestling a miniature Scott Walker back into its box)
National Express - Like most people here, I seem to have gone through phases of liking it and getting fed up with it. Right now I love it. I'm not a karaoke person but if I was I reckon it would be my song. pop perfection indeed. National Express 4.6/5
Life on Earth - I don't dislike it - I'd never skip it, but I do find it a little bit plodding. My least favorite song on the album. Life on Earth 3.8/5
