Simon Armitage’s LYR pick some of their favourite lyrics of all time
Consisting of poet laureate Simon Armitage, singer-songwriter Richard Walters and producer and musician Patrick J. Pearson, LYR are a band with a quirky constitution. However, their unified sound is anything but patchwork to a listener’s blessed ear. It is the sort of contemporary music that uses the best of today to hark back through atavistic eternities, creating a timeless swell.
Their new album, The Ultraviolet Age, sees them pair a “dramatic monologue spoken by a tyrant” with Sitar-like wails, trip-hop waviness and luscious toplines on ‘Presidentially Yours’ to twinkling rumination on loss in ‘The Song Thrush And The Mountain Ash‘. This creates a record that sees them waver through the ways of the modern age.
The album focus on both the current cataclysms of power, and the way that ripples down to the minutia of life. As Armitage explains of the punchy ‘Presidentially Yours’: “It was written as a response to the growing number of political dictatorships across the globe on both extremes of the political spectrum.” Adding: “In that world, violence and repression are never far from the surface, no matter how glossy and gold-plated that surface seems to be. The title of the song is pure arrogance: the person in charge doesn’t care what anyone thinks because they control all aspects of life including language and“truth”-they areuntouchable.”
However, in a world where you can also cushion yourself by clicking on a fantastic new record by A.S. Fanning or one of the other myriad emerging greats in two seconds flat on handheld device, we are blissfully insulated from a lot of that most of the time. And that isn’t necessarily a glib point, escapism is, in truth, a way of keeping our empathy and activism in tact. This is a point that The Ultraviolet Age clings to wonderfully. As Armitage says, at its core, it’s about “making beautiful, exquisite, transcendent music.”
One element that the poet missed in his list of descriptions was ‘poetic’. The music has a language of its own – at one minute languid, the next potently present ala Joy Division’s hymnal ‘Atmosphere’ – but there is also a sharpness to the lyrics that makes the whole swaying thing all the more visceral, like reaching into a murky sink to wash a razorblade.
So, with that in mind, we asked the band to provides us with some of their favourite lyrics, having already got the records they love last time out. You can see the choices from the full band below.
LYR’s favourite lyrics:
Richard Walters‘ favourite lyrics
‘St Swithin’s Day’ – Billy Brag
“The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St. Swithin’s Day“
Walters says: “‘St Swithin’s Day, Billy Bragg. It’s dark, seedy, funny and heartbreaking all at once.”
‘From the Morning’ – Nick Drake
“And now we rise
And we are everywhere
And now we rise from the ground“
Walters says: “‘From the Morning’, Nick Drake. Almost hymnal and just utterly beautiful in its simplicity and weight.”
‘Suzanne’ – Leonard Cohen
“And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China“
Walters says: “‘Suzanne’, Leonard Cohen. It’s my dad’s favourite song and since I was child I’ve loved that line and now believe there is nothing more romantic than the gift of tea and oranges.”
Simon Armitage‘s favourite lyrics
‘My Perfect Cousin’ – The Undertones
“He thinks that I’m a cabbage
‘Cause I hate University Challenge“
Armitage says: “Hilarious, ironic (smart boy cousin Kevin couldn’t have executed such a pithy half-rhyme) and keyed into the everyday.”
‘A Sad Lament’ – Orange Juice
“You came exactly on the hour, such precision worries me / like a bower bird in her bower as you watched me from the balcony.“
Armitage says: “Beautifully crooned by Edwin Collins on the lesser-known Texas Fever EP. Romeo and Juliet with a bit of voyeurism and a bit of ornithology thrown in.”
‘Elegance’ – Prefab Sprout
“Please be ashamed that you’re afraid,
Equating elegance and real estate.
When all the bullion in the world,
Cannot transform what’s simply second rate.“
Armitage says: “Exceptional poetic scansion, word-play, diction, syntax, then landing on that emphatic final rhyme. Few song-writers come anywhere near this level of brilliance.”
Patrick J. Pearson‘s favourite lyrics
‘Picture in a Frame’ – Tom Waits
“I’m gonna love you
Till the wheels come off
Oh, yeah“
Pearson says: “The whole song is perfectly simple, I couldn’t think of a better way to sum of loving someone so deeply.”
‘Videotape’ – Radiohead
“When I’m at the pearly gates
This’ll be on my videotape, my videotape“
Pearson says: “It’s beautiful, haunting and so immediate, like all of Yorke’s writing. Straight to the point.”
‘Towing the Line’ – Ben Howard
“Like a bird in a world with no trees
You were hung up there in your disbelief“
Pearson says: “I’d never given Ben Howard much attention until this record, Nica Libres At Dusk. I especially remember this song, a wonderfully murky production and a brave second song on the record. This line resonates with me so much, the despair of it. Something I would have loved to have penned myself.”
