You shift in your seat
And sip on your holsten pils
And say ‘its interesting, that
the vikings could build
Like incredible longboats
But they couldn’t draw them for shit.’
(From 'Charlie And Horse')

Here then are *our* incredible longboats: the all-conquering majesty of our songs as ideas, sailing on the sea of potentiality before being rendered clumsily on the flat plane of reality. These are the ones that didn't quite make it, the ones that we forgot about, the ones we had hopes for but just didn't fit. Here is a mixed bag of phone and home recordings, practice run-throughs and studio casualties. Have a rummage around, there's 25 different curios in here. Your new favourite Soup Review song could be in here. All songs have accompanying lyrics and notes. Enjoy !


ALL THE LINER NOTES:

Charlie And Horse

Chris: There was a period where we thought our 3rd album ‘Go and See’ was going to be our “Horse Album”. In the end, only one of our vaguely horse-themed songs stayed on the final track listing and Charlie and Horse didn’t quite make it to the finish line.
This song was inspired by two unrelated things: I witnessed a white horse gleefully rolling itself in mud on a quiet morning in Rivelin Valley and Mario had a conversation with their housemate comparing the achievements of the great ancient civilisations (i.e. The Vikings and their longboats) with the contributions of 20th century pop and rock icons (i.e. Neil Young’s 1974 classic On The Beach). The titular Charlie being that housemate of Mario’s: one Charlie Kondras - a man bountiful with bon mots, all ripe for plucking and sticking in a song. The fact that the two title characters are both drug slang I think is a coincidence. It only just occurred to me now writing the notes actually. Or maybe it was intentional and I forgot? I do however remember intentionally putting shades of Dylan’s ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ in the tune. Mario did most of the words on this one and we sang it together, a real collab ! Had a good energy to it when we were recording (provided mostly by good ol’ Zac B on drums) but the final product didn’t quite match up to the rest of the album.

Ian’s Big Treat Takeaway Tea

Chris: Cast your mind back to Lockdown 1, Spring 2020. To my mind one of the few pleasures left in life at that point was the humble takeaway. The ill-fated Delamere family Zoom quiz (we only managed two fractured installments) would conclude with everyone asking everyone else what they were having for tea. My sister Catherine’s partner Ian was having a treat and getting a takeaway. Great. Lovely. There was a catch however: Catherine was trying not to indulge herself so Ian’s takeaway would have to be of a sort that Catherine would not be tempted to try. Yes - the mercurial Delameres, with their uncontrollable appetites, have always had to rely on their level-headed partners to sacrifice simply because We Cannot Be Trusted. Ian was looking down the barrel of ordering his 5th choice takeaway at this point. Pizza was out, chinese was out, curry: don’t even think about it. So Donner kebab was the likely choice, as my sister hates the odious elephantine ribbons. Poor Ian. Poor, steady, ‘not that fussed tbh’ Ian. Having said that, I have never seen eye-to-eye with my sister more. We are the same.

Down From London

Mario: About five months or so before I knocked life in London on the head, Simon and I had a day out in Margate to go to one of Francis Brady’s workshops at that nice shiny new gallery they have there. Turner Contemporary? We got up early in the foggy aftermath of a late night of chatting and smoking, and when I stepped off of the train into the bright autumn light of the seaside, I felt a real yearning to become a better, healthier, happier person. I wrote a poem about it in my notebook, just for me, forgot about it, then came back to it a few times. I feel like I went really hard on this one, and I really like this performance of it, but something about it just hasn’t clicked, I feel like it’s maybe a bit too esoteric. Also I think the lyrics are really heavily indebted to Faith Eliott’s absolutely stunning album Impossible Bodies, in a way that made me feel like I was plagiarising Faith - I feel like I mentioned this to them and they weren’t fussed about it? Anyway listen to that album, it’s really good.

Interesting Cutlery Party

Chris: a short silly poem-set-to-music about a meeting of people who experiment with alternatives to conventional utensils.

To A Flying Fish

Mario: I have this really lovely book called Voices from the Sea, subtitled Poems by Merchant Seamen (Selected by Ronald Hope), which has been a bedtime favourite for years. There’s this poem To a Flying Fish by Edward Boyston-Smith:

You were cool in the deep green
Wave, with others dimly seen,
Veering, dappled by waving rays,
Veins of refracted sunlight.

Then you launched boldly, to pierce
The surface-membrane, met the fierce
Rush of bright air, and revelled in
Momentary air mastery.

Planing on fleeting ecstatic wing,
How could you miss the frightful thing?
Was it hard on the hot deck,
Flapping your life out?

I rewrote it in homage mostly as a writing exercise cause I like the images so much, but wanted to make it smoother for me to sing, and to put in the things it evokes to me. Now that I’m thinking about it, it feels like it’s in this weird grey area between homage and just theft, but we did a recording of it when we were in full swing with Go and See, and it just didn’t fit with the other songs, so I never got as far as worrying about how to credit it.

*That’s* how you…

Chris: I am easily riled by public behaviour that I perceive as having no sense of self-awareness or public obligation. For me, queues are an unfortunate by-product of polite society and one is duty bound to make the experience easier for all involved. When someone does not do that my irritability reaches fever pitch and, apparently, a song has to be written about it.

Sauna Rumour

Mario: This is a true story. Also I was listening to All Hail West Texas a lot when I wrote it, which is why it sounds like a song from All Hail West Texas.

A Recipe For Baba Ghanoush/Icarus Record Collection

Chris: Both of these songs appeared on our debut album 'From The Bed To The Settee (And Back Again)' but are included here as these versions deviate quite a bit from the album versions. The versions here are taken from a recording of a practice, so also include pretend in-between-song patter.
The recording of the album versions of these songs actually pre-dates us as a live performing duo, so once we came to perform them we had to re-work them. So - 'Baba' here has an additional guitar part and more backing vocals, and 'Icarus' changes from a scuzzy blues to something more akin to folk. In a way, I think we think of these live versions as the definitive versions.

I Am The Driver

Chris: a rare bit of Soup Review ‘character work’. This is a song from the perspective of someone who has been forced into servitude by some kind of mob boss. The way I think of it, the protagonist had historically committed a misdeed against the mob boss and in order to keep their life they had to leave their family and give themselves over to serving the mob. So then they’re stuck in this limbo of being alive, but not living their chosen life. Quite affecting actually.
I remember being aesthetically inspired by the (frankly quite bonkers) Al Pacino drama Hunters. Though not really anything in particular from it. There was just one bit that featured a dark limo at night I think. Don’t take this as a recommendation for the (frankly quite bonkers) Al Pacino drama Hunters.

Your Boyfriend

Mario: I wrote this for a Valentine’s Day thing at Delicious Clam. I was bold enough to ask the question: ‘what if your friend’s boyfriend was a dick who had weird bad centrist politics and only liked shit stuff like Carling and button bashing at Tekken 3?’ Mostly it reminds me of the lovely lager-fuelled Tekken 3 seshes we used to have at City Road before I got the new Mario Kart.

Dead Blue Tit

Chris: We released a home-recorded collection of songs called ‘Caterpillar Until Further Notice’ not long into the 1st lockdown in 2020. We had planned to release another collection basically straight away. This song was written for that 2nd collection. I was still going to work in the NHS and my daily walks to the office during that spring were beautiful and sunny but also hauntingly quiet. The quiet, along with that nervous hyper-vigilance that marked that early pandemic period, meant I noticed more on my walks than I would've normally. One day I spotted a perfectly pristine dead blue tit by the tram stop…

Yacht Feelings

Mario: I think this was fully a love letter to Dimitri, written for the aforementioned Delicious Clam Valentines Day thing, maybe specifically to be like, ‘Hey Dimitri, stellar bit pal.’

Thanks Flash!

Chris: 'Soup Review's Flash Gordon Suite: Music For The Last 20 Minutes Of Flash Gordon' is the great lost SR artefact. Performed exactly once at Regather in Sheffield at…I literally cannot remember the name of the event…but the idea was to represent a famous film with different performers given different chunks of the film to represent in whatever way they wanted. We were assigned the last 20 minutes of the film so it was chockful of lots of iconic moments like the joyless wedding of Ming and Dale, Flash using a rocket like a lance to kill Ming, and the bit where the Hawkmen arrange themselves in the air to spell out 'Thanks Flash!'. This song commemorates the last of those.

Where Only Drills, Flutes And Dogs Can Invade

Chris: I get hazy on the dates and timelines of when certain songs were written but if this isn’t a lockdown song I don’t know what is. Sheffield is full of rows of Victorian terraced housing, and it wouldn’t be overdoing it to describe the living conditions as still (lovely Victorian phrase) “cheek by jowl”. Lots of people, shared gardens, thin walls. You are very aware of what’s generally going on in your neighbour’s lives, even if you don’t want to be. If you add a national lockdown to what is already inherently nosy architecture, then you’ve got yourself a constantly unfolding drama where you are both audience and player. Social distancing and isolation were the big ideas at that time but I felt like I couldn't escape from the lives of others. I was trapped by them! I couldn’t bloody move for people! Our safe place, our home, was liable to be invaded at any moment by any number of echoes of the lives all around us!

Werewolves Of La Ciociara

Mario: My dad, uncles and grandma retell this story of my Italian granddad’s, who died before I was born. I love it, they always use it as a way of illustrating how superstitious southern Italians are, and finish it with the thought - ‘it might not have been a werewolf though’, which is just chef’s kiss, ‘it might have been an insane person, you know the word ‘lunatic’ relates to the moon, people are affected by the moon’ yada yada yada, which is pretty dark and obviously not at all chef’s kiss, but revealing in its way. I just love the idea of a werewolf wandering around the countryside of immediately postwar Cassino - a city that was bombed to shit because of its tactical importance. There’s something really evocative about that that I didn’t at all manage to get into the song, I’d say. Last line’s a cracker though.

Thirst Trappist Monks

Chris: a simple case of finding a pun and running with it. Used here to imagine a world in which Trappist monks no longer brew beer but instead post sexy pics on Instagram.

Stars In Their Eyes on SSRIs Demo

Chris: the first demo of our biggest song. Think me and Mario had written the bulk of this a few days before and I added the bridge and outro and recorded it all in a rush! I feel like I was sending this demo around to friends a lot once i’d made it, i knew we’d got a good one!

The Day After Epiphany

Chris: My family is an incredible source of material. None less so than my mum who, with her collection of over 17 different nativity sets, inspired this song. Traditionally, one is supposed to take down all your Christmas stuff on the epiphany, the same day that we celebrate the kings arriving at Jesus’ stable.
Through the Christmas period each set of kings lurks on a nearby bookshelf or mantelpiece to show that they’re ‘on their way’, but then having finally introduced each set of kings to their respective nativity, my mum feels ‘mean’ for packing them up in their boxes so soon after arriving at the stable. So she keeps them out another day so they get their time in the sun. A similar kind of sentimentality around objects applies to the subject of the second verse: a bag my mum keeps marked ‘odd gloves’.

Purdah Town

Chris: Purdah is a pre-election period in the UK during which public sector offices must maintain political impartiality and avoid announcing new policies or anything controversial that may affect the forthcoming election. In this song I sort of repositioned purdah as an old wild west outpost where all the widely known truths must remain unspoken. A nervous town where trembling hands hover over the holstered guns of politically controversial statements.

Dog Treaty

Mario: I think I tried to pet a horse while I was walking off an anxious knot of thoughts in 2021 and it stressed me out, cause like, what if it bit me? Switched the horse for a dog, bing bang bong, lil metaphor for getting comfy with Bad Feelings. I rewrote it too many times and never thought to add in a bit where I get to breathe.

Lovely Piece of Kit

Chris: as I careen ever further into my 30s I find myself coveting gadgets that I imagine will improve my life no end. One such gadget is the high power pressure washer. What began as pisstake of a certain type of garage-dwelling old fella has become a song for manifesting my greatest desire.

Volcanology

Chris: Uncovered this recording recently: a practice of us going through a song that I had previously recorded on my own for a podcast I used to produce called Dispatches From The Communal Bathroom. I have very little memory of us performing this together so we can’t have played it much (see Mario’s shaky grasp on the keyboard line). This recording provides invaluable insight into the Soup Review practice: the recording starts with a fart, then a reference to Richard Dawson’s Ogre but its about farting, and then blaming some recently ingested onions for the farts. The onions of it all suggests that this was a practice ahead of our show in June 2019 with Sean Morley. We used to run a show called ‘A Soup and A Show’ where we asked an artist to play a night with us and we’d make them a soup of their choice. Sean had picked French Onion soup and this band practice probably also coincided with a taste test of Mario’s practice soup ahead of the gig. The song itself follows the arc of a love story between to south american volcanologists.

Five Find Solace In The Group Chat

Chris: another pandemic era song about friendship, this one pairing the knockabout outdoor fun of an Enid Blyton adventure with the rich interior thrill of a Facebook messenger group chat. A tribute to Lauren and Liberty and the time we spent sharing stories and jokes and making memes for an audience of exactly 4 people. This also has, I believe, a classic phone recording feature: my partner Jade coming into the room while I'm in the middle of a recording, her seeing what I'm doing and swiftly exiting again. One can almost hear her eye roll on the recording.

Citrus Sharp

Mario: Basically there was this joke in which our whole MO as a band was to campaign to get Polo Citrus Sharps back on supermarket shelves. This may have originated in The Chat United FC, our group chat with Lauren and Liberty, after Liberty found a Twix wrapper that frankly belongs in a museum. I wrote the lyrics and sent them to Chris without mentioning what I had in mind, in the early days of writing the songs that would mostly end up on Go and See, and I think we had a brief giggle about it before forgetting it existed.
Chris: This one was a full 50/50 split write: me on tune, mario on lyrics. There's a very Peasant-era Richard Dawson vibe on the chords and tune. The music is sort of doom-laden and medieval, the lyrics are about sweets: perfect.

Come On In (Stay A While)

Chris: This one, This one. Man, I thought this one was going to be *it*. Coming out of the multiple Covid lockdowns in Summer 2021, I was drawn to writing about that first gesture of companionship after a long time apart, and the comfort of simply spending time together. No more rushing off after a short socially distanced chat on a doorstep. Finally, we said to each other: come inside, stay, be here with me. And it was exhilarating! The act of simply spending time with each other was intoxicating! Mario helped with the lyrics for the latter verses and together we crafted a song with a simple and strong emotional core that I thought would shine like a jewel on ‘Go And See’. I had earmarked it as the album opener. But y’know - a curious thing about the music making process - the recording you make sometimes just doesn’t come together and it ends up not only not leading the album but not on the album at all. I think in this case, it's not even that it didn't work, just merely 'we stopped working on it'. Our attentions just went elsewhere. This could've been the one !