Sunday 22 May 2016

"Decades" - the story

In February 2016 I wrote and recorded a concept album looking at the years from Harold MacMillan's "Never had it so good" speech in in July 1957 to the 29th February 2016.  This is the story of how it was written and recorded.  Clearly of little interest if you haven't heard it, so if you haven't, get in touch and I'll send a copy for a donation to Children with Cancer.

We've never had it so good.
Challenged by the lack of any recording of MacMillan's famous speech, I got my neighbour, who has a suitably received English accent, to reproduce it. Not having a clip of it would have been a real loss!  Arrangement influenced by Caravan's "Who do you think you are"!

World of opportunity
Originally envisaged as a Dylan style "Times they are a changin'" number, I realised those songs are too stylised and impossible to be influenced by - they just sound like Dylan.  So I settled on an early 60s English folk/pub/music hall feel to capture the innocent optimism of a shattered country emerging into the modern age, belief intact.

Here come the change
Written and largely put together by old pal John Almond who sent me the idea early on and worked on it and recorded everything other than the bass and vocals which I added later.  He did a great vocal, but by the time I recorded it in week 4 I knew it needed to be my voice - it had become too personal by then.

End of the dream
"End of the dream" was originally the title for the third track, but when John produced "Here come the change" it was going begging...and I still liked it as a title.  I left the 70s until week 3 as it's my decade and I hadn't decided how to treat it yet.  I knew it would capture the rock and prog of my teenage years, but not how it would reflect the vibrant and complex social and cultural history of the decade.  

The lyrics for "Shock" were originally intended for track 3, and I had thought the 12 string part might make an instrumental interlude but late one night I played and sang them together and they fitted perfectly, so I switched on the mics and recorded them straight away.  You can hear the roughness in my red wine embalmed and not warmed up voice, but in the spirit of the project I left it like that.  Listening back to it the following night I immediately heard the harmonies in my head and did them straight away.

"Anger" was written and recorded in the second weekend, in two sessions.  In the first one I decided I wanted some ROCK and plugged in my Stratocaster and fired up the EZ Drummer Funk! set and found the groove immediately.  It instantly suggested Jimi Hendrix, who was the epitome of rock/funk cool, and the guitar, bass, lyrics and vocals happened straight away.  I added the funky clarinet in the verses and Ben Fuller came around and added the fantastic solo and third verse clav which nailed it.  I felt some of the lead guitar tones were wrong, but left them rather than fiddle about and on reflection they are dead right.  I had the crowd sample and recorded "Jerusalem" as a tribute to Jimi's famous "Star spangled banner".  I only assembled the whole thing at the mixing stage and happily it all fitted together as I imagined it.

In the same session we recorded "Denial" - originally a coda of "Anger" but the chords all came from Ben and really it was a co-write and deserved to be a separate piece.  We sat at the desk together giggling at producing this piece of 70s prog 40 years late.  The bells part I hummed to Ben and added the high bell later - it's my christening bell, also featured on "Ripe apples in the spring" on my "Never too late" album.  The bells voice is "Temple bells" off my ancient Roland JV1010 module which is old enough to be "old school cool" these days.

"Acceptance" was a conscious Pink Floyd tribute, one of the great bands of the 70s.  I played the Farfisa part over a Nick Mason style drum loop,and added the rolls around the toms later.  Initially it just had the clean bluesy lead guitar and the Waters style bass guitar, then Ben added the Hammond part which transforms it.  Right at the mixing stage I was still wondering what to do with it, and on impulse I recorded myself talking about the 70s.  It sounded right so I organised my thoughts and redid it, and asked some friends to send me recordings of their thoughts about their 70s and took the bits I liked.  The US TV clip fitted perfectly with Simon talking about first hearing Dr. Feelgood.  The second set of lead guitars are triple tracked eBow parts with a soaring lead over the top, wailing with grief at the loss of what could have been.

Let it rip
Came from the original ideas session.  I listened to it in the car and immediately heard the arrangement - the 80s synth bouncing off rock guitars. The Thatcher clips are perfect - whatever you think of her she gives good quote, and kicks the track off with a bang.  Ben did the keys parts at his studio - the lead synth based on my original idea plus the moving chords influenced by It Bites' "All around the world" and the big Genesis singles. Very 80s.  Somewhere in the mad world of midi the code got slightly corrupted leading to the the wild burbling and blooming, none of which was planned, but which fitted perfectly.   I cut up the midi and moved it around to fit the words which came very quickly in the cafĂ© at work.  They're pretty simple but it was a simple time, bright colours, padded shoulders, the more vulgar the better.  The middle section was to provide some shade and remind everyone that the 80s was also the incubator for much of what followed. I was tremendously moved by the Scargill clip - I never liked him much at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight I can't disagree with a word he said.  I added the synth part in the acoustic interlude a bit later as a experiment which Ben could replace, but it turned out OK and I left it.  John Major makes a brief curtain call appearance and Blair appears to introduce the next part of the story.

We won't let you down
This had to be a Britpop number, and something anthemic, Oasis like and dripping with irony was called for.  Blair's insincere intro is a perfect start.  I wrote the words on a Friday night and finished them in front of a film on Saturday - they poured out almost unedited.  I think the reason I feel so angry about Blair is, like a lot of people, I actually believed him.  As Dylan said, I should have watched the parking meters.  Strings done late one night with the Korg X50 synth - me channeling Oasis channeling George Martin.

Confident and proud
The first piece for the project, recorded on a Saturday morning, pretty much in one session, finding samples and writing the music together.  There's so much stuff on YouTube that you struggle to choose what to use.  The last clip is the CEO of Lehman Brothers 3 days before they went bust.  Confident and proud.

It's not business, it's personal
After the bombast of the previous two tracks I knew we needed to get small and quiet. I wrote it on Saturday morning mid February, struggling a bit with the chords to get it to make sense.  Once it did I wrote the words pretty much straight down without editing them and recorded it immediately.  I added the spectral synth Solina part as an idea and Ben replaced it with a good version in the same session as "Anger".  He suggested the bass and grungy guitar chords.  I had added the drums but the guide guitar part was slightly out of time and it sounded horrible.  Happily with the guitar redone it all fell together very nicely.  I thought about adding harmonies etc but I wanted it to be very spare and raw.  That's also why I left the drums as an obvious loop, not trying to pretend to be a real drummer.  Time for a bit of honesty. I looked for a sample of people talking about how their lived had been wrecked by the crisis but became too disgusted with the whole business and didn't use any of them.

What goes around, comes around 
I thought about what this track should be like at work over a coffee, and concluded the whole post 2010 world looks horribly like variations on what has already happened.  The idea of doing something folky came quite early, though I imagined something more "modern folk/pop" like Mumford and Sons.  I wrote some lyrics which I didn't like at all,  and scrapped, but they did contain the lines "there's nothing new anymore, even the lies are recycled" and "they're even listening to folk music again" which seemed to close the circle back to the early 60s.  Then in week 4  I sat with Ben doing his homework and wrote a great stream of consciousness lyrics which I organised into verse the following night at old pals Leni and Jim's. On the Thursday night I came up with the tune - remembering Richard Thompson's fantastic "The poor ditchling boy" - but still couldn't fit in the original two lines I liked.  I did some rewriting and swapping around of lines and chopping out stuff which didn't say what it should and suddenly it fell together and I recorded it straight away, guitar and vocal live, and overdubbed the mandolin which is a folk tune called "The maid behind the bar".  In the original recording I got the lyrics wrong and sang "Lib Lab Labour" rather than " Lib Lab Tory"...so I rerecorded that one.  Couldn't leave it like that.

What will be left for us
Recorded the last weekend, on Sunday afternoon.  Ben did the piano in the marathon Anger session, and I sang a guide vocal for him to play to but kept disintegrating into tears at the underlying idea of the song.    I transposed it into 3 keys for my Ben to try and he felt most comfortable in D, and did it quite quickly - he was up for it, but nervous and dropped in a few lines later.  You can hear him bouncing on his toes with tension in verse 1, though everyone who hears it comments on how confident he sounds.  I added the string part in the evening.  It was the perfect end for the album and it could easily have ended there.

Today
I had written the chords for a track called Ending which Ben took away and recorded at his studio.  It was always a bonus, and the album could have ended with "What will be left for us"; I didn't know if I'd have time to finish it, and I recorded it on the evening of 29th February. I added the first clean guitar parts over Ben's keys, then wondered what to do with it...so I listened to the opening part of the news that day on Radio 4, and with a quick edit to remove the Oscar results and a long report about Syria it fitted perfectly.  The final soaring lead guitar part was the last thing recorded for the project.

Mixing and mastering was all done on the last weekend of February with various drop ins and fixes applied as I mixed.  I finished everything up to "What will elect for us" so that the album as planned was completed, then worked on finishing "Today". 
I'd never heard it all in sequence, so after mastering "Today" I put it all into the right order and left it over dinner and some normality - sofa/TV - then came back to it and played the whole thing through headphones with a glass of wine...it was a tremendously emotional experience, partly because it was complete, I'd done it and thought it was good and also because it had become very personal, somehow seeing myself as the custodian of what we've created for Ben and his peers to inherit.  We don't seem to have done such a great job.  I wept several times, partly with relief and partly due to something deeper.

Thursday 28 August 2014

The Cactus Flower Snake Blues

Isn't this a beautiful thing?  It's a painting by my friend Peter Billington called "The Cactus Flower Snake Blues" and it hangs on the wall in my house.   I simply told Peter to listen to
Little Feat (luckily he's as big a fan as I am), and that I like neon tetra tropical fish.  The rest came out of his amazing brain.  I have another miniature he kindly gave me which I'll write about separately....see here for more examples of his work and how you can have one too...

Monday 25 August 2014

Songwriting guitar




Songwriting in the garden with Applause and Boss BE Micro
This is my Applause acoustic guitar, bought in Slough in 1979.  Applause was the cheapo line from Kaman (Ovation was the main range, and Adamas was the deluxe line) and features a fibreglass bowl back, resin neck, a solid aluminium finger board with the frets milled into it and a crappy laminated wooden top.  The guitar has a weird thin compressed sound, and isn't easy to play.  Oddly, this makes it a great guitar to have.  You have to seriously dig in to get anything out of it, and it doesn't sound too bad loud, but you have to pick hard! Easy to play guitars can lead you to be lazy and laid back.  If you're lazy and laid back with this bad boy you get nothing!  Maybe because of this, I realised recently it's a great guitar for songwriting, perhaps because standard lines, licks, cliches etc don't come out right on it and you start doing things differently, use capos, open tunings etc in ways you might not on a nice Martin.  I've written loads of songs on it and most of them I still play.  It's almost indestructible so it is the take-on-holiday/camping/festival/beach guitar - one of the machine heads is held on with a wood screw provided by a Greek farmer in 1983 after it was knocked off in the luggage store of the magic bus from London to Athens whilst backpacking.   That metal fingerboard gets very hot in direct sun though.  Sunburned finger tips! Ouch. Not good for guitar playing.  So whilst it is doubtless the most horrible guitar I own I also would never get rid of it.  It's earned its place.  I'm not a collector - my guitars have to have utility and this one, for all its ugliness, has it in spades.