After many big plans and much deliberation between Monty and Smally, the resurrection of Lather, Rinse, Repeat has once again been postponed. There were a few good articles bouncing around in cyberspace, some of which being a review for the recently released Exercises in Futility by Fig Mints, which can be found at daydreamgeneration.com, and this, a track-by-track recounting of the making of the psychedelic masterpiece known as “My Own Personal Summer Of Love” by a little band called The Painted Shuts. Simon Piler reviewed the album for the daydreamgeneration.com, and it’s worth a look-see. But since you’re here, why don’t you stick around a little while, go to the downloads section and get My Own Personal Summer Of Love for FREE, and give a listen whilst reading this:

My Own Personal Summer Of Love

“My Own Personal Summer Of Love” was an album title I always loved that Paul had once left attached to a Real Burnouts song called “Every Little Man Saying Please” back in 2007. Having encouraged him for a long time to use the name (and it never materialising), at the outset of The Painted Shuts project I suggested we dig up and he agreed. So right from the start this was a concept record based around that idea. My own personal summer of love was in 1997, aged 21, a university drop-out, somewhat mad and mostly stoned. It was the hottest summer I can ever remember in Scotland and I spent most of it on our secret beach drawing shapes in the sand, writing songs and unreadable poems. Most of the songs on The Painted Shuts record are set against this background, things I can barely remember through the fog of smoke.

AT THE BUS STOP
This song was specifically for Paul. We’re very like-minded I think and both have very specific ideas about the music we make. Since I started to write songs again in 2006, I’ve been gripped by the feeling of time running away from me, and making music being a very finite endeavour. As a result of this I’ve tried to cram as much in as possible before it’s too late. At the age of 32, the chances are that you’ve missed the boat even if your songs are good enough to be discovered, so for this song I played on this missing the boat idea and turned it into a bus instead, or the idea of a bus (break) that never comes. I think it’s one of Paul’s favourite songs on the record, or at least one of the most obviously accessible pop tracks. We’d already written about a half of “The Utica Flower Company” project together the previous year, so the process and limits of writing and recording over great geographical distance was already well established. Paul emails me backing tracks from his side of the Atlantic consisting of drums, keys and guitars, and I write and sing the song along with any additional keys or sounds that are kicking around in that moment. At the point when recording started I was probably two-thirds of my way through writing and recording the second Kaleidonauts album “Tigermouse” with Warchalking, so The Painted Shuts was perhaps a welcome break from the effort of trying to write songs from the ground up, the direction and frame of the song already being pre-decided by Paul. It’s an interesting collision of styles I think – his very psychedelic, unique sounds, and my poppy, more conventional melodies, meeting up at a lo-fi bus stop somewhere in your imagination.

ANIMALS
“Animals” is about the origins of how I came to be the person I was in 1997 by telling the story of how I first took magic mushrooms aged 14 at the back of my History class some eight years previous. It was a pretty pivotal experience, the sudden shock of sensory emancipation, years of being caged within one frame of mind falling away in a matter of minutes – painted here like a nuclear war/revolution breaking out in the brain. The “can’t help it, can’t help it, you just can’t help yourself” that runs through the length of the song was intended as having dual connotations, on the one hand the idea that there is something within certain people that can’t help but follow their own curiosity through, and on the other the idea that actually your own destiny is often in the hands of others. My favourite contribution to this song is the “la la la” backing vocal that runs right through the middle of it (the original mix-downs of the songs were much more stripped back until Paul wisely insisted I add extra keys and backing vocal melodies). More than anything, I think that “Animals” is a perfect illustration of why Scottish people should never attempt to do Americanized rapping. Don’t ask me why, but it just don’t work so well.

DELPHI
Delphi (The Oracle) is the symbolic sum of parts of several girls that were orbiting my life at that time. At the beginning of the song she is a singer backed by The Flowerpots singing by the sea at night. We spent that summer pretty much permanently encamped on the secret beach (or neglected beach, as it was right beside a sewage works, and later was found to have been contaminated with radioactive deposits from the second world war) – sat around raging fires smoking and drinking and playing guitars into the small hours. There was a real element of wasted beatitude and with it a boy gang mentality, so I doubt very much whether any actual Delphi would have been seen dead with us. Anyway, in that context those of us who sat with guitars and sang our guts up are The Flowerpots. In the song, Delphi ends up standing on the local airstrip in front of a taking off plane, and leaves only her shoes behind. It’s essentially a song about depression, sung in cartoon verses. The “devil in your bones” comes from an earlier Wheelies song from the “Cosmonaut” album – it just fitted too well to not be recycled, or shake from my head every time I sat down to listen to Paul’s music.

ELEPHANT TEAPOT
Although not the most obviously accessible track on the record, it’s probably the one that I’m lyrically most attached to. The entire song is really the whole summer of 1997 condensed into four minutes of music. Everything you hear happened – phantoms in a graveyard, a trip to London, dopplegangers, running down the local by-pass in the middle of the night on the way home from the beach, Bielski’s song (for the record it was called “Shine” and really was better than anything Oasis were doing), floating out to sea on a moonlit night in a dinghy, the bird hut, the book I was writing, right down to the elephant teapot itself. The teapot was actually a kid’s watering can that had washed up on the beach and we used to take turns throwing it as far as we could across the sand. I liked that as an image to capture what it was like to be there – “watch the stoners run for an elephant teapot spinning in the sun”.

MY OWN PERSONAL SUMMER OF LOVE
This was the song that kicked the record off. After Paul had suggested we make a Painted Shuts record proper (the last Painted Shuts record was incorporated into The Utica Flower Company project along with Plural Noun – Fig Mints/Wheelies, and No Monkey’s Gonna Make An Honest Woman Out Of Me – Arthur Rules/Wheelies), I remembered a track of his I’d heard on a CD he’d previously sent. For a long while I’d been pestering him to compile a Real Burnouts “Best Of” with no joy, and then one morning a big cardboard box with a Utica postage stamp arrived on my doorstep. Inside was the entire Burnouts back catalogue, along with a box of “Wheelies” biscuits, some masks, a hash box, a t-shirt and “Copious Maximus: The Best Of The Real Burnouts Vol.1″. Fully expecting to hear “Set Your Senses Free”, “I Put It Down”, “Burnin’ Up My Mind” and suchlike, I was genuinely surprised to hear that it was made up of 30+ predominantly experimental lo-fi pop/psych keyboard tracks that sounded like they dated back to somewhere pre-2000. After several listens over a course of weeks, I kept going back to one particular instrumental and hearing a vocal melody, so for fun I lifted it, sketched some words around the “My Own Personal Summer Of Love” idea, sang it without really putting too much thought into it and shipped it. Thankfully Paul liked it and said how it was surprising to hear something that he’d done such a long time ago, being re-worked as a pop song like this. Again the lyrics are obviously autobiographical. I really did “clung to a cloud”.

RASKOLNIKOV
“Raskolnikov” stands alone from the rest of the songs both lyrically and in terms of sound, but I’m glad we included it. This was one of the two first backing tracks Paul sent me, describing it as “something a bit different from the usual stuff, like psychedelic trance…” I loved it from the minute I heard it, the layered sounds and this mad dark drumbeat (or beats) cascading through it – so good that to have added anything to it musically would have ruined it. Straight away I heard the “rip it up” lyrics and it wasn’t until much later that I changed the name to reflect the subject. “Raskolnikov” tells the story of “the Russian detective” (Porfiry Petrovich) from Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, set in an alternative universe/ revolutionary world of the future, attempting I suppose to somehow mirror the darkness of the music. There’s really too much content within it to spell it all out, but simplified it’s an anarchic tale of the tides turning where even apparently absolute certainties can be questioned (the sun that never rises, the black swan). I guess in that sense it’s not a million miles away from the stuff I was thinking about in 1997. It might have been my own personal summer of love, but there was a great iceberg of shadow beneath the sunny stoned surface of the sea. Melodically this song owes a lot to The Stone Roses and in particular tracks like “Fool’s Gold” and “One Love” – it’s a shame that nobody seems to want to make music like that anymore.

WHAT A WASTE
This song is as low as the record goes. I always said that I was going to record “three albums a year for three years” and “My Own Personal Summer Of Love” was the third of three proper records I was involved in during 2008 (the others being the two Kaleidonauts records – “I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)” and “Tigermouse”), and therefore the ninth and final album. It’s highly unlikely that this is really it though as there’s still possibly enough gas in the creative tank to limp on a little further up the road, but at the time of writing “What A Waste” that was how I felt. So the song is a farewell song (I have written a lot of these) that deals with closure, the music and the musical projects that have been running alongside (in particular The Daydream Generation) coming to an end. In many ways as a song, it is the unintentional Yin to the Yang of “The Utica Flower Company” on the previous project Paul and I collaborated on. When I wrote that song I imagined an underground basement beneath a flower shop where revolutionary artists would meet and “records play for your soul”, the music and melodies being upbeat and intricate with backwards singing and multiple forward melodies running at the same time. In “What A Waste” the shop is closing, the company disassembling, leaving blood on the floor of the empty aisles and “the piano on fire”. Whereas “The Utica Flower Company” took about thirteen mixes to get as right as I could, “What A Waste” was a first mix-down – at one point I actually added several piano parts, but of the two versions I preferred this first version as it sounded bleaker and much truer to the idea of lamenting the end of something.

66
Despite this being one of the easiest tracks to listen to on the record, it’s probably the one with the least substance when you hold it up to the light of scrutiny. Paul’s backing track for “66″ was one of my favourites of the instrumentals he sent me, an upbeat chugging guitar/drums combination. The cartoon storyline is simple enough – a boy and girl travel into the future in a time machine and discover how irretrievably fucked the world has become, and then at the end they decide to go back to 1966, the real summer of love (though I deliberately left a degree of ambiguity about whether they have come forward from the 1960s and are actually visiting the present day). It has weirdly got one of my favourite lines on the whole record right alongside one that I cringe ever time I hear. Upon being asked by “the little fat monkey with a master plan” whether he can borrow the time machine and ferry people back to a point where they can start over, the boy replies “it’s not much better where we come from/ we’ve got poverty and the atom bomb” (the bit I like), followed by the throwaway “plus I don’t think we can get everybody in it” (clumsy). The biggest regret about this track is that I didn’t add the invisible hand-claps that I can hear every time I listen to it, but I don’t regret at all leaving out the super cheesy battle-cry of “r-r-r rocket man!” that originally opened the song.

CASABLANCA
In the late 1990s, myself and one of my closest friends (The Millons Jaune) decided to rip free from the wasted beach bum life and cycle to Morocco. I’ve pretty thoroughly documented the beginnings of this adventure here: http://kaleidonaut.blogspot.com under the section “Square Orange Moon: Introduction – The Moroccan Express” – this song is really just that same chapter sung in some verses. At the time, I was a writing a book and figured that such a bike ride would throw up a storyline to run with. One thing we joked about was putting a big bet on who was going to reach Casablanca first – that’s where the Casablanca part at the end comes from. Needless to say, from the “weeds will grow through reflective spokes” that the whole Moroccan adventure was but a daydream, and the two of us now live on opposite sides of the world. A curious but highly irrelevant fact about me and The Millons Jaune is that we wrote a song together called “Monday Morning” that appears on The Wheelies “Oh Happiness Recordings” record, about being cycling bellboys – one of only two songs I wrote between 1998 and 2006.

OCEAN LOTION
I’m going to keep what this one is about under my hat if that’s okay – you can read into the words what you will. The title I borrowed from The Painted Shuts MySpace page and our influences list, a combination of both of us writing and altering what each other had put. In typical Real Burnouts fashion, one of Paul’s influences was “Ocean Lotion”, so I figured he’d dig it if I used it in a song (which he did and I think this is probably his favourite of the tracks). Musically it’s the densest of all the songs – I had it in my head when I was recording it that I wanted it to sound like the old shoegaze records that I grew up with (Ride, Chapterhouse, My Bloody Valentine, early Boo Radleys). I wasn’t particularly happy with it when I first recorded it, but it has grown on me and is definitely the right song to close the record.

And that as they say “is that”. The ten songs (almost all first takes and first mix-downs) that make up “My Own Personal Summer Of Love” were written between the 25th June and the 3rd of August 2008 along with four other tracks (“Broken Top”, “Your Bird Never Sings”, and “Don’t Take Me Down” for the “Bus Stop” EP we released prior to the album, and a spoken experimental piece called “Square Orange Moon” that will hopefully never see the light of day). At the time it was a project to fill some creative space, and just a bit of fun, but the further I get away from it the more I like it, and the more proud I am of it. Of the fifteen records I’ve made or been involved in making over the last three years, I can easily say that this one was the easiest to make. Partly it’s to do with the fixed idea of singing about some things that happened eleven years previous, and it’s partly to do with the fact that I didn’t really have to think at all about what I was doing, it just happened. But mostly I think it’s to do with being lucky enough to work with Paul, the quality of his original tracks that generated the song melodies, and the fact that we would seem to be twinned for a short while on the same imaginary road to an undefined lo-fi psychedelic destination. So I raise a battered old elephant teapot in his direction.

More on the painted shuts at:

myspace.com/thepaintedshuts