X has landed!

 

I pitched the idea of ten one-minute songs to EMA label head Oscar Condon at the Wig & Pen the second time I met him. At that point, all that existed was Sno-Globe, written the week before. Sno-Globe, like its namesake, felt to me like it contained a full song/world in miniature.  It prompted me to consider a whole album in microcosm, and X (at least as a concept) was born. Oscar loved the idea from the get-go (he was also the sadistic bastard that suggested I make videos for all ten as well).

The beauty of starting with a clear concept was I could just figure out what songs I would need for a rounded album, and then write them fit for purpose. I knew I’d want some kind of mid-point palate cleanser (That’s A Bingo), a song in French (Ou Est Henri?), a song with a starring turn from Mel and Cath (Unusual Curse), and a lot of crunchy rock (everything else). This was also the first tracks conceived knowing Mel and Cath were in the band, so songs like 6BB, Ou Est Henri?, Unusual Curse, and Love, Or Leave It Alone (For Iris), were written with female vocals in mind.

Three songs in particular wear their influences on their sleeves – Good Night was my homage to Cosmic Psychos, That’s A Bingo to Jon Wayne, and Kingdom Of Fear to The Blade Winner.

Cosmic Psychos are new favourites of mine, having only heard their music after watching the brilliant Blokes You Can Trust last year. Good Night is me unabashedly channelling my inner Ross Knight – the only twist I added was to cast the song in the second person, an under-utilised variant in rock’n’roll, and also a first for me.

In contrast, Jon Wayne, the sui generis drunken cow-punk band, have been on my radar for years. I first read about them in Dave Graney’s book It Was Written, Baby back in the 90s, where he extolled their praises and let loose the secret that The Cruel Sea’s Better Get A Lawyercribbed its best lines from their song Texas Jail Cell. They were very popular with me and Na in The Bluffhearts-era, and we adopted some of their catchcries and licks into our repertoire.  They are also concept album savants – nearly every song on their masterpiece Texas Funeral has ‘Texas’ in the title. Written in 2010, That’s A Bingo is the only song not written/finished specifically for this album. It sees me adopting the sneering, lecherous vocal style of Jon Wayne’s singer (also pseudonymously called Jon Wayne). I perform it with a guitar pick clutched in my teeth, to replicate the tight-jawed sound of someone talking with a cigarette between their lips.

Kingdom Of Fear was literally me wanting to do my version of a The Blade Winner song – a classic rock tune filled with grand, apocalyptic imagery, similar to his Sweet Babylon.

 

The blindingly obvious revelation came later – hey, I know The Blade Winner! Why don’t I ask him to sing it? As you can hear, he did not disappoint (though he nearly gets overshadowed by Mel and Cath’s showstopping backing vocals).

The final song conceived for the project was Kevin Lauro’s Blues (Angry Women, Pt. 1). Kev offered to write a song months before we began recording. I quickly agreed, mainly because it saved me writing another one. However, as the recording date drew closer, I began to question this decision. Kev, on a weekly basis, would insist his song was near completion and would be ready to show us all the following week. I was even invited round to his place a couple of times to ostensibly hear it – every time, the sly fox would nonchalantly defer its unveiling to a later date. It became a running joke, some kind of elaborate ruse. With just two weeks to go, and Kev still insisting it would be finished, I figured we needed a Plan B.

I am a huge fan of Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, the film where he challenges Jorgen Leth to remake The Perfect Human five times, each time with a new set of challenging rules and criteria (The Perfect Human was the inspiration for our current series of projections). On a couple of occasions, Leth does not strictly adhere to the set rules/obstructions – Von Trier then takes it upon himself to ‘punish’ Leth with more severe rules the following time. For the final iteration, Leth’s punishment is that Von Trier will make a version of the film… but it has to be credited to Leth. I co-opted this idea as punishment for Kev – his song, which is one minute of ludic avant-jazz nonsense made up on the spot by the band, had to be credited as written by him, and it had to be called Kevin Lauro’s Blues (in homage to the similar Stooges track L.A. Meltdown Blues). Kev accepted, likely relieved that he no longer had to finish his song (though he was still working on it on the day of recording!). The ‘Angry Women’ suffix comes from Mel and Catherine’s contribution, the song’s sole lyric, intoned in both French and English.

The last thing recorded for X was Nicholas Coombe’s saxophone. I’ll take a sax solo over a guitar solo any day (as any Missing Lincolns song will attest). To me, sax mixed with electric guitar either sounds like The Stooges or The Saints, two bands I credit as influences (fun fact: the chunky chordal riff of The Missing Lincolns’ Light A Fire Under You came about trying and failing to play Know Your Product). Nick C is a delight, one of the most relaxed and up-for-anything musicians I’ve had the pleasure to play with – he’s now played on Holiday Inn and X, AND performed with us at the launch – I’m surreptitiously trying to make him a fully-fledged member of the band before he notices.

The indelible cover image is by Uy Nguyen. Uy and I met on the first day of year seven – he’s now a talented artist and architect, and when he posted his drawing of a sloth in a bowtie, I was immediately smitten. The mixture of cuteness/evilness, savagery and sophistication, seemed to parallel our sound. The irony of a sloth as mascot for the quickest album in the world was also too good to pass up. I hope to convince Uy to design the covers for our future releases too – it would be brilliant to have an artist of his calibre establish a consistent look for the band’s material.

The launch last Saturday was a rollicking good time – as a label, EMA is distinguished by its lack of homogeneity – the night included sets of skeletal folk-pop, grunge, trip-hop, punk, choral electronica and drone. Around 150 people attended, and we sold a bunch of albums. Not wanting to dilute the impact of our one minute blasts, but recognising that the set would be too short otherwise, we played all the songs twice. It was Darren that came up with the idea to do it as a palindrome, playing the songs through the second time in reverse order. It added another layer of playfulness to a gig which also included a (minor) costume change, an intermission gag (thanks Nick!), and a pre-arranged stage crash by The Blade Winner.

For our projections this time, Paul Heslin live vee-jayed. We used the same black and white footage of the band (I hastily filmed new drummer Darren the week before and subbed it in), and Paul coloured our first set red, the intermission white, and the second set blue, to mirror the French flag. Paul is the unsung hero of the FFA family, having implemented our live visuals, remixed Holiday Inn, and recorded overdubs for X. He’s one of my favourite and most trusted collaborators and (friends), and I hope we do lots more together in the future.

With Nathan up on stage, our numbers swelled to seven, and we barely fit on the tiny stage. Combine that with the suit jackets and sunglasses, and I feel like we are entering our Dexys Midnight Runners/Young Soul Rebels phase. Which, excitedly, gives me a whole raft of ideas for the next thing.

All photos by Adam Thomas.

I love learning about the creative process of others – I’ve absorbed all the writing rules I could find, and spent happy hours reading the interviews in The Paris Review. In the same spirit I thought I’d break down the process for one of my recent songs – Love, Or Leave It Alone (For Iris).

Everyone starts with an inkling of an idea for a song, and at some point later, has a finished product.  That much, arbitrarily, all songwriters must agree on. The middle is harder to quantify – some refer to the muse striking, to telephone lines with God; for others it’s cerebral, about getting in the right headspace to forge new connections in your brain. The reason I’ve chosen Love, Or Leave It Alone (For Iris) is that, atypically for me, the route to the finished work breaks into several delineated steps.

 

It began with the melody.  I had been tinkering on an arrangement for a punked-up version of Iris DeMent’s Let The Mystery Be. The melody that became both the vocal and glockenspiel line was the guitar solo I wrote for this abandoned  cover. When the concept for ‘X’ was hatched, I went looking through my demos and re-discovered it.  Using the same stock I-IV-V-I progression, I refashioned the solo segment to be the entire song. It was a new way of working for me – like sampling, starting with a base material and reworking it into something completely different.  That’s why Iris is named in the title – my version of the literary ‘with apologies’ used when a work is based on another.

 

For me, lyric-writing starts with a strong opening line or title.  Until that comes, I’m powerless – I had the chord progression for Faux Faux Amis song Don’t Grow Up Too Fast for years until I found words worthy to be paired to it. The process for this song was compounded by three factors:

 

1) I couldn’t wait – I only had weeks before I needed to teach it to the band,

2) the strict and windy AABCCB rhyming structure I felt the melody suggested, and

3) I knew I wanted the song to be a boy/girl co-lead vocal.

 

I could have capitulated on the third point, but my gut wouldn’t let me budge. Not only a boy/girl co-lead vocal, mind, it had to be a “couples bickering” song. These are, to me, the pinnacle of duets.  The most famous example is almost certainly Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light.  Other favourites are Johnny Cash and June Carter’s Long Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man and Jackson, John Prine and Iris DeMent’s In Spite Of Ourselves (Iris again!), The White Stripes and Holly Golightly’s It’s True That We Love One Another, and The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s Fairtytale Of New York. Most feel like they’re between couples in long-term relationships – they get me where I live.  I’ve written a couple of my own over the years, including for The Bluffhearts.  I knew once Mel and Catherine joined FFA that I’d want to start writing them again.

 

But the model for this particular song is not any of the above  – it’s The Specials I Can’t Stand It. Uniquely, the duet is not call and response –  it’s Terry Hall and Rhoda Dakar singing the same thing to each other at once. It’s ingenious in its mirroring of actual fights in a relationship, when people tend to echo each other (“I’m not the selfish one, you’re the selfish one!”).

I decided I would demur writing the lyrics until I was in New York City, confident its bright lights would inspire me to new heights of lyrical accomplishment. The only problem was once I got there, I was in holiday mode, and had no inclination to work on lyrics.  Eventually, I forced myself up early one morning and, armed with notebook and pen, went for a walk around Brooklyn.  Lots of people (including luminaries like Nick and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) attest that walking is one of the best ways to spur creativity. I’d hoped to colour the song with experiences from the trip – references to streets we’d walked down, or diners we’d visited.  None of that was forthcoming.  In fact, the first verse I made it through had nothing to do with my intentions for the song, and everything about just getting a handle on the rhyme structure. It’s complete fluff, and utterly cringeworthy, but I wrote it down all the same to get the juices flowing:

 

I call my dreams the kingdom of nonsense

It’s where all logic hides

Pterodactyls

Crystal fractals

Divide and multiply

 

Most of the rhymes are slanted, and the syntax is forced. Crystals were on my mind as a result of reading J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World while in NYC, so the best that can be said is it bears the subliminal influence of my trip.  ‘Kingdom of nonsense’ is a Martin Amis reference, but so obscure no one would notice.

 

The next attempt was slightly better – it was definitely about a relationship, and the rhymes had improved:

 

When you see children, you see the future

My crystal ball’s less clear

We both were kids

Know what they did

I just can’t hide my fear

 

There’s an honesty to the sentiment, and the suggestion of a difference of opinion (if not a full-blown argument), but it’s still clunky – the ‘crystal ball’ line especially – and it didn’t give me anywhere to go in the second verse. I still like the volte-face in “we both were kids/know what they did”, but it wasn’t enough. I’m also still missing an internal rhyme in the first line.

 

The last attempt that morning had enough of an engine to get me through two verses:

 

Lived in the desert since I remember

Waiting on climate change

It’s just red dust

From dawn to dusk

And then you came my way

 

It started raining first time you kissed me

We should have bought a boat

Now every swoon

Brings a monsoon

Grab anything that floats

 

Written down, I admit it looks bad – the perky melody helps tremendously to sell it. And while I got two reasonably coherent verses out of it, it’s goopy stuff, and I’ve completely failed to deliver on the bickering tone I wanted. “Climate change” is too technical a phrase for a dippy love song, especially when it doesn’t even help fill out a rhyme – I knew when I wrote it I would need to replace that part. I like the desert-rain-love analogy, but it’s well-worn. And, again, it has absolutely nothing to do with my time in NYC (if there was any doubt, ‘red dust’ definitively places the story in Australia).

 

You’ll notice I began all of these without the one thing I insisted above that I needed – a strong opening line or title. The result is they all fell flat, and in hindsight, were always going to fall flat.  I was stumbling around, looking for a foothold – but I had to try, if only to get into the headspace to recognise the right line or title when it came.  That night, it arrived.

 

Lou and I visited Skinny Dennis – a Brooklyn hipster dive bar – to watch Pete Donnelly. His performance was great, but it was a phrase painted on the wall behind him that stuck with me – LOVE IT, LEAVE IT. There was no further context, but it felt strong.  I played with it against the melody and found my title.

 

Love, or leave it alone.

 

Once I had those five words, I was more relieved than when I’d penned the whole two previous verses – I knew the hard work had been done and the rest would fall into place. That one line alone unpacks into an entire argument between a couple. The remainder of the lyrics were written at home, drawing on a boozy Brooklyn night when Lou and I had an argument over nothing. We only argue after concerted drinking – too much alcohol brings out a bad combination of my pompousness and her stubborn nature. To give it balance, I wrote it from her perspective, delivering the words to myself, the drunken boor that won’t let go until he’s achieved his meaningless and pyrrhic victory.

 

There comes an hour when wine turns sour

Nothing good comes when you take that tone

You’re always right

So why even fight?

Love, or leave it alone

 

The bar is spinning but you think you’re winning

Your arguments bore to the bone

You won’t let up

I’ve had enough

Love, or leave it alone

 

I had the rhyme structure, the bickering tone, connections to New York, a strong hook, and it’s honest. I like the phonetic subtext of “love, or” as well – said aloud, it could be “lover, leave it alone”, several degrees sweeter than the ultimatum of the actual line.