The Party Finished Long Ago

Scott Jones on Ballboy's I Worked On The Ships

Another summer has long passed, the dark evenings and even darker mornings are upon us. Friends are making their way back to university and some just moving on, things will never be the same as they were, the beaches are still there but not the friends you once knew, the houses are there but the party finished long ago and the inevitable winter can only reflect. I’ve always felt a certain sadness as Christmas lurks, there’s a certain loneliness in the cold air, a loneliness about the trees who are losing their leaves to the grass, a loneliness to the moon that just shines there all alone not afraid to change.

But maybe it’s just me.

I worked on the ships, Ballboy’s latest album, arrived in the post last week like a candle lighting a pitch black corridor. Ballboy have a special ability to capture this sadness, they were amazing when I saw them earlier in the year in Cardiff and they’re amazing on record. There is a sadness that runs through the songs, a certain magic, melancholy stories of friends and lovers that will never meet again, and at the same time the songs are up-beat pop magic.

The imagery is such that you can almost see the stories unfolding, ‘The guide to the short wave radio’, is a story of love and hope and there’s an honesty, a reality that just hits you and takes you with it as it rides the waves.  ‘Songs for Kylie’ and ‘Cicily’ are written in the same sort of way as Darren Hayman writes some of his nuggets, where they are telling the story and expressing themselves from behind someone else’s eyes, and both are magnificent pop songs. ‘Godzilla vs. the island of Manhattan (with you and I somewhere in-between)’ captures the reality of how your whole life can change in an instant. There’s a line that goes “Nobody knows which way is north anymore, which way to go, which way is home” which is like a reflection of today’s society where TV dominates. Kerouac said:

“Take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamp light of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the televisions, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way.”    

and it’s happened. I see it at home every day, TV has taken the place of real life, nobody knows what is real anymore, people don’t see the moon shining in the winter sky anymore, people have lost touch with reality. ‘Disney’s ice parade’ contains one of my favourite lines ever I think “So strap your arm around your chest, buckle up your chain mail vest, what better than to walk this land with the boy who knows you best”. It’s like an old dusty book that you found with a torch in the corner of a cobwebbed attic, best friends running away together from the sadness of broken homes, following their dreams before they are broken before their eyes. The album follows on with the same depth and meaning and the imagery is magic, ’A relatively famous victory’, ’Empty throat’, ’Picture show’ and ’Above the clouds, the sun is always shining’ provoke a sadness, yet are uplifting at the same time. I can remember ‘A relatively famous victory’ from the gig in Cardiff, I remember how I was completely lost in it, nothing else mattered, I couldn’t see anything else or hear anything else, for me it defines a love, a now, that whatever you are doing and wherever you are is all that matters, it’s a magic that is rarely captured.

‘Absent friends’ is stunning, stirring up more melancholy deep down, and it’s sort of where I’m at right now, with friends leaving and seeing more and more of their girlfriends, the sadness of the inevitability of losing touch with friends has always been present in me and the song really rattles deep down in the soul. In a society where stories of love and of all kinds have become clich・d and generalized, where things of genuine integrity are hard to come by, Ballboy are like the first full moon of winter, shining so brightly and so differently from the other things in the sky. ‘I worked on the ships’ is a fine piece of pop magic, full of melancholy, sadness and loneliness, full of the magic of life, great losses and great gains. It takes you off into places you’ve only visited briefly in dreams, It’s the kind of album that’s made me put down my Ivor Cutler ‘Befriend A Bacterium’ stickies collection, the kind of album that’s seen me falling behind on the latest escapades of ’The Outside Of Everything’.  A time will come for dreams, but for now I’ve got Ballboy.

© 2008 Scott Jones

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