Walking Backwards Into the Future
A guest post from Dalek victim, Lovecraft investigator, tiny dancer, historian and my Pilgrim bandmate, Jana Carpenter.
Somapolis is the sixth Sweet Billy Pilgrim album. We put an insane amount of work into it as the pandemic literally and figuratively put us in our places. I felt like Jana - for reasons that will become clear - would be uniquely placed as an historian and storyteller (acting, singing, improvising), to relate the process of making our first (double!) concept album. Over to you, J.
“Walking backwards into the future”.
This is a phrase I remember hearing back in my improv days and I always liked its inference that despite our forward trajectory, we can only really see what’s gone before and that’s what we take with us into the future. As we move through life, we litter the ground, or our memory, with people, events, observations and ideas. In those moments when you feel a little paralysed facing the future, sometimes all it takes is a little glance over your shoulder to see what you can pull forward from the debris you’ve left in your wake to give you a nudge.
I tend to think that most good things that happen are a combination of intention and accident. “Direction” is often something observed in retrospect when in truth destinations are usually arrived at after a lot of stumbling around. Sometimes direction is making the unknown the point - being comfortable with not knowing what’s going to happen next and treating uncertainty as a ladder rather than a snake.
Like when the boys left the band. Bish and Al (bassist and drummer respectively) had decided to move on from SBP. We were saddened but understood. Shit happens and life changes. What followed, for Tim and me, was a period of wide-eyed shrugging as we mourned the loss of the band as it was and wondered what the hell to do next. We had had this idea of a little acoustic side project, a whole album of songs we could play anywhere (in people’s living rooms!) without the need for a van full of gubbins. This, by default, became our new focus. Start small, we thought. The result, Wapentak, felt like a salve and a sort of respite from expectation (and from lugging amps around) and afforded us the opportunity to focus on singing and telling stories in an intimate setting.
So imagine our surprise when, towards the end of 2019, we had the privilege of supporting Big Big Train on a tour of the UK, in venues much bigger than we had imagined and that were, by and large, made for singing. One snake became a ladder. And then another and another. The welcome we received from the generous fans of BBT meant that these two little people on these big stages felt not-so-small. It was heartening and instructive. We directed our attention to telling meaningful stories and in the process learned a lot about ourselves, about how we communicate, about the power of space and silence, and how to ask for people’s attention without actually asking. What I remember most is that we did a lot of listening.
With Somapolis we wanted something more expansive. We wondered if we could take what we had learned from Wapentak and turn it to something more upbeat and musically layered. We revived old riffs, building upon them and wondering what kind of noise we could make. Did these snippets of songs have legs? Were they too complex to be something we could actually play? There were only two of us now, for Peter Gabriel’s sake! We were mulling these things over when the pandemic hit. Suddenly nothing and everything seemed possible all at once and our list of questions grew. Should we just carry on? How could we work? Did any of this even matter?
It turned out that it mattered more that ever. We readjusted our expectations of what was possible, and what followed, then, was curiously absent of the pressures (self-imposed or otherwise) that usually accompany What To Do Next. As the world seemed to hush and time seemed to slow, what was left in the wake of data, rising numbers, graph-lines going up or down, red hot spots on maps, the accompanying worry and upset, and the enormity of what was often simultaneously unreal and very real… was space. We found ourselves in the oddly fortunate position to be able to just be playful - to exchange thoughts (remotely) and, in improv jargon, to ‘Yes, and…’ each other’s ideas. Snakes into ladders.
For me at that time, my head was in the clouds of the past (as ever. My midlife crisis resulted in a BA and an MA in history. As my friend Jim likes to say, if you’re going to have a midlife crisis, try and have a good one). In particular, I’d been thinking about the way that Renaissance cities responded to the Black Death, often by closing city gates and fortifying city walls and, in Venice, the deployment of quarantine (literally meaning ‘forty days’ and applying to the containment of ships off the coast). And beyond that, what a city even was. We kept seeing pictures of empty urban spaces, ghostly save for the reoccupation in some places by curious and bold-as-brass animals hanging out in gangs like the zoological version of The Warriors (“Nara deer, come out and play-ay!”), which exposed the oddness of cities and towns devoid of viscous humanity to make sense of the sharp edges. Empty streets, in variations of grey, were rendered nonsensical without people in them. I kept imagining future archaeologists and historians stumbling upon the remains of an early 21st century city and wondering “What did this do?” “What was that for?” “And who was this guy?” about some half-crumbled, bewigged fella on a horse.
From the time I first moved to London in the ‘90s, I was struck by how easy it was to be alone in a huge city, that one could be afforded more privacy than in smaller communities - privacy to the point of isolation. Yet, despite this, there’s always this underlying fizz of circuitry that connects us in ways that are not always apparent, things that evoke a sort of collective feeling. The sound of a siren or the peripheral flash of a back garden firework display, the network of motion that, when interrupted or transgressed, unites city dwellers so deeply that it needs only to be expressed in the merest shared glance. I remembered reading that cities were, in a sense, acts of imagination. Cities are too big for kin ties and a person living within its confines will only know a tiny fraction of their fellow inhabitants, therefore anything resembling a common urban identity is something that can only really reside in the mind. What humans build, how we connect to each other and animate our space, were musings brought to the fore by the surreal conditions of the pandemic. I think I remember this being a topic of conversation everywhere, in the news, between friends. Or maybe I was looking for it? It certainly found its way into conversations Tim and I were having over text and Zoom. This embargo on human connection seemed to amplify our need to explore it.
So we started to build. The lyric-less songs, as they mostly were at this point, felt architectural, spatial. Sometimes we felt we were looking down at something from above, sometimes if felt as though we were at ground level amongst the cacophony and chaos of a place that was beginning to take shape. We began to create characters and place them, like Beetlejuice, in our virtual Hornby set. Each song felt like someone’s story, and we tried to let the music tell us what that story might be.
My notebook is an amusing (at least to me) record of our thought processes as the ideas were developing. Phrases like: “The House of Vice and Virtue.” (Bliss Maps), “Stasis…reflection. Or this is what normal looks like.” (Night Watch) “Proof of faith. Ordeal. Displays of devotion.” (Pass Muster) “Future cabaret. Feels conversational, like a double-act. Jazz hands.” (Stress Position)
These ideas developed into a network of characters, who started to be able to speak for themselves. When it finally came to recording the vocals, our job was mainly to get out of the way and let them tell their stories. It was pretty liberating. What at first seemed like a detached approach ended up having the opposite effect in practice. We had spent so much time imagining this world, and then we got to be inside it. The result, for me, was that my memory of much of the pandemic is of another world - one with a tableau of characters making the best of what life threw at them…making choices to accept, to run or to let go…trying to kick the snakes away and reach for the ladder rungs.
I had been thinking a lot about Thomas More’s Utopia - his fictionalised account, written in 1516, of an ideal society made up of ‘human goodness’, addressing ideas of self-interest versus the common good, lampooning contemporary societal norms, and suggesting that it was within humanity’s power to choose our destiny - around the time we were spitballing ideas for the artwork and album cover. “Thinking a lot about” makes is sound benign, “unable to quit boring Tim with” is probably more accurate, to the point where I had a go at writing Somapolis in More’s alphabet (one that More made up and appears at the beginning of the book).
This idea did not, as you’ll probably know, Pass Muster. But it was one of the many fun lily pads we hopped, on our way to fleshing out our imagined city.
Somapolis ended up a place that we wanted to keep visiting. So we did. Employing the help of my Lovecraft Investigations partner in crime, Barney Kay, we put together a collection of spoken word stories to accompany each song. Tim’s beautiful prose paired with some very talented voice actors (plus the two of us) was a way of telling each story in a different way. We carry those characters with us now. They exist, in a way that seems almost as real as anyone we’ve ever met. To me, this simply displays the power of imagination. Thomas More wanted his readers to see society in a new way, to understand that self-interest leads to isolation and suffering and that pride is what holds man back from reaching a true understanding of how to achieve an ideal society. And he seemed to understand that fiction would carry his message further than a scolding treatise, exercising his readers’ imaginative muscles to expand the limits of their vision. We were certainly not aiming for anything as lofty as that, we were mainly following our noses and having fun. But what we could relate to was the exploration of hope and the struggle to maintain it, as well as the interconnected nature of human existence.
During the Big Big Train tour, we felt very strongly that the audience played an equal part in creating the atmosphere we all experienced. Without their good will and their own creative energy, our hope of connecting with them would have fallen flat. I think it’s important that people understand how creative they are. And the power we all have to remain flexible and open despite forces or events that might shutter and entrench - to reframe obstacles via the power of our imaginations and turn snakes into ladders. There’s no end point of the game. It may sometimes seem as though new rows appear just as you think you’ve cleared the last square, but perhaps it’s that the board is circular and it’s not about reaching up but reaching out
The first song on Somapolis:
Listen to Somapolis:
Come see us try to play songs from Somapolis in Guildford this month
What a beautiful text, Jana! I was lucky enough of seeing you guys with BBT at the Hackney Empire. You shone in that stage! I am sure that you made quite a lot of fans that day! ❤️
Very interesting indeed. Perhaps not to many, but to listeners who think. as I hope we , your admirers, do. I also believe the same is true of those who follow the band Big Big Train, as I also do. Just be sure never to go on tour with the Glitter Band...