Scan Happen (It's About Time)

In some ways Scan Happen was the ultimate realisation of Mirrorkill as it was before we went acoustic. Having figured out how to record & produce the music for myself on The 19 Sounds, I was able to concentrate fully on making a more accessible album.

It still took three years though.

Conceptually it's far more together than The 19 Sounds. Scattered through the songs on the usual Mirrorkill subjects (which is to say, anything other than love, relationships & how great it is being in a band, which subjects seem to make up approximately 95 percent of all songs which have ever been recorded) are a set of instrumental variations entitled "Resonances", spreading out from the central mast of "Resonator". Overall, as the album's subtitle makes clear, this is a meditation upon time, & how the way we see time affects how we see life & the world. Magic mushrooms were still a big part of the writing of this album, but I'd started to find that in addition to psychedelic flashbacks for a few days after taking them, I would also get these same "flashbacks" for a few days before taking them - whether I was planning to take them or not...

The labyrinth is a central motif - & yes, a labyrinth & a maze really are different things. The bridge mantra of this song is an haiku.

This album also features one of the first of my own songs with which I'm genuinely uncomfortable - namely Mingin' Bling. I was writing it at around the same time as so-called "chavs" were beginning to become a media phenomenon, & felt somewhat justified; but I wrote it because I was getting pissed off with being hassled by kids just for having long hair. After a while, the aforementioned media phenomenon began to take on a more disturbing hue, with some quarters calling (with varying degrees of seriousness) for mass sterilisation for this "underclass", & listening to my own song, I started to feel that it sounded like a middle class git panicking about working class oiks, which had never been the intention. But, much as I was tempted just to drop the song, enough people had heard & been amused by it that they started requesting it at gigs, so in it stayed.

I'll never forget the embarrassment the first time I played it to an audience that included a lad in a tracksuit with a baseball cap.

On a brighter note, the album also contains perhaps my favourite of my own songs, Silicon Gypsy. Written after a trippy wander around London; a riff constructed from the notes of the Gypsy musical scale; & a first line referring to the Romany anthem Gelem, Gelem; it reflects my increasing suspicion that, all my whinging aside, everything is as it should be with the world, a theme I've since revisited in The Final Curtain on (Batteries Not Invented).