CityLife

Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid: The lowdown

MERCURY WINNER: The Seldom Seen Kid

THE Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s Mercury Music Prize winning album. 

Here lead singer and lyricist Guy Garvey talks about the theme of the album along with a rundown of the story behind each song.

“The overall theme is the two years that the record was made in, during which, the most significant event was losing Bryan Glancy, our friend,” says Garvey of The Seldom Seen Kid, which was the nickname of the late Mancunian musician to whom the album is dedicated.

“It deals with how we were feeling before, how we were feeling after, the kind of questions it throws up,” Garvey adds.

“Lots of young men in their 30s are questioning everything, realising that they’re mortal, realising what you love and what doesn’t matter to you.

“Your social circle shrinks and you stop going out, that kind of thing. It’s not very rock and roll. All our records are the same: songs about what’s been happening to us really.”

Starlings
Starting with the opening line: ‘How dare the Premier ignore my invitations?’, Starlings represents Guy Garvey’s attempt to write about a character like Count Arthur Strong, the self-important codger normally heard on a Radio 4 sitcom. “He’s a guy who thinks he’s far more important than he actually is, a little pompous,” Garvey explains.

“I suppose he’s an exaggeration of an area of my own character that I’m very wary of: a little bit of that I have to keep in check. He’s this overblown, slightly older figure, who considers himself a cut above the others. But he’s absolutely lost for words in the presence of beauty, in this case a waitress.”

Garvey says that the loud horns at the beginning of the song are about making sure listeners are on their toes. “It’s the sound of undeniable love slapping you in the chops,” he adds. “And I think the song’s just long enough for you to forget that it’s happened when it happens again.”

The Bones Of You
Garvey says that the same character is also the subject of track two, only a “little bit younger and more metrosexual”. “The character is buzzing through St Ann’s Square, phone stuck to his ear, briefcase in hand. He’s a young, modern, go-getter and a song comes out of a shop or a café doorway and transports him back five years and 3,000 miles away, and he’s in the arms of a woman he lost because of his ambition. It’s a recurring theme of the record, balancing what you want with what you need.”

Once again, it’s autobiographical, Garvey says. “Totally, yes. It’s feelings I was having for somebody. Obviously, I’ve never been a businessman, but it’s about thinking that work and your career is the only thing that’s of any importance.”

Mirrorball
“Mirrorball is very simply about the morning after meeting somebody and falling in love,” Garvey says. “Again, it’s what’s going through my mind while I’m on the streets of Manchester. It starts kissing her on the cheek as you leave her flat in the morning: ‘I plant the kind of kiss that wouldn’t wake a baby on the self same face that wouldn’t let me sleep.’

"It’s about not wanting to wake her up and going out into the world and noticing that everything is different. It’s a very traditional love theme.”

Grounds For Divorce
Garvey says that Grounds For Divorce is the “opposite end of the scale to Mirrorball”. “It wasn’t originally about breaking up with somebody. It was just about, no matter how busy your life is, no matter how good your life is, no matter how much you enjoy it, everybody has days where they want to do a Reggie Perrin and just p*** off. And I’ve even felt that about Manchester. I have felt sick of it all and wanted to get away. It’s never lasted for very long and was in the wake of a few heavy things that happened.”

An Audience With The Pope
“It’s about my Catholic past versus sex, I suppose. God versus sex,” Garvey says. “I quite enjoyed being Catholic but it sort of faded in my early twenties. That’s why I can make up slightly tongue in cheek songs about it.”

Weather To Fly
“This is the only song I’ve ever written about the band,” Garvey says. “It’s about early aspirations when we were kids. It’s about playing about in town and fighting with each other all the time. And about having this unshakable confidence despite the fact that we were s***!”

The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver
Inspired in part by the Manchester skyline, Garvey says that this song has a very similar theme to The Bones Of You. “I like the idea that a tower crane driver is higher paid than the people on the ground but completely on his own. He has to start a bit early to get up there and work a bit later because it takes him longer to get down. I thought it was a good metaphor for ambition. Well-paid, but high and dry.”

The Fix
Garvey met Richard Hawley when he did a gig with Pixies mainman Frank Black and became good friends. “I introduced him to the lads, they loved him and we decided to ask him to do a duet with us. Me and Hawley discussed duets for ages and decided that if we were going to write a serious duet, then it was likely to be s***. So we thought we’d do something tongue-in-cheek – a little Flanagan and Allen. Kinda like, ‘we’re a couple of swells’. So we thought, yeah, two northern lads who’ve fixed a horse race and they’re planning on spending their winnings.”

Some Riot
“This was worrying about a friend of mine who drinks a bit too much. And I noticed that I’m using the phrase ‘A Friend Of Mine’ all the way through the song. That’s what you do when you’re telling somebody about something and you want them to think that you’re talking about a friend, when you’re actually talking about yourself.” Garvey says the line about “growing his very own brambles” is what happens whenever you do anything to excess. “You become acutely aware that everyone is looking at you, whether they care for you or look down on you. And the last thing you want is company. So it’s about addiction, I suppose.”

One Day Like This
The last song on the album to be written – and arguably the soundtrack to the summer – Guy Garvey is characteristically humble when talking about the work that went into One Day Like This. “We were buzzing, we’d just got our new deal and it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like ‘thank God that’s happened at last, let’s chuck this song together’. It was dead simple. We wanted to do something very uplifting and very positive. That’s where the line ‘One day a year like this will see me right’ comes from. It’s very northern, and that’s maybe why it’s not done as well abroad. Maybe they can’t get their head around it.”

Friend Of Ours
“Just a very simple goodbye to our old friend,” Garvey says about musican Brian Glancy who died in January, 2006. “You don’t realise that you’re going to die until it happens to somebody else or you get ill. Even when that happens, you don’t 100 per cent contemplate it. You don’t even give it a second thought until it slaps you around the chops a bit. And it makes you love your friends a bit more and it makes you love your life a bit more. Far from being a sad thing, I hope that the record is a celebration of a pretty extraordinary bloke’s life.”

Which is your favourite track of the record? Have your say.