Behind The Tracks: Midland Railway - The Pokemon Adventure (Single) (2025)

There was actually a very specific night out that inspired this song, and it involved going to Satan's Hollow in Manchester. However, I wrote the lyrics on a flight back from Lanzarote several months later, on an Airbus A320, and then I came up with almost all the music in one morning about a month after that. I had finished writing "A Song for Hannah-Beth" earlier that morning, and decided to work on this one almost as an afterthought, but I was on something of a roll that morning, in a way where I would like to have bottled up all the creativity I had that day in a way that would have allowed me to keep using it far more over the following months.

 

There are loads of songs in existence about really brilliant nights out, but I suspect relatively disappointing ones are at least as common, if not more, especially if you're single and quite lonely, and hope that a night out is going to magically fix that. At the time, I had been playing lots of Pokémon, as well as a bunch of other strategy games, and was pretty good at several of them. I once came 3rd in England in the Pokémon card game national championships. On a night out, all those skills don't really count for much, despite the famous Napoleon Dynamite quote, and the story this song tells kind of illustrates that, and how futile all your endeavours can feel at such moments. As I was writing the lyrics, I realised the narrative similarity to the verse in "How Soon is Now?" by The Smiths, so I deliberately made that one line extremely similar so that Smiths fans would quickly spot it, though my story is much nerdier than Morrissey's.

 

The idea I had for the music was a verse that built up to a much heavier chorus. I had been listening to "Pork n Beans" by Weezer quite a bit at this time. I love that song, and I think that was a factor in the melody having quite a wide vocal range in the verse, and a much narrower one in the chorus. In the first demo version, I played the solo melody on a keyboard, and the run at the end of it was Robert Hayton's idea.

 

It was my favourite of our songs when we came to start recording the album (though we had not-yet written "She Loves Ted Bundy"), so it was the one we recorded first. I like the story it tells, the way it takes the listener through different moods, and particularly the way that the melody and feel of the song fit the various moods of the lyrics as the song progresses. It feels like the most complete song I have written in that respect.

 

We recorded it with Neil Treppas at Redbridge Studio in Bolton. We had known Neil for a long time, and he had just finished working on Steps' first album. He is exceptionally good at making really bright, pop-friendly sounds and at vocal production, and even though this song rocks out a lot, I think his style was a perfect fit for this song. He was also exceptionally patient with us when we made loads of rookie errors during the recording process. We had planned to play the lead part and solo on guitar, but Rob was unable to make it to the recording, so I ended up playing it on a keyboard, and I think that actually works even better, as it's brighter and sounds more like a retro computer game. In the end, I couldn't be happier with how the recording turned out. When we played the first mixes to our friends and family, it seemed like everyone suddenly understood why recording the album was so important to us, and that helped give us the momentum to get the rest of the album recorded.

The song has always worked particularly well live, and here's where you can see us perform it, along with your other favourites from our debut album:

 

Wednesday 28th May - International Pop Overthrow at The Cavern Club, Liverpool.

Friday 6th June - The Annex, Southport.

Saturday 23rd August - Castle and Falcon, Birmingham.