Weather Report 2
Lyrics
Hello, how are you today?
I thought the vitamins would change my life
I walk down the city streets
I see weather reports
(It's like an ice rink)
Made a very, very, very big mistake
Nobody has called me sir in my entire life
You gave me the best years of my life
I look to the right then the left
The whirlpools cascade over my face
And I watched
"Murder, She Wrote"
At least five times
The cast deserved to die (3)
The whirlpools go wider and wider
Of words spoken
And you gave me the best years of my life
You gave me the best years of my life
Weather report
It's like an ice rink
Limescale (4)
In a Mediterranean retarded...
Mediterranean, it is not
Three days a week
(?) my TV
I miss my family in Oxford (5)
That's why I hope to get to back
That's what I'm looking at
That's what I'm looking forward to
That's the way it goes
That's the way it goes
You gave me the best years of my life
You gave me the best years of my life
The whirlpools get wider and wider
The whirlpools get wider and wider
Nobody has ever called me sir in my entire life
Nobody has ever called me sir in my entire life
The whirlpools cascade over the smoking tent
But then anathema
Gave up Tuesday
Chino hyphen lap (6)
Cheap crispy guitar
Nobody has called me...
Nobody has...
The medium
The whirlpools cascade
Over widening, widening, widening
Never mind Jackson
What about Saxon's
Recording of lost London
You don't deserve rock 'n' roll (7)
Notes
1. From a Quietus interview with MES (via Reformation):
Cumming: Is "Weather Report 2" a personal song?
MES: Yes it is. It’s one of the later ones. It is actually the last song recorded. It’s fitting that it’s the last song on the LP. It wasn’t meant to be like that actually. It’s a lot of people’s favourite as far as I can work out. If I’d have had my way, actually, I would have had it more instrumental. The only reason there’s a lot of vocals on there is the way we recorded it, it was quite difficult. We did that in Salford with Ding [Archer] in his studio. So it’s like you’ve got to do it very quick. The idea of it was to co-op an acoustic track with a machine track. Then I reversed it. Then Ding said, "If it’s going to work –" I was going to sing bits and bobs over it, just joining it up – and he said, "You can’t do that because we need a vocal level". So a lot of that is getting levels. They are the lyrics for it, but the middle bits – they’ve come out very well, and the end bits, I would’ve chopped them out, but they work out very well. It’s good that I didn’t have too much of a say in the matter! [Laughter]
This album in general seems to have medical and mortality themes running throughout. It now appears that MES had first received a cancer diagnosis around this time. Dan reports:
Eleni was quoted in "The Indelible Mark", by Simon Goddard, Q magazine, May 2018, p.44:
In early 2009, just as Poulou and the newly shipshape Fall F.C. of Greenway, Melling and Spurr were about to start work on their second album together, Smith was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In spite of his cult status as the post-punk Alex Higgins who likely bled Holsten Pils and chewed Marlboro butts for gum, Poulou maintains his specific illness was "non-lifestyle related". Smith was nevertheless "failed by the NHS", she claims, instead seeking medical attention in Germany were an infected kidney and surrounding tissue was successfully removed. "And he was fine", says Poulou. "He didn't need any chemo and he was five years clear. But he didn't want to tell anybody because he didn't want to be 'poor me'. He went right from the hospital and continued recording in a wheelchair. Mark was so, so strong."
2. Some of the commenters below have brought up the song by Kevin Johnson, and covered by Mac Davis, "Rock and Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life." An obvious, but not necessarily correct, thought would be that this line is addressed to MES's then-wife and Fall keyboard player Eleni Poulou. It is not (ever, in fact) clear that MES is singing in his own voice, so to speak; on the other hand, in a song that seems to confront mortality, it would be equally hard to insist that he does not identify with the narrator, and the song does have a sort of confessional tone. The best course is to keep all of this in mind.
3. "Murder, She Wrote" was a mystery drama that aired from 1984 to 1996. It appealed mostly to older audiences, and star Angela Lansbury was 70 by the time the show went off the air. The song is in some ways a reflection on aging, and "Murder, She Wrote" may be seen as a relatively placid entertainment for someone getting on in years, which produces a violent reaction in the singer. However, Lansbury should surely be given a reprieve on the basis of, at the very least, her performance in Gaslight.
4. Limescale is a chalky white deposit left by hard water in pipes, hot water heaters and kettles.
5. Oxford is in Southern England, and as far as I know MES does not have family there. This may be a fictional element, but there are various streets and roads named Oxford in Greater Manchester.
Aubrey: "Wanting to get back to his family in Oxford--he'd rather be watching Morse (set in Oxford) than Murder, She Wrote. Maybe."
6. There's a song called "Chino" on the same album.
7. Dannyno IDs this line (from the comments below):
"Michael Jackson died on 25 June 2009. Sky Saxon (formerly of MES-faves The Seeds) died on the exact same day. Guess who got the coverage?"
Again from Reformation:
Cumming: It’s a haunting end to that song, that last intake of breath.
MES: That’s right, that’s not meant to be there. [Pause, then quietly] Bit strange, isn’t it.
Cumming: Is that the process of fortunate accidents, chance operations?
MES: Very much so, yeah. On that one definitely. It’s a sound experiment, with things about whirlpools and esoteric lyrics over it, and it turned into that. I’m very pleased with it.
Thop comments:
"[Sky Saxon's 2005 album] Transparency was recorded live at the Dirty Water Club, a regular night of garage rock music in London. The club's last night was 19 June 2009, within the same week as Saxon and Jackson's deaths. I wonder if 'lost' could be a kind of reference to the club closing, had MES been a fan of it."
MES mentions Saxon in at least one live version of "Repetition."
See also note 2.
More Information
Comments (34)

- 1. | 27/04/2013

- 2. | 05/05/2013

- 3. | 26/08/2013

- 4. | 20/09/2014
Three days a week
(?) my TV
is...
Three days a week
I'm at ITV
which might make more sense of the following lines about missing his family in Oxford.
And might make the song a backwards journey from a pensioner lamenting their restricted lot to a media person working away from home and looking forward to retirement when (they think) they can spend more time with their family.

- 5. | 25/09/2014

- 6. | 19/06/2015

- 7. | 08/04/2016

- 8. | 19/04/2016
Transparency was recorded live at the Dirty Water Club, a regular night of garage rock music in London. The club's last night was 19 June 2009, within the same week as Saxon and Jackson's deaths. I wonder if 'lost' could be a kind of reference to the club closing, had MES been a fan of it.

- 9. | 20/02/2017

- 10. | 25/02/2017

- 11. | 25/02/2017

- 12. | 09/04/2017
Until that turns up, I'd just like to note the existence of a Charles Bukowski poem titled "Weather Report". It's in "Love is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977", published in 1977.
I suppose it's raining in some Spanish town
now
while I'm feeling bad
like this;
I'd like to think so
now
etc
Yeah, that's right, it pretty much carries on in that vein. I see you know your fucking Bukowski.

- 13. | 06/05/2017

- 14. | 05/02/2018
Maybe.

- 15. | 17/02/2018

- 16. | 04/03/2018
I'm suddenly struck by the echo of Hitler's comment, in the run up to his suicide:
The German people don't deserve me.

- 17. | 17/03/2018

- 18. | 22/03/2019
I see the song as Mark's reaction to a cancer diagnosis (swirling whirlpools in his head) watching Murder She Wrote on Repeat in a sort of trance. The Doctors calling him Sir. He's listening to random shit on the radio in bed trying to take his mind of things while fucked up on painkillers and sedatives...the whole album is pretty much like this. The radio is talking about Michael Jackson and some people stranded by the weather. Sounds like radio 4 or the world service or something.

- 19. | 23/03/2019

- 20. | 27/03/2019

- 21. | 27/03/2019

- 22. | 29/03/2019

- 23. | 30/03/2019

- 24. | 16/04/2019

- 25. | 17/04/2019

- 26. | 04/05/2019
And--there are a lot of comments like the other part of #18 lately, and I think they need to be taken seriously. But does anyone know that MES got a cancer diagnosis in 2010? It would cast a different light on much of the album, which we know does treat of medical themes in one way or another...and, finally, it feels a little ghoulish to be inquiring into it. Nevertheless, however suggestive it is, as far as I can tell right now this is all speculation.

- 27. | 04/05/2019

- 28. | 04/05/2019
https://www.discogs.com/Various-Country-Sounds-of-The-70s/release/7071560

- 29. | 04/05/2019
Eleni was quoted in "The Indelible Mark", by Simon Goddard, Q magazine, May 2018, p.44:

In early 2009, just as Poulou and the newly shipshape Fall F.C. of Greenway, Melling and Spurr were about to start work on their second album together, Smith was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In spite of his cult status as the post-punk Alex Higgins who likely bled Holsten Pils and chewed Marlboro butts for gum, Poulou maintains his specific illness was "non-lifestyle related". Smith was nevertheless "failed by the NHS", she claims, instead seeking medical attention in Germany were an infected kidney and surrounding tissue was successfully removed. "And he was fine", says Poulou. "He didn't need any chemo and he was five years clear. But he didn't want to tell anybody because he didn't want to be 'poor me'. He went right from the hospital and continued recording in a wheelchair. Mark was so, so strong."
There were rumours, but the story for public consumption at the time was that MES has broken his hip again.
Given this confirmation of the true nature of his illness at the time, revisiting songs of that period with this in mind does seem necessary.

- 30. | 09/06/2019

- 31. | 21/06/2019

- 32. | 19/11/2020

- 33. | 19/11/2020
Snow had blanketed most of the UK from December 17, 2009, to January 15, 2010 - in a winter which was described as the "big freeze". It was the most widespread and prolonged spell of wintry weather across the country since 1981 (coincidently or not the year another song entitled 'Winter' was recorded).
As the last song on the album to be recorded before release in April 2010 was it amongst this backdrop that the weather report was heard referring to the big freeze?

- 34. | 19/11/2020
My feeling is that the proximate inspiration for the song goes back to earlier in the year - Eleni's comments in note 1 indicate that there would have been hospital time for MES in February/March 2009, which is when a number of gigs were cancelled - at the time the public message was that it was down to another broken hip (the original broken hip, attributed to slipping on an icy pavement, was in c March 2004, by the way, so it's not impossible he might have been reaching back to that incident instead or as well, but I always prefer the more recent thing).
What about Saxon S
Recording of lost London"
Michael Jackson died on 25 June 2009. Sky Saxon (formerly of MES-faves The Seeds) died on the exact same day. Guess who got the coverage?
Sky Saxon's 2006 album "Transparency" was recorded in London. Perhaps that's the reference?