Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / Elvis Costello

Transcript

Elvis Costello · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. So Elvis Costello, welcome to Broken Record.
0:22
Speaker 2: Good to be here.
0:23
Speaker 1: And you are going to talk about your new release
0:28
Speaker 1: of your old release. So tell me what it is.
0:31
Speaker 3: It is the 49th anniversary set presenting My Aim is True,
0:37
Speaker 3: my first record, recorded over the back end of 1976
0:41
Speaker 3: in the first, you know, the first few days of 1977,
0:46
Speaker 3: released in 1977. And other recordings spread over.
0:55
Speaker 2: Four other discs.
0:57
Speaker 3: They are The Blueprint, which is a collection of acoustic
1:00
Speaker 3: guitar performances, songs I wrote in 1975, half of which
1:06
Speaker 3: I sort of held to myself for fear that they
1:09
Speaker 3: maybe revealed my, you know, my, stumbling steps to get
1:13
Speaker 3: to a style I mean they're to my mind at
1:16
Speaker 3: the time I put them away in a drawer because
1:19
Speaker 3: they sounded too much like the people I I liked
1:21
Speaker 3: when I listen to them now I just hear me
1:23
Speaker 3: and I'm you can have a vague sense of somebody
1:26
Speaker 3: I might have heard and songs I tried to write
1:28
Speaker 3: in a different style entirely than the one that informs
1:31
Speaker 3: Mime is True and then of course the demos which
1:35
Speaker 3: you know you can see that coming in coming into
1:37
Speaker 3: focus some recordings I made Prior to that, which were
1:40
Speaker 3: my first attempts to make any recordings with a band.
1:44
Speaker 3: And then the formation of The Attractions, who were put
1:47
Speaker 3: together to, as it were, promote or at least play
1:51
Speaker 3: the music from Miami's True, because the band that played
1:54
Speaker 3: on that album were an American group, Clover, who were
1:56
Speaker 3: not available to me after the recording of the record.
1:59
Speaker 2: They had their own career.
2:01
Speaker 1: You're stumbling attempts to find a style. And I do
2:05
Speaker 1: want to talk about how you developed that style I
2:08
Speaker 1: remember seeing your album when it was first in the
2:10
Speaker 1: record store. And there are artists, I think probably Springsteen's
2:15
Speaker 1: an example, where you follow them along as they develop
2:18
Speaker 1: their style. You were one of those artists for me
2:21
Speaker 1: who seemed to emerge fully formed with that first album.
2:27
Speaker 1: You had the attitude, you had the glasses, you had
2:31
Speaker 1: the great lyrics. So to me, going through this record
2:34
Speaker 1: and this package was fascinating because it's so interesting to
2:37
Speaker 1: see how that came about.
2:40
Speaker 3: You know, I sort of started writing songs when I
2:43
Speaker 3: was about 14, 15 maybe, played in public around that
2:49
Speaker 3: time for the first time, and then, you know, did
2:52
Speaker 3: all the usual things of learning, playing other people's music.
2:56
Speaker 3: I joined a band in Liverpool that immediately became a
2:59
Speaker 3: duo because we realized the singer couldn't sing at the
3:01
Speaker 3: bass player, went to university, which is a very typical
3:04
Speaker 3: teenage band experience.
3:06
Speaker 2: And we carried on for a year or more.
3:10
Speaker 3: And I realized that I had to return to London
3:13
Speaker 3: where I had been born. My parents are from Merseyside.
3:16
Speaker 3: And so my first experiences of even running music evenings
3:20
Speaker 3: were going against the grain of the folk music of Liverpool,
3:26
Speaker 3: which was mostly traditional. And we were trying to sing
3:29
Speaker 3: our own songs and songs by people we liked who
3:32
Speaker 3: were mostly Californian acoustic musicians. And the birds and the
3:36
Speaker 3: band and things like that. I went to London and
3:40
Speaker 3: the beginning of the pub rock scene as it came
3:44
Speaker 3: to be known, although it was never called that by
3:46
Speaker 3: the participants, it was simply bands taking the music directly
3:51
Speaker 3: to the audience rather than going on to the big
3:54
Speaker 3: glamorous stage with dry ice and lame pants. They were
3:58
Speaker 3: just walking up in their day clothes and playing music
4:00
Speaker 3: directly to an audience that could buy a ticket at
4:03
Speaker 3: the door. And Nick Lowe was in a band, Princey Schwartz,
4:07
Speaker 3: who I loved. And I had met Nick when Princey's
4:10
Speaker 3: came to, um, the cabin. I'd met him in the
4:13
Speaker 3: pub opposite the cabin. I got talking with him and
4:16
Speaker 3: then I turned, then I became the guy that would
4:18
Speaker 3: turn up at their gigs and ask him questions. You know,
4:20
Speaker 3: I was trying to find my way. I wasn't asking
4:22
Speaker 3: for favors. I was just asking advice about things, about
4:25
Speaker 3: songwriting and that. I don't remember what our conversations were
4:29
Speaker 3: really about. It was just, I thought he was cool and,
4:31
Speaker 3: you know, we hung out. And, uh, I put a
4:35
Speaker 3: band together for a little while, which were really just
4:37
Speaker 3: a collection of people who happened to play the instruments
4:40
Speaker 3: that made up a band. We didn't really have any
4:42
Speaker 3: other recommendations for being a group than that. And we
4:45
Speaker 3: stumbled around playing a few shows and field by songs.
4:48
Speaker 3: And we took the example of Ebenezer Schwartz in picking
4:54
Speaker 3: particularly obscure songs from American R & B repertoire to
4:58
Speaker 3: put in our set. And the only song that people
5:01
Speaker 3: recognized was bob dylan's knocking on heaven's door which was
5:04
Speaker 3: then in the charts everything else we played was like
5:07
Speaker 3: willfully obscure including my songs which were you know they
5:10
Speaker 3: were the first steps of course that kind of ran
5:13
Speaker 3: out of steam after we did a one recording session
5:16
Speaker 3: and i i went back to that studio with my
5:19
Speaker 3: acoustic guitar a few months later dave robinson was running
5:23
Speaker 3: the studio over a pub which in itself had a
5:25
Speaker 3: basement venue the open anchor and he let me just
5:31
Speaker 3: play every song I had while he was twiddling the dials.
5:33
Speaker 3: He was really working still on the studio. And I
5:38
Speaker 3: think Dire Straits may have done their demos there.
5:41
Speaker 2: I believe they did.
5:42
Speaker 3: And Graham Parker's first record was recorded there. So I
5:45
Speaker 3: just played every song that I had. I'd bought Bruce
5:49
Speaker 3: Springsteen's first record when I lived in Liverpool. I'd listened
5:53
Speaker 3: to that record back to back. And I had one
5:56
Speaker 3: song that sort of sounded like it was, to me,
5:59
Speaker 3: it sounded like I'd me trying to write like that.
6:02
Speaker 3: Another couple of songs sounded like I'd heard Van Morrison
6:05
Speaker 3: around the time of his Bannon Street Choir.
6:07
Speaker 2: All these ideas in my head was I was.
6:09
Speaker 3: Trying on those, as I put in the liner notes,
6:12
Speaker 3: it's like a man trying on hats, you know, does
6:14
Speaker 3: this suit me? And I put those songs away, and
6:19
Speaker 3: then I proceeded on to a style of writing which
6:22
Speaker 3: was informed by records that I loved, particularly Randy Newman's records,
6:27
Speaker 3: but also including Dr. John's Gumbo and Van Dyke Park's records.
6:32
Speaker 3: So they would be literally Americana, not the Americana music
6:36
Speaker 3: of today, but they had a lot of American references
6:39
Speaker 3: and a lot of arcane references. And I was really
6:43
Speaker 3: trying to work out how I could sing about the
6:48
Speaker 3: way I felt, 21, married with a son, on living
6:54
Speaker 3: in the suburbs where nothing in the world I was
6:57
Speaker 3: wanting to enter was within my reach. I had no
7:02
Speaker 3: way to make myself into a suitable face for pop music.
7:07
Speaker 3: And even the scene that was beginning to emerge in 75,
7:12
Speaker 3: I'd had a go at being in it. And those
7:16
Speaker 3: same venues were the venues in which punk began. And
7:20
Speaker 3: I wasn't in tune with that musically. So I proceeded
7:24
Speaker 3: to write these songs that were willfully styled to sound
7:28
Speaker 3: as if they'd been found in a trunk in 1927.
7:32
Speaker 3: And that's the way I wrote Jump Up and Wave
7:36
Speaker 3: a White Flag and a few of the songs that
7:37
Speaker 3: are on this collection. They were experiments of writing songs
7:40
Speaker 3: that were really from the heart.
7:42
Speaker 2: And if you actually read the.
7:43
Speaker 3: Lyrics of Poison Moon, it really talks about being like
7:46
Speaker 3: an outsider. And I didn't know harmony in any formal sense.
7:49
Speaker 3: So everything was just instinctive. Everything was just All my
7:53
Speaker 3: musical learning was from records. I never played a scale
7:57
Speaker 3: in my life. I can't read music.
8:01
Speaker 1: You can to this day?
8:02
Speaker 3: I can write it down and I can orchestrate, but
8:04
Speaker 3: I can't sight-read music back because I never trained my
8:07
Speaker 3: eye to my hand, which you have to do, obviously,
8:10
Speaker 3: as a piano player or as another kind of formal instrumentalist.
8:15
Speaker 3: So I saw that Nick Lowe had released a single
8:19
Speaker 3: and there was this new label, I'd had this demo tape,
8:23
Speaker 3: which I'd made in my bedroom, sent back to me
8:26
Speaker 3: by five, six, seven publishers or record companies that didn't
8:29
Speaker 3: see anything in it at all. And I left my
8:32
Speaker 3: tape there at this little office, never expecting to hear
8:36
Speaker 3: anything about it. And I got a call saying, we
8:38
Speaker 3: want to talk to you. And within a month, I
8:41
Speaker 3: was in the studio with Nick producing, playing bass. And
8:44
Speaker 3: I was introduced to John McPhee and Mickey Shine from Clover,
8:48
Speaker 3: whose records I actually owned. They were pretty obscure. They
8:52
Speaker 3: were on Fantasy, two albums on Fantasy. They had a
8:55
Speaker 3: new lineup with a different drummer from the original band,
9:00
Speaker 3: with a different keyboard player, or I think a keyboard
9:03
Speaker 3: player at all, Sean Hopper. And of course, they had
9:06
Speaker 3: two singers, the original singer, Alex Cole, and Huey Lewis,
9:10
Speaker 3: who was kind of the rabble rouser second lead singer.
9:13
Speaker 3: And I was put into the studio initially just with
9:16
Speaker 3: two members, with Nick playing bass and We cut Mystery Dance,
9:20
Speaker 3: which was, you know, a very simple rock and roll song.
9:24
Speaker 3: And I said I didn't want it to sound like
9:27
Speaker 3: a pastiche. I said I want to play it all downstrokes,
9:30
Speaker 3: you know, so that it was kind of, I'd heard
9:32
Speaker 3: the Ramones by then and I'd heard the Modern Lovers.
9:35
Speaker 3: I thought it needed to be more, actually less swinging
9:38
Speaker 3: in some ways, you know.
9:40
Speaker 1: What's interesting, one thing that, re-listening to this album, is
9:44
Speaker 1: I realized how much of it really had swing to it.
9:47
Speaker 3: Oh.
9:48
Speaker 1: Which is not what you did particularly with the attractions.
9:52
Speaker 3: That's very good that you say that because it saves
9:55
Speaker 3: me from saying it seemed like I'm wise after the fact.
9:57
Speaker 3: But one of the reasons I was excited to meet
10:00
Speaker 3: John McPhee was not just that I had these two
10:04
Speaker 3: records which they'd made. It would have been modest they
10:07
Speaker 3: hadn't made much kind of penetration, they were cult records
10:10
Speaker 3: to say the least. He played on Van Morrison's Tupelo
10:13
Speaker 3: Honey and I wasn't a psychedelic Van Morrison fan in
10:18
Speaker 3: that it took me a while to get to Astral Weeks,
10:21
Speaker 3: but from Moondance on, particularly Bannon Street Choir and Tupelo Honey,
10:26
Speaker 3: These records just made me crazy. And I just wanted
10:29
Speaker 3: to do that. And to have John, who could play
10:34
Speaker 3: pedal steel as well as guitar, but more importantly, Johnny Shambodi,
10:37
Speaker 3: the bass player, who was the most swinging bass player
10:40
Speaker 3: I played with other than Jerry Sheff, who was in
10:43
Speaker 3: the TCB band, later on. But John brought this thing.
10:47
Speaker 3: And I had these models for songs, some of which
10:49
Speaker 3: I'd been working on for a couple of years. And
10:52
Speaker 3: in my head, That figure that's Sneaky Feelings, if you
11:01
Speaker 3: play it slower, it's like... You ain't living till you're loving.
11:14
Speaker 3: In my mind, that's what we were playing, but I
11:16
Speaker 3: couldn't relax enough to be like, and I couldn't sing
11:18
Speaker 3: like Marvin Gaye, as I just proved. I'm not warmed
11:21
Speaker 3: up for singing, but I'm just illustrating. That in my mind,
11:24
Speaker 3: that was the music we were playing. We were playing
11:27
Speaker 3: like Marvin or like the Motown band. But of course,
11:32
Speaker 3: I never mentioned any of that to the global players.
11:34
Speaker 3: I just let them find it because I had no
11:37
Speaker 3: experience of directing musicians of any caliber.
11:42
Speaker 2: And I thought, well, they know what they're doing. These
11:44
Speaker 2: are guys that have already recorded.
11:46
Speaker 3: And everything they played sounded great because not only do
11:50
Speaker 3: you hear these songs being interpreted in a number of
11:52
Speaker 3: different ways.
11:55
Speaker 3: Starting with Clover, then the attractions taking them over, and
11:59
Speaker 3: playing quite faithful to that original model, I have to say,
12:02
Speaker 3: for the first 20 minutes. And then, you know, six
12:06
Speaker 3: or seven months later, you can't even recognize the songs,
12:10
Speaker 3: much less the people playing them. It's a completely different
12:13
Speaker 3: type of music. And then at the end, reunited with Clover,
12:18
Speaker 3: you know, 30 years after we made Miami's True.
12:20
Speaker 2: And guess what?
12:21
Speaker 3: When we went to rehearsals, I said to Pete Thomas,
12:24
Speaker 3: who was deputizing as the drummer, I said, it's the tempo, right?
12:28
Speaker 3: He said, it's the tempo from the record. I said, well,
12:30
Speaker 3: we've never played it like that. He said, I know,
12:33
Speaker 3: but trust it.
12:34
Speaker 2: And we did. And guess what? Back came that swing
12:36
Speaker 2: and feel.
12:37
Speaker 3: So sometimes that first information that you get about music,
12:42
Speaker 3: the attempts to copy aren't as important as the leap
12:46
Speaker 3: into the dark often that you make in finding your
12:50
Speaker 3: own voice. And frankly, for me, it was literally about
12:54
Speaker 3: being able to be in a room. Because when I
12:57
Speaker 3: tried to play those intimate songs I was talking about earlier,
13:00
Speaker 3: I would write them at home and they would sound
13:02
Speaker 3: attractive to me. And then I'd take them to a
13:05
Speaker 3: folk club where I was getting booked in 75 as
13:07
Speaker 3: in 76. I'd play down the bill from people I
13:11
Speaker 3: wouldn't be headlining. And when I played those more introspective songs,
13:16
Speaker 3: my people just talked over them. because I didn't have
13:18
Speaker 3: the relationship with the audience that they trusted me. All
13:21
Speaker 3: the people whose music I was listening to at that time,
13:24
Speaker 3: whether it be Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell or John Prine,
13:27
Speaker 3: of course, it established that relationship that allowed them to
13:30
Speaker 3: sing intimately and didn't need to speak out and shout.
13:34
Speaker 2: I just need to speak up for myself.
13:36
Speaker 3: And then I did. And that's my mistrue. And to
13:39
Speaker 3: be really honest, a handful of those songs are really
13:42
Speaker 3: deeply felt. And a couple of them are kind of
13:44
Speaker 3: dashed off. kind of as the sort of things that
13:47
Speaker 3: serve me well to kind of be in that moment.
13:51
Speaker 3: They don't bear too much scrutiny. They sound good as records,
13:55
Speaker 3: but they don't sound, you know, you would never read
13:57
Speaker 3: the lyrics out and say, hey, listen to this.
13:59
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to put a lot of scrutiny on them,
14:01
Speaker 1: see how much they can take. Talking about how you
14:06
Speaker 1: absorb music, how you relearned it, it's reminding me of
14:10
Speaker 1: a story from your book, which I loved, your father
14:14
Speaker 1: was a musician. He was a big band musician. You
14:17
Speaker 1: share that with Paul McCartney and Paul Simon.
14:19
Speaker 2: Whose fathers were all.
14:21
Speaker 3: Very different sort of experiences, of course. My father was
14:25
Speaker 3: originally wanted to be a bebop trumpet player. He came
14:28
Speaker 3: out of the RAF and he played the trumpet and
14:30
Speaker 3: like most everybody else, adored Louis Armstrong. And then he
14:34
Speaker 3: heard Dizzy Gillespie and he wanted to play that new
14:36
Speaker 3: music and got in a lot of trouble and on
14:39
Speaker 3: Merseyside trying to play that music.
14:40
Speaker 2: I don't know how good it was because there's no recordings.
14:43
Speaker 2: But I mean, that was his ambition.
14:45
Speaker 3: And when my folks went to live in London in
14:47
Speaker 3: about 1950, it was my father's idea to get into
14:51
Speaker 3: what was then called modern jazz scene. And when I
14:55
Speaker 3: was born, he took the pragmatic role and took a
14:58
Speaker 3: job as a trumpet vocalist and ended up being one
15:02
Speaker 3: of the featured singers and probably the best known and
15:06
Speaker 3: most successful singer dance band. They were a dance band
15:10
Speaker 3: on the Glenn Miller model. So the kind of music
15:13
Speaker 3: which people still really loved from the Second World War times,
15:16
Speaker 3: because Glenn.
15:17
Speaker 2: Miller was a heroic figure in England.
15:19
Speaker 3: My father then just had to sing what was put
15:22
Speaker 3: in front of him. He had to sing the hits
15:23
Speaker 3: of the day. And then by the time I became
15:26
Speaker 3: more aware of what it was he did, it would
15:29
Speaker 3: have been around 1963, they had a radio show that
15:34
Speaker 3: was a lunchtime radio show which was literally called the
15:37
Speaker 3: Joe Lost Pop Show.
15:39
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful scene where you are watching your father
15:43
Speaker 1: and he's got a very early, I'm not sure if
15:45
Speaker 1: it was a tape or it was a single, of
15:48
Speaker 1: Please Please Me.
15:49
Speaker 2: Oh, it was a 45.
15:50
Speaker 3: They would be sent A labels, you know, which were
15:54
Speaker 3: overprinted with an A so the DJ knew which side
15:56
Speaker 3: to play. Or sometimes even acetates from Dick James, from
16:00
Speaker 3: Northern Songs. And so all the records on my record
16:05
Speaker 3: shelf that are A-labels or acetates are songs my father
16:09
Speaker 3: sang on the radio. As strange as it might be
16:12
Speaker 3: that they include my generation and reach out and I'll
16:16
Speaker 3: be there and see Emily play by the Pink Floyd.
16:18
Speaker 3: It's still the only Pink Floyd song I can stand
16:20
Speaker 3: to hear. But that's just me. But that's what it was.
16:26
Speaker 3: It was a very odd introduction into the mechanics of
16:30
Speaker 3: learning songs because I heard my father doing it repeatedly.
16:33
Speaker 1: He.
16:34
Speaker 3: Wired a deck of Decalium, which was one of the
16:36
Speaker 3: first portable record players up. So the arm would just
16:39
Speaker 3: keep coming back onto the record rather than dropping another
16:42
Speaker 3: record in the stack. And he would listen to the
16:44
Speaker 3: record until he'd memorized it. He usually had sheet music
16:47
Speaker 3: as well or a lyric sheet. But a lot of
16:49
Speaker 3: these songs were harmonically quite simple. But they still required
16:53
Speaker 3: him to learn them, to sing them live. And he
16:55
Speaker 3: only had a few days to learn them. He was
16:56
Speaker 3: learning five or six songs a week.
17:00
Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
17:00
Speaker 2: And also recording them as well.
17:02
Speaker 3: Sometimes he would go and do sessions, which was like
17:04
Speaker 3: a little bit of pin money, as they say. You know,
17:07
Speaker 3: it was like off-the-books money where he would go and
17:09
Speaker 3: record cover versions of the same songs for producers that
17:14
Speaker 3: issued budget records of this. So there was this whole
17:17
Speaker 3: industry of songwriting, publisher, covers, radio performance. That's what I
17:25
Speaker 3: grew up with, that insight into it. Strangely enough, I
17:28
Speaker 3: never picked up an instrument. I never was moved to learn.
17:31
Speaker 3: I didn't take piano lessons. I think I took violin
17:34
Speaker 3: lessons for a week until they told me stop doing that.
17:38
Speaker 3: The usual horrifying things with the recorder that they make
17:41
Speaker 3: children go through. But I had a guitar from the
17:44
Speaker 3: time I was about nine, I think, that was bought
17:48
Speaker 3: as a souvenir from a trip to Spain. But I
17:51
Speaker 3: never learned to play it until I was 14 or something.
17:56
Speaker 1: And when did the songwriting start?
17:57
Speaker 2: Almost right away. I didn't learn three chord tricks.
18:01
Speaker 3: I learned the song Man of the World by Fleetwood Mac,
18:04
Speaker 3: which I think is 1968.
18:08
Speaker 2: So I would have been 14.
18:11
Speaker 3: I have no idea why it was that song because
18:13
Speaker 3: it's a very complicated song for a novice.
18:16
Speaker 2: And I patiently, a.
18:18
Speaker 3: Lad who I didn't really know played the guitar. He
18:21
Speaker 3: was a couple of years older than us. and heard
18:24
Speaker 3: that I liked that song, and he gave me a
18:26
Speaker 3: piece of paper with the words on it, with the
18:27
Speaker 3: chord symbols over it. I wish I had it, you know,
18:30
Speaker 3: the actual chord diagrams, not just the names of the chords.
18:35
Speaker 3: And so I painstakingly learned how to play this song.
18:38
Speaker 3: It took me ages, you know, it took me months.
18:42
Speaker 3: And the unlocking of that harmonic labyrinth, frankly, compared with
18:47
Speaker 3: most three-chord songs, made other songs seem really easy to learn.
18:51
Speaker 3: And I... quickly learnt a lot of other songs. I
18:55
Speaker 3: heard all these other things I couldn't play. But these
18:59
Speaker 3: few songs I could play and I immediately started writing
19:01
Speaker 3: and there was an opportunity to play in public at
19:04
Speaker 3: a local church basement that had a weekly folk club
19:08
Speaker 3: and I went down there a few weeks and saw
19:10
Speaker 3: a few artists and saw that people put their name
19:14
Speaker 3: down as to be what they call floor singers, like
19:17
Speaker 3: open mic singers. I happened to put my name down
19:20
Speaker 3: and went up there and sang my one song in
19:22
Speaker 3: E minor and made a terrible job of it. You know,
19:25
Speaker 3: I was really mortified, like didn't do that for a while.
19:28
Speaker 3: And then I suppose the next year I went to
19:30
Speaker 3: live in Liverpool and there was more of a music
19:34
Speaker 3: club scene there, which took a little penetration because they
19:38
Speaker 3: didn't really want to hear original songs. Me and my partner,
19:41
Speaker 3: Alan Mays, we used to end up having to Negotiate
19:46
Speaker 3: with club owners to open up a music night on
19:48
Speaker 3: a Tuesday night when they might not have even bothered
19:50
Speaker 3: to turn the lights on at all, you know.
19:53
Speaker 1: Did you it's going to sound like an odd question
19:55
Speaker 1: but did you like being on stage.
19:57
Speaker 3: No never no Alan was the much more confident he
20:02
Speaker 3: was better looking than me and he was a better
20:04
Speaker 3: guitar player and the only thing that he would say
20:08
Speaker 3: and I'm is that we tried to write songs together
20:11
Speaker 3: and I said it was impossible because I would finish
20:14
Speaker 3: them before I had the idea that was the only
20:16
Speaker 3: thing in which I was you know more Evidently, I'd
20:20
Speaker 3: say it's gifted, but I had capability. And they were
20:23
Speaker 3: really halting sort of compositions, but I wrote faster than him.
20:28
Speaker 2: I was able to complete the thought.
20:30
Speaker 3: And we used to sing mostly other people's material, but again,
20:35
Speaker 3: nothing from the charts. We were singing mostly Californian music,
20:39
Speaker 3: sung by the band, sung by the birds, you know.
20:43
Speaker 1: Your love of Joni Mitchell is well known, but it
20:45
Speaker 1: surprised me that you liked so many of those California bands.
20:49
Speaker 1: It seems so different to me from your own work.
20:52
Speaker 3: Oh, with Joanie, it's an exceptional thing as I came
20:54
Speaker 3: to understand it more and actually followed her development as
20:59
Speaker 3: a musician album by album. A friend of mine and
21:02
Speaker 3: I went to Manchester because the show, a lot of
21:05
Speaker 3: tourists didn't come to Liverpool in those days. Liverpool was quite,
21:08
Speaker 3: you know, it wasn't the richest town. And we'd go
21:11
Speaker 3: to Manchester to see people play. And we went to
21:14
Speaker 3: see Joanie, I think the Free Trade Hall maybe, And
21:18
Speaker 3: she played the songs from Blue. That was a couple
21:21
Speaker 3: of months before the record came out, which was something
21:23
Speaker 3: that used to happen then because people couldn't so easily,
21:26
Speaker 3: you know, they couldn't capture it on their phone and
21:29
Speaker 3: put it online. So artists would debut songs in concert first.
21:34
Speaker 3: But Joanie, you can imagine her singing River and Case
21:37
Speaker 3: of You. And then you've got to sort of memorize
21:40
Speaker 3: them on one hearing. and have the feeling of them
21:43
Speaker 3: and the playing. And then you went and sat and
21:45
Speaker 3: we listened. We went and bought the record the day
21:46
Speaker 3: it came out and sat at Tony's house and listened
21:49
Speaker 3: to it for a whole day, like a whole day
21:52
Speaker 3: and night.
21:54
Speaker 2: We just listened to it. So it went in deep.
21:58
Speaker 3: But when you get to the next few records, the
22:00
Speaker 3: harmony gets even more intricate and she started.
22:02
Speaker 2: To introduce other musicians.
22:05
Speaker 3: I know enough about it now that some of those
22:08
Speaker 3: musicians thought they knew better than her what the chords were.
22:11
Speaker 3: They didn't actually. Her chords were more interesting because they
22:14
Speaker 3: were more unusual. Sometimes the jazz musicians would adjust it
22:17
Speaker 3: to what they thought she was playing. But what she
22:20
Speaker 3: was actually playing was much more original. That's how you
22:25
Speaker 3: get to Chord and Spark and particularly Hissing on Summer Alarms.
22:29
Speaker 3: And that music is just, there's still nothing like it.
22:34
Speaker 3: The only thing that's like it a little bit is Prince.
22:37
Speaker 3: And that's why I think he admired her and she
22:40
Speaker 3: admired him. This is the only thing that sort of
22:42
Speaker 3: has that kind of imagination.
22:47
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful clip on YouTube from a party at
22:52
Speaker 1: Gordon Lightfoot's house during the Roll of Thunder tour.
22:56
Speaker 2: Where she plays Coyote.
22:57
Speaker 1: She plays Coyote.
22:58
Speaker 3: And McGuinn and Dylan are just looking at her and
23:00
Speaker 3: they know they can't follow her because she's playing on
23:02
Speaker 3: an open tuning.
23:03
Speaker 1: That's exactly it. They play along and then they look
23:06
Speaker 1: at each other and think.
23:07
Speaker 3: Everything about the performance, and the same is true of
23:09
Speaker 3: the performance on The Last Waltz, Everything is so perfectly weighted.
23:14
Speaker 3: Her phrasing is perfectly weighted. You know, it's a very difficult,
23:18
Speaker 3: long narrative song, and there's no common idioms in it
23:21
Speaker 3: at all, hardly. There are lots of very unexpected kind
23:24
Speaker 3: of things happening within the narrative of the song, and
23:28
Speaker 3: complicated ideas, you know.
23:31
Speaker 2: Like, what is the line about?
23:32
Speaker 3: My scent on his fingers while he's watching the waitress's legs.
23:37
Speaker 2: It's like, what the hell?
23:39
Speaker 3: It's a very erotic kind of, Image, but also kind
23:42
Speaker 3: of cold as well, like the whole dynamic of that song.
23:46
Speaker 3: It's the unique perspective. It's not anything I'd ever like
23:49
Speaker 3: try to write like, but it was the fact that
23:52
Speaker 3: you could write like that. So many people say, my
23:56
Speaker 3: elder brother played me this record by Dion and the Belmonds.
23:59
Speaker 3: Even if you chronologically couldn't have known that music firsthand. Well,
24:04
Speaker 3: that's why I didn't know who Elvis Presley was. Because
24:06
Speaker 3: my parents never listened to any of his records. And
24:09
Speaker 3: I knew he existed. And I knew it was a
24:11
Speaker 3: name that people really liked. But I'd never heard any
24:14
Speaker 3: of his records except by chance. Except a neighbor played
24:17
Speaker 3: me It's Now or Never. And she was a Cliff
24:21
Speaker 3: Richard fan. And she said, do you think this guy's
24:24
Speaker 3: as good as Cliff?
24:26
Speaker 2: And it was Elvis.
24:27
Speaker 3: And I'd never heard an Elvis Presley record played on
24:30
Speaker 3: a record before. And to an eight-year-old, I've got to
24:34
Speaker 3: be honest, it sounded like opera. or what I thought
24:36
Speaker 3: opera sounded like. I hadn't ever heard any opera, but
24:39
Speaker 3: if you think about it, you can imagine it was like,
24:41
Speaker 3: I don't understand what this, it's not like it's bad,
24:44
Speaker 3: it's well sung, but it's not, what am I supposed.
24:46
Speaker 2: To do with this?
24:48
Speaker 3: And your responses at that age are very uncomplicated, like
24:52
Speaker 3: you either like it or you don't like it.
24:54
Speaker 2: You can't really analyze it.
24:56
Speaker 3: Later on, John Lennon, next thing, a couple of years later,
24:59
Speaker 3: John Lennon sang how important Elvis was. I still wasn't
25:03
Speaker 3: really curious about, And I had no access. And all
25:07
Speaker 3: I saw were like trailers for his movies. And they
25:11
Speaker 3: truthfully looked a bit square. And then like the Motown
25:15
Speaker 3: review came in 65. I'm like, you could have Stevie
25:19
Speaker 3: Wonder or you could have this music, you know. It
25:22
Speaker 3: wasn't until like Suspicious Minds that I thought, oh, now
25:25
Speaker 3: I get it. Now I get why he's great. And
25:28
Speaker 3: so when I made My Image True, I'd never heard
25:30
Speaker 3: the Sun Sessions. You know, I'd like, you might say
25:35
Speaker 3: Mystery Dance. is a little bit like a 50s sounding song.
25:39
Speaker 3: But I learned that through the Beatles. Carl Perkins, I
25:42
Speaker 3: knew who Carl Perkins was. And I knew Chuck Berry.
25:45
Speaker 3: I knew Chuck Berry well. And Little Richard, he was
25:50
Speaker 3: far and away my favorite rock and roll singer. Him
25:52
Speaker 3: and Jerry Lee.
25:54
Speaker 1: When did you first hear Little Richard?
25:57
Speaker 3: When he was on TV when I was a kid.
25:59
Speaker 3: And he'd just come out of being a gospel singer
26:01
Speaker 3: and he came on Granada television. And it was backed
26:04
Speaker 3: by the Sands Incorporated And he was doing his Lucille
26:08
Speaker 3: and things like that. And he put out a new single,
26:12
Speaker 3: I think 64, Bama Lama Bama Lou. That was the
26:16
Speaker 3: first Little Richard record I owned. And I was far
26:20
Speaker 3: and away at Little Richard. It was just like, you
26:22
Speaker 3: couldn't be like that or anything. I never ever thought
26:25
Speaker 3: of going to the piano and seeing if I could
26:26
Speaker 3: play that even. But just in terms of the thrill
26:31
Speaker 3: of his voice. And the same with Chuck Berry. The
26:33
Speaker 3: first record I heard of Chuck Berry that I owned
26:36
Speaker 3: was not one of the ones from the 50s. The
26:38
Speaker 3: first Chuck Berry record I heard was No Particular Place
26:41
Speaker 3: to Go, which again was after he came out from
26:44
Speaker 3: when he was incarcerated. Just read the words down. It's incredible.
26:50
Speaker 3: Like all of those songs, they're just incredible. You could
26:52
Speaker 3: say they're poetry. They're so well constructed.
26:56
Speaker 1: Did that influence your lyric writing?
26:59
Speaker 3: It wasn't conscious, but I mean, I think the compression
27:02
Speaker 3: of syllables per line It never frightened me. Like a
27:07
Speaker 3: lot of words, it's a common observation that I use
27:10
Speaker 3: too many words, but they're not. I'm just using as
27:13
Speaker 3: many as I need. And that's true. And sometimes I'm
27:17
Speaker 3: aware that I'm overpowering the ability to gather them. And
27:22
Speaker 3: I think if you gather the sense of what I'm saying,
27:25
Speaker 3: then later on you'll hear the emotion or the intensity
27:30
Speaker 3: of it, you'll gather the rest of it. Because I
27:32
Speaker 3: think you'd be hard pushed to Together, Too Much Monkey
27:35
Speaker 3: Business or Maybelline at One. That was the whole thing.
27:38
Speaker 3: It's like a movie with a great ending. You go,
27:41
Speaker 3: that was a thrill. I have to go back to
27:42
Speaker 3: the top of the ride to get to that thrill.
27:45
Speaker 3: That's how Chuck Berry songs work. It's like he's throwing
27:49
Speaker 3: so many ideas at you.
27:50
Speaker 1: What you're talking about reminds me of, of course, the
27:52
Speaker 1: first song on My Name is True, which has a
27:55
Speaker 1: lot of words. Welcome to my working week.
27:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.
27:58
Speaker 1: And it has this sort of cadence I hear in
28:02
Speaker 1: a lot of your songs, which is The syllables come
28:05
Speaker 1: a little slower in the beginning, but then it really
28:08
Speaker 1: accelerates towards the end.
28:10
Speaker 2: I don't know where it comes from. It's not a
28:11
Speaker 2: conscious imitation of anybody.
28:14
Speaker 3: I think there are some songs within the blueprint where
28:16
Speaker 3: I'm experimenting with the kind of, you know, lyrical voice
28:20
Speaker 3: that I heard in other people, and I'm trying to
28:21
Speaker 3: get close to that way of using words or the
28:25
Speaker 3: kind of images that are incorporated to explain things. But
28:29
Speaker 3: I wasn't sitting around analyzing stuff.
28:30
Speaker 2: I was just doing it too fast, you know?
28:33
Speaker 1: There's some wonderful reproductions of lyric sheets. You said you
28:38
Speaker 1: always kept notebooks.
28:40
Speaker 3: I did meticulously early on. And I still like to
28:43
Speaker 3: write with a pen. I probably will commit too many
28:46
Speaker 3: things directly to a screen. But I'm trying all the
28:49
Speaker 3: time to get back to writing because I think the
28:51
Speaker 3: rhythm and the editorial, which some of these notebooks reveal,
28:58
Speaker 3: is a different use of the mind than reading lines
29:02
Speaker 3: on a screen where they're all the same they all
29:04
Speaker 3: appear to be the same length because there's no rhythm
29:07
Speaker 3: to the to the physical handwriting the problem is you
29:11
Speaker 3: get excitable you your your own handwriting can be illegible
29:14
Speaker 3: so i might write a brilliant verse and not not
29:17
Speaker 3: be able to read it back i train myself to
29:19
Speaker 3: be able to write in the dark oh yeah it's
29:22
Speaker 3: not that much of a trick and it was a
29:24
Speaker 3: familiar thing for me to wake up and with something
29:26
Speaker 3: would be on my mind and I'd try and write
29:28
Speaker 3: it down or enough of it. It wouldn't be a
29:30
Speaker 3: whole line. It would be just a couple of words.
29:32
Speaker 3: I knew that if I turned the light on, that
29:34
Speaker 3: that line would disappear. And we've all had that experience, surely,
29:38
Speaker 3: of like apparently being in a story or hearing music
29:41
Speaker 3: in a dream. And then you wake up and you
29:43
Speaker 3: think you've got.
29:44
Speaker 2: It in your head.
29:45
Speaker 3: But if you're a musician, and you go to the
29:47
Speaker 3: instrument almost instantly, you can't gather it.
29:50
Speaker 2: I've had that happen lots of times.
29:52
Speaker 1: And you've lost it.
29:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a melody would come to me in a dream.
29:56
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great tune.
29:57
Speaker 3: And I wake up and I think, and I go
29:59
Speaker 3: and go to a piano or go to a guitar.
30:02
Speaker 3: By the time you've got the guitar out of the case,
30:03
Speaker 3: you've forgotten it.
30:05
Speaker 2: And I guess if you.
30:06
Speaker 3: Can't gather it, then maybe it was only it only
30:09
Speaker 3: had its reality in a dream, like a lot of
30:11
Speaker 3: things in a dream are illogical.
30:13
Speaker 1: But that's how Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes came.
30:16
Speaker 2: That's kind of like a visitation.
30:18
Speaker 3: That's a thing that's happened a number of times, and
30:20
Speaker 3: I don't want to make anything that mystical about it,
30:22
Speaker 3: but it came to me on the back end of
30:24
Speaker 3: a train journey from London to Liverpool. And I remember
30:28
Speaker 3: the image coming into my head as we pulled out
30:30
Speaker 3: of Roncorn Station and went over the bridge, across the Mersey,
30:34
Speaker 3: and into the city. And by the time my got
30:38
Speaker 3: to lime street i had the whole song in some
30:40
Speaker 3: sort of embryonic form and then had of course no
30:45
Speaker 3: tape recorder no voice memo device in those days just
30:49
Speaker 3: a notebook i'd scribbled a few lines down in and
30:52
Speaker 3: a tune going around my head and i usually got
30:54
Speaker 3: the bus to my mother's i didn't have a lot
30:57
Speaker 3: of money on this occasion i i ran to the
31:00
Speaker 3: cab rank and got in a cab and said take
31:03
Speaker 3: me to my mother's address and uh I tried to
31:06
Speaker 3: sing the song in my head all the time so
31:09
Speaker 3: that I wouldn't lose it. And then got to the
31:11
Speaker 3: house and barely set a load of it and ran upstairs.
31:13
Speaker 3: You know, my old guitar was still sitting on top
31:15
Speaker 3: of the wardrobe and I played it and played it.
31:18
Speaker 3: She must have wondered where I'd gone because I must
31:19
Speaker 3: have been gone an hour playing it until it was
31:22
Speaker 3: imprinted on my memory. So I play it and I
31:25
Speaker 3: probably changed it a little bit, you know. And even
31:28
Speaker 3: within this box set, there's the structure of the song.
31:31
Speaker 3: The rhythm wasn't set originally. The lyric and most of
31:35
Speaker 3: the narrative was there But before we were putting this
31:37
Speaker 3: box together, a friend of mine wrote to me after
31:39
Speaker 3: a long time of not being in touch and said,
31:42
Speaker 3: I found a tape that you recorded at my house
31:46
Speaker 3: in 1976. And I must have just been playing through
31:48
Speaker 3: my new songs. And there's a version of The Angels
31:51
Speaker 3: From Where I Wear My Red Shoes. And the rhythm
31:53
Speaker 3: of it is like Wooly Bully by Sam the Shaman
31:59
Speaker 3: and the Pharaohs. I hadn't found what I later sort
32:02
Speaker 3: of felt was like the birds kind of spacing. The
32:05
Speaker 3: song was set to a totally different motive originally.
32:10
Speaker 1: What were the other influences on your lyric writing? Your
32:13
Speaker 1: lyric writing is so strong, so unique. What were you
32:17
Speaker 1: reading at the time?
32:19
Speaker 3: I was reading Pulp Fiction, a lot of it. You know, like,
32:24
Speaker 3: that's what's in Watching the Detectives. I read a lot
32:27
Speaker 3: of Graham Greene when I was a teenager. He was
32:29
Speaker 3: somebody that I think became his impact... on stories and
32:36
Speaker 3: the kind of outlook and the moral point of view
32:38
Speaker 3: is in some later songs, but I wouldn't say he's
32:41
Speaker 3: evident in these songs. But I didn't really have any
32:44
Speaker 3: pretensions to any literary sort of.
32:49
Speaker 2: Elevation.
32:51
Speaker 3: It's very notable that my first five records don't have
32:53
Speaker 3: printed lyrics because I honestly believed at that time, and
32:57
Speaker 3: I've since revised it, that they had to be heard
33:00
Speaker 3: or understood all at once with the music. And I
33:03
Speaker 3: kind of thought it a little bit redolent of the
33:06
Speaker 3: things I didn't respond to about Californian music that I
33:10
Speaker 3: had loved. There was a sort of, a slightly precious
33:14
Speaker 3: sort of, now my art, you know? And I didn't
33:18
Speaker 3: think that's what we were doing, particularly not that year.
33:20
Speaker 1: I had wondered if your interest sort of in gangsters
33:24
Speaker 1: and the underworld came a little bit from your father's occupation,
33:29
Speaker 1: because he must have known some characters.
33:32
Speaker 3: He would talk sometimes about somebody called Sid the Thief
33:35
Speaker 3: or something like that. There's characters in the dance hall
33:37
Speaker 3: he would sometimes tell me or tell that he would be.
33:41
Speaker 3: My parents put up when I was quite young, but
33:42
Speaker 3: he would come for supper or come for a Sunday lunch.
33:46
Speaker 3: And he regaled us with various stories about different colorful people.
33:50
Speaker 3: And I got to kind of like hang out with him.
33:53
Speaker 3: Sometimes when I was a young teenager, I'd go to
33:55
Speaker 3: a lock-in with him on a Sunday afternoon in a
33:57
Speaker 3: pub that was run by his former singing partner. And
34:00
Speaker 3: hear him and his friend, who was the guy who
34:03
Speaker 3: wrote Hard Day's Night, Alan Owen, who was a would-be
34:08
Speaker 3: Brendan Behan kind of character. And they would talk very
34:11
Speaker 3: expansively about colorful people. And I probably, in my mind,
34:14
Speaker 3: I've embroidered it a little bit to seem like we
34:17
Speaker 3: were in a Daman Runyon book, but it wasn't really
34:19
Speaker 3: like that. It was just some people kind of having
34:22
Speaker 3: a drink, you know. And I'm sitting there with my
34:24
Speaker 3: shambi in the corner, like, wondering about the adults, you know.
34:27
Speaker 1: Do you remember writing particular lines? I'm thinking of she's
34:31
Speaker 1: filing her nails while they're dragging the lake, which I
34:34
Speaker 1: think would make any pulp writer pretty proud.
34:37
Speaker 2: I wish I could say I did.
34:38
Speaker 3: I remember the speed with which I wrote that song
34:40
Speaker 3: might have overwhelmed that because I wrote it in one sitting. So,
34:45
Speaker 3: you know, I don't think I had time to stand
34:47
Speaker 3: back and admire my own work if I even had
34:50
Speaker 3: that impulse to do that. I have had occasion in
34:54
Speaker 3: going back to assemble this set of when we went
34:58
Speaker 3: back to the notebooks that I kept that you mentioned before.
35:02
Speaker 3: Of course, one of the things, one of the reasons
35:03
Speaker 3: that second disc in the set is called The Blueprint
35:06
Speaker 3: is because it quite literally is the blueprint in some
35:08
Speaker 3: cases where I had whole couplets, whole stanzas, whole entire
35:15
Speaker 3: lyrics that I kept and I discarded the music thinking
35:21
Speaker 3: that the songs didn't speak up for themselves enough in
35:26
Speaker 3: the musical setting and found entirely different musical settings.
35:30
Speaker 2: So Leave a Man.
35:31
Speaker 3: The lyrics of Leave a Man Become Accidents Will Happen,
35:34
Speaker 3: the words of I Can't Turn It Off become Watch
35:37
Speaker 3: a Step, Citizen Junction becomes King Horse.
35:41
Speaker 2: And those are very different music. They're not even remotely
35:44
Speaker 2: the same.
35:46
Speaker 1: Are the words always written with music in mind?
35:50
Speaker 3: No, they all exist in music and are on this
35:52
Speaker 3: record in the original drafts. And there are in the
35:55
Speaker 3: notebooks some titles and even some whole lyrics that I
35:59
Speaker 3: don't have music for. There's one called Sad Holiday that
36:03
Speaker 3: has lyrics that ended up in Lipstick Vogue. But I
36:06
Speaker 3: have no memory of what the original tune.
36:08
Speaker 2: Was of that first iteration.
36:10
Speaker 3: It's only the ones that I thought well enough to
36:13
Speaker 3: demo when I was given the opportunity. I didn't own
36:16
Speaker 3: a tape recorder of any consequence, so I used to
36:19
Speaker 3: borrow one, RIVOX, to record my.
36:24
Speaker 2: I only made a couple of these bedroom demos.
36:27
Speaker 3: And then I had the opportunity to go and record
36:29
Speaker 3: in Dave Robinson's studio open anchor. And the other things
36:34
Speaker 3: that are in this set are literal demos that were
36:36
Speaker 3: recorded at Pathway Studios between my first recording session with
36:43
Speaker 3: Nick Lowe and John McPhee for Mystery Dance and the
36:46
Speaker 3: beginning of working with Clover as a band. And I
36:51
Speaker 3: cut six songs in one take, which were most of
36:56
Speaker 3: Miami's truth. because I wanted to kill this idea that
37:00
Speaker 3: Stiff had at that time, that they were going to
37:03
Speaker 3: put me on one side of the record and Eric
37:06
Speaker 3: on the other. Kind of like two, what's it called?
37:09
Speaker 3: Two guitars, two fabulous guitars. There's a record with Chuck
37:12
Speaker 3: Perry and Bo Diddley that's one side each, you know?
37:16
Speaker 3: And I remember there was like lots of ideas came
37:19
Speaker 3: through in those early days, because I was still working
37:22
Speaker 3: in an office. I'd go to Stiff and they'd say,
37:24
Speaker 3: we've got this great idea. We're going to put you
37:26
Speaker 3: on half a record. And that's not going to happen.
37:29
Speaker 3: I was not good at speaking up for myself, but
37:32
Speaker 3: I just had to illustrate it. And once they heard
37:34
Speaker 3: the other songs, it just made a nonsense of it.
37:37
Speaker 1: Were you very competitive as a songwriter, as a performer?
37:42
Speaker 1: You were surrounded by some great talent. I mean, Ian Curry.
37:46
Speaker 2: It wasn't that confident. Ian, I really loved. We toured.
37:48
Speaker 3: The first sort of theater tour that we ever did
37:52
Speaker 3: was on a package tour with Nick Lowe and Reckless
37:55
Speaker 3: Eric and him. And There was a degree of competition
37:59
Speaker 3: because the original idea of the tour was very democratic.
38:02
Speaker 3: And there was a rotating bill, which meant that, you know,
38:08
Speaker 3: after about three nights or one, really after one time
38:11
Speaker 3: around the circle, the first four shows, it became really
38:14
Speaker 3: obvious that the other two acts could not follow either
38:17
Speaker 3: us or the blockheads.
38:20
Speaker 2: They just couldn't.
38:20
Speaker 3: It just didn't work as show business. And I probably
38:24
Speaker 3: knew that as well as anybody else. that was on
38:27
Speaker 3: that tour because I'd watched Show Business at work with
38:30
Speaker 3: my father. I said, just in showcraft, this doesn't work.
38:34
Speaker 3: Nothing against the quality of the individual songs. Ian's so dramatic.
38:38
Speaker 3: He really should have closed every night. He had the
38:41
Speaker 3: command as a performer. I was still learning it. But,
38:45
Speaker 3: you know, you couldn't say one was a better band,
38:47
Speaker 3: but we could both really play. Both bands could play.
38:50
Speaker 3: The other three anyway, not me, but the other three
38:53
Speaker 3: could play. The Blockheads were a great group. So, of course,
38:57
Speaker 3: it was a bit competitive, but only in a sense
38:59
Speaker 3: of it. I'm sure all package tours, you know, are.
39:03
Speaker 3: I mean, Joyce Moore told me once that, you know, Sam,
39:07
Speaker 3: he loved Wilson Pickett, but it was always difficult to
39:10
Speaker 3: play on the bill with him because if you played
39:12
Speaker 3: before him, he'd be angry with you that you were headlining.
39:16
Speaker 3: And if you went on before him, he'd accuse you
39:18
Speaker 3: of trying to upstage him. So I don't know how
39:20
Speaker 3: true that is, but it rings true, doesn't it? You know,
39:22
Speaker 3: because musicians can be competitive.
39:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.
39:27
Speaker 1: In the liner notes, there's a lovely quote from Roseanne
39:31
Speaker 1: Cash who talks about this album coming out. And she
39:36
Speaker 1: says that you know, when she heard My Aim Is True,
39:40
Speaker 1: she realized she had to up her game, and that
39:43
Speaker 1: a song like Seven Year Ache wouldn't have been written.
39:45
Speaker 3: That was a big compliment that she paid me. I mean,
39:48
Speaker 3: she's such a terrific lyricist. But everybody has to learn.
39:53
Speaker 3: And if you think about the comparative shadows of our fathers,
40:00
Speaker 3: she lived in the much bigger shadow, not because she
40:04
Speaker 3: wrote anything like Johnny, but because people wanted her to
40:07
Speaker 3: be her father's daughter initially. And for her to stay,
40:12
Speaker 3: she was living in California, and for her to be,
40:16
Speaker 3: to have such a singular but separate voice and in
40:20
Speaker 3: more recent years to have managed to kind of actually
40:22
Speaker 3: acknowledge the gifts that both her parents gave her And
40:27
Speaker 3: that musical understanding is something I can really relate to.
40:30
Speaker 3: That's probably one of the areas that why we're friends,
40:33
Speaker 3: because we can understand that really well.
40:36
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you about writing Stranger in the
40:38
Speaker 1: House and Just a Memory. They're such perfect songs for
40:44
Speaker 1: those artists, for Dusty Springfield and for George Jones. Did
40:50
Speaker 1: you have them in mind when you wrote those songs?
40:53
Speaker 3: George's records were hard to get in england you know
40:56
Speaker 3: i learned about george jones and merle haggard and even
41:00
Speaker 3: to a degree johnny cash who's most of his hit
41:02
Speaker 3: records were novelty records like boy named sue or you
41:05
Speaker 3: know one piece at a time most of the ones
41:07
Speaker 3: that i was aware of i knew about hank williams
41:09
Speaker 3: for some reason i kind of got into hank williams
41:12
Speaker 3: but then i started to trace forward and i found
41:14
Speaker 3: that so i just had lots of different people's style.
41:18
Speaker 2: It was the simplicity, simple chords, and.
41:22
Speaker 3: The structure of the song paying off to a refrain
41:26
Speaker 3: and the pace and the rhythm. Billy Sherald told me
41:31
Speaker 3: he knew it wasn't a Nashville demo because it had
41:33
Speaker 3: an electric rhythm guitar on it, and that's.
41:35
Speaker 2: How he knew it. It wasn't recorded in Nashville. They
41:38
Speaker 2: never would have let anybody play the rhythm part on
41:40
Speaker 2: an electric.
41:40
Speaker 1: I couldn't afford a thousand strings.
41:42
Speaker 2: But it was styled.
41:45
Speaker 3: In that Weeper style, you know, that I by then
41:48
Speaker 3: had absorbed quite a lot of George Jones and Graham
41:52
Speaker 3: as well. I'd say Graham Parsons was also probably in there.
41:56
Speaker 3: Because I figured if the Rolling Stones could record Wild Horses,
41:59
Speaker 3: then somebody could record Strange in the.
42:01
Speaker 2: House, you know, just as easily. You know, I felt
42:04
Speaker 2: lucky to do that.
42:05
Speaker 3: I think the thing about the song, it's related to
42:09
Speaker 3: Alison in a way, in the lyrical sense. in that
42:13
Speaker 3: it has this sense of dread about what may happen
42:16
Speaker 3: in a deep love that maybe you're not wired to
42:20
Speaker 3: be constant. And I suppose when I think about it,
42:24
Speaker 3: it was a kind of horrible realization. I think it
42:28
Speaker 3: was perhaps more true to life. I think I was
42:30
Speaker 3: role-playing when I wrote the song, and then the song
42:32
Speaker 3: came true. And that's true of both of those songs.
42:37
Speaker 1: Is that true of a lot of your music?
42:41
Speaker 2: Thankfully, no.
42:43
Speaker 3: You asked about the other one, Losing You. There is
42:46
Speaker 3: a song called Losing You on the Blueprint, which is
42:49
Speaker 3: a completely different song, except for the chorus, which is
42:53
Speaker 3: the same words as the later ballad. And I dispense
42:57
Speaker 3: with all the more arcane, and I have to say,
43:00
Speaker 3: Asbury Park-ish kind of imagery of the original draft, which
43:05
Speaker 3: was my attempt to write like a greetings from Asbury Park.
43:09
Speaker 3: That was shameless, I felt. I thought it was obvious,
43:11
Speaker 3: but you might not think that when you hear it.
43:13
Speaker 3: But I was definitely trying to do that. And it
43:17
Speaker 3: pays off to this pretty pure chorus, pure pop chorus.
43:23
Speaker 3: So When I had time to think about it, I
43:25
Speaker 3: thought those sentiments needed more longing.
43:29
Speaker 2: And I came up with the ballad melody, which we
43:32
Speaker 2: recorded in 1980.
43:32
Speaker 3: And that was totally dusty in my head because she
43:37
Speaker 3: already had a song called Losing You, so I changed
43:39
Speaker 3: the title to Just a Memory. And then my dream
43:41
Speaker 3: came true. She did actually pick it up without my bidding.
43:45
Speaker 3: And the next thing, I had a call while we
43:47
Speaker 3: were recording Imperial Bedroom. Would I take a call from her?
43:52
Speaker 3: And the call came through while we were in a session.
43:54
Speaker 3: And she said, I love this song that the producers
44:01
Speaker 3: played me, this demo, but it's too short. It was
44:04
Speaker 3: only one minute and 30 seconds or something, the demo,
44:09
Speaker 3: or one minute and 40. Can you write another verse?
44:14
Speaker 3: But nothing too lovey-dovey. That's what she actually said. And
44:18
Speaker 3: my heart broke, you know, like, And I did have
44:20
Speaker 3: wrote another verse for her. So, you know, that's only
44:25
Speaker 3: happened a few times. It happened with her and it
44:28
Speaker 3: happened with Chet Baker that I dreamt the song and
44:31
Speaker 3: then the person who was intended for it actually recorded it.
44:34
Speaker 1: That was almost blue. So that brings us to Alison,
44:38
Speaker 1: about which much has been written. What interests me, particularly
44:44
Speaker 1: when you listen through on the album, is.
44:48
Speaker 1: It's much more adventurous harmonically than the songs that preceded.
44:55
Speaker 2: Well, it was written in the informed by Tom Bell.
45:00
Speaker 3: Oh. Yeah, because I'd heard Ghetto Child by the Spinners,
45:03
Speaker 3: what you call the Spinners, what we call the Detroit Spinners,
45:06
Speaker 3: because there was a Spinners group in England, so they
45:08
Speaker 3: had to adopt Detroit Spinners. And that record, with its
45:13
Speaker 3: sort of halting, Life ain't so easy in your that phrase,
45:19
Speaker 3: that's Alison.
45:19
Speaker 2: That's where it comes from. You can hear that, right?
45:22
Speaker 1: That's where the rhythm comes from.
45:23
Speaker 2: That's where the rhythm comes from.
45:24
Speaker 1: But also you're using borrowed chords. It starts on a
45:28
Speaker 1: suspended chord. It's much different than the things.
45:31
Speaker 3: Well, that's Mark Taplin. That's listening to Mark Taplin. That's just,
45:36
Speaker 3: I mean, McPhee on the introduction is playing something different,
45:40
Speaker 3: but the suspended chord, the suspended five chord is, you know,
45:46
Speaker 3: that's something you hear in Tracks of My Tears and
45:51
Speaker 3: things like that. I knew those songs. And specifically, that's
45:54
Speaker 3: the way Marv Taplin played. I was nowhere near as
45:59
Speaker 3: capable a guitar player as he was. But those little
46:03
Speaker 3: things where you sort of hear something that makes you thrilled,
46:07
Speaker 3: and you try to find a thing that satisfies you
46:09
Speaker 3: to the same degree.
46:10
Speaker 1: I do want to ask you a little more about Alison.
46:15
Speaker 3: Yes.
46:16
Speaker 1: I think it was the only song I looked up
46:18
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia to see what other people thought.
46:21
Speaker 2: That'll make that, there you'll find the truth.
46:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's why I went there. Which is, some
46:28
Speaker 1: people argue it's a murder ballad.
46:30
Speaker 3: No, it's not a murder ballad. Neither is watching the detectives.
46:35
Speaker 3: It's describing the things that somebody's watching on the television.
46:39
Speaker 3: Alison is the sense that your nature may kill the
46:45
Speaker 3: love that you cherish most.
46:49
Speaker 1: You see, I find Alison.
46:50
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is.
46:51
Speaker 1: I've always found it an incredibly tender song.
46:54
Speaker 2: It is.
46:56
Speaker 3: It's a love song, but it's a love song with
46:58
Speaker 3: the possibility of failure written into it. So it's a
47:02
Speaker 3: little bit like these lines, you know? Somewhere a broom
47:05
Speaker 3: is sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life.
47:08
Speaker 2: Somewhere a queen is weeping. Somewhere a king has no wife.
47:11
Speaker 3: That's where I got it from. That's Hendrix. I got
47:15
Speaker 3: two lessons from Hendrix. One was that song. Moon Cries Mary,
47:18
Speaker 3: and the other was the switch in songs on live television.
47:22
Speaker 3: They were the two things I learned from Jimi Hendrix.
47:24
Speaker 3: I never tried to play like him. I actually truthfully
47:28
Speaker 3: love him most of all. It's not to say you
47:30
Speaker 3: don't love him as a guitar player, but I love
47:32
Speaker 3: him as a ballad singer because I can hear the
47:35
Speaker 3: Curtis Mayfield and everything in him. And that's truthfully the
47:40
Speaker 3: two things that I actually took directly from him is
47:43
Speaker 3: that That's the conception of the lyrics of Alison is
47:46
Speaker 3: that song. And not that song in its entirety, just
47:49
Speaker 3: those couplets. You add that to ghetto child and you've
47:52
Speaker 3: got like a pretty heady mix of cues.
47:55
Speaker 1: I don't think you were influenced by this song, but
47:59
Speaker 1: it reminds me of a song. I think you talked
48:00
Speaker 1: about liking once, which is Paul Simon's tenderness.
48:04
Speaker 2: Oh God.
48:06
Speaker 1: And the line there of course is, but there's no
48:09
Speaker 1: tenderness beneath your honesty. And to me, That's exactly....
48:15
Speaker 2: Everything put together falls apart as well.
48:17
Speaker 1: What's happening, the balance of tenderness and honesty in Alison,
48:23
Speaker 1: I find it heartbreaking.
48:24
Speaker 2: Thank you. Well, it was intended to be. You just
48:30
Speaker 2: couldn't talk about these things out loud at that time.
48:32
Speaker 2: It was very difficult.
48:34
Speaker 3: People don't want to hear you say these things. I
48:36
Speaker 3: can say them now because it's 50 years ago and
48:38
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter anymore.
48:40
Speaker 4: Yeah.
48:42
Speaker 2: But, of course, I had studied Paul Simon really, really hard.
48:48
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, when I first had April Come,
48:50
Speaker 3: She Will and things like that, I wanted to play
48:52
Speaker 3: like that. I tried to finger pick. I couldn't grow
48:54
Speaker 3: my fingernails. I didn't know that you put varnish on them.
48:57
Speaker 3: I kept breaking off and I had to take to,
49:00
Speaker 3: you know, then I got a little louder as a
49:01
Speaker 3: singer and then I realized I had to play with
49:03
Speaker 3: a pick. But when he got to that period, like
49:07
Speaker 3: from things like Peace Like a River, where he's obviously
49:10
Speaker 3: acknowledging all of these things that it's kind of like
49:12
Speaker 3: his gumbo. It's like he's actually putting the people who
49:17
Speaker 3: his music he loved in the arrangements. That's One Soul
49:20
Speaker 3: of Towns and so forth. And Ted Ennis is one
49:23
Speaker 3: of those songs. it's and yeah it's it's more knowing
49:27
Speaker 3: and it's more mature than my songs but then he
49:30
Speaker 3: was more mature he was older than me when he
49:33
Speaker 3: wrote that song it wasn't the same age as I
49:36
Speaker 3: was when I wrote us and I was 21 or
49:39
Speaker 3: 22 maybe just 22.
49:41
Speaker 1: Well I think you've got every reason to be.
49:42
Speaker 3: Proud of it thank you anyway thank you uh not
49:45
Speaker 3: as good as Paul's songs though not not as good
49:47
Speaker 3: as Anybody that's written an American tune, you can't challenge them.
49:51
Speaker 2: You just can't.
49:52
Speaker 3: Right.
49:53
Speaker 2: All for that matter, The Seven Psalms, which is a
49:55
Speaker 2: beautiful piece of music.
49:56
Speaker 1: This brings us to I'm Not Angry. I think the
49:59
Speaker 1: obvious question, because you were always described as the angry
50:04
Speaker 1: young man. Were you, in fact, angry at this point
50:07
Speaker 1: in your life?
50:08
Speaker 2: No, I think I was probably just frustrated at the weight.
50:12
Speaker 3: And it could have been as, isn't it said that
50:15
Speaker 3: like when the ship comes in, was written about being
50:18
Speaker 3: denied a hotel room.
50:21
Speaker 1: No, I didn't know that.
50:21
Speaker 2: I've read that story. I don't know whether it's true.
50:23
Speaker 2: It's repeated quite often.
50:26
Speaker 3: You know the song I'm talking about, the Bob Dylan song,
50:29
Speaker 3: that it was when he was on tour with John
50:30
Speaker 3: Baez and they didn't like the look of him because.
50:32
Speaker 2: He was a bit scruffy and they wouldn't give him
50:33
Speaker 2: a room.
50:34
Speaker 3: And he wrote that whole song about that one barrier
50:38
Speaker 3: being put up. But of course the song means so
50:39
Speaker 3: much more. And I think quite a lot of the time,
50:44
Speaker 3: I just found the language that I thought represented things
50:46
Speaker 3: I felt, but I'm not angry. How can I be
50:49
Speaker 3: angry if I'm the guy that wrote Arson? You can
50:51
Speaker 3: be both on different days, but that's about betrayal, that song.
50:58
Speaker 3: But the song, musically speaking, I think the song's a
51:00
Speaker 3: little bit of play acting as well. Again, in a
51:03
Speaker 3: sort of songwriter, certain thing combination, I think when people say, oh,
51:08
Speaker 3: this is very true to life, it's very autobiographical, and
51:12
Speaker 3: what's the word?
51:13
Speaker 2: Confessional.
51:14
Speaker 3: Hate that you know for me the absence of craft
51:18
Speaker 3: is the thing that stops it from being enduring often
51:21
Speaker 3: now that's not true of everything there are some very
51:23
Speaker 3: raw unfiltered records that are that i really dearly love
51:27
Speaker 3: but they talk about johnny mitchell's like blue being confessional
51:31
Speaker 3: oh i don't know i don't know whether you're right
51:33
Speaker 3: about that listen to the craft listen to the songwriting
51:36
Speaker 3: technique that underpins it musically and lyrically and even if
51:42
Speaker 3: it was spontaneous composition its composition at such a high
51:45
Speaker 3: level that it belies the idea that any old idea
51:48
Speaker 3: would have, would have served the means, you know, and
51:51
Speaker 3: I suppose that's what I'm talking about. I'm not trying
51:54
Speaker 3: to retrospectively claw back the idea that was ever any
51:59
Speaker 3: frustration or anger, but it was much more just not
52:02
Speaker 3: knowing who you are, what you are, what you need
52:04
Speaker 3: to be. That's expressed a lot in the This Is
52:07
Speaker 3: Model songs particularly, but which I sort of, mention that
52:12
Speaker 3: in the in the notes for when we take these
52:14
Speaker 3: songs in the road with the attractions and those and
52:16
Speaker 3: the songs i just newly written with them in mind
52:19
Speaker 3: obviously overwhelmed the my mystery songs to the last degree
52:23
Speaker 3: i'm not angry as it's don't fear the reaper you
52:27
Speaker 3: know the gothic riff of it the basic chord signals
52:30
Speaker 3: is logical and that's what i felt it's like i
52:33
Speaker 3: love that don't fear the reaper i think that's from
52:35
Speaker 3: that time it was on the radio and i think
52:37
Speaker 3: i just sort of like Oh, I need a riff
52:39
Speaker 3: like that. And of course, I never told anybody that.
52:42
Speaker 3: McPhee just did what he felt and it was perfect.
52:45
Speaker 3: What he did was perfect. I couldn't play like that.
52:48
Speaker 3: I couldn't play that kind of lead guitar that he does.
52:50
Speaker 3: And he gave it that kind of rock and roll feeling.
52:54
Speaker 3: But then the chorus is quite musical. I know you,
52:59
Speaker 3: I know what you're doing.
53:01
Speaker 2: I know where you've been. And that could be a
53:05
Speaker 2: pop song from any year. That's not a rock and roll. melody,
53:10
Speaker 2: rock and roll motif.
53:12
Speaker 1: You say it's about betrayal. It seems to me a
53:16
Speaker 1: lot of your songs, not particularly that song, you were
53:20
Speaker 1: writing at a time, I think probably more so in
53:23
Speaker 1: England than here, when appearances, propriety, being a certain figure
53:29
Speaker 1: in public meant much more. And you are often writing
53:33
Speaker 1: about the conflict of that in people's private lives. their
53:39
Speaker 1: dark sides.
53:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know whether I was standing back and
53:43
Speaker 3: writing about them. It was just happening quickly. But like
53:46
Speaker 3: I say, the character to some degree was being formed
53:49
Speaker 3: and the character overtook me or took me over, whichever
53:51
Speaker 3: way around you want to say it. In 77, there's
53:54
Speaker 3: a little clip that the fourth CD in this collection,
54:00
Speaker 3: Becoming the Attractions, it's a sort of documentary account of
54:04
Speaker 3: the band coming into existence, having these Miami's True Songs
54:08
Speaker 3: to play initially. And then we have pop stardom of
54:12
Speaker 3: a minor kind. And I included even just a fragment
54:15
Speaker 3: of an interview. I love that interview. This woman could
54:19
Speaker 3: not have been kinder. She was genuinely curious as to
54:23
Speaker 3: whether I would survive the process of being in a
54:25
Speaker 3: pop group. And she asked me straight out if I was,
54:28
Speaker 3: are you an angry songwriter? And I answered the question
54:31
Speaker 3: quite literally because I had no guile when somebody just
54:35
Speaker 3: asked you directly, Whereas what you would usually get was
54:38
Speaker 3: somebody who would come with a complicated theory that, you know,
54:41
Speaker 3: a music journalist particularly, come with a very complicated theory
54:44
Speaker 3: about what they had worked out and wanted you to
54:47
Speaker 3: agree with that, with your answer. So my response to
54:50
Speaker 3: that was sometimes to really exaggerate what I felt. So
54:55
Speaker 3: hence the revenge and guilt thing. I said that when
54:58
Speaker 3: I was, I'd had about five Pernos. And I was
55:01
Speaker 3: just like unguarded. I thought, okay, you want to hear,
55:03
Speaker 3: you want to get here angry?
55:04
Speaker 2: Here it is.
55:06
Speaker 3: And a guy bought it and repeated it. And I mean,
55:09
Speaker 3: I know this guy. He's a very good writer. I mean,
55:10
Speaker 3: he was a very good writer. But I don't know
55:13
Speaker 3: that he knew that I was putting him on. I
55:16
Speaker 3: think he took it at face value. And even if
55:18
Speaker 3: he did know I was putting him on, everybody else
55:20
Speaker 3: thought it was at face value. And that became the
55:23
Speaker 3: calling card for those first few years until it didn't
55:25
Speaker 3: serve purposes. I also recognized that by saying something like,
55:30
Speaker 3: I'm not angry, which obviously doesn't sound like that on
55:33
Speaker 3: the record.
55:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.
55:34
Speaker 3: It's about those circumstances, about holding back the most explosive
55:39
Speaker 3: part of your anger about the situation that's described in
55:42
Speaker 3: the betrayal that's described in the song. There's a degree
55:45
Speaker 3: of distance in that. There's a degree of songwriting. This
55:50
Speaker 3: is not to say it's not emotional, but to say
55:52
Speaker 3: there's a degree of craft. Like I said, the melody
55:54
Speaker 3: of the release is proof of that. It isn't just
55:57
Speaker 3: raw and filtered kind of raving. So I think that
56:02
Speaker 3: I worked out quite quickly there were two things that
56:06
Speaker 3: could keep people away from me. One was seeming like
56:08
Speaker 3: you shouldn't ask me and the other was I'm going
56:10
Speaker 3: to drink a little bit here and I won't hear you.
56:14
Speaker 3: And in that space, I heard Wayne Shorter say this
56:17
Speaker 3: in an interview, so I take Wayne's example. He said
56:21
Speaker 3: when he drank brandy, it created a zone around him
56:24
Speaker 3: in which he could do the creative work. And I
56:27
Speaker 3: absolutely understand that idea. That's not the reason to become
56:31
Speaker 3: a heroin addict or something, you know. But For a
56:35
Speaker 3: little while, the gin kept people away from me. They
56:38
Speaker 3: couldn't be where I was. They couldn't call me in
56:41
Speaker 3: that zone.
56:42
Speaker 2: Nobody.
56:44
Speaker 1: Well, the bad news is I'm a journalist with a theory.
56:47
Speaker 1: So get ready.
56:48
Speaker 2: Okay.
56:51
Speaker 1: Take some of that coconut water.
56:52
Speaker 2: Yes.
56:54
Speaker 1: What I was saying earlier about people's dark lives being revealed.
57:00
Speaker 1: To me, it animates some of your best early work.
57:03
Speaker 1: Sunday's Best. manner of time, even King of America.
57:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.
57:07
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of examples. You said confessional.
57:12
Speaker 1: We live in a very different age now. We don't
57:15
Speaker 1: live in an age where people feel they have to
57:18
Speaker 1: hide their dark side. If anything, it's the first person.
57:21
Speaker 2: That's their calling card. Yeah.
57:22
Speaker 1: It's the first person.
57:24
Speaker 3: I would never last five minutes. I wouldn't have lasted
57:27
Speaker 3: the scrutiny of social media or anything if I'd started
57:31
Speaker 3: now with the way I felt. I mean, there are
57:34
Speaker 3: lines in the song that if you knew how I felt,
57:38
Speaker 3: it'd bury me alive.
57:41
Speaker 1: I'm not worried about you revealing anything. What I'm asking is,
57:45
Speaker 1: as a writer, is it harder to write now about
57:48
Speaker 1: people where there's not that binary or at least that.
57:54
Speaker 3: I never think about it because, you know, I don't
57:57
Speaker 3: know that I cast myself in the present tense in
58:01
Speaker 3: that sense, you know. I have a lot of songs,
58:04
Speaker 3: and I have a lot of songs which I don't
58:06
Speaker 3: serve and would serve me. And if I have any
58:10
Speaker 3: time left, it might be to address some of those,
58:14
Speaker 3: even ahead of these songs.
58:16
Speaker 1: Interesting.
58:16
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's the honest truth, and I'm not saying that
58:20
Speaker 3: in a melodramatic way. I'm not saying, oh, I'm about
58:21
Speaker 3: to leave. I'm not planning on going anywhere.
58:24
Speaker 2: But whether I even.
58:26
Speaker 3: Consider some of these things, they've been well considered, and
58:30
Speaker 3: I'm very grateful for the attention And of course, everybody
58:34
Speaker 3: that's skeptical about this set will immediately observe that these
58:39
Speaker 3: records have been reissued before. And they've been anthologized even
58:43
Speaker 3: to a degree, but never quite as encompassing as this set.
58:47
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you one more question, which is
58:49
Speaker 1: that you mentioned your father in this set. You talk
58:52
Speaker 1: a lot about him in your wonderful book. You also
58:56
Speaker 1: talk about your mother who didn't play an instrument, but
58:58
Speaker 1: you said understood music.
59:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.
59:01
Speaker 1: In a very profound way.
59:02
Speaker 2: Much more.
59:03
Speaker 1: Do you remember when she first listened to this record,
59:06
Speaker 1: what she thought?
59:08
Speaker 3: You know, when she passed, I went and had to
59:10
Speaker 3: clear her house, and she had pristine copies of all
59:13
Speaker 3: those early records. She really followed what I was doing.
59:16
Speaker 3: Mama didn't play an instrument, didn't sing in public, but
59:19
Speaker 3: had a good musical sense. And why I know that
59:22
Speaker 3: is true, because she left school at 14 and was
59:25
Speaker 3: a record sales assistant. And she used to say when
59:29
Speaker 3: she discovered she had some kind of ear was when,
59:32
Speaker 3: before there were, of course, long, long before there were computers,
59:34
Speaker 3: there were just record catalogs. And people would come in
59:38
Speaker 3: requesting songs. And she said, well, what's the name of
59:41
Speaker 3: the song? And they'd go, I don't know. Well, who's
59:44
Speaker 3: it by?
59:45
Speaker 2: I don't know.
59:46
Speaker 3: Well, how are you going to say it? It goes
59:47
Speaker 3: like this. And they'd start singing some semblance of the melody.
59:51
Speaker 3: And she would sometimes recognize it and be able to
59:53
Speaker 3: point them in the direction of a recording or even
59:56
Speaker 3: the sheet music so they could play it for themselves.
59:58
Speaker 3: She became known as the girl who knew a bit
1:00:02
Speaker 3: about dance, band, and jazz. That's how my parents met,
1:00:05
Speaker 3: because my dad was a local trumpet player. And, you know,
1:00:08
Speaker 3: it sounds like a sentimental story, but it really just
1:00:12
Speaker 3: highlights the importance of the physical object of the record,
1:00:15
Speaker 3: certainly in my lifetime. She had friends who were more
1:00:18
Speaker 3: knowledgeable still, would put records in my way that, you know,
1:00:21
Speaker 3: much later on became the foundation of my ability to
1:00:25
Speaker 3: be able to hear orchestral themes as separate to song-like form,
1:00:30
Speaker 3: you know. And after my dad left, she was the
1:00:33
Speaker 3: one who raised me. She was at the last show
1:00:36
Speaker 3: I played in Liverpool before the emergency. And that was
1:00:40
Speaker 3: the last time I saw her because of the restrictions
1:00:43
Speaker 3: on travel and quarantine. Every time I'd go to visit her,
1:00:48
Speaker 3: they'd change the rules and it wouldn't be possible. So unfortunately,
1:00:51
Speaker 3: she passed on that time. I mean, she had lived
1:00:54
Speaker 3: a very difficult last few years after a stroke. So
1:00:59
Speaker 3: I know that music was a great solace to both
1:01:01
Speaker 3: my parents as they dealt with the respective issues, My
1:01:06
Speaker 3: Mother a Stroke, My Father Parkinson's, music penetrated and bore
1:01:11
Speaker 3: them up in that, for which I'm grateful.
1:01:14
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:01:14
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for coming in.
1:01:16
Speaker 2: It's been just wonderful. It's been a pleasure. It's really,
1:01:18
Speaker 2: really very surprising in a lovely way. Thank you. I
1:01:22
Speaker 2: do mean that sincerely. Thank you.
1:01:26
Speaker 4: Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with
1:01:29
Speaker 4: marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer
1:01:32
Speaker 4: is Ben Talladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries.
1:01:36
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Speaker 4: you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and
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Speaker 4: review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is
1:01:54
Speaker 4: by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.