Siobhan O’Donnell’s diary on band politics, genuine disagreement, and the specific discomfort of realising your lyrics might mean more than you intended
There’s a piece doing the rounds about a Clacton pensioner complaining that the town’s ridiculous by-election is making the resort “look stupid,” delivered with the kind of casually revealed prejudice that makes you laugh and then immediately feel slightly sick about laughing, and I brought it to rehearsal Thursday intending to just share a good joke. Instead we spent two hours arguing, genuinely arguing, about whether our own new song counts as a protest song, and if so, whether we’re actually equipped to be writing one.
How the Argument Actually Started
Our guitarist read the piece over my shoulder, went quiet for a moment, then said, with real seriousness, that our new track’s chorus, which none of us had really examined that closely before, was doing something uncomfortably similar, mocking a specific kind of casual, unexamined prejudice without doing the harder work of actually saying anything constructive about it. I didn’t love hearing that. I loved it even less because I think he might be right.
The Actual Substance of the Two-Hour Debate
Half the band felt the song works precisely because it holds the mirror up without moralising, letting the ugliness speak for itself the way the best satire does, the Clacton piece included, where the pensioner’s own words do all the necessary work without the writer needing to editorialise on top of them. The other half, myself included on alternating days depending on how the argument was going, worried that simply presenting ugliness without comment risks reading as endorsement to anyone not already paying close attention.
Where We Actually Landed, Tentatively
We didn’t fully resolve it, if I’m honest, though we did agree to add one additional verse, currently in genuinely rough draft form, that pulls the perspective back slightly, making clearer whose voice is actually being mocked rather than leaving it fully ambiguous. Whether this fixes the actual concern or just makes us feel better about it remains, genuinely, an open question I don’t think we’ll resolve until we’ve actually played it live for a room full of people who don’t already know our intentions going in.
What the Clacton Piece Got Exactly Right, In My Opinion
Reading it again after the argument, I think what makes it work is precision, letting one specific pensioner’s specific words carry the entire weight of the joke, rather than generalising outward into something broader and less pointed. That’s a genuinely difficult needle to thread, and I think our own song, in its current form, hasn’t quite threaded it as cleanly, which is exactly why the argument happened in the first place and exactly why I’m glad it did.
How the Rest of the Band Feels About the New Verse
Mixed, honestly. Our drummer thinks we’re overthinking a song that most of the room will experience as pure sonic chaos rather than close lyrical analysis, and there’s probably some truth in that too, most gig audiences aren’t parsing verses with the same scrutiny we just applied to our own work over two hours and several pints.
Where This Leaves the Song, For Now
We’re playing it live next month regardless, new verse included, and I genuinely don’t know how it’ll land until it’s actually in front of a room. What I do know is that a single satirical article about a Clacton pensioner sent our entire creative process into a two-hour genuine reckoning about our own responsibilities as writers, which feels like exactly the kind of thing good satire should be capable of doing, whether or not it was ever trying to.
What I’ve Actually Learned From Writing This Kind of Song Before
This isn’t the first time I’ve written something that toes the line between mocking prejudice and accidentally amplifying it, and I don’t think it’ll be the last, given the kind of band we are and the kind of subjects we tend to reach for. What’s changed, I think, over the years, is how seriously I now take the argument stage itself, rather than treating it as an obstacle to just push through on the way to a finished song. The two hours we spent Thursday weren’t wasted time. They were, genuinely, the most important part of writing that particular track, more important honestly than the actual chords underneath it.
I keep thinking about how the pensioner in the original piece never once realises how badly he’s revealing himself, and how that specific, unselfconscious quality is exactly what makes the satire land. Our song needs that same quality, the mocked voice believing itself entirely reasonable, and I think that’s the actual technical challenge we’re still working through, not whether the song is too harsh, but whether it’s harsh in a way that’s honest about where the harshness is actually pointed.
Where We Go From Here
We’re rehearsing the new verse again this weekend, and I suspect we’ll keep tinkering right up until the first live performance forces our hand one way or the other. Some songs get finished in the studio. This one, I think, is going to get finished in front of an actual room of people, the same way the amp disaster a few weeks back got finished by forty strangers singing the bass line back at me. Further London punk diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original piece available at thedailymash.co.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/
