My Nth Bit of Strange in Umpteen Years

(My 3rd Bit of Strange in 14 Years)

This is a new album by King Creosote as performed live in Anstruther AIA Hall on March 13 2010, and recorded / distributed with his blessing.

Scroll to the bottom of this post for an album download link.

I have written a tiny (and tenuously related) story (or 'thing') for each song.

--

There's No Escape

I started drawing windows on everything. In hotel notebooks. On steamed-up mirrors. In the foam of my beer. In the eye of my mind.

I needed them, I realised, because my head was full: of buildings and things and most of all people; their unknown, unwanted faces in mine.

And so I came back.

I don't draw windows any more. I look in and out at you, and the colour of the water, and the colour of the sky.

--

Collector of Mundane

In a gutter up Spearshill Road in Tayport, there's a copy of the Sunday Times from summer 1987.

You put it there to store its humdrum disclosures. We waited for the neighbours to dig it out, or for you to get fired from your paper round.

Neither of these things ever happened. No-one cared enough to pick it up, and your boss was too busy importing cut-price home perms from Hong Kong to give you the sack.

The paper's still there, more than 20 years on. Print is resilient, after all. Its headlines and revelations and serifs have reshaped the drainpipe and Tayport’s topography. The rain washes through our scandals and narratives, and over the village, and into the sea.

--

Trigger Happy I Am

Three examples of man’s raging virility, as conveyed through the medium of popular song:

“She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes” (She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain)

“I’m gonna hit you from all sides; lay your fortress open wide” (The Bee Gees - You Win Again)

“Stand back: trigger happy I am” (King Creosote - Trigger Happy I Am)

--

Bats in the Attic

I told you my fantasy look in a man is blue eyes and white hair. Ideally a beard. You huffed for a while, what with you being auburn.

So we sighed at the harbour, side-by-side, until my teacher sidled by. He sauntered across with his arrogant half-grin – confident I'd always love his blue, blue eyes, his white, white hair and a swaggering gait that had stirred me in the summer I turned fourteen, and every summer since.

I turned back to see the dawn of your smile. His 'swagger' was a limp, you explained: caused by old age and a polio leg.

And as you threw your head back laughing, the sun caught silver in your hair.

--

Details

Some microscopic prayers I have issued whilst on Tentsmuir beach:

Please God make that not be a dead highland cow. (It was).

Please God make that dog not have rabies. (It was candyfloss).

Please God let that man not have binoculars. (He did).

--

Swallow Dive

You never intended to teach me to drive. I only realise that now.

Those 'accidental' wrong turns. That farm road we'd end up on at the end of every shift I worked. Your insistence that the best way to get to grips with a car was to study the pedals closely - C, B, A: I remember that much clearly - the pedals that were, of course, between your legs.

You should have said.

--

J

For the first time ever, he smiled over. For something to say, to keep him there, you asked him all about his scar. He leaned in to tell you, curled his chest around you: traced the ragged line along his finger, across his knuckle, and down toward a curve at his arm. It was an umbrella, a half-smile, an anchor. It started your name. The letter J.

--

Tits Up

The first time I ever saw a woman sunbathe topless was on a school trip to Burntisland.

It was pouring with rain.

--

This Simple

Nothing is simple.

Apart from this wisdom:

Never travel from Sweden to take a woman to dinner, then spend the evening spitting tobacco into your hat.

--

The B All And End All Of That

My grandma says things like:

'What's for you won't go by you'

And

'It's written in the stars'