The Perfect English Weather” may be a perfect English band name. Of course it makes reference to allegedly common knowledge about the English climate. But it also doesn’t take itself too seriously, opting for wryness over depression — especially when combined with the title and cover of their first album, Isobar Blues. (On this side of the Atlantic, you might achieve similar effects by naming your new band “The Uneventful American Presidential Election.”)
While you may not — probably have not — heard of TPEW specifically, if you’ve been following English pop music for a while you might recognize the name of the “real” band which shares the same two group members, Simon and Molly Pickles: The Popguns. Specifically, says the capsule bio on TPEW’s Facebook page:
The Perfect English Weather are Wendy & Simon Pickles, a duo from Brighton taking time out from The Popguns to tell the usual tales of soggy café chess games, conversations with cats and weekend trips to cancelled Morrissey shows.
Of the Popguns themselves, Wikipedia says, they “played a part in the British jangle pop scene.” And if you, like I, furrowed your brow quizzically at the term “jangle pop,” the ‘pedia will help you out there, too:
Jangle pop is a subgenre of rock music with its origins in the 1960s which features trebly, arpeggiated picking (typically on chiming electric twelve-string guitars or 6 string guitars, often employing a capo and chord inversions), together with straightforward song structures. The Beatles and The Byrds are commonly credited with launching the popularity of the “jangly” sound that defined the genre.
The term “jangle pop” itself emerged as part of the genre’s resurgence the early to mid-1980s that “marked a return to the chiming or jangly guitars and pop melodies of the ’60s”, and was epitomised by bands such as The Smiths. Between 1983 and 1987, the description “jangle pop” was, in the US, used to describe bands like R.E.M., Let’s Active and Tom Petty as well as a subgenre called “Paisley Underground”, which incorporated psychedelic influences.
(The article later references The Who, The Beach Boys, The Hollies, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and Simon and Garfunkel. The common sound of such bands, reportedly, comes from their use of Rickenbacker twelve-string guitars. I don’t know enough about music to say whether that’s true. But in general, seeing them all lumped together like that does help me grasp the notion of something that might conceivably be called “jangle pop.”)
So what of this specific track from TPEW’s debut album? Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Linear Tracking Live!:
LTL: …We have lost a great many artists this year. Is this about a specific musician or the collective loss of so many talented people?
Simon: During the year which this album was written I was working next to a beautiful big park in Brighton where I’d spend lunchtimes listening to music on my ‘phones whilst sitting on park benches and drifting off to those places that music takes you. It was more the fact that music and ideas live on long beyond their moment of creation that inspired the “spirited away” theme, but obviously the death of Bowie was such a big event around that time, and it’s easy to imagine him as the song’s subject. Having said that, my own bizarre fantasy for the song was around the possible passing of Steven Patrick [i.e., Morrissey] and how that could feel for those of us for whom he loomed so large. Then the actual title probably came from my son’s Studio Ghibli film collection. But I usually say that songs are often not about things, they are inspired by them and become something else. Then the meaning is in the listening, not the writing.
Sounds like the perfect way to close off 2016’s unholy catalogue of pop-culture deaths*, eh? Here’s “Spirited Away,” then, from Isobar Blues.
[Lyrics]
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* Nope: apparently not just an urban legend.
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