Here comes my ship
I've waited so long for it
Electric light
When daytime turns into night

Here comes the fallout
Here comes the pain
Everlasting panic attack
Ever falling rain

It's such a shame
It's such a shame
Blue sky turns into rain
Sunshine pours down the drain
It's such a shame
It's such a shame

I was in a park
Sitting in the sun
Smiling faces on everyone
Why can't these people see
Someone's got it in for me
I was in a bar
I was on a ship
I was in my car at the Dairy Dip
It isn't right
It isn't fair
I must fit in somewhere
One of these days I'm gonna let it slide
Then I'll be satisfied

Sunshine pours down
Sunshine pours down
Sunshine pours down
The drain

I started writing it and immediately made a demo of the unfinished song which became the actual finished track because it had a casual feel to it that we really liked. I used an old Conn drum machine and recorded that on teenbeat setting (but slowed down to a slightly more middle-aged option) with a guitar playing the only two chords in the song which are D and G. I put the guitar through a flanger pedal to make it a bit more interesting. I sang the thing without any real care and attention and then sang a harmony, also without much attention to anything in particular. I put the Vox organ on it - I think I may have done two takes there and used the best bits to make up one track but possibly not. Then I recorded the four note repeated bass line. I could have looped this but the beat box was playing in real time as I couldn't be bothered to loop it in the first place so it wasn't very steady in its tempo. So I played the four note figure over and over all the way through the song and that probably helped keep the feel because sometimes it was louder, sometimes softer.
After all that I was a bit stumped as to where to go with it. We listened to it a few days later and Amy thought a spoken bit might be quite good so she popped upstairs for a good ten minutes and came down with the I was in the park... section. And then we came up with the end bit, the Sunshine pours down repeat.
Around about the same time I put a track of guitar feedback on it, a lot of big guitar chords on the end, a tambourine and even a set of bongoes which are buried somewhere in there. It still needed something so I overdubbed a bass guitar from the speaking section onwards with a snazzy intro figure. But it was still lacking so eventually I spent hours programming a drum track over the impossibly wavering beat. That's what took the most time. that and the backing vocals which we kept coming back to the following day and replacing - they took ages.

But what everyone (the odd person who stumbles on my site and gets as far as the lyrics) wants to know is what about the lyrics? I suppose it's our low expectation. I won't say pessimism - that would imply that there might otherwise be something to be optimistic about. We're neither optimists or pessimists. For us expecting very little is a survival mechanism, it means we won't be disappointed. My ship is always bout to come in as the expression goes, but it never actually does. I was thinking about Stranger Than Fiction which everyone tells me should have made me a rich man. It didn't of course because the publishers and the record company believed the cunt who put the music together for the film when he told them that Whole Wide World was only playing a very minor part in the film and let it go for a very small fee.
Anyway, what do I want? What do I need? An electric light that I can switch on when it gets dark. Like that I've at least got a roof over my head - you can't have the one without the other. The roof is implied. I mean, you've got to have a roof to hang the light from. So if I've got that I'm doing quite well really.
But there's the downside, the constant fear of a disaster - if things go too well there'll be an adverse reaction - here comes the fallout... And the sunshine won't last forever, pretty soon it's going to rain again. God we're a miserable pair!