Keane ‘Under The Iron Sea’ Podcast 3 – Tim谈关于A Bad Dream 和 Hamburg Song
2008-07-27 影音资料 enchinya
文件类型: mp3 下载
文本：
A Bad Dream
Tim: “A Bad Dream is the most emotional song on the record. It was based on a poem by W.B.Yeats, called “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, and I think it also came from visiting lots of battlefields and graveyards and so in France, which sounds very morbid, but that’s the kind of thing I like to do on holiday! I’ve just always been really affected by… I guess still being a relatively young man, I still have a lot of empathy of people of my age and even younger, who are going off to war; and I guess the idea of going off to war has been in the air for the last couple of years, with Afghanistan and Iraq particular. Those seem like very distant things, but I think in Europe in particular the Second World War is still something that still looms quite largely in a lot of people’s minds, and it certainly should do. I’d also been reading a book called “The New Confessions” by William Boyd, in where the protagonist of the book goes up in a hot air balloon to film the front line, and he gets shot down and captured. It just made me think a lot of people when they go off as young men, and when they come back – even if it’s a couple of years later it’s like they’ve become old, and all the things they left behind have changed. And it’s something that you can never ever go back to being young again. And I guess it’s just a very sad song.
We wanted to get a balance between a kinda dream sequence – it starts very quietly, and I love the idea of being in a plane, like a Spitfire or something, being so high up in the sky that you can’t hear the guns below you and so on. And it’s almost got a serene silence which is what this Yeats poem seemed to really express. The song starts very quietly, but it gets huge and angry as it goes on – the big distorted washy piano sound in the middle is a pretty vast sound and it’s I guess an attempt to express all that anger bursting out.”
Hamburg Song
Tim: “Hamburg Song was written in America – I seem to remember writing it on a guitar in the back of the bus. But the first time we ever got together and did a demo of it, was in Hamburg on a tour last year [it was 2004].We had a really great day – it was the first time we’d done any work on any new songs and we had a day off so we went into a studio and just worked on some new demos, and Hamburg Song was one of them. It was just labelled on the tape box as “Hamburg Song” and we never got round to changing it. Somehow the name seemed to fit really well with the song.
Lyrically I guess it’s about… again, it’s a bit like Atlantic, it’s about a fear of what we’ve got slipping away and I guess it’s a plea just to remember what a great thing it is to have a bond between people. And even if you all go off and you do different things and you make different friends and have all these adventures as people do – it’s just a plea that at the end of it all you’re still the backstop in someone’s life, as it were.
When we demoed it up, we did it very very simply, and then started to play it live a little bit and we played it very very simply, and Tom’s just playing an organ on it. And there was definitely a temptation to turn it into this big ballad, and we just felt … we actually tried it; we thought we better try it, so we tried putting some drums on it, and that song is all about atmosphere – in fact the whole record, the most important thing was to capture an atmosphere. And we just felt that the best way to do that with Hamburg Song was the way that we’d done it to start off with, which was really really stripped back and simple, so we kept it that way.”