BELL STREET......................

We released a big bad new single called American Dreams this passed Monday. I wrote a little blurb about the song a few weeks ago, so thought I'd best do a similar thing for the b-side, Bell Street.

Bell Street is song about the fear that you might be losing your mind, as each new day blurs into the last. It was written last year when I had two weeks off work, and found myself spending each day sitting at my kitchen window, reading, staring outside and listening to my neighbours bump around up-stairs. Me and Mikey J used to live in a bottom floor flat in a pretty rough part of Dundee. Our landlord had given up on fire safety and put bars up outside the windows to stop people smashing them and breaking in. Each day I would have to look through the bars to see the world outside. Often I would spend hours staring at hole in the wall at the bottom of our shared garden, through which I could see overgrown weeds and grass, and dark wooden structures. I would sit and dream about the Narnia-esque world that might lay beyond that wall. Only months later did I take the initiative to go and look over the wall and through this hole, and was saddened to find a garden much like mine.

Sometimes when you've sat motionless for hours, looking between a phone, book and television you start to feel so numb that you need something to spark you back to life. Sadly that can often mean following some filthy white rabbit down an alcohol fuelled hole in the ground, into a wonderland of vice and stupidity. And in Dundee there is one place you are sure to end up if you get caught in the act of drunken foolishness, the homely police cells on Bell Street.

I made a weird DIY video for Bell Street, by filming my legs as I went about my day over a two week period. I then pieced it together into an odd, sea-sickness-inducing short film. The video can be found on Youtube. I would share the link, but my laptop is being difficult at the moment and refusing to open certain websites. I blame the computer, and refuse to believe that it has anything to do with my "interesting" search history.

BELL STREET
I will sit and count the bars on my window
and start a faith from the hole that's in my wall.
I've been treading water like a champion,
I hear my neighbours but I don't know their names...

I'm running on empty,
I'm running on nothing at all,
running on empty,
I'm giving up....

I slept for twelve hours today
tomorrow I wont sleep,
I dream by day and choke myself at night.
The man in black says he's taking me down to Bell Street,
'cos I've been acting funny in the town...

I'm running on empty,
I'm running on nothing at all,
running on empty,
I'm giving up....

I'll stagger through this town,
a saviour is all I want.
Bad poets will turn into clowns,
what's freedom when there's no one around....

L O V E xxx