Posts Tagged song
Walking on Water
I learned long ago that when a song arrives, let it come, don’t worry about style (unless you are working to a tight brief, which is a subject for another post), and don’t load the song with your preconceptions about what you should or shouldn’t be writing. Every so often, without making any conscious attempt, a country song escapes from me, and after some years, I realised that I did have a country alter-ego, whom I dubbed Country Cliff. Cliff (and his band, The Cans) helps me to maintain a sense of balance in this evil, perverted world. He allows me to don a wide-brimmed hat, and use the words prairie and sundown. He’s not unpleasant, but he is dangerous, and he has to be, because survival is tough when you’re one cowboy’s drunken bullet away from death.
There is an inevitability about teenage rebellion which normally means that if they don’t follow along like clones, sons in particular strike out in the opposite direction to their fathers. Thinking about it now, the music I chose to turn up loud in the family home once puberty was well-established – Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Brian Eno, and a slew of loud new wave, reggae and ska acts – must have sounded like the distortions from hell to my 1950s music-loving popski.
Viewing my dad’s glittering pantheon of musical stars from my protective teenage bunker, Elvis Presley I didn’t really understand at all, associating him with the middle-aged, gaudy, fat Las Vegas crooner and endlessly tedious Saturday afternoon films, rather than the lean mean hip-swiveling sexuality that got him banned below the waist. I could take him or leave him. Lonnie Donnegan’s Jack of Diamonds high-speed skiffle was fun if you were five years old. But, my dad’s country music caused my head to hurt and my ears to complain, and I would state bitterly that I was bound to fail my exams if he insisted on giving his music an airing of a Sunday evening. The pathos was completely lost on my hormone-addled teenage mind, and all I could hear was wailing, depression, tragedy, and twanging guitars.
How wonderful and how strange therefore, to find myself in later years not only appreciating country music, but realising that certain elements of country were deeply embedded in my own songs.
Harmony singing is something I have always done, and I became aware of the harmonic differences between the white folk tradition and the black blues tradition early on; also, the rhythmic differences were clear to me. I clearly recall being ten years old and explaining syncopation to a music class, being mildly astonished that some of them couldn’t hear the difference between the on and the off beat. Later, I joined the school folk club, which meant we could remain in the music room and learn songs like Frankie and Johnny. Nobody taught us the harmonies for these songs, we just knew them. It is this miraculous fusion between black and white, blues, gospel and folk which gave us most of the popular music we currently enjoy.
I am just a country boy from Croydon, kicking at the chickens in the yard…
I would sometimes launch into this country music parody at art school, but it was there that I returned wholeheartedly to the music which I had once suffered, and on a visit home, asked my dad if I could borrow his copy of Marty Robbins’ El Paso to copy onto cassette tape. Country music had snuck inside me, and there I was, recalling every word, rejoicing in the narratives, the pain, the blood, and the joyous, lilting, latin-tinged melodies.
It’s more than a nod to my heritage, this love affair with country. It’s the rawest expression of living dirt poor that white music has yet produced, and while my own background wasn’t deprived, we were just two generations on from being in servitude to the wealthy and this knowledge was burned into us. Plus, being poor is no determinant of suffering, as many a rich suicide will tell you.
I don’t try to write traditional country music, and so I imagine that purists won’t like it too much. I just try to call it as I see it, and write about my own experiences, as always.
This song, Walking on Water, is an oblique narrative about wanting someone but not liking them, experiencing mixed feelings of desire and repulsion, moving from the early stages of delight in a romance to the later stages of betrayal and loss. Perfect country material.
Earth Hour
Writing for specific events is closely related to writing songs about the news, so I gladly accepted John Johnston’s suggestion that we write a song for Earth Hour.
Dan Brittain and I decided to put a couple of days into this project, and not to follow the usual Rise and Shine show format three hour deadline. That meant we could work steadily, and piece the song together with more care. Having time to revise and develop sections was great.
First, the song is deliberately based on the Earth Hour campaign’s call to action. The two verses are from the different perspectives of a poor rural subsistence fisherman in some low-lying place in the world, and in verse two, from a homeless urban beggar.
Second, we tried to make the chorus deliberately simple, almost a children’s sing-a-long, without being too toy town, or too Disney, and yet rejoice in what it is, a straightforward call to ecological action. I landed without preconception on the word GREEN. I wanted to combine an up-and-at-’em chorus with a meaningful lyric, and I think we succeeded.
And, what does it mean, to be green, to go green? To me the message is clear: we must face up to the need to reduce energy consumption now. We must make our politicians act responsibly, quickly enough to save us. We are rapidly exceeding the planet’s capacity to maintain a human population, let alone the other species we may bring down with us.
Lastly, is it really an anthem? I think a true anthem has an irresistible, hymnal chorus, which this doesn’t have, but it does have a lot of energy and a good tune, and I’m particularly pleased with the ending.
Rise and Shine Album Release
Busy times at Funk Towers. I’ve been remixing, remastering and in some cases finishing the songs which came out of the pilot series (five weeks) of the Rise and Shine songwriting show (more here about the show).
The official release is 11:44am GMT March 20th 2009, which is the exact time of the Spring Equinox.
It’s been a labour of love as well as hard work. Mostly I’m happy after a break to go back to song recordings, and bring them blinking into the light with the aid of cleverness, but in some cases – especially when you’re mixing three per day – it’s a pain. You have to regularly rest your ears, or the mixes sound bad, it’s simple as that.
Funnily enough, the song I most enjoy after all the extra production attention is one which I found difficult to write at the time (wasn’t feeling too well) – Money to Burn, which lambasts our culture of insanely excessive wealth and specifically the Forbes rich list.
The reason I found this song hard to go back to was that it’s a an angry protest song, and while I get the point of such songs, full shout mode isn’t a place I like to inhabit. But, like plenty of people, I love loud, aggressive songs in the right place and time. Rage is a part of the human experience, as is outrage.
Money to Burn is well written, the performances are good, I like the intro by @Langley and it was actually great fun to remix. It’s very much in the style of Beastie Boys hip hop, with trashy guitars, nice beats and samples, and megaphone vocals ripping the piss out of super-rich snobbery.
Now of course with taxpayers money being donated by the truckload to busted bankers, it’s become fashionable to poke the rich with a sharp stick. Back in March 2008, most people still hadn’t quite cottoned on to the appalling state of capitalism.
All the songs will be up and ready for tomorrow’s official launch, and we’ll have a party in London in April to coincide with the physical release of the album.* I’m also looking forward to hearing some remixes – Lagowski is on the case.
The Road Home
As a songwriter I’m prone to journeys of investigation to the Galapagos Islands of my evolving mind, and the songs I find there sometimes determine a future path which has unexpected returns.
I met Mark Crook when I was 11 years old, and I met Andy Carroll when I was 21, and I have written with both of these talented musicians many times, but this song was the first time I managed to combine both forces. It was very simple. I visited Andy in his studio, he gave me three loops and phrases. I brought them back to the writing studio I shared with Mark and he played some country-tinged acoustic guitar over the groove we constructed. I had free rein to improvise the melody and lyrics.
The music seemed relaxed and open, warm and welcoming, so I provided an appropriate scenario. I pictured a traveling salesman who misses his wife and yearns to return to the comfort of her arms, making a relationship work in the day to day struggle of life. A song of love and marital fidelity could be a bit of a cliché if approached in the wrong manner, and since crass sentiment is something I tend to avoid like the plague (a serious challenge when you’re writing pop songs) I needed to be sincere and write from my own experience of playing gigs, living on the road and missing my partner.
I tried not to make it too gender-specific, and I included some thoughts I was having from reading Eckhart Tolle.
My lover caught the oblique references to our relationship and this became a favourite. She loves the line “As the evening sunlight softens…” and repeats it with a soft look in her eyes. The power of songwriting to seduce will be another post… Another friend of mine who fell in love with this song is Kate, and I was very touched when she asked to use the song in a photo DVD she made for her son’s wedding. That’s when music is at its best, embedded in real, life-defining moments.
But you have to be careful. When the people around you are aware that at any time they might become the subject of your work, it can make things uncomfortable for them, so I try not to analyse or discuss lyrics with friends – I don’t want my normal human relationships to become stilted. You can usually find a way to say things indirectly most of the time, in any case, which is usually better for poetry.
This song is deliberately long, like the landscape through which our protagonist is traveling to return to his love. I do have a shorter edit, but it doesn’t work. I like the big space in the verses, the pauses which allow the words to sink in, which are great to sing, and between you and me, I think the chorus is one of my finest, because everyone can sing along.
And even though this road goes on and on
Cold mornings, nights are weary, days are long
And though I travel far, we stay so strong
This road leads back to you, where I belong
If you want to use this song or any you find here in your music podcast, blog or broadcast, you probably can, but please ask me first.
Am I A Voyeur?
Some collaborations are as unlikely as apple pie served with anchovies, and yet, if there is enough shared intent to bring the enterprise to fruition, the songs produced can be unexpected miracles.
In 1998 I was recovering from exhaustion, clinical depression and a long-term relationship breakup, feeling bleak, despondent and wasted. I hadn’t much to give. Enter Mick Martin, one of the most creative people I have ever met. Possessed of a profound and subtle musical sensibility, Mick had been part of the trio of Habit, the first band I wrote with that achieved commercial success, and appearing out of the blue, he somehow twisted my unwilling arm and got me involved in his music project.
Mick is a fan of pure pop, as well as artistic luminaries such as David Bowie, Tom Waits, Kraftwerk. When I first met him he was technician and a one-finger keyboard player, but that didn’t prevent him from having good musical ideas, many of which came from the time-honoured route of audio collage and sampling. Mick is also good collaboratively; with a strong sense of when a song is truly finished, he works hard to achieve his visions, but is prepared to share and include ideas, which is important. Mick was working with singer Emma Whittle, a backing vocalist in his brother Vince Clarke’s band Erasure. Our writing sessions benefited from Mick’s work ethic and the down-to-earth use of his own remarkable talent, which is conceptual and original but which doesn’t rely on being an instrumentalist, as much as his determination to write material for Emma, who he sincerely believed had what it takes.
Mick would never use his relationship to his famous brother for self-aggrandisement, or even (it sometimes seemed to me) perfectly logical advancement. If anything, having a famous brother made Mick wiser to the downside of the music business and conscious that he must tread his own path to succeed. Having brothers myself, I could understand that. But despite this caution, we did get to trade favours with Vince, and together we worked on material for Vince’s side project Family Fantastic and thus we earned studio time in Vince’s wonderful, sunken circular studio.
Emma hadn’t done a lot of writing, so the project was as much about writing songs which connected with her complex internal world as it was defining an artistic statement which we all felt could work in the hard, outer world of music business. In 18 months, we progressed from bouncy synth pop – the kind of material that Habit had been good at – to a more sophisticated, darker trip-hop tinged style which suited Emma’s voice and moods.
For me the pearl in the set has to be “Am I A Voyeur?” which is based on an infectious lounge groove in 3/4 which Mick had constructed. I was having a strong lyrics day, and working through aforesaid depression, wrote a fluent, punning lyric about the crime of looking but not having – an accurate description of my own situation – around a lazy jazz verse melody, which rose and soared plaintively in the chorus:
“Am I a voyeur on the outside looking in?
Find me a lawyer and book me for my sins
My case is hopeless, I have the wrong attitude
Guilty or blameless, the prosecution has to prove…
No judge or jury will hear my confession
Even if it’s over just won’t learn the lesson
God is my witness, and I have had enough
Release me I’m a prisoner of untouchable love…Around you my whole world keeps turning
Inside out, so close we’re moving..”
Happily, Mick and Emma liked this idea, and the production went well. The icing on the cake was musician Sovra Wilson-Dickson who played delightful Stéphane Grappelli-esque violin for us in the middle eight.
I always thought we should translate this song into French.
This period was possibly the most important in my songwriting career. It arrived when I was spent, and showed me that I could still produce good songs, no matter the state of my emotional life. It’s not essential to be completely screwed up to write meaningful romantic songs, but it does give you a lot of material which is much better out than in, and I did need to let it out.
It also did me a lot of good to express myself through music without the strain of having to be the leader – Mick was leading the project, and Emma was the singer, which gave me a lot of freedom. The discipline of writing and producing, and the fellowship with Mick and Emma restored a level of confidence to me quite rapidly, which might otherwise have take years longer to resurface.
Some musical projects are healing to the people involved in them – for me, this was such a one.
When Zappa Met Morcheeba
Recording has always been a passion for me as much as songwriting. When I was ten, my older brother Stephen brought back from Japan one of the first plastic, lightweight hand-held audio cassette recorders, which after a suitable absence of his attention, I purloined and used avidly. Hooking up with friends, inspired by psychedelia, early electronica and audio comedy (The Goons, Monty Python) I was making multi-layered overdubbed audio, using reel-to-reel and cassette tape.
After three years intensive use of audio-visual equipment at Middlesex Poly art school in the early 1980s, it was partly my knack of producing decent sounding demos which brought me my first professional writing gig. Making albums with other artists, performing with my own band, and running a small part of Beethoven Street studios, by the 1990s I was helping out on sessions with big stars, and starting to take seriously my role as producer.
Finances at the time were either feast or famine – this was the middle of a recession – and I was always on the look out for friendly studio owners with whom I could barter. I met Adrian Hughes, aka Uncle Lumpy (right) the drummer from the Tiger Lillies who hailed from Deal, Kent, on the south east coast of England. He introduced me to Dave the owner of Astra Studios near Folkestone, who gave me access to his 24 track studio. It was there I met Paul and Ross Godfrey, who went on to become Morcheeba. Paul, the 20 year old older brother was at the time, deeply suspicious and cynical, but nonetheless brimming with talent, knowledge and curiosity about music; and Ross, aged 16, was a perfectly charming musical prodigy who spent most of his time in a hippy daze, learning new instruments.
Paul did some audio engineering on a couple of my tracks, and we collaborated on several songs which came out well. I was expanding Paul’s horizons as much as he was impressing me with his Beastie Boys-inspired approach to beats and sound textures. We were working on the marvellous but temperamental mixing desk that had produced the Queen classic “Bohemian Rhapsody”. When it worked, it sounded great.
It was all lots of fun and quite promising. Ross came on tour with my scratch band to Palermo, Sicily. Unfortunately, we also took his friend the snide sax player, who decided to play on Paul’s paranoia and having taken the money and enjoyed the gig, bitched on his return that I had been scornful of Paul’s lack of experience and had publicly demeaned him. I hadn’t, of course, but nonetheless, a schism ensued as intended, and thus ended a fertile period which could have gone further.
I had worked hard for our little project, even taking the demos into Capitol Records and receiving a really good response. Still, many are the fish which you do not catch and one can waste a lot of time and energy bemoaning that fact. It was immediately clear to me that Paul was the driver of his own project and wouldn’t cope for any length of time with someone like me around, knowing my own mind as I do and having the producer’s knack of getting my way.
I don’t carry any regrets or grudges, indeed, the opposite is true. I am still proud of some of the songs, particularly those which came from my lending Paul some classic Zappa, which he loved, and promptly looped. I thought so much of it that I even took it to Los Angeles in December 1993, and set up an audience with Frank’s lawyer to license the use of his music in this song. But in this endeavour, time was against me. I was mid-deal when Frank Vincent died on December 4th. Few people knew how desperately ill he was, and it was a shock when he died tragically young, having left a huge legacy and inspired more bands and individuals than you would know.
Years later I met up with Ross and Paul at a music festival where I was working for Amnesty International, and they seemed content with their success as I chatted with them backstage, not just the level of it, but the manner of it. Paul was considerably chilled and a model of politeness – not how I remembered him – and confessed quite spontaneously that he was something of a changed man from the irascible, angry young man I had met not a decade previously. Ross was unchanged, still a beautiful player.
Writing and performance credits for this song “Not So Bad” are: Paul Godfrey, lyrics, spoken vocals, Dean Whitbread, lyrics, vocals and melody in the chorus, falsetto backing vocals, Ross Godfrey, keyboards and guitar. Overall production is by Paul – with an obvious musical debt to one Frank Zappa, RIP.
What I love about this song is the dramatic contrast between Paul’s study of decadence, indulgence and insanity, his narrative based on the death of Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, with a marvellously laconic delivery, peppered with sudden blasts of confidence from a man convinced of his own genius. Wonderful.
The groove ain’t bad, either.
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