CHAPTER 43

 

#58: McALMONT & BUTLER

"Yes"

from the single "Yes"

Released: May 1995

 

 

The first of three songs in this book about rebirth, the ability to glide through the splinters of an old, failed life and fly into the limpid radiance of a new and implacably better one. You wouldn't recognise me now, sings the singer, or maybe you do and you want to pretend you didn't treat me like shit and prod me through Hell. Such bright, tinny optimism, such relentless brightness, and perhaps the singer had Billy MacKenzie in mind, since they both used the same producer (Mike Hedges). Behind the voice is a guitar, or guitars, or a sitar guitar in remembrance of Thom Bell, a synthesiser of sorts and a tilted string section. Multiple vocal overdubs mean it wasn't recorded in one take, but the record would like you to think it was, with its studio applause and drum runout (see also "Hello It's Me"). It is the most exuberant of V-signs, cheerily chanting stick your fake welcomes up your fucken arse, you who was previously glad to wrong and minimise me.

David McAlmont and Bernard Butler came with their separate histories, briefly slammed together to dunk the British hit parade in cubes of mauve tea. The nice thing about the perceived boom in British pop music in the mid-nineties was that it liminally permitted curveballs like this to be sung in school playgrounds and supermarkets. It's hard not to think of "Yes" as an Associates tribute - just as, one year later, "A Design For Life" was a reluctant sequel to "Story Of The Blues" (again, Hedges produced both). It's perhaps harder still to think of it as not a Joycean squeal of arrival but as the sweetest up-yours ever recorded. Well, recorded three or so decades ago. Look, the song proclaims, I'm still living, while your smug selves merely exist. They didn't last long, then got together again for a brief while some years later, and again some years after that, and the circuitous potter's wheel will presumably keep throwing them together when the sand curves at the expected prompt.