(I'M) STRANDED & NOBODY KNOWS WHAT'S GOIN' ON (IN MY MIND BUT ME)

This is New Zealand. Peel back slowly and see (thanks to Bruce Russell with an excellent epiphany on The Velvet Underground & Nico's acetate in The Wire's August issue).

Even after a decade, there are still days I feel exactly like this song by The Saints. I forget whether I bought or exchanged '(I'm) Stranded'. But it was procured from schoolmate James Clubb with some other early singles by the Aussie band when I were knee high to a grasshopper in Ilkley. We'd take the bus to t' other side o' t' moor to Keighley to visit the one record shop 'round our parts that sold independent punk and post-punk records.

Stranded is a popular rock 'n' roll metaphor in our southern hemispheric antipodean settler paradises 'so far from home'. The Saints make it urban anomie rather than (wo)man alone in the beautiful wilderness or desert island. Could it be someone on their OE?

I like the way The Saints bracket the (I'm) in the title. Pop songwriters were applying the parentheses to split phrases long before post-structuralist academics used them to split subjectivities. The Chiffons gave us 'Nobody Knows What's Goin' On (In My Mind But Me)' back in the early sixties. Check out the shifting echo volume on the lead singer's vocal at the beginning of the track and the plucking harp later on. Schizophonics!