30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twelve – By The Time We Said Goodnight

I drummed up the melody for By The Time We Said Goodnight when I was working with my dad in an industrial complex in Leeds where we were fitting huge buzzbars to a machine that made gynormous rolls of aluminium for the big printing companies. The lyrics didn’t come for a long time after that. It went through various iterations until it got where it is now. It still feels funny to sing a song from the point of view of a fourteen-year old when I’m, er, no longer a fourteen-year old. I always think of it as the stuff that’s really going through the protagonists’ head in the Arctic Monkeys’ Riot Van – they are hanging around outside the shops because the girls they fancy at school don’t know they exist. In many ways the song is a period piece – after all, who has a phonebook these days, except perhaps some skeumorphic variety within someone’s mobile phone!

I recorded a version of By The Time We Said Goodnight with the great Nick Watts on Wurlitzer piano which can be heard on Bandcamp, along with the rest of the songs on Love Songs From The Feral Park.