TRAMLINES AND TEETH
Some people are born with safety nets.
Some are born with sharp edges.
Tramlines and Teeth is about two people from the wrong side of the tracks who have learned to survive by refusing to yield.
Not heroes.
Not victims.
Not saints.
Just two difficult, damaged, proud people trying to move through a city that has never made much room for them.
Kat arrives first:
“Rain on the glass of the Twenty Two,
Kat walks on like a match through blue.”
Zero-hours work.
A landlord at the door.
A temper already looking for somewhere to land.
Pete comes in from a graveyard shift carrying the same kind of weather.
They meet in Old Market Square and do what people like this often do when they recognise themselves in somebody else.
They fight.
Not because they are weak.
Because neither of them knows how to surrender without feeling erased.
The chorus says it plainly:
“You don’t break, I don’t bend.”
That line is both their strength and their problem.
They can survive almost anything.
Including each other.
There is affection in the song, but it is not soft.
It is defensive.
Combative.
Two people standing back-to-back against the world while simultaneously finding new ways to wound one another.
“We call it love, but it rains through the cracks again.”
That is probably the centre of the song for me.
Whatever exists between them is real.
It just leaks.
The city matters as much as the characters do.
Tramlines.
Rain.
Shutters.
The Trent running black.
Late buses and empty streets.
Nottingham is not background scenery here.
It is the pressure around them.
By the bridge, the song becomes less about romance and more about survival:
“I won’t kneel for a warm place to sleep.”
“Nor will I, but the wolves eat the weak.”
Neither character is prepared to trade dignity for comfort.
That sounds admirable until you realise how expensive pride can become.
There is no neat resolution.
No prince.
No saint.
No easy amen.
Just two people still standing.
Still difficult.
Still together.
Still showing their teeth.
Tramlines and Teeth.
Track three.
14 October.
— SHANNOW