Episode 127 - Elvis Costello

and his mum Lillian's job running the record department in Selfridges. At sixteen he moved with his mother, who was originally from Liverpool, to his father's birthplace at Birkenhead, where he lived for a few years, completed his schooling, and began his performing career in local pubs and clubs.

And twenty thirteen's Wise Up Ghost with the root.

story going on. Yeah, there's something I say to the guys, right, we're gonna go do this and in recent times it's been where we've been has had a lot to do with, you know, we don't have a big piano, we have a little piano, we we're not gonna have

every guitar sound we're gonna we're gonna have just this one. You know, that can be the way or we just use very, very limited resources and and that sort of shapes it. This record is more like one where I worked out in advance. I wanted all these sounds

I think of that more like what they did in pop music when I was growing up. They you could have a magical sound, it could be a few voices, it could be some strings, it could be a horn section. But the most important thing is gotta have the feeling from the bass and drums and you've got to sing well.

I've never written like that. The songs are always worked out. So whether we're taking the simple approach or something a bit more widescreen. I've always got the actual songs. I could play them to you on a piano and they'd be different as well, you know. There'd be maybe some qualities of the songs in the simple form would appeal to some people, but they don't speak to a lot of people like that, because it's intimate, you know.

The reason we could do it in three weeks, despite the fact as you hear, it's it's quite a detailed picture musically. is'cause we just prepared really well. You know, the the rhythm section went in and ran the songs down. They'd send me demo tapes just, you know,'cause we can do all that with these gadgets, you know.

Send me the um the rough recordings and and I go, Yeah, that's great, but you're playing too many fills. Keep it simpler. You know, that way we we knew that when we went in, when the red light went on for the real recording, we knew what we wanted to do. And then because the guys can play well.

there was none of that mystery of like, Are we gonna get there? Are we playing the right tempo? You know, things are not conflicting.'Cause I had a a much bigger picture in my head of what the final sound was going to be. I knew You know, the the background voices were coming in this spot, so we'd better not put a guitar or a keyboard in there because it would all just get in muddy, you know.

And that way we were able to kinda get it done really quickly. And and kinda it sounds like it wouldn't be very joyful to do it like that, because it would be very kinda like going to the factory and you know, bolting something onto the machine, but it's well, I think it's more like is if you've ever developed a picture, you know, in in the chemicals when they put it in and then the picture starts you see just a bit of it and it's fuzzy and then it suddenly it's bang, there it is.

It's closer to that'cause as you add each piece you're going, Yeah, that's gonna work and there's there's a thrill to that, you know? Mm. I mean that wasn't always the case, I have to say, when I first did that kind of approach. Yeah. I just kept going until I filled up all the space, you know. So it doesn't always work, but it did for this one.

And then the next record I made was with Bert Bacarak. Now it's not like I could turn up and go, But it's great we're writing the record together, so here's a song I wrote we're gonna I mean, you know, just simple things like that. And then if you actually go through my catalogue from ninety eight onwards

You couldn't really make a case for Burnt Sugar being on any of those records because they all had their own story and the reason why the repertoire for those records was what it was. And I just thought, one day I'm gonna make this record where where this kind of song really fits.

And then last year we went out on the road with the band playing the songs from Imperial Bedroom. And it was then that I I really thought, We're not recreating these songs, we're rewriting them in some cases. So why don't I just give the band A group of new songs or at least unheard songs.

and we'll make a record. I I hadn't really thought that it was urgent to make a record until last year. We've been doing pretty well with the live shows that I found a way to find a space for all my songs and one of the problems when you get a few songs in your bag is how do you make a show out of them that makes sense to you. Cause if it doesn't make sense to you, the audience is gonna notice it. They might say, Oh, I really hope he plays such and such, but if you play it like it

kind of a you know, uh an obligation. You're not gonna play it with any sense of reality to the emotion of the song. You're just gonna be playing it like a ritual. And you do see bands that do that and that, you know, it's fine, but that's a different thing than I do. I wanna find the ways of the song and it feel like something.

So sometimes that's a question of going through a couple of other different songs to get there. And that's kind of what I do in in concert is try and I won't say jumble up the pieces randomly, but jumble them up in a way that there's a new picture comes out of it, you know.

It's sweet and it's you know, sharp at the same time. And there's something about her music anyway that is that way'cause she's you know, she's written some of the most beautiful tunes ever, but she's also You can tell she's not somebody to mess about with either. You know, she's got a definite outlook, you know. And if you've written Natural Woman or a song like that, it's a very assertive sort of song, you know. So

It just the story sort of started tumbling out off the music about this woman trying to organize her life. You know, she's gone through a divorce and You know, I didn't know when I wrote that one that I was gonna end up with a bunch more songs where I'd be putting myself in somebody else's shoes. It just that's the way it this collection of songs ended up. For the most part they're not The things that happen to me so much as things I've seen happen to people and trying to make a story out of

of musical thoughts and with Bert Baccharak as well. I mean, uh he's known entirely as a melodist. So people would be surprised to know how much of some of our songs I wrote musically But I'm trying to write in a language which is compatible with his, so you can't tell where the joins are. And in the case of the two songs on this album th on which he plays piano, he wrote all of the music. But the third one that he's credited on

He only wrote the bridge. I wrote everything else. Yet it's in a language which is sort of recognizably, you know, like his. I won't say is his, you know. Obviously I can't be him.

Whereas this band can be just as aggressive, pretty ferocious sounding, you know, but they can also play like this. And that's kind of the point of this record was to take advantage of both things, you know. So you're right, the space they don't play as many notes. Even Steve, naive, who can give you lots of notes is deliberately sort of choosing or I asked him to choose.

to not play so much because the other things that were gonna be in the arrangement I didn't want us to get into conflict, you know. So live when we're playing these same songs, you may hear more from him and that'll be another version, you know. So that's good. It then it develops, you know, then when you play it live, it has another character again. That's what we're working out next.

And the music is really clear and when you have somebody like Bert who's got like a very particular touch at the piano, I f was fascinated to hear my band play with that. And they were the only two songs I sang live in the studio.

'Cause the timing made it necessary for me to sing with, but the rest I wanted to have the joy of going up to the microphone when everything was in place and sort of having the whole picture so that I didn't oversing anything, you know, I wasn't trying to create too much heat. 'Cause usually I arrange outwards from the initial vocal performance and then add things later. So we need a harmony here, we need another guitar part or another keyboard part or whatever it is.

This record, I had all the the whole arrangement in my head. So by everybody preparing in advance. and everybody showing their best ideas to each other in advance. There was a degree more trust that when we played, we were only playing things we wanted to hear. And then when we added the vocal group or the the horn section, it made complete sense'cause we'd allowed for it.

And I wasn't sort of trying to fill all the spaces up. I wasn't trying to sing with too much aggression. I knew what I had to do. But more importantly I also knew I could hold hold it a little closer to myself and it would sound more intimate. Something like stripping paper it would make no sense. I was yelling at you know

Usually, you know, if I send a a demo tape to Pete Thomas, he's coming back going, I know what to do on that and you know, he's talking about drum things. Logically, that's what he is. He's a drummer. But for some reason in this group of songs, a lot of the notes the guys gave me back about the music

were to do with the emotional little things that triggered a feeling in them or recognition in them. And I knew we were onto something because we saw them the same way. It wasn't I was telling some mysterious story and they were trying to accompany me. They actually made comments about images like that one about the pencil mic. That was one that Pete particularly noticed.

And I thought, well, if he's noticed it, then there's a good chance the audience will. So maybe we we better make sure we don't cover that up, you know. I better sing that line very clearly. We'd better not have something happening in the background that's gonna distract you, you know. So that's a perfect example of where I ask Steve and I have to play very simply.

And he just plays and it's you know, because he's such a good pianist, when you hear him play just simple chords, it still has something to it. If I were doing the same thing, it might just sound like I was playing my musical exercises, but when he does it, he's got such a beautiful touch. And then the Woodwind quartet that I added is answering him. So again, if he was playing lots of other notes, that would get into chaos and you wouldn't be able to hear the story, you know.

That seemed to have a place in that song,'cause otherwise it's just like all tragedy and it can get into melodrama, you know. That's something I've also learnt ever in the last twenty years. I love the songs I'm painted from memory, but they're all dark. And so there has to be a little bit of light in the room so you can see the other details. That's really the

And do you know one of the things for which Burt gets very little credit in our collaboration, because people always assume that he wrote all the music and I wrote all the words, is that Whether or not it was a huge presumption on my part to suggest music to Bert Bagrid, you gotta give him credit that after everything he'd written, he was curious to see what happened when he did write with another composer.

'Cause he'd never really done that before. And I think that's pretty amazing because I knew it couldn't be Hal David. I'm not technically good enough to be Haldave. I mean he's like more like one of the Broadway, you know, Hollywood era kind of songwriters like a Lorenz Hart or uh an Ira Gershman. I mean, his words all have the right sounds and the right rhythm and

Mine are a little bit more erratic and sometimes I'll bend the music to the words. Burt wouldn't let me do that, so it was actually exacting for me to write the words. Particularly the ones that he had the dominant part of the composition,'cause he wouldn't let me change one single note in the music, even if I had a good line that would make sense. I'd say this line, but he's going, Yeah, but that's not on the music, you know. You're adding another bit of rhythm there and I go.

Nobody'll notice. Yeah, they will. Um of course he's right, you know, because that's how a tune sticks in your head,'cause it's the shape he said it's gonna be, you know. So those little details are like what I I learnt from the experience of working with him. All the songs on Painted from Memory are really most of them are huge in range, some of them right to the edge of where I can physically sing. So not everybody likes that sound when I get up there, so I accept that.

But, you know, that's it. When you write a song you sometimes have a a singer's voice in your head, but the thing that comes out is the tatty thing that you can do, you know, s and and it's got rough edges. But the emotion of it is what matters really. It's not the technical expertise. It just worked out that when we were writing these particular songs, the first group of songs were written sort of with a sense of discovery. You know, we were just writing and

the final shape of them was just because Bert and I were adding to each other's ideas and the songs would develop in the scale. Quite a lot of them are long as well. A lot of songs that are over the four minute mark, that we were not trying to write two and a half, three minute pop records, you know. Don't look now as a perfect example, you say the space but also brevity as another thing, because it was written originally to be part of a theatrical story.

So all of the story can be told in two and a half minutes. There was no bridge it needed to go to. It already has a bridge. You can't add another one, you know, then you're starting to kind of bend it to convention and it's unconventional. But it's unconventional in the sense of instead of going to large scale, this time it's gone small and close, you know,'cause that's appropriate for the story. The woman in the story

is undressed, you know, and she's looking at the man saying, you know, go sit over there. I'm in charge of this now. She's working out the way he's looking at her. Now you can imagine whether that's two lovers or an artist and a model or whatever you hear is the reality.

I know what story I think we were telling, but you don't get a advisory card with a song that tells you how to feel. You know, you hear what you hear and the music is the music, you know, it's not other music that it could be. It's these notes. That's what I learnt from Bert, you know.

But it's you know, it's ambitious to take recognizable details of people's story and make a fantasy. It's kinda like what we'd call now fanfiction, isn't it? You know. It was obviously done with a huge amount of respect and love. And when I was asked to write the first song for that movie, it was like, We're coming to you because we think you understand how to write a a song that's

in the style of one of the Hollandosia Holland social commentary, as they used to call'em, things like Love Child or I'm Living in Shame. And I wrote Unwanted Number for a a girl group, you know, there were imaginary like there were supposed to be the Supremes or something, you know. And I mean I never thought more about it except I knew it was a good song. They sang it really well. This this vocal group called For Real sang it in the

in the movie and did a great job. And then about, I don't know, a month later or more, there came back to me. Karen Rackman, who was music supervisor, rang me up and said, Would I write the big emotional ballad? And would I write it with Bert Backrack? I mean, I I was so shocked, you know. I'd only met him once before, like briefly in a studio. I never dreamed I'd ever have a chance to work with him, so

It led from that one song to more and that's what became painted from memory. And that's all ended up really leading to this record, even though it's twenty years afterwards, you know.

Bert was a little bit older,'cause he had written songs in the fifties with other songwriters, like the same lyricist that wrote some of Bert Bacarak's lyrics wrote um in the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, the Pranksonatra song. His lyricist before Hal David was the same man that wrote that lyric. So, you know, he is literally a link to pre-rock and roll songwriting because he crosses over generationally with people who were writing for the Frank Sonartra type singers, you know. Then he

in the early sixties simultaneously was really an R and B producer. I mean, he was working with Tommy Hunt and the people who did the the original versions of the songs which are really famous. And or even famous here in Liverpool, like, you know, Alfie is a Silla Black song in England. Don't tell that to Dion Warwick, you know. Anyone who had a heart, she's been very outspoken how they copied her records, you know.

So e everything was just songs would be in catalogue and then different people would cover them and the fame would be for the song, not always for the artist. Bert Backrack was also on tour at the same time as he was making those records with Marlon and Dietrich. So I mean that's a weird thing to consider, isn't it? You know, that's such different music than Walk On By or The Look of Love or any of these

In bad health, no money, pretty desperate in terms of his love life, you know. And then I I just painted a picture of him, left him on the station on his way to his next gig, you know, probably never to be seen again. And then I thought what if he was seen again? What if it's twenty years later?

I mean still to this day there's a big part of British light entertainment. Every Saturday night people gather around their TV to see people embarrass themselves. Don't they? Isn't it part of the game here is to If you want to be successful, you've got to be prepared to humiliate yourself at some stage. That's part of being accepted.

So I thought, well, let's write that into a song and let's have him be brought back in the fifties and they used to have these shows where they would blindfold the guests and they would try to guess their identity or something about them.

he starts into his familiar act of trying to kind of show an indecent amount of curiosity about her boyfriend. You know, this is a a rhythm of a language that, you know, I've seen with an older man going, Tell me about your family and suddenly she's unfolding her secrets to him and of course as she's doing that, she's putting herself in danger, you know. Nothing really happens in the song. The whole point of it is there isn't a crime.

but there's the thought of a crime and the way they report it in the song, it's for you to decide who's right and wrong. I mean, it's fairly obvious that he's thought about this seduction in his mind. It's described in the lyric, you know. But at the same time He's actually wrestling with his own conscience. So is he guilty or is he is he rising above his worst things? I don't know. You know, that's why I didn't put

And the moral of the story isn't the final chorus, you know. I suppose if there's any point to hearing the song, it's it's very easy to point the finger, you know, and if you have to do that, it's you know, he was without sin cast the first stone.

But he's not like uh I'm not painting a picture of somebody who's sitting behind a desk in a movie studio having a an actress come in and audition for him and say, Okay, take your clothes off. That's not the story of Underlyme, you know. He's sort of like vulnerable in a way, but he's vulnerable to his own worst. Impulses. The song is about that. I didn't sit down and work out in advance. I mean, I had two versions of this song. I mean, I wrote it two years ago, the lyrics.

And uh I sang it as a ballad with a different tune. And then I thought, well, it gave the game away too early on. Sometimes having bright music, th the the the listener hears the song as music first and then the story unfolds once they're liking the music. And the fact that I could have the theme song of the show that they're on be the kind of refrain instead of a, you know, some sing song y kind of summarizing chorus. The summarizing chorus is musical.

And all of those decisions, those are conscious, but how the character developed and when I'm writing it is spontaneous. You know, it's i it's again the little picture developing in the in the chemicals, you know, it's it just comes on the page and Often you don't see it's happening when you're writing it. You you're writing stuff and it's just then it's just there.

And that's why there are sometimes internal rhymes in songs like the one you just mentioned. I don't consciously work out, oh, there's a clever internal rhyme, or people who use the word genre in reviews are like overthinkers. You know,'cause they're using those French words to make themselves look clever. But the reality is I don't calculate things nearly as much as they think I do. That actually just is natural to me, the way some people can do

Crosswords, I can't do them. I can't do anagrams. You'd think if I have you know any kind of gift with words, all of those other talents would come with them, but they're not. I can't do arithmetic. So it's not a rhythm it's not a counting pattern. It's just a freak talent, you know.

It's connected to emotion, it's not connected to intellectual scheming the way more cynical people believe it is. They're the ones that have invented the theory that supports the idea that this is I'm the one who's written those things. So you show me how you do it. And then tell me it's calculated. Mm-hmm.

Okay, he's a sophisticated kind of balladier, you know. He'd come on and go, Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to play this song that's been very good for us back in nineteen forty eight. It's called Black Knight. You know, he he had this really suave way, and I thought okay, I'm gonna do

I'm gonna try and be Charles for a minute, you know and I was like, You find your tongue is tied, your words escape and hide, but she's so patient and kind, she's prepared to read your mind, that's all very well till you find because of the wine you drank. Your mind is just a blank. And I went, Oh yes, he's gonna love that. I sent it to him and he sent me this great blues and it went

I found it hard to think when I drink. He ignored all that fancy stuff and just got it down to what the song was really about. It means the same as the lines I said. In the end that we published both songs, one co written,'cause he kept a few other of my lines, and so I have a co write with Charles.

Which we didn't sit in the room, it just we pieced it together and I kept my song with all the smart Alec lyrics for another occasion. And it you know, I always tell that story. I mean, I'm not telling that story for the first time when I sing it because it it does say something about when you do. give in to your ability to juggle words. And I I look at some of the lyrics that I wrote in the eighties when I was throwing words around like like people throw around paint.

And I go, What the hell is that about? You know, like and then I would think for a while. Oh yeah, it's sort of like you go through three doors to the meaning, you know. Uh and is that bad or is it good? Because it leaves space for people's imagination. That's why I was thinking like that.

I was thinking all these straight line songs are a bit predictable. So sometimes it's a way to, you know, throw the words and images around inside the music and other times you want to be straight on the meaning, you know? Like if you're writing something very specific about

something you saw in the news, you might use much simpler words than if you're writing from the complexity of an emotional relationship,'cause it's never quite as simple as the simplest love songs are, the you know, the pain and the elation of it is all much more complicated. And it also takes a lot longer. So songs you're automatically making an editorial decision to which part of the story are you telling. That's the other thing to consider, you know. Yeah. That part of it is craft, I guess.

Like if you think in terms of a camera, if you were gonna focus on one detail in the in the picture, yes, you have to know what the stop is and how the lens works to do that. But your decision to do it is from emotion or from the need to tell a story. And that's the same as choices and songs.

They were a part of um Wise Up Ghost. You know, they were a big part of Wise Up Ghost. The record I did with Greslov and and Stephen Mandel ended up being credited as a Roots record, although really the members of the Roots really appeared as instrumentalists on a record that we the three of us made.

Amir and I, uh Questlov, exchanged ideas through Stephen, you know, and uh then we would bring in different people to play on it, and some of the members of the Roots and then Pina Paladino played, and Ray Angry, who's sort of an auxiliary player of the Roots. But from a lyrical point of view, I did really do cut ups on my own lyrics initially because the rhythms were so different. I thought, well, this could be the story that we've told in the imposter song Bedlam.

I could take those lyrics and I could make the emphasis more deliberate on the words because the beat is a more insistent one. It's not the music isn't as fast and as infurious. Bedlam's a good example because the music that the imposters created in Mississippi The record reflected the chaos of the lyric. But if you took your time to say the same lyric very slowly, there was a different emotion. The emotion was one of sort of more like

Where something happens and there's a stunned silence and then you start to piece it together what's happened. Whereas if you're in the middle of something and you're portraying it. then you want the music to actually be as frenetic as the ideas, you know. Both have virtues. Like saying something calmly can sometimes be more chilling or threatening. I'm not putting them in competition. I don't see why they can't both exist.

What was interesting about the process is as we learned our working method, we were then able to create brand new songs that didn't have any cut up element to them, you know, maybe in the music they did but not in the lyrics.

I said, let's just go in and whatever we get that day is the record. And we worked for fourteen hours straight and we made My Dark Life, which was a it was a weird record. It was Warner Brothers commissioned a record when the X Files was huge. They commissioned this record of music inspired by the X Files. So if you had anything mysterious sounding they'd accept it. But they had the money to let us have fun. And of course that's something that's sort of changed.

Just in the twenty years or more since I made that record is record companies can't afford to do that anymore. There isn't enough reward for them to have people just going here, here's some money, go and knock yourself out. That just doesn't happen now. You know, they're back winners. And everybody else is sort of like

trying to get the money together like independent filmmakers. You know, when you go to the pictures to see any interest in film, before you ever get to the film you've got nineteen producers logos come up because that's how many people it took to make the finances. To make the thing at all, you know.

that was probably without realizing it, editorial. You know, sometimes I'd lose verses, realise that verse doesn't hold up and that sort of thing. And and of course with computers you tend to do that stuff even more instantaneously. I mean I think sometimes I've been guilty of just hitting delete and not even keeping the other draft, you know. So maybe that's a mistake.

But I can't say there's millions of songs that have escaped because of that, you know. I mean I've just had lots of opportunities to write because you get these other invitations and it's not like you need to have a certain amount of songs by a certain date. You write them when when it feels good, you know, or f the opportunity presents itself to create something.

You know, which I had maybe more than half of it written before I arrived, but crucial things about the middle of the song were his. And then we started writing and it was My Brave Face, Candy, That Day Is Done, the next or The Lovers That Never Were, then the next three or four songs that we wrote, they're all really good. You know, and I mean but they were just coming, they've just appeared.

between us on the table, you know, from playing ideas. And you've got to think that although I I've had experiences with songs emerging very quickly, when you're working with him, do you dealing with somebody who just recognises melody really quickly, you know.

So it probably is a point where you have to stop it off a little bit so you can get the sense and value of it. For me I'm not worried about that so much. I've got lots of bits and pieces of me humming things and bits of scribble and and notebooks and notes On computers and everything.

It's just taking the time to review them now and again and see whether anything is really worth going down a road. I've got lots more songs we could have recorded and it would have made a different picture. And there's many good songs, but I I think have made this record.

way that he speaks, he sort of said, I would prepare these I think he referred to them as canvases, you know, because his backdrops are kind of like the preparation and then the events are supposed to happen within it. And that's what he does with you too. He said, and David would just write to the edge of the canvas. And he would fill it right up and when we're talking about the later Bowie collaborations, you know. So I mean, I understand how that works. Uh in some way, Clive's music

very, very clearly defined stanzas without this extra, as you say, run on that happens in the music. And it was actually when we came to play it with Chet Baker, it was the thing that made it difficult for him to play initially. Because it wasn't a it wasn't the form of a standard, it wasn't a you know, a thirty two bar form, it wasn't a twelve bar blues, it was it was this very uh irregular form, you know.

And it sort of confounded him. He'd start to play uh his instrumental and then the harmony wouldn't change where he thought it should, where his instincts told him. So it took a few takes for us to get All the playing was beautiful, but the form was exactly what you said. Yeah. What you were trying to say emotionally would not always fit in there.

Clive and I never spoke about shipbuilding, you know, because I was the other side of the world when I wrote the lyric. I was in Australia on tour, and he had asked me to write the song for Robert Wyatt, and he had imagined that Robert should make another record like I'm a Believer because he had done this great version of I'm a Believer, and he wanted it to be like um

Almost like a brill-building lyric. He wanted it to be like about the hours of the day. He said, the only idea I've got lyrically is it's something to do with the clock. I said, okay. And I I may have even written some sort of an attempt to do that to that music, but the music seemed like much more serious than that, you know. And then everything that was happening around the Falklands War was in the papers every day. And this

idea abstracted from the conflict. The country was gearing up to towards where it is now, where the warrior class is much more adored again. You know, there was a period where I don't really think people were doing that much saluting. You know, now every other show on T V is about the army or selling something or selling the army.

To you. And that's what shipbuilding is about. You know, somebody's got their job, but what's the purpose of the job? Build a ship to go take their son to a war that they have no right to be in, or they have no reason to be in. It doesn't benefit them in any way.

That's what the song is about. So Clive's extra form of music, I was grateful for it,'cause it allowed me the space to to work out that thought in a way that I think is coherent. It must be because people still hear the song today, and unfortunately it's still sad.

And then I think they were working with Madness or Dexies or somebody, you know,'cause Clive and Allen were working so furiously at that. They were just like this assembly liner hit records. So I was given the job of recording Robert and

you know, the reason to have a trumpet was because Steve had already had a solo on Robert's version. We didn't want them to be identical in arrangement. Right. And I I even had conversation with Winter Masalis about playing on it.

Winton had made two records for Columbia, his first two records, one jazz, one classical. And because we were on the same label, they'd put me on the phone with them and we had some strange dance of a conversation that we didn't really understand what we're talking about. It never happened. And by sheer incredible good fortune, Chet Baker came to London to play a show at very short notice, having fallen how it standetts on a tour of Europe.

and was suddenly playing in Covent Garden. I just went in there and asked him to play. I mean, it's just unbelievable good fortune, you know. So there's many sort of coincidental things that make it the piece of music it is. Maybe you can't ever get those pieces together. You know, and the chance elements, there's so many chance elements in the writing and the recording of the two versions of that song.

It's funny how over the years like other people have found more depth isn't the right word, but more feeling in the song than I intended. I always thought it was a trifle. You know what I mean? Right. Like we were on the road with a group called the Bluebells out of Scotland. They had some really, really attractive sort of jangly as was the way from bands from Scotland at that time, jangly sort of pop songs before the Smiths, you know. Post postcard kind of sound, you know.

And we were on the road and I th I I'd like these. I thought, I'll write one of these. I could write like a Mersey Beat song. And the first version of Every Day I Write the Book sounded like it should have been played by the Mersey Beats or the Big Three or something. It was like straightforward, straight beat.

And when Clive heard it, it's like well, you know, that's been done, that that kind of rhythm's been done. Why don't we try and make it a little bit more like a c a a more sort of of the moment sound, which at that time was this sort of electric Like it had a drum machine on it, I think, in with the drums and he said, Let's make it like an English R and B record So I

I wasn't sure at all, to be honest. And then as he introduced the different elements in the studio, you know, like he brought Karen and and Claudia in uh the Aphrodisiac singers. Then I could get it, you know. Then then it seemed like, okay, this is something and it ended up being

A lovely record, you know. I think the band at first kind of went, Oh god, we've got to just play at that space. Can't we just go mad? Because we always did. But you know, the the the the truth of it is that when we made the record before that Imperial Bedroom with Jeff Emmerich. We came in for the first ten days and just went mad. Five go mad at Oxford Circus, you know, like or four. And Jeff just sat there like, ugh, not another group that does this, you know, and and

Obviously he'd seen the Beatles do the craziest things and had been given the job of making sense, you know, you can imagine if you were Jeff Emmerich who's trained at Abbey Road and somebody walks in and goes, I want to make tomorrow, never knows and describes the sound of it but doesn't know how to do it. And then they did do it and that's what we all copy. Is that kind of invention, sonic invention. By the time we got to work with Clive and Allen, I'm trying to make

Some sort of coherent record that can get on the radio. We still thought in those terms like, let's get one, they'll play on the radio, then they'll hit shipbuilding. It was as calculated as

So I started to sing it a bit like that. Now I've done it all sorts of different ways now. And then the weirdest thing happened, I think summer before last, I went up to do the Newport Folk Festival. And uh the middle brother with the guys from Doors, one of whom was in the New Basement Tapes record with me, Taylor Goldsmith.

Said, we wanna do every day I'll write the book with you. I said, Okay. We're at a folk festival. We're gonna do it in Ron's arrangement or my arrangement. No, we've learnt your arrangement and they played it note for note like our record from eighty two or eighty three. And I went, you know what, this ain't bad.

Ever since then, the imposters have played it in the original arrangement or a slightly more swinging version of that. So there you go. There's the story of how a song can you know, you you cannot know the value of it yourself. I mean, I have to credit Ron Saxmith It was a little chilly, the original song. He made me realize that you could find something in it. Now, what was the other one?

At best, they're supposed to be keeping the peace. At worst they're not. You know, all of the complexities of that. And I went, This is not the first or last time this has happened. And the whole lyric was written on the playing back.

'Cause it wasn't like, Oh, this is about Belfast and explains Belfast. This is like this is what my granddad did. This is what both my grandads did. They were put in the army to do somebody else's dirty work. That's what the song is about. It's all about that. That's really all it's about, you know.

the trick, if you like, is the same one as Underlime plays, although Underlime is a much longer song and I I know it's not going on the radio, you know, but at that point we had something of an audience. And I knew if we made a pop record out of it, you could get the ideas of the song across to an audience and they were listening to the tune before they'd heard the words. Right. And then if they heard the words after that

Then they'd have their own thoughts about it. I wasn't telling them what it doesn't show me somewhere in the song that it says, and this is the way it is. There isn't. There's lots of conflicting ideas in the song.

But the whole point of singing them is that somebody takes out of it and lots of people just sing along with it, don't care what it's about. That's fine too. Then it just becomes a piece of music that works. So that's the two ways you can write. You can underline all the meaning, like another song.

that comes from the same time of shipbuilding as is pills and soap. Whether it's very spare and there's just a drum machine when we'd never used one before and just a piano and a very stark, almost like recitation way of saying the word, so you have no choice but to listen to it.

Is that better? Is it more honest or less honest? Or is honesty even part of it? It's just about that's one way to say it. Just like bedlam is one way to say it. Refuse to be saved or wake me up on Wise Up Ghost or think I'm a new thing. Cinco minutos con vos, son, rise up ghost, is a view of the conflict in the Falklands, or Malvinas, from the other side.

So, you know, you wait thirty years and then write the answer song. What I'm saying is that all possibilities of song, they're not to do with calculation, they're to do with opportunity to respond to your own feelings. And the things you kind of accrue, the talent, skills and everything, and your cohorts of course, whether they're songwriting collaborators or individual musicians that illuminate the things.

that's the chance element that that comes into having any song come into existence, you know? Mm-hmm. You couldn't possibly plan it in advance. You'd have to just say one thing led to another. Like I had no idea that that music for shipboarding was gonna be something that I would sing for the rest of my career. I just thought that's a piece of music. I want to write for Robert.

Here's a song with Robert singing. This is a good song. Let's have more people hear it. And so that song travels, you know. Not every song travels.

So Bert's music has been like another one of those ones that's been echoing down since I was a kid, along with as I call it, Tamla. I never called it Motown,'cause that's what it was always called Tamil. And the Beatles and the Small Faces and The Who and Ray Davis and you know, and on and on and on, the band and you know, and of course through the seventies particularly, I started to become aware of Alan Tucson, you know, like I knew his songs

But I didn't know he'd written them. I I loved Holy Cow and and working at a coal mine, the Lee Dorsey records. And then I'd start hearing, That's Alan Tussant and and you could never see this guy, you know, he never left New Orleans, you know. So y people would respect Of course that's an Alan Tussant song and people in the know would say,

Of course that one is produced by Alan Tucson. It was always like that, you know, it was like his secret code word. And then I got to work with him and he turned out to be really a a lovely, lovely gentleman. And then of course these really terrible things happened.

at the time of Katrina, you know, where he was forced out of the city. And a friend of mine who was a a business colleague of his, they had a r a little label that they used to record things on, uh, was saying, What uh you know, Alan's up in New York, he's starting to play shows, you should come and see him.

I went to see him play in this little club in in New York and he's playing his songbook and he'd never done this before. He'd never performed like that outside of New Orleans. He'd go and play once a year in New Orleans. Most of the time it's just producing records. So you see the value of of like seeing somebody who's open to all these other possibilities and and we got to make that record. And you can imagine watching him

He didn't produce the record. That was the strange thing. He didn't want to produce the record we made together. He wanted to be in the band. We could barely persuade him to sing. We had to really say, Alan, you've got to sing. People wanna hear you. You know, they don't want to see me singing your songs.

We made this record and and then the more we went and we played on the road and then he started arranging my songs. Like he'd arranged Bed Let me arrange Clown Strike, extraordinary arrangements, like really amazing. So it's one of the many things that replaced an education for me. You know, I left school at 17. I didn't go to university. I certainly didn't go to music college.

I never learnt to write music down until I was in my late thirties or early forties. So some things I was always having to delegate, like I'd say, Can you do it like this? and I'd sing something and when it would be written out, it wouldn't be quite like I imagined, you know.

So here we are like all this time later and I've learned how to do that. Suspect My Tears is a song that I wrote immediately after Painted from Memory. So I can hear in it the things I'd learnt, you know, the things I'd carried with me out of writing with Bert Backrack. But it's also got all those other things in the arrangement that come down the years to me and I go, oh, now I know how to write that out. And now I know how to make those strings do that. I always love Tears of a Clown.

Yeah. By Smokey and the Miracles. And what's great about the arrangement is it's supposed to be like like circusy, but the way Smokey did it was he had a bassoon. And it but a mob This really staccato instrument that you wouldn't expect to hear on an R and B record. And the bassoon is such a I mean, I happen to know a really great jazz bassoonist. I'd worked with him about fifteen years ago. And it's not an instrument you say jazz on the bassoon. You don't you don't put'em together much.

But Michael is really a great musician. And I knew that if I wrote it out, he would play it with a feeling. Sometimes when you put a classical instrument in with a with a pop group, it sounds kinda weird. But he just played it with enough feeling. He still played the notes I wrote, but he played it with enough expression that you could have it and he's on under lime and he's on suspect my tears. Right. But the you know, the one that really references Alan Tussant

is actually Mr. and Mrs. Hush. The horn players all said, So you that's your little kind of tip of the hat to AT, you know, as they they'd work with him and I could never make it quite as hip as he would have made it, but you can just go Well, I think I learnt how to do that thing. I could point at one bar in that where something happens that he would have smiled at, you know.

The way he thought in music was not it was never thought out and it really taught me something about not over theorizing it and just, you know, yet he had tremendous knowledge, instinctive knowledge about sort of a different kind of intelligence. Like he'd look at that glass. And something would go on that you couldn't explain. Like it was like that he was connected to something.

like and the spirit of things. If you watched him in a room, he'd go and he'd start going and touch the table. And it wasn't doing it like in a voodoo way to kind of like spook you, but there was definitely a way in which he was connected to things that I couldn't explain. And when you hear his music, you kind of know that. Now you can't learn that, but you can learn little things from the music that that sensibility created. You can learn like how to phrase, how to create space.

That's the beauty of having amazing friends that have lived different lives to you. You know, because then you're open to other ideas. Uh you can't get right around the world and live everybody's life. That's impossible. That's it. Taylor V said the old folks. Goes to show you never can tell.