Out of the Blue

Where do songs come from? What once was not, suddenly is and even if you're the one who did it, that doesn't stop it being a surprise sometimes- that moment when you do a double take and think "oh, hang on, this is a song!" Finding the genesis of a song or idea is often like finding the source of a river. You go upstream, constantly being met with decisions over which fork to take, and eventually you make it into the mountains before thinking "fuck it, this is too hard and now there's a cat in the way". Hang on, that's what I just thought now. Forget the mountains... Radiostasis, then. Where did it come from? It started out almost as an acoustic guitar, strummy, campfire, mock Johnny Cash song. You can kind of hear it if you listen to the melody. It probably wouldn't have become a Captain Horizon song were it not for a cunning little app called 'Bloom'. Designed by Brian Eno of Roxy- and ambient- music fame, it's just a rectangle of colour. Touch or click it, and a note will start to play ever now and then. Touch a different part and a second note joins it. Eventually you get your own little ambient music piece, which is nice. Well, one evening I touched in some essentially random notes and promptly left the room. I played the Radiostasis idea for a while, then came back upstairs and walking into my room to find a cool, melancholic sequence of notes playing to me out of the Bloom program - over the time I was out, the music had evolved into a haunting little riff that I knew I had to put with the idea I'd just been working on. It totally changed Radiostasis, and next time you hear it spare a moment to think that the guitar riff which opens the song is just a happy accident, written by a computer! I came up with the music that would become 'Patch' in 2006. I showed it to my band mate at the time, he hated it, and I gave up on it for a few years. It had a set of lyrics, but one morning I was driving to work and Radiohead were on radio 4 - a tribute they'd written to Harry Patch, the last living person to experience ww1 trench warfare. I've always been fascinated by the First World War, and I thought Radiohead's attempt was a bit weak so I wrote another set of lyrics to Patch. Still, it took two years before I demo'd it to show the rest of the band. I had no idea people would think it was good.