Shaun Hand Week: Notes on the Twilight World of Birmingham Music Library

I’ve always been drawn to twilight worlds—sunset, after hours, the very end of summer, the border of very late and very early, etc. And the music on this EP all has that vibe. 

Usually, I’ll potter around one evening a week, making stuff up as I go along. With this EP, though, circumstances meant I wrote most of it over summer—or at least got the basic ideas—and then recorded in two or three intense bursts, which meant I was able to get deeper into what I was doing.

There’s a very specific vibe that I’m always after but have only managed to capture a couple of times in my life (and then usually on rough demos). I’m not even going to try and describe it, but two or three tracks on here have it.

CIRCLING KEEPER’S POOL
When I write music, I often get very specific images in my head. The good thing about instrumental music like this is that you can usually use those images for titles. The synth sound here immediately put me in mind of walking around Keeper’s Pool in Sutton Park (Sutton Park’s one of my favourite places to be; it’s a whole energetic connection thing) and I didn’t think it needed much else to capture that.

I actually went over there early one morning to record myself walking through the leaves in the woods behind the pool, but I did get the birdsong and ambient noises you can hear throughout. As I was recording some of it, a swan actually took off from the water, circled the pool and then flew off, which was a beautiful moment.

STRANGE AFTERNOON
I’ve had this title since I was 13—I remember trying to write a song for it in my head walking home from school one autumn afternoon—but I’d never come up with anything that fitted. This needed a title at the last minute and, after 27 years, this one finally seemed to work.

I wrote it on guitar over summer, but as often happens with BML music, when I came to record it, it didn’t work because the chords and picking pattern were too tricky. 437 abandoned takes later, I switched it to keyboard and it worked straight away, with the added bonus that it’s slightly different to how I naturally play piano/keyboard.

The little bit in the middle comes from a demo cassette of me and two kids I was in a band with aged 15. (We were recording a song in my room by recording onto a boombox, putting that tape into my stereo, then playing along with that to overdub, switching the tapes again, and ending up with a (very fuzzy) multitrack).

KODAK TWILIGHT, AUGUST 1988
This one was actually finished this time last year, but I didn’t want to release a 45-second single. The top-line reminded me of a late ‘80s soap opera, but then I picked some odd bass-notes to counter it, warped and saturated everything, and then slowed it all down slightly so it’s in that twilight hinterland between comforting and haunting, like a light-leak on an old family photograph.

CLARITY AT THE MOMENT BEFORE DAWN
The title is from that slightly hysterical lucidity you get if you stay up all night (or I do, anyway).

One of my favourite times to play guitar is sitting with an unplugged electric whilst watching the TV. If my mind’s only half on it, my hand tends to drift to unusual chords. This one was written that way. I recorded it while my wife and daughter were out, with my amp set up at the top of the stairs. One vague inspiration for all the spacey noises in the background was ‘Santa Teresa’ by EOB.

Because I don’t play live with Birmingham Music Library, once I’ve recorded something, I rarely play it again. So even though I was working on this all through summer, I’ve already forgotten what the chords are. But I quite like that. It reminds me of a line in the Tao Te Ching that’s always intrigued me: “When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.” (As in, you don’t get bored of it, like you sometimes can in a band, rehearsing the same set over and over).

19TH DEC. 1983
On YouTube, there’s a Paul McCartney interview on Radio One from December 1983 (he’s promoting the Pipes of Peace LP). The upload was recorded on cassette; it’s ever-so-slightly slowed down and has that lovely nostalgic compressed sound and loads of static and bleeping in the background, like the radio wasn’t quite tuned in properly. I basically sampled the silent gaps from the interview and then wrote some music over the top of it. I also put in the audio of another YouTube video (from the same week in December ’83) of buses coming and going from the old bus garage in Sutton Coldfield, which was round the corner from where I grew up.

None of this happened on the 19th December 1983, by the way (although both had just happened). I got the dates wrong and didn’t realise until I’d uploaded the EP.

EMPTY AFTER GIG
I think the title for this came first—I’ve always got long lists of potential titles, most of which never get used. I was remembering that feeling of emptiness and “What do I do now?” (which I now know to be a huge dopamine drop) after playing a great gig, even if it was to 15 of your mates on a Thursday night at Bar Academy or something. When I was 20, each gig was the end of the world, and I’d feel completely lost afterwards. I can see why successful musicians get into trouble because those feelings must be so intensified on huge tours with thousands of people cheering you night after night. Where do you go from there? Bed with a Sudoku? 

I wanted some vocals on this, so I spoke to FABRIK’s singer Hayley about how we used to feel after our gigs, and that’s her you can hear talking near the end. 

The thunderstorm you can hear is one I recorded out of my window during summer 2020 for a track that didn’t work out. The last thing I put on (both this and the whole EP) was some static from a very old radio that barely works. At the very end, I happened to flick onto Radio Three or Classic FM just as a piano piece finished, which gave me the perfect ending.