A Tribute To Fergus Miller, AKA Bored Nothing: Beauty, Bullshit And Bliss

I mean, really swear. The songs he recorded under the Bored Nothing moniker are peppered with expletives, rounded out with curses that would be shocking if they weren’t sung with so much care. He dropped the F-bomb as though he were passing thread through the eye of a needle, in a manner that lacked drama but proved heavy with promise.

You don’t realise the brutality of a song like ‘Bliss’ until you stop to inspect it, and even then its bile is tempered shot-for-shot with beauty. Part of that is because Miller favoured reverb-heavy guitar lines and possessed an unparalleled ear for crafting pop hooks, but part of that is also because his work never once spilled over into the territory of the cruel. Even when he was pissed off, singing lines about “bullshit spill[ing] from your lips”, his music had a ferocious form of love to it.

Indeed, such is the power of all his songs. A record like Bored Nothing – a fuzzed-out batch of choruses that invokes My Bloody Valentine and Elliott Smith and also nobody at all; nobody but Miller – works precisely because it mixes up horror with grace, until both are revealed to be exactly the same thing. In a song like ‘I Wish You Were Dead’, the pain of a disintegrating relationship isn’t somehow distinct from hope: poetic, perfectly formed lines about “the moon on the rise” are folded into barbed proclamations about “facing fear” and “the end of a million kids”.

By the same token, although ‘Why Were You Dancing With All Those Guys’ rides on waves of jealousy, even the song’s prickly and possessive narrator realises elegance in the perceived betrayal of their partner. “As your hair caught the blue light,” goes the line. “As we moved through the hot night”.

Such tonal clashes stop the songs from ever becoming too po-faced – Some Songs, the second Bored Nothing record, has a distinct, dark sense of humour about it, and the aforementioned ‘Why Were You Dancing’ draws inspiration from a line featured in the animated series King Of The Hill – but it also makes them profoundly relatable.

The late Miller’s lyrics largely follow distinct narratives, albeit in a way that is more flip-book than epic Russian novel. Songs pivot on fragile, bone-thin tipping points – on muttered exchanges and promises both broken and largely unimportant. Calamities occur in a way that feels somehow totally free from danger; after all, even the things that hurt eventually stop hurting, and the songs have a kind of quiet resignment about them.

In both the great joke and the great sadness of Miller’s music, nothing irreplaceable is ever at the stake. But he had a counterpoint to set up to in response to that dearth, and his songs successfully argue that the replaceable has a power entirely of its own: that the things we largely consider to be distractions from our ‘real life’ – overheard, under-thought conversations; idle crappy behaviour from lovers; the vague ways our friends annoy us – have a power equal to, if not greater than, our jobs, the clothes we wear and the people we call family.

Miller never cleaned anything up or left something out of a song because it was too ugly or too mundane. His work mines the emotional territory other singer-songwriters might well ignore altogether: the unsexy, in-betweeny stuff.

He said it best himself, because of course he did, in a 2013 conversation with 2SER. “My favourite things to sing about are really boring things that seem like they should never have songs about them,” he told an interviewer then. “Like getting a degree and then having to work at a supermarket, or getting drunk and embarrassing yourself on the weekend.”

Such an approach to songwriting is crystallised best in ‘Ultra-Lites’, the song on which every single one of Miller’s talents is laid bare. The tune is funny and dark, and Miller rhymes ‘7-11’ with ‘heaven’, and it all ends without fanfare, almost as though it collapses in on itself, or there’s simply nothing else left to say. It does a host of things, and yet it seems like it isn’t doing anything at all: it is bent in the middle in a pose of gentle, unmistakably knowing humility.

That was Miller, really, and his genius. He released records you could love the way you love your friends, and played songs that were of you, not simply for you. And he did it all as though it were the easiest thing in the world; as though art was as common as air.

Rest in peace.

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