Category: Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

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Off the Beaten Track #7: One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov) by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)
The Cover of One Word That Means the World (Arkhipov)

The latest single from London-based prog rock band, Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate is taken from their eighth studio album The Uncertainty Principle due to be released later in 2024. It’s called One Word That Means The World (Vasily Arkhipov).

The band enjoy a high concept for their songs – their previous album The Light of Ancient Mistakes included songs on the Cold War, English MPs’ discovery of Hitler’s atrocities, and the  miserable childhood of author John le Carré.

The new song is dedicated to the Soviet naval officer Vasily Arkhipov (pictured below). During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Arkhipov was onboard a B-59 submarine, part of a flotilla stationed near Cuba, hiding so deep in the sea that it hadn’t received radio signals from Moscow for several days. When the US Navy began to drop depth charges to try to force the submarine to the surface, the captain and the political officer, assuming that they were now at war with the US, made the decision to launch their T-5 nuclear torpedo. Arkhipov managed to persuade the others not to launch the nuclear weapon but to surface and obtain orders from Moscow. The submarine was then ordered to return to Soviet territory. Arguably, Arkhipov’s brave action saved the world from nuclear war – the simple Russian word ‘nyet’ (‘no’) was the ‘one word that means the world’.

Arkhipov’s clear-headed decision is even more remarkable for being taken in extreme physical conditions. The submarine’s batteries were failing; there was no air conditioning and the heat was extreme; high levels of carbon dioxide caused feelings of suffocation and panic. Yet on their return home the crew were treated as if they had let their country down, although Arkhipov did rise to the rank of vice admiral in the Soviet navy before he retired in 1988.

Vasili Arkhipov - Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova

Vasily Arkhipov – Image courtesy of Olga Arkhipova

Arkhipov’s predicament is soon turned into a much wider existential crisis in the song’s lyrics which begin with specifics but soon widen to the haunting refrain,

We don’t know who we are till we’re forced to decide/We don’t know what’s inside

The song begins in medias res, with a spiky, slightly frenetic guitar solo, immediately evoking the claustrophobic setting, ‘trapped beneath the waves … The burning lifeless air…’ The sense of intense claustrophobia is enhanced by the octave doubling on the vocals, similar to the vocal effect on Pink Floyd’s ‘Welcome to the Machine’ from their 1975 album Wish You Were Here. There’s also a rising synth motif which has a similar tonal quality to the treated piano part at the opening of Echoes from Pink Floyd’s Meddle (1971), evoking the sonar from the submarine.

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

The doubling of the vocal line stops during the chorus, creating a more intimate feel, showing that the words ‘We don’t know who we are…’ are more personal to Arkhipov’s situation, whilst at the same time being of more universal relevance by using the word ‘we’ rather than addressing him directly. That changes again at the end of the chorus when Arkhipov is directly addressed with the poignant words, ‘That was the day when you said no.’

There’s a further shift in of point of view with the words ‘That was years ago, and now I’m told I’m a hero.’ We are now seeing events from Arkhipov’s perspective, and the vocals become more restrained and thoughtful. The point of view then switches to the universal ‘we’ and back to Arkhipov again in the first-person singular. There’s a powerful guitar solo, again suggesting the anguish Arkhipov must have suffered when making his decision. The song ends with Arkhipov’s poignant words, ‘I found out when I said no.’ It’s a fine song, a worthy and passionate tribute to a brave man. to whom the single is dedicated.

Personnel

Music by Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland

Lyrics by Malcolm Galloway

Malcolm Galloway – vocals, guitars, producer, mixing, mastering

Mark Gatland – bass guitar, co-producer, vocal engineer

Artwork by Malcolm Galloway, made with DALLE-3 (AI art) and Photoshop.

The B-side of the single is the instrumental ‘Music For Dancing’ – Written and performed by Malcolm Galloway (guitar, synths/keyboards, producer, mastering) and Mark Gatland (bass guitar, synths, co-producer).

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The Light of Ancient Mistakes by Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate – Album Review

The cover of The Light of Ancient Mistakes by Hats Off Gentlemen It's Adequate

A compelling mix of science fiction with the personal and the political

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The core of the modestly-named prog rock band Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate consists of Malcolm Galloway (vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and producer) and Mark Gatland (bass, backing vocals, keyboards and co-producer). Their latest album, The Light of Ancient Mistakes isn’t a concept album as such, but it contains multiple overlapping themes, including politics, history, current affairs, failure of communication, threat, and the mistakes humans have made…and continue to make – as Oscar Wilde said in 1891 in his philosophical novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes“

There’s also a strong science fiction influence on the album, particularly the award-winning British novelist Adrian Tchaikovsky. The longest track on the album, ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ is inspired by Tchaikovsky’s novella of the same name, and some of the instrumental tracks on the album take their titles from characters in Tchaikovsky’s books, such as ‘Avrana Kern’ (from Children of Time) and ‘Gothi and Gethli’ (from Children of Memory). Philip K Dick is also referenced, in the instrumental track ‘The Man Who Japed’, Dick’s 1956 science fiction novel.

Like the best science fiction, The Light of Ancient Mistakes urgently engages with contemporary issues. Galloway says that the track ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ was partly inspired by the dehumanisation of our enemies that enabled guards at Auschwitz to regard their victims as monsters, just as the Tchaikovsky novella describes the transformation of a man into a monster.

There’s another literary source, for the track ‘The Glamour Boys’ which takes its name from the book by Chris Bryant, the MP for Rhondda. The Glamour Boys is subtitled ‘The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler.’ It tells the story of a group of young, queer MPs who revealed the extent of Hitler’s brutality well before the Second World War and were branded ‘the glamour boys’ by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to suggest there was something untoward about them. The song is sung from the perspective of one of the MPs.

The political, in a much wider sense, is also the inspiration behind ‘Sold the Peace’ which describes politicians who won the Cold War but ‘sold the peace.’ The title track, ‘The Light of Ancient Mistakes’ is inspired by Iain M Banks’ novel ‘Look to Windward’ published in 2000. The protagonist of the song is an artificial intelligence, who according to Galloway is ‘trying to show the futility of cycles of hatred to someone planning an act of mass destruction.’ The book describes an explosion that destroys the sun, and ‘Burn the World’ looks at the effect of catastrophic climate change (see the review of that track here in the new Off the Beaten Track series).

The more personal is reflected in the track ‘Sixteen Hugless Years’, which movingly describes the emotionally-starved childhood of the late spy novelist John le Carré who was beaten by his father and abandoned by his mother. And the most personal track on the album is ‘imtiredandeverythinghurts’ a heartful cry of pain from Galloway who has what he describes as the ‘invisible disability’, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome which causes chronic pain. Both of these songs are much more direct than others on the album, approaching punk in their delivery rather than prog. This is entirely appropriate – as John Lennon once said in response to those critics who criticised the simplicity of the lyrics to his song ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy’) from The Beatles’ White Album (1968), if you are drowning you don’t shout that you would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to throw you a rope; you simply scream.

If those two songs are very simple, there is plenty for prog fans to enjoy elsewhere. In particular the complex bass guitar and keyboards lines are a highlight, as are the Floydian guitar solos in several songs. Galloway’s vocals are compelling too, sometimes reminiscent of Tim Bowness of no-man; elsewhere there’s a touch of the urgency and yearning of Bowie – the vocals on ‘Sixteen Hugless Years’ have something of the feel of Bowie’s Five Years from Ziggy Stardust (1972). The album is nicely paced too, with gorgeous widescreen instrumentals like ‘The Requisitioner and the Wonder’, and several versions of ‘The Anxiety Machine’, interspersing the vocal tracks. And ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ is a multi-faceted drama in its own right. A thoughtful, highly literate and political album that forms a very satisfying and coherent whole.

Sources

Notes by Malcolm Galloway

The John Lennon interview with Rolling Stone magazine by Jann S. Wenner, 4 February 1971