The End of the MovieStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The Maida Vale session recording for BBC Introducing is the one most people have heard, and it is better than the album version.

The song

A song about the moment after something ends — not the ending itself but the peculiar flatness that follows it, when the lights come up and everyone has to work out what to do with their hands. The title is exact, which is usual for this band.

Four minutes and twenty seconds, tenth on the album, and one of the most restrained arrangements on it. The drums barely assert themselves. The harmony carries almost everything.

The Maida Vale session

The band recorded The End of the Movie at Maida Vale for BBC Introducing, and that session video circulated widely enough that a substantial number of listeners know the song in that form rather than from the record.

Session recordings usually sound thinner than album takes. This one does the opposite: the room gives the harmony space that the studio version tightens, and the performance is a good argument for a band that had spent four years playing live before anyone recorded them properly.

Near the close

It sits between On The Rocks and Long-Distance Lullaby, in the run of longer, quieter material that ends the album. A record that opens with Zorbing and closes here has moved a long way in forty minutes.

The song remained in the live set across both eras, which is not true of every album track, and it is one of the pieces the acoustic arrangements on Best of Unplucked were made for.

Endings, as a subject and otherwise

There is a particular irony in this song’s title given what happened to the band: an announcement in October 2016, a farewell tour, a final show at the New Theatre in Oxford on 12 March 2017, and then five years of nothing.

And then the lights came back up. Three of the four played Truck Festival and WOMAD in July 2022 and did not stop, and the band has released more since the reunion than some groups manage in a career.

Which makes the song’s actual subject — the flatness after an ending, before you know what comes next — read rather differently now than it did in 2010.

Where the album’s title came from

Beachcomber’s Windowsill is named after a song that is not on it — an early piece the band wrote and never released.

That is an unusual choice for a debut, and a revealing one this late in the running order: the record is named for something discarded, by a band who kept the discarded thing’s title because it described the whole better than any of the eleven finished songs did.

This track, tenth of eleven, is where that sensibility is most exposed — an ending written before the ending.

In the sequence

On the record it follows On the Rocks and leads into Long-Distance Lullaby. That puts it tenth of eleven, at 4:20.

No single was cut from it. The record it sits on, Beachcomber's Windowsill, carries the release detail.