For almost as long as I’ve had a website, I’ve had little randomised quotes that I like from songs popping up in various places. In the previous incarnation of clivemurray.com they were up in the header, in this version they’re over there in the sidebar. Look! Over there!
Well one of these is from a Wildhearts song called “29x The Pain”, and it goes “Where you hiding, Richey James?”. I was introduced to the Wildhearts by an old flatmate, Dave The Goth. He lent me his Wildhearts’ Greatest Hits album, which I um… still have. Anyway, I grew to love most of the songs on there, and “29x The Pain” was one of the best.
Some time after I had entered that lyric into the list of quotes (there are 113 at the moment) I heard the song on the radio and listened out for that particular line – most of the song consists of namechecks to Ginger’s influences, so it can be hard to pick a particular one out – but even though I was concentrating on each line as it went by, I couldn’t find the Richey James reference.
I thought no more of it for some time, deciding that I must have just been distracted at the critical… ooh look, a bee!
But then this exact event happened again, and I became mildly freaked out. I went home and listened to my version of the song and sure enough, there it was. I wasn’t imagining it. And until today I have simply assumed that on both occasions I must have lost concentration at the crucial moment.
Happy was I, then, to discover just now that there are two recordings of the song, and the line in question is only in one of them.
Phew.
–c.
