A notebook from the Ship, and a greyhound that won
The kick is a fact before the words are. A synthesizer line repeats until repetition becomes weather, and Karl Hyde starts speaking in pieces, boy, lager, a blonde, a station, as if the night had been cut with a flash and the flashes were all he kept. Born Slippy .NUXX does not build toward a chorus so much as refuse to sober up. The vocal was one take. When he lost his place he repeated the line, which is why lager arrives four times, not as a toast but as a man missing the step. Rick Smith’s rhythm is enormous and unembarrassed. The embarrassment, Hyde has said, came later, when the cans went up.
The words were written on one night in Soho. He drank, ended at the Ship on Wardour Street, walked with a notebook and a camera, Lou Reed’s New York and Sam Shepard in his head, trying to see the way a drunk sees, in fragments. Smith had a rhythm. Hyde sang. The title was a greyhound they had won money on. The .NUXX version, the one the world means, began as a harder B-side in 1995 on Junior Boy’s Own, made at the duo’s studio life in Romford, not as an anthem and not as a joke. Danny Boyle put it in Trainspotting in 1996, over a night that looked, to some ears, like permission. The single went to number two in Britain that July. Hyde was horrified the first time a room raised lager cans, because he was still inside the drinking the song was trying to map. It was a cry for help, he told The Guardian in 2006. It was never meant to be a drinking song. Now, he said, he does not mind.
The film gave the fragments a plot they did not have, and then the plot stuck to the kick drum. Live, Underworld play it as a long weather system. Hyde’s notebook voice, half spoken, cuts across Smith’s architecture without asking to be understood line by line. You can shout the lager and miss the woman squatting in a tube hole at Tottenham Court Road, the journey he has described from the Ship to the last train. The map is specific. The misuse was general. Boyle’s picture, Hyde has allowed, put some of the irony back, so the celebration and the sickness could be heard in the same bar.
All the lyrics were written on that night. A drunk sees the world in fragments and I wanted to recreate that. The vocals were done in one take. When I lost my place, I’d repeat the same line. That’s why it goes lager, lager, lager, lager. It was never meant to be a drinking anthem. It was a cry for help.
(Karl Hyde, The Guardian, 2006)
What the size conceals is how little composing, in the old sense, the vocal required. One night, one take, a lost place, a repeat. The music is the opposite: patient, huge, built to hold a man who cannot hold a sentence. That mismatch is the record. A tidy lyric would have made a tidy single. The splinters made a song people use at the moment they are least able to read them, which is either the failure or the proof.
What remains is the greyhound’s name on a cry. Born Slippy .NUXX still fills rooms that do not know Wardour Street. The cans still go up. Hyde, sober in the later years, lets them.
