I’m pretty much a daydreamer and so essentially a lot of the lyrics I write appear to have no internal logic. I join up the words with images that anchor them in a murky ocean of metaphor and though I can see the figures and snapshots within songs, glimmering bright and with fluid purpose, on paper the narratives are more like crosswords with grammar often offensively crude. However, I didn’t start writing to attain a level of academic excellence. This was never the point. Ideas blurt out across the inside of your mind and it is your job to catch them like a necklace falling down a grate.

I started writing these long observational pieces in the first year of university.  It rained for four months solid and I think it passed the time sitting on the bus to ride to campus. Amy and I hung out a lot that year between London and Brighton, listening to Autobahn on the motorway and to the seagulls soundtracking our ventures from my halls to the beach.  I would show her my little written pieces on A4 narrow ruled notepads and we would talk about records.  I probably still have a lot of them, except the ones I tore up in embarrassment or because they reminded me of times I would rather forget.  At the time I couldn’t connect up what I wrote about or the way I wrote with anything I was very familiar with and so it felt invisible and without substance, but I was compelled to continue to produce these pieces of writing that were hiding with increasing impatience in my head.

I shunned a degree in English Literature partly because of the rigour, but I always maintained an interest in writing.  The idea of writing a novel absolutely terrifies me, in the same sense, the idea that anyone can run a marathon.  The endurance, the self discipline required; it’s baffling.  But shorter pieces seem to be able to shape themselves more easily for me, for now.  I am always interested in the way people work, at what time, if they listen to music, if they are solitary or watching people, if it is the middle of the night and you’ve been drinking whisky, if you go for a 7am jog and sit in the library all day, if you sit in a shed with candles and a battery radio in the place of a heater.  I have a curious mind. I like to know these details.  I like Soho Square, I like to watch the multitude of characters passing through, lying back on the dying grass, the guys passed out on benches clutching special brew, the ghost of Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, and somewhere, my father, in the background.

What I have learned so far mainly is that if you are terrified of writing rubbish, you will write nothing at all, and there is nothing worse than paralysis. Secondly, always sleep with a notepad and pen next to bed because all those zoetropic flickerings, chords, notes, phrases that tempt you from sleep may be remarkable.  And trust me, you won’t remember them in the morning.