Daniel Land

I’ve actually had a couple of boyfriends called Benjamin, but I do change the names around in my songs: for privacy reasons I won’t say the guy’s real name. What I can say is that "Benjamin's Room" is about my first boyfriend, my first real relationship, someone I write about quite a lot in my upcoming memoir under the name "Seann". 

This was in Devon in 1998. I was 17, and I came out at a time when Section 28 was still in force, and when the age of consent for gay sex was significantly lower than it was for my straight peers (I later fought to change both these things; you can read about that in this extract from my memoir). 

“Ben" and I faced a fair amount of resistance (and a certain amount of homophobic bullying) in what was a very conservative town and time. His family were deeply homophobic too, and did everything they could to keep us apart. But we still managed to steal afternoons (and the occasional evening) together, during college term time, usually by slipping away to my house.

(I don't have a picture of myself with the boy in question, but here's me with my best friend, Verity, from that same year, 1998)

There’s something almost metaphysical about first love. I can remember whole days spent in bed doing nothing really: talking, kissing, making love. In those moments I felt a kind of transcendence I don’t think I’ve experienced since. That was all hightened by a definite us against the world (I'm tempted to say folie à deux) feeling given the strife we experienced locally. 

A couple of people have asked whether “Benjamin’s Room” is a reference to James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room. The title is, I suppose: I was certainly aware of Baldwin when I wrote the song, but I didn’t actually read him until years later. The real allusion is to Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf, which I read around 1999 or 2000 during an intense Woolfian phase. I suppose hovering in the background as well was the general sense of how important bedrooms are to teenagers: they're the only space that's private and yours (although only up to a point)—the whole Beach Boys “In My Room” aspect of it all. 

The funny thing is that, given the situation with his homophobic parents, I never actually saw “Benjamin's” room, or even his house, which was in a different town five or six miles away. So the song is, in a sense, a kind of wish fulfilment. My room became “his” room because it started to only feel alive when he was in it.

The line "This is my new lover song / Can you hear it in the bedroom" is about something that happened on one of those lazy, loving afternoons together at my place. "Ben" was a bit of a prankster (one of his coping mechanisms, I came to realise, was to needle people a bit, to get a rise out of them); one afternoon my brother was ascending the stairs, to his bedroom (next to mine), and "Ben" pretended to cry out with passion, just to embarrass him: I had to shout through the wall to tell my brother that he was just kidding around, while I tickled “Ben” into silence and submission.

The images of stars and pines in the lyrics come from another time with him. For all the difficulties we had seeing each other outside of college hours, there was one Saturday when he was visiting my town with his family, and managed to slip away to see me for a couple of hours. I was so happy about his surprise visit! At the end of the afternoon I walked him up Canal Hill towards his grandma’s place, and we kissed goodbye in an alleyway in the early December dusk, with the breeze whistling through the evergreen pines above us and the first stars just beginning to appear. It is one of my favourite memories of him. 

(Canal Hill, Tiverton)

That relationship ended in a dark place, with both of us experiencing mental health issues; I wrote about the aftermath of all that in my recent single “Snowdrops”. I spent most of 1999 in recovery, but in 2000 I was able to put it all behind me: I moved to Manchester to study English, and overnight my life changed forever. I never lived in Devon again.

By 2002, I’d met Graeme Meikle, had started singing, and had begun writing songs. By the autumn of 2002 we’d already written songs that would go on to become audience favourites (“Codeine”, “Glitterball”) and I was starting to write independently as well.

(Whitworth Park Halls, University of Manchester, Autumn 2000. Blurred out: a friend who is obviously stoned, and likely wouldn't appreciate this picture being on the Internet)

“Benjamin’s Room” was one of the songs I wrote on my own. It was January 2003, and around the time my winter student loan instalment came in, I saw a guitar in a shop on Deansgate that I couldn’t stop thinking about. 

It was a Crafter semi-acoustic, a bit like the Gretsch I’d seen Robin Guthrie play with Violet Indiana at the Night & Day Café in 2001, or the guitar Joni Mitchell played on her 1979 tour (filmed as Shadows and Light). I’d never owned a guitar before: I barely thought of myself as a guitar player, so I always just borrowed them, but it felt like it was about time I bought one.

One afternoon that January, I was in an English exam in a big gymnasium on the Manchester University campus, answering questions about Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism, and I was thoroughly bored: all I could think about was going out to buy this guitar. I did it straight after the exam, and the chords to “Benjamin’s Room” were the first thing I wrote on it that night. The chorus, what became “This is my new-lover song”, actually started life as “This is my new guitar song…”

Graeme and I were making so much music at that time that I actually forgot about “Benjamin’s Room” for a while. Already by then we (or I) had written “Good Speed, Good Fun”, “The Magic In My Head”, “Codeine”, “Glitterball”, “Lovelife”, “Starfish Fucking”, “Lee-on-Solent”, “Starcrossed/Butterfly Lovers”, and many, many more: we had an archive of perhaps fifteen or twenty C60 or C90 cassettes with various ideas on them (many of these were shite, of course). 

I probably did just one rough take of “Benjamin's Room” to get the idea down and then moved on: there was so much material flying around at that time that it was hard to keep track of it all. I only rediscovered it a year or so later when I stumbled across it on a cassette and realised it was good; I’d completely forgotten about it.

(The cassette archive as it existed around 2007).

Our first proper attempt at recording “Benjamin’s Room” happened in 2007: the autumn when the Modern Painters started. 

I'd recently recorded Voss, largely by myself. And there was meant to be an EP between that release (September 2007) and Imagining October (July 2008), which would have included “Benjamin’s Room”, “Glitterball”, and a couple of other things. But a few issues with the recording (basically, our near-complete lack of decent equipment) meant that some of the more complicated tracks had to be held back until the first album.

From 2006 until 2012, Graeme and I lived in a five hundred year old cottage in Northenden, South Manchester, with a rotating cast of housemates. All the Modern Painters music was recorded there, in my bedroom-cum-studio: a large space with a vaulted ceiling, oak beams, and a view out over a church and graveyard. 

(This is just one corner of the room, and the microphone is at standing height, so it gives you an idea of how large that space was—big enough that, even as a six-piece, the Modern Painters and I could rehearse in it. Photo taken around 2009—the A2 charts pinned to my wall show the chords and structure for what became “Run Silent, Run Deep”).

A lot of the instrumentation from that early version of “Benjamin's Room” made it to the version everyone knows: Graeme, Oisín, and I all played acoustic guitars, and Oisín did the country-leaning arpeggiated lead part that carried over into the final recording. There were some subtle ambient guitars on it, courtesy of me, but the whole vibe was much more acoustic and country-sounding than the final version. 

I played bass, and did the (very rudimentary) “drums” on a keyboard, playing with my fingers and a “Jazz Brushes” setting. Drum recording was a total shitshow for me at the time, and was always the bottleneck for recording: I hardly had any equipment of my own and was constantly having to beg and borrow gear from friends. Quite a few tracks went down with these kinds of fake drums, or with drum machines, instead of real drums. 

There was also some studio chatter at the beginning: Oisín, Graeme and I pissing ourselves laughing as we did Father Ted impressions to each other. Most of our recording sessions were like that: we took the music seriously, and for me it definitely came from a deeply emotional place, but in the execution of it were were often in fits of laughter. 

(One recording session in Northenden).

And then, in mid-2008, Nathaniel Cramp from Sonic Cathedral emailed, saying he wanted to release a 7-inch single. We shared a bunch of unfinished material for him to choose from. “Benjamin’s Room” was one of the songs he picked. He said (and I though this was a great idea) that pairing it with a remixed version of “Within the Boundaries” would show the two sides of the band: the shoegaze part, and the country part.

Ulrich Schnauss and Mark Peters remixed the tracks. They added some extra instruments to “Within the Boundaries”, but not so much to “Benjamin’s Room”, I think: most of the instrumentation on that one came from those earlier Painters sessions, or from other things I'd added in the year that the Modern Painters and I had been performing it live. By that point, “Benjamin's Room” had become much more floaty and ethereal, and I'd come up with those long, shoegazey guitar trails: those were part of the bundle of things I handed over to Mark and Ulrich. 

For the Sonic Cathedral version, and at Ulrich and Mark’s suggestion, we replaced the programmed congas with real ones (I'd bought some congas in the summer of 2008 because, at that point, the Painters had two drummers: I needed to give them things to do!) Mark came round to my house one Friday night to record me playing the congas and left me with his nice preamp: I used this to re-record my vocals for both tracks. The drums were reworked as well: Mark reprogrammed them, using more or less the same pattern as on the demo, but with much better sounds than I’d had access to at that time. 

I think Mark had a bit of a nightmare with the drum programming, because the tempo slips ever so slightly here and there: when the basics of “Benjamin’s Room” were tracked in 2007, we weren't recording on a DAW—we used a digital mixer and kept time with a metronome from a cheap Yamaha keyboard (unbelievable in retrospect). The tempo slips aren't obvious on the recording; it sounds like a normal band performance, where you can expect minor, human variations. But it meant that when Mark and Ulrich mixed it in an actual DAW, with grid-lines, they had to finesse things a bit to make it all click together. (Our recording abilities definitely got better as Graeme and I invested more money, and time, in things over the years, but our early recordings were pretty threadbare, rustic, and amateur: it was only really with the first album that things turned a corner.)

(The view from my studio out to the church, taken in Autumn 2011 when I was mixing “The Space Between Us”)

The Sonic Cathedral single came out in 2008 and sold… very badly, I think! I write about this elsewhere on my site, but it's funny that those two tracks (and the wider Love Songs for the Chemical Generation album) have come to be seen as sort-of neglected classics, because at the time they fell into a great silence.

The album more so, I'd say: thanks to Nat there was actually a decent flurry of press for the 7-inch single, although that didn't make a difference to the sales; I think it was possibly one of the worst-selling Sonic Cathedral releases. And when the album came out, a year later, it sank totally without a trace. There was a period when I couldn't give it away: from 2010 until 2015 or so it was available as a free download on my Bandcamp, and it attracted very small numbers…

How things have changed! It's been a charm and a delight to me that things have now swung back around the other way and it's getting some listens. There's an irony in there, I suppose: it was all nearly 20 years ago now; I do feel like a different person. 

But I can't deny that as my Spotify numbers have ticked up, from the hundreds, to over 40,000 now, and as more and more people reach out to say how touched they are by the music, there has been a slight feeling of settling; of relaxation; of gratification; of the knowledge that this work, which I never put less than 100% of my heart into, is achieving some belated and most-welcome attention.

Anyway. Not sure if anyone actually read as far as this sentence, but it was, for me, a nice trip down memory lane; either way, thank you for reading, and for listening—whoever you are.

Daniel