In the World
(12 Inch EP)

THREE TRACK 12" ONLY ON ROUGH TRADE. CAT NO. RTT175.

Side a- Loftholdingswood, Teddy Dogs
Side b- 464.

These three songs also appear on the CD
'Love Your Enemies'.

After a long absence of new material appearing on vinyl, 1985 finally saw a fresh offering from Microdisney. The two main songs had already been aired on a John Peel session almost a year before with the other song, '464', having been played live for a good six months. 'In The World' came with a much fuller sound and more up front lyrics than their previous releases.

Microdisney had a remarkable knack of writing songs that were easy to understand while, perversely, being equally ambiguous. You knew what they were about but at the same time didn't have a clue. Teddy Dogs is typical of this and is a bewildering mix of lyrics with an almost endless stream of memorable one-liners but difficult to piece together. James Dean and Lillian Gish references are lost on me, but the common theme is there for all to see: disillusionment and cynicism towards the world around them, living a drifting, purposeless existence.

floating, aimless, waiting to live
love and money, banks and beds
this is all there is

follow fashion i'll follow you home
they don't want reason they want obedience

The song ends with a background rant at the well ordered middle class lifestyle, pitched somewhere between straight nihilism and a desire for people to wake up and do something better with their lives. I still have no idea what a 'Teddy Dog' is though.

Play the record to hear 'Teddy Dogs' in Realaudio.

Loftholdingswood ('this is a song about drugs'), like 'Teddy Dogs' is another song that is difficult to pin down. Starting with a quick dig at Christ it rapidly moves onto liberal England and it's token gestures towards the dispossessed.

i died on a cross and now I'm the boss

aren't you glad you were born in england
aren't you glad you were born an angel
that's why you think you see
everywhere struggles to be free

Changing direction by the second it travels from an Irish racing punter with brandy glass, then to Edgware Road and then onto Lebanon. The latter having a dig at the superficial world of pop with any 'message' in The Human League's 'Lebanon' song being lost amidst the glitz and glamour.

lebanon, grooving on...

The song was one of their most popular and a regular in their live shows. It was also one of the few to be given a significantly different treatment (live mp3- right click 'save target as') on stage.

'464' is about as hardcore as Microdisney ever got. It sits uneasily among the rest of Microdisney's published songs and fits more into the Fatima Mansions way of doing things. A furious screaming rage interspersed with melodic irony:

oh dearie me, I'm in a state.

As an outlet for Cathal's frustration it was a great live song and one to unsettle even the most open minded of audiences, but no studio recording would have had any chance of recapturing that spirit on vinyl.

A good record that can be picked up in full on the CD re-issue of 'Love Your Enemies'. Disappointing only because after such a long wait and with all the new songs they were playing we were getting to hear just three of them on record.


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