CHAPTER 70

 

#31: ASSOCIATES

“Club Country”

12-inch single

Released: April 1982

 

 

The Tuesday smiles were unnerving. It was the calmest, warmest and most disciplined of evenings out in a part of the village which wasn’t quite the village I recognised, resplendent chairs crammed with awkward ducks wise enough to realise that school wasn’t worth anybody’s bother, least of all theirs, who benignly bulldozed their own pattern through the timid etchings of life. Huge, whitening tuxedos, property developers who maybe promised me a future; I wouldn’t know, being voluntarily stranded on another mental planet at the time.

 

It was the annual Rotary Club meeting and I had agreed, via my school, to go up there and make a speech. I can’t remember what the hell, if anything, my speech was about, except it was most likely as fatally overcrammed with qualifying clauses as every other thing I have written. However, it went down uncomprehendingly well, and I was politely schmoozed from agents of promise from whom I never heard again.

 

Social life in my later school years consisted of my fumbling attempts to put myself about. None of them stuck, else I wouldn’t be writing this now. I wrote an essay about something or other which won a prize – can’t remember what it was, but I had to go to Bellshill Academy in order to collect it and be reassured by the middle-aged lady who awarded it to me that I had a future. I didn’t keep a copy and nor do I suspect did anybody else. Again, there was no consequence.

 

Hence, when this song materialised a couple of springs later I immediately understood its aura of suffocated compromise, its surface busyness scarcely concealing a gully of absence. I didn’t stick around at the Club but still managed to get looked down upon. Oh, everyone in Uddingston looked down on me, those nice middle-class types with detached homes or bungalows in Douglas Gardens or Kylepark, at this hapless, impenitent clot stuck in a flat above a pub and a launderette. It didn’t matter whether I was at an actual country club or in the classroom; I felt that every breath I did breathe belonged, de facto, to somebody else, a stolidly solid member of the parish who went to church every Sunday (we did not go to church any Sunday – oh, there’s the stain of irreparable sin).

 

The genius of the song “Club Country” is that it juggles and rearranges those violently discursive inner voices keeping the singer’s arteries available with impossible chord changes, bass parts and lyrics which remain just the right Simple Minds edge of coherent – the song is all about impressions, those we hope to make on others and how they are at eternal war with the impressions we wish to preserve of ourselves. Maintain this outer self which isn’t you but keeps you alive; it’s something the child learns at birth – act in ways which please the mother who is going to feed you. Then sustain it because it’s just so much easier for society. What the child secretly wants is unattainable because then there would be no civilisation. I’m not sure anybody managed to tell “Club Country”’s main singer and co-writer that.