Notes on Attention All Shipping

Someone at the songwriting circle asked if Attention All Shipping had been hard to write. I couldn't give a very detailed answer on the spot, but felt it was a question worth exploring a bit.

The short answer is, I don't find songwriting difficult. I find making time for it difficult, and I find being patient enough to let ideas form difficult, but the process of finding phrases and combining them into verses and picking up the guitar to figure out an arrangement, none of that is hard. (Picking up the piano to figure it out, I acknowledge, would be significantly harder.)

Usually, there's a nugget for a song, an idea that pops up organically and takes hold -- with this one, it was that German Bight crossed my mind and "Don't let the..." prepended itself unbidden.

From there, the idea of a Shipping Forecast with monsters wasn't a huge leap. I used to fail to fall asleep to it at university. There's something delightful and old-fashioned about it, and I love the idea of people around the coastal and inshore waters hunched over the radio, wanting to know what the conditions will be like for their particular navigational plans.

I love that it has a not-very-secret language all to itself -- it feels like you're listening to something in code, and once you know the format of it, you unlock some kind of forbidden knowledge, even if it turns out the visibility in the North Atlantic.

Once the idea set in, the final chorus followed pretty quickly. I opened up an awful lot of browser tabs about sea-monsters and Shipping Forecast areas (it still throws me that Finisterre isn't a region any longer, and that it's nowhere near Finistère -- which I guess is why they changed it to FitzRoy. People just liked it better that way.)

But then what? I figured it would be a tedious song that was a series of warnings, and two things became clear to me at once: (1) there needed to be an actual sea-monster story and (2) the only way I would be even moderately happy with the song was is it mentioned every Shipping Forecast region. Like Tom Lehrer's The Elements, but not just a list. That's what cracked it: suddenly it became a jigsaw. How am I going to shoehorn in Shannon? Can I do a Faeroes/Pharoahs joke? (Yes, obviously). Am I allowed to put some of them in the verses rather than the warnings? (Yes, it's my song.) Which ones start with the same sound? Which ones have awkward scansion and need to be buried at the start of a line (Hebrides, I'm looking at you.)

It felt obvious that the sea story had to be about a monster-related shipwreck -- in my head I stole the monster from the wikipedia page on sea monsters but on reading it back, I find that my details are different. I shall hastily retcon that that was deliberate -- after all, the narrator hasn't heard of this whale before. I wanted there to be some ambiguity about whether the beast was real or imagined, and whether the crew of the rescuing ship believed the story or not.

Once the structure was in place -- largely alternating between warning refrains and storyline, it took a few days of dog-walks to sort it all out. (Walking the dog is where I do most of my putting-together-of-words, to the point that I wonder if I should credit Pete Pawthleswaite as a co-writer.) I asked for Sam Hartburn's opinion -- I trust her to tell me what's wrong with a song in an encouraging way, and I try to do the same for her -- and she said the verses and refrains sounded too similar, so I switched up the chords (and to an extent, the picking pattern) to separate them. I think a "proper" version of it would have many voices doing the refrain. My experience of playing it has been great -- I find that it's pleasantly whimsical for most people, but for a small but significant subset it's YES! I LOVE THE SHIPPING FORECAST MY FAVOURITE IS BISCAY WHAT'S YOURS? And that makes me feel like I'm doing something good -- as someone who's spent a lot of his life obsessed by weird things that are tricky to explain to people (that's not junk, it's a cool rock), showing people it's not just them is something of a calling.

It's an excellent feeling when you feel like a song is finished and you can close all the tabs -- but I wouldn't call any part of it difficult.