In many songs by British trio Fink, there is an everyday mystery to be unravelled. Beneath the vignettes of the mundanity of ordinary life, something simmers away. In ‘Yesterday Was Hard On All Of Us’, the protagonist asks “where are we going now, where do we go, because if it's the same as yesterday, I’m out, just so you know”. You can tell that whatever it was that happened yesterday wasn’t good. We all have bad days, but this one sounded awful. Did someone die? A funeral perhaps?
Meanwhile, in ‘Biscuits’ (for breakfast), a disgruntled junior executive mulls how, if they can just get through “four more years of this shit”, they’ll be on sixteen grand (it was composed almost 20 years ago). Then again, they will inevitably become “one of these clowns”. Even the tea round is just too much to bear. “Gimme some chocolate, gimme some cake, gimme so much more than I think I can take”. These thoughts run through the young executive’s mind during the usual office humdrum, and he can see how his future pans out - it’s not great. Who hasn’t wondered what it’s all about from within the mediocracy of office life?
In ‘Blueberry Pancakes’, the central character recalls a Sunday morning cooking up pancakes with his lover before lifting up their t-shirts. However, post break-up, he can’t bear the thought of buying maple syrup in Asda ever again. Instead he is left moping on thoughts of how they first met in the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. Time is a great healer but will he ever truly get over it?
If all this sounds like ordinary life, then that’s precisely what Fin Greenhall conveys as he goes from song to the next, solving yet another of life’s small dilemmas. The thing is, it makes the songs get under your skin. They stay with you, just like those simple quandaries that keep our minds mulling over what might have been or why something even happened in the first place. We really don’t have the first clue about any of it if we’re honest with ourselves. If introspective music is your thing, Fink are masters of the craft.
The power of hindsight, of course, could solve many of life’s problems and this is something Fink explores with a new record, IIUII: “it isn’t until it is”, an acoustic retrospective described as “viewing the past through the lessons it has taught”. The album precedes an accompanying memoir of singer Fin Greenhall. While the music industry is littered with ex-musicians and creatives now working on the management side, Fin Greenhall did the opposite - spending nearly half a decade in the offices of labels (hence ‘Biscuits’), figuring out how the industry worked (and working his way up from office skivvy to marketing manager). He flipped from being an executive to a creator - but seems to have picked up on some clever marketing angles along the way. Along with these reworked versions, the 2015 short film “Less Alone” was one of the first examples of an artist manifesto I’d ever seen expressed through the short documentary format. It’s a nice exercise in artistic branding. That might just have something to do with Fin’s thought processes. Another example is the track selection for IIUII. Fin told me: “we went back over the streaming stats and thought about our live shows over the years and picked the songs that the fans feel really represent us”. Savvy indeed, now that is how creatives can use industry data simply and effectively.
This subject of a song and how to give it an ongoing life beyond a finite recording, is something I discuss with Fin in-depth on The Art of Longevity. It’s a real dilemma for artists these days. As we continue to be spoiled with (or, perhaps bombarded with) a constant flow of remixes, remasters, album off-cuts, acoustic versions and demos, many artists use the growing array of song formats in the streaming age as a way of staying connected to their fan bases - in other words, terrified of what might happen if they go away for a while. It’s the equivalent of ‘presentism’ in office - not always healthy and certainly not productive. But, since Fin Greenhall was never that keen on the office in the first place, Fink would never make that mistake ;)
This little sampler of Everyday Mysteries should help you enjoy some of Fink’s songs, in their various guises.
Go to the podcast page to visit Fink’s Art of Longevity appearance. It’s well worth your ears.
IIUII is available everywhere via the usual links and the memoir is also on Finkworld.