Climbing Up The Walls...
How it all started in a Sainsbury's car park...
Hello friends!
Firstly, some immediate news! Bandcamp Friday is back and this month’s reworking is out today and is an entirely solo synths-and-bleeps endeavour as I take on the mighty Radiohead and rework a special version of ‘Climbing Up The Walls’.
You can download it for a very limited time here: iamtheanchoress.bandcamp.com/track/climbing-up-the-walls-2
Please be as generous as you can with your donations today as it's Bandcamp Friday when no commission is taken on all sales and 100% of revenue goes directly to the artist. Your patronage is ploughed straight back into making it possible for me to continue creating and sharing new music every month with you directly.
I have moved my mailing list across to its new home here at Substack as Mailchimp was soooo darn expensive to use and I also wanted to have a place to dive a little more deeply into what’s going on in my music world here at Anchoress HQ. So here goes the first deep dive into this month’s song choice…
CLIMBING UP THE WALLS
Alongside the Manics, Radiohead have always been a key band for me. OK Computer was kind of a gateway album for me getting into “alternative” music. I remember hearing ‘Paranoid Android’ on the car radio for the first time while I was in the back of the car after school with my Mum in Sainsbury’s car park. I was just mesmerised.
It felt familiar in a way as the kid that grew up on classical music in ballet class and playing in youth orchestras. The strange time signatures and shifts in tempo felt familiar but exciting.
They were also the band that taught me how to play guitar. Or rather, I should say, I taught myself, clumsily learning the strange chords shapes with my hyper mobile bendy fingers from the tablature book I got that Christmas after I permanently “borrowed” my sister’s acoustic guitar (I still have it - sorry!). I slowly worked out that hyper mobility and finger picking are good bedfellows - thank you ‘Street Spirit’! - and that Thom Yorke also repeated lots of his chord shapes across an album, making the process of learning infinitely less painful in both the physical and metaphysical sense!
Not long after I would start those first tentative steps towards writing my first “songs” and occasionally, somewhat shyly playing something to a schoolfriend at lunchtime in the music rooms, although it would be many years yet before I could admit “I want to do that”…
There weren’t many examples of girls in bands that weren’t just the front person. And I didn’t want to “just” be a singer. I wanted to climb inside Johnny Greenwood’s weird and twisted sonic landscapes. I wanted to pluck out strange melodies on a piano, even though I didn’t know how to play it properly because my parents couldn’t afford lessons for me, no matter how much I asked.
As an autistic person who felt permanently uncomfortable in their emerging adolescent body, I also loved Thom’s unashamed awkwardness that reclaimed a kind of beauty and glamour for those that didn’t quite fit the expected mould. And he had a fake fur coat. While the Manics would go on to be THE band that captured my heart and soul completely, Radiohead would always still excite and challenge me musically as they shape-shifted through their experimental phases and morphed into something that lots of my friends just didn’t “get” anymore. Not only did I “get” it, I lapped up each and every twist and turn and unexpected new sound.
I hope you enjoy what I’ve conjured for this Bandcamp Friday from my armoury of synths and bleeps that tries to capture just something of that “teenage feeling” (as Neko Case puts it…)
You can download ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ for a very limited time only from The Anchoress Bandcamp.
Your patronage is ploughed straight back into making it possible for me to continue creating and sharing new music every month with you directly
With thanks and love as ever,
Catherine (aka The Anchoress) xx
