the keyboard is like a really good sound. Just got to have some space to
breathe, you know, so yeah, he's a keyboard wiz.
How long had you been developing those songs for? I remember,
when Flaming Pie came out, for example, it had Great Day on there,
which I think you have from the seventies. Were all these songs kind
of bespoke, custom made for this record, or were there bits and pieces
in there?
No, you're right, it’s true. There were some that I'd had for quite a while.
Most of them were kind of new, but there were a few that I'd written quite
a while ago. I think we did about 20 tracks, but there's about 10 or so that
didn’t get on the album, so some of those particularly were older ones.
On this album, yeah, there was a few that I'd written a couple of years
ago, ‘Who Cares’ was a couple of years ago, but most of them were kind
of recentish, you know.
At the Abbey Road gig, you told the story of Confidante, and that it’s
kind of an ode to an acoustic guitar, can you elaborate a little bit on
that?
What happened was I was at home on my own once and I just looked
over at my guitar, it was propped up in the corner and then I thought,
wow, there was a time when I would have just been playing that all this
evening. But I had something else to do, I'd been for something to eat and
I was going to watch a bit of telly, so I had kind of side lined the guitar
and I kind of felt a little bit sorry, you know, that I'd sort of grown out
of just playing guitar every minute of the day. I thought, okay, I'm going
to apologise to this guitar, so started sort of strumming and saying, you
know, ‘you used to be my confidante, my underneath the staircase friend’
- because that was like one of the places you'd play it, you know, hiding
away, you'd always go into little hidey places. People who don’t know that
story are going to think it’s about other things, you know, so it can be
interpreted as humans, rather than an inanimate object.
It kind of brought to mind Junk a little bit, imbuing, you know,
an inanimate object with these kind of emotions and like human
characteristics almost personification.
[Laughter]. I don’t know, sounds very posh to me. That’s right, I mean,
you never know what you're going to write a song about, you know, just
get a little inspiration and you just think, here goes nothing, I'm writing
to a guitar, but I'm just going to follow it through. Then I kind of liked it,
you know, - I played with you throughout the day, told you every secret
thought - because it’s kind of what you do when you're writing a song. It’s
like a therapy session, you know, you're getting all these little things you
don’t say to people into your song.
Does that mean that you’ve got a lot of those little things lying around,
would there be books at home with titles and possible lines in, lying
around?
Yeah, but not at home, they're right there. [Laughter]. I've got books of
my travels and then the other thing is fun, fun is just loaded, loaded with
fragments, little ideas. I know I've got a lot of ideas, some of which are
just little ideas, some of which are pretty good - he said modestly, - so I
know I've got to take some time, sit down and actually finish them, but
in this thing I've got loads of stuff, all sorts of just things, they just grab,
you know, little songs.
When we spoke to Paul Simon a couple of years ago, he said, when it’s
time for an album, he just basically writes the songs he needs, writes
enough songs for an album, then he stops, is that the case for you?
Yeah, that’s what it is, yeah, I mean, you know, I've got maybe like 10, 12
songs or maybe more and I think, woah, this is too many, you can't just
keep having 30, 40 songs, you're never going to get around to it. So that’s
when I go, okay, now, let me think of who might produce this, think of
where I want to go, how I want to do this, whether I want to involve the
band and yeah, that’s the cut-off point when you’ve got so many songs,
yeah.
30 wirrallife.com
You're obviously one of the all-time great melody writers and one of
the prettiest melodies on the album we thought was Hand in Hand.
When you're formulating a tune like that, are you singing out loud
over some piano chords or something?
Yeah, I remember it was kind of late at night, we’d been out somewhere,
but I didn’t kind of want to go to bed yet, so I'm noodling on the piano, I
got those chords, those opening chords and I was thinking romantically
about Nancy, so you know - let me show you my love - and I kind of
finished most of it up there and then I went to bed, but I knew I only had
the easy little bits like the middle to do and I did the middle the next day,
but yeah, I always thought it was a pretty little thing.
So when you know you're onto a good idea like that, you'll chase it or
try and finish at least a good portion of it?
Yeah, there's the chorus, well, there's the first verse, there's a chorus, then
the second verse and then the chorus and that was sort of, that was the
bulk of it and I knew I would just have the middle to do, so by that point,
I was getting a bit knackered, so I went to bed, knowing I could finish it
tomorrow and I made a little recording of it, you know.
Those melodies at the piano, they're always so distinctive, I wonder
how hard you work in finding those notes, for example, This Never
Happened Before from Chaos & Creation, that’s another piano song
where the melody just leaps around to just the perfect choice of notes,
do you spend a lot of time thinking about where you're going to go?
Not really, no, you know, if I'm lucky it just comes, you’ve just got to be
in the right mood and just feel like, oh, I'm going to really write a great
melody now and you just start up and if you're lucky, be like, oh yeah, this
is good. So no, I don’t really sweat over melodies, I'm very lucky, I have
this thing, they kind of come to me quite naturally, touch wood.
And in terms of lyrics, will you usually kind of finalise those once
you’ve cemented that melody?
Often it happens the same time, 'Hand in Hand', was just the same time.
It happens different ways, you know, sometimes it’s that, you're playing,
you're singing it and you get the words, sometimes it’s just the melody and
you don’t have any words, so you just work on the melody and make sure
you’ve got that right and then sometimes one or two songs, not many,
they’ve just been lyrics. I remember once, I was on a Beatles tour bus and
we had three hours from Southampton to London or somewhere, you
know, so I'm just sitting there on my own and I thought of the lyrics to
All My Loving, so then when we got to the theatre where we were, then
I'd sort of go to like a piano or a guitar or something and get the tune of
it, you know, but the lyrics all came first.
Will you switch between guitar and piano typically when you're
writing something?
Yeah, writing, it’s either guitar or piano and sometimes I will just actually
switch them, I'm getting fed up, I don’t think I'm going anywhere on the
piano, I’ll just say, well, let’s see how this would sound on guitar and it
somehow can lead you just to a different place and then you could go
back to the piano, or just anything to get out of not knowing what to do,
got a couple of little tricks.
We've heard you say in the past that sometimes you'll think about
other writers when you write, like, you'll think, alright, I'm Ray
Charles or something like that, is there any of that on this record?
Right at the end of the album there's a track called Hunt You Down and
it’s just like a little rocky riffy thing and that was written right after I'd
seen Prince, it was written in a New Year and he played a New Year’s Eve
concert, so I was definitely thinking of him. The thing is, you know, you
think of them, you get inspired and you write it like you're him and then
you listen back, so it’s nothing like him, you know, but it’s okay because
you used the inspiration to write. I mean, Long and Winding Road, I had
Ray Charles in mind, certainly didn’t turn out like Ray, but those chords,
[sings], I can imagine that being Ray… It’s just little tricks like that you
get, that once they work a couple of times, you go, if you're stuck, you pull