'The Amber Lights' is the third video single from the album 'The Death Throes of a Jaded Empire' released at the end of January 2021.
Reflecting on his formative years Cade explains the story behind the song:
My childhood was spent growing up in the 70s and 80s in a long forgotten Victorian seaside town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, off the Kent coast. Neglected since the end of the Second World War, by the 1970s the town was already on a downward slope, but was still a bustling centre for the local population. Those two decades though, were the time in which new and modern was seen as the way forward, scrub away the past, and gradually the character was wiped from the seafront to be replaced with brutalist concrete and plain disposable buildings with little or no character. If only they had foreseen the resurgence of the British seaside town that was to come.
Cade continues:
‘The Amber Lights’ is about my youth, which was spent sculling around the streets with my mates, down the arcades, on the seafront around town, in the back street pubs that didn’t worry about age restrictions, as long as you didn’t get drunk and cause any problems. All the street lights back then had been changed from white lights to amber, which gave the streets a slightly otherworldly look, particularly when the sea mist rolled in across the town at night. A large part of my teens was spent out in the evenings on my bike, around with mates, to be honest there wasn’t a whole lot else to do, some of my mates had record players in their bedrooms so we could listen to music, or take our guitars round for a very quiet jam. But mostly we were on the streets.
Describing his home town now, Cade’s observations certainly ring true to many who have witnessed a similar decline over the years:
My folks still live in the town where I grew up. It is a soul crushingly sad place to visit now, large parts of the main town have be ripped up for a ring road to get people to a large supermarket on the edge of town. The 8 pubs I would regularly frequent, some with live music, are now betting shops, charity shops, takeaways or barbers, the last cinema closed in the 80s (there were originally 3), the two clubs followed a decade later. The once bustling high street now has a few random people walking around, and the beaches where I spent my childhood, which were always busy, are now largely deserted.
As with the best laid plans for 2021 the COVID-19 pandemic meant Cade had to re-think his plans for the video shoot:
Originally the video for this song was going to be shot down around my old home town, but the pandemic put paid to that. Maybe, I’ll do a new version when everything has cleared up.
And, on the future Cade offers some hope:
Thankfully some of Kent’s vibrant seaside towns have had a resurgence and are once again busy and thriving places to visit.
‘The Amber Lights’ is the current release from the album ‘The Death Throes of a Jaded Empire’. It is available now on Bandcamp.