⛰️ on English Teacher’s Sideboob
A song recommendation, Friedrich, Shelley and Byron, and possibly Pendle Hill
28 September 24 | Vol 3 Issue 7
A short and pithy post; another song recommendation. If you’ve recently subscribed via Daily Philosophy hold steady, more consumerist questioning will be on its way.
Meanwhile,
My friend Nick raved this week about the band English Teacher, and posted as his Instagram status their song Sideboob. Time for transparency; I’m a shallow dilettante and sybarite, and I only clicked to play because it’s called Sideboob. Nothing to do with his recommendation.
By the eighth bar of the undulating synth washes I found myself drawn in. Gently majestic melancholia, with a loose skipping drumbeat, vocals with a Northern twang; something of a rarity. My ears pricked up with the spoken word part.
You take every sunset
And somehow make it sexier
With your haunted asymmetry
Someone's brought a camera crew
They're exploring your history
Now you're on the news
And it's driving me insane
Because everybody wants to climb you
And they don't even know my name
I did an aural double take. I replayed the track, paying attention.
It's a love song to a hill.
Yes, a love song to a hill.
It’s whimsical and clever, without becoming twee. It name checks the painter David Caspar Friedrich, before promising that “Shelley and Byron will be on their way. Begging for my postal code”. Very English Teacher.
Not wanting another Oasis moment, I rang Nick to double check before recommending the song, in case they’ve blown up to become household names while I’ve been listening to Addison Rae (see: shallow dilettante and sybarite).
“Well, last week their album won the Mercury Prize,” he replied.
“What’s the Mercury Prize?” another friend asked.
Taking the middle ground — rather fitting for a hill — here I am. The song makes it clear that being a hill is enough, referencing the absurdity that in the UK being over 2,000 feet is a mountain, and anything under just isn’t.
For all their #JohnLewisCore aesthetics [1 ], the lyrics come from a darker place. Their singer, Lily Fontaine, suffers from social anxiety disorder [2 ], and says of the song [3 ]:
“Moving to a city for university forced me to reflect on how my experience of growing up in and around Pendle, witnessing the social, economic and political issues that exist around it in juxtaposition with the beauty of the landscape and the characters that live within, has shaped me into the artist and person that I am.”
“I think some of my own issues about self-worth stem from the experiences I had growing up as one of the only black faces in my town, but I also think those experiences fuelled a desire in me to be active in educating myself in and opposing the intrinsic and historical racism in our society and the wider world.”
⛰️
This week featured
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Teacher
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendle_Hill
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich
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References
Putting the title aside - I've been vaguely obsessed with this song for about three weeks now. That's good going by my standards. I tried to recall any songs on similar themes but haven't got beyond Solsbury Hill which is about facing up to your reality while on a hill not because of it. Nature runs through much of English Teacher's work but not in the 70s rock idyl of bucolic upstate retreats and the May Queen. I can't imagine anything like "Sometimes it tears like a freight train, Through a christening, Displacing the new growth, And making everything ugly", accompanied on a 12-string. Yet the song is equally affecting and rousing.
Extremely good!