Kicking The Machine
The Knightleys' first single is landing next month
The Knightleys’ first single comes out six weeks today. I’ve been thinking about how the inspiration for it was somewhere between humour and anger. Actually, not between. It was both. Like any character “I” am in my songs, it’s an amalgamation. Often the reason the story stuck with me deep enough to become a song is it’s a situation or an argument or a question that recurred, in different relationships and friendships and circumstances of life, echoing down the years. Kind of hence the band name. Bringing so many versions of yourself into the now.
So Kicking The Machine is inspired by a minimum of three people I can think of, and three very literal machines were kicked. One of them was a photocopier, another was a computer terminal. The third was me and an organisaiton that had been in (ineffective) place so long it didn’t recognise its own humanity or mine, trying to deal with it. The people kicking the actual machines both existed within the bigger one I eventually accepted defeat and walked away from, which I accepted later was really the only (and real) victory available.
You can let it haunt you in whispers, or you can let it teach you to sing.
All of which was equally funny and equally sad. We can take things so personally, fight the brick wall we’re presented with. Make being angry feel like being powerful. The song is maybe one person seeing someone else choose anger, or maybe it’s me looking back at a version of myself I evolved out of.
Either way, the important thing for me the song is really about is we get to choose. We don’t have to keep going in the circles this story tells. It only gets more difficult to move from ‘But I’ve been kicking this brick wall so long, I’ll have wasted so much time if I stop’ to realising that (il)logic only goes in one direction: more lost time.
So I guess as it’s a walking away song, it’s really a song about grief. Because you have to go through grief, accept endings, to reach the beginnings beyond. Those are the choices you have with trauma. You can let it haunt you in whispers, or you can let it teach you to sing.
Kicking the Machine comes out 25 September. Follow the Knightleys here.
