The story behind - A Butterfly, A Bouncy Castle and A Pole Joust

"Well it was like a bar-utterfly, and a bouncy castle, and a poule joust..." repeated the old cassette tape, over and over.

Back in around 2001, Stuart and I had borrowed his step-dad's telephone recorder and there was a taped conversation on it. Amongst it all was that sentence, said by some unknown man. By the sounds of it, that's what we think he said anyway.

We had recorded this onto my little, poor quality tape cassette recorder. Better than nothing at the time I suppose. Once we recorded it over and over in different variations, again and again, we then stuck the end of the whole conversation on the tape, then played it on another cassette player and got recording the song.

I am sure I played keyboards in it, and Stuart the guitar. The song, for what it was and how it was recorded, I still consider quite a good one. One of the better tape cassette recordings from then. I always remembered thinking Stuart and I had done well to record that song the way it sounded, on a crappy old cassette tape player.

About 6 years later in 2007, I was living in my new flat. I hadn't lived there long. It was my first proper flat with my flatmate Geo. They were good times.

I sat with my laptop on a horrid tiled table, holding my white electro-acoustic, considering what to do next. I had this riff. Had it for months. Was very deep and sad sounding, literary a drop D tune. I remember asking Geo what kinda mood it evoked in him, and he said sad and nostalgic. I also felt it had a nostalgic quality to it.

I had been writing a lot of new songs, and they were all personal to me: Merchant City Man, Mother you deserve, Thursday 5th April 2007 @ 11.51am, etc. I had been listening to the Stereophonics album 'You Gotta Go There To Come Back' - an album I didn't rate highly at first, but with time became one of my favourite albums ever. I wanted to do the whole honesty thing and look at my life, and essentially write about it in an open way. I had always tended to write songs in a very metaphorical way, or political. I had never written about me and my real feelings. So I did.

The nostalgic idea got me thinking. What could I write about? What mattered to me, that I had nostalgic thoughts about? What was significant in my past that now made me sad? It took months to consider the subject matter. Then one day I had the idea of writing about a friendship. Then I thought about one of my best friendships from my youth which had unfortunately at the that time had fallen away - the one with Stuart.

I sat and the lyrics essentially wrote themself. I always had the nostalgic memory of us in my room in my mum's house, looking through catalogues at 3am, deciding what we'd get when we'd get a flat together. Largely what the first verse is about. Another memory was when we use to talk about ghosts and aliens and keep each other up doing all nighters discussing it. Second verse. The third nostalgic memory was about our time making the WriCarHam, and everything with that. Third verse. And then the last memory (or fourth verse) is regarding our time jamming, writing anf recording music, and us trying to get a band together. The last line of the last verse used to sing 'the friendship we lost forever', however I have since changed that as the friendship began again in 2009. It now ends on 'lost'.

The dilemma I had for weeks after that was deciding on the best title for the song. I had ideas, one was something like 'Two Jesters in a pack of cards' or something like that. Didn't think it had an all round significance however. So looked at different opinions, and I thought of our song writing endeavours, and thought of 'A Butterfly, A Bouncy Castle and A Pole Joust'. I thought, the title doesn't make any sense, as both Stuart and I didn't when we were together. We tended to be a couple of fools, with a crude and mental sense of humour. We were just a little eccentric. Also because 'A Butterfly..' didn't have any lyrics (the 2001 recording) I thought it'd be a good all round title for the song. The lyrics are very deep and meaningful, but the title ridiculous and pointless. The extremities with which me and Stuart lived our lives on.

A Butterly, A Bouncy Castle and A Pole Joust

We use to chat through the moonlight hours,
In my room, on the floor in our sleeping bags,
Allowed the ghosts to overwhelm our minds,
Our souls so spiritualised,

We hypothesised what happens when we die,
We stayed the night and freaked each other out,
Stories told, lives shared alike,

We watched the videos,
Watched the memories,
When we were young, when we laughed at nothing,
We were a couple of jesters then,

We longed for the band that never happened,
We tried and we tried, but it never got started,
The Heads of State, spent years together,
But in the. end, the friendship we lost (forever)

Written in July of 2007 for 'Be Lucky'

Since writing it I have recorded numerous versions of it, as recent as December 2010. This was the first song I played on 'Sunny Govan Radio' in August 2007; and I have played it at numerous gigs particularly in late 2007 and 2008.
Watch this space, for more 'The story behind',
Wullae

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New 'Anonymous' music and webpages coming soon in 2011.