Interior Cities: Selected Lyrics 1993–2022

by Anthony Reynolds

Selected lyrics of Anthony Reynolds. Includes all the Jack, Jacques and solo albums.

262 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Collecting almost all of the lyrics from one of our most underrated singer-songwriters, and I believe now you can even get an updated edition incorporating the handful which escaped my early copy. Some of them are from songs I've heard I don't know how many times, especially in the case of Jack's brooding Pioneer Soundtracks; with others, I'm far less familiar. But unlike a similar collection of the lyrics of, say, Brett Anderson (to pick a frontman of a similar vintage, and with whose band Jack toured), there's never a sense of early inspiration giving way to an increasingly wobbly recycling process. Sure, certain concerns recur, but they're the big ones: sex, Catholicism, loss, time, art. The later lyrics are just as likely as the earlier ones to hit on a note of impossible yearning, which has always been one of my favourite emotions in music and poetry alike (it makes such sense that the publisher for this is called Hiraeth Press): "We were so, so young/And we'll be young again/Someday". Yeah, fundamentally I'll always associate that voice and the words from the early albums especially with being young, debatably elegant and not knowing where the night was going to end – or with the regrets attendant on where it did. The first side of that debut album, in particular, remains some of the best going-out music ever made for pretentious bastards who find most going-out music lamentably short on references to scandalous French novelists. But part of the charm of having everything together like this is seeing that sensibility mature, for a given value of the word, and reach a point where a slightly more settled life definitely has its appeal, despite which you can't help finding it melancholy that a fallen world won't allow you to have that, and this, and everything else, all at once:
"And then I walked out into the garden/Took my place under a cinder toffee moon/Took a swig of scrumpy/And indulged in my favourite fantasy:/That I could leave this moment now/And walk into every love affair I've ever known."

True, there are no annotations, which I generally like in a lyrics collection, but Anthony is working his way through those online, as and when, which I think may mean greater depth and less restraint than hard print, so it all works out.