Take An Arrow (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

It is a day that will live in history — today — because on this day, we conclude the TV en Français Demo(lition) Derby. Yes, 11 December 2024 will be given a penthouse suite in the apartment building “History,” right next to 12 Feb 1809 (where Abe Lincoln’s b-day and Charles Darwin’s b-day are roommates), and across the hall from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If this metaphor seems labored or confusing — history as an apartment building in which domiciles represent significant dates — recall that viewers of the Lumière film, experiencing cinema for the first time, yelped in genuine fear, leapt from their seats, etc., and some guy thought Led Zeppelin was bad when he first heard them or whatever.

Many readers of today’s newsletter, too, will yelp aloud as they realize that the TVeFDD has ended. Some percentage will leap from their seats. What we can say to these readers, by way of consolation, is that many splendors lie ahead. Many demos and scratchy acoustic covers, interviews and DJ playlists, photo dumps and other artifacts litter the path before you, so be careful not to trip. What would it even mean to “trip” on a newsletter post, you ask? God, you’re in a really pedantic mood today. I guess, like… go crazy? You’d get the post, start reading it, and somewhere around paragraph three your sanity would fall away, like a glacier calving into the sea?

Anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s live in the moment. Let’s merge with the present. Let’s wind up all our consciousness’s little tendrils, pull them back out of the future and the past, back into the now, and for a couple of minutes just be.

The best way to do that, of course, is to listen to some music.

KEITH: I think that when we started working on this song, I had in mind a sort of Pixies vibe? Real Kim Deal-style bass-led chugging with a guitar part that can maybe best be described as “pesky?” I’m thinking “Wave Of Mutilation” Pixies, or “Debaser” Pixies. Strictly Dolittle action, here, before Pixies got all mad that nobody was actually listening to their records (yet). Damn, Pixies got real pissed off there, for a while.

But, yeah, I don’t know that it really sounds all that Pixies-ish, ultimately. Do I not shriek shrilly enough? Are we too unfamiliar with the Massachusetts mindset? Is this why Boston seems to have been permanently stricken from our U.S. tour routings? Shit, we even played Northampton once or twice back in the day. I can’t help but notice that those shows were before we corrupted the Pixies DNA with “Take An Arrow.”

CHRIS: You’re right, we appear to have crumbled up our Mass. pass with this song. I have to say I’m a little surprised that the residents so unanimously condemned our Pixies parody. I’d have thought Pixies would have an ambivalent, Morrissey-like relationship with their homelanders. Not that anybody in The Pixies is as objectionable a persona as ol’ Mozzarella, but Massholes are a notoriously cantankerous bunch (“We tell it like it is,” they’d no doubt protest), quick to cuff their children, fling hot pans at their spouses, punch cops, etc. I suppose they’re a rough lot, but in the end loyal. This speaks well for them, and I have officially raised my estimation of Massachusetts, The Damned State.

A photo from our May 10th, 2016, Boston show. Don’t know who this is, but we clearly snapped the pic with the aim of prosecuting her for bootlegging. In hindsight, it’s good we forgot to report her to the FTC, since she’s one of the few Boston fans who stuck with us after we had dragged their entire culture by releasing “Take An Arrow.”

A lyric question for you, Keith: Is “I would take an arrow for you/her/him/my dog/my pet cause” an expression that predates this tune, or did you coin and popularize it? I simply can’t remember whether I used to say it before TVeF came out, or if I only started saying it several times a day back in 2014!

KEITH: Well, I don’t THINK it’s a saying that was widely used before this album (it’s been universally adopted in all languages, since). Without getting too deep into an explication of my own lyrics, my admittedly corrupt memory tells me that the lyric started because I was thinking about good old Eros and his amour-inducing, and then also of the idea of taking a bullet for someone, and how that duality related to the overarching album theme of bittersweet romance, the push and pull of love-and-hate vibes, etc. etc. But then I think I also just enjoyed how that phrase is a mildly-confounding bastardization of a cliche, and it tickled me. Overall, a top-tier lyric that will cement my place in the annals of music for all time.

Anyway, I was hanging out with old Peanut from Kaiser Chiefs on our day off in Leeds, and our conversation turned to our upcoming mutual show, at which our bands will each play our debut albums in their entirety. We were chatting about how album track-lists don’t necessarily translate directly into potent set-lists; he bemoaned the fact that the six(!) singles on Employment are also that record’s first six songs, which means that the back half of an album-faithful setlist will be populated by songs that might generally be less-celebrated by a crowd of 20,000 Kaiser Chiefs fans. (In anticipation of our 20th anniversary, we wisely put “The Great Escape” and “It’s A Hit” halfway back into WLAS). But anyway, Peanut mentioned that part of the reason that the band were hesitant to shuffle the song order in the name of live payoff is that lead singer and Chief lyricist Ricky Wilson was loathe to interrupt the narrative arc of the album.

We never really have that problem. Even if our albums did tell a specific, linear, chronologically-sensitive story (which, to date, has never been the aim), we tend to place far more importance upon musical flow rather than lyrical through-lines when ordering our records. But I do think that “Take An Arrow” was the rare instance in which I’d become convinced that a song had earned a specific place on a record thanks to its lyrical content. I don’t think the song necessarily serves as a chronological ending to the relationship story in TV En Français, but the blend of optimism and pessimism, devotion and resignation kind of sums up the thematic scope of record. Maybe I’m just arguing that the song is redundant?!

I do also like that the album concludes with those resounding band hits at the end of the song. It’s like nails being driven into a coffin. We’re geniuses.

Keith’s sister Caroline’s friend Anne Marie was, by this point in the evening, starting to regret her decision to participate in a big time rock & roll album photo shoot with no official end-time for free.

Knee Jerks

Here are some things we’ve hearted recently.

If you ask Chris: The Spanish musician and radio DJ Carlos Pereiro used to front a rock band called Novedades Carminha, but went solo last year as CARLANGAS. His self-titled debut was an eclectic ramble through half a dozen styles that sounds more like 40 minutes of tasteful radio than a tight artistic statement, but on new album Bailódromo, Vol. 1, the message is clear: disco is not dead, and it’s time to dance. 🪩 Throw this on at a holiday party to bring up the mood.

By Keith’s reckoning: Before they devolved into Rob Zombie’s industrial pre-solo-project, White Zombie were a bunch of art school crust punks bumming around Greenwich Village and essentially inventing Queens Of The Stone Age’s sound for them. The band (Jay Yeunger, Sean Yseult, and Ivan de Prume) were all sidelined fairly quickly as Zombie’s egomania swelled to uncontainable dimensions, but for a while, they were just a great groove-rock band. Yeunger went on to produce QOTSA known associates Fu Manchu’s 1997 album The Action Is Go, which also rips. Rob Zombie went on to make the two worst Halloween movies.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) came out this year digitally and on double-LP vinyl. You can listen to more demos here.