Listening to the ho-hum title track to Magical Mystery Tour, I was reminded again what a weak track it actually is, especially coming hot on the heels of ‘Pepper’. But come to the coda, and fade, and it all suddenly gels – a plinky-plonk piano ambles skywards, vaguely referencing the main theme, beneath the sound of clinking glasses and one of Macca’s best bass moments – a pulsing, dark little groove, that bubbles and squirms its way out of the song.
I think it’s a proper little HJH moment, and thinking about it, they did seem to chuck in little goodies at fade-outs or codas. Backwards tapes on ‘Rain’, the honking laughter on ‘Within You’, those big, straffing lush guitar lines at the end of ‘Strawberry Fields’ and of course, HJ itself, about 5 minutes bloody coda.
So, what are your favourite endings? Happy or otherwise…
As a direct comparison, the ending of The Rutles Shangri-La is a winner (and I’d prefer it at the end of any major public event – all Macca seems to do now is Ob La Di Ob La Da and Hey Jude)
The album version of Down In The Tube Station At Midnight is a good ‘un.
Fades out like the single, and then comes back to life – a tube train moving off and then Ricks drums bring the instruments back. it’s less than a minute, but is a better ending than the single
oooh, what about the end of Safe European Home, the bit when everything but the guitar and vocals drop out, and then it all comes crashing back in?
Topper’s drum rolls may very well be my favourite drum roll thingy
Best Side One ever that .
Better than Moondance? Scary Monsters? The Band? Fulham Fallout?
Maybe it was the 2 pints of Guiness, but hearing the full playout of Layla over a PA system in a very small sweaty club restored interest in an overheard track
Always reminds me of Goodfellas, that piano coda
Apropos of Goodfellas, wharrabout the long ending to Atlantis by DONOVAN… which makes the hippybollix narration you’ve just endured well worth sitting* through.
(*cross-legged, natch)
Happy Trails, the last track on Van Halen’s Diver Down.
Done acapella style with a nice round of laughter and yeehaa to finish.
Also, One Foot out the Door from the above Fair Warning.
A totally blazing fretwank with super fast fluid runs and generous toppings of pick squeal.
Some erm…proficient blues Nazis here will fucking hate it.
Bless em.
Gotta be the end of Boys Keep Swinging . But go back to How Does The Grass Grow off The Next Day and listen to that last minute or so when the bass takes over and takes it elsewhere …why do they both fade out too early ?
How about Remake/Remodel off first Roxy L.P.?
End bit of Squonk off A Trick Of The Tail by Genesis ?
Blimey , this could go on forever .
Pink Floyd: Eclipse
Dark Side has dealt, rather beautifully, with some of life’s big issues, like time, greed, conflict, mental illness, politics, death. And then we come to the sheer pointlessness of it all, cos everything -all that you touch, think, feel, love, hate, create, destroy, do, say, and all that is now and all this gone and all that’s to come and everything under the sun- will be blown away. Eclipsed. When the Little Rocket Man and the Mentally Deranged Dotard press their buttons. And we return to just the single, lonely hearbeat.
Magnifique.
Good post that, Gary.
Thankee, Freddy my love. x
Flying (the Beatles tune) is another one with a great dreamy psychedelic ending. I used to dream there was a bootleg somewhere with all these lovely jams on them. (Of course, there kind of is. It’s called What’s The New Mary Jane and it’s awful).
Endings? What about Starship Trooper by Yes. One of my all time favourite guitar solos that fades out all too early.
Strawberry Letter 23 by Shuggie Otis. That great cascading guitar riff.
The last minute of Tubular Bells (side one) is pretty special as well. All the mass instruments die away and you are left with a beautiful little solo spanish guitar song. Really delicate.
As a youngster I found the end of Flying to be quite creepy. All that mellotronic noodling – it sounded like no normal instrument; as if they were having a musical seance and were hearing things from somewhere unearthly.
Quite interesting that this thread mentioned both Magical Mystery Tour and Down in the Tube Station as I heard both these songs as a nine year old and so I am reminded of Neil’s Hole in my Shoe, which was a single i had at the time, all of which made me think about ‘but what comes next?’ I have the same feeling with Oh Well part one, which I always think has quite a sci-fi sound to it, as if you’ve been left on an alien planet. I have no idea why I feel like that, it just sounds so lonely.
Favorite ending? Buzzcocks ‘Love You More.’ One minute and forty seven wonderful seconds, “until the razor cuts” and it’s all over.
ELO’ s Shangri- La. The dreamy but dull final track of A New World Record almost ends at 3.50 then builds up again into something magical before the fade out.
That’s a good call. AND it’s also a song that directly references the fade out of another song.
Rather uninterestingly, my man Brian Wilson is, if not famous, then reasonably well known, for his “tag endings”, where he adds a little tune from out of nowhere to the fade. Sometimes he’d not bother with the song itself and just go with the tag, as on much of Smiley Smile, an album I love so very deeply my doe-like eyes well with tears at the very thort of it.
Can’t be arsed to find a clip.
It’s easily overlooked how odd Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love is, especially as the lead single from a comeback album. The last wordless minute where a languid guitar solo gives way to a more frenetic, galloping riff while Lindsey’s uhh/ahh samples sit on top of everything is quite the finale.
Video is still great too:
Always thought the rhythm track was a bit derivative of Running Up That Hill.
Great tune. Saw an unplugged solo version of this once which was pretty amazing too – another climactic fade!
I quite like the ending of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko”, which concludes with an excerpt from the South African funeral song “Senzeni Na?” and then a double drumbeat.
I enjoy a wig out guitar based ending. The singing stops and we can sit back and listen while the band let rip. In the case of Baby’s On Fire it feels like the ‘song’ part is just there as a device to get us to the more interesting and tremendous Fripp solo. Other examples are In Every Home A Heartache and The Strand. Or Hot Rats even (a rather longer coda that is the track really).
Been listening to some more random fine fades
Street Fightin’ Man has that rich, dense fade, with chiming Nicky Hopkins piano etc
Julian Cope’s Double Vegetation has the kind of full-on wig-out guitar ending Diddley mentions above, truly epic
I always loved the ending of Ashes To Ashes. It feels like seeing the planet growing smaller and smaller as you get further into space
That pounding drum assault on Misty Mountain Hop
Listen To What The Man Said – right, right at the end, this beautiful resolving chord comes in, right in the last few seconds.
One of my favourite endings is to the movie Friday Night Lights. I suspect it’s a film that will find no favour on here, given that it’s a sports movie, it’s pretty cheesy and extremely American. Nonetheless…
[SPOILERS FOLLOW – not that any of you are in danger of watching it]
The movie is based on H.G Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name, which contains the author’s observations on the small town of Odessa, Texas and the local passion for Gridiron. It charts the true story of the 1988 football team of the local high school – the Permean Panthers. Odessa was famous for its football players; they were traditionally smaller than most, but trained from birth to be hard as nails. And hard as nails they had to be, because the local community pretty much demanded each and every year that they bring home the State championship. Teenage boys, treated as local celebrities, with crushing expectation on their shoulders, full in the knowledge that they had a few short months in the spotlight before heading off to live workaday lives, with the memories of what they had or had not achieved likely to absolutely define them in the eyes of their peers.
The 2004 movie, directed by Peter Berg, brilliantly soundtracked by blog favourites Explosions in the Sky and subsequently turned into a teen soap opera for television, tells a similar, albeit slightly altered story. The Panthers are among the favourites for the State title when they unexpectedly lose their star player, one Boobie Miles, to a career destroying injury early in the season. Without him, the remaining players are left to attempt to pick up the pieces of their title challenge, their collective angst summarised in the form of quarterback Mike Winchell, who spends the movie fretting and anguished over the “curse” he believes hangs over them.
Somehow, the Panthers scramble their way to the finals of the State championship. Up to this point, the movie has been decent, without being great. In the last half hour, it becomes absolutely bloody magnificent.
Their opponents on the day are Dallas Carter, an unstoppable machine who have swept all before them, who are physically much much bigger and virtually all of whom appear to be at least 30 years old, which kind of feels like cheating. The Panthers spend the entirety of the first half being brutalised and swatted around the field, before returning to the locker room bloodied, depressed and certain that the game is lost.
In the half time break, their Coach (Billy Bob Thornton) delivers this speech:
It’s one of my favourite scenes in any movie ever, because it sums up what I think team sports (team anything, for that matter) is all about. Throughout the movie, the Coach has urged his players to be perfect. Now he reveals what “perfect” means to him:
“Well it’s real simple: You got two more quarters and that’s it.
Now most of you have been playing this game for ten years. And you got two more quarters and after that most of you will never play this game again as long as you live. Now, you all have known me for a while, and for a long time now you’ve been hearing me talk about being perfect.
Well I want you to understand something. To me, being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you and your relationship to yourself and your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told them the truth. And that truth is that you did everything that you could. There wasn’t one more thing that you could have done.
Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart? If you can do that gentlemen, then you’re perfect.
I want you to take a moment. And I want you to look each other in the eyes. I want you to put each other in your hearts forever, because forever’s about to happen here in just a few minutes. I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to think about Boobie Miles, who is your brother. And he would die to be out there on that field with you tonight. And I want you to put that in your hearts.
Boys, my heart is full. My heart’s full”
It’s cheesy, and reads terribly if you’re not invested, but I absolutely love it (fun fact: the big guy stood next to the Boobie Miles character is the actual, real life Boobie Miles). Sport, like life, is not about winning. It’s about your relationship with yourself. It’s not about hating your rival, it’s about loving your team mates, and supporting and lifting each other. It’s all very Hallmark, but I find a great deal of truth in there.
The Panthers go back out and scrap their way through the second half. Bones are broken, shoulders are dislocated. They fight their way back into some sort of cohesion, and start to edge up the score. In the last minute, they go on one epic drive up the field in search of the touchdown that will win them the championship. The game ends with Mike Winchell surging towards the end zone, a pack of much larger opponents attempting to stop him crossing the line. He goes down, there’s uncertainty as to whether or not he’s scored the vital touchdown, and….. he hasn’t.
He hasn’t, and they’ve lost, by no more than an inch. And I absolutely bloody love that. It’s not a new thing in a sports movie for the heroes to lose, but I don’t think it’s ever been done better than here.
Friday Night Lights is an easy movie to sneer at, but it can be properly great if you let it sweep you along (plus, my bar for sports movies is super low, which helps). It taught me something about life (perhaps something obvious, but still something valuable) that I subsequently took on and applied. Andres Iniesta once said of football “the result is an imposter”. When I heard him say it, I thought immediately of this movie, because that’s what it’s about, both in sport and in life. It’s about your input, not your output. It’s about approaching what you do with a full heart, and with joy, and recognising that you may not always get your just reward, but that’s OK.
Probably my favourite ending of any movie ever.
Brings to mind this half time team talk…
That’s another favourite!
As always, Iron Maiden is the answer. The outro mirrors the intro in a nice way.
If you can´t stand the whole thing, zoom in at around 6:34.
I love the end of Rapture, more than the rest of the song, in truth, the guitar solo just threatening to start as the song fades. Much better than the 12″ which exposes it.
I reject entirely the premise of the initial post; Magical Mystery Tour is a perfectly great song from beginning to end. But, that aside, it would be the singalong ending to Van’s “Caravan” and Dylan’s cry of “a-hah” as the band bring home Obviously Five Believers.
If no-one’s mentioned it, and even if they have, Suede’s New Generation. That line-up at it’s absolute peak.
Good… But the coda to The Wild Ones betters it.
Or Still Life. Actually that album’s chock full of great endings (….and beginnings…. and middles)
The end of We Are The Pigs is brilliant, but I defy anyone to listen to it with the lights off.
It’s the giggling.
*shivers*
The coda to The Wild Ones was one of the major disagreements, if not *the* major disagreement that made Bernard Butler leave the band. The coda that we have now is Brett’s coda. Bernard wanted a more freeform meandering ending with a guitar wig out which eventually showed up on the 2011 reissue. I love BB and it’s not bad, but Brett was 100% right.
“Ain’t there one damn song that could make me break down and cry”
Hang on – I’ve got an absolute doozy!
New Slaves – Kanye West
The first section of the song is bog standard Yeezus-era Kanye: interesting production, dreadful rapping, horrible pitiful lyrics. Lots of moaning and self aggrandising.
Then, with about a minute to go, it briefly turns into a completely different song, and that song happens to be one of the absolute best musical moments of the last decade.
There’s a heavily sped up sample, the tune drops away, replaced by a fantastic sounding drum roll to announce what’s coming and then – this absolutely phenomenal beat (are there bagpipes in there? I don’t know), probably Kanye’s best ever. There’s still time for him to balls it all up with his big mouth, but he doesn’t, because instead of the usual bobbins, we get this really heavily treated vocal that appears to be torn direct from his own inner monologue. And then Frank fricking Ocean drops in for 30 seconds of freestyle vocal gymnastics to top it all off, before the song outros to (of course!) a sample from the Hungarian rock band Omega.
It’s absolutely bloody magnificent. The only song I can think of that I routinely listen to starting two and a half minutes in. Seriously, check it out….
https://m.soundcloud.com/kanyewest/new-slaves
Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes isn’t the first time the tonal centre of a track/piece shifts upwards right at the end (Ravel had already done so with his Bolero) but the thrilling effect is obvious in both.
Thom Yorke’s brilliant The Eraser almost grinds to a halt then springs back to life and drags us to Ibiza !! https://youtu.be/4lSiyXKu05Q
Again a movie, and again one that many might consider cheesy and overly American in these parts but I love it.
The Prince of Tides is one of my all time favorite movies, the type that I really enjoy re-watching every few years. And the ending just kills me. Maybe you have to know the journey the main character takes throughout the course of the film to appreciate the ending, but, if so, it’s a journey worth taking with him. The book is also wonderful with, as usual, even more depth and breadth than the film. I highly recommend it.