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4/ Mitzi's cure [ Back to excerpts ]
I had written Mitzi's Cure, I Think We're Alone and The Noises of The Evening as a trilogy of songs, almost as a mini-soap-operetta, and that's how we played them, both live and in these recording sessions. They chart the breakdown of a friend of mine at the time whose name wasn't Mitzi. The first song lists unrelated everyday events, like headlines from a newspaper, combining the dramatic with the banal, the sensational with the humdrum, against a slow, simple melody. It used the cut-up method of writing, discovered by the surrealist Tristan Tzara, and championed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin; letting random and chance dictate a narrative and descriptive flow.
In brilliant blue gardens
One man has his moment
The band played a samba
The priest moved like wild fire
His masses moved mountains
And newspapers folded
A nurse found a time bomb
It blew off her forearm
She's still on the danger list
She'll never get off it.
A refrain in a higher key follows the verses, like a dislocated Greek chorus, separated from, but commenting on, the action.
Mitzi says she's going in for a cure
She's so sure she can make it
If her friends just stop breaking it down for her
Cos breaking it down is breaking her down
Breaking her down.
The music for the verses is hypnotic and repetitive, bass, acoustic guitar and drums all washed over by Urban's restrained, modulating droning violin, which was fed through a variety of effects to warp the sound still further. On the refrain the drones clear, and the clarity of simple, guitar arpeggios and guitar harmonics comes as a relief as the voices of Peter and Stoner act as the Greek Chorus in a two-part harmony, and the part is very understated. After a second verse the chorus returns, but this time with much more lavish instrumentation and a much more abandoned and histrionic lead vocal singing against Peter and Stoner. When the song reaches its climax, another acoustic guitar slides out from underneath and segues the song into 'I Think We're Alone' which I performed solo with just the acoustic guitar.
After Mitzi's breakdown in the first song, the second part finds her in hospital, traumatized and sedated, trying to cooperate with the doctors, but feeling frustrated by their lack of understanding. She grows increasingly desperate and decides to commit suicide. The second verse finds her in her hospital bed in the middle of her darkest night:
Looking around for a rope, and I feel that the end is almost in sight
Tying the knot, or firing the shot can't be so hard this time of the night.
And your fifty-foot jumps and your cold stomach pumps
DonĠt scare me no more- I don't care.
The whole band enters for the second desperate chorus, which is an anguished howl of despair:
They just make me feel its all been a waste of time
They just make me feel I'm in a surrealist pantomime
They just make me feel there's no more to talk about
They just make me feel it's the only way out.
The third and final part of the song sequence, The Noises of the Evening, is brought in by a mutated funk riff on Stoner's fuzzed-up bass, a choppy rhythm guitar, a honking alto sax which I found lying around in the studio, ambulance sirens, then a dirty guitar solo and finally Urban's violin takes up the same riff as the bass guitar and sees the frenzy home to the second section. A totally contrasting atmospheric soundscape, with acoustic guitars, violin and assorted sound effects acts as the musical platform for a phased lead vocal. It is a sort of dream sequence that chronicles the imagined physical and mental process of dying, albeit in an oblique way.
When darkness stains the foreland and ships of doom set sail
We're stranded on the mainland inside acoustic jails
Too far to touch the window, too late to go outside
WeĠre paralysed behind our eyes
With nowhere left to hide.
A blistering instrumental section follows which, when I hear it now, sounds like a dervish vortex. The music spirals with an ever increasing intensity, led by Blitz's jazz-fired violin solo, while di Lemma adds timbales to punctuate the rhythm of his kit and Stoner plays one of the finest bass lines he ever devised, a bursting, bubbling loop. When the music can get no higher or more intense a final vocal coda intervenes, to close the song:
As others people's music puts dramas in my head
Our own beguiling silence lets me know
We're nearly dead.
These three songs, jointly and separately represent the gloomiest and darkest music I have ever written.