The writing of ‘FUCK ALL’

How we wrote ‘Fuck all’

 Blimey! Crikey! Blinking flip! Talk about musical differences! This is a tale of band tensions, phobias, ill-will and tantrums. All I did was write the beginnings of a song called ‘Fuck All.’ I did a little demo on my ProTools thing-y. Looking for a suitable beat, I copied a glam-rock stomp from the 1970s. I thought the lyrics were great and I’ll explain about them first.

Lyrically, I’d been thinking a lot of how when I was at school all the popular kids were good at sport or were posh or were tough. Of course, I was none of those things, so my teen years were pretty angst-y. But most of those sporty, posh, hard kids ended up in dead-end jobs, failed marriages and suburban futility. For them, being sixteen was the peak of their popularity. After that it was all downhill. I wanted to write a ‘revenge of the nerds’ type lyric, pointing out that they’d ended up with fuck all. Nasty. Very. But there you go. The other thing I’d been thinking about was the college yearbooks that are common in the US. You’ve probably seen them. Photos of the students gurning at the camera with a few sentences below each one, based on their classmates prediction for their future. These sentences often say something like: ‘Voted most likely to be an astronaut’; ‘Voted most likely to be a beauty queen’; or ‘Voted most likely to make a billion dollars by the time they’re twenty-five.’ Yeah, right. I once read a biography about the great blues singer Janis Joplin. In her college yearbook from Thomas Jefferson High School in Beaumont, Texas her fellow students voted her ‘Most likely to be a man.’ Charming. These yearbooks are great if you’re sporty, or handsome or tough. Not so nice if you’re a nerd or a weakling or painfully shy.

So, that’s how the lyrics came to be as they are.

But the beat. Oh! The beat. Armed with my demo I drove to Weller Towers to stun Ant-Man Moretti with ‘Fuck All’, wherein my fecund lyricism synced perfectly with the thumping rhythm of a thousand school discos. I fired it up over the studio console and sat back while he leaned forward, his head looking strangely insectile with his new AKG K240 headphones clamped to his ears.

Now, normally young Antonio is content to sit in silence and listen to my demos until the end before delivering his crushing indictments. But on this occasion, the song hadn’t even reached its first joyous chorus before he removed his headphones and raised a hand somewhat in the style of the Emperor Caligula ordering a former friend to be disembowelled using a blunt sword. 

‘Can’t listen to this, Harley. The beat is all wrong.’

‘All wrong? It’s a solid glam-rock stomp that the kids will really go for.’

‘Stop you there, Harl-o,’ said Antonio. ‘It sounds like Gary Glitter.’

‘And your point is?,’ said I. 

‘We can’t do Gary Glitter.’

Well I was what you might call dumbfounded. ‘It rocks, it rolls, it makes you want to swing your pants,’ I argued. 

But The Moretti-Man just kept shaking his head. ‘Can’t be done, old cock,’ he said.

Well. I sulked for a while and then had a brainwave. At Weller Towers there’s a resident artist, the well-known ceramasist [Yes – that is an actual word] Miche Follano. ‘Right,’ I told my gurning amigo. ‘Let’s get Miche up here to give us an unbiased opinion. She’s probably just cooking yoghurt or something.’

So we dragged the Miche from her studio and into ours. ‘Listen to this and give us your completely unbiased, impartial, non-partisan objective opinion on how brilliant the beat of this song is,’ I told her.

We played her the track. She listened to the end. I held my breath.

‘I like the lyrics – singing “fuck all” about a hundred times makes it a radio friendly sort of song - and the tune could easily become a favourite among football hooligans – it has something of the qualities of “My old man said be an Arsenal fan…” about it,’ she said. I was encouraged only to be crushed by what she said next: ‘The beat’s terrible. It sounds like Gary Glitter.’

In my peripheral vision I observed Antonio doubled-up with mirth, but I maintained my composure.

‘OK,’ I threw out to the room. ‘Perhaps young Antonio could come up with a more politically correct, wishy-washy, liberal, woke beat that’s acceptable to the sensitivities of today’s music listeners?’

‘I’ll take that challenge and run with it,’ smirked Antonio, firing up his super-duper ProTools suite of computer magic on his MacBook. 

And he did. And then some. Transforming my 1970s school disco glam-rock knees-up into a rankin’, skankin’, reggae-in-your-jeggae, rocksteady dancehall thumper. And then added horns. And keyboards. And a dirty great big jazzy instrumental break in the middle that just seemed to come out of nowhere. 

I had to admit, the Moretti stripling had style. 

And that’s how we wrote ‘Fuck All.’

Harley Taylor - Tin Cry