The Man Who Listened To Planes
March 2000
Swivel Chair had started as a joke by Craig and a friend of his, Dave, 6 years before. On discovering the music software Acid, Craig had resurrected the project and recorded some bizarre tracks with another pal (also called Dave) including ‘My Dog Has a Cold’ and the genius ‘Last Night an At-At Walker Fell on My Head’. When I expressed enthusiasm for these and the aforementioned ‘Ventilated Solvent Abuse’ (see part 1), Craig set me a challenge: to come up with lyrics to the title “The Man Who Listened to Planes”. This was inspired by a friend of his who spent his spare time tuning in to conversations between aircraft pilots on one of those special radios. I went away and inspired by the title, I wrote the following from the imagined perspective of such a person:
I Just want to get high
I Just want to get high
I don’t want to see the world
I just want to see the sky
I don’t want to talk to a corpse
A living corpse living a lie
My thoughts are just routine reports
And a high altitude collision once in a while
So you don’t understand me, well neither do I
I just want to get high
I Just want to get high
I don’t want to see the world
I just want to see the sky
I don’t want to talk to a corpse
A living corpse living a lie
My thoughts are just routine reports
And a high altitude collision once in a while
So you don’t understand me, well neither do I
I just want to get high
I then dusted off the four track I had bought a couple of years previously and recorded myself singing this over the badly looped bassline to the A Team theme. Then I shouted the chorus which consisted of “I don’t wanna fly on no plane with no fool” repeated ad infinitum over the main melody of the same theme tune. I presented this poorly recorded tape to Craig who proclaimed it genius. He added it to Acid and made it into a finished track by adding beats and some other ridiculous samples including “everybody dance now” from the CC Music factory hit of the early 90s.
I had recorded my first Swivel Chair track.
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