SONG: "No Happy" - Serafin (No Push Collide, 2004)

This is an odd little effort which I never fully appreciated until I dug out Serafin’s first (and, to date, only) album No Push Collide for revisitation recently. With its blistering chorus and hard-line production, No Happy immediately jumps out at you as a standout track upon first listen, but it’s only after a few spins that it starts to become apparent just how genuinely bizarre this song is.

For my money, Ben Fox Smith is one of Britain’s most interesting and distinctive songwriters, and yet he remains relatively unknown outside of a small circle of alternative rock fans. He first came to my attention in the late 90s as the nasal-throated frontman of short-lived teen-rockers Stony Sleep, who cut their teeth on the promising LP A Slack Romance before disintegrating in a narcotic-fuelled haze when their record label collapsed (their bassist sadly didn’t survive the fallout; however, in recent years Smith’s brother Christian went on to drum for Razorlight). I came across Serafin entirely by chance when I heard an advance copy of their debut EP and immediately recognised Smith’s unmistakeable voice. Indeed, watching them perform around the time of its release, it was evident that the singer was experiencing a new lease of life: gone were the choppy Egyptian vistas of Stony Sleep’s later work and in was a more full-on rock approach which owed as much to mid-period Idlewild and the Pixies’ dynamic attack as it did to the furious charge of Nirvana.

Lyrically, Smith has always exhibited a somewhat distorted conception of the world. Sometimes he sings almost absent-mindedly, head cocked quizzically to one side as if staring out of the window and creating abstract metaphors for the everyday things that he sees. On this track, however, he goes one step further and spins a labyrinthine yarn reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and the gatekeeper scene from Kafka’s The Trial in its evocation of a tangled web woven by some enigmatic visitor. “Sunday morning, a revelation”, he sings; “Banged my head against a brick wall / Turned around, it was him!”. What follows is a philosophical and often surreal conversation between himself and this mystery sage, who offers him a series of cryptic riddles to solve in an apparent attempt to gain some form of clarity.

The narrative builds in weirdness and intensity until everything drops away and a lone guitar remains, perfunctorily chunking out the chords which will inevitably pave the way for the chorus. Its eventual arrival is prefixed with a hilariously skewed guitar bend, the alt-rock equivalent of a needle being abruptly knocked across a record or the comedy proing in The Prodigy’s Out of Space. When it finally drops, the chorus explodes with the full force of a fucking megaton bomb. “Go and get no happy! Go and get no happy!”, Smith shrieks like a banshee from the depths of an oesophagus that sounds like it’s gargling Jack Daniels and gravel. I honestly haven’t the faintest idea what he’s on about by this stage but god, it sounds incredible. The chorus itself seems almost hexagonal in construction; the accompanying chords shift around at odd angles to create a kind of rotating kaleidoscope that the melody can’t seem to break free from no matter how many variations on itself it attempts. Second time around, the sweetest of falsetto harmonies replaces the scream for a couple of bars before it all kicks off again in gloriously ragged fashion. “Go and get no happy! Go and get no happy!”…

Is the song a metaphor for something? Who knows. Judging from the title, it could be about depression or the darkness which befell Smith after his previous band’s collapse; alternately, when he sings “I saw myself as my own salvation” in the opening lines he might be suggesting that the mysterious visitor is a metaphysical extension of his own personality. But then of course it could be anything. The refrain in the chorus is at once a command from the protagonist’s instructor, a call to arms, or even the writer’s own veiled message to himself – like all the best art, it’s whatever you want it to be. What’s undeniable, however, is the skewed quality of the song itself and the fact that it rocks like an absolute bastard while doing something genuinely different. Well done, that man.

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Addendum: I e-mailed the above article to the songwriter for perusal and got this response, which he's kindly allowed me to reproduce -

"Hey Chris, excellent writer you are and thanks for the ego boost. You might be interested to know that while reading your article I realised what the song actually meant to me personally, but, as you know, that should never be the whole story. Essentially, something really weird is going on. I seem to write what I want to say without actually having to say it, whether it's to myself or to someone else. The truth is hard to bear and you're right, I am absent-minded, this is a good defense from it. It seems that songs are like being in therapy and not listening to the expert advice being given or even caring an iota what it is; until later. Thanks a lot, Ben. "