Keith Relf: Shapes in my Mind (Epic, 1966)

Saturday, December 9, 2023

The perfect record comes unexpectedly, and at times, it feels like you are hanging off a cliff and your fingers can’t hold anymore, and you let go, and this song comes to your mind. That is how I feel about Keith Relf’s Shapes in My Mind, which is perfection. It sounds shorter than two minutes and twenty seconds, and yet it defines my life to a T.

Keith Relf, The Yardbirds' lead singer, and blonde bombshell, was the anchor that kept their famous guitarists together as much as possible. A blues band that was touched by pop but seen through the talents of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. I would include Eric Clapton, but I feel he was holding the band back. The Yardbirds were a band of equal strength within its fold, but the tension of dealing with the pop music world was a landscape filled with landmines. In that sense, they remind me of the band Manfred Mann, a classic bluesman who approached the pop music world with great jazz instincts.

The solo Keith Relf didn’t take off, but he left a masterpiece produced and written by Simon Napier-Bell, one of the more colorful figures in British pop music. As a manager, he worked with a young Marc Bolan, took care of the band Japan, and invented John’s Children, which also featured Bolan. And then, to top it off, he was the manager for Wham! He also wrote amazing memoirs and was an excellent writer and songwriter. And he wrote the song Shapes in My Mind. That, and his books, are his lasting masterpieces. Pop music doesn’t come from one source but from a group of individuals who work in the kitchen to make magic. And Shapes in My Mind is such a perfect dish to feast on. Even though it is light tasting, it’s food that keeps me glued to a specific reality.

Life as a pop song is so much more satisfying than real life. The song is romantic, and in life, it seems to be from a demented male obsessing over a lost love. The melody and words appeal to me, but its violence is off-putting, and the power positioning over the importance of one person’s memory of a love gone bad has an aggressive tone to the overall song. In the beginning, the singer demands to be helped, but he has lived with this sense of loss/regret, and The pain I felt is here again /I've nothing left. Is this the end? The singer blames himself but is stuck in a moment that seems impossible to remove himself.

Memory plays in this narrative in that the song reminds me of Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marinbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad), which deals with a male figure obsessing over a memory of a relationship that may or may not have taken place in Marinbad. And it only took two minutes and twenty seconds to take me a memory of my feelings and what may have or have not taken place in my world. That is the beauty of a pop song, whatever it is something positive or negative, it is still a reflection of human misgivings that is projected on a screen of one’s mind and ears. As long as we don’t confuse the thin line between real life and the life we dream.