nixsight

A bit of a diversion this week, because… well, because the urge took me, and I had to take it back…

I’ve loved They Might Be Giants for such a long time, but it’s a peculiar kind of love. They are the loyal, cute and intelligent friend that I forget about from time to time, but when something reminds me of them, I have to seek them out instantly, nervously concerned that they won’t remember me. A quick search reveals that so much has changed in their lives – like a new album that I knew nothing about. I wonder how much they’ll have changed.

Then, of course, it turns out that they do remember me. And even though they’ve got more stories to tell, we easily fall into the same old conversations.

Oh, god, They Might Be Giants are my Cookie.

Anyway, people know the band for a lot of things that the band aren’t. It isn’t their fault, or the band’s, really. The closest they ever got to fame were with two songs that could easily be described as novelty hits, and that’s the sort of peculiar celebrity that can kill an otherwise long-lived group.

In fact, those two songs – “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul” – though characteristic of the band’s output musically, and a lot of fun, aren’t typical TMBG tracks, though Birdhouse comes close. If all of their output had that same crowd-pleasing infectious appeal, and that was all they had going for them, I would have loved them for the length of the glorious summer of 1990, but I don’t know if they’d still resonate with me as much as they do today.

The reason 1990 was glorious… and then horrible, was that that was the year when I went out with Jessie for two months. It was a strange relationship, in which our personalities seemed to gel as perfectly as is possible for two 18 year olds, but we never quite got the other stuff right – you know, the stuff that is generally easier for randy teenagers to get up to.

There’s a story there. Perhaps not a very interesting one to most. But inevitably I fucked it up. And then she started seeing someone jerky and Alpha male, and my Sixth Form experience broke in two. He used to sit on the school bus next to me – because we were both in the Sixth Form – and say things like:

Him: You got Jessie flowers once, didn’t you?
Me: Hurm. Yeh.
Him: Yeah, she really liked that. She mentioned it.
Me (suddenly attentive): Hm? Yeah?
Him: Oh, yeah. So I bought her some, and it really did the trick. HRR HRR. Thanks for that, mate!
Me: Meep.

That situation, ridiculous as it sounds, pretty much coloured my response to relationships until around my mid-20s. I was still a bit crazy about Jessie for years, and can picture her, though I can’t remember her surname. (I want to say “Spencer” or “Fletcher”, but neither of those can possible be right. Maybe “Simpson”? Hm, no). She is another one of those odd people that I’d actually like to meet on Facebook, but that never seem to surface.

Anyway, the first time Jessie and I really got close to each other – actually, maybe the first night we met, and certainly the first night we kissed – there was a lot of dancing. We were introduced by friends, and doin’ dancin’ at the Sixth Form disco Rugby Club, and danced close all night, though I figured that was just because we both wanted to dance to the same stuff. I mean, we danced with each other, not, y’know, “with” each other.

Anyway, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” was playing a lot back then, and we almost certainly pogoed the hell out of it over the night. After an hour on the dancefloor – which was actually kind of a dance carpet – we went and sat down, and slumped on each other. We were both very sweaty, I remember, and she was flushed red. Thinking about it, she looked kinda blotchy at that point, with the flushing, but after a couple of minutes of slumping, there was kissing, and then there was dating.

We must have been going out around my birthday, because I got a present from her. It was “Flood”, by They Might Be Giants, on vinyl. I’ve still got it, with it’s lovely fold-out yellow sleeve, and listened to it an awful lot – because that’s what you did when you got a new album in your teens.

Dead – They Might Be Giants (“Flood” – 1990)

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In retrospect, it sounds like I fell for TMBG because I fell for Jessie, but I don’t think that was the case. Though “Birdhouse…” and “Istanbul” were fairly obvious pleasures, I think what pulled me in to the band was how different they were from everything else I had ever listened to, and how good they were with it. Their lyrics had an irony to them that I’d never heard – possibly only “Lola”  by The Kinks had ever struck me as enjoying such mischevious wordplay.

“Dead”, for example, still gets me, with it’s misleading repeated line that is such an obvious wise-ass feint that when you hear it, you wonder how you’ve never heard it before.

“I returned a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date.”

… sounds so innocuous, until you hear the lyrics around it, and realise that the chaps aren’t singing a daft song about shopping – the song is actually all about death, regret, rebirth and… that stuff.

It’s the trick they keep playing throughout the album, and their career, making songs that are superficially novelty items, but actually have turns of phrase or word-pictures that reverberate through your brain and make you think much deeper thoughts than you’d expect, if you’d only ever bounced up and down to a song about a canary.

I’ve sought out acts that do similar lyrical trickery ever since, and I have to say that the band utterly changed the way young Nick interacted with music. I’d always loved hip-hop, and listened carefully to lyrics, but this was like my proper way in to music. I’d never be cool enough to know what the different styles of music were, or play an instrument, or know which band were cool, but I understood words.

This smart use of language is common throughout the band’s catalogue, accompanied as it is by an abstract intelligence that makes for songs that are almost self-aware. This isn’t so uncommon now, but it was a big deal to a guy in his late teens, for sure.

Number Three – They Might Be Giants (“They Might Be Giants” – 1986)

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“Number Three” does some wacky meta-textual fidgetry with the “world of the song”. It isn’t unheard of, even in mainstream songs – listening as an adult, I realised that even Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” does it – but when They Might Be Giants do it, it’s got a bitter-sweet but funny self-criticism to it that appeals to me at a basic level.

“Number Three”, in particular, is also as jaunty as fuck, which one can’t help but bounce to.

I’ve Got A Match – They Might Be Giants (“Lincoln” – 1988)

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“Flood” had to last me a few years, until my second or third year of university when a friend – a lovely lass that I think was called Marianne, who for some reason I really mainly remember driving a carload of us to somewhere nice – found out that I liked what I knew of the band so far, and did me a tape.

(Back then, we were all “doing each other tapes” – it’s what youngsters who hadn’t got it together enough to be promiscuous did in the early nineties.)

I’ve since worked out that that tape was made up of tracks from the band’s eponymous first album, and the 1988 album “Lincoln”. Though I knew “Flood” first and best, many of the songs on those two earlier records are what I’ve come to think of as the classic core TMBG songs, and they recur a lot on collections and such.

“I’ve Got A Match” is one of several love songs by the pair. Though that sounds like an odd fit with their peculiar brand of nerd music, their songwriting actually makes for perfect and poignant songs about broken love.

“Which one of us is the one that we can’t trust?
You say I think it’s you, but I don’t agree with that.” 

… is one of those lyrics that didn’t really come home to me until after a couple of bad relationships. If you can relate to it, it’s one of those perfectly phrased lines.

And if it wasn’t for They Might Be Giants jaunty delivery of sharp and quixotic narratives, I probably wouldn’t be listening to bands like Los Campesinos or even the Eels now. I’ve come to love the acts that don’t need to make a big deal about the fact that they are writing the most insightful stuff there is to say about the human condition because it just comes naturally – they don’t need to act sincere, because they are sincere, so there’s no need to dress their heartache up with mood-lighting and po-faced music videos. TMBG can break your heart with a song that has accordion playing on it.

The thing about They Might Be Giants is that because I’m a lousy fan, and because they aren’t either massively popular across the mainstream, or particularly popular with hipsters, new releases by the band always pass me by. Though I continued to l listen to the stuff I had by them, I didn’t really become aware of new material by them until “Malcolm In The Middle” aired for the first time with a theme song – “Boss Of Me” – that was instantly recognisable as the band.

Man, It’s So Loud In Here – They Might Be Giants (“Mink Car” – 2001)

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Having said that, I wasn’t so sure about the rest of the album at first, mainly because it was so different from the band’s previous output. However, once the shock of the new wore off, the variety of the songs started to seep in. “Man, It’s So Loud In Here”, a song which has no right to be as catchy a disco track, being by a band that was just visiting the genre for the feck.

Despite the song’s addictively vacuous musical approach, the characteristic They Might Be Giants playfulness is there in the words once again, with a narrative stance that is sardonically evocative of “Big Yellow Taxi”. It’s a song about clubbing that’s also about not being able to keep up with the pace of clubbing, and after a million awful techno versions of already not great eighties pop in the last few years, this sort of post-modern pop seemed and seems particularly timely.

The other thing about the duo is that at a basic level, they love song. From seeing their approach to music, one gets the feeling that even if they weren’t selling – or even making – albums, they’d still be making music. And that’s something else I’ve picked up from them that carries through into my current listening habits. If I hadn’t encountered them, I’d have wondered what the fuck James Kochalka was up to, for starters. A lot of anti-folk would have just utterly confused me. And they were pioneers of giving stuff away for free online, almost before Apple had even thought of it.

In common with Billy Bragg and The Barenaked Ladies – as well as Kochalka – TMBG don’t seem too bothered about imprinting their “brand” on their songs, or to be particularly precious about how they appear, beyond their basic ideologies, which they are passionate about. This is music stripped of the artist’s ego. The second from last time I saw Billy Bragg live, he played a cover version of a song about wetting the bed. The Barenaked Ladies do everything tongue in cheek, and they aren’t above a pop-song medley – specifically they’ve done an album of Christmas songs that was only half serious. And Kochalka would record and release the songs he sings absent-mindedly to himself on the toilet, if allowed.

They Might Be Giants fulfilled this inclusiveness of approach by branching out into family friendly children’s music, the first recorded outing of which was “No!” in 2002.

Bed Bed Bed – They Might Be Giants (“No!” – 2002)

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Just as addictive as previous releases from the band, there’s a lot of great stuff on the album, and though it’s slanted towards songs that are literal enough, and have enough repetition, to be sung along with young children, they are also almost viral to most listeners. Or at least, they were to me.

I’ve included this song, though I could have posted many others from the album, because it makes me broody – I can imagine using it as incitement to getting the kids we don’t yet have up to their respective bedtimes.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this – admittedly quite long and rambling – retrospective on my relationship with They Might Be Giants. Tell me what you think in the comments!

They Might Be Giants can be found online at http://theymightbegiants.com/