Darren Hayman on Break-up songs

The break-up song is a staple of pop music as much as the love song. There are as many endings in life as there are beginnings, and such moments are vital and need to be soundtracked.

An entire album devoted to a break-up is a little less common though. The bitter taste of rejection is enough for a snack but not a whole meal perhaps? It’s a strange place to linger. Who would want to hear that? Why would artists want to stay in such a situation?

Marvin Gaye liked to linger. He wanted to dwell and smother himself in the anger and hurt of the end of a relationship. ‘Here, My Dear’ is regarded as some kind of totem for the nasty break-up album. Even the title is a barbed kiss-off.

Behind on alimony for his estranged wife and child, Gaye’s attorney agreed that half of the royalties of his next album should be part of the divorce settlement. What Gaye produced was a list of faults, failings and accusations. The titles alone tell a sorry tale; ‘Anger’, ‘Is That Enough?’, ‘When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?’

What’s interesting about the record though is that it isn’t angry-sounding or throw-away in its construction. Marvin Gaye can’t do that. His original intention was to make a ‘quickie record – nothing heavy, nothing even good’. The sloppiness would express his resentment, but Gaye found a way into the record and became obsessed. The sound is sumptuous, even romantic. The album is good enough to stand alongside ‘What’s Going On’. It’s when you look beneath the surface sheen and notice the lyrics that you find its dark heart:

“You don’t have the right to use a son of mine to keep me in line”.

The words are emphatic; they leave no room for misinterpretation.

The problem with creating art is that it freezes your opinion at a certain point, which is fine in the space of the song, but gives the impression of a more determined state of mind when stretched over an album. You have to wonder whether Gaye ever regretted his vitriol being made so permanent, his resentment trapped in amber.

Graham Fellows is forever frozen both as an older man and a younger man. We know him best as aged, amateur entertainer John Shuttleworth but he is also etched on some people’s minds as teenage loser Jilted John. The name of the act immortalized him as being eternally dumped.

His best-known single was also called ‘Jilted John’ and is a direct, childish attack on his girlfriend’s new lover. Gordon may indeed be a Moron, but there’s no need for the list of insults that John directs towards his ex-girlfriend at the end of the song. The record wouldn’t pass any current-day political correctness test, but it remains a brutal reminder of the cruelty of the young. The accompanying album ‘True Love Stories’ is more of the same; it’s supposed to be funny, and it is funny the first time you hear it. The second time, less so. John just never wins. It’s a grey world of failed parties and rainy bus stops. It could only be 1978. It’s a punk rock concept album. Julie is always there but never for long with John. He is sorrow personified, walking alone in a parka.

The insults hurled at Julie aren’t the only reason to feel uncomfortable. They point towards the break-up album being a very male domain. Lack of understanding, one-sidedness and ‘poor me’ betrayal is very well suited to blokes. What often makes the break-up album even more uncomfortable is that there is rarely a right to reply; although, in the case of Jilted John, there is an exception. His ex-girlfriend Julie and her boyfriend Gordon made a comeback song called ‘Gordon’s Not a Moron’ which takes the time to mock John’s record as well as pour doubt on his account of the break-up.

There are, of course, brilliant examples of the female break-up album. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ is a candlelit collection of sun-bleached polaroids. You can still smell the love, but it can’t quite be touched. Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and in particular ‘You Oughta Know’ was screamed out of coach windows in my college days. It was a weapon to be thrown at shit boyfriends.

It’s one thing for the account of a relationship to only be in the hands of a man. It’s another to see it written by a man and sung by the woman in question. (‘Shoot Out The Lights’ by Richard and Linda Thompson qualifies here.) But what of a record written by two guys and then sung by both their recent partners?

ABBA’s ‘The Visitors’ is a gorgeous, deep-pile rug of an album. ABBA went full ‘Fleetwood Mac’ and both Agnetha and Bjorn and also Frida and Benny were divorced just before they made this, their final album. During the making of the album, Benny has said proceedings “could be frosty sometimes”. No kidding!

It’s the ABBA album you recommend to non-ABBA fans. It has glacial synths and pristine digital production. Everything moves a little slower than usual. The album walks around your bedroom like the ghost of a broken relationship; it wears your dressing gown and drinks your coffee and doesn’t even leave you a note.

“Slightly worn, but dignified and not too old for sex” Frida sings on ‘When All is Said and Done’ and then on ‘One of Us’…

“One of us is crying, one of us is lying,
in a lonely bed.
Staring at the ceiling
Wishing she was somewhere else instead.”

To be fair to Bjorn and Benny, this is a break-up album that doesn’t apportion blame. It’s written from the female perspective and is not so much about the anger that comes at the end of a relationship, but about the weariness. It’s very much a record about divorce and the end of marriage(s) rather than just the end of a relationship.

I am writing this article in response to writing my own break-up album, and I’m hoping that I have avoided some of the pitfalls listed here. It’s called ‘Home Time’, and I tried my best to approach the subject with some kind of wit and distance, and also create something that both sides could find some truth inside. I tried to avoid vitriol.

My guiding light for this project wasn’t found in music but poetry. Sharon Old’s book ‘Stag’s Leap’ is an extraordinary piece of work and has the advantage of not being frozen in one place and time. The poems stretch out for many years, from before the break-up and initial suspicions to long after, when she runs into her partner with his new lover. She is never cruel, but her words still feel sharp and acutely painful.

“I did not know him. I knew my idea of him.”

It’s very intelligent in observing there is no definite ending to these things, that the detritus of a genuinely colossal separation can litter your life for decades. A part of you stays with the other person, a part of them with you.

Every page is astounding, and I recommend it to everyone who is reading this.

Another kind of break-up album is the unashamed attempt to undo what’s been done: the ‘take me back’ record. It’s not often seen. We don’t make those statements public, do we? The break-up album is usually an attempt to move on.

In 2019, Luke Howard started playing the piano in a park in Bristol and said he would only stop when his lover took him back. He stopped much sooner, however, when someone punched him in the face. It was a bit stalkery; he misread the room.

Robin Thicke is pop music’s Luke Howard. We already knew he was a wrong’un due to his song ‘Blurred Lines’, a song about a situation with a woman where there are clearly no blurred lines to anyone with more than mince between their ears.

It’s unclear whether it’s the poetry of lines such as “You know you want it,” which drove away Thicke’s girlfriend Paula, but Robin was confident that more of this prose was all that was required to return her to him. He called the whole album ‘Paula’, it is the sound of a baby mewling for his rattle. On the lead single he sings “I never should have raised my voice” and “Maybe I should have kissed you longer”. I think we all know which one of those it was Robin.

Imagine thinking, when surrounded by the ruins of a broken love, that the reason for your rejection might have been that you didn’t kiss someone long enough? “Oh, I get it now, kiss them longer, is that it?”

Paula didn’t come back and now Robin’s desperation, just like Marvin Gaye’s anger, is preserved in aspic for all to see. Relationships and love can flicker and die; the wind blows them, blood is indeed left on the tracks. However, records are written in stone, be wary when making your break-up album, those words will probably stick around longer than your girlfriend/boyfriend did.