Road to Rouen/”Play the Hits”
Dublin
I.
In the fall of 2005, I took a flight from Newark airport to Dublin. It was the first international flight I had ever taken. I was flying to Ireland to study abroad at University College Dublin for the first semester of my junior year.
Why I was studying abroad or wanted to study abroad was a completely different matter. I was doing it because it seemed like it was something you were supposed to do in college. I suppose that I wanted to study abroad, but I had no real perspective on why I wanted to or what I wanted to do while I was there.
What I did know, on some level, was that I was in the malaise of being at the midpoint of my time in college. I went to a small liberal arts school in the northeast and after two full years, being part of a student body of just about 3,000 starts to feel a little bit like being in high school all over again. Maybe I was taking my situation for granted and simply lacked a certain kind of imagination or humility. Looking back on it now, that seems mostly true. But at the time all I knew was that I didn’t like being at my college and wanted something to change.
What I also knew was that I loved James Joyce. Like so many pretentious undergraduates who contain the vanity and also the vague dreams of becoming a published author, Joyce seemed to me to be the epitome of what a writer should be: challenging, serious, uncompromising, poetic, and a genius. By that point in my life, I’d read the stories in Dubliners a few times, read A Portrait of The Artists as a Young Man, made several attempts to start Ulysses, and randomly asked one of my English teachers in high school if I could read a part of Finnegan’s Wake aloud and then read a piece of my writing that was written in the style of Finnegan’s Wake. So, you could say that I had my head just a bit up my own ass.
The half-baked plan that came together for my semester abroad was that I would go to Dublin, study at an Irish university, take a course on Ulysses as well as courses on linguistics (I guess to deepen my understanding of the history and mechanics of the English language to be more like Joyce), and then come back triumphantly to my college campus and English Department as the best writer and English Major the school had ever seen. The one destined to go on greatness not only in the history of students at the school but also in the canon of Western Literature.
Or something like that.
All I know was that, at that time, I was a serious young man with serious literary ambitions who seemed to take things too seriously; someone who walked around campus staring at the ground a lot. Beyond that, the only thing I really loved was listening to music and reading music magazines (and their websites) like Spin, Rolling Stone, MOJO, and, at that time especially, New Musical Express.
I also, like so many college students, drank a lot and probably too much. So what ended up happening when I went to Dublin was less of the high-minded studying that I imagined and more of the drinking and listening to music that I read about in NME.
And what I think of whenever I remember that specific autumn in my life are an album by one band and a single by another—both released in 2005. The album was Road to Rouen by Supergrass, which is now seen as perhaps an overlooked entry in their catalog that has the case as maybe their most accomplished album. The other was the song “Play the Hits” by the band HAL.
I feel pretty confident that both “Play the Hits” and the band HAL are mostly forgotten to time. But not to me.
II.
The decline in the importance of music magazines, and of NME specifically, has been written about before. I don’t know if it’s depressing that music magazines no longer have a real place in the media landscape or if it’s simply the harsh realities of technology and time progressing. It’s probably both.
Near the end of the movie The Worst Person in the World (2021), a main character delivers a poignant soliloquy on the power of objects and about how objects have defined his life. This speech can (and has) been interpreted as a kind of elegy for the generations that grew up in an analog world. In the New York Times, the film critic A.O. Scott wrote an essay focused on this moment in the film, reflecting on his own proclivity for collecting objects throughout his life and how those objects came to symbolize his youth and, by extension, one’s youth in general. He comes to the conclusion that every generation has their signifiers of youth and predicts that those in Gen Z also will, “even if [Gen Z’s] characteristic cultural pursuits don’t seem to be manifested in physical objects.”
In Scott’s view, we can mourn the passing of an analog culture, but as he says: [T]he technologies of cultural consumption are always changing, and the art forms that flow through them tend to wax and wane in unpredictable cycles. People continue to read, watch, listen, browse and seek out not only distraction and diversion, but also sources of meaning and connection. Young people tend to do so with a special avidity, sometimes as if their lives were at stake.”
This, I can relate to, because that is how I used to read music magazines and websites from the time I was fifteen until my late twenties. My love of music publications peaked when I was in college and the years just after it—so from about 2003—2009. During that time, NME had entered a phase when it had moved beyond celebrating Britpop specifically to the rebirth of guitar rock in New York City, captured in Elizabeth Goodman’s oral history Meet Me In the Bathroom (2017).
By the time I was entering my junior year in college my favorite bands were, in no particular order: Wilco, The Strokes, The White Stripes, and the Super Furry Animals. What three out of those bands shared was some common thread with the Beatles. I was constantly looking for bands that resembled either the shape of the Beatles (a tight-knit group of distinct personalities that seemed to exist above and beyond the rest of the world) or the sonic ambitions of their late period.
Any mention in NME of a band that fit some part of that bill directly led me to go out and buy a record—or download it illegally on Kazaa. That’s how my CD book ended up filled with relics from the early aughts like Rooney’s self-titled album (2003), The Thrills’s So Much for the City (2003) and Let’s Bottle Bohemia (2004), the Sleepy Jackson’s Lovers (2003), The Soundtrack of our Lives’s Behind the Music (2001), and The Coral’s self-titled debut (2002). I had other friends who swore by The Spinto Band or the Kooks or The Killers or The Libertines. It seemed like every other week or month there was a new band who could change your life by channeling bands that had already changed your life.
Inevitably, of course, you were let down. In some cases, the records were only good for the single that had gotten the band press in the first place. In others, the full records lacked any kind of dynamism, sounding pretty much the same as the single. And sometimes, you got tired and just wanted to listen to Room on Fire or Elephant or A Ghost is Born again.
But I can’t overstate how exhilarating it was to feel like I had learned about the latest most important new band in the world. And NME had that magical ability to make you feel like you were on the cusp of some great discovery in so many of their record reviews. Whereas Pitchfork’s tone was chiding, suggesting that “you should’ve heard of them by now,” NME’s tone was something closer to “wait ’til you get a load of this.” They were the masters of the breathless, hype review. A band could only have two songs to its name, with a full-length album on the way “later this year” and be christened as the second-coming of The Rolling Stones or the Kinks or, by some strange logic, the successors to The Strokes, who had only released two albums at that time. And no matter how many times I was let down, I was always ready to be sucked in again.
In the fall of 2005, as I arrived in Dublin for my study abroad, there were two records I was specifically excited about: a debut record from a band called HAL, and the latest record from Supergrass, a band that wasn’t one of my very favorites, but one that was dear to my heart. I had loved Life on Other Planets (2002) and couldn’t wait to hear what Road to Rouen sounded like.
III.
The night before I was supposed to register for my courses at the University College Dublin, I got incredibly drunk. There was nothing special about the night. I don’t remember most of the nights I spent drinking in Dublin because most of them were unremarkable. We mainly walked around the quiet neighborhood surrounding the school or sat in our sad dorm apartments drinking cheap Czech tall boys or Powers or Paddy whiskey.
Most of my time studying abroad was indistinct from the experience anyone else most likely had while they studied abroad during college. I made a close group of friends during my time there that I swore I would stay in touch with once we returned to the states, but never did, I barely attended my classes, and I partied too much. The only thing that makes it memorable to me are the opportunities I wasted.
The main one being that because I got so drunk the night before class registration, I overslept and then leisurely made my way to the building on campus where the English department was housed and learned that the seminar on Ulysses that I had specifically come to Ireland to sign up for was filled. Somehow, I was surprised by this.
My linguistics courses were available though, so I signed up for those and then haphazardly picked some other literature courses that focused on 17th and 18th century plays and then a course on the American novel where I’d be taught The Great Gatsby again. I think I attended these courses half a dozen times total over the course of the semester. I did most of the readings and the papers and the homework, but I barely set foot in a seminar room or lecture hall. Instead, I spent most of my days going to the library and pining over an ex-girlfriend’s profile on Facebook (then still only a little over a year old), writing emails to my friends, and trying to find leaks of the highly anticipated third Strokes album on internet message boards. Either I was doing that or drinking at the campus bar, drinking in the dorm, or going into the center of Dublin to drink.
By luck, a distant cousin of mine sent me a gift while I was in Ireland. Over two decades older than me, he was and is probably the most well-read person in my extended family. Apparently knowing that I was in Ireland, he sent me a DVD of a course on Ulysses taught by the Dartmouth professor James Heffernan.
Licking my wounds, what I ended up doing was reading a chapter of the book, watching the corresponding entry on the DVD, and then going to the locations mentioned in the novel on my own. It sounds like an organized idea in hindsight—my own self-taught seminar—but believe me when I tell you that this all came together piecemeal. All of a sudden, this became my routine, my organizing principle.
Soon my days were spent reading Ulysses, watching professor Heffernan’s seminars, and then walking the same streets as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and all the other souls that pass through the novel. I went to the Martello Tower near Seapoint Beach beside Monkstown and looked at the frigid waters of Dublin Bay where Buck Mulligan took his morning swim; I went to Davy Byrne’s where Mr. Bloom ate his gorgonzola cheese sandwich and drank a glass of burgundy; I went to the National Library of Ireland where Stephen explained his theory on Hamlet, the one he himself did not believe; I walked down Grafton Street where the “Wandering Rocks” episode took place, each section a dazzling display of character; I went to the Ormond Hotel; and I strode along Sandymount Strand, brooding the way Stephen did when he saw a live dog sniff a dead dog’s body.
And so my confused semester passed. As the weather turned colder, I began to take trips: to Galway and the Aran Islands where I bought two wool sweaters that I still have tucked away in a closet; to Paris to visit a friend of mine from college who was studying abroad there, living in an apartment with a widow; to London to see a friend of mine from high school, one who was also obsessed with NME and falling in love with bands (she was taking her semester abroad in the middle of her undergraduate degree at NYU where she lived around the corner from Lit Lounge, which was a cornerstone of the New York City “rock revival”); to Barcelona so I could say that I’d been to Spain and had drunken absinthe the way Stephen Dedalus had in the “Circe” episode; and to Belfast so that I could see the Giant’s Causeway.
Soon the semester was over and I’d finished reading Ulysses without being enrolled in a seminar. I turned in my final papers for the courses I’d barely attended and hoped my work would be deemed acceptable enough to earn a “Pass” instead of a “Fail.” I was returning home to New York, to go back to my little liberal arts school Upstate, where I was successfully enrolled in a seminar on Ulysses during the spring semester of 2006.
IV.
Supergrass’s most famous song is “Alright.” The last single from their debut album, “Alright” rose to number two on the UK Singles chart in 1995. Most people probably know the song because it was featured on the Clueless (1996) soundtrack and very often pops up in white-hued commercials for products that aim to make you feel young.
They never made another song as popular as “Alright,” and Supergrass never rose to the heights of other Britpop groups like Blur, Oasis, or Pulp. Their second-most popular song is probably “Pumping on Your Stereo” from their self-titled third album. “Pumping on Your Stereo” peaked at number 13 on the UK Singles Chart in 1999. They were never really that big or present in America.
I got into Supergrass through their 2002 album Life on Other Planets, mainly because I loved the single “Grace,” which sounded like “Lady Madonna” crossed with “Victoria.” The entire record is touched with influences from the best of 1960s and 1970s British rock: you hear T.Rex, Bowie, Wings, the Small Faces, and a whole lot more of the Kinks. But try to listen to songs like “Evening of the Day,” “La Song,” or “Seen the Light” and not smile. It’s an album full of hooks and life. The whole thing isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s just a good album, and one that gave me joy on plenty of afternoons driving my car around with the windows open during high school.
When Road to Rouen, their next album, came out in September of 2005, I read about it on NME's website while sitting in the Library at the University College Dublin. At the same time, I’d been reading about an Irish band called HAL, who were being compared to The Thrills, another Irish band whose first two albums I had already purchased. Their debut album had come out earlier in 2005 and because descriptions of their single “Play the Hits” included touch points like the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” I knew I had to pick up the album. So on one trip into Dublin’s city center, I bought both Road to Rouen and HAL’s self-titled debut and eagerly took them back to my dorm room to listen to them on my Sony Discman.
I knew Supergrass already, so I started with HAL, immediately going to Track 2 to hear “Play the Hits” for myself. Starting with a ringing guitar line that sounds like a sea breeze, “Play the Hits” immediately jumped through my headphones. Then I heard the quick, dry-sounding drum hits like the ones on “Good Vibrations” followed by clapping castanets in the mix.
I was in love. The song sounded like 1966-1968, a period of music I was completely obsessed with; a period of music when music was produced in a way that I couldn’t get enough of. The lyrics of the song describe watching a band play their hits on the radio and watching as girls shake their hips on a television show; so the song itself seems to be about that period of time.
I probably listened to “Play the Hits” on repeat for almost an hour after that. The music filled my chest in a way that made me want to say: “Yes, this song is the answer! Everyone in the world must love this song as much as me!” The high-pitched singing of the pre-chorus lines, “I want it, can not get it / I need it, can not have it” stuck in my head for weeks after.
I was sure that HAL was going to be huge.
Except, the rest of the album really wasn’t that great. It sounded good and the songs were solidly written, well-performed, and well-produced, but there was nothing as exciting or thrilling as “Play the Hits.” I think I maybe listened to the album in its entirely from start to finish only two or three times.
So I turned to Road to Rouen. I had read that it was a more mature Supergrass album; a record that was less like the Beatles and the Kinks of the late-’60s and more like Pink Floyd on Animals (1977). I started the record from the beginning with “Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5, & 6” and heard the moody strumming and slide guitar that settles into a groove before being accompanied by piano and shakers. This continues for a minute and a half before a blast of echoey horns intrudes on the mix. The vocals don’t start until the two-minute mark with drums rolling in after. It was completely different from the fuzzy, sharp, dynamic sound of the other Supergrass records I’d listened to; it leaned more on vibe than melody.
The rest of the album continues this more somber (well, for Supergrass), subdued tone. There are lovely songs like “St. Petersburg,” or “Sad Girl,” and “Low C” alongside moody jams like “Roxy” and the title track. The only song that seems to break the record’s atmosphere is “Coffee in the Pot,” but even that is a strange, dreamlike instrumental that sounds like something that might score a scene in Twin Peaks.
Later in my semester abroad, on the bus ride back to Dublin from my weekend trip to Galway, I sat in my darkened seat looking out the window and watched stone-lined fields pass in the night. To kill time on the over two-hour ride, I pulled out my Discman and put in Road to Rouen. As “Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5, & 6” began to play and I let the sound of the strumming guitars wash over me, I noticed that the moon was full over the fields. The music played and I watched the moon and the light that it shed down on the dark, green grass. Suddenly, I felt very small and weak, but also full of pride. I was alone in another country, across the ocean from my family. I was alone and on my own and riding a bus in the night back to the room that was my home for now. But I was returning to nobody, to nothing; I was only returning to a sad, unadorned room on a college campus that was not my own.
However, I felt deep within myself that out there in the dark, out there somewhere in time there was something more for me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was something. I continued to listen to Road to Rouen as the bus brought me back to Dublin in the night.
V.
As of the writing of this essay, HAL’s “Play the Hits” has only been streamed 123,762 times on Spotify. And I’m pretty sure I account for about 100 to 200 of those. HAL didn’t release another album until 2012, and they haven’t released an album since then. “Play the Hits” only made it to number 38 on the UK Singles Chart—it wasn’t even close.
Whenever I ask people if they remember HAL, they blink at me. And when I try to give them details about the band, about “Play the Hits”, about the groups they were compared to, none of it jogs their memory. For many people it’s as if they didn’t exist, which is fine, because there are countless bands that people I know have fallen in love with that I don’t remember hearing about even once.
“Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5, & 6” has been played over 12 million times on Spotify and it’s Supergrass’s fourth-most streamed song. Road to Rouen is now the album I listen to more than any other Supergrass record and “Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5, & 6” is probably the song of theirs that I love the most.
That semester when I studied abroad feels like another life that I lived. It is hard to bring to the surface of my memory, to make it come alive again. We all have those years or eras where we can’t really remember why we were the person that we were or why we felt the way we did. But that was me then. And that part of me still exists. It must, because I still obsess over James Joyce’s Ulysses like a pretentious undergrad.
Yet, whenever I listen to Road to Rouen, I am immediately brought back to that bus ride from Galway to Dublin. I still can see out that window and onto the dark fields, the bus vibrating beneath me, the confetti patterned fabric of the seat against the back of my head. The moon may not have been shining, but in my memory it was. What I do know is that I was listening to Road to Rouen. That will always be true.
When I listen to Road to Rouen now, it sounds better than it did then; I appreciate the album even more. It’s incredibly hard to make a work of art that moves someone, let alone an album that has something sturdy about it, something that makes the work stay with a person for almost twenty years. Road to Rouen is a record that will always be with me—one of those albums that has its own unique spot in your heart, in the mental record collection you carry with you through life.
HAL may be lost to time, but they aren’t lost to me. “Play the Hits” still thrills me, makes my heart skip a beat when I listen to it. Because I remember what it was like to breathlessly look for the next single or band to change my life. I remember what it was like to believe that music could do that, that it could make me feel more alive than I ever could have imagined.
But in so many ways I’m more alive now than I ever was then. I feel, very often, that I am more myself than I have ever been. My life now contains actual responsibilities and there are people I am truly accountable to and for. Despite that, though, I still don’t have all of the responsibilities in my life that I want. And I’m not quite sure who I really am—or if this is the person I am meant to, or want to be.
I’m trying to get comfortable with all of that. I’m trying to be as alive as I can be each day as I progress further and further away from that time when falling in love with a new band could fill me up more than anything else.
And hopefully one day, before it’s all over, I’ll make or be a part of something that lasts or is remembered, even faintly, nearly twenty years later.