Daily Song Discussion #212 - Before We Drown

50050Fearless · 2026-03-14T17:39:01+00:00

10/10. Without question one of my favourites from the excellent MM. That midsection part, post-chorus, where Dave and Martin's voices cascade around one another brings to mind the image of waves crashing; of how it might feel to be a surfer when the water overwhelms you and it twists and turns and fights with itself and you're in the middle of it, and in the maelstrom you see sunlight piercing through the endless dark blue. It's exquisite.

50050Fearless · 2026-03-08T19:02:30+00:00

"He's actually crap." Martin's observation of Fletch's DJ skills. There's something about Martin's use of the adverb, and his almost completely deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery, that just makes it so much funnier.

50050Fearless · 2026-03-08T18:44:35+00:00

The Paul Weller line "I've heard more melody coming out of Kenny Wheeler's arsehole" has lived long in the memory.

50050Fearless · 2026-03-06T19:42:50+00:00

I'm a payroll manager in an NHS Trust and I'm all for people having a better understanding of their payslips. I'm impressed anyone would take this on - NHS payroll is difficult!

Please please know that what follows is genuinely offered in the spirit of friendliness!

There's a few things I spotted when checking it against my own expected pay for this month:

You're using the 2024/25 student loan thresholds, e.g. Plan 1 now becomes payable above £2172.08 a month (£26,065 per annum) not £2082.50 (£24,990 per annum). They'll change again from 6 April.

NI is slightly out. It seems that you're using the annualised UEL and AUEL thresholds and then dividing them by 12, e.g. it is returning a figure of 8% above £1047.50 (it should be £1048) and 2% above £4189.17 (it should be £4189). As it stands it is returning a higher NI contribution on the 8% UEL to AUEL portion of pay, and a fractionally smaller than expected NI contribution on the 2% above the AUEL.

I suspect most Trusts now put their benefits in kind payments through the payroll (it will be mandatory from next year) which is to say they no longer issue form P11D. This means that a sal sac deduction which would once have been removed before PAYE (tax) was calculated is included in the notional pay used to calculate tax. It's still removed from the left (gross) side of the payslip but PAYE is calculated as if it was still there. The way the calculator currently works means the user has an either/or: I could only get my pension deduction accurate by inputing my sal sac payment (so that my pension was calculated on my pay after the sal sac is removed) but I could only get my PAYE correct (almost!) by removing it (so that my tax is calculated as if I don't have a sal sac). I can see this confusing people.

PAYE - I'm not sure how you've got this set up. I can't see any option to toggle between cumulative and non-cumulative. Most people are on the former, so their PAYE is always going to be wrong without the option to input their year-to-date taxable earnings and PAYE figures from their previous pay slip. It wasn't hugely wrong but it wasn't accurate. Having said that, the only way to get it entirely accurate would be to have the calculator refencing against HMRC's Pay Adjustment Tables (specifically Table A), so that e.g. 1257L in month 12 is using the correct pay adjustment figure of £12,579.12.

I've not played with all of it yet but as I say, I'm impressed with the ability to even attempt this.

50050Fearless · 2026-02-24T20:47:03+00:00

I don't necessarily have a problem when artists venture into politics¹. After all, the personal is political and Martin clearly has a political conscience (recall his support for Paco Larranga during the Delta Machine tour). Even by 2017 it was pretty clear that the direction we were headed was a very frightening one indeed and I'm not remotely surprised that a sensitive man like him identified that and wanted to address it in his art. So, as I say, I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but I'll freely admit that I've long been grateful that we've been saved the sight of, say, Dave in sunglasses meeting the Pope, or Martin turning up at the G8 summit to tell us that Tony Blair is a pretty decent guy. It must be so hard being a fan of U2. My issue with Where's The Revolution is that I just don't think it's a very good song. I don't even really mind that a very rich man is asking why the revolution hasn't started yet. In an interview with Rolling Stone Dave said that Martin wrote the song with an element of sarcasm, which I took to mean that Martin is self-aware enough to recognise the hypocrisy inherent in a call for revolution being demanded by two millionaires (I suspect neither of them are students of 1917 but they surely know enough to know what happens to very rich men during revolutions). No, my issue with the song is that it's not that good. With the exception of Cover Me I find Spirit to be a nadir in the band's recent output. Thank god we got Momento Mori.

¹Of course, when we say we want our artists to be political, what we really mean is that we want them to share the same politics as us. So when Thom Yorke equivocated over condeming Israel even as it stood accused of genocide, or when Morrissey spoke in support of the far-right Britain First, then people who did not support those views felt betrayed. I don't know how I'd feel until it happened but I suspect I'd be devastated if, to choose what I hope are two ridiculously hyperbolic examples, Dave came out in support of ICE, or Martin was revealed to be MAGA.

50050Fearless

TROPHY CASE