Felt pretty rough this morning. No beer last night so before you start... Felt a bit of a cold or something coming on and really didn't feel up to the Middlesbrough 10k. Sharon and the kids ran the 3k fun run and I got a little bit more in the mood seeing Donovan cross the line in his new trainers (Apparently he had to be carried most of the rest of the way though).
A short warm up run had me feeling a little more sprightly and I placed myself in the sub 1 hour section of the start group. In the back of my mind I was figuring out ways to get out of running the extra 6/7 miles that my training schedule said I needed to do. In the end I was pretty comfortable running the 10k. the last couple of kilometres were tough coming up Acklam Road in the blazing sun and the lead up to the finish on Hall Drive is always at least twice as long as you think.
Confession time. I stopped running for a good forty minutes or so after the 10k, collected my goody bag (no sweets!) and sat with Donovan for a bit listening to a half-decent rock covers band called, wait for it...Under Cover. They played She Sells Sanctuary and some Billy Idol so it could have been worse although they bottled it halfway through Whole Lotta Love when they realised they hadn't quite figured out their self-imposed tempo changes.
Soundtrack - 10k - Polyphonic Spree (assorted). The rest - The Cardigans - Long Gone Before Daylight.
Chose some uplifting and, surprisingly, motivating Polyphonic tracks to start with. The sun was out and they were singing about it and the hope it can bring so it really helped get me started on the 10k and I picked off a good few people I knew which satisfied my dormant competitive streak. No matter how gently I say I'm going to take these runs I still usually hit a decent pace and my finish time was close, if not quicker than my personal best (I don't really keep that close an eye on it but my wife reckons it was). iPod played up a bit and skipped a few tracks I wouldn't have minded hearing but I got round with a bit of a burst of speed at the end.
For the second part of the run I needed something gentle, mellow and, if anything, demotivating. In a previous blog I talked a bit about my love of The Cardigans early material and that I should really give their other stuff a chance. Well, I've bought them all now and can report back that, while they never return to their earlier 60s pop sound, they still wrote some bloody good stuff. I'm not 100% with all of it and Gran Turismo, the album they went truly global with is probably my least favourite and sounds the most "of its time" in terms of production. A slow burner though is "Long Gone Before Daylight" the follow up to Gran Turismo but a noticeable departure for them in pretty much all they had done before. It makes everything they had previously recorded sound like they were just playing around (not an entirely bad thing). It's a big, lush, mature but strangely intimate set of songs about broken relationships delivered with a country rock feel, mostly down-tempo, the linked "For What It's Worth" is about as upbeat as it gets, and with Nina Persson's voice never sounding sweeter or more fragile. She had, by this point, taken over pretty much all of the lyric writing too so there's some genuine soul there, although she says she bases her lyrics more on the lives of others or her distant than anything she may be going through there and then.
I won't give the best song, in my opinion, away (possibly / probably the best thing they have ever done, though they failed to include it on their best of compilation) but there are some real gems on here. It's got a big orchestral sound at times but is very honest otherwise with some fairly basic instrumentation but exceptionally written songs and playing. I fall a little bit more in love with this album every time I hear it. Maybe I'm getting old now and wanting some of that smoothness, which it has in spades, but I still listen to The Clash too...shit I really am getting old. Country music, like Bob Dylan and Radio 2, comes to us all in the end but it's worth it if this is what you end up with. In some ways their most commercial album except nobody really bought it. It will still sound brilliant in 30 years though so no mad rush. But do buy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment