I was really quite excited about this album when it came out. I listened to all the promotional interviews — so I can tell you, for example, that the woman on the cover is Tim Booth's partner on the playa at the Burning Man festival — and I went to see him on his first full solo tour in a church in Piccadilly. For a while I thought Tim had done it again and I was going to like Bone as much as Booth and the Bad Angel. In my outbox for August 2004, there's an email to Mark Radcliffe (who was at the time conducting one of those promotional interviews):
I wasn't going to write this, but that Tim Booth has done it again: for the last 20 years, he's had this uncanny knack of writing songs that express exactly what I'm feeling about my life at that particular moment. Please tell him: thanks!
I'm guessing this was a response to Wave Hello, which puts its finger on the emotional anxieties I was feeling just after Lucy moved in.
Much of the writing is very personal and sharp — sharper, I think, than the words Tim did for James in their later releases. But somehow Bone never stuck. Maybe it would have a better chance if I'd had it on repeat play in the car, as I did with the Bad Angel. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
Comments