25 Comments

I’m really glad I have three degrees in English Creative Writing (we’re better than lit majors). Otherwise, I would not be able to understand a damn word of this Interview.

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I think Don’t Blow It is lyrically one of your most visually descriptive songs with some great scene setting. It’s one of the reasons I love it. It would be a fantastic addition to your live set imo.

Great read as always, had to look up “sesquipedalian” and now need to find an excuse to use it somewhere!

Love the photo with the donkey. These look like good times. Is Chris actually being measured in the Stone Henge one? He has the stance of a man with his back up against a height chart.

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Thinking about it, I am also curious to know the context in which you had a photo opportunity in a field with a donkey.

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(she "took the sheets from off of the bed" in I Bought Myself A Grave") ⚰️

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Yes! If we are including figurative examples, there is also mention of a shelf in One In, One Out and a ceiling fan in Your Light Has Changed.

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Don't hate me, but that ceiling fan lyric makes me feel icky

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Could never hate you, Emma!

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"Don't Blow It" is such a great song and one I'll sometimes find mf self humming randomly. I'd happily see it included in a live set but I suppose you'd need to adjust the other songs on the set list as well for it to fit.

Loved the post for the demo as well as coming away with a new word "sesquipedalian" and new things to read by authors I've vaguely heard of (Raymond Carver). So it's been great to vicariously reap the benefits of your liberal arts education, something the English uni system moved away from.

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Sadly, I think US authors have always been pretty niche in the UK uni system. When they say English Lit, that tends to be what they mean!

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I did one module on American Literature in my first year but my first degree was American Studies so you'd expect that. Only did two books though, 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Color Purple'.

They do try to make the reading lists in UK English literature degrees more diverse these days though.

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Fair! I’m just old 😂

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It was 1997 when I did that module.

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Yeah. I did English lang and lit 93 - 96. Very English based but I guess that could just be Birmingham 🤷‍♀️

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I may be responsible for most of those streams. One of my favourite WAS songs. It deserves to be heard live.

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R.L. Stine doesn't come up enough in Substack despatches. Another brain- and vocabulary-enhancing read 🧠🗣️

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Point Horror and Goosebumps for life

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I also liked Point Crime 🕵🏼‍♀️

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I may have also read a couple of Point Romance 🙈 I also really liked Christopher Pike's horror books. 'Bury Me Deep' springs immediately to mind.

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I was a total nerd and loved Nancy Drew. But gosh, what a dearth of decent YA fiction we grew up with compared to today.

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Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club 🙌

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2014 was the first time I saw you guys live, at Reading festival. I have no idea what took me so long! 🙈

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I was studying fashion design at university in Birmingham when TV en Français came out. All of my conceptual design work at this time was kitsch meets kitchen sink realism, but then romanticised into something giant and more mythical.

Don’t Blow It was an instant favourite and still remains in my top three. I was so taken aback by the lyrics which felt so hopeful yet sad and seemed to speak a lot to what was influencing me at the time.

I’d discovered the film Umbrellas of Cherbourg a couple of years prior and felt like it altered my brain to see the romantic relationship between the two leads play out on screen. Just the way their romance goes from this technicolour jazz thing that means the world with its idealistic hopes for the future, to the most wistful and real feeling conclusion at a petrol station in the snow.

Maybe that’s just the lens I was seeing ‘Don’t Blow It’ through at the time and how my mind interpreted it. But it’s funny to read in this post about the things that have influenced you at university and realising I was consuming the product of that with all the things that were heavily influencing me at university floating around my brain, making me love this track even more.

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Another thing that happened in 2014:

You played Brixton Academy with The Hives!

What a venue! What a lineup!

I had a pair of tickets and actually took this guy on a date. It didn’t go as planned after bumping into some old school friends which changed the whole vibe and made things awkward. Also the first time we’d caught the band since Keith Carne joined. We were all dazzled by this brand new energy in the band, but the guy I was dating was especially taken aback and admitted to having a crush on this new drummer. For fucks sake.

Great night for live music though

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Song am real good. Me like big amount.

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