Northern Lights: Hood's "Cold House"

"Yorkshire is really a small country" ... I think it was the Guardian who said that in an editorial about 1995 or so, and it's certainly the only English county which is vast enough to have really significant dichotomies within its boundaries; urban and rural, Labour and Tory, old mining villages and prime foxhunting country, hippie settlements and aggressively conformist working-class heartlands, and the Bradford estates with an almost entirely Asian population up against many rural areas which are pretty much all white (in terms of differences within its bounds, the pre-1974 Lancashire comes close, but it lacks the sheer *vastness*).

There are just so many Yorkshires that us Southerners grew up on - I clearly remember the images and rhetoric of Scargill's collectivist troops battling the individualist tide, but I also recall reading Barry Cockcroft's books on the life and character of the Yorkshire Dales, starting with Hannah Hauxwell and then heading even further in, and being utterly spellbound by the timelocked rural lives portrayed. Many years later, William Hague (a Tory brought up in the sort of South Yorkshire mining community where they didn't even need to count the Labour vote - weighing it was enough) would flee to the other side of his native county, inheriting the Richmond constituency from Sir Leon Brittan, and attempt to appropriate what he perceived as a tide of public support for the preservation of the old Tory countryside. It didn't work - the ruralism most people related to was something more romantic, even more mystical, not recontextualised Thatcherite bombast and aggression.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can imagine Hood all going to university together, perhaps in Leeds, and suddenly finding themselves deeply unsettled by the greater harshness of what they'd just been thrown into, wondering how they could maintain the sensitivity and individualism of their characters. "I Can't Find My Brittle Youth" is the moment it hits home, the shock of the transition to the Leeds side streets of Braintax and Bowyer, a brilliant, percolating song built around disorientation, yet still keeping its cohesion and clarity intact. "This Is What We Do To Sell Out(s)" has a fantastically double-edged title, as if taking the urban shilling is simultaneously being condemned as the commercial cop-out option, and also something that will be enforced upon those who don't feel any affinity with the place that bred them ... or maybe even the disorienting line about "all your friends who have died". Certainly the music sounds relatively closer to a Leeds or Bradford estate than the rest of the album, and maybe this is what the city does to you - it invigorates part of your creativity, but you end up thinking less.

It can't last. "The River Curls Around The Town" returns to the source, and is a plate glass window of a song (not in any way specific to its inspiration - I associate it instantly with my own Southern English deep-country winter experiences, and it hits home). "Lines Low To Frozen Ground" is barely even there, like a landscape that doesn't feel the need to promote itself ("frozen ground beneath your feet / where you can be free"), and "You're Worth The Whole World" is a dream finale, full of barely comprehensible pixies' (not Pixies') voices and silent, unspoken love for what surrounds them.

If the government eventually succeeds in turning Britain into a truly federal society on the mainland European model, I think I'd use this album as the strongest piece of evidence for a reconstituted Yorkshire with greater powers. Any county that can produce this sort of psychological, musical and cultural dichotomy within one album has to be a place of endless fascination. I'd love to hear Hood's urban album.

RPC 24th October 2002
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Hood exist on the cusp of all this - they come from Wetherby, just inside (post-1974) West Yorkshire and therefore in a Labour seat, but always associated in my mind with its National Hunt racecourse, and thus with the tweedy and the land-working. Echoes of the deep country run high, but the noise and flux of Leeds is within commuting distance - you're never far away from either extreme, so it's easier to cut through the essentialist rhetoric surrounding both urban and rural communities, and see them for what they really are. Their "Cold House" album - recorded in Leeds, sleeve imagery gauzed, wintry countryside through frosted glass - captures the dichotomy brilliantly.

It's very hard not to associate a song title like "They Removed All Trace That Everything Had Ever Happened Here" with the agricultural recession, and the desolation of the lyrics also suggests a place whose past use has been removed permanently - the new suburban houses and capitalist settlements here now have zero connection with what was there before, it's as though history has been rewritten. A song like "You Show No Emotion At All" could as easily be about a place as a person - it transcends the language of human psychoanalysis to capture a deeper sense of impotence, Movietone's "Useless Landscape" indeed.

If the stereotype of Yorkshire is one of short summer and perpetual winter, Hood are using it for their own purposes. "With Branches Bare" fades in like one of Piano Magic's Bratislava taxidermies if it had been a derelict farmhouse on the Moors; couched in these terms are the sort of words most bands wouldn't touch because they'd see them as either too emotive or too neo-hippie ("sometimes the sunset doesn't want to be photographed" is the best line). "Enemy of Time" renders clear in its title the desire for retreat in their character, almost as if they literally want the world to stop.

The *real* masterstroke, however, is "The Winter Hit Hard". From its opening cracks on frosted ground, to the lyrical evocation of how much has *existed* here before, and how stultifyingly heavily it can weigh you down even if you wouldn't know how to live without it, to its ultimate images of hardship and deprivation over the sounds of burning fields and landscapes crumbling back into the dust from which they came, it instantly brings the foot-and-mouth pyres and their attendant chimera for a whole section of British life right back into my mind (the only other segment of a song that evokes those images so well for me is, perhaps surprisingly, the outro to Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill", a song which said everything about 1977 that the Sex Pistols thought they were saying).