Crystalline arpeggios descend through the minor scale on a marimba and creamy electric guitar against a huge black space. Morrison croons the title twice in a gentle croon. He's breaking up with her, asks her not to cry and, whether he tells her or just thinks it, struggles to remember what she looks like.
He won't need her picture until they say goodbye. Meantime, the lines of the face he perhaps all too briefly loved are being consumed by carnival dogs. These aren't the lines of age but the defining shape of her face. Carnival dogs? Well, it's Jim Morrison who in the same lyric mentions insanity's horse adorning the sky and later in the album. But I don't think this is a high school poet image as it has a real potency. I see scavenger mutts wolfing down her image. He's young and loved by multitudes. Everything's a carnival and when its dogs see his lover's face unattended they go for it. When he looks back he just sees darkness, the brief bright flashes of the chords not helping.
The music is extra smooth here, the brittleness of the marimba offset by Robbie Krieger's rich slide on the Gibson. The drums whisper only when the chorus needs a little support. Mostly, it's Jim and the same croon he used on Crystal Ship that breaks a little here and there for texture before returning to cold cold satin.
And it is cold. He is worried that he can't see her but the worry is about the faculty of imagining, not her. Her shelf life up, her last commercial over, he's already somewhere else right there in the same room. This, eerily, is the voice of the alpha, he no longer cares for her because his physical system is losing that capacity. Beneath the charm of the lights and the winner's unconscious skill at dissembling care there is the great sucking void that salivates for its next fill. And it all sounds so silky.
But that is just how the doling of pain feels to the victor in this: I'll put some extra work in because I'm good at this. Then, well at least I've got the photo.
The Doors were a rangey outfit, covering warfare down to the micro-personal, expressing this with music both mature and fun (seldom has serious musical scholarship sounded so much like a party) and over it the voice that ran from whispers to almighty screams. They were as much at odds with their flower power era as the Velvet Underground on the other coast except The Doors had hits and played huge venues which they filled. That was always going to make a difference but the seriousness and self awareness evident in so much of their output can be both inspiring and confronting.
In this one the disturbance comes from it being impossible to tell how much Morrison is describing his own wall-eyed sexual cruelty and how much he is just letting go and have it describe itself. The song comes and goes without banging or whimpering, the shiny black libido swims away and the lone and level darkness flows eternally.
With a name that made you smirk or wince when you spoke it, this electro-burlesque act from the noughties plastered the laddish triple J waves with guaranteed airplay numbers about rootin', tokin, snortin' and partayin'. So how come this? How come, from under the tide of motherfuckers on motorcycles and pussy towns this eerie tale of ghosted love emerged and took it place among the filth and japes?
Well, the answer's easy: Matt Ford can write a good song and forced this one into the ready made context of the band rather than sell it through a solo identity with the extra admin and PR bullshit that that would entail. Apart from everything else it stopped everyone who was a fan or all the naughtiness in their tracks when they heard it and so profoundly moved them that they almost forgot about 99% of the band's material.
In backgrounding this post I went through some online resources and found out that Ford co-wrote the big spooky epic pop song No Aphrodisiac for the Whitlams. I had no idea that was so but if he wrote this one the surprise of it dwindles rapidly.
Unsent Letter is a song of a man seeking contact after disconnection. He's broken up with a woman and now when he tries to talk to her he can't get past the weather. She doesn't hang up but there's nothing left there on the line. So he imagines himself driving around with a pair of girls. Nothing else matters or doesn't, though. He gives things up, starts others with no effect. At every turn, his thoughts and daydreams or ambitions return to her silence and his frustration at having created that. Even when he admits the part he played there is no resolution; it's just too engaging going over it again and again.
It's important that he suggests that he was the one who ended it. Without that this might just be another wallow. Here he knows he has made a mistake and because she can never be present at his best, most eloquent and pithy after-the-fact pleas all he can do is polish them further and move on ... but it's just too engaging going over it again.
The song doesn't start so much as lift in a slight breeze. Quiet wukkawukka guitar chords are raised by a synthetic tom tom without which they would just return to the dust. Ford's quiet voice begins with the line about trying to talk. A clanking like a train at a crossing appears briefly and a deep synth note swells like a cue in a horror movie. This is taken by an electric bass and a Rhodes piano on its slowest tremolo setting, lending a seasick wobble, and a light drum kit plays a skeletal shuffle for the chorus about driving around.
Then we get back to the inertia of the opening but bolstered by the bass and the drums. The guitar does not now or at any other time in the song, break out of its tiny insistence. The second chorus adds an organ which swells and then fades under the first line of the next verse. Then inertia again as the bass coaxes the guitar to keep aloft. Some whispered backwards percussion and another chorus with the organ returning but with an funereal solemnity. It takes the solo after the last chorus which falls back to inerita before fading out on the mournful figure. Silence.
While some double tracking appears to alter the vocal texture this is a solo vocal, one man against himself and the frayed mess around him, singing with minimal to no reverb, as his words, though they briefly rise to inspiration, keep falling to the floor. And nothing resolves. The song he wrote for her (this one) has only just been finished and joins the other unsent letters addressed to her care of someone somewhere better. The girls in the car with him are either ghosts of her or revenge bimbos but either way they are made of neurones and synapses, not flesh and blood.
The insistent regret that drives this song with its minor key harping reminiscent of folk music or timeless blues that circles around and could keep doing so well after lights out. It's gently paced but it's intense as this sadness is not self-pity but self-torture.
We have all gone through breakups and felt variously well-rid of people or cruelly used by them but there is always that one we never quite shake, the one we threw away. This is the one who appears in the shadows at every new time to remind us of what we had and will never have again and that WE were the ones who made sure of that. And, as we formulate again a replay of the last argument where we win, we remember that this is true, that our one shot at the great dream of a lifelong love was something we chose to annihilate.
We might have felt threatened by the intimacy or desolate that it didn't feel like it was enough. Whatever it was we are now greatly empowered by the experience and will just keep learning ... except it was us, we did that, we crushed someone because we weakened. The real one probably recovered and has long moved on to "something better" and can't take any contact with us past the weather. But, and this is where it really gets eerie, they are not the one we miss or the one we "talk" to when we can't do anything else. We talk to the ghost.
The video of this song from the time at first made me wince. It came at the end of a decade of serial killer chic at the movies and on tv. That genre's characteristic look and feel seemed force fed into the imagery, private operating rooms and confused looking women being taken by a man (played by the vocalist) while the palette desaturates and the angles and editing do the herky jerky. But the clip goes into far more interesting territory as the woman he's dressing up like a victim plays the comatose real one he's injured (take your pick of car accident, domestic violence or maybe just leave it at metaphor), eventually sitting beside her inert body on the hospital bed as the entire room begins to shake and shudder as though it's moving along a road.
Divinyls poured out of the funnel of their record company as a kind of pre-mix new wave act but just as no one identified as punk then no one smeared themselves with its softer epithet. The term was a joke, a dad-in-a-cardigan stab at hipness, and no one under thirty would say it without a smirk or a sarcastic twang. Divinyls, of course, weren't so much a new wave band as a band. They dressed theatrically in their videos and their songs clicked into AM radio playlists like Lego pieces.
For me, their overproduced rock sound and reliance on sweet guitar hooks turned me off. And then there was the singer. Chrissy Amphlett's turn as the female answer to Angus Young was astute and proved durable. Miming on Countdown or flailing on stage, she tore it up as the eternal schoolgirl, the first one to blow perfect smokerings at the bike shed and make much more of it than shaping of exhaled fumes. Publicly, the brat child of pop royalty and senior administration, Amphlett played 19th Nervous Breakdown from the point of view of its target, living and playing unto peril and dependency, a thick moppy fringe hiding a pair of eyes you knew could turn you to stone if she showed them.
But there was also the side she would only allow us to glimpse and while it could be sentimental, it wasn't warm and fuzzy. That was the briefly sounding harmonic that had me thinking twice about her while the rest of me dismissed her band and their output as costumed-up Oz Rock. My favourite song of theirs is Good Die Young and it would be here except that the loss that it tells of and wails with is not about love.
Only Lonely, recorded for the film of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, shattered my dismissal of the band who were sold as new wave but sounded like the old 70s. Shattered because for all its guitar track trowelling it did something extremely effective. On the one hand the bright wall o' guitars chimes like churchbells on speed, Amphlett's chanting verses, which would be choruses in a lesser song, use a chirpy almost calypso melody to tell us how lonely she is. She likes morning but can only feel lonely when the sun goes down. Even in the arms of a lover she feels lonely and apologises for it helplessly.
This is the crush of every day and it rings with the urgency of youth and rasps with the desperation of experience, sometimes in the same line, Amplett's turning of a phrase transferred her effortlessly between the schoolgirl and the cranky old hen with the cats. For every bird call springing up to the third there's a sob down a semitone, welling in the minor until the lush descent of the guitars come down to pick it up again. The chorus bashes in with cooing falsettos and Amphlett's torn voice pleading to get involved.
Chrissie Amphlett was a beautiful woman. She became a rock diva in the space of a very few hit singles. But look at the clip I've linked above and count how many times you see her face in light. Go and find the video for the first hit song, Boys in Town. Even back then there's a conscious effort to play down the sexiness of her school uniform. But here she's backlit, her face a dark shape in the frame of her mop of hair. It's an impression, almost negative space. This is not the video done on film which has much more light and air, more 80s, if you will. This one is less the 80s of hot pink hair and yellow jeans than the 80s that came after the sweaty old 70s when for a few years at least the brashest of pop music shied from sex like the schoolgirl who didn't smoke from the disco medallioned monster eyeing her off from across the room. In the record company video she's a singer in a rock band; the Countdown (!) clip she's a scream in the darkness.
I think it's unwise to align songwriter or singer too closely to their life when a song lyric is most likely a distillation of experience rather than a direct report of it. Then again, we happily attribute a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain with near divine inspiration from personal trauma why not Amphlett who was pretty open about her own. And why sniff at her and McEntee's wish to keep all of that wrapped up in contemporary pop? It works, it still works. Let that stand.
This is the girl who try as she might can never connect with those she does gets close enough to hold, whose desperate eyes scare her dates who tell her to wait. That middle eight used to annoy me and seemed to be an uncorrected line written by the male of the songwriting partnership. Now, the more I hear it the truer it rings for this character Amphlett has assumed. And here she is, singing from the void that was once a girl, her face a blur, her hopeful springing melody cracking with failure.
This is essentially the same message as the Smiths' How Soon is Now and while there is much to love about that song there is really none of the scream through the bars of Only Lonely whose gleaming fresh guitar rock cannot conceal the real deal. I prefer it the way I prefer Good Die Young to The Smiths' Suffer Little Children (a bigger stretch, admittedly, but while we're down there...): the sombreness of Morrissey's lament for the victims of murder doesn't go as far as Amphlett's broken anger and pain for the missing person for me. The tight sustains of the chords and insistence of the chorus which seems to fall from the verses breaks into my chest cavity every time I hear it. Same goes for Only Lonely. To my knowledge, while the band and their central creative partnership delivered nothing as powerful as these again this pair of songs shall stand for the rest of my imaginable life as the essence of pop music's power at its best and that is the glimpse of what always seems to lie behind the joys of love, the ache that burns to pain ... and can get you singing along like a kid on a school excursion bus.
