THE DISTRACTIONS: Time Goes By So Slow

1979 again, and Manchester again, and Factory Records again (not that I’ve noticeably done anything on BiA yet to justify all those “again”s) but I was listening to an old Cherry Red compilation over the weekend, a Double Play Cassette, no less – Seeds 1: Pop on one side, Seeds 2: Art on the other – or to be more precise I was concentrating on side one. Despite the recent anniversarial interest in C86 the fifteen songs and artists on this length of tape still seem to represent currents in British pop which haven’t been properly explored or assessed (and much could be said of the more “adventurous” acts which populate the Art side, but that’s for another day and not necessarily an imminent one) – OK, most will recognise the June Brides and the Pastels but do many, or any, people still recall, warmly or otherwise, the likes of Vital Disorders, Big Table or even Girls At Our Best! (who even scored a minor hit album)? And what, if anything, is to be said or made of this tentative explosion of slacking youth, all of whose protagonists are now steadily hovering around the 50 mark?

I quickly noted how the female-led groups (including an atypical Television Personalities track) have generally proved the most durable and interesting, and how the Wild Flowers (semi-Goth types) spelled doom; the loathsome late eighties migraine-inducing treble-only drum sounds and so forth. But “Time Goes By So Slow” continues to stand alone. The five Distractions remain difficult to pin down; the single suggests a multiplicity of future options – the anxious rush of their rhythms suggests an OMD had they pursued the guitar rather than synth route – but above that “Time…” is one of the great post-breakup pop songs.

Singer Mike Finney, sounding like a less twinkly, more rough-hewn Roddy Frame, walks the streets and wonders why she left, why her laughter still remains; like Del Shannon, he busily mourns within his self-contained/self-destructive world, and like “Runaway” it’s raining (“It falls like tears/Of wasted years”). There is a slight beacon of hope in the song’s opening ascending rainbow of guitars and synth (bearing a slight relation to that other 1979 pop song as model of knowingly self-destructive world, Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” before diverting onto a different B road altogether) but the monologue, though addressed to the singer’s departed, is strictly internal and internalised.

In the second verse Finney manages to invent Jarvis Cocker, and his Manchester might even have been Cocker’s Sheffield if he’d had the chance; he puts her statue up in Albert Square “but Albert just won’t do/I don’t need him but you!” He pledges to drive past on a Saturday but can’t avoid the truth that “Just like my own/Your face has turned to stone.” It’s unclear whether she’s gone for good or actually departed this world, and the ambiguous interspace between the two is where the song finds its greying oxygen – as Finney wonders why she had to go with slowly increasing anger, some mocking “la la la”s enter behind, or beneath, him.

Then everything drops out except the drums and bass (and shortly thereafter, synchronised synth), representing the void in which he now finds himself; guitar returns for a brief unison, then a solo of sorts, but the despondency doesn’t diminish when Finney returns for the final refrain and we are finally left with a question mark of a synth chord and a bass slowly ascending to…heaven? They went on to release one album, 1980’s perfect Nobody’s Perfect on Island Records, which has yet to resurface on CD. But many still consider them the overlooked jewel in Factory’s crown, and “Time Goes By So Slow” remains one of the most singular of all singles.