European Sun: School Report – single review and Interview

Single Review / Interview

European Sun 

School Report

(Skep Wax)   

DL / CD

released 30 December 2025

School Report, by European Sun is a 17-minute pop song in which a diary of an anxiety-ridden day is punctuated with readings from the singer’s school report: the acid, dismissive remarks made by uncaring teachers years ago echoing cruelly down the years. An epic, free-wheeling, Sister Ray length song that encapsulates “what it’s like to live in my head for a day“, set to music that resembles an indie-pop ‘New Face In Hell’ or ‘What Goes On’.  From the first play Ged Babey thought, I can relate to a lot of that, and, ‘this is one of the most remarkable songs I’ve ever heard’.  See if you agree and in the words of Lou Reed, ‘feel less alone’ as a result. 

It is an epic. The War-and-Peace of Pop-songs. A fantastic-journey to the centre-of-a-mind… a self-study in neurodivergence, an over-share of one mans thoughts & anxieties…. an analysis of how the past manifests itself in the minutiae of everyday life….

The initial musical similarity to New Face In Hell means that you can fully concentrate on the lyrical narrative…

I can’t think of another song quite like it – one that has over 3000 words! One that is so open, simple yet complex, and as entertaining as it is serious. There is a lot of humour in it – the autobiographic detail is intentional to amuse and relate to, as well as the (cliched idea of the) artistic exorcism…

Just because I think that this song is absolutely brilliant, I am fully aware there will be those of you who will give-up-on-it after a minute, or two, maybe three… and that’s OK. Not everyone is gonna relate or enjoy it.

You might not like the narrators voice, or find the music generic…. but those of you that keep listening, because you are intrigued, because you can relate to the ‘internal monologue’  within the first minute or two and who get that it’s more Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads than David Byrnes, will absolutely love it.  The song-format is just the chosen artistic vehicle that transports this art into your life…and heart.

This is a Day in The Life Art Work. A Lifetime’s worry. It is full of self-deprecating humour -as defence mechanism and coping strategy. But it does have a resolution by the end. The overlapping narratives and loose ends all tie-up eventually.

I was hooked at:  I wake up before I want to, like a wound reopening… I never have been good at waking up, no matter what the day had in store… I wish I could live in my dreams…

Does everybody feel like that?  Maybe not. If you are in peak fitness, have a ‘positive mindset’, love your job, have a ‘great life’, money… but many of us don’t have the whole kit and caboodle. Or maybe just aren’t equipped to deal with things. Like ‘Life’.

The song is punctuated from quotes from old school reports from the 1970’s – I haven’t asked whether they are all 100% verbatim and real – but I expect they are. HE WORKS STEADILY, BUT ACTUAL ACHIEVEMENT IS A LITTLE DISAPPOINTING.

The other thing that crops up at intervals are ‘feel-good’, ‘self-help’ phrases of the kind well-meaning people put up online: LET GO AND FORGIVE / TAKE SMALL STEPS EVERY DAY / STOP TO SMELL THE ROSES /AND MAKE THE TIME TO PLAY…

Halfway through the song become a seemingly endless list of objects and thoughts cluttering the narrators mind and forming an imaginary pile of things to do, sort, file, put away, forget, put off to another day or quit worrying about.

I don’t think you need to know Steve Miles at all to get this song. And I don’t think you have to necessarily be neuro-diverse to relate to it: but maybe it helps, whether you have a formal diagnosis or not. (Neither Steve or I do, but we have both read extensively about the subject.)

So, as well as being an autobiography in miniature, it’s a List-Song (like A House’s Endless Art, the Psychedelic Furs All Of This & Nothing, Reasons To Be Cheerful Pt 3) and a classic proto-punk Long Song -which seemed so different to 3 minute (punk) pop: (Sister Ray, The End, Interstellar Overdrive…) as well as a couple of sessions with a therapist – set to fine, fine music.

In short, it is a work of genius… as far as I’m concerned. But I am prone to exaggeration…

I asked Steve about the song. (Just give me a few words mate, to pad out the review.)

School Report isn’t about school at all.

Anyone who’s read or heard anything by me will be aware that I often feel pretty uncomfortable in society generally. It’s no big deal, but that’s despite the fact that I keep a great deal of what I feel and think hidden because it just doesn’t fit with what people expect or feel comfortable with.

And, therefore, when I do share things, I put a great deal of effort into how I share it – you’ve noted before, Ged, that my music journalism is both remarkably lengthy and inappropriately subjective.

My songs tend in the same direction – wordy and intimate. I guess songs and writings for me are like planks in the bridge that I’m trying to build between me and the rest of the world, in a way.

I tried on this record to go a bit further – oversharing, many might say – and I think School Report was the start of that because I just sat down one evening and thought, wouldn’t it be funny to write down what it’s like to be in my head for a day… Funny for me if not for anyone else! I remember my Uncle Fred used to point to my skull and say, ‘It must be hell in there.’ He was joking, but still…

My whole life has persuaded me that no-one wants to know what it’s like to me, but I did it anyway! And I have been quite genuinely astonished by the really positive feedback from people who’ve heard the song already, because it even though I spent four years fiddling with it to make it more accessible and acceptable, I still felt it was really more of a vanity project, an audio version of a diary, than anything.

We recorded the drums, bass and rhythm guitar live in one take, with me reading the lyrics in my head and waving at the band to indicate when to move between the verses in the chorus. They did such a brilliant job and you could never capture that sort of tension and excitement without real humans in a room together. But then it took four or five years from the day we recorded it to the day it came out and in the meantime I changed the words quite a lot so they didn’t fit in with the structures we already recorded. Because of that it’s a bit of a muddled story – in the song, I’m inexplicably someone who has a really long commute to work and is simultaneously working from home, because my circumstances changed over that period. But as I fiddled with it I was also learning more about myself – in hindsight, it was my very first step towards discovering the world of neurodivergence.

When I originally wrote it, I was just trying to recognise the internal monologue of my head – and note that it isn’t a monologue at all, but more of an overlapping dialogue between numerous contradictory voices. And one of the loudest sets of voices in my head are the real and imagined criticisms from other people. They diminish and inhibit me daily. How to capture that was a challenge, but then I thought that the real criticisms put down on paper by my teachers all those years ago, and which still haunt me now, would illustrate that point better than anything else. Other parts of the album are about growing up in an earlier less-enlightened time, so it all fitted together.

I did wonder if younger people might be shocked to discover that there was a time when teachers would write such personal judgments of your character and personality for posterity, so freely, and without any kind of accountability. And then I thought, if I call them out – at long, long last – for a lifetime of dragging me down from inside my own head, then all the years of suffering that my school years left me to reckon with and recover from might be held to account at last.

But in the time that passed since writing that song, it slowly became more and more clear to me that all those comments in the School Reports that haunted me were, well… kind of true.

All through my teenage years I was asking myself, ‘Is the world making it difficult for me to fit in?’ and I answered, ‘Yes!’

And then I said to myself, ‘But are you trying hard to fit in?’ and I answered, ‘Yes!’

But deep inside, I knew the answer was ‘No. Not at all, no.’

‘Don’t you want to fit in?’ I said to myself. ‘Yes! Desperately,’ I answered. ‘But not here. Somewhere else. I want to fit in and I want to belong. I just don’t want that to be here. In this world… I’ll fit in in a better one, please.’

It turns out that the most difficult bits of being me were always the very same parts that made me me. My personality seemed to be the biggest challenge, but also my biggest strength. Catch 22.

And that’s kind of what they said, my teachers. They said I wasn’t joining in, always going out on the less-travelled limb, like I was determined to make life awkward. But I didn’t want to succeed on their terms – or more to the point, I didn’t want to stop being me. In the end they stopped offering and then I thought they were mean and cruel, and so I turned away more, and on it went.

I didn’t want to belong but I also didn’t want them to exclude me. I wanted them to wrap me in their arms and treat me kindly – as long as they were offering me a different sort of belonging to the one they were actually offering. I expected them to see through my hostility to my need, see through my arrogance to my lack of confidence. But they didn’t. And that set up the pattern for the rest of my life, I think.

And even though I’m saying now that perhaps my teachers weren’t wrong in what they said, I don’t feel any more forgiving of them. Less so, if anything, because they had an opportunity – maybe even a duty – to help me when I was too young to understand myself, and they didn’t try. And the proof of that is what happened when I went back there, almost a lifetime later. I thought I could get closure and all I did was reopen the wounds.

Now I think about it, that was just before I wrote the first draft of the song, so…
What happened when I went back? Well, I was working with a really struggling school – a place where forgotten, white working-class kids literally sat under asbestos roofs with the rain pouring in, taught by worn out teachers, the whole place crushed by decades of underinvestment, decline and the double-sworded assault of Ofsted and economic decline. And I’d heard that my old school wanted to be seen to support the community a bit more. So I went to see the Headteacher at my old school and said, ‘I’m working with families who have no ambition, no money, and no confidence, and you’ve got plenty, so I’ve come to ask for your charity.’

I sat there, having tea with the Headmaster, in his huge, oak-panelled office, and I admitted, ‘I didn’t fit in when I was here.’

He looked confused. But I thought to myself, ‘Don’t worry, Steve, that was a lifetime ago – you’re OK now.’

And so the Headmaster said, ‘Come and talk to the governors.’

And I went to a big governors’ meeting, and I sat and I watched them all planning, and being proud of themselves, and then I heard the Head saying, ‘So that’s all our successes, but now someone has come to talk to us,’ and he nodded to me.

I stood up to speak, as he added, loudly, ‘…Someone who was a failure here.’

And I knew I still wasn’t OK.

But I could write a song about it.

European Sun  – School Report – Bandcamp

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Steve Miles writes an occasional guest column for PennyBlack Music, in which he discusses common themes across a wide range of music, and explores links between music and mental health in its widest sense, called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. His column has included long-form in-depth interviews with the likes of Jah Wobble, Wreckless Eric, Tom Robinson, and Peter Perrett.

All words Ged Babey with press release and artists content in italics.  

 
I probably always confuse myself…

I know I confuse disappointment with regret but just because it didn’t happen like I wanted doesn’t necessarily mean I could have done better, does it?

I know that to be happy you have to live in the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be.
But what would be the point in that?

I don’t think I ever really recovered from school.

Or from work.

Or from anyone I ever met…

To be fair, just because things didn’t always turn out the way I planned doesn’t mean it wasn’t all for the best in the end. That’s quite often been the way…

That’s quite a comforting revelation!

I’ll forget it tomorrow…

(C) European Sun 2025