Over the weekend, I got obsessed with ‘Reaching Out From Here’ by The Boo Radleys, off their Wake Up! album. It was kind of an antidote to the other songs that were sat inside my head all weekend (pray I never write about Gollbetty’s ‘Fighting Girls’ – I’ll spare you the YouTube link if nothing else), but there’s a kind of undeniable loveliness to it that I’ve not come close to putting my finger on yet.
I’m tempted to say there’s not much to it. It’s mostly acoustic, till one of those big Britpop electric guitar noises comes crashing in towards the end, and it gets its forward momentum from percussive noises – the drummer wavers between thumping and tinkling, while the acoustics seem peculiarly defiant in their repetition and stolidness, clanging with the syllables of the chorus: “And it LOOKS like a-NOTH-er RAIN-Y DAY…” That should get on your wick, shouldn’t it? Constant clang and clashing of acoustic bloody guitars, by Britpop people, on Creation, in the mid-90s. Sensitive sodding boys from Liver-sodding-pool.
It never even gets close to annoying, though. That electric swathe sounds so very alone, a half-hearted attempt at defying the sofa – kind of a counterpoint to the bit in ‘Can U Dig It?’ where A Mock Turtle treads on the REALLY FUCKING BIG PEDAL and lo, they doth transcend by doubling the distortion and having to play at half the speed because there is no other humanly-possible way of harnessing such INTENSE ROCK POWER.
Here, though, it’s pathos, a crushing blow – the tones get harshed up, a glide into ordinariness, that British tendency to step on the pedal to emphasise just how great things are, just how well this song fits into Your Modern Life. Here, as the buzz dies, Sice is left whispering “If you say it’s alright, and they say it’s alright, then I can be alright too.” The reassurance of the electric guitar becomes this squidging of the individual into that British pigeonhole, convention’s triumph pushing you back into the box where discontent simply will not be brooked. Isolation and loneliness are necessary facets of the modern, vibrant British existence.
Here’s the Jools Holland version. You may notice bits of the sonics are slightly different from those specified earlier.
