Feature
Not given lightly
by Chris Knox
The unlikely rise of an unlikely love song.
Sixteen years ago this month, I wrote a song that was to change my life.
Previously, I had been known as an odd sorta bugger who oozed outa the punk scene with a mostly playful malevolence as my main creative party trick. Prone to personal and musical excesses, I was definitely an acquired taste that few had acquired.
Then I wrote a love song.
I’d previously written landfills of songs about sex and lust and all manner of relationships. But never a straightforward love song. It wasn’t my territory – that’s what other songwriters did, it was too easy, too glib, so not punk.
But there it was, a terminally corny chord progression, complete with soaring middle eight, and a set of words that clearly, succinctly and pretty damned soppily expressed what I felt for the mother of our children. It was clichéd (so much so that a commentator in this very mag declared it, a few years back, to contain the most banal line in the history of NZ music, FYI: “Shed me your tears till I drown in your ocean.” Ring 0900 CLICHE if you agree that it sucks, 0900 GENIUS if you like it, results after the weather), but, y’know, the damned thing was heartfelt.
The title line was ripped off the Velvet Underground’s sado-masochist paean “Venus in Furs”, but few noticed. Even fewer seemed to notice the awful second line in that chorus: “Yeah, it’s you that I love and it’s true that I love and it’s more than what it might be.” More than what it might be? Good lord above, what a godawful clunker – always meant to get round to replacing it with something better, even faintly euphonious and meaningful but, well, time to record it came along and, for lack of something better, it was there for posterity.
Aware from my increasing number of solo gigs that this was the song that people tolerated more than any other in my tiny angst-filled repertoire, we went all-out to make this recording as easy-listening as possible.
It sold a few hundred and the mostly really noisy album that featured the song managed a thousand or two. Very much not a hit.
Still, someone at TVNZ liked it and sent up a crew for a day to shoot whatever I wanted them to, which turned out to be two complete, uninterrupted takes in our living-room with a cast of tens. It got a bit of airplay on the Triple Z network in Oz, becoming a “radio hit”, sold a few hundred and, sometime later, Frente did a B-side cover that made it onto a small US indie film soundtrack.
And that was it for a few years.
Then, long after its natural use-by date, the bloody thing started making an insidious comeback. The first sign was probably when a friend in the US asked for a version of the song to put on a CD he was compiling as a gift for guests at his wedding. I obliged with an event-specific remodel. Next, when Tall Dwarfs were setting up for a Big Day Out gig in the mid-90s sometime, a bunch of kids in front of the stage threw me a piece of paper. Apparently, their 19-year-old mate loved the song, so it was played at his tragically premature funeral. There were the lyrics on the service sheet.
Soon I was getting pretty regular requests to play the song at weddings, something I was loath to do, being shy as hell under the aggressive persona. And also, the song was pointedly,
specifically aimed at “John and Liesha’s mother” – the lyrics said as much. It was not a universal love-song. But, as with so many things, the more nakedly specific you may be, the more people all over the shop seem to be able to relate. Once Were Warriors works similarly, Whale Rider, “How Bizarre” … So I did it once at a reception, cramped under a Westmere stairwell, feeling like a bloody idiot but cognisant of the emotions
it brought forth in the recently spliced duo. Most requests thereafter were met with a personalised CD, burnt in the cosy privacy of my own workroom.
Still, one hardy soul convinced me to help celebrate his first anniversary by serenading his partner with an acoustic
rendition. In a reasonably crowded Ponsonby eatery. I must have been mad.
At some point in all this, a certain bread maker had their agency approach me to use the ditty to advance sales of their product. Having responsibly checked their GM status, I happily sold my soul, accepting that the song had entered into the public domain – maybe its consciousness – no longer mine, no longer Barbara’s.
My fellow songwriters made it number 13 in the APRA best New Zealand songlist, which demonstrated the dubious advantages of producing only one “hit”, whereas fans of the Finns and Dave Dobbyn had so many to choose from that their votes were split. Its subsequent inclusion on the Nature’s Best CD and DVD ensured more wedding requests.
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