Colm O'Regan: In praise of The Long Song - and Nick Cave's Jubilee Street
"I’m talking about the song that meanders, changes its mind halfway through about what kind of song it is. It’s a small opera. A long bit in the middle with just guitars. It requires patience. It’s going to kick in soon."
Today I’m singing the praises of The Long Song. You’ve got one don’t you? Where did you hear it first? Years ago on a BASF 90 Chrome Extra II? Just now when on a Spotify playlist? Longer than six minutes. A song that goes on and on but doesn’t drag. It hooked you. Maybe you played it for someone else and spent a rather tense nine minutes watching their reaction. And they didn’t get it. The fool.
I’m not talking about 30-verse rebel songs. A young man just needs food, meets a cruel redcoat, a perfidious woman betraying him, transported to Austral-i-ay. It’s too detailed. Too hyperactive.
I’m talking about the song that meanders, changes its mind halfway through about what kind of song it is. It’s a small opera. A long bit in the middle with just guitars. It requires patience. It’s going to kick in soon.
There might be a radio edit but something is lost. Three minutes of Kraftwerk’s is not comparable to 23. One is a voyage up the motorway to the next German town which has a Bahnhof and a Jugendherberge. The other is just nipping down to the shop to get slice pan.
Did you first hear as a teenager? It will resonate with you for the rest of your life as you remember your teenage years and experience the gratitude that you don’t need to do ‘that kind’ of angst anymore. So forever when I listen to The Fall’s or Sonic Youth’s , I’m reminded of playing that for ages not knowing where the next/first shift was going to come from.
With any luck the first time you hear it is live. You might not be that big into That Band when you arrived at the gig but one song converts you. Arcade Fire’s at Electric Picnic was the song where I went from being ‘imposter stealing a ticket from a real fan’ to ‘This is my music too’.
And this year at All Together Now, entered the chat.
I’m not enough of a Nick Cave fan to really be qualified to talk about him. was our wedding first dance song but it kinda was everyone else’s first dance song too. So I’m basic. Proper Nick Cave fans will probably say it’s not even his best eight-minute song. Hardcore ones will probably say it’s not even his best eight-minute song about a working girl named Bee who lives on Jubilee Street making ends meet. But it’s the only one I know for now anyway.
It was early in the set. For the first few minutes of it’s sedate. There’s a story in the song but lyrics hard to pick up at a music festival when you’re weighed down by a few cans, both inside and outside your body. Nick Cave prowls, the band tootle, but they’re all one organism so something is building. This song is long and it’s going somewhere. You know Warren Ellis, his mad wizard collaborator is up to something. And then about five minutes in, sh*t gets real.
Nick Cave lashes out, every instrument on stage goes nuts. A fella wallops a cymbal with a tambourine as if to punish one of them, Nick Cave himself goes battering a grand piano with plonks that used to be plinks (the other keyboardist is the woman who wrote the theme tune for Line of Duty), and you sense the crowd who are in the know have been waiting for this moment that the Long Song has crescendoed.
It’s one of those transformative moments in your relationship with a musician. You don’t need many of those in a life but you need one. What’s yours?
