Episode 67 - Tom Robinson

as the bass toasting front man and principal songwriter of his eponymous band, before embarking on a long and varied solo career, Over the last decade he's also established himself as one of the most familiar and best love voices on British radio with a hugely popular BBC Radio six music show dedicated largely to showcasing new and up and coming artists. We are decidedly chuffed to welcome the great Tom Robinson to the podcast.

Returning to the south of England, he entered Fincheton Manor, a facility for troubled teenagers in Kent, remaining there for six years. A visit by noted blues musician Alexis Corner proved pivotal. Corner became Tom's friend and mentor and inspired him to try his hand at the music business.

Building on the success of their early singles, the record went to number four in the album charts and was certified gold.

Towards the end of the decade, Tom received a letter from the singer songwriter and producer Dan Hartman of Instant Replay Fame, praising his then current album Still Loving You. A friendship blossomed and the two artists collaborated on a number of songs for Tom's next record, nineteen nineties Blood Brother.

Tom launched his Six Music show, which is now in its thirteenth year and currently goes out at nine PM on Saturday evenings. He also won his second Sony Award in twenty twelve for his Sunday evening show, Now Playing at Six Music.

To stream and purchase our guests impressive solo oeuvre, we would urge you to visit Tom Robinson.bancamp.com post haste.

And I think it might be hard for today's listeners to understand how different the world of nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty four was to the present day. Although there's great music that people look back to on radio stations that took place in the sixties and they go, Oh, that must have been great growing up in that golden era.

We couldn't hear any of it. There was no national pop radio station. There was only the BBC Light programme, which had one pop music programme per week, Saturday Club. and uh it was only when Top of the Pops was started that we actually had one weekly fix of what was actually happening in the charts. And even then you had no way to record it. Cassette recorders were unknown at this point.

So you had to save up your pocket money. Two weeks pocket money was a seven inch single and an album had to be like a Christmas present. So you and your mates would kind of pool your resources. So one of you would get a Beatles album, one of you get a Stones album, you'd go round to their house

where they had a gramophone and you'd play it on there because that was how you heard your music. And our school, my secondary school in Saffron Walden in Essex, was lucky insofar as we had some older kids in the school who uh formed bands. So they became a thing of people playing in bands at school dances and stuff, and copying shadows, numbers and what have you. And so uh when it came round to me getting into the sixth form being of an age to be in a school band, I was copying Manfred Mann.

pop scene around that time. Mm-hmm. And then come age sixteen I had a nervous breakdown and uh quickly left the school and ended up at a therapeutic community for disturbed adolescents. in Kent called Fincheton Manor, which uh was really the saving of me, I think. I I was so clinically depressed and suicidal at that time that if I hadn't gone there I probably wouldn't have made it through.

So suddenly the whole nineteen sixty seven, the whole musical horizon broadened out for me personally. Mm-hmm. Um and I think actually for m my generation generally, sixty seven was a kind of pivotal year. There was pre sixty seven, which was one thing, and there was post sixty seven, which was an entirely other thing.

Whereas none of us could have sounded like um the stones if we'd well we tried, but we didn't we didn't get anywhere close. Because the playing skills were so different and also the amount of amplification technology a drum kit. I mean imagine trying to afford a drum kit on seven and sixpence a week. It just wasn't gonna happen.

And I think we were blinded to any kind of possible business downsides to the deal that we were offered by the fact that he was and is, actually, uh such a stellar songwriter. And tomorrow, the day after we do this interview, I'm finally getting to talk to Ray Davis for the first time in forty years. Oh wow. And do a two hour interview with him on Six Music.

And um in preparation for that I've uh asked on Twitter what songs of his that aren't big hits people remember with fondness or or like. And the list is as long as your arm. I've put together on my blog at Fresh on the Net, I've actually put together a Spotify playlist of thirty four classic songs that the Joe in the street wouldn't know about. Uh every one of which is a gem. And it's quite amazing. So as a quality songwriter that nobody gets close to.

Ray Davis, in terms of history, uh in terms of being part of the national psyche, being a national treasure Um and consistency actually. People don't realise that right through the seventies, right through into the eighties, and then again in his solo records in the in the twenty-first century, he's continued turning out quality work.

And it was interesting that people on Twitter were picking Ray Davis solo records from the last ten years as ones that you must hear, as well as ones from obscure sort of um concept albums from the late seventies.

seeing racism at work in the London police and what have you led to certain subject matters. But the first motivation wasn't thinking, Oh, I'm gonna change the world, I know, I'll become a songwriter. No, it was I wanted to be famous. And then if I can, while I'm on the way there, help things I care about, then that will be a bit of a bonus. But um I never thought that I would be a a kind of

A great songwriter. Certainly not among the company of the sort of people that you've interviewed. For one thing, I didn't think I could sing that well. And in fact, if you listen back to my early records, I couldn't.

I mean Joe Strummer totally changed his own natural speaking voice, but he did it so much more convincingly than me. And so it was only towards the end of his life when you heard interviews that you actually heard the kind of nice rounded Oxbridge vowels. starting to sneak through the uh the kind of strum of persona.

But uh in Cafe Society, the first band I was in, there were three of us in there, three singers, two guitars, but I was only the backing singer. I was the catalyst. The other two I thought were much better songwriters than me. and also better singers than me. And basically what I brought to the table was being a catalyst and getting the gigs, organising the rehearsals, suggesting ideas for arrangements.

presentation, that kind of thing. Just somebody that made things happen, which I think creative people always need. Um, and many gifted songwriters depend on a a really nurturing manager or partner in the band or somebody that will actually take care of that stuff. And that was my role. So it was only after seeing the Sex Pistols that I realised it didn't really matter if you couldn't sing in tune, and it didn't really matter if you could only play C F and G.

What mattered was that you meant it and as, you know, Rotten said, We mean it, man. Th there was something of that in there and uh and that's what gave me the courage to strike out on my own as the uh modestly named Tom Robinson Band.

I find and I I've heard this from other songwriters too, that as a song settles down it kind of beds in and the words which at first are a bit fluid and you try different lines on different nights After a while they just kind of bed in and suddenly every word is in its place and nothing else needs to change and it becomes

a fixed thing. I one of my acid tests back in the pre-computer days used to be if you could copy it out, the whole lyric, on an A four pad of paper, from one sheet to the next, and you didn't change any of the words, then it was finished. But um there'd always be that thing with the new song that you'd

as you were writing it across, the physical labour of writing it would make you think about each word as you put it down. You go, Actually no, maybe that should be and, not the or whatever, you know. So With computers now it it it does make that alteration process a bit different.

unless you lived next door to a record shop, you wouldn't be able to obtain the original. So it was trying to work out those chords and gradually Oh, that's quite nice, though those running down chords.

Uh and then when I went back to my little flat in Highgate where I didn't have a piano, I then got the guitar out and tried to reproduce the chords and came up with that. So it was quite an early demo of me just with the um one acoustic guitar recorded on a cassette machine uh in a upstairs flat, knocking the song out as it was.

that night by night it toughened up and it got down to its essentials because there's nothing like performing a song live for actually finding out what's good about it or what isn't good about it. It's a thing that bedroom musicians today struggle with and you have to use things like YouTube and see how many likes you get, how many views you get to get that kind of feedback, which is vital.

But when you're playing it live night after night, you see the whites of the audience's eyes and if people start picking their noses or uh turn to each other and start chatting or they decide to go to the bar at that point, you know the song hasn't really got their attention.

And if they put their drink down and take their finger out of their nose or stop talking to the person next to them, that's when you know you've got a song that's starting to work. And gradually two four six eight Motorway started to have that impact and instead of being like rhythmically dum did it became poof poof poof poof four on the floor and uh kind of getting people's attention as it came thundering out the bass bins.

And then Danny's wonderful crunching guitar riff that uh he played on his Les Paul, it kind of made it.

So it was quite lonely. It was quite often more police than there were marchers on those events. But I used to get up with an acoustic guitar just to do my bit. Um and I'd already written a song called Glad to Be Gay which was just a kind of little ditty about how great it was to be gay and it was just Isn't it lovely? Um it's the same old story all over the world when a boy meets a boy and a girl meets a girl. You know that kind of

Pollyanna optimism. But in the intervening year I actually saw what the London Met police were up to in terms of uh beating up Gay people, just the same as they were beating up black people, running people in for no reason without an excuse. Again, just the same as the Sus laws were being used against black youth in in Brixton and Notting Hill. Same thing was going on in Illscourt. And they would get a softer rest.

If they went and um ran in um a banker from Surrey who was wearing leather and chains and stuff standing outside a pub in Earl's court. because he wouldn't want it to get in the local paper so that the the case wouldn't get contested. Their arrest record would go up, so they'd get their promotion and everything. So it was a nice soft target for them. So it was making that connection really between my own situation and the wider situation, who else was suffering from these heavy manners.

that led me to to make this connection between um between all the kind of oppressed communities if you like, that you either live in a free and a fair society or you don't. And we clearly didn't. And so, um glad to be gay was a badge that people were wearing round the gay scene at the time. Uh the the phrase

predated the song. Uh there was little yellow badges that said, uh, glad to be gay and then people would take them off when they came out of the club and went out onto the streets at night. You thought, Well, how glad is that? So that was the idea of the song was to write something really scathingly sarcastic about listing the stuff that was happening, and then going ironically, well sing if you're glad to be gay, hey on the back of that. But I didn't have a tune for it.

So as I was writing the lyric I needed to have something some idea of a metre that you could write to so you can get the words done. And yes, as you say, it was Bob Dylan's Sarah. So it originally was going like that. The British police are the best in the world. I don't believe one of these stories I've heard about them raiding up pubs for no reason at all.

And you look at the words on paper next day, cold and go, hmm, how could you sing that? And suddenly it became something you could swing, the British police are the best in the world. You can go like that and then you pick up the guitar and then the chords kind of come.

And they'll have some completely different concept of the music that goes to it and bingo you've got a new song. It's sort of like in the old days of stone and brick bridges. You know, when they built a brick railway arch, they'd first of all build a wooden arch, and then the bricklayers would come and they'd lay the bricks up the side of this wooden arch, right up onto the top, and then they'd just drop the keystone in right at the top of it.

all the time putting the mortar in and then when the mortar was dry you could take the wood away. You got a brick arch. So the wood is like uh somebody else's song that you're writing to. It's a kind of handy little trick.

But the best advice I ever read for writing songs was Tom Paxton saying the key to writing songs is being unafraid of rubbish. And just being willing to write real shit songs because if only one in ten songs is any good, which is generally the case, you know, the rule of nine says you have to write nine bits of shit. before you can get to something that you're gonna be proud of. Unless you write the first nine, you never get to that tenth.

And so the beauty of it is you've got this deadline coming up on Tuesday. You have to cobble something together, because you can't not turn up So you're right, any old bit of shit. But once it exists once it exists, you can change it. That's the great thing. It's much easier to change something that's there that's a bit rubbish or a bit weak than it is to create it in the first place. And most of us

are tempted to give up before we get it even halfway finished as a piece of shit. And mo most songwriters we know all have books full of half finished songs or tapes full of half finished songs or demos that are just an incomplete song idea.

It's so hard to force yourself to finish that crap idea so that you could sing it all the way through and that's it, that's that song, now I can move on. If you're not careful you never finish it and you get into Peter Gabriel territory where it takes four years to finish an album.

You know, especially playing Chelmsford Prison, I mean it was really it was touch and go, but because there were songs like My Brother Martin, which has this story about this kind of pair of delinquent teenagers, earlier on trying to establish this

empathy with the audience where they they join in and become part of it. You then go into the British police are the best in the world, I don't believe one of these stories I've heard and so many people can relate to that. They're already going, Yeah, that's right, bastards It's only when you get to the chorus Sing if you're glad to be gay that they go Oh, hello. Yeah, all right, fair enough. And so um yeah, we managed to pull it off and and not get bottled off stage.

Um and then you suddenly go, Oh, that would make quite a nice source for that and uh you put'em together. So with War Baby I had this um little groove on the T R eight oh eight. Um it was wonderful the technology that Roland came up with in in the early eighties. They made technology available to cheapskate not very well off songwriters that had previously been only available to the likes of Kraftwerk.

or Peter Gabriel, you know, with the the multi million pound um Moog synthesizers and the uh Lin drum machines and what have you. And suddenly Roland are making these little boxes that you can buy for a few hundred quid and that you can sync together with MIDI.

So with War Baby I made this eight bar sequence with the TB three hundred oh three which was a bass synthesizer that synced with the drum machine and then the the drum groove on the eight hundred oh eight was just going doom doom doom doom doom doom doom boom.

Boop boom boop boom boom boop boop boop. Eventually of course my wonderful drummer Steve Laurie translated that to a real drum kit, but The eight oh eight was such a great um boon to songwriters in the early eighties, because it was the first really sensible programmable drum machine available to the songwriter and There was the C R A sorry if these are kind of technical dull things for

And once you had a TASCAM one four four and you could put a cassette in and you could multitrack yourself and once you could program the drums, whatever drum rhythm you heard in your head as a songwriter, you could actually hear it.

And you didn't have to go into a rehearsal room and persuade somebody else to actually slog it out on a drum kit and have one of those trogs conversations about splitting your hands to try and get Bubba Bubba Bubba ch No, no But finally the Roland Corporation set us free from that with the C R seventy eight where you could actually make it go b

Boop boop boop bo chish play and that was it. And there's that old joke about the difference between a drum machine and a drummer, which is that with a drum machine you only have to punch the information in once. Um the eight oh eight though very quickly took over from the uh CR seventy eight and that was a proper professional grade but still affordable drum machine and War Baby was written on that with the T B three oh three playing the bass thing.

and uh doing lots of weird sound effects on a little cheap again integrated circuits moog, a mini moog to make the bird noises.

And a Roland Space Echo to make some atmospheric sounds. So I had that going on, but I didn't know what it was as a piece of music or how on earth you'd fit anything over it. Separate from that, I was living in Hamburg in exile, fleeing the tax man.

Uh which began only the very young and the very beautiful be so aloof, hanging out with the boys or swaggerin' poise and you know, is it was all in there, along with a lot of other stuff. And again I had no idea how I was gonna sing that either. And it was just gradually over the coming months that I then tried singing that over the demo on the Porter Studio. And gradually every time I tried to make it rhyme, it didn't work. Every time I tried to shorten the lines, it didn't work.

And in the end I just took random lines out of the rant and just used them in their entirety and and and went for it. And uh my German record company actually dropped me because of War Baby. They said, You know what, Tom? It's hardly another two hundred four six eight motorway.

kind of song. It's um it's difficult to do rabble rousey songs if you're radiohead, you know. They they rouse rabbles in an entirely different way. Uh which is splendid and I couldn't do to save my life, but The one thing they won't have is is everybody singing along, stamping their feet and punching their fists in the air, shouting power in the darkness. That's my special uh prerogative.

And people started, you know, writing letters going, Dear comrade, I notice you have not yet written the song about insert cause here and expecting us to do it, to write songs to Ward of and it's so tempting to try, you know, at that time because When sudden fame comes, when you've been signing on and living in one room with one acoustic guitar to your name and borrowing your instruments to go out and do gigs, um and you suddenly find yourself with Zero's in your bank account,

Nothing is certain anymore. You don't know how much money is worth anymore. You don't know who you are almost. So thinking, well maybe that's what I'm supposed to do, is to write some songs about oppression in Argentina. So I actually did write a song called Let My People Be, which was in response to a request, but it wasn't because I felt passionate about Argentina. It was

Alas, because somebody had said, Here are the facts you ought to write about them. It never works. I mean it really that's such a fatal thing. And in interviews, too, people would say, Oh, Tom, you know, what do you think the solution to the problems of Northern Ireland is? And bugger me, I'd try and tell them.

and uh I'm there at the buffet just filling my plate and there's Billy Connolly beside me, you know and Billy Connolly's cracking wise, and there's all these celebs around the place. And then just as we're all settling down, in walks Prince Andrew, With his entourage. And uh Elton actually like took me to one side and gave me a little notion and went, Not bad for a council house boy from what for day

We actually found we got on quite well and uh he didn't have anything like as much front as I thought he was going to, and I wasn't anything like as mouthy and obnoxious as he thought I was going to be. And when two songwriters meet, what do they do? Well they they write songs. So I had some lyrics that I hadn't been able to put music to, which I gave him.

And next time I saw him he just sort of beckoned me over to the piano, put them up on the um music stand and sat and played them. And I had my cassette recorder and uh recorded him singing the songs and and there they were. Songs. Bang. But he can one of his party tricks is he can sing the phone book.

When he's drunk enough and there's a there's a party, then they they get the phone book out and he he just makes up a song on the spot, just singing whatever page they ha happens to have got at. He has incredible facility with melody and chord sequences that come naturally. But then finally there was uh that was Never Gonna Fall in Love Again and um Sartorial Eloquence, which went on one of his albums. But then

Um, he had a tune that he didn't have any words for, and again he played it for me and I recorded it on my cassette recorder, and then he went off on tour and I came up with some words and sent them to him. And I didn't hear anything for six months, and I assumed that he'd hated him. Um, and then one day he went to I really like that that song you did and it was a song called Elton's song.

Uh and the only reason it's called Elton's song is because it didn't have a title. So I just put Elton's songs just to mark out who it was for when I sent it off in the post. Uh and he went, Oh, that'll lose a title And yeah, he put it on the album um The Fox. And that was an album that he made videos for all of the tracks on it. And I'm proud to say the video for that one song got banned. I actually managed to write a lyric that got Elton John banned.

But it was about um a schoolboy crush, uh the uh gay schoolboy crush that had precipitated my nervous breakdown uh in my own teams. And I just wrote that very much from the heart, trying to imagine myself back in that situation and it resonated for him and uh he still plays it live to this day actually. So um it's been a nice a nice surprise. I think that's the best of the

Harvey Goldsmith rashly promised that we could have Hammersmith Odin on Christmas Eve to say thank you to the fans, you know, so He'd made this firm promise and we had Pink Floyd's management at the time, so Harvey didn't want to renege on his promise to Pink Floyd's manager. But it turned out he had booked Peter Gabriel for eight nights.

But once again we found we were almost exactly the same age, we had similar backgrounds and similar tastes in music that we'd both grown up with Manfred Mann and Traffic and Steve Wynwood and Spencer Davis Group and uh Roxy music. So I went down down to his house

in Bath to meet him and his wife and his kids and uh we found we got on, so we decided, yes, we'll go the whole hog on this. We'll um We'll make this um a joint show with both of us playing all the time, rather than one supporting the other. and we'll form a special band just for this one show and we'll write some songs specially uh and we'll do one where where I write the lyrics and Peter writes music to it and another where Peter writes the music and I'll write the lyrics to it.

And then we'll sing each other's songs as well. And we'll write hand signed invitations to all the members of both our fan clubs and let them know in advance of the tickets going on sale so they can get tickets to it. And we'll make it two quid from the front of the stalls right to the back of the circle. First come, first serve.

Just a flat two quid, we'll give all the money to charity, and we'll give everybody who comes in a free Christmas cracker with a paper hat and a whistle and a little badge saying Merry Christmas from Rob and Gab. And then for the badge we actually had a special photo session done where I wore his stage clothes and he wore my stage clothes. He was dressed up with a school tie and everything. And somewhere there's a load of those Merry Christmas, Robin Gab seventy eight.

Badges from all those 2,000 crackers. We put a band together and we rehearsed during the afternoons of Peter's run of eight gigs because once he'd done one sound check he didn't need to do any more, so there was sound check time all through the evening through the afternoons, and we'd rehearse on the stage at Hammersmith Odeon.

Which was really something. And the band was good because um we had Danny Custo from T R B on guitar, Andy Mackay from Roxy Music on Sacks, Paul Jones from Manfred Man on Harmonica, Phil Collins on drums, Peter Gabriel on Synth, And Elton John on piano. Unfortunately it wasn't recorded. You know, nowadays every bloody thing gets recorded and the BBC gets in on the act and

and does a broadcast from it, everything. Back then, you know, it didn't tend to happen. There wasn't even a cassette recording off the desk, so it's probably just as well because as I say, I couldn't really sing that well at the time, and Peter is an amazing singer and uh the challenge of trying to perform Salisbury Hill in seven eight and play bass and hit all those notes. Um well the headline of the review in Melody Maker was One Sings, the Other Doesn't.

So uh but it was a great memory and that's how Merrily Up on the High and Bully for You came about as songs and that's how come Peter and I formed the friendship and uh came to write together for a while.

during his time as Director General, working at the BBC, used to go up to the staff canteen on the uh eighth floor. And there'd be Greg Dyke in the queue, in the canteen, with his tray, pushing it along beside yours, and he'd just go and put it down on a table and anybody could go and sit at the same table as him and he sent emails round going, Hey team, you know, this, that and the other.

Anyway, when he had his first big presentation to staff about what he wanted to happen, they took that line out of Bully for You, cut the crap and make it happen, and actually played it over the speakers and it was his slogan to the staff, cut the crap and make it happen. So very proud moment.

imagine our way in. But the thing is at the time there was a l the last days of the Labour Calaghan government and I think what I was trying to do is, you know, make the point that the uh the haves versus the have nots were still doing fine, even though the rest of the country was in three day weeks and kind of turmoil on the streets and uh strikes everywhere and um riots and industrial disputes and kind of race stuff happening with the National Front.

But for a certain stratum that could afford uh Land Rovers and shotguns and stuff, uh everything was uh apparently fine.

And I think it's worth talking about because so many people do suffer from depression and it doesn't get acknowledged, you know. You're told to do the British thing and keep a stiff upper lip and if you have a broken leg it's fine. People understand that you're walking round in a plaster cast and it's fine for you to go to the doctor and to go to the hospital and have it done up. But when people are suffering from an equivalent disability, but it's mental,

then suddenly people shy away from it. And um it's worth acknowledging that over the years I've struggled against oppression, although I had it pretty much beat by my fortieth birthday, it did come back again in my late forties and uh you just have to deal with it. You have to seek help. Today compared to when I was sixteen and trying to kill myself, there is so much more help available, thank God.

And maybe people who write songs, you know, are maybe more prone to uh to that kind of inner soul searching as well. It does seem to be quite common among people I've met who who are creative in some way. And all I'd say is seek help because it is there and it does work. Here I am. The fact that I've made it almost to my sixty-fifth birthday is living proof that um therapy, treatment, counselling does work.

album Twenty Four Years of Hunger came to be made just in their basement with a multi track recording machine and people coming in and giving their services and engineering it themselves. It's just so extraordinary. These days it's not it's not that uncommon for people to make great albums at home, but in those days

The late eighties, wasn't it? eighty nine or something? It's quite amazing, and the playing on it is stunning, the singing is stunning, and the lyrics are killer. No surprise that Egg has gone on to become one of the country's greatest songwriters.

Songwriters of a certain kind of veteran status have gone back and revisited their their own key back catalogue. People like Suzanne Vega have gone in and re recorded mhm some of those songs because they weren't quite fulfilled in the original recording, and that there's having lived with the songs for another few decades, they now inhabit them in a whole different way, and those latest recordings of Suzanne Vega's earlier songs are just stunning.

And of course it has the added advantage that it doesn't belong to a record company and she can now, when she tours, she can actually sell those C Ds as merch and this whole other economy becomes available to songwriters. that they're not dependent on the old model, which is so broken anyway, that you can't live by it anymore. And the fact that you can record on a budget, that you can crowdfund it with your audience, that they can help you promote it. And then when you play the gig

You can actually play places that are off the beaten track and th the fans will turn up because they know you through social media and they'll come to somebody's house if necessary to a gig. You can play to fifty people in a house. Flog some CDs afterwards, and turn a sizable profit. It's really wonderful the way that relationship with the audience has now changed, that instead of being a kind of pesky thing that gets in the way, fans you you need security to keep them at distance from you.

Instead of that, you suddenly find out that there are lawyers and artwork people, or musicians, or whatever, who can contribute to your whole campaign, or Hopefully in some cases, uh wealthy business people who can put a few grand your way towards making the next album.

uh last year. He's a fantastic producer and um yeah, we're making making a record that I'm very, very excited about and uh we're hoping to go the crowdfunding route ourselves.

And you do your best to help it, but in a lot of cases I'm still the only person that really knows about some of those artists we played six, seven years ago, and I've got them treasured on my Mac here at home.

But yes, that inhibits you a bit'cause you think like how could I, at my age, with my experience and with my limited time, hope to compete with this work which is the The work of young people at the height of their powers, the height of their hunger and motivation, coming up with kind of life essential work that they live, breathe, eat, sleep, drink twenty four seven.

you know, to produce this work, what could I do in my position that could compete with that? And it's only really in the last couple of years I've gone hell with it. They've got their thing, I've got my thing. I can do stuff they can't do as well. And um

I've gathered together the songs that I've been writing and putting on one side for the last ten, twelve years. But I still didn't get around to making anything recording wise'cause I just didn't know how to get it recorded. Because I knew what I wanted to hear. was something that I would play on the radio. I'm bored with making the kind of music that I used to make.

That's not to denigrate it. It was great in its time and right up to the mid nineties I was making music in a traditional way and the only way I knew how. And I'm proud of that work and it was the best work I could make at the time. But I wouldn't write songs like that now. Well, to put it another way, I wouldn't want to make records like that now. We've had another twenty years of music since then. Music has grown, music has moved on, and I now know a lot more about what music needs to be.

All those seven minute songs I released, oh God, you know it's Trying to make no song on this album over four minutes, and most of them under three, if I can, because uh I'm so much a fan of the artists who managed to be able to say what they have to say and then get out. So that they leave you reaching for replay rather than reaching for fast forward. I think that's the the key difference between uh the old way of doing and

And a lot of today's artists. Of course there's long form artists as well. Radiohead are great, explosions in the sky, post rock is great. But that's a different art form. In terms of the arena where I'm interested in, which is the kind of, you know, the the pithy pop song in its broadest sense. Um, I'm trying to get'em short.