SONG: "The Ballad of David Icke" - Clem Snide (End of Love, 2005)

A simple song, this – but, as I’ve said before, it’s often the simplest ideas which are the most effective. A two-minute a cappella track about the notorious E.T.-fearing loon who once made a right tit of himself on Wogan doesn’t have a particularly promising ring on paper, but on record it becomes something else entirely.

I stumbled across Clem Snide when the band’s lead singer Eef Barzelay played solo support to Ben Folds on his last UK tour. At the time I wasn’t sure if ‘Clem Snide’ was the singer’s own name, a collective band moniker or a persona he’d created. However, what quickly impressed me about this wiry, bespectacled character was the fact that within seconds of strumming his first chord he’d managed to silence the room with his engaging tales of religious doubt, the sinister side of I Love Lucy and waking up in a world soundtracked by German hip-hop. Literate, paranoid and at times just plain odd, his lyrics primarily focus on the eccentricities of his own perspective and the off-kilter way the universe seems to stare back at him. The accompanying music is old-time folk in its overall feel, but infused with a melancholic alt-country twinge which brings to mind artists like Smog, Sparklehorse and Heartbreaker-era Ryan Adams.

This song originally appeared on a political benefit album in the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election entitled Future Soundtrack for America, before turning up on a bonus CD with the band’s most recent long-player End of Love. The double-edition of the album is well worth tracking down, if only for this and the video for their equally-magical single Fill Me With Your Light, in which you get to see Barzelay do the grooviest little dance this side of the Pixies girls on Youtube.

What really makes this track (though of course it has to, given that it’s the only musical element on there) is Barzelay’s achingly sad voice, an instrument so finely nuanced that it conveys subtleties of expression that most singers can only dream of. Full of defeat but still able to convey humour in its strangely reciprocal tone of desperation and bemusement (there’s a great moment on the album when the music trickles to a halt and he sings “The first thing every killer reads is – Catcher in the Rye…”), when combined with the despondency of the song’s lyrics it’s a truly marvellous thing. “The secret rulers of the world have stolen my girl”, he wails plaintively in its opening seconds; “They whisked her away in a black limousine / And that was the last of her I’ve ever seen…”

It’s certainly tongue-in-cheek, and might even be slightly silly were it not for the unfakeable anguish in Barzelay’s voice and the strength of the protagonist’s conviction that his beloved’s will would remain resolute no matter what (“They knew that her heart was the purest of pure / Through unbearable suffering, she would endure”). There’s beauty in the horror, and even a certain poetry as the abductee stares into alien eyes and longs to find herself “Drowning in honey, awake in a dream”. The surrealism of this ghostly waltz is enhanced by its sole concession to production trickery - a lonely echo which creates the effect of it having been recorded in a deserted aircraft hangar which he’s stumbled into just certain that he’d find evidence of a massive government conspiracy.

It the song were any longer it’d probably fall flat on its face. Set it to music and I suspect it also wouldn’t work half as well – but then that’s the mark of any savvy tunesmith, knowing just the right buttons to press and for how long. “Now that I’m found, I miss being lost”, Barzelay muses on another fine track from the album, the gently ambling Jews for Jesus Blues. Listen to it at just the right time of night and you’ll find yourself magically transported to a similar netherworld partway between consciousness and dreaming.