The King Blues - Walking With Orpheus

“Every time we take a step we’re surrounded by the ideological birds of prey who feed on our possibilities” Fredy Perlman Every now and then, I’ll finish a final draft of a song and get a feeling that I’ve been chasing since I was young - the feeling of “I’ve cracked it”. It’s a sensation unlike any other, a mix of pride, power, reflection and validation. There’s no other feeling like it. I’m sure it’s the reason why massive rockstars with huge amounts of money, who could retire at any point, instead choose to lock themselves away with a pen, paper and a guitar. There’s just nothing like that feeling of “Yeah, I smashed it” when it comes to writing. When I’d finished the demo for this song that addictive feeling took over and made the absolutely gruelling slog that was writing and rewriting the song over and over again all worth it. The ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is, to my uneducated understanding anyway, broadly about faith, carrying on through fear and never looking back. Orpheus was a poet and musician who’s works could move the Gods and the rulers of the underworld. But great music and poetry has its limits. Even the greatest works cannot revive the dead. Orpheus’ love for Eurydice was so integral that he travelled into Hell to bring her back to the land of the living. That’s the power of love. In order to undertake the task, the terms were set- all he had to do was simply walk his own path with complete conviction with the one condition being that he doesn’t look back. In other words; he had one job. It sounds easy, but something being simple and something being easy are two very different things. “Just do the right thing” may be a simple concept, but one of the issues with the living is that on our journey, we inevitably make mistakes. We succumb to temptation, curiosity, a lack of blind faith. No one walks the perfect path all of the time. There are limits to what humans can do. Orpheus’ downfall was that he craved the comfort of certainty; unfortunately for us all, life holds very little certainty other than death. We are ruled by strange forces such as love and fear, and it was because of giving in to this fear that he turned around. Fear and love are concepts on opposite ends of the spectrum. Hatred is just fear being expressed. This was a concept I was taught by the poet Kae Tempest. I’d first come across them in 2003 during the Iraq war, when under a loose banner of “Peace Not War” organised by Rob The Rub - a long time peace activist and musician - a collective of artists performed and collaborated to raise the spirits of the growing peace movement. Years later, I invited them to on the remix of “I Got Love”, and their opening line in the song was “A good friend once told me, the opposite of love is fear” I’d never heard that before. I contemplated it on and off for the next year and decided that I believed Kae and their good friend to be correct. I scribbled down tens of pages of notes, couplets and starting points that lead me around in circles. I tried changing the setting to today. I tried changing the characters to be famous figures. I tried focussing and zooming in on small parts of the story. There was nothing wrong with those versions on paper, but they didn’t set my heart alight. At some point, it hit me that if I could make it like a theatre script, it could be something really special. A play that could be acted out not on the stage but in the mind. It took a whole lot of hair pulling and head slapping and days and days of writing to get it to a final form. But when I finally did, and I read it back, I really loved it, I had just needed to keep going. The band being the great musicians that they are, took it up several levels adding their own nuances, highly skilled playing and undeniable energy. It now sounded far better than in my head. We tried out several different vocal delivery approaches including having the characters being read by different band members, or different accents and intensities. What worked on paper just didn’t work in the song. It was just too much for the listener to take in at once which distracted from the lyric and was confusing. In the end, I played the roles myself, with the gang vocals punctuating the narration and character entrances. Overseen by Tom’s in-your-face and aggressive production, the verses held back slightly to allow the choruses to really hit hard. When they did, they were like being hit in the face with a shovel. Of all the songs on the album, this was the biggest struggle. At times it seemed like a hopeless headache that would never end. Like walking through Hell. But sometimes, when there’s enough faith to just keep going, everything comes together and just about pushes it over the line. If I had to pick one song from this record to play to people, it would either be this or Stuck In Samsara - both for entirely different reasons but both loved equally and intensely.