I’m occasionally of the opinion that if I were to
write an autobiography, and simply stop at the point at which we started getting
gigs in London, it would be a rip-roaring success with an unholy clamour for
the sequel – of course in reality wouldn’t even be worth the tax Amazon would dodge
on it. I’ve very much lived my career so far in a sort of parallel universe to
those who have made it though, and who have retired
to a life of speaking tours, and the occasional showcase gig in (say) Pompeii. Nevertheless
we share many of the fundamental aspects of our life and experiences. I’ve got sleeping in the van stories,
sleeping in someone’s kitchen, sleeping in a dormitory at a community centre in
Denmark…in fact upon reflection, very many of these rip-roaring anecdotes
involve either finding, or being overly concerned with securing, places to
sleep. There more I consider it though, the more I tend toward the school of thought which holds that I may have misjudged the mood of the memoir-buying public in this
respect. You see what I mean though – it’s hardly doing our second gig at Woodstock, is it?
I do have my own little moments though – like this morning, when the SftBH song ‘Another Happy Day’ came on in the car through the magic algorithm of random play. I see by reference to the electric internet that it came out over twelve years ago. Twelve years before that I was covering Gram Parsons songs in gods kitchen, which had a nice sort of synchronicity when we put a GP in-joke on the credits for our next album. Back in 2005 though, we were in the middle of a hugely creative and collaborative patch. I think we were still making up the set list as we went along whenever we played live, which certainly kept things interesting for the rest of the band, whilst at home the creative nucleus of the band swooped and dived around each other like two starlings hatching a plot. Helen and I were chipping in on songs with each other remotely, but I think this was one of the first times we sat in a room and decided we were going to write a song together. She wrote the words, I came up with most of the progressions and Mr Wendell, along for the ride for the evening, provided a vital intervention with the odd passing chord in the bridge (he described it as either a “Paul Weller chord or a Beatle one…”) which forever after I had to check the fingering of before we played it live, and without ever quite getting it quite right.
The whole thing was intended as a sub-Bible tribute
song (certainly on my part) - an intent further magnified when everybody else
declined to sing it and I had to adopt my best Boo Hewerdine croon in order to
perform the vocal. It was never going to win me first place on an obscure singer-songwriter edition of Stars in their Eyes, but given
that my usual party trick up to this point was a note-imperfect rendition of
Tonight’s the Night I reckon I got away with that one. Occasional auteur Pete ‘Radar’
Pawsey – a man who had (and I strongly believe still has) the uncanny ability
of being able to tinker seemingly pointlessly for hours on end before coming up
with a moment of inexplicable genius which puts the cherry on top of whichever
Bakewell you’re currently involved in icing – put on a Skywriting dobro part to counterpoint Russ Barnes' lovely answering mandolin. As
evidence of both our creative and collaborative instincts we then decided that
what the outro really needed was a sung/spoken rapid and rhythmic vocal at the
end, which we duly adjured from our friend Matt* who accepted both the
commission of writing a short essay on the theme of Another Happy Day and the
lack of attention afforded him when he actually came to record his part with
impressive equanimity. To be fair, his wife was wearing an astonishingly short
skirt when she accompanied him to the studio, and the sofa in the control room
was not a forgiving place to sit and think, or even to just sits, so at this remove perhaps you’ll
forgive us our temporary distraction from the job in hand.
We also overdubbed and timecoded the sound of James’s
camera, which we’d noticed made a sound in the same key as our song when he switched
it on, and which he was duly credited with playing in the sleeve notes. Studio
engineer and unflappable sound guru Steve Tsoi arranged the stereo microphones
with an impressively straight face for that session, I seem to remember.
Upon reflection, I guess this isn’t the sort of anecdotery
by which rock memoirs are judged after all. “We wrote a song, we recorded a
song, we hung out with our friends and ate rotisserie chicken from the Tesco’s
in Tiptree” it pretty much runs. Still, whenever he hears Harvest on the radio while out cruising
in his LincVolt, I wonder if Neil Young chuckles to himself and thinks “That
day with Nash on the lake. Man that was fun…”?
*In the same way that Matt came up with the rap part
on this song, our friends Wendell and Kilbey did some guitar parts, a friend of
Helen’s Dad played the accordion and the mandolin player’s girlfriend came in
and did a lead vocal for us. At times it was a bit like the von Trapp family in
there, with us going “Adjure, adjure, to you and you and you…”.**
**Do it in the accent.
