Revisiting 'Asleep in the Back' - Elbow's murky ode to their hometown

Recently, I saw a meme on Twitter mocking Keir Starmer supporters - rightly so of course. Within the dystopian montage of images set to MGMT’s excellently memeable track ‘Little Dark Age’ were the usual valid critiques of Starmer and his fanbase. However, one part I couldn’t forgive was the inclusion of the generic Spotify template proclaiming ‘This is Elbow’, as if being a fan of Elbow is somehow akin to believing in Centrism in all its (lack of) glory and progress.

Well frankly, I’m not having it. Sure, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ probably strikes a chord with every dad across the land and beyond with its wistful and poignant croons that could just as easily be courtesy of your dad’s mate down the pub. Sure, ‘One Day Like This’ has inevitably become the overplayed staple of those that yearn for the Britain of the 2012 Olympics when everything was fine and dandy (it only took a year after those London riots as well - amazing!). But at the risk of sounding hipster, there was so much before and after that made this band an absolute must-listen for anyone with a pair of ears.

It should also be mentioned that ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ is absolutely brilliant in any case. ‘The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver’ is just as haunting now as it was in 2008. ‘Some Riot’ is a heartbreakingly beautiful paean to a drunken friend transgressing the limits of what is right, and the aforementioned ‘One Day Like This’ is still a stunning song, regardless of how often it gets played.

But there’s a band before and indeed after this album that deserves attention. ‘Cast of Thousands’, their sophomore effort released in 2003, hones in on Garvey’s masterful bitterness from the debut through tracks like ‘I’ve Got Your Number’ and ‘Ribcage’. For me, it’s hard to say whether ‘Cast of Thousands’ or ‘Asleep in the Back’ is Elbow at their best. I’d argue that it edges out ‘Asleep in the Back’, but only just. 

‘Asleep in the Back’ paints a bleak picture of life in Northern England to say the least, and we get that from the very start on ‘Any Day Now’ - a song about escaping that bleakness punctuated by the subtle sound of hospital beeps. It’s a far cry from anything on ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, but it packs just as mighty a punch.

‘Red’ serves as a stark warning to a friend living too fast - much like the aforementioned ‘Some Riot’ in many ways, before ‘Little Beast’ takes us back to Bury and all its emptiness - ‘the whole town’s slipping down the hill, like the spine of something dead’. It’s so rare for a song to encapsulate that hopelessness sonically, but Elbow absolutely nail it here.

That kind of emptiness segues into other tracks like ‘Bitten by the Tailfly’, but ‘Powder Blue’ precedes that with the kind of depressing gut punch that few other songs have managed. It genuinely might be one of the most depressing songs of all time, and that’s a huge compliment.

The title track and ‘Newborn’ take us to sonically sunnier climes, but the lyrics are anything but - ‘I’ll be the corpse in your bathtub’ for instance. Then frontman Guy Garvey again takes on the role of concerned friend on ‘Don’t Mix Your Drinks’, before the woozy ‘Presuming Ed (Rest Easy)’ which encapsulates the fear, trepidation and excitement of potential fatherhood (at least from this fatherless perspective).

In essence, Elbow have always been there since the turn of the century, offering us advice, a hug, a pint, and all the wondrous things in between. But the gritty edge of their early work is something that deserves a hell of a lot more attention. Take the ‘Beetlebum’ snarl of  ‘Coming Second’ for instance, in which Garvey sings of his jealousy at ‘coming second to dickie face white nine to five who’s just arrived’. Again, it doesn’t hold back, nor should it.

The album closes with ‘Can’t Stop’ (which oddly hadn’t been on the very first version of the album I downloaded on iTunes way back when), followed by ‘Scattered Black and Whites’ - a Proustian dive into the majesty of memory. It’s a nostalgic and hopeful end to a bleak and embattled album.

As I write this, I’m reading Pat Barker’s debut novel, Union Street, which equally encapsulates a time and a place to great effect. Where Barker depicts a Thatcherite patriarchy in the north east, Elbow creates a hopeless north-west at the turn of the millennium. Now, some 23 years on with much of that hope still missing, ‘Asleep in the Back’ deserves to be heralded for the great album that it is.