Right so ‘Bury Me With A Scarab’ is the second single taken from The Bear and it’s out now. Here are the lyrics and at the bottom I’ve written about them, in some fashion…

‘Bury Me With A Scarab’ by Chris T-T

V1/2
Bury me with a scarab
The one I carry for luck is 2,000 years old
Bury me with a wooden Buddha
Stretched-out ears and a smile of gold
Bury me with a cross of Jesus
In a photograph soaked in piss
But bury me with an Internet connection
For when you start regretting that it came to this

BRIDGE
One nail, two nail, two nail, three
You’d better nail that coffin lid down on me
One nail, two nail, two nail, three
I’m not as dead as you thought I’d be

V3/4
Bury me with a guard of honour
A pipe and a drum and a dumb salute
Or in a ditch when the storm’s upon us
No-one gives a shit about the rotten fruit
Bury me however you want
Rituals and bonfires, knock yourself out
But bury me deep and keep on running
It won’t be deep enough, no, there’s no doubt

BRIDGE
One nail, two nail, two nail, three
You’d better nail that coffin lid down on me
One nail, two nail, two nail, three
I’m not as dead as you thought I’d be

HALF CHORUS
It’s always uphill all the way – and uphill all the way back
Never will you ever find a corner worth cutting on the way
That road’s a trap

V5/6
Just when I finished that last verse
Something fell out my guitar
A shiny black, massive black spider
Yeah, nature is having the last laugh
And now that we’re getting near the chorus
I don’t want to sing it again
I’m not going back to telling the story
Til I know where the spider went…

FULL CHORUS
It’s always uphill all the way – and uphill all the way back
Never will you ever find a corner worth cutting on the way
That road’s a trap
Always outside looking in – or inside looking out
Never will we ever feel the weather if together
We can blow away all doubt
Blow away the doubt

V7
So anyway
They buried me and nailed it down
My hands were tied and they cut my hair
But in the spring when they come back
They can dig all they like –
I’m not there.

I think ‘Scarab’ is about resilience in the face of the storms, and/or defiance against the oppressors. Also, it’s an attempt at more oblique, impressionist lyric-writing than most of my stuff. First of all, I loved the repeatable refrain of ‘bury me with…’ and I’d got that written down as a notebook idea on its own, with lots of different description options, like a potential list song. I was excited by how flexible that phrase could be – and how the resulting verses have no firm sense of place or scale, they just nod at history. The wooden Buddha is real. The cross of Jesus in a photo refers to Andres Serrano’s wonderful (incredibly controversial) ‘Piss Christ’ image. Recently a woman came up to me at a gig and showed me a little scarab beetle preserved in amber she wears around her neck; that’s exactly what I’m thinking of, the ancient Epyptian totem. The ‘pipe’ and ‘drum’ feel Crimean (in my head anyway), so it’s historically very skittish.

Once I started putting it together, I imagined a horror short, like a Tales From The Unexpected, influenced mostly by the Bloody Cuts film series. I like these remnants of old-school religious faith juxtaposed against the practical, casually modern Internet, in that a totem (or a ritual) may be vivid but fundamentally useless. Reminds me also of the James Bond villain sketching out some ridiculous drawn-out death method, when he could just shoot Bond and be done with it. We all know Bond will escape.

The ‘one nail, two nail, three’ bridge phrase was stolen from a song in spoof music biopic Walk Hard with John C Reilly; a few years ago I was lucky enough to sit in on music recording sessions for that film in Los Feliz – and the phrase (obviously originally written about Jesus on the cross, sung in deep south country/gospel) stayed with me ever since. When it came to pulling together this idea about being buried but not necessarily dead, it fit perfectly. Again, it’s meant to be a bit horror film-ish, like a menacing child’s refrain echoing across an empty playground (or something). I don’t think that comes across particularly in the final recording but it’s in my head when we sing it.

The spider verse was already written, completely separate to the rest of the song, though it happened to fit rhythmically. I have two other, more ‘normal’ verses that could’ve sat there instead (or it could’ve been re-arranged to be one verse shorter without much problem) so it was a conscious (nervous, time-consuming) decision to put the spider verse in (and in fact that decision wasn’t taken til after we’d recorded pretty much everything except final vocals). Although I love it, I know it divides people because of ‘breaking into the fiction’, especially when the content is otherwise ‘serious’. It’s a joke but not a joke: nature’s tiny intervention is so much more powerful/intrusive than the human stuff I’m banging on about (as we’re discovering in the real world right now!) so the other thing about that is, that spider verse has to be sung totally straight, not joked around with.

Recently we had to censor the lyrics for something and Ben suggested “No-one gives a fig about the rotten fruit,” which is better than the original, since fig, fruit, obviously. I don’t think I’ll change it every time but at least that’s a version that I can sing to schoolkids without any issues (and they love the spider).