The Wasteland
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The Wasteland is the second track from the “Small Things” album, which depicts a ‘long/lost’ weekend charting the attempts to reconcile a relationship in crisis. The album begins with ‘The Big Freeze’, the initial indication of the perilous state that this particular relationship has reached. I deliberately left the sequence of events ambivalent on this album, which can of course lay one open to misinterpretation. The very wonderful electronic music fanzine “A Closer Listen” reviewed the album on it’s release, commenting that the instances of upbeat tracks suggested that the album was ‘an unusual take on the subject (of separation), presumably from the point of view of someone who feels spiritually lifted by the break’. Tempting though it is to take credit for coming up with something original, I can’t in all honesty say this was my intention. I had got a scenario very much mapped out in my own mind, and maybe it’s a failure of my intent that this doesn’t read clearly, but I rather like the idea that listeners can arrive at such radically different interpretations of pieces of music. The more positive, up tempo tracks on the album, such as “The Road Trip”, alternate with despondent ones such as “The Night Drive”, in the way that we so often seem to lurch from a state of unbridled optimism to one of fear and suspicion. We never really know what someone is thinking, even when we’ve been close to them for many years. This is, of course, the greatest gift that the universe ever bestowed on us, and the reason that a) we are able to have relationships in the first place, and b) why so much of these relationships are taken up with asking “What are you thinking?”. As any one in any relationship will know, there is absolutely no right answer to this; it’s right up there with “Does this look good on me?”. I suppose if I wanted to, I could take the idea that we are ultimately ignorant of each other’s thoughts as the explanation for keeping the course of events and scenarios on the album so deliberately opaque, but, dear reader, that really would be pushing artistic license too far. Suffice to say that I’m open to being told what any of the pieces mean- after all, if it’s true for you, it’s true.
One of the most over used phrases of the modern age is ‘in the real world’. The implication is usually along the lines of “It’s all very well, for you, but I live in a much more authentic environment, where worrying about whatever may be concerning you is a privilege I, or let’s face it, any ‘normal’ person, can ill-afford”. It can at worst enable people to avoid taking moral responsibility on issues- as living in this ‘real world’ exempts them from having to exercise such problematic ethical choices- or at best imbue them with a certain kind of artisan self-righteousness. I was a firm believer in this notion of what is ‘real’ myself, until I had a conversation with a friend who was teaching yoga to a lady in Knightsbridge- throwaway middle-class phrases, we got ‘em!- who had recently flown her son by private jet to the South of France because he’d had been feeling poorly; nothing too serious, but she knew a specialist/friend there, and had the means to take him straight away. I made a comment about living ‘in the real world’, and was surprised to find Natasha defend her client- of whom she was no great fan- by making the point that:” For them, that is the real world. That is the world they live in. A rarefied world, yes, a privileged world, obviously, but a real world nonetheless. For them, almost everyone else’s world is surreal by comparison, so it’s not valid to talk of one person living a more ‘real’ existence than another”.
So if it’s real for you, that’s good enough for me. And if it’s real good for you, why, so much the better.
Psychogeography Teacher
Making field recordings- otherwise known as standing around furtively in public places with a microphone- can be a tricky business. Today seemed like the perfect day to be wandering the highways and byways of the capital to capture sonic gems for the tracks I’m currently working on for the album ‘Liminalondon.’ Beautiful though the day was, it was also unreasonably windy, and the two places I most wanted to take recordings from- Parliament Hill and Primrose Hill, for a track called “The View”- were suffering more than most. Without getting too technical, the louder the source, the lower the microphone on the hand-held recorder I was using adjusts its level, which meant that many of the conversations I was oh-so-casually eavesdropping, and which seemed to be yielding up psychogeographer’s gold, were barely audible, as the persistent Metropolitan scirocco kept ducking the recording levels.
You also don’t know when making these recordings what will turn out to be the real treasures. There was a very eccentric chap at the top of Parliament Hill using a metal detector- remember them? must have Christmas presents around 1979, last seen clogging up Ebay alongside untouched Soda Streams- and I was concerned that the noise of his machine, a steady blip-blip-blip, like some badly dubbed R2D2, was going to pervade- and therefore ruin- the recording. He was clearly in no hurry to move on, exclaiming his finds -“50p! How about that?!”- to anyone who would listen, and indeed at one point was filmed by a chap who’d stopped to admire the view. This meant that he was being recorded by two separate people simultaneously, the kind of attention most of us can only dream of. This would no doubt have occurred to him as being nothing more nor less than his due, as regardless of whether he was being filmed or not, he gave a continuous running commentary on his activities, much to the intense apathy of the various suntanning bodies sprawled along the top of the hill. We were, of course, both employed in the same activity, scrabbling around the fringes of the capital in search of choice items that would generally be overlooked. He’ll definitely find his way on to the album somewhere.
Primrose Hill turned out to be a bit of a nightmare- wind now at full strength, crest of the hill covered in some strange mutation of hipster and skater, super skunk and rubbish dance music filling the air. I’m sure I never smoked dope so brazenly in public when I was a slip of an adult, although of course we’ll never know, what with me being, er, stoned at the time. I did manage to capture a couple of German girls having a very involved conversation on the bench next to me; again, one of the pitfalls of field recordings, particularly in London, is that you often capture very animated discussions, mobile phone conversations etc., and unless you can be bothered to enlist the services of a foreign speaking friend- reader, I can’t- you can never be quite sure what you’re using, and just have to hope you’re not broadcasting a heartfelt teenage dialogue about chlamydia or some other such alarming issue du jour.
The recordings are now safely stored on the desktop-(I realise even as I type this sentence that it’s inviting some kind of catastrophic hard drive failure. I have been told by people with no life that nothing is really backed up in the digital domain unless you have three copies of it on different drives. What fun!)- and I’ll begin the process of stitching them into the various tracks tomorrow. Until then, keep being volubly indiscreet in public, preferably somewhere out of the wind.
When I Loved You (Yesterday)
Greenwing’s new release is out on 1st July, once again featuring the sublime vocals of Jane Milligan, singer, multi-instrumentalist, dog-lover and now official West End Wendy (of which more later….)
“When I Loved You (Yesterday)” has been a long time in the realisation. Following the single “Irreplaceable”, which was my first collaboration with Jane, I took a break from writing and producing (and performing! Did I mention I play on all the tracks?) songs under the Greenwing banner to concentrate on the instrumental album “Train Tracks and Travelogues Vol.2”. “Irreplaceable” had been a real pleasure, from writing through to recording, and indeed video-making, but the whole promotional process was incredibly time-consuming. The miracles of modern technology enable you to reach out across the globe, but by the same token the globe is also trying to reach out to you and it can all feel like we’re just shouting into a void. Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Milligan, J., we did manage to get some much-needed radio play for “Irreplaceable”, but I can honestly say I spent more time on the phone chasing up radio producers- (in the guise of my alter-ego, PR specialist to the music industry and totally non-existent person “David Charles”)- than I did working on any new music.
Thus, a break from Greenwing to work on the electro-acoustic minimalist material that became “Train Tracks and Travelogues Vol.2”. To be honest, I questioned the wisdom of trying to release and promote a single off my own bat again. I say “Questioned the wisdom”, I think the exact phrase was “Fuck this for a laugh”, and so some three years passed before I felt minded to give Greenwing another outing.
Having said all that, alot of the delay was in reworking the song, tinkering with it whilst working on the “Train Tracks” album, and taking time to find the right sound for it. Jane’s voice is amazing for wrapping itself around anything, and you could go in any one of a thousand different directions with it. I also enlisted the help of guitar guru Julian Littman, a long -time friend and collaborator, and go-to-guitarist for so many people. It’s difficult to know with Jules which is more exciting, the people he has worked with- Madonna, Gerry Rafferty, Brian May, Dexys Midnight Runners, Steel Eye Span, to name a few- or the unprintable anecdotes that always accompany his experiences of playing for the great and good (coke and hookers in a limo anyone?!). His playing is so instinctively musical that it’s always a joy to hear him turn up in the studio and do his stuff.
And so off we go again… Jane is about to appear in the West End in Mama Mia!, so now seemed like as good a time as any to set off on the promotional band-wagon once more. I finished making the accompanying video for the single a couple of weeks ago, out of old home movie footage garnered from The Prelinger Archive, a site hosting literally thousands of hours of public domain video material, most of which I seem to have sat through in the course of making the promo. All the footage, including that of the loving couple, was filmed in San Francisco, where the song is set.
“When I Loved You (Yesterday)” is out on 1st July, but you can listen and preorder it now, and as ever, tell all your friends, and then tell them again…
