COVER
ON
SONGWRITING
STORY
INFLUENCES
I was influenced a lot by the Stones. I’ve
always felt Mick Jagger to be much older--he’s
two years older than me, but he’s always felt
a lot older. Maybe that’s because they were
a bigger group. But I liked almost everything
they did. I also liked a lot of the Beatles stuff
but I was never influenced that much by it. I
mean, musically they just seemed to have such
a peculiar method of working. Also, a lot of it
was melodic in a way that although it sounded
great when they did it, when you tried to find
out what it was that made it tick and react to it
musically, it was sort of like Italian love songs.
How can you be influenced by that? Ray Davies
is one of my favorite songwriters. His stuff is
a little heavily nostalgic but I still really like it.
I was quite keen on Elton John’s first album. I
didn’t entirely realize at the time it was a two
man show. That weakened it for me. I really like
Joni Mitchell, but then again I don’t always listen
to the actual words. What gets me is the sound.
She writes so personally. She writes about
things that are so secret and I sort of shy away
from that a little bit. I’m deeply in love with her,
though.
EARLY SUCCESS
Almost from the first time I put pen to paper
I was a successful writer. “I Can’t Explain” got
into the British charts. It was kind of a lift off
the feeling the Kinks had in “You Really Got
Me,” but the words I suppose were more moon/
June. I thought later, yeah, it’s got nothing to
do with love at all. It’s got to do with a whole lot
of other things. But that was only in retrospect.
I discovered then that I had this ability to just
sit down and scribble things out and think that
I was writing consciously; but the real meaning
was coming from somewhere else that I had
absolutely no control over. Odd things would
give me an incredible surprise. I suppose I was
surprised by how obviously observant I was
without ever really being conscious of it.
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DIGITAL EDITION
“Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” was the second
song I wrote. It was modified a bit by Roger
Daltrey. That’s why he shares a credit with me.
Those two songs I wrote while I was living in
complete squalor getting stoned every night
and listening to Jimmy Reed records: Anyway.
Anyhow. Anywhere. Those were just three
words I wrote on a piece of paper. You know
you used to do that when you were stoned
out of your head. You look at it the next day
and you say, “What the fuck was I talking
about?” Those three words were what I wrote
to describe the way Charlie Parker plays. So
that became the title for the next single, which
was required the statutory two weeks after
the release of the first song. I knocked out the
song and it was a much more conscious thing.
I already looked back at ‘I Can’t Explain’ and
started to think, yeah, this one’s gonna be
about a punk kid.
About a year after that Kit Lambert started
announcing to everyone that he thought I was a
genius. I mean, I produced a fantastic amount
of demos. I holed up in my flat with two tape
machines writing consistently. Kit often used
to fantasize about doing something on a grand
scale – even then. It was his idea to do the
DEC/JAN