Status: Single
City: Swindon
State: Southwest
Country: UK
Signup Date: 10/26/2005
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Sunday, November 01, 2009
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Song of the Week
Last week, Andy talked about the making of "Collideascope," originally from 1987's Psonic Psunspot, the long-lost full-length album by those '60s icons The Dukes of Stratosphear. This week we bring you the demo, which he also discussed during the interview.
Posting this week's blog early, as your faithful correspondent is headed to the airport to catch a flier for a busyness "trip." However, there's time to point you toward the newest release by keyboard and chanteuse (respectively) extraordinaires Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, a compilation called The TLG Collection that features a 1991 remix of "Roads Girdle the Globe," written by one Andy Partridge. To find out more about Dave and Barb's always interesting and engaging music, get clicky with this link. You won't regret it.
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Sunday, October 25, 2009
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Song of the Week -- Andy's take
Part of an ongoing series of interviews by Todd Bernhardt with Andy Partridge about the songs we feature each week on MySpace. This week's song, "Collideascope," is from 1987's Psonic Psunspot, the long-lost full-length album by the Dukes of Stratosphear.
Due to recent negotiations with Virgin, XTC now has rights to several of their albums, including the Dukes catalog, which has now been beautifully remastered and packaged by the band. They've included demos that weren't available before and added extensive liner notes, and made them available to the public separately for £9.55 (£10.98 including VAT, which doesn't apply to those living outside England) or together for £17.38 (£19.98 including VAT). But if you your order both, you get a pstunning pset of psix psychedelic button badges free! (It's been said before, but we'll say it again -- you can get the buttons these days!)
They're there on the APE Web site, ripe for the picking. Plug in and tune out TODAY.
No one takes home the coveted "guess the next song" cup this week -- our hint ("an interview about one of Andy's more divisive songs" -- referring to the line, "You will see one young girl split into two") was rather oblique, we must admit -- but given the subject matter, we hope you'll take a sip of your wormwood tea and float downstream with us.
We'll be back in two weeks (circumstances permitting!) with a look at a song that often was joined to another when the band played it live.
TB: Let's talk about "Collideascope."
AP: Do you have your manatee turned on, to capture the psychedelic vibes? I think I can hear it whirring contentedly in the background.
TB: [laughing] I do indeed! So, Sir John -- what was the inspiration for this particular song? I saw somewhere that you said you had the lyrics for this sometime in the late '70s, but you decided not to use them because they were too psychedelic, even then.
AP: Do you know, I'd forgotten that! I think you might be right. I think that some of these lyrics were hanging around in the late '70s, but I don't know if there was any music to go with them.
TB: It makes sense in a way, because a lot of your earlier lyrics were kind of kooky and Science-Fiction-y...
AP: Oh yeah, I was just writing stuff like, you know, those kind of compendium comics, those "weird stories," like "Tales of Suspense." Inevitably drawn by Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby or whomever. The stories all had a kind of a formula -- the shock was in the last couple of panels. The unexpected "turn it on its head," which you began to expect! It would have been more shocking if they'd kept them more conventional.
But that's all I did write about at one time. I thought I could do my own version, yet as a teenager or a man in his early 20s, what experience of life had I had? I hadn't -- I could only guess at what life was going to be like, and then, as the more living you've done, the more you can talk about it, and the more you can tell. It always amazes me when anyone under the age of 20 can write things that are not about holding a girl's hand or fumbling with somebody's bra.
TB: It's interesting to hear you say this, because you can think about some artists who seem to have all their creativity in their 20s, and then they're done. In fact, they should be getting more mature and having richer output as they get older. I mean, that was certainly the case with you guys -- your music got more complex, your lyrics got more complex.
AP: Yeah, that's true. Look at the Beatles' early lyrics -- they're so banal, in that sort of Hallmark Cards way.
Can you imagine what it must be like to be a copywriter for Hallmark cards? [laughs] Can you imagine sitting in an office and thinking, "Okay, it's got to go [imitates meter of simple rhyme]. They all do that."
TB: I think they have to drink. A lot.
AP: [laughs] They have to drink! But it's not conventional liquids. It's helium, or a couple of liters of krill. "What have you got there?" "I've got some krill!" "I've got some sink cleaner!" "Let's make a cocktail! It's nearly 11 in the morning -- come on, we've got a few more hundred cards to write!"
TB: [laughing] Or, they sit there and say, "How far back in our catalog can we go before people don't realize that we're plagiarizing from ourselves?"
AP: [laughs] And that's your standard Pop lyric, really!
But I guess at that point I was working for the Hallmark branch of Sci-Fi lyrics -- that was my early attempts at writing lyrics. I mean, the hundreds of songs that we never got to record, from the early career, are just ludicrous. They are like those comic compendium things -- you know, "My Baby Was a Reptile from a Horror Movie on TV." That was one of them. Or, "Escalator Out of Hell."
TB: Nice. How did audiences react to that?
AP: Well, there was nothing they could grasp on to. But sometimes, some of the gigs The Helium Kids did were, like, to no people. Or one or two people. I remember traveling 40 or 50 miles to play a pub somewhere, and it'd be a Monday night or something, and one person would come in. You'd be in the corner of this pub with the disco lights flashing on you, running through your set -- stuff like [sings dramatically] "Martian invasion, 1970" -- and there's this one lobotomized local, drinking cider, leaning on the wall looking at you for an hour-and-a-half. And that was considered a good gig, because a person came.
But yeah, well done, "Collideascope" was an earlier lyric that I thought was a bit too daft to do anything with, so it was left to rot. And I grabbed it when I was secretly writing for the next Dukes record -- I didn't think it ought to be done, but really secretly I was thinking, "Oh god, I wish they ask for a second one, because I'd love to do another one!
TB: Were you just waiting for permission from Virgin?
AP: Yeah, because they were having to fund it. But it was also the thing of, I could say, "Well, yeah, they made me do it." [laughs] I really wanted to do another Dukes record, because it was so much fun. You'd get to have a musical holiday.
But the actual music for the song all derived from that ascending chord change. In fact, let me put the phone down a second, and put you on speaker. There you go, you're on speaker!
TB: Ooh, I feel it bouncing around under me.
AP: Yeah, you just love the vibrations, don't you.
TB: I do!
AP: So, this chord change -- the E minor with the ascending B to C to C# to D -- then you go up to G-flat minor and you ascend on the top line again -- I thought, "Whoa, that's just like a kind of Lennon-esque, lazy chord change, the sort of thing that he'd do, and wow, it's also like The Move's piece of fake Lennon," which was "Blackberry Way."
So, I thought, "Ooh, perfect -- I've got a double whammy. I've got a piece of fake Lennon psychedelia, and I'm snaring in The Move," who were trying to write a piece of fake Lennon psychedelia, I think, with "Blackberry Way." I killed two Byrds -- that's B Y R D S! -- with one stoner! [laughs]
TB: [laughing] Do you remember how you stumbled upon this chord progression?
AP: It probably was the same as how I stumble upon all the chord progressions -- I make a mistake. You know, "What happens if I -- oh dear! Oh! That's not bad ... if I keep going to get myself out of the mess I've just made -- ooh, that's pretty good. It's climbing up. What if I go up one more? Oh yeah, that's great."
So, 90 percent of my chord changes come through blundering, I'm sure of it.
TB: What are you and Dave playing on the song?
AP: Well, it's me playing acoustic, fumbling around on my Martin. I think Dave comes in during the choruses, doing the descending then ascending line on the guitar. Dave's best contribution to this, which to me really makes the song, is the Mellotron stuff. The orchestration he comes up with is great. That ascending Mellotron part really makes it for me.
TB: Who does that figure at the very beginning of the song?
AP: That's myself and Colin -- he's on bass, and I'm doubling it on guitar, and it's probably got a little twisty, bendy effect on the guitar. On the outro, it's the intro backwards -- [imitates the final part] -- it's just flipped around. That's the sort of thing they'd do in that era.
TB: Are you playing any electric guitar on this?
AP: I don't think I am! I think I'm just strumming the Martin, and Dave's doing the little electric rolling things. He's also playing a piano that doubles up the bass line during the choruses. And, like I said, the Mellotron stuff, which is really the backbone of it all.
TB: You guys owned your own Mellotron by this point, right?
AP: We did, yeah. But as the years went on, Dave seemed to nab it more and more, which was fair enough, because he'd keep it oiled and feed it grapes or whatever it needed [chuckles]. It's kind of a living thing!
TB: I was going to say, it's a cranky old monster, isn't it?
AP: It really is. You've got to feed it its own special mello-grub or something.
TB: Mellomars!
AP: Yeah! Mellomine!
But yeah, he seemed to like that. He'd get the can of oil out and the screwdriver, and he could go all Great Western Railway footplate engineer on it.
TB: So, tell me, where did the sawing come from? It's even on the demo.
AP: It's even on the demo because I had a disc with sound effects on it, and one of the sound effects on the disc was sawing. You can even hear the number, which is the fellow introducing the tracks.
TB: Ah, I was wondering what that was -- "Number 57."
AP: That was track 57 on the album.
TB: I thought that was you being silly and doing a "Revolution 9" thing.
AP: No, no, I just put the record on and left a couple of tracks running. One was sawing, and another one, I think, was smashing glass. It was whatever came up -- I thought, "Well, this is the approach to use. I'll just grab whatever." I loved the sawing -- I think I just dropped the needle on the record, and when that came up, I thought, "Wow! Sawing -- snoring -- sleeping! That's great."
So, we decided to reproduce it in the studio, and I think I forgot to bring the album, so we had to re-do the sawing.
TB: It's obviously done live.
AP: [laughs] Yes, it's live sawing! That's Colin sawing.
TB: And then who says "Bloody hell"?
AP: Oh, that's "Bloody Nora." That's Jimmy Jewel, the English Variety Hall comedian, who was in a quite a long-running, truly awful sitcom on TV called "Nearest and Dearest," where he and an older English comedienne -- no one seems to use that word anymore! -- named Hilda Baker played his sister. They ran a run-down pickle factory in the north of England. This series was truly awful, saved only by the fact that Hilda Baker spoke in these mashed-up English phrases, very much like the ones that Lennon used for his books -- you know, like "a bowl of Rice Khrushchevs," or "take a taxi ride to go sightsee Buckinghell Palace." You know, that kind of mashed-up English made into comedy phrases.
TB: So, what is said after "Bloody Nora"? I haven't been able to parse that.
AP: Oh, it's something like, she says, [imitates Nellie] "Any changes here will be made over my dog's body." She'd speak in this mangled up English, which I think Lennon caught, and which is why he used that kind of stuff to write his books with, because she was already doing variety shows and doing stuff like that on TV and radio in the '50s and early '60s. I think that was an influence on him, to be truthful.
And then, she did this long-running TV series in the late '60s and early '70s. And one of the videos we took with us to the studio -- possibly the only video -- for entertainment was the "Nearest and Dearest" feature film, which is truly appalling. It's really awful. We decided to just take some of the phrases from this film, and spin them into the song. So, you get Jimmy Jewel saying "Bloody Nora" when the apparent leg gets sawn off -- or whatever it is you're imagining! -- and then we captured a phrase from Hilda Baker.
It's tricky to talk about this one, actually, because I wrang out a lot of this stuff in the liner notes of the re-issue. I could always repeat them, and say them in a more-ornate fashion!
TB: [laughs] No, because we want people to buy the album!
AP: [laughing] That's true. So, in this interview, I'll say totally different things! I'll lie terribly.
TB: You had a little bit more of a budget for this album than for 25 O'Clock right?
AP: We did. We had just over twice as much. The original budget for 25 O'Clock was £5,000, and we gave them £1,000 back -- sort of facetiously, I think. Because we felt like they were laughing at us -- "Let's see you try to make a record for that much."
TB: And so, you were saying, "In your face -- here's £1,000 back."
AP: Right -- "Here's your change." We should have just drunk the change, to be honest, but it was a kind of fuck-you. "Here's your change, and here's your album." And it sold very well, so there was more budget to go around on the second one. It was still a laughable budget in terms of what they were handing out to other bands -- you know, they'd be handing out 30, 40, 50, 100 grand out to other bands, but they gave us £11,000 to do the second one.
TB: And the studio was a proper 24-track studio?
AP: I think it was a 24-track. We wanted to go somewhere different than that Christian place where we did 25 O'Clock in. John had been to the Sawmills, and liked it, and liked how remote it was. I think he liked how psychedelic it was, because it was up a tidal creek, so it was a bit dreamlike up there, and I think he thought it might lend to the atmosphere.
TB: Did he bring along a bunch of vintage equipment, or did you just use what they had there? For example, you brought the Mellotron, right?
AP: We couldn't get too much down, because we couldn't actually drive up a truck or anything to the studio. The only way you could get to the studio was either walk about a mile up a railway track, or you'd ring them from the nearest town, and they'd send a boat along to get you. You'd have to load the Mellotron and amplifiers and stuff on this tiny little boat, with a little petrol engine at the back and a little wheelhouse up front, if you didn't want to drag it a mile along this railway track.
TB: That's quite an image -- the Mellotron in the back of this little boat.
AP: We were manhandling it onto this tiny boat -- about the size of a rowing boat, with a little house on the front with a steering wheel -- and I was thinking, "Oh god, this is going to go to the bottom of the sea. I know it. If we don't drop it to the bottom of the sea as we're loading it, we're going to turn a corner and, because of the excess weight of this bloody big thing, the little boat's going to tip over, and down it will go, into the briny deep.
TB: Along with you!
AP: [laughing] Along with me! Yeah -- "I'll walk along the railway track, fellas!" Actually, I think I took the boat, but I was not happy about it, being a non-swimmer.
But if you wanted to get any equipment there, you had to bring it in this tiny little boat, because you couldn't get a truck or a car up to the studio very easily.
TB: Did you guys rehearse these tunes in Swindon before you went out to Sawmill?
AP: Did we rehearse these here? I'm sure we must have done something...
TB: Because you have some demos, but not for every song, and obviously you would have had to get together with [drummer] Ian [Gregory] to work through the tunes with him...
AP: Do you know, I don't remember rehearsing this stuff! Maybe we didn't. Maybe it was a case of, "Yeah, we'll play it through a couple of times, then you turn the tape machine on and away we go!" Maybe Dave or Colin could remember, but I don't remember rehearsing this material at all.
TB: When you were recording your parts, were you playing together?
AP: Oh yeah. We'd be playing as much live as possible. And if we couldn't do it live, then the other person would play the instrument -- like, Colin would be playing the rhythm guitar on "Vanishing Girl," and because we needed a bass on the song, I played the bass. He played rhythm guitar because I'm a slow learner, and there were too many chords to remember, so I played the bass -- I could pick that up quicker -- so we got the whole rhythm track done as one thing.
And it was the same thing with this song -- I seem to remember it's Ian on drums obviously, it's me on acoustic, Dave on electric and Colin on bass. Dave would have overdubbed the Mellotron on another pass. In addition to the sound effects, we also dubbed some "interesting" percussion. There were these rather large drum cases -- I think they were Ian's or they were there in the studio. I said, "What would happen if we got all of the percussion in the studio and put it in one of these cases, and I drop it on the backbeats, so you get this rattling crunch?" John said, "Yeah, try it." The spirit of the Dukes was, "Do it, no matter how daft it is."
So, we threw all the tambourines we could find, all the maracas, everything that shook, into this big black drum case, and I lifted it up and dropped it on the parquet floor of the studio on the backbeat.
TB: Did you sample it once and play it that way, or did you have to do this throughout the song?
AP: I lifted it up and dropped it on the backbeat, sort of in-time [chuckling], throughout the song.
TB: [laughing] Well done! That couldn't have been easy.
AP: [laughs] That kind of sampling thing was really against the Dukes' ethos. Lift-drop, lift-drop, lift-drop...
TB: And you had to lift it up the same height each time, if you wanted it to land at the same time.
AP: Science gone mad, eh? Nothing to do up that creek. We really were up that creek without a paddle, I'll tell you.
TB: So, let me ask you about one of few times you've been on stage post-touring, which is when Aimee Mann was performing this song...
AP: Oh, she had a real thing for this song! When she and Dave were romantically linked, she had a series of gigs at The Bottom Line in New York. Dave was in her touring band at the time, and I was living in Erica's apartment on 2nd Avenue at the time. That sounds so cosmopolitan for me -- council-house boy from Swindon! -- "There I was living on 2nd Avenue" -- way down in the East Village, in the scummy bit.
Anyway he rang me up and said, "We're playing at the Bottom Line, and she wants to do 'Collideascope' -- will you come up and do the vocal?"
TB: Oh, so that was planned! I thought you were just there attending the show, and that getting onstage to sing was spontaneous on your part.
AP: Nope, he talked to me about it -- told me where it would be in the set, and all that. I did it because Dave was in love, and he asked me. So, a favor for a friend.
TB: I remember, in the fan community, it caused a little bit of a stir, because there you were, performing live.
AP: Yeah, and I wasn't dying, and I wasn't throwing up. I probably had chronic diarrhea, for about three or four days beforehand, when he asked me. I probably never left the lavatory in the days preceding the performance, but it went okay. A little rough. I've never heard it, but I remember thinking at the time, "Jesus, I'm a bit out of tune, because I'm out of practice."
TB: It's funny -- if you're not singing live a lot, it's a muscle like anything else, and you get out of shape.
AP: Oh yeah, sure. I was a bit croaky and out of tune, but it was a case of helping a friend.
TB: Anything else you remember about the song?
AP: It's just a piece of fake Lennon, really. I'm doing my own harmonies, for speed of getting them done. I did sing "sleeper" with a pronounced "PUH," because I knew it would trigger off the slap-back echo, in that Lennon fashion.
Also, it was to end the album -- this was to be the closing track. But Virgin flipped the sides. They said, "We want to start with 'Vanishing Girl'."
TB: So that should have been side two?
AP: Yeah -- "Collideascope" was supposed to be the apocalyptic closing track of side two.
TB: Ohhh -- that makes so much more sense to me.
AP: The album should start with the approaching airplane of "You're My Drug" -- you know, the Dukes are flying in, and "Pale and Precious" is the halfway house.
TB: Exactly. That song never felt like an album closer to me.
AP: If you play the sides reversed, that's how we intended it. They said, "The most commercial thing on here is 'Vanishing Girl' and we want to start with it, can we flip the sides?" And it was a case of, "Ohhh, okay."
TB: Plenty of singles have been the lead song on side two!
AP: But this was their reasoning. To be truthful, they didn't really want us to do the first Dukes thing, and then, because it sold so well, suddenly they were keen and getting serious -- or more serious -- about the second one, so they started to interfere.
So, the album should have ended with the dead stop of the backward guitar at the end of "Collideascope."
©2009 Todd Bernhardt and Andy Partridge. All rights reserved.
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Monday, October 19, 2009
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Giddy
Folks, this week we can offer you no interview, because though Todd and Andy spoke today (Sunday), there was no time to transcribe / polish / etc. (oh, if you only knew what went into those et ceteras), so instead we point you to the Next Best Thing -- Pugwash's Giddy, the newest release from the APE House.
Giddy comprises 13 tracks handpicked by Andy and Pugwash frontman Thomas Walsh from Pugwash's previous albums. It's completely remastered for this special compilation and comes in a beautiful multi-fold gatefold cardboard sleeve with a two-piece slipcase. The album is only £8.99 (including VAT) or, for those in lands less greene and pleasant than England's, £7.82. To order, simply point your browser here.
If you like your music in a purely digital format, you can get a whole host of Pugwashery by clicking here and debiting your credit card for the low low price of only £5.99 (including VAT -- £5.21 for those outside the UK) per album. Where else will you be able to find something that will be able to give you pleasure for so long for so short a price?
If you want to find out about more things Pugwashesque, check out the Podcasts section of the APE House.
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Sunday, October 11, 2009
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Song of the Week
This week we give you Andy's demo of last week's song, "The Disappointed." This version was released on Coat of Many Cupboards, Virgin's four-disc retrospective of the band; the original was on 1992's Nonsuch. Enjoy!
We'll be back in a week or two with an interview about one of Andy's more divisive songs.
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Sunday, October 04, 2009
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Song of the Week -- Andy's take
Part of an ongoing series of interviews by Todd Bernhardt with Andy Partridge about the songs we feature each week on MySpace. This week's song, "The Disappointed," is from 1992's Nonsuch.
Per added yet another win to his string of guess-the-next-interview victories. Keep on this track, Mr. Aronsson, and soon you'll be more than just the Fisher King!
What are we going to run in two weeks? Um ... well, Andy's been recovering from swine flu, while Todd's been consumed by communicating about it at work. We'll figure out what the next interflu, erm, interview will be about sometime during the coming week, and hintatcha next weekend.
TB: Let's talk about "The Disappointed." This is another one of your prescient Nonsuch songs. Maybe we should start by talking about the lyrics.
AP: It's pretty prescient! Actually, could I just derail you for a moment? Could I start with the video?
TB: Sure!
AP: Which I hate -- hate, hate, hate! You think I'm acting disappointed in that video? [laughs ruefully] I was told when we arrived on the set of this, early in the morning, after all the preparation that had gone on with the director -- I can't remember her name. Somebody Fiennes? She was the daughter of the polar explorer Fiennes. I had meetings with her at Virgin, and I'd brought up books, and I'd done sketches, and we'd gone through what I wanted.
I turned up in the morning, and walked in at this big sound stage, and it was nothing like I'd asked for. And so, I started to say, "Hang on, this looks nothing like what we'd agreed on," when the producer wandered over to me, and said, "Look -- shut up, sonny, we're trying to make a video here." And I just knew the day was not going to go my way! [chuckles] I don't think she had any idea who I was, and why I was saying, "This isn't right," but that was her response. "Be quiet" -- I don't think it was "shut up" -- "Be quiet, sonny, we're trying to make a video here."
TB: Had you intended it to be more like a house of cards -- kings and queens?
AP: Actually, it would have been mostly computer-generated, but I wanted the perspective to be all wrong, as in medieval paintings. You know how we used the "Siege of Jerusalem" picture on the 12-inch of "King for a Day"? I really liked that, and I wanted to go on from that and do a fully fledged, weird-looking medieval-perspective thing, where the towers of the castle are slightly smaller than the people in them -- so, their heads are looking out the towers, but there's no way they could actually fit them in the towers! [chuckles] Or, an arm would come out of a doorway, and fill the doorway. Or, there'd be somebody stood at one point that looked about three inches tall, and somebody next to them looked about 10 inches tall.
It was that kind of medieval perspective, where they used to make the most important things larger -- it didn't matter whether it worked perspective-wise or not. If the king's in the picture, he'd be a foot tall, and everyone else him would be six inches tall. He'd be sat in his castle, and the tower he'd be in would be drawn massively, and the rest of the castle would be tiny. So, it was all that weird, messed-up medieval logic of...
TB: Hierarchy, rather than perspective.
AP: Yes, hierarchy -- which is like a lower-archy, but it's the taller one. The one on the top shelf. Or, it's one where you can't afford your own archy, so you pay the rent on one. "Is that a hire-archy?" "Yeah, don't scratch it!" [laughs]
Like I said, I had a meeting with this Fiennes woman, and I brought up these books of medieval art, and did drawings, and I said, "I want this bit to look like this -- I want the sky to have a kind of grid pattern, like you get on tapestries. I don't want it to look anything like real life, now or medieval -- I just want it to be this totally insane perspective thing."
When I turned up on the day of filming, she hadn't listened to a thing I'd said. They'd gone and built this set, they'd gone and booked these actors that were all friends of hers from some university thing. I felt like saying, "No, I don't want these New Romantic-y looking idiots in my film, please!"
TB: [laughing] I think it was all an elaborate ploy to make you genuinely disappointed.
AP: Yeah -- it was the big thing to get me in character! Of course, then they keep you waiting around all day 'til about 11:00 at night, from something like 6 in the morning, and they say, "Okay, we've got to wrap up now -- ohhh, we haven't filmed the group!" [Todd laughs in disbelief] Seriously! That was what they said. So, they crammed us all in, in about a half-hour at the end.
And that was the most we ever paid for a video. It was something like £45,000, which is the equivalent now of something like £100,000.
TB: And you certainly didn't get the return on your investment -- that was your money -- that you'd hoped for. Did the £45,000 invested in that video sell its equivalent amount in more copies of Nonsuch?
AP: No no no -- I think it was shown on TV a couple of times, and that was it. Nonsuch was a very poor seller in England.
TB: Around the rest of the world it did alright, didn't it?
AP: Don't think so! It sold very poorly in the States as well. And, at the time, I thought it was our best album, by far. I don't think it is now -- I think it's our second-best album. I think Apple Venus is our best.
TB: How did the song come about?
AP: I offered this, in its unfinished state, to Terry Hall, ex of The Specials, now doing his solo career. He wanted to write with me, and I agreed. I offered him this -- gave him a really rough cassette version of me strumming through it, with unfinished lyrics -- and for some reason he turned it down. He didn't like it. Which is a shame, because it might have been a hit for him, who knows? Though, it wasn't a hit for us, so maybe it wouldn't have been a hit for him.
After he turned it down, I thought, "Well, I'll just finish up and we'll use it, if the rest of the band think it's okay." I did a new demo [later released on Coat of Many Cupboards] that is possibly the most finished demo I've ever done of any song that the band went on to do. Consequently, it really shut them out -- which I feel a little guilty about, but I guess if you know exactly how a song has got to go, that's how it's got to go.
TB: I listened to the demo today, and I was going to ask you about your setup in the Shed at this time -- had you gone digital by then, or were you still working with an eight-track cassette?
AP: It was eight-track cassette machine.
TB: Because it is very fully realized, almost at the Apple Venus level. I don't know if I'd say it's your most finished demo, though, because some of the AV demos are at least as finished, if not more. But it's pretty much all there, except for the string parts and some of the backing tracks.
AP: The string thing was more of an idea of a part, rather a finished product. I haven't heard the demo, didn't play it today, but the string arrangement on the final product was one of those committee arrangements that we did with Proteus, which for the time had great string samples in it.
TB: But you have string players listed on the liner notes.
AP: We do, yeah.
TB: You figured it out on the Proteus, then they played their parts?
AP: We figured it out on the Proteus, and got the string players to play it, but they were so fucking out of tune that we put Proteus on and ended up using more of that in the mix than them.
They were good players, all apart from one. I think it was the cello player, who was appallingly out of tune. We asked [violinist] Stuart Gordon to put the quartet together, and he rang up on the morning they were due there and said, "Look, I'm really sorry chaps, I can't get this really great cello player -- he's ill -- so I've just grabbed the only one I can get," and I don't think she'd ever been in a studio before. She just couldn't get in pitch. It was horrible, because it was spoiling the other three players, who were fine. Stuart Gordon is fantastic. But once she started rubbing the rosin across that enormous brown thing clamped between her legs, there was a horrible sound filled the room.
TB: Yeah, I think I remember you saying the same thing talking about "Rook."
AP: Yep. We only had one day to do all the string parts for the album, and the quartet that showed up did not have the cello player Stuart wanted.
Still, they're not as bad as the quartet that turned up for the original Apple Venus recordings at Chris Difford's place. They were truly awful. We'll save that one for another day.
TB: Okay. Let's talk about the lyrics.
AP: I guess they are prescient, yeah. Listening to it today, though, I don't think it's all about affairs of the heart. I think it's about life in general. I think some of my take on the music business in general is in there as well. I don't think it's all affairs of the heart, although that's the framework it's hung around.
TB: I guess that's pretty much the lot of anyone who gets older -- life is bound to have more disappointments by that time.
AP: I guess so, but also if you feel that you've given your all, and it's not been welcomed, it's not been rewarded -- and we really did give our all -- then it's discouraging. But I've got to go careful, so I don't end up sounding like a bitter troll. [laughs]
TB: It's interesting to hear you say that, because in terms of your career, you were in a relatively good place at this point -- Skylarking and Oranges and Lemons both had sold pretty well. But at the same time, you'd been dealing with litigation with your ex-manager, and facing record-company troubles, and...
AP: Yeah, we were only fresh out of that when we were writing this album. So, I think there are big dollops of different things. My marriage, my disappointment with that, is in there. I think the disappointment with the musical career, with not getting the recognition that I thought we were due, and certainly not getting the financial recompense that we were due, is in there. All that genuine disappointment filtered into this.
But I can tell you why I started writing this -- it was from a totally different reason, which I abandoned, because I thought, "Oh, you posey git, you can't possibly know that pain." There was a story on TV about the mothers of The Disappeared in Argentina.
I started to sing [sings to the tune of "The Disappointed"] "The Disappeared"... and so on, and I just caught myself. "I can't write about this, because I haven't had sons and daughters taken, with a bullet put in the back of their heads and them thrown in a shallow grave by a dusty roadside somewhere. How can I write about that? It's not in my experience."
TB: You can imagine the horror of it, of course, but...
AP: Exactly! But I knew I couldn't write about it truthfully. But that is what started the whole song off. I was singing "The Disappeared," because I was seeing this documentary about the protests of the mothers of these people.
I often sit with the telly on and strum a guitar. I read that John Lennon used to do that, and I thought, "How the hell could he do that?" But now I think about it, and a lot of my best songs have come out while I'm sat watching the TV with a guitar on my lap!
I'm sitting there watching this documentary, thinking, "Oh, that is awful, and I'm strumming away, and singing in my head, "The Disappeared." I liked it, but as I worked on it more, I thought, "No, I can't sing about this. It's not my experience."
TB: You and I have talked in the past about how you like to offset the tone of the lyrics with the tone of the music -- so, you put sad lyrics to happy music or vice-versa. But in this case, both strike me as fairly somber.
AP: I dunno -- it's major key, isn't it? I guess it's major/minor-type mixes, so it's sweet-sour, sweet-sour.
TB: And you're moving down the neck, taking people down with you as you talk about the Disappointed and how they want you to do this and that.
AP: [dramatically] I'm descending lower than a Kinks bass line! [laughs] Yeah, I'm going down -- "Next floor, Disappointment!"
Yeah, it's a sweet-sour mix of music. In fact, I remember I was appalled when one reviewer said, "The intro and middle section sound like Fleetwood Mac." I remember thinking, I'm not supposed to like the West Coast Fleetwood Mac, but maybe they're quite good if someone thinks we sound like them!" [laughs] But seriously, that was very far from my mind when we put this song together.
TB: [laughing] Of course. The thing I was going to ask about that part is, I realize that you start with the bridge, and then you go into...
AP: This song is kind of a vhorus!
TB: Exactly! This is a vhorus song -- after the intro, you kind of start with the chorus.
AP: It's the title line -- it's that Bacharach/David thing of, title line / some response to that/ back to title line again / another rhymey response to that -- so, it's well in vhorus land.
TB: Is the bridge, or middle part, of this song one of your shortest? Lyrically, it's only two lines.
AP: [sings it to himself] Is that eight bars? I think it is.
TB: So it really is a middle-eight.
AP: An old-fashioned, Tin Pan Alley middle-eight. A Tin Ear Alley middle eight! [chuckles]
TB: [laughs] You've said before how you like to start songs with the bridge...
AP: It's just one of those little songwriter tricks. You think, "Fuck, where do I go now? I've got myself to this point in the song, and I don't know what to do. Wait! The intro can come back!" Why waste a good intro?
TB: Speaking of intros, where did you guys come up with starting it with the drums like that?
AP: I love that spastic roll he [Dave Mattacks] does. I said to him, I want a really distinctive roll into this.
TB: And he moves up through the drums, from the lowest to the highest tom, then the snare.
AP: He moves up, and he does it on the and's, and it's all flams.
I said to him, "Look, the playing in this has got to be really solid, really regular. There are not going to be many rolls in the song, because it's just got to keep going, so I want a very distinctive one to get in." He really done me proud -- he's playing it backwards, starting it from the lowest tom up to the snare, playing all flams, and playing it on the and's.
In rehearsals, when we started the album, he said, "I'm looking forward to this, as long as you haven't got any shuffles for me to play, since I can't play a shuffle." And not only is this song a shuffle, but it's a shuffle with an offbeat hi-hat. It's an offbeat, triplet hi-hat.
TB: I was just going to say, in Dave's defense, this is an hard pattern to play. The hi-hat part is what makes it hard. If he was just doing your standard, dotted-eight hi-hat pattern you find in a shuffle...
AP: Well, that's what he can't do! He said he can't do your average shuffle.
TB: At least he knows his own blind spot, right?
AP: Sure! So we ended up doing quite a lot of editing with the drum performance on this, because I wanted it really solid. I don't know how many takes we did of him, but this is not one drum take all the way through. It's best bits, you know?
But the poor sod had to play these off-beat triplet hi-hats, because [producer] Gus [Dudgeon] loved that on the demo. It was easy for me, because I could just program a drum machine. But Gus said [mimics him], "Ohh, yes, I love those offbeat triplet hi-hats -- we've got to keep that in! That's such a hook!" And poor Dave had to play these triplets cutting across the rhythm that hit on the offbeat.
TB: It's very, very hard to play well, and consistently, for a long time. I can say that.
AP: And, after that roll! I mean, the man's a giant, really.
TB: Let's talk about the rest of the song -- who is in which channel? Are you in the left channel on this one?
AP: Dave's playing the sort of choppy guitar -- he's also playing the arpeggios. That's his forte, to do those. I'm doing the chuggy guitar, and I think that is over on the left.
What else do my notes say? "Good use of echoes in the mix to double up all the rhythms."
TB: Yeah, the guitars sound very big on this song.
AP: That's all those rhythmic echoes, picking up all the parts. That's the trick.
What else did I write here? I started the demo on this on the 15th of April, '91. The song before it was "Wonder Annual," and the song after it was one I worked on with Peter Blegvad called "Hell's Despite." That's where this fell out historically.
TB: I don't think I realized "Wonder Annual" was a Nonsuchy-era song.
Dave is credited with keyboard on "The Disappointed" -- does that have to do with the Proteus strings?
AP: I think so, yeah. There's also this bendy, echo-y, reverb-y thing at the end that I think is keyboards.
TB: This was one of the singles from the album, yes?
AP: It was, yes. There's this notorious old-women's show that used to be on called "Pebble Mill at One." Pebble Mill was the name of the BBC's Birmingham studio, and they did this kind of "glad to be gray" chat-show thing at lunchtime. [mimics old woman] "Ooh, and we'll have a Pop act on as well!" We went on there to mime the song, and I think that was our only shot at fame with it in England. [chuckles]
TB: Who played drums? Was it Ian [Gregory]?
AP: It's Ian, yeah. He always used to do our last-minute mimes. He'd do it for the drink alone, I think! [laughs] And I do remember we got rather drunk on the way back from doing this. We decided we were going to hire a chauffer-driven car -- we thought, "Fuck it, if we've got to go and play to a load of old women up in Birmingham at a lunchtime show, and do a mime, we're going to get some booze on the way back and have a party."
TB: [laughing] Like proper rock stars!
AP: [chuckles] Like proper rocks stars, yes. So we did. We got some bottles and had some fun on the way back.
TB: Did Virgin tag this as a single, or did you push it as such?
AP: I sensed that they were going to go for this as a single, as it was being written, because it was so sort of solid and, face it, old-fashioned. So, I thought, "Yeah, they're gonna hone in on this."
TB: But it came second, after "Peter Pumpkinhead."
AP: Yeah. But I knew they were going to go for it, as a single. But, again, I don't think it got very high in the English charts -- probably somewhere in the lower 20s or 30s -- because nobody played it. We hadn't bribed the right people. We hadn't even bribed the wrong people! [laughs]
TB: So, after this, "Wrapped in Gray" was the next -- and last -- single?
AP: Yeah, that was it. That was the end of Nonsuch.
TB: And we all know what happened after that!
AP: Then Dave had the idea to go on strike. Which I think he said facetiously, but I thought, "Great idea!"
TB: Well, it worked, right? Took a while, but it worked.
The final thing I want to ask about is how it fades into "Holly Up on Poppy."
AP: Yeah, what a lovely cross-fade that is! That worked out really well.
TB: It does, and I guess what I wanted to ask about involves a larger question -- you guys love to do cross-fades.
AP: I know, and there's someone who gets on the various sites called [name redacted], and obviously these cross-fades have mentally unhinged him, because all he rants about is how much better it would be if there were no cross-fades.
TB: So, let's talk about that -- "In defense of cross-fades, by Andy Partridge."
AP: Listening to an album is an event. It's a film. It's a play. It's reading a book. You wouldn't read chapter nine first, then jump to chapter two -- you read the book the way the author intended you to read it, from page one to page last. You watch a film from scene one to scene end. You hear a collection of music on an album from track one to the last track. It's like saying that there should be one or two seconds of blank screen in between every major scene in a film. No! Some scenes cross-fade. Some scenes are blank. Some scenes dissolve.
It's how you're pulled through the experience. It's the order we want you to hear it in, the way we'd like you to hear it. The fact that one blurs into another -- that's intended! That's not some weird accident that happens at the pressing plant! He must think that it's some terrible disease that has infested all of our records, that we have no control over the cross-fading. No, you fucker! I want it to happen that way!
TB: You can tell -- it's absolutely intentional, because you do so much of it.
AP: With so many of my favorite albums, I am led by the hand from song one right through to the spindle. And that's how I like it. As I say, you wouldn't watch a film watching scene nine before scene five -- you go through in the way that the director and editor and writer want you to see that film. It's the same with an album of music.
TB: We had some friends over last night, another couple, and the other guy and I were out in the kitchen at the end of the night, drinking and bemoaning the death of the album.
AP: That's what all this separate stuff in the digital domain has done. It's turned the film into a bunch of scenes -- it's turned the book into a bunch of chapters.
TB: One of the examples I used for him was XTC -- I wouldn't love some of the deeper cuts on your albums as much as I do if I hadn't been able to listen to them multiple times, in the context of the other songs on the album. They're not all sugary-sweet singles. Instead, they reveal themselves to you over time, and if I didn't have a commitment to listening to an album -- of being led through the album as you'd intended, as you were just talking about -- I don't know if I necessarily would have discovered those songs to the same degree that I have. That's a sad thing -- to know that future generations might not have the joy of having an album reveal itself to them over time.
AP: Well, the album is an art form, as much as the single is an art form. The threads that carry through are what pull you through the whole experience. Nothing in life is ever unseparated, so why should this one art form be totally unseparated? There's not many art forms you can think of where it's not an interactive thing, or there isn't a journey involved.
I'm Andy Partridge, and I love cross-fades!
©2009 Todd Bernhardt and Andy Partridge. All rights reserved.
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Sunday, September 27, 2009
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Song of the Week
In honor of Dave's birthday, we're posting a song that features one of his finest solos, "Real by Reel," which Andy discussed back in 2007. It's from 1979's (oh, what a year!) Drums and Wires.
Apologies for not putting up a new interview this week, as promised/scheduled, but it's been a hell of a week in your humble correspondent's life -- feel free to blame the H1N1 virus and all the preparations involving in planning to fight it in Northern Virginia. So, swine (flu) before pearls (of wisdom from Andy), unfortunately...
We’ll be back next week with your regularly scheduled Andyview.
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Monday, September 21, 2009
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We wish to wish the happiest of all possible birthdays (except for future ones, of course, which we hope will be successively happier) today to the original Guitargonaut himself, Mr. Dave Gregory. Best wishes, sir -- here's to many, many more!
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Sunday, September 20, 2009
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Song of the Week
This week we give you Colin's demo of last week's song, "King for a Day." This version was released on Coat of Many Cupboards, Virgin's four-disc retrospective of the band; the original was on 1989's Oranges and Lemons. Enjoy!
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
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Song of the Week -- Colin's take
Part of an ongoing series of interviews by Todd Bernhardt with Colin Moulding about the songs we feature each week on MySpace. This week's song, "King for a Day," is from 1989's Oranges and Lemons.
Don Device was first to guess the correct song for this week, followed closely (and logically) by Steve from Film Extras. Congratulations, gents!
We'll be back at in two weeks with an interview about a song with a title that almost matches a song by Terre Roche.
TB: Let's talk about your single from Oranges and Lemons, which is "King for a Day." The demo for this is on Coat of Many Cupboards, and it's one of your more well-realized demos, I think. The guitar parts are there, the vocals seem to be all there. Some of the lyrics are different, and the drumbeat is kind of straight-ahead -- it's not as much a shuffle -- but by this point in your career, you're doing more complete demos.
CM: Well, it's still pretty primitive by my standards, but the main guitar parts are there -- the guitar motif, which goes pretty much through the whole song. It's a bit of a bugger to play!
TB: I can imagine -- is that any special tuning?
CM: It is, yeah. It's a secret tuning, which I won't divulge to anyone! [laughs] You actually play the strings, and the strings that you play, you think they should not make that note, but they do. It's that much of a wild tuning.
I showed Andy the tuning, and I remember he got tripped up by it a few times. Until you play it over and over again, it's hard to do, and the repetition of it gets to you as well. Don't think about it too much, otherwise you'll trip over yourself.
But I thought it was a great riff, and tried to write some words to it.
TB: Do you play with alternate tunings a lot?
CM: At that time I did, yeah. My strings were going up and down like a whore's drawers, you know? [laughs] I was just desperately searching for songs -- I used to experiment with all sorts of tunings and capos and stuff, to try to get a melody going. I was really pleased when I came up with this riff -- I thought, "That's usual. I like the way that goes round and round."
And then, having laid the principal riff down, I started to strum some chords over the top. I thought, "Christ, you get some really lovely clashes here." The whole thing kind of revolved, and I thought it had the makings of a really good tune, if I could find some words and a melody to go with it.
So, I was quite pleased with the way the song started out. It was kind of earmarked as being a single right from the word go.
TB: Was it similar to what we were talking about with "Nigel" or "Ball and Chain," where you sent the demos to Virgin, and they took notice?
CM: Yeah -- it was going to be either the first or the second single. As it happened, it was the second single, but it was going to come out as a single. We even made a video for it, so they were that keen, right from the beginning. The Americans liked it in particular -- they seemed to see something in it that was special. We also had "Mayor of Simpleton," so we seemed to be quite well-equipped with singles to offer up.
TB: And you were just coming off the success of Skylarking, so you were a bit of a hot property at this point, I'd imagine.
CM: Yes -- we were starting to sell a lot more in America, and starting to do the rounds there, in terms of promotion.
TB: You did the radio tour after this album, and you played this song on David Letterman.
CM: We did, yes. We were fretting a little bit about how we were going to achieve it, but he's got such a competent band of musicians under his wing there that it worked out alright. We were able to arrange something with the band -- you know, the parts that were too difficult to sing and play at the same time, they would fill in. We played most of it, but occasionally the band would help. We used their drummer, of course.
TB: Anton Fig.
CM: Yeah, great musicians, and we were able to pull it off and do a competent version. That was the main thing.
TB: So, what's the process for a show like that? Did you spend the afternoon rehearsing? I guess they actually tape it in the late afternoon or early evening, right?
CM: You'd bash out a version of it, then go up to the control room to see what it would sound like coming out over the air. They had a pretty good handle on how it was sounding -- I have to say, it sounded a lot better than some of the TV shows we'd done in England, certainly a few years back. I remember the Old Grey Whistle Test was appalling, how dry it sounded. But this show had a certain amount of life to it, which was good. The guys who were doing the show -- they might have been musicians, or certainly engineers of our ilk, rather than just for TV shows, you know? They were pretty clued up, and it was a pretty good sound right from the word go.
So, we felt pretty confident going into it, really, having heard what was being delivered upstairs.
TB: Had Paul and the band listened to the song beforehand and worked things out, or did you do it on the fly with them?
CM: They'd heard the song, and they'd rehearsed it before we even got there. So, we managed to do a reasonable version of it.
TB: Did Andy have to deal with any nerves? I remember this was a big deal for XTC fans at the time, because you guys hadn't played in front of an audience for something like seven years.
CM: Indeed, yes. I think it was a bit more of a bigger deal for him than it was for me and Dave. But the radio tour was just as nail-biting. Anytime you're playing live, there's the risk of errors and all that.
We acquired a new manager at the time -- Tarquin Gotch. He was an English guy, but he was based in Los Angeles, where he working for John Hughes, doing films and stuff. He was having a lot of success with that, but I think his heart was really in music.
Anyway, we got friendly with him, and he said he could do things for us, and that's how we got the acoustic radio tour going.
Speaking of LA, [producer] Paul Fox has us rehearse the songs at Leeds Rehearsal Studios near LA, and he really murdered us on those rehearsal sessions. We were about three or four weeks there, rehearsing solidly, and I'll tell you, I was so drained at the end of it -- we hadn't rehearsed that much even in the old days! It was the complete antitheses of Skylarking, where we had no rehearsals.
We were working on the principal numbers we'd agreed we were going to do -- there were still some fringe tracks that we didn't know we were going to do or not, so consequently they didn't get rehearsed hardly at all. But the main body of the album, we rehearsed like crazy, so we pretty much knew what we were going to be playing.
TB: Do you think that paid off once you got in the studio?
CM: Yeah, I do. It makes a change, to know what you're doing! [laughs] When we recorded, we worked as a band -- the usual procedure, to get the drums down, and then if there were any corrections to be done, we'd do it individually. But we'd rehearsed so much that there weren't too many corrections. I just remember working so hard at those rehearsals, and playing those tunes to death. But it was worth it.
But there was still a certain amount of building the song once you got into the studio, you know?
TB: I know from other interviews I've done with Andy that Paul Fox was willing to try lots of new things once you got in the studio, correct?
CM: Yeah -- although we knew basically what we were going to be playing, when we got into the studio, there was a feeling of, "Oh, perhaps we could do this instead." So, in a few places, there were a few changes and a few additions -- for example, you'd get the main riff down on "King for a Day," and then there was that bell-like melody in the beginning that Andy wanted to put on, I think. That had not occurred to me to do that, and I came round to liking it in the end, but I wasn't sure about it to begin with.
My demo was a bit more rough and gritty, I suppose, and this sweetened it up perhaps more than I would have liked, but you yield to the fact that it probably needed something. You didn't know if that was quite the ticket, but it was there, so you used it.
I think we had some sort of backward thing on the riff as well -- although it was going forward, it was going backward.
TB: I noticed that today, as I was listening on headphones -- that the circular guitar riff has a backward effect on it.
CM: Yeah, that was Paul Fox's idea -- or it might have even been [engineer] Ed Thacker's. I think it might have been an accident to begin with, and somebody liked it and said, "Well, why don't we keep that happening?", as very often happens in the studio.
TB: Happy accidents.
CM: Precisely. "Oh yes, let's let it run, then." It made it a little bit fuller, perhaps. It seemed okay. We went with it at the time -- everybody jumped up and down when they heard it, so we went with it, but I supposed that we maybe could have done without it [laughs]. I don't know.
We had Pat playing the drums, of course.
TB: I wanted to ask what it was like working with him.
CM: It was Paul Fox's idea to use Pat -- he said that he'd principally been the drum player in Mr. Mister. He seemed a competent player, and he was Paul's recommendation, so we went with it.
TB: Kind of like Prairie was Todd's guy.
CM: That's usually the way it works out. If you haven't got a drummer, then the producer usually has somebody in mind. We're open to suggestions, so why not?
TB: And Pat's a fan of you guys, plus I've heard he has a really good work ethic...
CM: He did, yes. He worked really hard, and he was a fan of the band since the Drums and Wires days, so he knew our stuff quite well, and we got along with him pretty well. He's open to suggestion -- if the bass drum doesn't have enough weight in it, then he'll probably be the first one to suggest putting a little sample with it -- you know, these kinds of things.
On this song, he played the shuffle. I mean, it was always going to be a shuffle -- on the demo, it's created with a kind of cabasa, while on the album it's a hi-hat.
TB: So, you'd always intended it to be a shuffle?
CM: Well, the riff kind of suggests it -- you're propelling it with the riff in a kind of a shuffle way anyway, so all you need is a thump-whack, really. Give it a little help with a cabasa or hi-hat, and away you go! [chuckles] I just kind of left it up to Pat, I think, to come up with something that was what we needed.
TB: Did he record all his parts at once, or separately? I remember an interview with him where he said that, on some songs on this album, he recorded his drum parts separately, to get more separation. So, he'd record the snare part just by itself, or the kick and hi-hat just by themselves. Did he do anything like that on this?
CM: The only thing I remember was that we put a sample on the snare, to help the snare -- and on the bass drum, I think -- to make the sound a little fuller. We did the drums and backing tracks at Ocean Way -- it used to be called Western Studios, I think, and The Beach Boys supposedly used the studio to do a lot of their stuff in the early days. So, it was nice to know that!
And we had Elvis Costello next door -- he was doing that album with T-Bone Burnett. Spike, I think it was.
TB: Is that where you met T-Bone? Or had you known him before?
CM: The whole band was kind of ushered into the studio to meet up with Elvis and T-Bone, and so it was not specifically me meeting it, but more the band saying "hi," you know? I had not met him before that -- it was my first encounter with the name, even. I didn't know what his pedigree was until later.
Later down the line, of course, we became even more acquainted.
TB: When did you do that album [Martinis and Bikinis] with him and Sam Phillips?
CM: It was the year that River Phoenix died -- it was the actual month that he died! He got me the gig, to play on this album.
TB: He was someone else who was at the Oranges and Lemons sessions.
CM: Yes, he would drop in. Quiet chap with a kind of rucksack on his back. He'd come in to the lounge there, the relaxing area, and make himself known. I didn't pay much attention to him. He was a child star at the time -- he seemed a nice chap, and I just thought he liked to hang around rock bands or something.
But apparently he was a big muso, loved music, and was a big fan of the band. I didn't know -- I just thought he dropped by to say hello.
TB: Is it because he knew Paul or someone else at the studio that he was able to come by?
CM: I don't know who got him in, or how he got word that we were there. Someone said, "Oh, there's River Phoenix -- he's in films." I didn't give it much notice, and vaguely remembered seeing him in one film, I think. I didn't pay that much attention.
Later on, he got me the gig for that Sam Phillips session. And while we were at the studio doing that, he came to grief. They came in one morning, and said, "Did you hear the news?" I said, "What's that?" and T-Bone said, "River's dead, at the Viper Room." We were doing the session down in Santa Monica at the time. It was quite bizarre, because he lived next door to them, in West Hollywood, and it was him who'd put my name forward for the session.
TB: You had some other guests at the studio as well -- I heard that Chris Squire would stop by. Did you ever get a chance to chat with him?
CM: No, we didn't really chat -- he was just this big, towering figure who'd visit. Foxy knew him more than we did, because he'd worked with him on "Owner of a Lonely Heart," I think.
[chuckles] He poked his head 'round the door when I was doing a bass overdub -- right at that moment! So, it was a bit, "Hang on a minute -- do I have to have this kind of pressure?" [laughs]
TB: [laughing] You weren't playing a Rickenbacker, were you?
CM: No, I was playing my Wal bass, I think! He was just this towering figure kind of staring down on me suffering, you know? [laughs] Very influential player -- he must have sold more basses for Rickenbacker than anyone else.
We moved from Ocean Way to Suma when the drum tracks were done. That's where we did the overdubs and the mixing.
TB: Were you able to stay for all of the mixing, or did you have to go back to the UK?
CM: I stayed for some of the mixes -- I can't quite remember which ones, but I know I didn't stay for all of them. I think Andy did as well -- I think he came back with me.
TB: He said that he stayed for as much as he could, but because you guys were dealing with litigation at that point with your former manager...
CM: Yeah, it was a heavy kind of time. I think we were under a lot of pressure -- a lot of worry about how the court case was going to turn out. It was just hanging over our heads. It's most unusual for Andy to leave the mixing -- he must have been completely washed out, for him to say, "I'm getting on the plane and going home, and leaving the mixing to somebody else" -- that's unheard of. But I'm almost sure we went home together.
TB: Did you initially have your family there with you, like he did?
CM: Yeah, we came over in April, and I left at the beginning of October, I think, with a couple more weeks left of mixing. I think the mixing didn't end until the end of the month. I know Dave stayed in LA 'til the very end.
The families came over when we did in April, and I think they went home beginning of July -- spent about two-and-a-half months. It was a long old haul, being away from home that long, but obviously having your families there for a good proportion of the time made it a lot more bearable.
TB: That was one of the hardest things about Skylarking, correct? It was another big chunk of time you were away, with no family at all.
CM: That's right. Things got a bit dire -- listening in, I didn't know if it was Andy jerking off next door or the woodpecker pecking the tree, you know? [laughs]
TB: [laughing] I wouldn't think that the shark would make that noise!
CM: [laughing] You wouldn't think a pecker would make that noise, either!
TB: [laughing] So, speaking of long hauls and litigation, let's talk about the lyrics of this song. They're pretty dark. Where did these come from?
CM: Probably the case! We were out in sunny Los Angeles, but it was a pretty grim time.
TB: So, even when you were back in the UK writing this song, you were feeling the pressure of the court case and all that?
CM: Well, it hadn't come to a head just yet -- it was about to come to a head, and that was the worrying thing. It was settled in late '89, I think. Certainly the months preceding it, we thought there was going to be a trial, a court case, but it didn't actually get there. It was agreed that both sides would settle -- come to some arrangement -- before that happened. Which was a kind of a relief, although not a totally pleasing outcome.
TB: Yeah, I think in situations like that, part of you wants to do battle, to have your day in court. Get all the facts out in the open.
CM: That's alright if you don't have an album to make, or need to write more songs.
TB: Or have the money to keep spending on the lawyers!
CM: We knew we were in the hole quite a bit already, because we'd gone to Virgin cap in hand to get money to cover our court fees. I knew we were quite a bit in the hole. If we hadn't had a relatively successful record with Oranges and Lemons at that time, we would have been in deep shite, I think. It was quite a relief, to be doing rather better. Took the pressure off a bit, but still, the months making the record were quite tough.
TB: Why all the alternate mixes for this song?
CM: Nothing to do with me, Guv! [laughs]
TB: [laughing] Nothing at all? So, it was Virgin deciding to squeeze the lemon a little bit?
CM: I think we were lured into thinking that there was a demand for it, that "you should get this guy on the case" -- whoever we was -- "who does these 12-inch mixes, and get him to do one."
At the time, I didn't really care if they came out or not. I think my mind was elsewhere -- I just wanted a happy outcome to the court case, I think, and whether we were doing a 12-inch mix was a matter of, "If you can find a use for it, then get somebody to do it."
TB: Of course, it was your money they were using to finance these mixes, right?
CM: Well yes, I think the budget for the album hadn't reached a couple hundred thousand yet, but by the time we did these remixes and stuff, it'd gone up to about a quarter-million, you know? It really stretched the budget to the limit -- we broke the budget several times, really. I think they threatened to pull the plug several times.
But it was out of our hands -- it was certainly out of my hands. Somebody suggested it, so I said, "If you think it's got a chance, sure." I didn't know the American market, and it was done more for the American market than for the English -- they said that it would be a good thing for the clubs, or whatever. I just think they were trying to flog the song more than it should have been flogged.
My feeling is, if it's going to be a hit, the audience will find their way there eventually, and make it a hit.
TB: You can't really force it upon them.
CM: I just wanted to release it as a single and see how it did. It came out, with a video and stuff, and got some attention, but I think that maybe doing the 12-inch mixes was one step too far. But somebody suggested it, and somebody was willing to [laughs] put up some of our money, and there you go. There you go -- very often you do a lot of things to please people, when you know you should be putting your foot down, and saying, "Look -- no. This is not going to achieve anything."
But, to tell you the truth, I didn't really know the market too well, and there was talk of it being played in clubs and stuff, and that it would be a hit in the clubs, and so it was, "Alright, okay, if you think it will be, then go for it." But it wasn't my way of thinking.
TB: Finally, speaking of the video, we've talked about videos you like and those you don't -- where does this one fall?
CM: The guy who did it, Tony Kaye, had done lots of advertisements on English TV. These guys have really got their sights set on making feature films, and it does look rather glorious, I suppose, from a purely visual point of view. There was a sepia version at well, though it was in black-and-white to begin with. It was okay -- made us all far better-looking that what we were! [chuckles]
TB: And Ian Gregory plays drums in the video, yes?
CM: Blimey, yes! Come to mention it, I think you're right. Couldn't afford to fly Pat Mastellotto around the world, I suppose -- we'd broken the bank already, so that was the way it was. Ian comes through for us again! [laughs]
There are a lot of those video shoots where you don't know how it's going to turn out until you see the finished product. You're in the hands of these guys, and you just hope they don't make you look a fool.
TB: Do you feel as if you succeeded on that level with this one?
CM: That it didn't make me look a fool? [laughs]
TB: Yeah.
CM: Ahhh -- the hat may be a bit dubious. [laughs] I don't wear hats all that well -- I've too much hair! I'm glad to have it, mind you. But I just followed orders, and it didn't come out to bad. Got away with it on this one -- not too much acting involved, and that's the main thing. When you're seen to be doing stuff you really shouldn't be doing, that's a problem. You should be strumming your guitar, fellow -- then you're not going to look too much of a twit.
TB: So, how did the song do, ultimately? Did it sell well?
CM: It was quite well-received in America. Judging by my PRS statements, it still gets played quite a lot in the States. In comparison to some of my other stuff, it seems more favorable, perhaps, to Americans than to English, really. You don't hear the song on English radio -- certainly not on the main stations, anyway. Although you might hear "The Mayor of Simpleton," which maybe just got inside the top 30 here at the time.
TB: I know that I've heard it quite a bit on what seem to be compilation mixes that get played in public places, if that makes any sense.
CM: Come to think of it, yes, I think you're right. I've even heard it in DIY shops or something over here. Yes -- you wouldn't hear it on the main radio stations here, but you hear it in DIY shops!
TB: That must be a strange experience, for you to be walking through the store and suddenly say, "Hey, that's me!"
CM: Yeah, it's even more bizarre when it's not you playing it, but it's a rendition of it! I've heard that as well.
I remember that we met up with a lot of people in Los Angeles, being over there. Couple of the guys from Frank Zappa's band -- Mike Keneally, and Scott Thunes -- they used to drop by. I remember learning cribbage with Mike Keneally and Dave Gregory -- we used to play in our spare moments, and I've been thrashing my mother-in-law at it ever since! [laughs]
We'd go up to Griffith Park, the big park there in Los Angeles, and did a lot of sightseeing at various places. Quite a strange place to be -- funny town. It's alright if you're working, but if you've got time to kill, I wouldn't recommend it.
TB: It's so spread out -- there's no real urban center.
CM: Yeah, that's right. If you heard of a good book shop, you'd have to travel miles to get there, and by the time you'd gotten there, you'd more or less gone off the idea, you know?
The frustrating thing was, once we got there, there were too many days off. I would have liked to have just got on with the record, gone in straight to rehearsals, and all that. But obviously Paul Fox and Ed Thacker had families, so they wanted time off. That's all very well, but when you're in a strange environment, it's not always good for the guy in the middle of it all.
TB: And plus, you're continuing to pay money to live there but not being productive, even if you're not spending money on studio time or the staff there.
CM: Burning up per diems, yeah. I think with the success of Skylarking, there was a bit more money available to make this record, but having said that, it appears we even surpassed that budget. We spent a hell of a lot of money on this record, and I'm sure those remixes took it well into the red.
TB: Did you guys experience any earthquakes when you were there?
CM: We did actually -- there were a few days when we had a few rumbles.
TB: That must have been strange for a West County boy.
CM: Indeed. I think I woke up in the middle of the night with the bed shaking a few times.
TB: And it wasn't you!
CM: [laughing] That wasn't me wood-peckering! Promise!
©2009 Todd Bernhardt and Colin Moulding. All rights reserved.
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Sunday, September 06, 2009
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Song of the Week
Continuing our popular (with us, anyway) tradition of posting live versions of songs that Andy has already discussed here, this week we feature a live version of last week's song -- "Scissor Man," as performed by the band in December 1980 at the Hammersmith Palais in London. Initially released on BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert, it was later released on Transistor Blast, a mix of live and in-studio BBC recordings.
If this version doesn't bring an idiot grin to your face, then you're dead inside. Dead, we tell you. (Or maybe you're a fan of Fox "News," in which case only the "idiot" will show on your face. While you're still dead inside. We're just sayin'. Better watch your fingers.)
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Sunday, August 30, 2009
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Song of the Week -- Andy's take
Part of an ongoing series of interviews by Todd Bernhardt with Andy Partridge about the songs we feature each week on MySpace. This week's song, "Scissor Man," is from 1979's Drums and Wires.
No one correctly guessed the hint given two weeks ago ("one of the band's more threatening songs"), so we get a virtual check mark in our virtual victory column. We'll be back in two weeks with an interview about a song that's a good reflection of the city in which the band recorded it.
TB: Let's talk about "Scissor Man." I'd like to start with the lyrics -- they're a bit dark.
AP: I wanted to make an adult morality tale.
TB: Prompted by what?
AP: Struwwelpeter! Do you know the story about the kid who lets his hair grow, lets his nails grow, and just misbehaves all the time? Then, a person comes in with a big set of shears, and basically cuts his fingers off, and there's blood squirting everywhere -- the end!
TB: It's a story that parents used to tell their kids to keep them on the straight and narrow, right?
AP: Yeah! It's a scary tale, because I don't think he gets his nails trimmed -- he gets his fingers cut off!
TB: "He'll never have to worry about those nails again."
AP: [laughs] I liked the idea of there being an adult version of that -- of somebody who would come and punish you if you were being an asshole. Although that's only kind of alluded to in the lyrics, it was the inspiration behind writing it. That, and the love of this very dark, Gothic, Struwwelpeter story, which has been parodied many times. I think there was even a "Struwwelhitler" version during the war, which I'm sure you can find online -- I've seen it. It's basically Adolph with his hair all over the place, and he gets what's coming to him.
TB: So, was there something going on in your life that prompted this?
AP: I think, around that time, I was plugging in to trying to be moral. Perhaps I was becoming a bit of a moral vigilante, because I came up with the idea of "New Broom" as well, on Takeaway. I'd read the "Mr. A" comics by Steve Ditko, which were very highly morally judgmental examples of what you'd call graphic novels these days. I liked the no-gray approach -- it was very black or white, you're good or you're bad. Of course, that was a silly attitude, because everybody is every shade of gray, brown and khaki. But at the time, I guess it helped me think more clearly about the world, in terms of right and wrong. You know, bringing things into focus -- I had no space in my life then for out-of-focus gray things.
TB: Did you feel as if you were being taken advantage of? Is this you getting revenge?
AP: I don't know if it was as deep as that. I think it was just my state of mind at the time -- I needed to think in terms of good, bad; day, night; right, wrong. I found it very difficult to think in terms of wishy-washy.
TB: It's interesting to hear you say that, and to think about the graphical approach you took to the band's look during the White Music and Go 2 era.
AP: Sure. That was a decision to try to make a graphical language out of that whole thing.
TB: Then you moved into primary colors for Drums and Wires.
AP: So, I guess, this was one of the last of those songs that express this black-and-white, moralistic point of view.
If you read those Ditko things now, they are a bit totalitarian -- my-way-or-the-highway kind of things. But I remember liking that -- there was no gray. You were either good or bad.
TB: Sure. There's a certain clarity you get from that point of view.
AP: Yeah -- that "clear thinking." It's a bit "Right Wing radio." [laughs] But it doesn't have to be! That's the weird thing -- it doesn't have to be Right Wing. It can be Left Wing, center ground, or anywhere. In fact, I see myself pretty much as a centrist nowadays. The fulcrum! [laughs] What a silly fulcrum I am.
TB: [laughing] So, where did this song fall in the writing cycle for the album? One of the earlier ones?
AP: Do you know, I can't remember. I think it was one of the later ones, because I remember that after it was on the album, and we began playing it live, it started to grow much more.
For a start, it got faster and faster, which was insane. I'm sure Dave thought it was comical, but he'd play it faster and faster each night, and be daring us to keep up with it. He'd start off with the pattern, and you could see this evil grin come over him -- "Keep up with this, you mothers! I'm gonna start this song, and you're going to keep up with me! [laughs]
But it actually grew quite a lot live, especially the end section, which on the record was basically made up in the studio. It was basically a, "Okay, well, let's do a little Dub-by ending."
Playing it today, I thought how wishy-washy and half-hearted the end sounded. But it grew into quite a monster live. I mean, we'd be playing that end section for a good five to 10 minutes live! [laughs]
TB: Yeah, I listened to three of the versions today -- I listened to the studio version, of course, and to the BBC version that's on Rag and Bone Buffet, which is faster...
AP: That version, I think, is better than the album version.
TB: And I can see why you'd think that, too -- the song sounds more fully developed. It sounds like you guys had been playing it more.
AP: We'd had more time to live with it, and play it live.
TB: And then there's the Radio 1 Live in Concert version, which is faster still, and longer. Plus, I have an old EP with "Love on a Farmboy's Wages" on one side, and on the other side has live cuts...
AP: And one of them is called "Cut It Out"!
TB: That's right! It's you guys jamming on the "Scissor Man" progression.
˚
AP: Because the actual coal shed attached to "Scissor Man" -- the Dub section -- got so big and long and important live that it overshadowed the song completely. The song became this little tiny hallway on the front -- this little entrance hall -- and when you opened that, you had this Albert Hall of the Dub section!
So, you'd whip through the first bit in a minute, then you'd spend another nine minutes playing the end part. That was one of the few things live I looked forward to -- was getting to the Dub-by bit of "Scissor Man." Because it was different each night.
TB: So, you had a basic structure -- the bass line and drums were more or less the same -- but you and Dave did something different each night?
AP: Yeah, sure -- we'd try to weave in and out. Terry was the one who improvised the least of all of us, because he needed to be "programmed." But he'd settle into his program, and you knew that on some nights he'd be relaxing, because he'd put in these beats and little flourishes -- little snare or timbale and cymbal bashes, punctuating in unusual places between the bass drum.
The "Cut It Out" section at the end became such a thing of its own that it was one of those spots, in the playing, in the night to look forward to -- one of the points where you knew you could fly a bit.
TB: Let's take a step back and talk about recording the studio version. This was obviously back when you guys were arranging songs together.
AP: Yeah. This song sounds to me like a Gothic machine. It's like a Tim Burton kind of construct or something -- Tim Burton before he was Tim Burton [laughs] -- like a slightly Satanic music box or something.
We always used to joke, when we were playing it, that the motif and the chords behind it were kind of like an old-fashioned, cheesy opening to a sitcom -- "open to living room" chords. You know how the motif kind of descends as it goes on? You get to a point you'd want to throw in a major chord -- which is what we used to end it on live -- which gave it a really cheesy, sitcom feel.
But it's also got a weird, almost like Gilbert and Sullivan changes to it. [sings the vocal line in a semi-operatic way] It's like a dark little musical or something.
It is the daftest song we've ever had, I think.
TB: [laughs] I've got to say, when I was listening to it today -- especially the Radio 1 version -- that I had a big grin on my face, and was thinking, "You know, this is one of the reasons I love these guys." You can tell you were having a great time, and you're playing tight as hell...
AP: It was fun to play! Like I say, it was like a little machine, and each person's part is one of the cogs to this little music box, this dark tale of comeuppance for badasses.
TB: So, how realized was this when you brought it to the band? Did you have the guitar part figured out?
AP: I had the guitar thing and the song -- it was one of those sort of things you work out on your own, and you learn it, and it becomes like a twitch for your hands -- which is why I can still play the vast majority of it these days. It gets set in your muscle memory.
If you had to learn it from scratch, it'd be, "What the fuck am I doing here? This is rather complex!" But I must have kicked it around for a long time on my own and made it turn into one of those muscle-memory things, where each of these little twitches in your hands go to put the runs and chords together.
So, I don't envy being the other members of the band when it was first brought up. They must thought, "What the hell is that, and how do we learn it?"
TB: [laughs] Although it sounds like Dave relished the challenge...
AP: Do you know why? I don't think it's a million miles away from the number he used to enjoy playing the most with Dean Gabber and the Gabberdines, which was "Friday on My Mind," by The Easybeats.
TB: Yeah, I can see what you mean by that! Let's talk about the bass and drum parts for this song -- do you remember working with Colin and Terry at all on this?
AP: You know, very little, actually. I don't know how it came to have all these little bumps and pushes and snatched parts. I know that -- and we've talked about this before -- Colin and Terry had this thing where they had their telepathy going, where they'd push each other on and try to catch each other out. I guess this is one of those songs where the arrangement has that bubbling up to the top, you know?
TB: There's some great stuff on there -- the slides that Colin does, and the little accents that he and Terry emphasize together -- as you say, there's this great push and pull.
AP: It's a very odd drum pattern. Have you sat down and worked the drum part? It's really bizarre!
TB: Oh, definitely. I'll tell you, when I think I can do just about everything Terry can, I'll put on "Cut It Out" -- which is probably the fastest of your versions of this -- and he always surprises me with his precision and endurance. It's tough to keep up with. It's not particularly technical, but to do it right, the way he does it, is not easy.
AP: Do you know, I haven't heard that version in years and years.
TB: He's doing the same hi-hat pattern that he does on "Living Through Another Cuba," and using the roto-tom for accents, with a driving bass drum...
AP: Yeah, I can't think what they call that bass drum pattern -- I mean, it's like disco, but when it's got that slightly Jamaican feel to it, I don't remember what they call it. Ambient Step-a-billy -- I don't know. [laughs] Anyway, the four-on-the-floor bass drum.
TB: [laughing] Yeah, that'll do.
AP: When we came to this very hastily grabbed ending in the studio, which later grew into a monster live, [producer] Steve Lillywhite said, "Did you know that we have a machine that can do this?" It was an Eventide harmonizer.
He said, "Terry, just hit the cymbals for me." Terry hit the cymbals, and then Steve dialed up this thing on the harmonizer where it steps down -- so you'd get these cymbal smashes that Terry does, and they're being caught this harmonizer and being bent down.
TB: Which he must have loved.
AP: I think Terry really liked that. I know Steve Lillywhite liked it -- it was like the effect of the week. "Hey, wow, have you heard this great new thing we discovered?"
TB: So, when you guys were recording, did you have these kinds of effects in your headphones, or did you apply them after the fact?
AP: I think it was probably dialed up later, because they had to set it up in the mix. I don't think they could set it up live, because they didn't quite know what was going to happen. Either did we, because it was pretty much improvised! Even though the album version is the lamest of the improvisations.
TB: The reason I ask is because sometimes that kind of thing will inspire your playing. It's like when you're an actor, and you've been rehearsing your part, but when you get in makeup and costume, it transforms you. Suddenly you're able to take it to the next level.
AP: I know what you mean, but that wasn't the case here. That had to be set up in the mix, because there are a couple of total drop-outs as well, where they punched everything out on the desk.
TB: Toward the very end, around 3:40 I think, the drums stop, and then when they come back in, the kick drum sounds like it has some effect on it that they forgot to pull away.
AP: That's probably reverb. I noticed, playing it on headphones today, that the bass has got reverb on it, which is very unusual. That usually clouds up a mix, but you can hear that he does these slides and things, and they've put that into reverb, and that sort of casts them off.
I think it was the dying days of being interested in Dubbery for me. I went on and took some of this material and did the Takeaway album, and that, for me, satisfied my desire for Dub. "Okay, I don't need to muck about with Dub too much in the future." So, I guess this was the prow of the hill in my Dub fascination.
TB: Tell me about this deep bass note that comes in about halfway through the song. Where does that come from?
AP: Oh, that's Mr. MiniKorg! Our little Korg synthesizer would be put on a rack unit, to the left side of the mixing desk in the studio and be left there, and if anyone had a little idea that couldn't be done on guitar, bass or drums, it'd be, "Run to the Korg and try to explain what it is," you know? So that's where that deep, rumbling octave comes from.
TB: And then Dave manages to do that live as well, and uses the same keyboard, I presume, for the high keyboard parts?
AP: Yes, to do those little, kind of whistling parts. Those little, pernickety parts that sound like a Sputnik swearing or something. [laughs] A bad-tempered Sputnik.
TB: The stereo separation on the album version is quite severe.
AP: I'm on the left in your headphones, and Dave's on the right. I also think there's a bit of slapback on Dave's guitar, which casts him across the stereo image as well.
TB: With the drums, the hi-hat is only in the right channel, it seems.
AP: It's far right, isn't it! I noticed that, and thought it was unusual. Those were the days where I didn't pay that much attention to the mixing and all that. The fascination with being in the studio grew more and more as the years went on. Now, I think, "Whoa, that's a radical move, putting that hi-hat right so far right."
I've got a note here that says I could very much hear the XTC of Barry Andrews playing this song.
TB: Yeah, I can see that.
AP: And I think maybe I might have even had that in my head -- it may have even been put together before Barry left.
TB: That's why I was asking when you wrote it, in terms of writing for the album, but you initially said that you thought it was one of the later songs. But, thinking of it, do you think you wrote it earlier?
AP: That's a point -- I just contradicted myself.
TB: [laughing] Hah! Got you.
AP: You have got me. I am fallible. I guess I can't really remember whether it was an early or later one, but you know what? When we say early or later, we're probably only talking about a period of three weeks!
TB: Yeah, that's true -- you guys were given so little time to make albums back then.
AP: It was like, "Okay, well, this tour's finished, we've got you chaps booked in the studio in five weeks' time, so that's three weeks to write the material, 10 days to rehearse, and then you go in there."
TB: And, as you said, you could have been messing around with this guitar lick for months before you decided to build an actual song around it.
AP: I probably was, yeah. And this was banged down so quickly in the studio -- for Drums and Wires, we spent the majority of the time recording "Making Plans for Nigel." That took about a third of all the recording time for the album, and then it was something like two more weeks to do the rest of the album, with a couple of weeks to mix it.
So, writing it early for an album was probably only the difference between week one, week two, or week three. That's how telescoped the time period was.
TB: I had one more question that I wanted to ask -- as I listened to each one of these versions, you seemed to enunciate less and less with the lyrics.
AP: Yeah, it's not important! They know the song, so it's more important to have fun and deconstruct it, and try to do something new with it.
It just becomes percussive noises and yelps and squeals and stuff. It's all about Andy having fun. If I'm not having fun, I would have quit touring a lot earlier. You've got to make it fun for yourself. And they know the song -- they don't want me to sing it like Julie Andrews. [laughs]
TB: [laughing] Although, that could be a pretty good arrangement, when you think about it!
AP: [laughing] Now I've said that, you know what? I want to hear that version.
©2009 Todd Bernhardt and Andy Partridge. All rights reserved.
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Sunday, August 23, 2009
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Song of the Week
Last week, Prairie Prince discussed what it was like to drum for XTC during 1998's Apple Venus sessions. One song we weren't able to cover, because of technical (*cough* user *cough*) difficulties, was "The Wheel and the Maypole," the last track on 2000's Wasp Star (Apple Venus, Vol. 2).
Not a lot we can say about this song that Andy hasn't already said. What? You haven't heard what he's already said? Then click the link above for an opportunity to do so.
The only thing we'll add is how stunning this song is, in every way. Let's hope it's not their last, but if it is, it's a helluva song to go out on.
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Monday, August 17, 2009
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We, the assembled XTCfans of MySpace, wish a very happy birthday to one Colin Ivor Moulding, who came into this world on this day back in 1955. Best wishes for the day and many more!
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Sunday, August 16, 2009
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Album of the Week -- Prairie Prince
This week we've got our second interview with artist and drummer extraordinaire Prairie Prince -- founding member of The Tubes and current drummer for Todd Rundgren (who will be touring, with Prairie on the drummer's throne, in the coming months to play his seminal album A Wizard, a True Star in its entirety, along with some other favorites).
Last time, Prairie remembered what it was like to work with the band on the Skylarking sessions; this week, he spoke with Todd Bernhardt about recording with XTC during 1998's Apple Venus sessions. The song we'll put up this week in Prairie's honor is "Greenman," since he does such a stunning job on it.
Before we get going, we have a tale of technological woe to tell -- though the conversation surrounding the AV sessions lasted for almost an hour-and-a-half, for some reason the second tape didn't record (user error, no doubt, though the user has trouble accepting this), so we only have the first hour, which covers everything up to "In Another Life." During the rest of the conversation, Prairie talked about "My Brown Guitar" and "The Wheel and the Maypole," as well some of the personal dynamics among the band during the sessions. We will try to catch up with him later about this, and hopefully will amend this blog accordingly. In the meantime, please enjoy the hour of conversation we managed to capture.
We'll be back in two weeks with a look at one of the band's more threatening songs. Speculate away!
TB: Let's talk about the Apple Venus session. You have said there were some tense moments there, and it seems to me that much of that could have had to do with the fact that Andy's demos were so well-realized, or fully baked, so there wasn't the opportunity for the other members of the band to have the same amount of input that they might have previously had, when they were all arranging songs together.
PP: I would say that his songs were not only fully baked, but well-done! [laughs] I received a batch of demos in the mail, and I was very excited to get it. The anticipation was killing me. They had called me maybe a couple of weeks before that, and secured me as their drummer -- if I indeed liked what they were going to send me. I said, "Oh, I'm sure I'll like it."
After I'd sat down and listened to the demos, I just went, "Do I really need to go do this?" [laughs] I mean, the drum programming was flawless, and the songs sounded great. Probably the only thing missing was real strings, which they ended up doing at Abbey Road.
TB: When you got these demos, how many songs were on there?
PP: Everything! Everything was on there except for the two songs that they wrote later on -- "Standing in for Joe" and "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love." Those were written later, as the second album came out, I think.
TB: Yeah, they added those, but the funny thing about that is that they were both actually older songs -- "Man Who Murdered Love" was written around the time of Nonsuch, while "Standing in for Joe" was originally meant for the Bubblegum album that never came to fruition.
PP: Oh, no kidding? I wish I had those demos right now, but I can't find them -- I've been looking through my tape box, but I have about 5,000 tapes [laughs], and it's totally unorganized! I know I’m going to find the tape at some point. The songs might have almost been in the same order as it ended up on the album -- on Apple Venus, Vol. I, anyway.
TB: Tell me about the call you got.
PP: I think Dave called me first and asked if I would want to come over and record, and that Andy would be following up with a call to discuss details. I said, "Of course -- sure."
When I heard from Andy, he said, "We were kicking it around, listening to our last three albums, and decided that we liked your drumming the best of all three." He wouldn't say that he liked the album, just that he liked the drumming! [laughs] He was still a little bitter at that point, I think.
I was very flattered by that, and I said, "Great!" I think he offered me a certain amount of money, which seemed a bit low to me at the time, but I just thought, "Whatever -- I'll do anything to go over and have this experience again with these fabulous musicians."
So, I accepted the job, and I think I got the demos about 10 days later. About a month later I was on my way over there -- flew to London, and then took a cab, or maybe someone picked me up, and drove to Chipping Norton Studios. Chipping Norton is in a little village in the Cotswolds. The recording studio had been a boy's school probably 20 years before or something, and I think some pretty classic albums have been done there.
It was a working and living situation -- they had the studios, with some side rooms or isolation rooms, and then the rest of it was a big house, with living quarters and a kitchen and a couple of little cottages on the side. It was just very charming, and the whole thing was great. We all lived there, though I think the engineers came in daily. The band stayed there, along with some cooks, housekeepers and gardeners who were living there.
It was amazing. The first day I got there, Andy came out and greeted me, and said, "So good to see you again." We had a nice laugh, and Colin and Dave were there -- we all sat down and sort of reacquainted ourselves, then went immediately into the studio and started on the first track! [laughs]
I said, "We're going to play together, right?" And Andy said, "Oh no no no, I'm just going to put down some scratch guitar, and a little scratch vocal, and I want you to go in and put drums on it." I don't recall which was the first song, but I have a feeling it was "I'd Like That."
You know, I was going through these songs and trying to remember the order that we recorded them in, but for the life of me, I cannot remember.
"I'd Like That" actually doesn't have drums on it! It has me playing my knees, and some syncopated, Flamenco-style handclaps that I think both Andy and I did together. But otherwise I was sitting there on a stool with my knees getting redder and redder with each take. [laughs] And I remember there were many takes! He just keep saying, "That sounds great! Beat it up, beat it up!"
TB: [laughing] Easy to say when it's someone else's legs, right?
PP: Right!
TB: Did you originally try the song on drums?
PP: I think I might have. I might have sat down and tried a real simple, kind of marching-snare thing, but then he said he liked it better with hands.
TB: So, you recorded your parts before the band had recorded any significant backing tracks? It was just scratch vocals and guide guitars and such?
PP: Yeah. I would be pretty much sitting around with Andy, mostly, who would just record a simple guitar part or maybe a little drum machine click thing that I played along with on a couple of songs, and a scratch vocal. I'd be sitting around while he would do this first, to show me how it was going to go. Of course, we'd refer to the demo. Then I'd go in, and he'd kind of work me through it.
I don't really remember doing more than one song a day, and we were there for a solid month, doing this whole record. Nobody else was really performing much at all, except for Andy, and Colin, when he would do his songs -- "Fruit Nut," "Frivolous Tonight" and "In Another Life."
I played on those song just by myself, playing along with a scratch vocal from Colin, and maybe an acoustic guitar.
TB: No Dave playing piano or anything like that?
PP: I think Dave actually did overdub some piano on one -- I remember him playing piano on a few songs, and I think that was one of them.
TB: It has such a strong piano feel to it.
PP: Yeah. That's really the only time I remember Dave doing too much. I think he did maybe one or two guitar parts -- little overdubs, and maybe he wasn't really happy with them. They were just more concerned about getting the drums while I was there.
TB: So, it was a month, basically, getting the drum tracks down?
PP: Pretty much, yeah. But we did all of the songs on both records. And then I guess they replaced my parts on a bunch of the stuff on Wasp Star. I played on maybe four of the songs.
TB: Yep, you're on "Stupidly Happy," "In Another Life," "My Brown Guitar" and then, the last song in the XTC catalog, "The Wheel and the Maypole."
PP: That was a little disturbing to me because -- I don't know, [chuckles] as I remembered the others, the way I played them, I thought that at least several of them were just as good, if not better, as what they ended up with. But who am I to say? I don't know all the circumstances around it.
I know it was much later when they released Wasp Star. They sat on that stuff for about a year.
TB: Yeah, I think that had a lot to do with it.
PP: I wish I had some rough mixes of the tracks that I did with them.
TB: So, they didn't send you back with scratch tracks to remember the session by?
PP: No. I wasn't allowed any of that. But also, I'd love to hear the demos again, too. Those did come out, didn't they?
TB: Yeah -- Homespun and Homegrown are the demo releases for those albums.
Concerning the logistics of you going over there -- did you bring any of your own equipment, or did you hire everything?
PP: I had Yamaha supply me with a set of drums, and Paiste with a set of cymbals. Plus, there was percussion that Andy had around the studio that we used -- tambourines, maracas, stuff like that.
TB: Did you just have a single snare, or did you ask Yamaha for several types?
PP: Several -- I think I had a brass snare, and a couple different wood snares.
TB: Different depths? Different types of wood?
PP: Yeah for both. I think I had a birch, and a maple. I'm sure I used them all, or at least tested them all, in front of Andy and [producer] Hadyn [Bendall] and [engineer] Barry Hammond.
TB: Was your kit a birch kit?
PP: As I recall, they were birch.
TB: That's your preference?
PP: The first set I got from Yamaha was birch, and I've always liked them, yeah. I have a good set of maples that I like as well, but they don't quite have the attack that birch does. Maple is warmer, which is good in certain situations. I also like beech drums. I like oak -- I like all of them! [laughs] I like them all for different reasons. The oak drums have the most attack of all -- they're so loud.
TB: That's the hardest wood, right?
PP: Yeah, I think so. They're wonderful drums. But the maple has a special warmth, and the birch has a special sound to me because I've been playing it for so long. The beech -- I don't know if I've actually played a whole drum set, but I've played several of the snare drums, and I like them a lot. I have that Yamaha Akira Jimbo-model 13"x7" beech snare, and it's really good for that kind of popping, Funk sound.
TB: So, let's talk about the songs themselves. "River of Orchids" doesn't have any drums at all, correct?
PP: But what a great percussion track! The dripping water percussion is so unique. I'm sure that was the first song on the demo, and I remember being struck by what a great build that was.
TB: And the pizzicato strings are very percussive in their own right.
PP: Very percussive.
TB: Did you and Andy ever talk about the possibility of adding any drums or percussion for that song?
PP: I think I might have been pushing toward that, but in the end, I guess he didn't need it! [laughs] Or he had the idea that the plucking strings would be enough. It's incredible stuff -- I love that song.
TB: You've already pretty much talked about "I'd Like That," so tell me about "Easter Theatre." It's hard for me to understand how you could have played drums for that without any other reference than a scratch vocal and guitar, and the demo in your head.
PP: We did a lot of that song in sections. In fact, we did several of the songs in sections. With this song, for example, we did one whole track of cymbal swells -- you know, which you hear with what sound like tympani rolls on the floor toms.
I wish I could talk to Andy, and see what he remembers! [laughs] Because I'd hate for him to go, "That's not how it happened at all!"
TB: [laughs] But you know what? When we talk about this stuff, sometimes he says, "Oh, you'll have to ask Prairie about that."
PP: [laughs] Okay, good -- so I can just make it up as I go along!
But I remember doing a lot of things in sections. He'd say something like, "Okay, that was a brilliant take for that section." Then he'd ask, "Are you tired? Let me walk on your back." He had great pride in his back-walking massage technique.
TB: [incredulously] He actually walked on your back?
PP: On the studio floor, yes! He's very good at it, too. I'd be sitting there all day, doing these tracks, and would need a break. It'd be, "Is it time for tea, or a back rub?" [laughs]
We'd have breakfast in the morning, and everybody would be watching the Teletubbies -- which I guess had just come out -- while eating Marmite and toast, and then we'd be off to the studio. We'd start the takes, and there'd be a tea break around 10 or something, then lunch, then work again until dinner, and then work until 10 or 11 at night. That was every day for a month!
TB: Wow. So you earned your paycheck!
PP: Man, I don't even remember a paycheck! [laughs] But, you know, I was nervous about the whole thing, and when I got there, I was so jetlagged. I remember reading all my notes that I had taken after listening to the demos for a week or so, trying to remember the parts and stuff. I'd be up at 3 in the morning until 5 or 6, and then I'd sleep until 8, then get into the studio.
TB: I was surprised that they'd pull you right into the studio to work on "I'd Like That," because coming from the West Coast, you were looking at a significant plane ride. You had to be jet-lagged.
PP: Yeah. We definitely went right into it.
TB: Can you sleep on planes?
PP: Usually I can, yeah.
TB: That's a gift. I wish I could.
PP: Even in economy, in the middle seat. I can usually just put my head on the table, and just go out. [laughs] Without drugs!
TB: [laughs] So, with "Easter Theatre," you built it up in sections -- do you remember Andy talking about any particular feel he was going for?
PP: He just wanted it very orchestral and symphonic. Something that would remind you of church on Easter Day, with the smells of beautiful spring flowers and chocolate bunnies. [laughs] I loved it. I just love that song.
TB: There are part of that song that remind me of the Beatles, especially the very dead-sounding drums. Did you do anything in particular to the kit, or was that all after-the-fact processing?
PP: I remember that Andy would definitely sit back in the producer's chair, as we were working on the drum sounds before each track, and really work the tuning. He would pretty much tell me how he wanted it to sound -- "Tune this up, tune this down a little bit, play this, play that." A lot of time was spent on the sound, I recall.
For that song in particular, there might have been some dampening to make it sound a little more tympani-like than tom-like. When I was listening to it today, I was shocked at how much it did sound like tympani, or an orchestral drum ensemble.
TB: I was wondering if perhaps you had done any overdubs using orchestral percussion.
PP: Maybe they actually did some things later on, when they got to Abbey Road with the orchestra. I didn't do any overdubs, other than doing the sections separately, which is almost like overdubbing.
TB: "Knights in Shining Karma" has, I think, just wood blocks on it -- is that you or Andy?
PP: I think that's Andy. I don't think I ever played on that one. Great song. I love the title.
TB: "Frivolous Tonight" -- I had talked to Colin about this a little while ago, and one of the questions I had for him was whether you played this with brushes or not, because it sounds kind of like that.
PP: I think I played it with Blasticks. That one, and "In Another Life" -- I might have done both of those together with him, maybe in one day. I'm not sure, but we kind of knocked those out.
TB: That makes sense with the Blasticks, because some of these songs make me wonder if it's brushes or sticks. And doing things in sections makes sense, too, because that would make it easy to switch between brushes or Blasticks, and regular sticks.
PP: That's true. Of course, sometimes I just flipped them -- Blasticks can have a wooden handle.
Colin's songs on these albums really have that Kinks, four-on-the-floor, boom-boom-boom-boom "Sunny Afternoon" feel to them. [laughs] Which was kind of fun to play! And, compared to Andy, Colin was easy to amuse. [imitates Colin] "Oh, yeah, that was fine. That was just right." Where Andy would take me for six or seven hours on one part, I did at least two tracks with Colin in one day.
TB: "Greenman" is a rather epic production.
PP: When I first heard the demo, that was my favorite song of the bunch. I almost like the demo better than the way he mixed the drums on the finished version! I was a little disappointed in the way that the drums sounded, as opposed to the way the demo sounded, where the drum groove seemed like it was more up-front in the mix than the final version. But I guess he decided that the orchestra was more important than the throbbing Middle Eastern groove, which is more prominent on the demo.
TB: Although there are some cool things you do on there that really stand out, like that little triplet you play right before the vocals come in...
PP: Yeah, a couple little embellishments that I added.
TB: Do you remember what you did with the equipment on that, what kind of drums you were playing?
PP: I pretty much just played the drums I was playing, I think.
TB: Did you tune them up high?
PP: I might have tuned them up a bit, yeah, to get a little more a tabla-ish sound on some of the toms. Plus, I think I used the snare drum without the snares pulled up against the bottom head, so it sounded like a high-pitched drum. I think that might have been the case as well -- let's say it was! [laughs] Now that you've asked me all these questions, I need to go back and listen again!
Since then, I've done a lot of research on the history of the Green Man, since Andy brought this character to my attention.
TB: Has he made his way into any of your artwork?
PP: He has! The cover of Tabula Rasa, which I did for Lyle Workman, turned out to be an interpretation of the Green Man. He's not really green, but there are leaves coming out of his head, and all that -- there's the whole rebirth theme.
I've done his last three album covers. He just came out with a new album called Harmonic Crusader -- it's all instrumental, very majestic, symphonic orchestration, with lots of Jazz infusions to it.
TB: Do you play on any of those albums?
PP: I haven't played on any of his records, unfortunately. I requested the next one -- I told him, if he doesn't ask me, I'm not going to do his cover! [laughs] "Oh, by all means!" he said -- like he never thought of it. But, of course, he's played with some great drummers -- he has Simon Phillips on this one, and Vinnie Colaiuta.
TB: Oh, Jesus. You shouldn't feel too bad, then!
PP: Yeah, it's sick. The drum solos on this record are unbelievable.
TB: So, back to Apple Venus -- the end of "Your Dictionary" is pretty much tambourine and bells, I think.
PP: That was all Andy. I didn't do anything on that song, though I love it as well. Very Beatlesque to me.
TB: That's one that, for me, seems almost better in demo form because it's more immediate and raw.
PP: I felt the same way.
TB: Did you guys ever talk about you playing drums on it, and then you both decided not to?
PP: I don't think he ever intended to have any drums on it, and I think a lot of the things that he did, he added later, after I had gone. I don't recall working on that song at all, or even hearing them work on it.
TB: "Fruit Nut" is the next one. There are some cool things you put in here, like the hi-hat on the "three" during the verse, then during the chorus, you're doing some cool accents. When I was talking to Colin about "Frivolous Tonight," he seemed almost apologetic, basically saying that he felt kind of bad about just asking you to do "meat and two veg"-type playing. He wasn't really stretching you too much on that, but it sounds like on this one you had a bit more room.
PP: I think he gave me a little bit of leeway on this one, and just sort of said, "Play it how you feel it." I knocked it out pretty soon, I think -- we went through it a few times, and he said, "Yeah, that sounds great, now let's start taking it." He gave me a few ideas of course, but he was pretty happy with the drum part on it. And what a wacky song it is! [laughs]
TB: His demo wasn't quite as realized as Andy's, so it must have been quite a surprise for you to hear the finished product!
PP: It was, yeah. Pretty amazing. In fact, his demos were pretty simple, if I remember right -- just him and an acoustic guitar, maybe with a little drum machine part.
TB: Did you play any cymbals at all on "Fruit Nut"?
PP: I don't think so, except for the hi-hat.
TB: Do you remember Colin asking specifically for that?
PP: I recall him saying he wanted kind of a thudding song, very Troggs-like.
That was one of the things we did when we got a little bored in the studio, or had some time -- someone at the studio had the outtakes of those Troggs sessions, and we listened to the whole thing. Everyone would chime out the parts they knew so well -- [imitates accent] "Drummers! I shit them." [laughs] It was just crazy -- we were dying laughing. That was a fun day.
TB: "I Can't Own Her" is the next one, and this strikes me as the most orchestral of the bunch, especially at the end, where you're doing those runs down the toms.
PP: Yeah, I was thinking of Martin Denny as I was doing that. He had this kind of Trader Vic's circular "toms in a pattern" feel to his playing.
TB: This was one of the songs where Andy worked closely with you on the tuning?
PP: He definitely did, yeah. He wanted the toms to go exactly with the rest of the music. The cymbal swells and the short little groove sections were all probably done separately.
What a gorgeous song that is. I think that's my favorite song, now that I think about it. "Greenman" for its groove, but "I Can't Own Her" for the incredible feeling you get. It's like a beautiful dream.
TB: When those strings swell like that, you kind of feel it in the base of your spine, don't you?
PP: Yeah.
TB: I think it's probably the most improved of the demo songs. The orchestra and the orchestration on it really take it to the next level.
PP: Which is also true with "The Last Balloon." On those two, the orchestra is just incredible.
I was sad not to have been included when they did those sessions at Abbey Road.
TB: How soon after you finished your parts did they go into that studio?
PP: I think it was a few weeks, maybe a month later. So, it wasn't an option for me to go, but I would have loved to have witnessed that.
TB: Have you ever worked at that studio before?
PP: Nope. I've worked at Apple Studios, the Beatles' studio on Savile Row, when I recorded with Nicky Hopkins, but never at Abbey Road.
TB: So, the next song is "Harvest Festival," which sounds to me like it could be another Blasticks song.
PP: I think I might have used real brushes on that one.
TB: With sticks during other sections of it?
PP: Yep, this was another one recorded in major sections, waiting for my part to come in -- trembling, hoping I would get it right! [laughs] For the hundredth time that day. No offense, Andy!
TB: [laughing] He knows what he wants!
PP: Yes he does! And he knows how to get it. I'm glad I could finally get it before dinner, or before bed. [laughs]
I love "Harvest Festival." My girlfriend, Diana, came over about halfway through the sessions and lived with me, partook in the breakfasts, and witnessed the building of a lot of these songs. Which was nice, because at that point I needed some support. Plus, it was early in our relationship, so these songs really bring back such wonderful memories of my love for her.
TB: The last one on Apple Venus, Vol. 1 is "The Last Balloon."
PP: My favorite part of that is when the vocal leads into the flugelhorn. And the orchestration on that song -- it's just like magic.
TB: The whole track is very atmospheric. Dud you guys ever talk about you doing on full kit? I think it's Andy doing a ride cymbal, and just that, right?
PP: I thought I played it!
TB: Did you?
PP: I definitely played that, yeah. I was listening to it today, trying to remember if I actually played more than a ride cymbal. I thought I might have played some brushes as well, but I can't decipher the difference between the sound of the "hot air" in the balloon, and the actual drum -- I'm going to have to listen to this one again.
But it might only be the ride cymbal, and I definitely played it. He might have re-done it! [laughs] You'd have to ask him, but I remember spending hours on the part.
TB: [laughs] Oh my. You would think that would be an easy thing, but again, with the lack of the other instruments, with so much focus on the part it would be easy to keep re-taking it, going for exactly the right thing.
When I was still doing a lot of recording, I got to the point where I liked to record the drums by themselves first, with just a click track and the song in my head. When you hear the drums by themselves like that, it really does expose everything. You know that if you can come away with a bare-bones drum track that sounds and feels good, once you put the other instruments on top of it, it's going to sound that much better.
PP: You can't hurt it, yeah. That's absolutely true. I love to go back and hear basics of recording projects that I've done, where you just have a simple guitar part, and bass and drums, because you really get a feel for the song. I have a lot of basic tracks like that from The Tubes that I'll go back to and listen to a lot. I love some of the drums sounds that you hear before they get squashed!
TB: Yeah, before they get swallowed up by the other sounds!
So, let's get into Wasp Star -- let's talk about the songs that made it on the album, of course, but I do want to hear about the other songs you recorded, too, and your memories of those.
PP: Sure thing. The first song, "Playground," was so much fun to play, and I thought I did an excellent job on it! When I heard the final version, I've got to say, I thought, "Well, I liked my version just as well, if not better." But, you know, it still sounded great.
The one track on the record where I was most astounded by Chuck's playing -- a song that I was having a hard time with -- was, "We're All Light." He did an excellent job on that.
TB: That's a tough groove, isn't it.
PP: It is. It's a tough groove, and even though I think I got close with it, I had the feeling that Andy wasn't satisfied. That one, and "You and the Clouds" -- the two kind of African-sounding tracks on the album. I thought Chuck did a great job on both of those.
TB: Yeah. his playing is very groovy and fluid on those tracks.
On "Stupidly Happy," they did keep your playing of course. Now, it's not a hard part...
PP: [laughs] You know what was hard? Having to do it over and over and over again. I must have done that song 100 times.
TB: Trying to play a simple part consistently, without deviation, throughout a song can in some ways be harder than switching it up, playing fills, and all that!
PP: Yeah. You feel like all three of the Ramones' drummers at once! [laughs]
But yeah, to play the same thing over and over, and feel like you're building it, but not really changing your part that much, is really hard. You can only get a little more intense, to try to match him as he builds the song and adds each instrument -- you want to make the drums sound more exciting and bigger, but it's still the same part, no matter what.
TB: Which had to be even tougher, because you were playing with only a scratch guitar and vocal.
PP: Exactly.
TB: You want to fill the space, right?
PP: Well, that's it. I would try to build it, to try to get it more exciting, but every time I would do that, he would say, "No, just keep it as straight and intense as possible." Very Stones-ish, you know.
The last sound engineer who we used for Todd Rundgren, our front-of-house guy, would always start his after-show tape with "Stupidly Happy." For years! As soon as the lights went up, he would put that on.
TB: Did he know that you played on it?
PP: Actually, I don't think he knew I played on it when it became one of his favorite songs, but I told him later. He was a big XTC fan.
TB: It's funny how XTC is so popular among musicians. Musicians definitely "get" the band.
"In Another Life" -- you've got that big, thumping bass drum going throughout. Was there anything in particular you did to that, to get that sound? I remember, when you and I talked about Skylarking, that you said you took some bass drums and turned them on their side on "Sacrificial Bonfire," to create "faux tympanis."
PP: We didn't do anything that like on this record. All I can remember about this session is that it was just me, the engineer and Colin, and I remember Colin saying, "Keep it simple and play what you feel." I did, and I think he was pretty happy with the say it came out.
TB: Would he have been playing along with you?
PP: No. He never played along with me. He did on Skylarking, but when I asked if we were going to do that for this session, he said, "No, I don't think we need to do that." And I went, [dejectedly] "Oh!" [laughs]
TB: [laughing] "But I like that! I want to play with you!"
PP: Yeah! I love playing with that guy. And Dave! And Andy! But pretty much this whole record, I played by myself.
[And, at this point, the first tape ended, and the second tape failed to record. We will update the blog when and if we can.]
©2009 Todd Bernhardt and Prairie Prince. All rights reserved.
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Monday, August 10, 2009
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Song of the Week
This week we give you an unreleased-single version of last week's song, "Ball and Chain." Recorded in March 1981 with Alan Winstanley and Clive Langer, this version finally saw the light of day when it was released as the final track on Disc 2 of 2002's Coat of Many Cupboards. The version most of us knew for 20 years was on 1982's English Settlement.
Which version do you prefer?
We'll be back next week with a special guest who has fond memories of a month spent working with the band.
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