In the autumn of 1066, one of the epic stories of English history unfolded. After destroying the last great Viking army at Stamford Bridge, Harold and his men went down fighting at Hastings.
Any song about a subject of this nature will always seem superficial, but this is an attempt to capture a flavour of Harold's story and of William's brutal scorched earth campaign.
This song is mostly about my parents' relationship which came to an end when I was 12 years old. It is also a commentary on the high hopes of young people and the disappointments that inevitably follow.
I've had the music and melody for the song part of the track for 4 or 5 years. Initially it sounded a bit too close to a memory of a hymn we used to sing at school, but no one else found it familiar so I worked up a full arrangement. Phil came up with the percussion track which gave the song a different feel from anything we've tried before.
The lyric theme for the 'tore each other's hearts out' section recurrs in Blacksmithing and For Winter and originated in a song called British Racing Green which didn't make it onto the album but which may appear on English Electric.
The lengthy instrumental passage explores a number of different themes and ideas, mainly stated on keyboard and piano. Just after the piano solo, a motif emerges which is based on a memory of Robert Mellin and Gian-Piero Reverberi's music from the 1960's Robinson Crusoe tv series. That music has haunted a generation of English schoolboys.
A very late inclusion on the album, written in the summer months of 2001. Space was found because two other songs were dropped from the CD (Her Words, abandoned, and British Racing Green.)
This Is Where We Came In is about children leaving home and the empty space left behind for the parents, who had a strong relationship before the children came along, but then took to living their lives vicariously.
We normally demo songs before recording them properly but the version on the album is the demo, so it sounds very fresh to us. This is one of our stronger songs, influenced in part by Costello and Bacarach.
A short instrumental, which takes us back to Harold's story. The bird song on this track was an accident due to poor sound proofing in our garden studio.
The lyrics are based on an early English poem called Deor, with a bit of Alan Garner's Stone Book thrown in. The earliest version of this track consisted of the current verse with a different arrangement of the middle 8 as the chorus. A section from the last third of For Winter was used as the original middle 8. The problem was, the chorus wasn't strong enough so we re-arranged it so that it sounded broadly like the current middle 8. This was better but the slower pace broke the flow of the song.
Normally when we can't get something quite right, it gets abandoned. However, we came up with the new chorus just prior to finishing the album. We then moved the older chorus into the middle 8 and, finally, it worked.
Another track from the Harold suite, this closes Blacksmithing and is based on a keyboard theme from a song called A Long Finish which didn't make the album.
This is another demo which we didn't feel we could better by re-recording. The influences are Entangled by Genesis and Little Wing by Jimi Hendrix.
More from the Harold suite. This is a short instrumental passage which was originally the closing section of Her Words. The theme played on a bell sound is picked up earlier on the album on Malfosse. The title comes from the first English historian, Bede.
Short Visit was the first song written for the album, dating from 1997. It's a divorce song and follows on from themes from English Boy Wonders.
This lengthy piece has evolved through so many changes that it is difficult to be clear about its evolution. Part of it originated in a track with a working title of Long One which was intended to be the centrepiece of Bard. The song didn't work and much of it became the basis for the instrumental passage on Broken English. Other parts became two separate tracks called Rocket Science and To Guard the Sea and Shore. Later on, we used an updated version of a previously abandoned track called Big Empty Church as a bridge between these two songs. This track had been written at the end of the Age of Steam sessions and was originally intended for English Boy Wonders. We couldn't get it right then, but by replacing the original chorus with a passage from another unused song, Keele Services, it started to work.
Originally, For Winter started with the electric 12-string passage where the vocal begins. However, we decided to state an instrumental theme from Big Empty Church at the start of the song to help link the pieces thematically. It still lacked something, so we composed a re-introduction on Mellotron which is based on the chords and melody from the 'You and me babe' section.
For Winter is about the destructive forces of love and betrayal and again finishes off some themes from English Boy Wonders. The title is taken from "A Winter's Tale" which links to the album title.
Just prior to release, the final part of For Winter became a separate entity. The instrumental playout restates and explores themes and motifs from much of the rest of the album (Last English King, Blacksmithing, Broken English, Harold Rex, Short Visit and the unused British Racing Green.)