A Song on an Album
Should have been a single?
Ngaire's Substack Playlist 1
In 1992 when Breeders released their debut recording Pod, now considered a groundbreaking album, I immediately recognised the track Happiness Is A Warm Gun, written and composed by John Lennon, and I loved what they had done with it. I could wax lyrical about the whole album’s impact, in terms of musicality and lyrics but that’s for a rainy day in this chair.
The Breeders were a big thing for women in music: a member of Pixies (Kim Deal, joined by her sister, Kelly), Throwing Muses’ (Tanya Donnelly) and That Perfect Disaster (Josephine Wiggs). Arguably Kim had written some of the Pixies’ best songs and what’s his name was a bully. I knew JW’s band, where she played bass because they were regulars at my favourite toilet venues in northwest London. The boys always seemed to get in first when it came to writing about the Throwing Muses. If I recall using multiple gender stereotypes and word choices to put them on a pedestal or knock them down. I felt TM fitted into current feminism, the “I’m mad and that’s OK,” phase, a magnet for boys wanting to analyse the inside of their heads. It was about time one of them in the band realised who was missing in the fan scenario. It was like TD now belonged to us, not other people’s fantasies.
The BBC banned the original song for its sexual symbolism. On the other hand, the song is also referred to as a metaphor for drug use, specifically heroin. Neither is a thrill to me and yet, I love this song, the dragging of its feet, the yips… The Breeders version gets to the bare bones of the song’s mood: both the glorious melting sensation that comes, as the edge of everything begins to blur (as heroin addicts describe), and the fear, confusion, and destructive feelings that motivate addiction. (Allegedly, Kelly had experimented with drug. ) Even though she was new to playing guitar her understanding of the depth of feeling, showed in the band’s music.
It would have been interesting to see whether their version was acceptable for a 1992 BBC Top Of The Pops. There were a lot of guitar bands on TOTP that year: Manic Street Preachers, The Lemonheads, The Charlatans, The Sugarcubes, The Senseless Things… as a single, it may have just slipped through...
On another note Toris Amos’ album Strange Little Girls (2001), which featured covers of tracks written by men, interpreted from the woman's viewpoint, also features Happiness Is A Warm Gun. She had to get permission from Yoko Ono to release it. Toris brings the literal image of a ‘smoking gun’ and the idea of a phallic symbol into the frame. She investigated John Lennon’s death as part of the writing process. She discovered that Mark Chapman had seen an escort just before he shot John Lennon: A woman out there, forever silenced, being intimate with a killer and having to carry that around with her all her life. The result is very Kate Bush but not in a ‘should be a single’ way. You can hear Tori’s version on my new Substack Playlist 1 as well as The Breeders fab version.
