Don’t talk about it ‘cause I might feel so sad
Don’t talk about it ‘cause I might feel so bad
Don’t talk about it ‘cause I might feel so blue
Don’t talk about it ‘cause I’m in love with you now
Chorus
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey, hey hey hey
Don’t talk about it ‘cause you’re messing around now
Don’t talk about it ‘cause you make me feel down
Don’t talk about it ‘cause I can’t take no more now
Don’t talk about it ‘cause I’m leaving for sure now
Repeat chorus
Guitar solo
Repeat first verse
Repeat chorus
Jim Pembroke 1967
Artist: Blues Section
Line-up:
Jim Pembroke, vocal
Hasse Walli, guitars
Måns Groundstroem, bass
Ronnie Österberg, drums
Saxophone, Eero Koivistoinen
Release: A-side of 7” single Love Records LRS 1006, October 1967
Studio: Finnvox
Producer: Otto Donner
Engineer: Erkki Hyvönen
General comment: This is the A-side of Blues Section’s second single. See ‘Only Dreaming’ for more general comments.
The Music: It may the true that Jukka Tolonen Band invented Funk/Punk, as they used to announce at their gigs, but more than ten years earlier Blues Section were playing in a style that can only be described as ‘Jazz/Punk’: a simple, melodic pop song torn to shreds by a howling saxophone and a badly distorted guitar. You certainly can’t complain that the guys are selling out to be commercial on this, their second single, and the B-side ‘Shivers Of Pleasure’ (not a Pembroke song, so it falls outside the scope here) is even more ‘far out’, which is probably why it has escaped all the re-issue programmes save the 1980s LP ‘Once More For The Road’.
The structure is ultra simple, a two-chord riff drives the chorus, which has the same, repetitive two notes sung over four different chords. As with Pembroke’s previous compositions up until this point it is all pretty much the kind of stuff songwriters tend to come up with rather soon after having learned a few basic chords on a guitar.
My main objection is the sound of the distorted guitar, which is simply awful. There are a lot of nasty, high frequencies slipping through, known as ‘dirty’ or ‘un-harmonic’ distortion. In fact, most distortion pedals make such sounds but they are cut off by the average guitar amp, which reproduces only little beyond 3.5 kHz. To get a sound like the one Walli has on this track you either have to use a non dedicated amp for your guitar, or you plug directly from the pedal into the mixing consol in the studio. In any case the result isn’t anything to strive for, to put it diplomatically.
The lyric: At a glance there seems to be nothing much to come for here, save some repetitive phrases meant to carry the melody. But it would be wrong to dismiss this lyric so hastely. As with many other Pembroke lyrics the song features a male narrator pleading with his girlfriend to ‘treat him right’. Knowing quite a few couples where the man is English and the woman Nordic I can’t help but spot certain recurring difficulties, and it is hard not to draw parallels between these and essential parts of Pembroke’s lyrical production. There are some very basic differences between the roles that men and women are supposed to live up to when coming from such diverse backgrounds, and it often leads to serious problems. I don’t know much about Pembroke’s private life, but we must assume he has known one or two Nordic women in his time and it is mainly his experiences from these relationships he deals with in his songs (as Finland was where he basically spent his time from 1965 onwards). Viewed on that background there suddenly seems to be a heartfeltness to this lyric that a swift glance might not disclose. The narrator’s pleadings – and eventually his threats to leave the relationship if she keeps talking about ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ is) – come across as true and honest. It seems that we’re listening to one side of a very serious and genuine argument. This guy is deeply frustrated (and to make matters worse his girlfriend’s poxy, longhaired little brother in the next room with the new fuzz box he got for Christmas is making a horrendous noise like a dentist’s drill, satana perkele! But hey, hey, hey ... take a chill pill, maaaan!).
-- Claes Johansen, 2007