There is gold across the river, but I don't want none.
Laura Marling 'Your Only Doll (Dora)' / 'Alas I Cannot Swim' (Alas I Cannot Swim - 2008)
The 50th entry on The Run Out Grooves, ‘Gouge Away’ by Pixies, is an opportunity to take stock.
So earlier in the week, we looked at some data analysis on the half-century. Today I’m taking a detour from the schedule and not posting an entry on Beck’s ‘Ramshackle’ from Odelay as per the Acclaimed Music list. We will return to that next week.
I can hear bird song.
It is Monday 10th March 2008 in Oxford, England. It’s sunny in that way where most times of the year you’d not be impressed, but when it has just been February, it is welcome. There’s more wind and clouds than you’d like, but it is a lovely day in relative terms. I’m on my way from the railway station to what was then The Carling Academy, now The O2 Academy and to most people known as The Zodiac1 Setlist.fm tells me I made the short railway journey from Reading to Oxford half a dozen other times in 2008 to see (British) Sea Power, The Wedding Present, Bat For Lashes, Glasvegas and Ida Maria2.
This time, I’m going to see Guillemots, two weeks away from releasing their second album Red which I ultimately don’t enjoy as much as their debut Through The Windowpane, but I don’t know this yet; I will pick up the album alongside the final album by Supergrass, Foals’ debut and In Ghost Colours by Cut Copy in one of my several £50 man splurges that year at the end of March.
Ironically, given that I’m going to see a band called Guillemots, as I cross over Magdalen Bridge and head towards The Cape of Good Hope, I am distracted by bird song. This bird song is in my ears, not up in the trees or the sky above me. More accurately, it is coming out of my Creative Zen Vision: M 30GB MP3 player, but let’s not quibble.
Usually, I’d listen to the artists I would see at the gig while on that walk, psyche myself up a little and get myself in the zone. This day was different because I’d been at another gig the previous night.
Nine months earlier, I’d been at a gig at The Fez Club in Reading for Jail Guitar Doors, in conjunction with Billy Bragg's Jail Guitar Doors Campaign, named after the song of the same name by The Clash and raising money to buy musical instruments for inmates at Reading Young Offenders Institute. I was most interested in seeing The Strange Death of Liberal England and Six Nation State, but one performer had me returning to their MySpace page again and again in the weeks and months that followed.
Eventually, summer becomes autumn, and on the weekend of my 24th birthday, Laura Marling is now not playing pubs and clubs in Reading; she’s on Later… with Jools Holland on BBC 2, supporting her first releases on Virgin Records.
By this point, I was itching to hear her debut album and measure how far Marling had progressed between the ages of sixteen and seventeen with her material. There was already evidence of her precocious guitar playing on covers such as Neil Young’s ‘The Needle and The Damage Done’. So it took me very little encouragement to sign up for the Song Box edition of the album - this was a version of the album on CD with a box of trinkets and a ticket to a local show for me in London at Islington’s Union Chapel, about a month after the album was released. Looking at the email now, it is immediately dated by the request to print the email out and bring it with you!
Supporting Marling at the show were Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit. A lot was written about West London’s nu-folk scene from 2006 onward, but if anything, a gig like this or Marling’s 2009 Royal Festival Hall show at the Southbank in London show that these were musicians who liked to play live music together. It is odd to think that packed onto a tiny stage in a Gothic revival church in early 2008 were future Mercury Prize nominees, BRIT Award winners, Grammy nominees and winners, and a man who would play David Bowie in a film.
The gig itself was magical; a venue like that is almost perfect for showcasing Marling’s voice as she pitches her songs into the rafters, resonating amongst the stone, marble, glass and pine. You can hear a few of the songs as b-sides on digital platforms, but there is a CD promo version.
This concert was very much in my head the next day in Oxford, more so as that lunchtime, I picked up Mystery Jets’ single ‘Young Love’, which features Laura Marling on guest vocals. What stopped me in my tracks was the bird song.
The last credited track on the album is ‘Your Only Doll (Dora)’, a thoughtful song in which you get the impression of an abusive relationship where one party sees the other as his property, a toy, a doll to do as he pleases. The song ends on a low note, to say the least, suggesting that the abusive partner has broken his only doll and what can he do with a girl if “…she's refusing to be alive”.
Throughout the three minutes of this sorrowful tale is the sound of bird song. As the song finishes and fades, the bird song does not; it continues for almost two minutes. It is as if ‘Your Only Doll (Dora)’ was the last song of a performance, and the birds are demanding the players come back to the stage for an encore. This is more noteworthy as Marling and her band do not do encores.3 The night before, I had heard her explain after playing ‘…Dora’.
If you want an encore, this is the final song; if not, it's the penultimate song.
After this declaration, and it feels like a manifesto commitment after all these years, she and the band launch into the title track of Alas, I Cannot Swim, which is unlisted on the album. The live version even has a false ending before it progresses into a hoe down - an encore within a fake encore.
On record, we could unpack all the different possible interpretations of that opening line, “There’s a house across the river, but alas, I cannot swim.” We have to take the context that someone on the cusp of adulthood wrote this. Adulthood means responsibility and opportunity, and both bring a degree of anxiety - we all want to get to the other side of the river, but jumping in the water, unaware of our swimming prowess, is a literal and figurative leap. Sitting above the threat of not being able to swim is potentially a more significant threat of not jumping in and regretting that you didn’t take a chance on something you were unsure of. Even this insight isn’t enough to propel her into the water.
The second verse features a boy with short black curly hair across the river, surely a nod to the Pathan marching song that goes,
There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach. But alas, I can't swim.
This song has a backstory, a version from a century ago that speaks of a girl with cheeks like a peach. The substitute of “boy” and “bottom” swapped appears to have happened around the Second World War.4
As the song continues, it seems to me that there is a level of acceptance that sometimes we don’t get what we crave, and that is OK. Wanting things we can’t have is fine and accepting our lot is also all right, as is settling for what we need. In many respects, it does bring to mind another famous closing track, that we will cover another day, that dwells on what we want, what we need and what we get.
Since that night at Union Chapel and the following spring evening in Oxford, I’ve been to many Laura Marling gigs and festival performances; From Pewsey, Glasgow, Cambridge, Guildford, Banchory, Glastonbury, Paddock Wood, London, Oslo5 and finally, after over a decade later in Reading again. I’ve been quoted in The Guardian as a super-fan and interviewed by ITV News.
All of that can be traced back to the gig’s impact on me and hearing that bird song. Because one thing we love more than anything else at The Run Out Grooves is when we assess closing tracks, and they deliver something that Marling had in spades at the age of eighteen.
The promise of much more to come.
We will be back after Easter with a song from 2022.
It was called The Oxford Venue before 1995 and was the location for the video of a local band’s single from their debut album, Pablo Honey.
Ida Maria was the support to Guillemots on that day in March. She is a guest vocalist on the Red track ‘Words’, and at one point during the main set, she accidentally treads on my foot.
I have seen Marling almost three dozen times, and I can only recall one encore, coming back on to perform ‘Daisy’ at Queen Elizabeth Hall in Apr 2015.
Marling is likely to be the only act I’ll ever see twice in the Norwegian capital and at Oslo in East London.
"I have seen Marling almost three dozen times..."
This sentence stopped me in my tracks, and tells me I've clearly been missing out on some amazing music.
Wow — this is amazing, Mitchell. I've always like Marling, but this makes me want to really dig in.