All this mess and blood and grime and snail-slime makes life.
Puritans wash clean their filthy rotten souls
Nothing grows
God is love; love is dirt, unclean
We are unclean

– Ultrasound, “Sovereign”

Ultrasound were my favourite band when I was eighteen. And your favourite band when you’re eighteen stays with you forever.

Led by the fabulous Tiny Wood, a queer role model very much ahead of his time, the band were capable of writing prog-indie epics of heartbreaking beauty. On record they were great, but live, they were transcendental. A breakthrough tour saw them support Placebo, and blow the Belgian cod-miserablists off stage every single night; I’m sure Brian Molko handled this with his typical maturity.

Ultrasound were the ultimate outsiders. The five of them didn’t even look like they were in the same band. Which is, I think, why they wrote a song with the chorus “we’re in the same band” – to remind themselves.

They didn’t last long – I did always prefer glorious, heroic failures to sensible career-mongers – and then returned, unexpectedly, in 2012, when everyone had forgotten them but I needed them more than ever.

A lot of the best Ultrasound tunes were guitarist Richard Green’s tunes set to Wood’s lyrics.

I’ve been thinking a lot about songwriting lately, and I keep coming back to “Sovereign”, the closing track of this comeback album.

A sprawling epic musically speaking, Sovereign feels unusually personal and intimate. It’s huge and it’s tiny at the same time.

The lyric is perfect: a hymn to human connection and a rejection of Christian guilt and fear. As with album opener “Welfare State”, Ultrasound’s “Play for Today” reveals them as proud, almost heroic, working class modernists and socialists.

“Human beings weren’t born with morals and should not feel guilt for indulging in that that does no harm. In dirt things grow”, explained Tiny at the time of release, to God is in the TV zine.

“This song was the very first thing to come together when Richard played the chords that sort of shimmered in their own time. I spent a long time with the lyrics, honing and refining them, wrapped in blankets from the intense cold and trying to get to the truth of the matter.

“I was just trying to say that it’s alright to be who you are, and what you might think is grubby and sordid is actually the stuff of life.”

This honing and refining is what interests me, as I’ve been thinking about my own lyric writing processes.

For the show about far-future folklore that I wrote and performed last month, one song came together at the very last moment. The day before the performance, in fact.

It started off as an a Capella chant. I then tried singing it to some chords and the melody changed, and became warmer. The verses were stream of consciousness, with only very mild alteration after the fact.

The song is called Dunwich Dynamo, and is about a population of a future-Dunwich that has returned from beneath the seas and exists in thanks to an enormous electrical generator powered by mutual human labour.

Presenting the show to my friend Ruth a few hours before I was due on stage, she noted that I was very dismissive of my own songwriting.

In a section she encouraged me to cut, I compared my songwriting unfavourably with my band mate Martha’s. “She works on her lyrics very hard until they’re right, while I just toss mine away like an out of date salad.“

As I ended up saying in the show, here’s a kinder way of putting it:

“There’s an element of divining to it. The songs choose me, not the other way round.”

Wood, in Sovereign, was intensely influenced by the writing and art of Dennis Potter. It’s all there – the dirt, and the mess, and the truth.

I’ve reached a peaceful halfway house in my own process, and I’m confident in fiddling a bit more than I once would have. I’ve just added a middle eight to Dunwich Dynamo, and thought a little more about what I want the lyrics reflect. I’ve also changed a couple of lines from the original verses that I don’t think quite work.

But the magic still comes from finding out what comes out, rather than picking up an instrument with a particular intended outcome in mind.

It takes all sorts. And as Wood would say, there’s nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about.