
Taken from the album Ether Song, also released in a Tony Hoffer Remix and as a single! Olly:’Average Man’, is one of the older tracks, we wrote that quite a while ago, just after the Optimist LP. I wrote it after I read a review, we’d only just started getting reviews and this one I think was in the Guardian about one of our live shows, and it was actually quite a good review but it said some interesting things that I thought were wrong. And for the first time I felt what it was like to read a criticism by someone who doesn’t know you, and that hadn’t happened before. And that song just came out. I don’t know if I was suppose to be the average man or if the man telling me was the average man, but that song appeared and it does make a kind of curious sense.
Q: What did the review say?
Gale: Average.
Olly: Yeah pretty much.
Q: So its one in the eye for them?
Olly: Sort of, but not in the same way Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics wrote Mr Writer. Which I think was very, well to me anyway, it was like the first hurdle you come too where you read a bad review and you write ‘Mr Writer’. But Average Man was meant to be more insightful than that, it says more about me than it does about the bloke who wrote the review.
If I was a farmer
Instead of a faker
If I was a realer
Not just some raker
Raking through a memory
That doesn’t belong to me
Just someone I could have been
if I only kept walking…
Have another drink my son
Enjoy another cigarette
‘Cos it’s time you realise
You’re just an average man…
Alone on a motorway
You catch your breath
Cat’s eyes lead everyway
To lonesomeness
Since you learn to hide your fears
And downsize your dreams
Still alive, still sincere
inside the scheme…
Have another drink my son
Enjoy another cigarette
‘Cos it’s time you realise
You’re just an average man…
If this is darkness… Here
And if this is darkness… Coming
Have another drink my son
Enjoy another cigarette
‘Cos it’s time you realise
You’re just an average man…
Two black lineS SCREAMING NOW like a GARDEN line.
Put one foot on the road now where the SUNBEAMS are driving,
With the WD-40 YEAH
screeching little brakes complain.
With MY briefcase empty and the holes in my shoes,
I try to stay friendly for the SHIMMERY ABLUE.
So tell my secretary now to hold ONTO my calls,
I believe I can hear through these walls.
Oh please save me, save me from myself.
I can’t be the only one stuck on the shelf.
You said you’d always fall for the underdog.
Well I’ve been dreaming of jetstreams and kicking up dust,
MMMMMMMMMMM DONE THE LUST
And with THE MM number 9 ticked off OF my mind,
Oh can you hear me screaming out now through the telephone line.
Oh please save me, save me from myself.
I can’t be the only one stuck on the shelf.
You said you’d always fall for the underdog
Save me
Save me
Save me
Save me
I MEAN I’M NOT GOING TO DISS MY LYRICAL TALENTS BUT THIS WASNT MY BEST. I THINK I SHOULD REALLY REALLY MAKE A CONSCIOUS EFFORT TO LEARN THE RIGHT WORDS BEFORE THE GLASGOW GIG!
ANYWAY HOPE MY SHARINGS MADE YOU SMILE. LOVE YOUR SITE AND YOUR CONTENT. IT HELPS ME BE THE VERY BEST TURIN BREAKS FAN I CAN
OH AND WHENS THE NEXT FAN ZOOM BEING HELD. YOU KNOW YOU PROMISED TO DO ONE AT THE LAST LIVE STREAMING ON YOUTUBE.