January 7 - Pure Milk

Sometimes when you're listening to early material by an artist you can catch the moment that they "get it". Not when they become successful, but a point some distance before that where they first do something that sounds like them. There's a point in pre-Discworld Terry Pratchett's novel The Dark Side Of The Sun where the decent but not that original pseudo Frank Herbert tone breaks and you see something more interesting underneath: a funny and acute voice that grows in confidence as subsequent writing allows the writer to work out who he is.

Something similar happens in Pure Milk. It's a rough sing in a good sense, John is still playing with keyboards and trying to work out what he sounds like, but it feels like he's moving from taking poems and putting music under them to writing music and finding the words that go with it.

This song is urgent, charged with desire, and makes use of a repeated refrain "put your hand on the god damned radio" that contains more significance than meaning. The rest of the lyrics are considerably more narrative than earlier songs, giving a story of late nights in small towns of young people seeking out their own meaning in a place where they belong and don't belong. I know this narrator. I went to school with this narrator. I wonder what he's doing now.