I imagine if I have it, others must as well, but I have a Spanish radio recording that is listed as 3 August 2001 (or maybe that's 8 March, not sure who did the metadata), though it must comprise two different dates, as a couple songs are there more than once. I can send you the files if you want (or anyone else wants them).
Looks like some other dates (mostly audience recordings) from this era that are in circulation are: Brixton 2002, Canvey Island 2002, Meltdown 2002, Shepherd's Bush 2002, and an unknown date where each song title has PB on the end (six of the seven tracks are from Regeneration). Don't know if that is a location or venue or what.
I think I was/am expecting Note To Self, Dumb It Down, and Regeneration to be the lowest scoring songs. I think if they had been replaced with some other songs* then the album would have a much different feel. *Especially if one of the songs was U.S.E. !
There's a 19 track gig from La Trabendo, Paris in 2001 that I think was streamed online - it's certainly very listenable (I used to listen to it a lot back in the day). It includes every track from Regeneration as well as Tonight We Fly, Your Daddy's Car, Life on Erth, Sweden, Lucy, and acoustic versions of National Express and Alfie. Also happy to share this with people though it'll have to wait a week til I'm back at work.
Note To Self Another very strong song for me. The hypnotic groove sets an atmosphere of disquiet for Neil's musings. Excellent musicianship throughout as we would expect as well. The desperation that comes in at the loud section is pure release, and the song, and indeed the album, is all the better for it in opinion. This isn't a song I would generally listen to outwith the context of the album, but it works very well within it. 4.75/5
A bit late now, but I forgot to post this bit from Neil's 2020 liner notes about "Note to Self"... "The moment that perfectly encapsulates the album for me lies two minutes and ten seconds into Note To Self. Here's the sequence of events. Ivor has laid down this clanging guitar chord followed quickly by a high harmonic that rings out eerily. Joby (whose string arrangements are particularly sublime on this album) brings the violins in up high, on roughly the same note. While recording the strings I suggest the violins should push the note a quarter-tone higher to perfectly match the harmonic. Then Nigel suggests that they, ever so slowly, lower the pitch until it's perfectly in tune with the rest. Well, it was something like that anyway. It's a weird spectral moment. Not life-affirming. Not even particularly pleasant to listen to. Just a perfect little sonic complement to the stark lyric. And a good example of why Regeneration sounds the way it does."
I will come back to count up yesterday's scores later, but on to today's while I have the chance. Today's song is: Lost Property Track 5 on "Regeneration", and one of Neil's famous "list songs", this one is about losing things, as he explains in the 2020 liner notes: "I think Lost Property and Eye of The Needle get close to something quite profound. Lost Property was inspired by the inimitable Bryan Mills. To call Bryan our bass player doesn't really do him justice. He was a charismatic, angry, hilarious, lewd, sentimental, potential rock star, and if things had worked out differently I'd have been in his band. [...] Mighty BM had a fatal flaw though - he used to lose his stuff. A lot. This was bad enough in everyday life, but a complete nightmare on tour. One time, we were halfway to Dover before he realised he'd left his suit lying on the wall outside Setanta. But nothing can match the abject sorrow he displayed upon realising he'd left his favourite sheepskin jacket behind at Exeter University. That was really the catalyst for Lost Property. I still find it strangely moving." And slightly more detail in this 2001 interview quote from "Newcomer" (as usual translated from Neil's words into French and then back again by me): "It's a song about our bassist, who's always losing his things. And he has a recurring dream: one day he arrives in a field and all his stuff is waiting for him, piled up, in the middle of it. And he feels immensely happy. I find this story very touching, I don't know why. Musically, it really doesn't have a standard format. It has quite a high reading level (?!)*, it's reminiscent of a dream. We added the recorder, it gave the song a melodic side that we liked." (this is literally what the French says, despite apparently being nonsense!) Here's the song:
The new 2020 Bonus disc has this "early idea" - I have to say I'm personally very glad the lyrics went where they went in the end...
Not much else to post today, but how about this quite rare later-day solo live performance of the song in 2010:
Lost Property No messing about from me today- this is straight to the top of of the class!!! Great music, lyrics and vocals. One of the best on the album, and a song I would love to see reinstated into the live shows 5/5
Lost Property Making something unexpectedly profound and lovely out of a list of (slightly weird and tobacco-centric) lost stuff - a Neil Hannon speciality. Its refreshing to hear the piano and acoustic guitar at the beginning here, and it has the TDC classic intertwining second vocal melody in verse 2, adding interest and some nice imagery. I thought this was one of two high points of the album for me, and perhaps it still is, but... After the first verse it all feels a bit flat and dirgey, particularly the 'all that I'd like section...' and Thom Yorkesque 'posse-e-essions' bits. It seems the 'I found them... cried tears of joy' section at the end should be uplifting, but musically it isn't, with that falling scale tumbling downward in slow motion at the end and just tailing off. (Also, 'Bennies' and 'twen'ies'?). I really like the idea, bit find parts of the execution a bit meh. 4.0/5.0 I think I prefer the solo guitar version - glad he sung the countermelody rather than the continued list in verse 2. Slightly Lady of a Certain Age style finger picking at the end
Lost Property I love this. It has been my favourite song on the album since I first heard it. For me Neil's greatest strength, the thing that above all makes me a fan, is not his lyrics, his voice or even his overall musical vision. It's his way with a melody. That is the golden thread that runs right from "Your Daddy's Car" onwards, whatever he is doing instrumentally. So even if I wasn't sure of the overall direction of the album, I could still enjoy tunes like this. This is straight out of side two of Liberation, but with the added gravitas of experience. Then, the lyrics. I didn't know they were about Bryan (indeed, I didn't know who was even in the band except Neil and Joby). I honestly have no idea if objectively they're very profoud. I feel in my bones that they are, but I could be unduly swayed by A) the beauty of the music and B) how completely I relate to them. I have been a terrible loser of items my whole life, particularly favourite items of clothing. It's a very privileged postition to have such things to lose in the first place, and I only have myself to blame for losing them, so it feels wrong to openly lament my losses. This song gives me permission to grieve somehow. It stoops to give my petty "first world" problems the honour of a beautiful song. It dignifies it with art. It's quite cathartic. Even though it apparently just derives from Bryan's own fantasy, the final verse where the protaganist is reunited with all his stuff is oddly reminiscent of the end of "The Dogs and Horses". 5/5
I normally wait for most people to vote before I do, but I don’t want anything to dampen my enthusiasm today ... Lost Property I mentioned before about the melancholy songs on this album seeming either achingly beautiful or unspeakably dull to me - and I’m happy to say that today’s song is in the former category. It’s a reminder after yesterday that I actually don’t want everything to be jolly and bouncy, and that a spot of misery is right up my street when done right - and this absolutely fits the bill for me. The tinkling piano and acoustic guitar, the strings when they come in, the slightly out-of-tune recorder chorus, and especially the counter-melody “Lost... blown like seeds in the wind” - all of it is wonderful to me. And I don’t even mind the “non-emotive singing” (it’s this song they’re recording when Neil apologises to Nigel) - it fits the idea of a list of mundane possessions disappearing; and is it me or does that change when the possessions are found? Brilliant. 5/5
Lost Property. Really quite like it, but nothing in particular to say about it (maybe I'm lost for words...). 4.5/5
Best track on the album for me, playing to Neil's strengths - no-one else writes them quite like this, mixing the mundane with the fantastical, and it has the pensive, emotional depth of many of his best songs. Maybe I like it because it drifts off into the fantasy world so common to the previous albums but distinctly absent from this one. However, this is also the track that fully justifies the Godrich production for me - a clear move forward beyond what the band had done before, and hard to imagine working so well in their old style. The creeping, enfolding arrangement is quite special - the simple guitar and piano at the start gradually giving way to double-tracked acoustics (providing the same shimmery effect as on Timestretched), several electrics, another subtle off-beat bass line, and synth strings that somewhere mutate into rather beautiful, ethereal real strings (and woodwinds?) - and suddenly we're washed away to sea, lost in a dream world. By the time we get to the end of the counter-melody ("Hiding just out of reach, waiting for me") we're somewhere quite eerie indeed. Neil's vocal is very good here, a tone we hadn't heard before this album that works very well - and @Vagabone's right about the melody, I'd never noticed it particularly, but it's a strong one, though subtle, building in tension and weight all the way through. It's not quite top tier for me somehow - with @The Turning Year, I don't quite feel the emotion of the ending, and I don't often feel like I want to go on this journey. But it's enough on its own to make me glad we have this album. 4.5/5 On the demo: this is one of the songs that wasn't played in February 2000, so may have come after that, but it seems possible it was the final lyric idea that came along later, and the basic song was part of the honeymoon set. I agree with @LivingForever the demo lyrics wouldn't have done, so maybe it was put aside for a while, but they're quite revealing emotionally. I'm finding it refreshing to come to these one at a time, rather than all in one go. Makes the torpor more bearable, even comforting. Not sure if that's going to hold up in the second half though... Found setlist.fm's album stats for the band quite sobering - the Regeneration songs have very few performances compared to the other canonical albums, and almost half of them are Bad Ambassador & Perfect Lovesong. Half the album has never been played since 2003.
Broadly agree with everything that's been said so far - Lost Property is a wonderful track. Lyrics might be a bit functional - you could interchange the things on the list with anything that rhymed and it would make no difference - but the melody and arrangements are wonderful. Some very intricate guitar chords throughout, which always appeals to me, but the rolling piano is the real star here. The dual vocal lines in the second verse are superb, and the strings complement everything brilliantly when they come to the foreground. I'd actually rate this as the most Radiohead-esque thing on the album, but I was a huge Radiohead fan at the time of release, so that certainly never bothered me. Interesting to read about Bryan's dream as the inspiration here - I'd always associated this with the but in The Hitch Hiker's Guide about the biros... Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life. I suppose there could still be a link - it might have been an influence on the dream - or I could be completely barking up the wrong tree. Anyway, an easy 5/5 from me. The early version's pretty dreadful though. I'm going to assume it uses placeholder lyrics that would never have got anywhere near a proper release.
I find this a little sad. I wonder how it'll feel for Neil to play it through at the Barbican whenever that happens. I'd like to think it might encourage him to revisit these songs a bit more often, but I guess it has the potential to be quite difficult for him?
Mm, that's interesting - I guess several different things might going on there; what does Neil think now of the production? Of the songs? Does he have a problem remembering the making of the album? Does he not like to play them because he feels the band made them as much as him? Does he not play them because he thinks the audience doesn't like them? I guess I assumed he doesn't like the songs much, but then (without wanting to get too far ahead of ourselves) he enthuses about Regeneration (the song) several times during the album PR, then... hasn't played it at all. Maybe that's linked in with the elusive meaning of the song he keeps teasing about... but sorry, let's leave that until Friday!
The lyrics may not be profound but they do tug at the heart strings in a weird sort of way, so you could argue that they’re at least profoundly sentimental! I expect we’ve all misplaced something seemingly mundane that really meant something to us, and it’s hard not to think about that when listening to the song. Of course you could also look on the whole lyric as a metaphor for the deeper losses one suffers in life. (No, *You’re* crying! )
No its definitely you! Yes, I've also heard it that way. The 2nd verse (ships on the ocean etc) makes me think of the song he did with Air, Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping, in which I think people instead of things are waiting at the water's edge in a dream (although that one seems to be more about some kind of near death experience/ River Stix).
Note to self Sorry a bit late to this. I like getting the extra information on this forum about the songs and didn’t know this was inspired by Pi: good knowledge! I like Radiohead but I’m not sure Neil’s at his best when trying to sound like them. Not a fan, sadly. 1.5/5
We’ll get to it in due course, but I just found this live video from Air and Neil and had to share it immediately!
Missed Note To Self yesterday but it's my least favourite on the album, and I was surprised to read the love for it! I don't really care for the guitar line and that is basically the focus of the whole song, I think it's a bit of a momentum killer on the album really. 2/5 And it's a shame that it kills the momentum because Lost Property is great, love the piano line, the counter melody, the imagery of passing through a sheepskin screen. Lovely. 4/5
