Main Road is on the Life Line album – released 2009.
Listen
Lyrics
Living on the main road, the noise is always there.
The rain and thunder are on my doorstep,
Peaceful times – they’re rare.
You tell me that I’m living, I can smell I’m living,
I want to know I’m living on the main road.When I look out of my window, an illusionist is there.
Painting pictures on the billboards,
An audience has gathered there.
You tell me this is living, it’s how I know I’m living,
I want to know I’m living on the main road.Courier riders with their headphones,
Cycle homeward with their heads back,
And the homeless with their ear tags,
Sit around now in the gutter.
Risk and destitution, delusion and delirium,
It’s how I know I’m living on the main road.We could drift off now, we’re all on our own,
Clear our heads and spin around in cool country air.
We could lift off to a world of our own,
Cleans our minds so thoroughly the dreams never end.But I like to keep awake here,
I like to know what’s happening,
And everything is humming on the main road.
And sometimes people cry there,
And sometines people lie there,
And sometimes people try to change…Copyright 2009 Graham Armfield/Laura Fudge
Song history
Main Road came together in the mid 1980s when I was in a band called The Aviators.
I’d recently bought my first 12-string guitar – an acoustic, and one day the riff just popped out. That’s all I had initially, but I liked how it sounded, and when I played it to Laura Fudge who was the Aviators’ singer, she really liked it too.
Laura started writing some lyrics for it, I came up with the bass intro and the chord structure, and we started to bash it together with the rest of the band in the rehearsal studio. It wasn’t long before it became a favourite in our set – but we never recorded it in the studio before the Aviators split up.
When I decided to record it for the Life Line album, I wanted to recreate the feel of the original as much as possible. So the drums are programmed to sound as close as possible to the patterns that Kevin Moore used to play.
