Begging You

I'm begging you
I'm begging you

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it
And he knew what to do with it
Everybody saw it, saw the dust that he made

King bee in a frenzy, ready to blow
Got the horn good to go, wait till his sting's all gone
Now he's begging you, begging you

Here is a warning, the sky will divide
Since I took off the lid now there's nowhere to hide
Now I'm begging you, begging you
This is a mystery not to be solved
But be minded like-minded, I'm gone, still I'm with you
I'm begging you, I'm begging you

Give it over, give it over
Give it over, give it over
Yeah I'm begging you
I'm begging you
Give it over, give it over
Give it over, give it over
Yeah I'm begging you
I'm begging you

Weigh it and say it
Is it all in a name
Does it call you or maul you
And drive you insane
Can it make you remember time is a place
Now I'm begging you
I'm begging you

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it
And he knew what to do with it
Everybody saw it, saw the dust that he made

Make all the dust that you can
Make all the dust that you can
King bee in a frenzy ready to blow

Lyrics by:
Squire / Brown

Music by:
Squire / Brown

Written:
1993

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar, recording of Jets)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums, backing vocals)

Producer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder.

Engineer:
Partly recorded by John Leckie.

Programmer:
Brian Pugsley

Format:
Released 1995:
Begging You (radio edit) / Begging You (chic edit) (Geffen, WGFSTD 22060, CD promo)
Begging You (Geffen, WGFST 22060, 12" promo)
Begging You (Geffen, WGFSX 22060, 12" promo)

Released October 1995:
Begging You (lp version) / Begging You (lakota mix) / Begging You (stone corporation mix) / Begging You (chic mix) / Begging You (young amercian primitive remix) / Begging You (radio edit version) (Geffen, GEFDM-22061, Australian CD)

Released November 1995:
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (lakota mix) / Begging You (stone corporation vox) / Begging You (chic mix) / Begging You (young amercian primitive remix) (Geffen, GFSTD 22060, CD)
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (chic mix) (Geffen, GFST 22060, 12")
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (chic mix) (Geffen, GFSC 22060, cassette)

UK chart details:
Begging You entered the charts on 11th November 1995, spending 3 weeks in the charts and reaching a highest position of 15.

Also available on:
Second Coming (4.56)
The Very Best Of The Stone Roses (4.55)

First live performance:
Stockholm Palladium (20 April 1995)

Artwork details:
The Begging You artwork is from 'Begging You' (1995), plaster, floppy discs and watercolour on plywood, 35" x 35"

Details:
A secret comeback tour of the UK in April 1995 was planned by The Stone Roses but this was cancelled after the music press announced the dates. A major blow to the band's status was the cancellation of their planned UK comeback performance at the Glastonbury festival in June 1995. John Squire had suffered a mountain biking accident in Northern California just weeks before the show and had broken his collarbone. The band finally booked a full UK tour for November and December 1995 and all dates sold out in a day. Begging You, the last of the Roses' thirteen singles, entered the charts in mid-November, just prior to the onset of this tour. While I would not agree with Ian Brown's assessment that it was one of the best things they ever did (U2 were certainly impressed by it however, ripping it off for 'Discotheque'; in particular listen to 3.40 - 3.44 and 4.40 - 4.44 of Begging You), they at least were experimenting in different genres of music, this one being in the mould of indie-techno.

"This was really the main one for sample loops. The loops were done before the group came to Rockfield, by a guy called Brian Pugsley, who structured the loops they had created. John had them on disk, and I think Brian just got them in the right place and at the right time - quite a lot of work, I think. Brian also programmed a bass pulse, a sample of an oscillator generating a sine wave at a low frequency, which we ended up using in the verses of the song. Mani had come up with a bassline, but we liked the pulse. It was quite difficult though - because the pulse was a straight sine wave from an oscillator, it had no harmonics, so we had quite a problem at the mix getting it so you could hear it. We were cutting from the bass to the pulse, and matching it up was quite tricky. You can hear it when you've got a really nice pair of speakers.

"Other than that, there are a few different loops in there - old soul loops running backwards, slowed down - so no-one can recognise them - and there's also a backwards guitar riff, which John had to learn to play in reverse. We turned the tape over so it ran the opposite way, then John experimented over the backwards music until we found something that worked when we turned the tape back over. It became the main riff, and we decided to triple-track it, so John had to do it the same three times, which is quite hard to do over backwards music ! There are also some jets in the middle of the song, which John Squire recorded at an air show with his DAT player holding his mic up in the air, and which we layered in."
(Simon Dawson speaking to Sound On Sound magazine, May 1995)

Speaking to Select Magazine in November 1997, John cited Public Enemy as a considerable influence on this track:

"I got hooked on Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet and I wanted to make music like that - deconstruct it and reassemble it. So a guy called Si Crompton was showing me how to use the sequencers and samplers. But it wasn't for me. Too much like a science lesson. So I ripped up the floppy disks I had used and set them in plaster. I pinched all the colours from a Degas painting."

Begging You is very stressful musically: ferocious drumming, screaming guitar licks, unremitting bass and a shouted vocal. Although the song musically and lyrically conveys an apocalyptical scenario (Albrecht Dürer's (1471 - 1528) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498) would provide an apt visual accompaniment to the song), I think that some of the lyrics are merely rewritings of Aesop's and Abstemius's fables. Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620–560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving personified animals. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" was derived), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, are well-known throughout the world. Returning to discussion of the apocalypse, Second Coming was released in 1994 and the aspect of millenarianism (the belief that the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of His kingdom on earth, as predicted in the Book of Revelation, is near) will not have been lost on Squire and Brown, with the year 2000 approaching. End of the world predictions have been common throughout Christianity and other religions for almost 2000 years. Begging You, the moment of the 'Second Coming', rightfully takes centre position in the album tracklisting.

---------------------------------------------------

A Fly Upon a Wheel (by Abstemius)

"What a dust do I raise !" says the Fly, "upon the Coach-wheel ? And what a rate do I drive at." says the same Fly again, "upon the horse's buttock !"

---------

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it
Saw the dust that he made, make all the dust that you can

------------------------------------------------

The Fly and the Draught-Mule (by Aesop)

A Fly sat on the axle-tree of a chariot, and addressing the Draught-Mule said, "How slow you are ! Why do you not go faster ? See if I do not prick your neck with my sting." The Draught-Mule replied, "I do not heed your threats; I only care for him who sits above you, and who quickens my pace with his whip, or holds me back with the reins. Away, therefore, with your insolence, for I know well when to go fast, and when to go slow."

---------

King bee in a frenzy, ready to blow
Got the horn good to go

------------------------------------------------

Of all the Roses' videos, Begging You is the most bizarre, and one lacking in effort. Ian Brown attributes this to the excessive creative freedom given by their record boss, David Geffen:

"David Geffen said 'Your music, I don't care, do what you want. Just give me three great videos and you'll be a star'. Did we ever give him three videos ? Yes, but they weren't great. We needed someone at that time to give us a kick up the arse."

The video - which incorporates video footage from the Roses' Berlin Metropol gig (25th April 1995) - is a continental pastiche of Led Zeppelin's 'Trampled Underfoot', from 1975, which likewise synchronizes various forms of dance with the band's music. The female night-club dancers wearing Roses masks in the video disrupt what John Berger called the 'male gaze', by not allowing us to look at the women 'properly'.

"men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female."*

I have highlighted that piece in bold above as the male face and female body in the video may be representative of the male surveyor of the female and the surveyed female respectively. Or perhaps the video merely jokingly uses the NME masks which the magazine supplied for people to wear at Glastonbury that year, in the absence of the band. The interspersing of clips of the Roses live and the female night-club dancers is significant in its statement that the two are not radically different in their purpose. Given the strong influence of Degas on Squire (he pinched the colours for the Begging You artwork from a Degas painting. See also the Ten Storey Love Song video analysis), the concept for the video could perhaps be traced back to Degas’ 'The Orchestra of the Opéra' (c. 1870), a portrait which contained his first representation of ballet dancers - a subject that he would go on to paint more than any other. The men in the Degas painting are individual beings engaged in creative activity; the women are made 'headless' like those in the Begging You video. The video updates the sexual undertones (concentration on the ballerinas' limbs and tulle skirts lit by the footlights, and the phallic aggressiveness of the double-bass projecting into the female space) of the painting to a hi-tech 1990s medium.

* John Berger, Ways of seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 47.

1995 - Begging You video stills:

Back To The Songs