A Minute to Midnight Album

'A Minute to Midnight' is a song that I wrote and recorded this year. It's an odd song, as the tune is rather jaunty and upbeat and reminds me of something that Jake Thackray might have written, while the lyrics are anything but upbeat and jaunty. I could perhaps claim that this was a deliberate and clever ploy I used in order to create an unresolvable tension between the words and the music that would engage the listener. But that, of course, would be a lie - the song just happened to turn out like this.

I wrote my first songs in 1995 and recorded them onto an old Akai 4000DS MkII reel-to-reel tape recorder. There were twenty or so songs recorded, and most of them were not that great. The songs which were passable I made better recordings of on the two Fiery Flying Roll albums and High. Listening back to the reel-to-reel recordings thirty years later they are, for the most part, still best forgotten. However, 'I Don't Need Anything' has its charms, and, shorn of an unnecessary (and not especially good) third verse, I include it here so you can hear where I started. To borrow a line from The Big Bang Theory: "He's come a long way. Or a short way very slowly, so it feels like a long way."

Robert Farmer (Guitar, Bass, Harmonica, Vocal).
Album cover, 'Les distinctions orthodoxes' is by plochingen (www.flickr.com/people/le_plochingen/) and is used here under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND licence.
All songs written by Robert Farmer.
CC BY-NC
1995/2025