JC
Lucas Woodland talked to Sound of Pen about the themes threaded throughout his own work. Note how relevant his ideas are to the texts we’ve been studying in the classroom!
Listen to the Sound of Pen podcast. Click here to hear Lucas talk about love, life and lyrics.
ACTIVITY 1
Read the article below and watch the videos. Complete the activities as you come across them.
HOLDING ABSENCE
Holding Absence are one of the best bands on the planet As profound as it is poignant, their breakthrough album – ‘The Greatest Mistake Of My Life’ – really is a masterpiece.
Which means we couldn’t have been more pleased when frontman Lucas Woodland agreed to speak to us. As we listened to him talk about the themes threaded throughout his own work, we found ourselves spotting corresponding ideas within the texts we’ve been studying in the classroom.
And now we don’t just have a new favourite record, we’ve also got a deeper understanding of why the writers we’re learning about in class are relevant to us right now. What a shame young Lucas didn’t have his own music to listen to when he was at school…
ALIENS
“I was kind of a funny student,” Lucas laughs. “Because I’m not very good at maintaining knowledge. I learn things as I do them but if I had to sit and read a book and remember it and then do it in an exam, I was never the best at that.”
So many of us know exactly what the singer means.
“I just wished I had understood what I love about English more,” he muses now. “I did English Literature for A-Levels and we were looking at books that I just didn’t really connect to or relate with.”
Woodland’s not alone in feeling like this. Often, it can seem like the writers we study are from a different planet.
Not so with Holding Absence. Their music talks loudly to us about a world we know and recognise.
“I’ve seen the way it can connect to people,” Lucas nods seriously. “And I like to think there’s always room for a band that people can relate to in the world, because every year that goes by there’s more untrodden ground and life becomes harder to navigate. My Chemical Romance really taught me how to come to grips with being an emo! Hopefully, I can help people navigate this part of life. The concept of helping more people and reaching more people, that’s the goal.”
It’s such a HUGE ambition, and we’re excited by it – just like we’re excited by Lucas’ passion for comics.
“I’ve recently started reading this really old manga called Akira,” he grins. “It was really insightful for me to read a brilliant comic from the early 1980s – that was written in Japan – because I’m obviously a Welsh dude from 40 years in the future trying to understand an art form from such an alien land!”
And right there, the Holding Absence frontman synthesises our role in the English classroom. Reading Wyatt’s poetry – or Dickens’ prose – or ANYTHING – can be challenging, but dig deep enough and you’ll find that those ‘aliens’ have buried a treasure chest filled with tips and hints aimed at making your own existence more manageable.
Lucas Woodland talks about his own philosophies with such energy, it’s hard not to get caught up in them. Clearly, he is a great thinker and a real ARTIST.
SECRET PASSAGES
“A big lesson I try to portray on this album,” he says, “is no lesson is pointless; every lesson is something to learn from and everything that you do, be it a success or a failure, is something to learn from. ‘Celebration Song’ is about being depressed for so many days of your life that you learn to be happy, and then ‘Mourning Song’ is about losing somebody in your life and learning to value your life because of that. So, I guess, as a grander kind of thing, you know I very much embrace negative choice on this album because you learn from those things.”
Not that you have to concern yourself with those enormous ideas if you don’t want to. ‘The Greatest Mistake Of My Life’ works incredibly well simply as an album that makes you want to sing and dance like a lunatic.
But if you do engage in a deeper way with Holding Absence’s record, you will certainly be rewarded. It’s like what Lucas says about pop music…
“Maroon 5’s ‘Songs About Jane’ was one of my first albums. It’s one of the best pop albums of our generation and because of that I got into ‘band’ music, then it was rock, then it was metal, and it’s one of those things where – back to art as a whole – there’s always another door to open. Pop might be the foyer, but if you want to go any further into the building, there’s a lot more to explore.”
That’s exactly right That the more you commit to something, the more you’ll get out of it. And if you can picture the building that Lucas describes above, then you’ll now be able to imagine the room – somewhere in that same building – built purely for Holding Absence’s music.
Now, consider the fact that there’s a secret passage running from that very room all the way to Shakespeare’s study – and another that will lead you straight to Mrs Johnstone’s council house – and a third that ends up at the Plaza suite in New York, 1922…
As English students, we need to take advantage of the fact that Holding Absence really are exploring some seriously sophisticated ideas – ideas that link so well to those at the heart of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Blood Brothers’, ‘The Great Gatsby’… and the rest.
FORM
Just listening to Lucas talk about why he writes songs instead of, say, poetry or plays gives us a thrill.
“I would never know when I was done with a poem,” he says. “Whereas with a song, I do have parameters that I need to fit within. Lyrics are poetry, but forced into a shape. Most music that we enjoy will conform to some sort of comforting idea of what we perceive as music. It’s so understandable, a really digestible kind of structure that, over decades, it’s kind of been forced into.”
Wow. That makes so much sense. And now – maybe for the first time – we’re thinking about why Oscar Wilde chose the novel form or why Willy Russell decided his story needed to be performed on a stage or why Lord Byron’s ‘She Walks In Beauty’ could only be a poem…
ACTIVITY 2
So we’ve heard a bit about why the rock song structure fitted Holding Absence’s needs PERFECTLY. Now, it’s time to think about how Lucas Woodland’s ideas serve as doorways to a deeper understanding of our GCSE/A-Level texts.
Why did ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (replace with title that’s relevant to your study) have to be a novel?
Why did She Walks In Beauty’ (replace with title that’s relevant to your study) absolutely need to be a poem?
Why did Willy Russell’s ‘Blood Brothers’ (replace with title that’s relevant to your study) have to be a play?
Think about the writers that you’re studying – can you come up with one reason why each of those chose the form they did?
These critical ideas might be useful as springboards for your own thinking…
Jennifer Tseng: “As a writer’s experience deepens, it can become increasingly difficult to articulate meaning within the confines of a short form.”
April Bernard: “The novels and short stories I have written are very much fictions, very much made up, and the difficult pleasures I had in writing them comes mostly from the thrill of making up whole worlds. In poetry, I am trying to describe the given world — however round-aboutly, however mischievously.”
April Bernard: “Greatest movie line ever, in ‘The Big Short’ — one businessman overheard saying to another: ‘Truth is like poetry. And everyone f****** hates poetry.’”
Will Self: “In the early 1980s, and… throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms.”
Will Self: “The capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis.”
E.M. Welsh: “Because every theatre may not be equipped with everything to make your story a reality, plays tend to be far more character focused instead of world or plot focused.”
Additional critical ideas from: The Millions, The Guardian and E.M. Welsh.
STRUCTURE
What we’re certainly starting to understand about Holding Absence is that they have a finely-tuned awareness of shape and order, of form and structure – and this enables them to deliver their messages with extra oomph.
The opening to ‘The Greatest Mistake Of My Life’ hits particularly hard. The beautiful ‘Awake’, then that explosion as Lucas roars, ‘I’m alive.’ A spine-shivering moment if ever there was one.
“From where I’m stood, happiness feels like a bit more of a special kind of treat,” Lucas confesses. “I’m not one of those people who’s always happy. I think when I am happy I’m grateful for it because it’s a little bit less of a day-to-day thing for me. On a structural level, the verses are me acknowledging the hardships I feel that I’ve gone through – then the chorus is just an exclamation of, right at this moment in time, I am happy to be alive. “The ‘I’ve been so hurt for so long’ lyric chanting for literally a minute is this constant reminder to the listener that this is context that makes the ‘I’m so alive’ so important in that song.”
The fact that this moment comes so early on is significant too.
“How do you start an album without grabbing someone’s attention?” Lucas wants to know. “That’s the point, to give them this big moment.”
We can almost hear Shakespeare himself applauding. Just look at how many of his plays start at full-pelt.
Not that ‘The Greatest Mistake Of My Life’ peaks too early. Holding Absence’s second full-length record is FULL of big moments. All of which become even larger when you start contemplating the record’s motifs and themes in more detail…
ACTIVITY 3
Some of our course writers have also employed the dark/light structure that Lucas makes such powerful use of. Can you think of moments – in the texts you’re studying – during which the ‘light’ shines brighter because of the ‘darkness’ the writer has surrounded it with. Or vice versa? Maybe the moments of ‘darkness’ feel way more shocking because of the ‘light’ everywhere else? Whatever the case, explore that relationship between ‘light’ and ‘dark’.
See bottom of this page for ideas related to Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ Even if you’re not studying that text, you might find these ideas helpful as a model of the kind of quotes you could be looking for in your chosen text.
ACTIVITY 4
We love that Lucas so clearly wants his music to take us on a journey. And maybe you won’t even realise how significant Holding Absence’s starting point is until you understand it in context of where the record ends up…
Consider each of your course texts in that light. We always notice when a poem or a play or a novel begins. But why does the piece of art in question start the way it does? How does the writer grab our attention and what statement is he/she/they making by kicking things off in that manner?
Look at how Oscar Wilde sets the tone with the very first sentence of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Look at the length of the sentence, explore the words in bold – and see if you can spot any other ideas worth investigating!
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Kit Whitfield’s blog contains some interesting ideas! Here’s a taste:
“It’s unusual for a writer to focus so heavily on smells, especially on attractive ones; Swift may have made a name by writing of stenches and slime, but Wilde – as John Sutherland points out in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? – overloads us with scents, summer roses blooming together with spring lilacs and May thorns in crowded, dreamlike profusion. This is Wilde’s world of artifice: the realities of natural seasons are excluded from the outset. Nothing will be ‘natural’ – Dorian’s extended lifetime, for one thing, but also, of course, the vexed question of sexuality, hinted at in hushes, never to speak its name.”
FLORAL MOTIFS
Let’s start with flowers. Yes, flowers. Oscar Wilde writes about them A LOT, F.Scott Fitzgerald writes about them A LOT, John Keats writes about them A LOT…
“The flower thing has always seeped into the band on the visual side,” Lucas acknowledges. “I just think flowers are really beautiful and natural. It’s one of these intrinsic things that we live in a world surrounded by such materialistic things and a lot will seem obsolete in ten years’ time. Even now, when I look back at when the internet first came about, because of the way the technology world is, everything cycles ten times faster – so everything that’s cool now will stop being cool quicker than ever before. But I think that’s kind of why I’m enamoured by flowers – and religion – those are things that will outlive me. There’s a sense of timelessness to those kinds of things.”
And yet of course, the rose is as thorny as it is sweet-smelling, the lily as pale as it is beautiful, the laburnum as poisonous as it is pretty…
ACTIVITY 5
Sooooo interesting to hear Lucas talk about flowers in this way. A real ‘lightbulb’ moment!
Where do you spot flowers – either in the foreground or the background – of your own course texts? What are those flowers representative of? What is their significance? Send us your ideas and we will include the best of them on this page!
You can start by looking at Oscar Wilde’s use of flowers in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.
Read part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this article to help you.
And consider that: “In the Victorian era, flowers were primarily used to deliver messages that couldn’t be spoken aloud. In a sort of silent dialogue, flowers could be used to answer “yes” or “no” questions. A “yes” answer came in the form of flowers handed over with the right hand; if the left hand was used, the answer was “no.” (Catherine Boeckmann)
Create a bookmark. Draw or paste small pictures of all the flowers relevant to your text onto a bookmark-sized piece of card. Next to each picture, write the name and symbolic value of each plant.
DUALITY
“Where I was as an adolescent growing into a teen,” Lucas remembers, “and feeling a bit misunderstood and a bit alone, My Chemical Romance came through for me and they showed me it’s okay to be a little bit different – it’s okay to be very different if you want! It’s very much about embracing the most bombastic – or the most introspective, sensitive – version of yourself, and both of those things were totally fine, you know. Those songs made me feel like I could climb a mountain or I could sit in my bedroom and cry all day.”
Ah, yes, the top-of-the-mountain/pit-of-despair see-saw. So often found in the playground of love…
ACTIVITY 6
You might have discussed duality once or twice (or a thousand times) in class!!
In which texts, can you spot both the quieter and louder sides of a person’s nature? Which quotes really highlight that duality?
LOVE
“Beyond Belief is a song about love,” Woodland explains, “but it’s a song about fearing love, it’s a song that says if I go out with this person today, I might go out with that person again, I might get engaged to that person, I might marry that person… I might live with that person forever! And it pairs up really well with ‘Die Alone (In Your Lover’s Arms)’, in the context that ‘Die Alone’ is about realising on your deathbed that the person you loved wasn’t right for you. ‘Beyond Belief’ is about being at the foot of the mountain and scared of climbing it in case that happens.”
Know the feeling? Of course you do. Love is BONKERS. Almost as bonkers as religion.
ACTIVITY 7
It’s pretty hard to find a text which doesn’t explore ideas about love in some way or other! Where – in the texts you’re studying – can you recognise the character(s) really struggling with wanting love but also not wanting it at all? Try to identify the quotes that really highlight the struggle some characters face when deciding whether or not to devote themselves to a single individual.
RELIGION
“‘Nomoreroses’ is essentially about my relationship with God,” the Welsh frontman says, “and the concept that I wish I believed in a god, but in all my life I’ve never been given a moment of clarity that made me believe. That song is kind of about being angry at God for having all this power and using absolutely none of it to convince me that he even exists in the first place.”
Deep breath. This is gigantic stuff. And there’s more of it everywhere you look. Take the opening line of ‘In Circles’: ‘Crushed like a bug under the weight of listlessness…’
ACTIVITY 8
The Holding Absence singer’s attitudes to religion feel more typical of right now than, maybe, 1821. Consider the texts you’re studying. What were the typical attitudes towards God and religion at the time each text was written? Why is it important to understand these attitudes?
ACTIVITY 9
We LOVE the ‘crushed like a bug’ simile.
Does the bug imagery feel relevant to any of your texts? Perhaps you’re studying John Donne’s ‘The Flea’. How do Lucas Woodland’s thoughts help to develop your ideas in relation to those bugs or similar creatures?
Here are some thoughts you might find interesting if you’re studying ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’.
Chapter 1: “A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall…”
“In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a handsome mortal who fell in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos realised that her beloved Tithonus was destined to age and die. She begged Zeus to grant her lover immortal life. Zeus was a jealous god, prone to acts of deception in order to seduce beautiful gods and mortals, and he was not pleased with Eos’s infatuation with a rival. In a classic Devil’s Bargain, he granted Eos’s wish — literally. He made Tithonus immortal, but did not grant him eternal youth.” As Tithonus aged, he became increasingly debilitated and demented, eventually driving Eos to distraction with his constant babbling. In despair, she turned Tithonus into a grasshopper. In Greek mythology, the grasshopper is immortal. (In a close cultural parallel, the Chinese believed that locusts live forever.) This myth also explains why grasshoppers chirrup ceaselessly, like demented old men. (Chris Lawson)
Chapter 1: “…a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze wings.”
“Dragonflies are brightly coloured insects known for their vibrant colours and flying abilities. They’ve often been the subject of myths and legends, and have been a part of our stories and art for as long as humans have been around. The dragonfly molts several times throughout its life, and each time it starts a new chapter of its life. Dragonflies are a common symbol for change and accepting new beginnings and new opportunities. Dragonflies spend most of their lives as nymphs below the water’s surface, and only exist as the beautiful dragonfly that we know and love for around six months maximum. Because the dragonfly is only in its final form for a few months, they’re a symbol of living in the moment and taking advantage of the short time given. As I mentioned above, the dragonfly as we know and love is actually the creature’s last stage of its life. As such, the dragonfly is a symbol of growth, maturity, and wisdom that one would achieve after living fully and gaining life experience.” (Carrie Cabral)
ACTIVITY 10
Think about all the texts you’re studying. which similes are your favourites and why?
IMAGERY
“That (“crushed like a bug” simile) is so vivid and blatant, right? It’s like you will always be that crushed little bug because you’ll never try and amount to more. As a student especially, I never reached out of myself – and fortunately music gave me something to do with myself – but I dread to think what my life would be like right now if I didn’t have music because I’m not the kind of guy who reaches out and tries things and it’s one of my greatest flaws. And this song is basically addressing those of us who do just go on in circles.”
BECOMING THE BUTTERFLY
And yet, these days, Lucas Woodland is NOT moving in circles. He’s the spearhead of one of the UK’s most important bands.
“I’m a cog in a bigger machine,” he smiles. “I am bigger than myself because of this band behind me. I think, no matter what it is, no matter what project you may be working on, you can always create something larger than yourself. That is the main difference between me now and me ten years ago – I didn’t have anything bigger than myself to make. But if you want to sit down and write a book, spend hours or months or weeks of your life labouring over this thing – that surely could transcend higher than you as a person ever could. And I think that’s the idea of ‘In Circles’. One of the final lyrics is, ‘I live my life inside of this cocoon, just like a flower too afraid to bloom, I live my life inside of this cocoon and I’ll die here.’ And I think that song is a kind of reverse psychology, a way of saying: do more, be more, become the butterfly, don’t just sit there and make up excuses that you don’t have wings. Go and achieve more than one person ever should.”
Okay, I think that’s your cue! What do you want to do? Go and do it. What will make you feel like the person you want to be? Go and do it. What will make you happy? GO AND DO IT!
To help with activity 3, here are some light/dark quotes from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’:
Chapter 1
The “sunlight” slipping “over the polished leaves” in chapter one feels significant. The presence of that light is established so early on, but it’s illusory. The light only touches the surface of the leaves – perhaps foreshadowing the darkness at the core of the text? At the core of humanity? At the core of the Victorian’s superficial codes of conduct?
Think too about the end of the chapter, when: “The painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight.” What is Wilde prompting us to think about the relationship between light and dark, and what those two things symbolise? Is it worth thinking about the fact that there’s no explicit mention of dark/darkness in the opening chapter of ‘Dorian Gray’?
Chapter 2
Look too at chapter 2 when: “the painter appeared at the door of the studio… ‘I am waiting,’ he cried. ‘Do come in. The light is quite perfect, and you can bring your drinks.’” Why is the light significant? What does it symbolise?
Chapter 3
Lord Henry is lighting up Aunt Agatha’s lunch party and… “Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.” Consider the light elsewhere so far in the text, then the impact of this ‘darkening’.
Chapter 4
Dorian is telling Henry about his visits to watch Sybil. He remembers leaving one night and, “the lights were being put out in the theatre, and I had to go.” What do the lights represent? How are they significant? What is left once those lights go out?
Chapter 6
Think about the moment at which Lord Henry and Dorian drive off to watch Sibyl perform. There is no room for Basil. “He drove off by himself, as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in front of him. A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them…. His eyes darkened…” Consider the “flashing” of the lights and his darkening eyes!
Chapter 7
Consider the “dimly lit streets” and “black-shadowed archways” wanders through after rejecting Sybil. Consider the adjacent paragraph in context of this darkness. In that next paragraph, Wilde writes that, “As the dawn was just breaking… The darkness lifted…”
Chapter 8
Dorian has reflecting on his brutal treatment of Sybil; Lord Henry has told him not to waste his tears. Then: “The evening darkened in the room… the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.” What is the significance of the darkness here?
Chapter 13
Dorian kills Basil, then: “For a few seconds he stood bending over the balustrade and peering down into the black seething well of darkness. Then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in as he did so.” What is interesting about Dorian’s relationship to the darkness here?
Chapter 14
“The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was almost like a morning in May.” At this point, memories of Basil come to haunt Dorian. “The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.” What do we understand as a result of the dark/light proximity?
Chapter 16
Dorian visits the area of London where he knows he’ll find the opium dens: “the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist” and “Most of the windows were dark.” What can we read into the relationship between light and dark here?
Chapter 20
Dorian dies and his cries are heard. A policeman and two older gentlemen look at the house. “Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark.” What are we meant to understand about the light/dark relationship as the novel ends?
You can click here to find out more about Holding Absence and Sharptone Records.
And make sure to send any thoughts related to this interview here or email jc@soundofpen.com.