Favourite Songs Ever: Surf Music
A couple of years ago, I listened to an interview with comedian James Acaster on The Adam Buxton Podcast. During the interview, Acaster discussed in detail the opening of the standup show he was touring around the UK. He explained that the show began with him DJing as the audience walked in. For Acaster, an avid music enthusiast, this was no doubt a slight vanity project, but he made sure to sprinkle the DJ set with some comedy in order to justify it. The recurring gag was that every so often, he would return to playing the chorus of the same track, then stand back from the decks and put his hands in the air. Naturally, when he was having this routine explained to him, interviewer Adam Buxton asked Acaster which song he’d used for this gag.
“It’s a song called ‘Surf Music’,” Acaster said, “It’s by my friend Paul, from New Zealand”.
After listening to the rest of the interview, I went away and sought out the track. The artist, Paul Williams, had made the song and the album of the same name following some minor success as a standup comedian. It was quite hard to find information about him, the song, or the album anywhere. But within two or three listens, it had become one of my favourite songs ever. I wouldn’t have admitted it then, because it would seem ridiculous, but honestly it was a case of love at first listen. If there is such a thing as a perfect song, ‘Surf Music’ is it. I could suddenly understand why Acaster had chosen it for his routine — it wasn’t that it had any specific comedy value; it was that by including the song in the show, he was trying to correct the travesty of justice that was Paul Williams’s relative lack of success.
I mentioned in my post about Pickle Darling’s ‘Rinse Spin Cycle/Nicolas Cage’ that I’m really drawn to music that has the sort of sound that wouldn’t have been achievable before modern recording techniques, and ‘Surf Music’ is a song that falls into this category. Williams is doing everything he can with the technology available to him. There aren’t any acoustic sounds and everything is messed with to make it sound as clean as possible. Even his voice is manipulated to an outrageous degree, autotune all over it. In the chorus he pitch shifts it to the extent that it sounds almost inhuman.
The song doesn’t feature a rhythm section in the traditional sense, but everything about it just sounds extraordinarily percussive. There’s a blurring of the lines between bassline and drumbeat, such is the percussiveness of the bass synthesiser sound used throughout, and we hear tuned percussion sounds, as well as drum samples and drum machines. Melodically, the sounds are similarly diverse, with Williams employing all manner of keyboard and piano synth sounds, and even introducing some synth strings later on that a less daring artist would dismiss as excessive. It should sound chaotic, but it sounds so tight. Williams’s laptop is his instrument of choice, and he plays it with virtuosity. It’s some of the most stylish production I’ve ever heard on a song.
Interestingly though, despite my adoration of the song’s instrumentation and production, it was its lyrics that first caught my ear. The track opens with a brief but striking acapella introduction, before the first verse begins, and Williams laments:
“I wrote this song on some software that I stole when I was seventeen,
I thought that it might get me somewhere,
I’m still nowhere and I’m twenty-three”
It’s a truly hilarious opening lyric that demonstrates that its writer is a comedian by trade. The rest of the song is clearly written as a pick-me-up to himself and others, but in its opening he’s required to preface this with some despair. Later on the album, which across its 10 tracks tells the story of a breakup, Williams manages to earnestly communicate a sense of depression and despair, but on the title track he wraps this side of himself in comedic self-deprecation. You’re too busy laughing at “some software that I stole when I was seventeen” to really notice that he’s talking about being directionless and dilapidated. By the time you’ve stopped laughing, you’re already at the pre-chorus, an early turning point in the song wherein Williams lays out its overarching mood going forward:
“Oh when I hear that wet California sound
I swear there ain’t nobody that’s getting me down
Cause they put all the right notes in all the right places”
Williams may ostensibly be talking about California surf music here, but I think this pre-chorus really acts as a meta-commentary on itself. When I hear it, and the chorus that follows it, there ain’t nobody that’s getting me down, and I think Williams is completely aware that his song has that kind of power. Notably, when he sings the phrase “all the right notes in all the right places”, each of his words falls upon a perfectly placed note within the major scale, autotuned to perfection. He’s creating his own happiness here as much as he’s deriving it from the music of other people.
As we enter the chorus, the pitch shifting reaches those inhuman levels I referred to earlier, and in the section that follows the chorus, he is swallowed up into the mix further still, as his vocals are reduced to triggered samples. It has an out-of-body experience quality, as if Williams’ euphoria has caused him to depart his human form and become one with the synths.
I went to see Williams at a small live gig in East London a few months ago. It was just him on the stage, with a small keyboard, a sample trigger, and some backing tracks. There was no live autotune and no other band members helping him out, which made for a strange performance. It felt as if he was almost admitting that all he could be in a live context was a tribute to his own album. Afterwards, he did an impromptu meet and greet afterwards, and pretty much everybody who approached him mentioned that they’d been introduced to his stuff by James Acaster. If Acaster’s goal in including ‘Surf Music’ in his show was to widen his friend’s popularity, then it seems he’d succeeded. And I suppose, in a way, this article is me continuing what Acaster started. I implore you to listen to ‘Surf Music’ and the rest of the album of the same name. It’ll be the best thirty five minutes of your day, and it’ll be impossible to shake the infectious happiness you’ll feel from the title track. That’s a promise.
