The title of The Dreaming Spires‘ third album – the first in nearly ten years – refers to Didcot in Oxfordshire being named ‘England’s most normal town’ in 2017. Several members of the band grew up locally so Robin Bennett was inspired to write a concept album exploring what it means to be raised in and intimately familiar with somewhere so conventional.
The Dreaming Spires – Normal Town review
1. Normal Town
A drone reminiscent of a power station alarm or an alien landing craft draws us into the narrative. We’re instantly placed on notice that we’ve been invited to tour Didcot with locals.
The narrator’s history is interweaved with place history. Those familiar with Didcot’s aspirational ‘Garden Town’ designation in 2015 might spot either wry irony or compelling necessity in the observation: “it’s a normal town/not a blade of grass in the new high street/and the underpass where we used to meet and pretend to smoke.”
As the song continues, we see early evidence of Bennett’s ethos that “specific is generic.” After all, you might not know Didcot but you know somewhere where this is oddly familiar: “it’s a Saturday night and there’s blood on the floor and a broken glass/somehow nobody saw what happened here when the officer asked.”
It’s not just about individual acts of restlessness and aggression. There’s a wider sense of ennui: “there used to be hope but that’s all in the past.” It’s worth noting that the 2017 ‘normal town’ accolade was based, in part, on how closely Didcot residents share average national opinions.
Textual analysis alone doesn’t do the song justice. The distinctive run on vocal delivery and local church organ style playing giving a sense of repetition and resignation matching the thematic concerns. You really feel for Bennett when he plaintively sings: “I don’t want to die in a normal town.”
There is no happy ending. Evidently a fast pace of external change doesn’t preclude a strong streak of traditional conformity. The final stanza of Normal Town offers a fascinating commentary on feeling like an outsider in, and a prisoner of, the place you’re from. Where can you escape to when you’re an atypical product of the most archetypal place there is? “People round here sometimes like you to lose/they’ve been paying their dues, so why shouldn’t you?/You dream of running away but there’s nowhere for you/except a normal town.”
2. Normalisation
Normalisation is more upbeat in tone but not in topic. There’s no pulling punches with the opening line: “I’ve got a sinking sensation/it’s the normalisation of the hate in this nation.”
There are clear pointers to protest songs and slogans of the Sixties, but the thoroughly modern context is clear. Both eras are connected by a call to activism with optimism: “We can never go back/we can’t live in the past/but we can work for a future a little better than the last.”
Alongside the simmering division is the “opinion that the working man’s dead/they replaced us with robots.” The song’s lyric video features a photo of a heated protest outside an Oxford hotel housing asylum seekers and a caption that reads: “the nearby Mini plant employs around 3,500 people today, compared to around 28,000 in the early 1960s. The Oxford factory now uses over 1200 robots.” You’re left to draw your own conclusions about who is really ‘taking our jobs.’
Comparisons to The Who’s Baba O’Riley in terms of chord progression are obvious, although given a more jangly sheen here. Normalisation is the early earworm of the album, for sure.
3. Cooling Towers
Rhythmic industrial sounds underpin a sweet observational song about the bittersweet march of progress. Beautiful family harmonies with bassist and brother Joe Bennett’s backing vocals fit perfectly in this intimate intertwining of personal and public memory.
Everything changes and the consequences can’t all be predicted. Dismantling the disused power station to become a Garden Town might have seemed wholly positive in theory.
However, four men (Michael Collings, Ken Cresswell, Christopher Huxtable and John Shaw) died when the turbine hall collapsed. Previously fondly remembered as a school trip destination for local children like the Bennetts, it’s now forever a site of tragedy. Almost ten years later, the police investigation has yet to be concluded.
Still, much like with the local tragedies documented on Stereophonics’ Word Gets Around, daily life must move on. It’s poignant but not accusatory when Bennett admits: “we’ll forget all the names of the ones who died/maybe we’re not the ones to hold back the tide/but I want to be able to tell you we tried.”
The railway looms almost as large as the titular cooling towers in this song, offering a reason and a way to arrive, escape and return. Didcot’s historic strategic importance as a Great Western Railway (GWR) branch station is alluded to in the line: “There’s an old steam engine rolling back the years/and a shop selling Great Western souvenirs.”
We accompany Bennett to London, his place of birth, signified by the sight of Paddington Basin [see also the song Dusty In Memphis: “I was born in the capital city/I was born with a capital B/round the corner from Paddington Station.”]
When – now pushing past 43 – he returns to his family home, he’s struck by the importance of landmarks or their absence: “Ain’t it strange what you miss when you’re gone too long/strange shapes in the mist say you’re coming home.” Once again, even if you don’t know Didcot’s landmarks, you know your own and the ones you’ve lost to history.
4. 21st Century Light Industrial
This a catchy little number. Unfortunately for us at Music Closeup, our specific earworm is actually a mondegreen.
The often doubled vocal has a ghostly echo redolent of starting a lonely early shift in a steel-framed industrial estate building.
Much like with Normal Town, Bennett’s delicate vocal delivery makes you really feel for him. You want him to succeed even when the only hope available means more uncertainty and instability: “In the warehouses weighed down by heavy machines I get carried away with my dreams/and I’m never coming back to work again.”
The album continues to describe specific places and experiences that you’ve never lived but fundamentally know. You can likely list the offending tunes from your own personal hell of “the radio plays the same ten songs, now they’re circling round my brain.”
Deeper still, you’ve probably worked at least one job that makes you skip a breath when you hear the line: “got to be more than this/’cause we barely exist.” If you’re still in that job, consider this a neon sign for you to make a change.
A quick shout out for the video. Not just because it was edited at Music Closeup HQ, but because we’ve reached the perverse situation where multi-million selling artists (who used to have video budgets in the hundreds of thousands) offer static images or half-arsed ‘visualisers,’ while some independent artists are inspired to deliver creatively inspired and technically adept music videos despite minimal to no budgets and distracted, hard-to-reach audiences. Every view is meaningful.
This is one of a series of complex videos created by The Dreaming Spires’ keyboards and synths player, Thomas Collison.
5. Stolen Car
We return to themes raised in Normal Town, interrogating what it means to be an outsider in your hometown when a ‘salt of the earth, do anything for anyone’ community refuses to include you.
Whether othered by class, poverty, race, religion, sexuality, gender, nationality, or countless other markers of perceived difference, far too many will recognise this sense of frustration: “Maybe you don’t think it’s right that people like me get a fair throw of the dice/yeah, ‘you made your own way’/well, isn’t that nice/yeah, that’s easy to say when you don’t know my life/We don’t even pretend we’ll get there in the end if we play by their rules.”
Bennett is quick to point out that the friend who inspired the song didn’t actually steal the car (it was his own), but there was a car chase.
The delivery feels relentless, sonically expressing the claustrophobic sense of having no time to stop, think, or correct mistakes and misconceptions. The odds seem stacked, like in many a Springsteen story song. However, it isn’t hopeless. There’s power and pride in not giving up or giving in and, importantly, in knowing that they truly do belong: “I’ve got a worn out soul but I’m still on my feet/give me that rock and roll, I want to feel my heart beat/let the sirens wail cos I know every street.”
Once again, the video is meaningful, not least because the filmmaker also grew up locally and recognises the conflicted emotions this generates.
“When Robin first played me Stolen Car, it felt eerily personal…I’d just been diagnosed with Combined ADHD, and through that process also uncovered Complex PTSD linked to a pretty traumatic childhood growing up on the Nightingales estate in Greenham.
It’s a journey back through the places that shaped me, and in many ways, the life I’ve been trying to move beyond ever since. A time where life seemed to fly past whilst I stood still. It was a very surreal day, and whilst I felt totally detached from my past, a bit like it was a different life, or a lifetime ago, it was cathartic.” – Martyn Chalk, Chalkstar Films
6. Faraway Blue Sky
We’re let into the mind of a wanderer, perhaps a musician, forever flitting between the next horizon and home. We hear their dreamy and slightly discordant wanderlust made manifest but they can never fully escape bad weather, whether metaphorical or real. However much they appease their wanderlust, the weather catches up with them. Meanwhile, what has been missed at home? Nevertheless, “faraway blue skies are calling me” to the very end.
7. Linescapes
When Bennett’s ecologist friend Hugh Warwick said he’d written a book about industrial lines across the landscape but didn’t know what to call it, Bennett suggested Linescapes. He decided it would make a good song title too.
Bennett’s telling of the tale makes the marks on the ground tangible and unmistakeable; scars made with “impenetrable concrete” and “cold steel.” Bridges, tunnels, roads and rails connect but also divide, and endanger individuals, communities and habitats.
Linescapes has a gentle community choir aesthetic that’s sweet and homely.
8. Bitter Pill
Bitter Pill is a gorgeous, almost-lullaby like reverie. It carries allusions to beautiful days in beautiful dazes. We’re periodically returned to the present with the lament “generations come and go, must we be divided so?”
It’s one of several tracks on Normal Town that share musical DNA with Grand Drive which is fitting given how many members of The Dreaming Spires are now or have ever been members of that band’s successor, Danny and the Champions of The World.
9. Coming Home
Here we’re offered bongos, shakers, insistent alarm clock allusions, acoustic guitar, lush harmonies and a distorted, almost whispered vocal but everything has space to breathe.
We return to themes of escape and return, facilitated by a career in music. It’s the outsider insider’s perspective of a place that’s ever-changing: “you were never gonna be the king of this town/things are changing in the corridors and hallways…coming home you hardly recognise the Broadway/dreams fade.” No matter how things change, Didcot Broadway never outshines its namesake or slakes the wanderlust of this rolling stone.
10. Where I’m Calling From
We get a peek into the Bennett boys’ deep love of music, especially the twentieth century American type: “The trumpet king of swing is back at Connie’s Inn/the Carter Family stare from their rocking chair.”
There are no dazzling, high-volume Harlem hijinks here, just a meditation on the a theme. Your life can be soundtracked by or like previous eras, but you can’t live in the past.
11.These Days Will End
Another gentle soundscape follows. Nostalgia for sunsets, weekends and younger years lead to the shock of ageing: “changes come through sliding doors/creep up on you ’til you can’t ignore/what happens then still echoes down the years/isn’t it strange the way we change from day to day the way we feel? Underneath we’re still the same.”
These Days Will End has a gentle George Harrison earnestness, although Jamie Dawson’s insistent drum beat stresses that the march of time can’t be stopped by stopping to smell the roses.
12. Real Life
The final song, Real Life, is a gentle plea for safety and stability – normality, if you will. It’s a mature view of domesticity as a refuge, not a prison: “All I want is the real life/I don’t care about the high life/I don’t want to waste my life…there’s only one life, so don’t wish it away.”
The threat of change recurs with the Fleetwood Mac reminiscent line: “All our lives, we’re chasing changes/what I wouldn’t give for things to stay the same.”
However, we’ve learned by now that change is inevitable, but not inevitably negative. Think back to 21st Century Light Industrial – if you’re feeling there’s “got to be more than this/’cause we barely exist” then change is imperative.
Conclusion/TL;DR
Robin Bennett is right. Specific is generic. Think back to that first Stereophonics album, or the early Arctic Monkeys output. The regional specificity in the people, places and voices that Glasvegas introduce us to. Or Roddy Woomble’s Idlewild and solo work replete with passing places and journeys back to the islands. It works even if it’s further afield, like Counting Crows‘ “Omaha, somewhere in middle America/get right to the heart of matters/It’s the heart that matters more.” You don’t need to know those places to understand and identify with their nostalgia vicariously.
So ends our exploration of a normal town with all that means; ordinary, conformity, routine, tradition, change and but, despite it all, inescapable familiarity. You may not know Didcot but you know somewhere like it. It will never leave you, even if you have left – or tried to.
You don’t have to love it – you may even resent it – but it pays to take notice because it shaped who you are. It’s the shiver when Springsteen sings “take a good look around/this is your hometown.” It’s changed, but so have you.
For fans of: Grand Drive, Big Star, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Wilco.
The Dreaming Spires – Normal Town
Songs by Robin Bennett
Produced by The Dreaming Spires
Mixed by Joe Bennett
Mastered by Tony Poole
The Dreaming Spires – Normal Town is out now on Clubhouse Records.
Signed records, signed CDs and digital version (not signed) are available from Bandcamp.
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