Post by valis on Aug 19, 2005 9:54:48 GMT
PART 2
And who actually is Jenny Wren?
You know it was, it isn’t anyone. It’s like a lot of my things, it’s just a made up thing,. But it’s funny actually I was talking to someone yesterday, and I was talking about how much I love Dickens, and I read a lot of Dickens. She was talking about it for different reasons. And this person said ‘Ah Jenny Wren, Our Mutual Friend’ which is this character in the Dickens book Our Mutual Friend; and she is a really cool little girl who’s sort of magical, who sees the good in things and I think subconsciously that reminded me that’s where I got it from, I think, but to me it was just something to do with Blackbird, a wren: a wren is one of my favourite birds, little English bird, it’s the smallest English bird and I always feel very privileged to see a wren because they’re very shy and it’s just ‘Ah!’ So a combination of all of that. It’s a favourite bird for me, and then instead of making it a bird, again like Blackbird, only more definitely this time I made it a woman, you know, a girl. So it was good fun doing it.
The next track is called At The Mercy.
At the Mercy was one that I wrote on a day off in LA. Sometimes when you get into recording an album, you start to sort of get a feel of what you and the producer are going for and what kind of a new song might fit with what you’ve already recorded. So this one was just made up like on the Sunday when I was having the weekend off. We’d worked all week. So on the Sunday I just sort of thought ‘Oh I’d like to take this in tomorrow’ and have a new completely new thing that he hadn’t heard that I hadn’t heard. Just very, very fresh. So I was just sort of messing around on the piano and I just got a couple of chords that I liked, slightly darker chords than I might normally have. And this phrase just kept sort of coming. A lot of people do this , when they’re writing, they just let anything happen, so that it can be “Scrambled Eggs, Baby o var, Baby’s legs Oh no ver, Man of here, Man of Fire” and you just suddenly go ‘Ooh Man of Fire that could be a direction you know’ and with me it just came ‘At the Mercy, At the Mercy ‘ At the Mercy of what? At the mercy of a busy road. At the mercy of a busy road and I didn’t really attach any significance to it but one of the things that I like about my songs when I’ve written them is you can attach very specific significances to them. I was talking to Heather about that particular one and she said ‘Whoa! For me at the mercy of a busy road.’ Remember she lost her leg in an accident. You know that’s very appropriate. So that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of that how life can throw you a curve ball, suddenly you’re going along and then suddenly ‘Oh no!’ and it’s a similar scene to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Only that was like a comedy dark black comedy based on that idea: you never know what’s round the corner kind of thing. So At The Mercy was that and I took it in to Nigel next day and said ‘What do you think of this?’ And he said ‘Oh great, great.’ It became his favourite, you know. So we just worked on it and that was it and I erm, It was basically that it was finding a couple of chords that were kind of dark enough to get this sort of message that life can throw you curve balls and what do we do about it? Oh well I don’t know just keep on resolute, whatever you do.
What’s the inspiration behind the next track, Friends to Go?
Funny thing about some songs is when you’re writing them you can think you’re someone else. (Picks up gtr). I mean when I was doing Long and Winding Road I thought I was Ray Charles. (Sings title). In actual fact my record of it the Beatles record of it is nothing like Ray Charles at all. But in my mind I was being him. I was playing Ray. And on Friends to Go I realised I was playing George Harrison. So to me it just started dot sound like a George Harrison song. So I was writing with that in the back of my mind, so it was kind of like (sings) ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to leave so I don’t have to hide’
You know that whole sequence (plays) I can see George doing it (Sings) I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to go.’ So that was it. You know I was just sat down to write and the feeling of George came over me and I just kept writing it thinking ‘George could have written this’ it was nice. It was like a sort of friendly song to write. And I just kept imagining I was just over by some sort of housing estate, where these people lived, in a sort of block of flats and I was like over the other side over here just watching them and waiting for them to go so I could go in. I don’t know why, a psychiatrist could probably again have a whale of a time with that one
Track number 6 is English Tea, a song to make you smile…
It’s erm, the lyrics say ‘Very twee, very me’ and I think it is very me that stuff. The Beatles made a sort of English y sort of music, once they got past their American roots, American influences. You know a lot of our early stuff was ‘Some other guy now’ and you know pure soul RnB stuff that we loved (sings Twist and Shout) was directly taken from America. But then we started to sort of work in little things that were more us, and erm that kind of thing, that’s particularly me that kind of English Tea type of thing. Again it was this fascination with sort of how people speak, how some English people speak. But the idea started, I was on holiday, and if you want a cup of tea, you don’t do what you do in England, say ‘A cup of tea please’, They always say ‘What kind of tea?’ You know like in England nobody would ever say ‘What kind of tea?’ Well they actually would these days, but in the old days it was never like ‘What kind of tea?’ It’d be like ‘What do you mean? Cuppa tea.’ So now they say ‘What kind of tea?’ and you have to say ‘English Breakfast tea ‘ and then they go ‘Oh OK’ and you get it you know you get an ordinary cup of tea. So I just thought that’s amazing that calling it English tea’, but I thought it’s kind of original because we don’t call it that . So I just started playing with that idea, of English tea. And then as I say there’s one particular older English person I’m thinking of who instead of saying ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ might say ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’ It’s just the way they say it, and I love that. ‘Would you care?’ and in this case ‘Would you care to sit with me, for a cup of English tea?’ And so I really went to town on that whole fruity way of talking, that whole fruity language that I like. It’s I think it’s very endearing, very English, and I even managed to work in the word ‘peradventure’ which I was very proud of. Cos that’s like, cos I read Dickens quite a bit, it came to me from…I thought there is a word ‘peradventure’ and I think as I say I read it in Dickens (you get these old usages of words in there). And I thought ‘I do hope I’m right cos I’ve put it in the song’. ‘Do you know the game croquet … Per adventure we might play’ … You know I thought ‘Oh I hope this is right ‘ I looked it up in the dictionary, : ‘peradventure – perhaps, maybe’ ‘Yes!’
I thought ‘Oh great I’m sure not many people work that into a song.’ And then also, ‘Do you know the game croquet, peradventure we might play, Very gay Hip hooray’ you know in the old sense of the word ‘gay’ so it was nice, it was that croquet, very English, lawns, hollyhocks, roses, very Alice in Wonderland, that was also in the back of my mind, which influenced a lot of me and John’s writing. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, that’s Alice to us you know (Sings) Picture yourself…’ The whole idea of ‘picture yourself’ you know in a boat on a river very Alice very Lewis Carroll, it’s just the way I like to write that, so a fruity little song.
Too Much Rain comes next. Where did this song come from?
The actual inspiration for Too Much Rain is Charlie Chaplin’s song Smile. Which he wrote: not many people know he wrote it, you normally think of him as a comedian, but I was always amazed to hear he’d written that you know, beautiful song. Good old Charlie wrote it. I think it was for a film, you know Modern Times, or something was it? It’s a great song and the idea of Smile (sings) Smile even though your heart is breaking Smile when your heart is breaking do do. That’s a nick, a direct pinch from that so it’s ‘Laugh when your eyes are burning Smile when you’re doing this and Sigh when you’re that’.. So it was really that it was Hints for feeling horrible, you know when you’re really down this song could get you up. You know remind you as the Smile song does to just sort of push through it, feel good cos it’ll be alright. So that was that. And er I think also in some way I know I was thinking of my missus Heather who’s had lots of rough times in her life, and the chorus just sort of says ‘It’s not right in one life, Too much rain’ . So that was kind of inspiration and you know I’m never that specific I would never say that’s exactly what its about and it then widens out and its for everyone who’s had just too much in their lives to cope with. And that applies to an awful lot of people. But that was it, it was really just a sort of helpful song.
Next on the list, Certain Softness.
Certain Softness is just a straightforward love song, to me. I like things like Brazilian music, I like that sort of rhythmic, Latin y kind of thing. I think it’s sexy, very romantic, and I was actually on a holiday, where I do a lot of writing because it’s where I’ve got a lot of time. Here’s me, I go on holiday to work! I don’t think of it as work, it’s more, I just enjoy just sitting around. And I was in Greece, actually, on a boat trip, and this sort of Latin y moment came upon me. I just found some nice chords and this idea of a certain softness in her eyes and a certain sadness haunts me. It’s just sort of all the love songs that I’ve heard and the ones I love, cos I love a lot of old fashioned stuff, it’s just so well crated. I have v lot of influences from before my time, before my dad’s time even you know, people like Fred Astaire, people like that I listen to and love really. The craft behind it all. So sometimes all that just floods in and becomes a new song. If I’m lucky. And that was one of them and I like very much the way we recorded it, which was very simple. It was just me playing guitar, and we just decided to have a go at it. And this was in LA and the bongo player, Joey, was just sitting on the floor, and the guitar player was just sort of sitting there, and I had a guitar, so it was just 2 guitars and bongos, so it was very informal. But we just got a good little take on it, you know and so then we built it up from there, and its got a very intimate sound on the record. I like particularly the sound on that record.
How did track 9, Vanity Fair, develop in the studio?
Vanity Fair I originally had as quite an up tempo sort of thing, I had it as quite Plays (Sings) I bit my tongue . It was like (plays and sings) It was all kind of staccato and very fast and, came in one evening where things had all kind of laid back a bit more like, and we said, O.K. let’s just (plays and sings) ‘I bit my tongue.’ I sort of swamped it right out (plays) just took it right down which changed the mood completely but this was particularly the one that Nigel didn’t like that, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue…’ It was all these little short phrases so he encouraged me to try and go somewhere else so I ended up with keeping the first line which was what he liked so it was, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue. I never talked too much….’ And got those run much more smooth. Those next couple of lines and knocked out the ‘Where did it get me? Where did it get me?’ I just knocked that out. Kept the kind of meaning about you’re approaching someone for friendship and they just kind of don’t want to know. They’re just kind of rejecting you and it’s not about any particular person, it’s about anybody who’s like that which I think we all meet in life, you know, you’re in a great mood with somebody and, ‘Well, I bit my tongue. I didn’t talk too much,’ and it’s one of those songs where you get your own back on those people by writing a song about them and whoever it applies to, people who are just generally a bit sort of you know a bit yuck and so that was it yeah, and we’d done the backing track but we didn’t like the basic song. We liked the track. It was nice and dark and quite moody. Nigel had messed around with some sort of echoey things, got kind of quite spooky but yeah, we re-worked it here, right here in the studio and kept working at it till we liked all the words and all the tune and finally I said, ‘O.K. Wait a minute. This is an O.K. song now’. Because it was getting blown off the album. It wasn’t going to be on and by the time we’d finished working with it it was like , ‘O.K. we like this one now,’ and it made its way back onto the album so it was worth all that work.
And next is Follow Me.
Follow Me was one of those songs that kind of almost wrote itself. You know, sometimes you’re feeling great about your life, not always but you’ve been lucky. You’re feeling great (plays) and, erm, I actually had done something where I had sung Let It Be and I was thinking, ‘It’s kind of nice having a song like that because it’s kind of quasi religious but it’s very uplifting, you know’. ‘There will be an answer, let it be,’ and stuff, you know. (Plays) It’s in C, a very sort of open key. (Sings) ‘When I find myself, in times of trouble,’ so I was sort of messing around in that region and thinking of the same sort of thing, you know. What is it? It’s just somebody very important in your life or is it spirits of goodness or whatever it is, something kind of great so it was just like, (sings) ‘You lift up my spirits, you shine on my song, whenever I’m empty, you make me feel whole, I can rely on you to guide me through any situation, hold up the sign that reads, Follow Me.’ Come on, boys, everybody in. It was one of those that just kind of wrote itself once you got there. It was like you do this, you’re great, you just give me direction, it just inspired.
How did Promise to you Girl develop?
It started as a piano thing. You know, I just wanted to … It’s a little two part piano thing. The right hand is doing the melody a bit and then the bass has got a definite part instead of just vamping away so it was just like a little mathematical problem trying to work out how I could do this and I just started singing it, (sings) ‘Gave my promise to you, girl. I don’t wanna take it back.’ And then it kind of went like a Motown thing, for me, started to go like a, I could hear tambourines and Chooka, chooka, chooka, chooka, I could hear the Motown guys, the Funk Brothers putting a backing track to that. ‘You and me, side by side, we know how to save the world.’ Actually, originally, it wasn’t, that was slightly less positive. I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t, ‘we know how to save the world.’ Anyway, so it just developed, went through that little Motowny thing. (Sings) ‘That is why I gave my promise to you girl,’ second verse, diddly, diddly der. Then I had this other little bit that is on the front of it, (sings) ‘Looking through the backyard of my life, Time to sweep the fallen leaves away, Gave my promise to you girl.’ And that ends it as well. It’s really two little songs put together and then when we came to do it in the studio it was multi-layered because it was just me so I think I started off with the piano and then put a bass on it, put a bit of drums on it and then Nigel started encouraging me to play some guitar licks and things so that was quite complicated, all a lot of little bits, but I think it sounds like a band in the end, you know.
Track 12 is This Never Happened Before. Tell us about this track.
Again that was, It’s Never Happened Before is a straight love song and, you know, I’m a lover not a fighter as they say. I think that’s such an important thing in the world and it gets spoken of, sung about a lot but I, certainly you know Silly Love Songs, what’s wrong with the message of that? I love that, I love to do that so this one was really exactly that. It just kind of wrote itself a bit, you know, it just (sings) ‘I’m very sure it’s never happened to me before.’ The chords, it’s always a big help if you get a nice little chord sequence and the opening chords to the verse of that go a nice place so they settle you down with your melody and you feel like you’re going somewhere, so that was what was happening and wrote it and recorded it, one of our very first things we did with Nigel at Rak, that was one of the things to see if we could sort of get it on and I thought, ‘This is good. We’re going to go somewhere with this’. That and Follow Me were really the first two that Nigel and I did together and nice little story about it was, I was in America and I was actually getting a massage and I happened to play it and the girl who was doing the massage said, ‘Oh, I love that song, it’s magnificent,’ and she happened to tell me she was getting married so very quietly I just sort of sent her, a few weeks later, she told me when she was getting married and you know where it would be so I got her number off her, sent her a little letter saying, ‘Look, if you love it that much, why don’t you play this at your wedding?’ so I said, ‘but this is highly bootleggable,’ I said, ‘so just play it and send it me back. You can’t keep it, but,’ I said, ‘I’ll send you the proper record when we’re done with it,’ and it was great, really lovely. They did do that. They got married to it and it was like their first dance. Highly romantic stuff this and, but it was very nice because she just wrote me a letter, thanks and all that and told me about the wedding and all that, about her husband but she just put this one little line, she said, ‘You know we had a great time. We laughed. We cried,’ and I thought that sums up that song for me.
The ‘last’ track is Anyway.
(Sings) ‘Anyway, anyway,’ yeah, it started off as the (sings) ‘If you need me,’ the little verse thing, (sings) ‘won’t you call me?’ which is just about, ‘If you love me will you call me?’ And then, you know, it was going quite straightforward and for some reason I was getting this feeling, again, why do you get these feelings? I don’t know, but I was getting this feeling as if it was the deep south of America, like Charlestown, Savannah, something about the chords, I think. There was just something reminding me, almost sort of Randy Newman kind of thing, I thought I was doing. As always it turns out nothing like him but at the time I think I’m doing this thing, so that was going on. Then I got these other chords that sort of happen half way through the verse which were Oooh, really sort of started to inspire me then. (Sings) ‘Only love is strong enough to take it on the chin,’ and that started to move it into a slightly other area which then led up to this, (sings) ‘Anyway, anyway, you can make that call.’ So then it was written and took it, recorded it in Los Angeles and then got our string arranger out there, we use two string people, one’s David Campbell, happens to be Beck’s dad, or Beck happens to be his son, and then we use a guy, Joby Talbot, over here who’s very good too, he’s our English guy, and took it to David and we did a little string arrangement on it and so that kind of sewed it all up, you know, and it was sort of a ballad Anyway.
So, Anyway wasn’t actually the very last track. There’s a hidden 3 part instrumental that ends the album…
We’d done a lot of the album. We were almost finished and we just thought, you know, ‘How about opening the album with just something for nothing, not like a song? Let’s just open it with like a little jam thing, a noise, just something to get your attention, then we’ll go into the first song,’ so we said, ‘O.K. great,’ and I always like that where you sort of throw away the rule book and you go, ‘O.K. let’s just do something completely different’. It’s not a song, it’s not a thing, you just go and play a bit and Nigel said, ‘Why don’t you just have a couple of ideas, songs, and we’ll make them. They don’t need to be long. We’ll just see which one works,’ so he said, ‘Just go and do two things. While you’re doing one, do two,’ so I thought, ‘O.K. I’ll do three just to show him,’ so I came out here. The piano was set up here and just sort of started doing the first little vibe, second little vibe and I said, ‘O.K. I’ve got a couple of ideas here,’ so he said, ‘That’ll do,’ so we recorded the piano bit first. (Sings) just really nothing, just in your face, sticking your tongue out and erm, we were joking. It was like as if the grown-ups had gone away, you know, they’d left us the studios, so ‘O.K. come on, then,’ and I just got on the drumkit, just thrashed that out and we recorded in the space of like about ten minutes, well, maybe an hour, but we just did all three of them and in the end instead of choosing one of them for the beginning we stuck three of them all together and put them at the end.
What’s the story behind the title of the album?
You know, you’re always looking for a title when you’ve finished an album. The Beatles album Abbey Road was going to be called Everest and suddenly it didn’t seem like a very good idea and we all came up with Abbey Road and hey, once you’ve got it, you sort of feel good so I was looking around and once we’d finished the album and Promise ToYou Girl says, (sings) ‘Looking through the backyard of my life,’ so I thought, ‘Backyard’. That might be kind of good for an album, just Backyard. Rang Nigel up and said, ‘What do you think about that, Backyard?’ and he said, ‘It’s O.K., just not very intriguing. It’s kind of catchy and all, it’s just not very intriguing. Why? What’s it mean? You know.’ So, ‘O.K.’ So I rang him back the next day and I’d had a thought of maybe then calling it, ‘Looking in the Lyrics’. In Fine Line it says there’s a long way between chaos and creation so I thought, ‘O.K. maybe chaos and creation could be a good title but it sounded a little too monumental, Chaos and Creation, the Book of Ecclesiastes, you know, it was a little bit too sort of posh, so then I thought, ‘In the Backyard’ and that kind of stuck so, and that’s from Promise To You Girl so I just stuck those two little quotes together and that kind of put the tongue in cheek and stopped it being too sort of pretentious and then we were talking about it and he texted me back and said, ‘You know, great, it fits because that’s sort of what this album’s been about, chaos, creation and it’s also home-made, it’s a bit in your backyard, you know,’ so he said, ‘Yeah, that’ll do it then.’ He just texted, ‘Yes, I love it, yes it fits, yes.’ And all that so that was it.
In conclusion, Paul, what have you got from the making of this record?
You know, from making this record I’ve got a record I like and that’s what I set out to do. I wanted to be able to have a record that I wanted to play and then if other people liked it that was a bonus, so, yeah, I’ve got a record that I like.
And what, do you think, will the listener get from it?
I never really think about what I want people to get from a record because that’s very difficult. You start to want them to give you things they’re not going to give you. So a long time ago I just learned, make it something that I like and then people put their own interpretations on it and that’s fine by me. As long as I like it that’s the main thing, and I like this one.
And who actually is Jenny Wren?
You know it was, it isn’t anyone. It’s like a lot of my things, it’s just a made up thing,. But it’s funny actually I was talking to someone yesterday, and I was talking about how much I love Dickens, and I read a lot of Dickens. She was talking about it for different reasons. And this person said ‘Ah Jenny Wren, Our Mutual Friend’ which is this character in the Dickens book Our Mutual Friend; and she is a really cool little girl who’s sort of magical, who sees the good in things and I think subconsciously that reminded me that’s where I got it from, I think, but to me it was just something to do with Blackbird, a wren: a wren is one of my favourite birds, little English bird, it’s the smallest English bird and I always feel very privileged to see a wren because they’re very shy and it’s just ‘Ah!’ So a combination of all of that. It’s a favourite bird for me, and then instead of making it a bird, again like Blackbird, only more definitely this time I made it a woman, you know, a girl. So it was good fun doing it.
The next track is called At The Mercy.
At the Mercy was one that I wrote on a day off in LA. Sometimes when you get into recording an album, you start to sort of get a feel of what you and the producer are going for and what kind of a new song might fit with what you’ve already recorded. So this one was just made up like on the Sunday when I was having the weekend off. We’d worked all week. So on the Sunday I just sort of thought ‘Oh I’d like to take this in tomorrow’ and have a new completely new thing that he hadn’t heard that I hadn’t heard. Just very, very fresh. So I was just sort of messing around on the piano and I just got a couple of chords that I liked, slightly darker chords than I might normally have. And this phrase just kept sort of coming. A lot of people do this , when they’re writing, they just let anything happen, so that it can be “Scrambled Eggs, Baby o var, Baby’s legs Oh no ver, Man of here, Man of Fire” and you just suddenly go ‘Ooh Man of Fire that could be a direction you know’ and with me it just came ‘At the Mercy, At the Mercy ‘ At the Mercy of what? At the mercy of a busy road. At the mercy of a busy road and I didn’t really attach any significance to it but one of the things that I like about my songs when I’ve written them is you can attach very specific significances to them. I was talking to Heather about that particular one and she said ‘Whoa! For me at the mercy of a busy road.’ Remember she lost her leg in an accident. You know that’s very appropriate. So that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of that how life can throw you a curve ball, suddenly you’re going along and then suddenly ‘Oh no!’ and it’s a similar scene to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Only that was like a comedy dark black comedy based on that idea: you never know what’s round the corner kind of thing. So At The Mercy was that and I took it in to Nigel next day and said ‘What do you think of this?’ And he said ‘Oh great, great.’ It became his favourite, you know. So we just worked on it and that was it and I erm, It was basically that it was finding a couple of chords that were kind of dark enough to get this sort of message that life can throw you curve balls and what do we do about it? Oh well I don’t know just keep on resolute, whatever you do.
What’s the inspiration behind the next track, Friends to Go?
Funny thing about some songs is when you’re writing them you can think you’re someone else. (Picks up gtr). I mean when I was doing Long and Winding Road I thought I was Ray Charles. (Sings title). In actual fact my record of it the Beatles record of it is nothing like Ray Charles at all. But in my mind I was being him. I was playing Ray. And on Friends to Go I realised I was playing George Harrison. So to me it just started dot sound like a George Harrison song. So I was writing with that in the back of my mind, so it was kind of like (sings) ‘I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to leave so I don’t have to hide’
You know that whole sequence (plays) I can see George doing it (Sings) I’ve been waiting on the other side for your friends to go.’ So that was it. You know I was just sat down to write and the feeling of George came over me and I just kept writing it thinking ‘George could have written this’ it was nice. It was like a sort of friendly song to write. And I just kept imagining I was just over by some sort of housing estate, where these people lived, in a sort of block of flats and I was like over the other side over here just watching them and waiting for them to go so I could go in. I don’t know why, a psychiatrist could probably again have a whale of a time with that one
Track number 6 is English Tea, a song to make you smile…
It’s erm, the lyrics say ‘Very twee, very me’ and I think it is very me that stuff. The Beatles made a sort of English y sort of music, once they got past their American roots, American influences. You know a lot of our early stuff was ‘Some other guy now’ and you know pure soul RnB stuff that we loved (sings Twist and Shout) was directly taken from America. But then we started to sort of work in little things that were more us, and erm that kind of thing, that’s particularly me that kind of English Tea type of thing. Again it was this fascination with sort of how people speak, how some English people speak. But the idea started, I was on holiday, and if you want a cup of tea, you don’t do what you do in England, say ‘A cup of tea please’, They always say ‘What kind of tea?’ You know like in England nobody would ever say ‘What kind of tea?’ Well they actually would these days, but in the old days it was never like ‘What kind of tea?’ It’d be like ‘What do you mean? Cuppa tea.’ So now they say ‘What kind of tea?’ and you have to say ‘English Breakfast tea ‘ and then they go ‘Oh OK’ and you get it you know you get an ordinary cup of tea. So I just thought that’s amazing that calling it English tea’, but I thought it’s kind of original because we don’t call it that . So I just started playing with that idea, of English tea. And then as I say there’s one particular older English person I’m thinking of who instead of saying ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ might say ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’ It’s just the way they say it, and I love that. ‘Would you care?’ and in this case ‘Would you care to sit with me, for a cup of English tea?’ And so I really went to town on that whole fruity way of talking, that whole fruity language that I like. It’s I think it’s very endearing, very English, and I even managed to work in the word ‘peradventure’ which I was very proud of. Cos that’s like, cos I read Dickens quite a bit, it came to me from…I thought there is a word ‘peradventure’ and I think as I say I read it in Dickens (you get these old usages of words in there). And I thought ‘I do hope I’m right cos I’ve put it in the song’. ‘Do you know the game croquet … Per adventure we might play’ … You know I thought ‘Oh I hope this is right ‘ I looked it up in the dictionary, : ‘peradventure – perhaps, maybe’ ‘Yes!’
I thought ‘Oh great I’m sure not many people work that into a song.’ And then also, ‘Do you know the game croquet, peradventure we might play, Very gay Hip hooray’ you know in the old sense of the word ‘gay’ so it was nice, it was that croquet, very English, lawns, hollyhocks, roses, very Alice in Wonderland, that was also in the back of my mind, which influenced a lot of me and John’s writing. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, that’s Alice to us you know (Sings) Picture yourself…’ The whole idea of ‘picture yourself’ you know in a boat on a river very Alice very Lewis Carroll, it’s just the way I like to write that, so a fruity little song.
Too Much Rain comes next. Where did this song come from?
The actual inspiration for Too Much Rain is Charlie Chaplin’s song Smile. Which he wrote: not many people know he wrote it, you normally think of him as a comedian, but I was always amazed to hear he’d written that you know, beautiful song. Good old Charlie wrote it. I think it was for a film, you know Modern Times, or something was it? It’s a great song and the idea of Smile (sings) Smile even though your heart is breaking Smile when your heart is breaking do do. That’s a nick, a direct pinch from that so it’s ‘Laugh when your eyes are burning Smile when you’re doing this and Sigh when you’re that’.. So it was really that it was Hints for feeling horrible, you know when you’re really down this song could get you up. You know remind you as the Smile song does to just sort of push through it, feel good cos it’ll be alright. So that was that. And er I think also in some way I know I was thinking of my missus Heather who’s had lots of rough times in her life, and the chorus just sort of says ‘It’s not right in one life, Too much rain’ . So that was kind of inspiration and you know I’m never that specific I would never say that’s exactly what its about and it then widens out and its for everyone who’s had just too much in their lives to cope with. And that applies to an awful lot of people. But that was it, it was really just a sort of helpful song.
Next on the list, Certain Softness.
Certain Softness is just a straightforward love song, to me. I like things like Brazilian music, I like that sort of rhythmic, Latin y kind of thing. I think it’s sexy, very romantic, and I was actually on a holiday, where I do a lot of writing because it’s where I’ve got a lot of time. Here’s me, I go on holiday to work! I don’t think of it as work, it’s more, I just enjoy just sitting around. And I was in Greece, actually, on a boat trip, and this sort of Latin y moment came upon me. I just found some nice chords and this idea of a certain softness in her eyes and a certain sadness haunts me. It’s just sort of all the love songs that I’ve heard and the ones I love, cos I love a lot of old fashioned stuff, it’s just so well crated. I have v lot of influences from before my time, before my dad’s time even you know, people like Fred Astaire, people like that I listen to and love really. The craft behind it all. So sometimes all that just floods in and becomes a new song. If I’m lucky. And that was one of them and I like very much the way we recorded it, which was very simple. It was just me playing guitar, and we just decided to have a go at it. And this was in LA and the bongo player, Joey, was just sitting on the floor, and the guitar player was just sort of sitting there, and I had a guitar, so it was just 2 guitars and bongos, so it was very informal. But we just got a good little take on it, you know and so then we built it up from there, and its got a very intimate sound on the record. I like particularly the sound on that record.
How did track 9, Vanity Fair, develop in the studio?
Vanity Fair I originally had as quite an up tempo sort of thing, I had it as quite Plays (Sings) I bit my tongue . It was like (plays and sings) It was all kind of staccato and very fast and, came in one evening where things had all kind of laid back a bit more like, and we said, O.K. let’s just (plays and sings) ‘I bit my tongue.’ I sort of swamped it right out (plays) just took it right down which changed the mood completely but this was particularly the one that Nigel didn’t like that, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue…’ It was all these little short phrases so he encouraged me to try and go somewhere else so I ended up with keeping the first line which was what he liked so it was, (sings) ‘I bit my tongue. I never talked too much….’ And got those run much more smooth. Those next couple of lines and knocked out the ‘Where did it get me? Where did it get me?’ I just knocked that out. Kept the kind of meaning about you’re approaching someone for friendship and they just kind of don’t want to know. They’re just kind of rejecting you and it’s not about any particular person, it’s about anybody who’s like that which I think we all meet in life, you know, you’re in a great mood with somebody and, ‘Well, I bit my tongue. I didn’t talk too much,’ and it’s one of those songs where you get your own back on those people by writing a song about them and whoever it applies to, people who are just generally a bit sort of you know a bit yuck and so that was it yeah, and we’d done the backing track but we didn’t like the basic song. We liked the track. It was nice and dark and quite moody. Nigel had messed around with some sort of echoey things, got kind of quite spooky but yeah, we re-worked it here, right here in the studio and kept working at it till we liked all the words and all the tune and finally I said, ‘O.K. Wait a minute. This is an O.K. song now’. Because it was getting blown off the album. It wasn’t going to be on and by the time we’d finished working with it it was like , ‘O.K. we like this one now,’ and it made its way back onto the album so it was worth all that work.
And next is Follow Me.
Follow Me was one of those songs that kind of almost wrote itself. You know, sometimes you’re feeling great about your life, not always but you’ve been lucky. You’re feeling great (plays) and, erm, I actually had done something where I had sung Let It Be and I was thinking, ‘It’s kind of nice having a song like that because it’s kind of quasi religious but it’s very uplifting, you know’. ‘There will be an answer, let it be,’ and stuff, you know. (Plays) It’s in C, a very sort of open key. (Sings) ‘When I find myself, in times of trouble,’ so I was sort of messing around in that region and thinking of the same sort of thing, you know. What is it? It’s just somebody very important in your life or is it spirits of goodness or whatever it is, something kind of great so it was just like, (sings) ‘You lift up my spirits, you shine on my song, whenever I’m empty, you make me feel whole, I can rely on you to guide me through any situation, hold up the sign that reads, Follow Me.’ Come on, boys, everybody in. It was one of those that just kind of wrote itself once you got there. It was like you do this, you’re great, you just give me direction, it just inspired.
How did Promise to you Girl develop?
It started as a piano thing. You know, I just wanted to … It’s a little two part piano thing. The right hand is doing the melody a bit and then the bass has got a definite part instead of just vamping away so it was just like a little mathematical problem trying to work out how I could do this and I just started singing it, (sings) ‘Gave my promise to you, girl. I don’t wanna take it back.’ And then it kind of went like a Motown thing, for me, started to go like a, I could hear tambourines and Chooka, chooka, chooka, chooka, I could hear the Motown guys, the Funk Brothers putting a backing track to that. ‘You and me, side by side, we know how to save the world.’ Actually, originally, it wasn’t, that was slightly less positive. I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t, ‘we know how to save the world.’ Anyway, so it just developed, went through that little Motowny thing. (Sings) ‘That is why I gave my promise to you girl,’ second verse, diddly, diddly der. Then I had this other little bit that is on the front of it, (sings) ‘Looking through the backyard of my life, Time to sweep the fallen leaves away, Gave my promise to you girl.’ And that ends it as well. It’s really two little songs put together and then when we came to do it in the studio it was multi-layered because it was just me so I think I started off with the piano and then put a bass on it, put a bit of drums on it and then Nigel started encouraging me to play some guitar licks and things so that was quite complicated, all a lot of little bits, but I think it sounds like a band in the end, you know.
Track 12 is This Never Happened Before. Tell us about this track.
Again that was, It’s Never Happened Before is a straight love song and, you know, I’m a lover not a fighter as they say. I think that’s such an important thing in the world and it gets spoken of, sung about a lot but I, certainly you know Silly Love Songs, what’s wrong with the message of that? I love that, I love to do that so this one was really exactly that. It just kind of wrote itself a bit, you know, it just (sings) ‘I’m very sure it’s never happened to me before.’ The chords, it’s always a big help if you get a nice little chord sequence and the opening chords to the verse of that go a nice place so they settle you down with your melody and you feel like you’re going somewhere, so that was what was happening and wrote it and recorded it, one of our very first things we did with Nigel at Rak, that was one of the things to see if we could sort of get it on and I thought, ‘This is good. We’re going to go somewhere with this’. That and Follow Me were really the first two that Nigel and I did together and nice little story about it was, I was in America and I was actually getting a massage and I happened to play it and the girl who was doing the massage said, ‘Oh, I love that song, it’s magnificent,’ and she happened to tell me she was getting married so very quietly I just sort of sent her, a few weeks later, she told me when she was getting married and you know where it would be so I got her number off her, sent her a little letter saying, ‘Look, if you love it that much, why don’t you play this at your wedding?’ so I said, ‘but this is highly bootleggable,’ I said, ‘so just play it and send it me back. You can’t keep it, but,’ I said, ‘I’ll send you the proper record when we’re done with it,’ and it was great, really lovely. They did do that. They got married to it and it was like their first dance. Highly romantic stuff this and, but it was very nice because she just wrote me a letter, thanks and all that and told me about the wedding and all that, about her husband but she just put this one little line, she said, ‘You know we had a great time. We laughed. We cried,’ and I thought that sums up that song for me.
The ‘last’ track is Anyway.
(Sings) ‘Anyway, anyway,’ yeah, it started off as the (sings) ‘If you need me,’ the little verse thing, (sings) ‘won’t you call me?’ which is just about, ‘If you love me will you call me?’ And then, you know, it was going quite straightforward and for some reason I was getting this feeling, again, why do you get these feelings? I don’t know, but I was getting this feeling as if it was the deep south of America, like Charlestown, Savannah, something about the chords, I think. There was just something reminding me, almost sort of Randy Newman kind of thing, I thought I was doing. As always it turns out nothing like him but at the time I think I’m doing this thing, so that was going on. Then I got these other chords that sort of happen half way through the verse which were Oooh, really sort of started to inspire me then. (Sings) ‘Only love is strong enough to take it on the chin,’ and that started to move it into a slightly other area which then led up to this, (sings) ‘Anyway, anyway, you can make that call.’ So then it was written and took it, recorded it in Los Angeles and then got our string arranger out there, we use two string people, one’s David Campbell, happens to be Beck’s dad, or Beck happens to be his son, and then we use a guy, Joby Talbot, over here who’s very good too, he’s our English guy, and took it to David and we did a little string arrangement on it and so that kind of sewed it all up, you know, and it was sort of a ballad Anyway.
So, Anyway wasn’t actually the very last track. There’s a hidden 3 part instrumental that ends the album…
We’d done a lot of the album. We were almost finished and we just thought, you know, ‘How about opening the album with just something for nothing, not like a song? Let’s just open it with like a little jam thing, a noise, just something to get your attention, then we’ll go into the first song,’ so we said, ‘O.K. great,’ and I always like that where you sort of throw away the rule book and you go, ‘O.K. let’s just do something completely different’. It’s not a song, it’s not a thing, you just go and play a bit and Nigel said, ‘Why don’t you just have a couple of ideas, songs, and we’ll make them. They don’t need to be long. We’ll just see which one works,’ so he said, ‘Just go and do two things. While you’re doing one, do two,’ so I thought, ‘O.K. I’ll do three just to show him,’ so I came out here. The piano was set up here and just sort of started doing the first little vibe, second little vibe and I said, ‘O.K. I’ve got a couple of ideas here,’ so he said, ‘That’ll do,’ so we recorded the piano bit first. (Sings) just really nothing, just in your face, sticking your tongue out and erm, we were joking. It was like as if the grown-ups had gone away, you know, they’d left us the studios, so ‘O.K. come on, then,’ and I just got on the drumkit, just thrashed that out and we recorded in the space of like about ten minutes, well, maybe an hour, but we just did all three of them and in the end instead of choosing one of them for the beginning we stuck three of them all together and put them at the end.
What’s the story behind the title of the album?
You know, you’re always looking for a title when you’ve finished an album. The Beatles album Abbey Road was going to be called Everest and suddenly it didn’t seem like a very good idea and we all came up with Abbey Road and hey, once you’ve got it, you sort of feel good so I was looking around and once we’d finished the album and Promise ToYou Girl says, (sings) ‘Looking through the backyard of my life,’ so I thought, ‘Backyard’. That might be kind of good for an album, just Backyard. Rang Nigel up and said, ‘What do you think about that, Backyard?’ and he said, ‘It’s O.K., just not very intriguing. It’s kind of catchy and all, it’s just not very intriguing. Why? What’s it mean? You know.’ So, ‘O.K.’ So I rang him back the next day and I’d had a thought of maybe then calling it, ‘Looking in the Lyrics’. In Fine Line it says there’s a long way between chaos and creation so I thought, ‘O.K. maybe chaos and creation could be a good title but it sounded a little too monumental, Chaos and Creation, the Book of Ecclesiastes, you know, it was a little bit too sort of posh, so then I thought, ‘In the Backyard’ and that kind of stuck so, and that’s from Promise To You Girl so I just stuck those two little quotes together and that kind of put the tongue in cheek and stopped it being too sort of pretentious and then we were talking about it and he texted me back and said, ‘You know, great, it fits because that’s sort of what this album’s been about, chaos, creation and it’s also home-made, it’s a bit in your backyard, you know,’ so he said, ‘Yeah, that’ll do it then.’ He just texted, ‘Yes, I love it, yes it fits, yes.’ And all that so that was it.
In conclusion, Paul, what have you got from the making of this record?
You know, from making this record I’ve got a record I like and that’s what I set out to do. I wanted to be able to have a record that I wanted to play and then if other people liked it that was a bonus, so, yeah, I’ve got a record that I like.
And what, do you think, will the listener get from it?
I never really think about what I want people to get from a record because that’s very difficult. You start to want them to give you things they’re not going to give you. So a long time ago I just learned, make it something that I like and then people put their own interpretations on it and that’s fine by me. As long as I like it that’s the main thing, and I like this one.