Brought out as the B-side for Life In A Day in March 1979, I missed giving it a mention when I posted about the anniversary of the album in a previous post.
In the early days in particular, I think the Minds recorded really strong B-sides to their singles. I have a real soft spot for this and Garden Of Hate (the B-side to Chelsea Girl), as well as another 1979 recording that stretched over into the I Travel single release in 1980 – Kaleidoscope. It appears on a flexidisc that shifts with the initial I Travel single release. The actual B-side of the I Travel single is New Warm Skin – possibly my favourite of this run of B-sides. There is something I find about the musical structure of NWS that denotes where they are headed musically for the next two years, at least.
I digress.
Back to Special View. When I was first exposed to this song, it conjured up very strong imagery in my mind. Jim’s lyrics had a very strong propensity for doing that for me. I think it is why I became such an ardent listener of his lyrics and started the art that I did. There was something about them that brought to my mind my own little music videos. Either it would be a continuous stream through the whole song, or it would be particularly lines and it would be like flicking through a photo book – that is more how the imagery of King Is White And In The Crowd works in my head – it’s snapshots of scenes.
Special View is a little of both. A little bit of a moving picture and a little bit of a “snapshot”. I had this very specific image in my head of this beachfront. A beach I had never seen before. Very sort of jumbled up and nondescript. Definitely a UK beach because no Australian beach would look so gloomy and downcast. This beach had a seawall, like a kind of wavebreaker thing. The beach was sandy, so I knew it wasn’t Brighton or any other shingled/pebbled beach I’d been to. It wasn’t one of my favourite beaches in the UK, either. Not that I’ve been to a ton of beaches around the UK, I’ve hardly been to any, in fact. Living in Luton and 100 miles from any beach meant that visits to the seaside didn’t happen that often – and although the Ayrshire coast is SSOOO much closer, I’ve been to the West coast twice since we’ve been here – once to Ayr and once to Girvan. This favourite beach I alluded to is Wells beach at Wells-next-the-Sea on the Norfolk coast. Nothing like Wells either.
The only other beaches or seaside towns I’d been to were Eastbourne, Hastings, Southend-on-Sea, Jaywick – near Clacton, Hunstanton, Bridlington, Weymouth and Weston-super-Mare. Nothing along the Welsh coast.
In 2021, as the restrictions were being lifted, I wanted to go to Portobello Beach in Edinburgh. I had recently acquired the poster pictured and I had found out it was taken at Portobello Beach and I wanted to see if I could find the spot in which it was taken.
Although it was June, it was quite a mild day that we went and the conditions were not dissimilar to the image I had in my head when listening to Special View. Porty itself felt so weirdly familiar and as we walked further along one part of the beach, it was there in front of me – the beach I had been envisaging in my mind’s eye all these years! It was “Special View Beach”!
Coincidence, I’m sure, as there are PLENTY of beaches that could have been in Jim’s mind when he was writing the lyrics. A composite of several beaches, even.
I love the pace of the song. It kind of meanders, but in a good and seductive way. It complements the mood of the imagery the lyrics bring.
I have always seen a meeting play out between a young man and woman – or perhaps a teen boy and girl. A young couple, either way. She’s sitting on the concrete sea wall waiting for him to show up “you know the summer’s gone / it won’t take long / I’ll meet you there” (I think that’s what he says – Dream Giver says the line starts as “you know the sun has gone” – but I hear that meeting of lips that brings the “mmm” sound out when I play it and listen to it. Either way, it’s the meeting that’s important.
I feel like I need to write a story about these two. In my head, I’m not sure what is going to happen from this rendezvous. I can’t work out if they’re just meeting up to “hang out” as young lovers do, or whether the foreboding of the sun/summer being “gone” is foretelling that he’s going to break up with her? Or that perhaps she’s requested him meet up with her and the line is just confirming that he’ll be there and she’s gonna give him the shove? She’s very mysterious. Those lines “the special view / the one she sells to you / no more consumes” I mean…wow! What the…? I bloody LOVE Jim’s ability to write with such ambiguity. It doesn’t sound like just a jumble of words put together. Although those words together make little sense.
She also seems quite a sad character with the line “The white mile city is so full of pity for the things she said” – that’s how the line sounds to me. Again, Dream Giver has different lyrics printed – although he is also just doing a deciphering job like me, as no lyrics to the song have ever been printed. Ah, if only we could ask Jim to pull out his notebooks from 1978/79 and let us know what the actual heck they are for sure.
The bridge of the song lightens up some and the tempo changes to be more upbeat but then we slip on back into that slower tone as the sun sets on the lovers. Are they still lovers by this point? “Love could be an illusion / she don’t seem to care.” Are we meant to interpret that she doesn’t care about love, or whether it IS love or not that she’s feeling for him? “You can cross your heart / play the part” – the part of girlfriend/love interest?
I just love how absolutely ambiguous it is. I see those two figures on the sea wall – her alone, and then with him when he shows up. And they sit there hardly saying a word to each other. Hardly acknowledging each other’s existence. How long do they sit there like that? Do they go off and have sex and just part ways until next time? Is it break-up sex? One last shag for the road? They meet, they shag, they see each other next week? Nothing in between?
I have to find out about them! Perhaps it is the burgeoning writer within me that feels so compelled to try and tell their story? We shall have to see.
In the meantime, I’d love to get back to Portobello Beach sometime soon. I’ll have the summer off from study after all.
