Stop Whispering

abingdon

It is one of the oldest ones, from the years when they were On a Friday and still at school in Abingdon. They cut various demos of it unsigned, and one of those tapes reached Chris Hufford, who ran a local studio; he and Bryce Edge became the band's managers on the strength of it, and still are.

When Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade were deciding whether to produce the band, this is the song they were played.

tinkered with

We tinkered with it a bit. It was kind of a sprawling thing and we weren't sure how long it would be.

paul kolderie

The version on Pablo Honey runs five and a half minutes, and the band were not happy with it. For the American single in October 1993 they recorded it again. Ed O'Brien thought the new one more atmospheric, and reached for Joy Division to describe it.

The words are about oppression and the frustration of not being able to explain it, which is roughly what the title says.

the third single

It was the third single from the album, and like the two before it, it went nowhere: 23 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, 131 in Australia, where it followed “Creep” in February 1994. A video premiered on MTV's 120 Minutes on 19 September 1993. Jimmy Eat World covered it in 2013.

how the night ended

This is the surprise in the numbers. Of 131 performances in the archive, forty-one closed the show, more than almost anything else they had at the time. It was in the set from Oxford on 31 October 1991, played forty-nine times in 1993, and then dropped: the last performance is Galway, 28 July 1996.