I started writing a song called ‘Mountains’ about six months ago. I liked the epic title and the suitably epic chord structure that went with it. I knew that I would never be able to sing it myself but I figured Mary would do it and so I worked on it without worrying about the limitations of my voice. Originally I recorded it onto my phone, one long ago forgotten night with the baby in bed and Mary up in her office working. This would be me voicing wordlessly over guitar chords. I never remember to inform my future self what key it’s in or if Im utilising a different tuning or a capo and sometimes I can’t work out what it is that I’m doing on the guitar. These first drafts are extremely important, not just for the melody and structure (if one exists) but for phrasing and inflection. I tend to find that on the first draft, which is usually me singing the same thing over and over again, there are tiny pieces of interesting harmonic accidents (or rather, incidents, the whole thing at this stage could be described as an accident; groping as I am for some kind of compelling melodic structure) that only happen once but which are worth keeping and every now and again a word or a phrase will surface from the nonsense that makes complete sense, that fits the mood or gives me a title or a subject to hang the lyric on.
I find it worthwhile to do a number of these drafts, after the first I usually start singing and playing into Ableton (for the uninitiated Ableton is a music sequencer, basically a recording studio on my desktop) over the course of a few days or even weeks (I’ve usually got quite a few song ideas going on at the same time). This helps to hone the melody and I can also start working out harmonies and instrumentation.
With ‘Mountains’ I had the same chord structure and melody until a couple of nights ago. This was when I sat down to actually ‘write’ the song i.e. to finalise the structure, write the lyrics and find the definitive melody. I knew I was going to have problems because, although I hadn’t listened or played the song for a couple of months, my brain has been constantly working on it, working on all of them. They present themselves to me while I’m doing something else as if to say, “Well, here I am, what else have you got for me?” and whenever ‘Mountains’ nudged me I was at a loss, certainly lyrically. I had a big build up ‘bababababa like MOUNTAINS…’ and nothing else. ‘Like Mountains’? What can be associated with a mountain that will reflect a facet of humanity, make it empathetic to the listener? Longevity, scale, solidity, beauty.. sounds like a love song. But I don’t believe that love lasts forever, or Mountains for that matter so unless I bury my personal beliefs and write that kind of song I’ll have to write that idea off. Well, it’s easily done and since I’m trying to write songs of a commercial nature it would be an obvious step but for me the joy of songwriting is that they (the songs) mirror my life and experiences or lack thereof and to write something that I don’t feel or believe would take all that away and I wouldn’t enjoy it and then I may as well go work in an office for the rest of my life.
So I sat here and I played it over and over and recorded myself doing so a couple more times but nothing was happening, or nothing new was happening anyway. I then tried out just singing the word ‘Mountains’ in the chorus, this was much better, freeing me as it did from having to explain myself in the chorus (songwriting is odd, it’s the most important thing in the world to me yet I understand that it doesn’t matter at all and I’m happy to throw out ideas I’ve had for months, years even, if I think they’re not going to work). Now I can work on a lyric that can be a little more opaque. I also started singing different melodies, the one I had was pitched a little low, one of those verses that you have to sit through twiddling your thumbs waiting for the main event (see every Leona Lewis song, in fact almost every modern pop song on the radio). I swapped a couple of chords round, changed the key and suddenly a new melody presented itself, one that I sang again and again because it was so good to sing. A good melody can feel good in your mouth, coming out of your mouth and into the air, creating hues and harmonies that bounce of the walls and it feels natural and simple and true.
The last gig in London was ace; Sice was there, we played well and The Union Chapel is possibly the most beautiful venue in the land. Jimmy Webb, in thanking me from the stage, called me a ‘doll’ and a ‘beautiful cat’ so a decision that had been lurking around my head these past few months was made. This was to be my last live performance and there will be no more records for the foreseeable future. Everytime I play or record I end up losing money and the all the good albums and great reviews in the world won’t make a difference to that.
I’m going to concentrate instead on writing songs for other people. I don’t know how to do this but I do know where to begin; I want to spend what little free time I have nowadays working on my writing. It does feel like weight has lifted. I’m not one of those men who leave bringing up the kids and most household stuff to the little woman. We share everything and I’ve been trying to do too much lately with the usual result being that I completed nothing to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.
I will still write stuff on here, chart my way through this new phase of my life and I will be posting new songs and demos whenever I can, so stick around. It might even get interesting.
Love
Martin
We need to vacate the apartments by eleven so we’re on the road shortly thereafter heading for Gateshead. By the time we hit the Pennines the rain is beating mercilessly on the roof of the Bongo and visibility is almost zero. It clears up though and we reach the Sage Theatre on a sunny, although very cold, early evening.
I don’t think I’ve ever played somewhere this large. I’m not sure that the tour is selling that well and a small audience would be dwarfed by the vast surroundings. I wander about the stage, taking photographs of Tim the pedal steel player and Jim and Justin Webb as they set up and play. I feel comfortable with them, I first met them in the late nineties when I was asked to Dj at their first UK gig at the Water Rats in London and over the years I’ve bumped into them at various concerts, annoying them with questions about their dad. They are lovely people, friendly, generous and astonishingly polite, that goes for all members of the traveling band.
I’m missing my family, at one point I mention Sonny on stage, about how this was the first time I’ve been away from him and the fact that he’s started walking while I was away. I choke up and I think I’m going to going to lose it but I get through it. I’m shattered by the end and I get catch a taxi back to the travel lodge just as the Webbs hit the stage.
Tuesday I stayed in bed until almost ten thirty, something I haven’t done in a long time. I wasn’t well at all and neither was Mary. Just our luck, miles apart and we both get ill so our friends Martin and Ffion looked after Sonny for us and for that we are most grateful. Sonny took his first steps that evening as well, it’s very disappointing to have missed that but I am proud of him, I can’t wait to see him.
I had planned to record some demos and write lyrics but I felt dreadful so I read and wrote letters. That evening Bernie went to Old Trafford to watch Utd play and the rest of us watched Watchmen which I thought was fantastic, different from the book but only a fool could expect otherwise. Mark and Stu then went out drinking and I was left alone. I retired to my room and smoked a joint out of the back window. The window faced a monolithic brick wall over the top of which the Hilton Hotel loomed out from the Manchester mist. Below me crouched an old back alley, blocked at either end by a wooden fence. I smoked and wondered why such drabbery appeals to me, makes me feel contented. I don’t know if it’s the elevated position and it’s not as if I’m not fond of a scene of a more picturesque value.. I flicked the glowing roach into the cold air and watched as it cascaded down towards the alleyway below. The path it traced was so sure, so accurate that it seemed as if an unseen guiding hand ushered it straight into a vent on the side of the building opposite. I froze, expecting at any moment the whole vent to explode and the wall to come crashing down in front of me. I wondered what I was going to tell the fire service and the police and whether I should sweep through the apartment hiding all traces of contraband. I watched the vent for twenty minutes before closing the window, turning out the light and falling into a long, unbroken sleep.
The next day I felt better. My insides were still lurching around but I felt able to get out of the apartment. I met up with my friend Adam Walton and we spent half an hour searching for somewhere to sell us breakfast. We ended up by Piccadilly Station, not the most friendly place in the world and found a bar that served breakfasts. We sat and chatted, he gave me a cheque for some art I had done for him and I put it in my wallet which I placed on the floor next to me as the table was small and it’s kinda too big for my pockets. I only bought the wallet a few weeks ago, I don’t really like them. Same goes for watches.
As I’m talking I slowly become aware of a large red presence that has somehow impinged my personal space. This huge, tiny lady had sat at the next table, facing us and was sucking at some manner of council snout and blowing the resulting smog our way. At first I was annoyed but I started to warm to her when I realised she was content to stare at us with a her mean little big boat and blow smoke in our faces. She really was enormously small, I can’t think of the proper way to describe her. Anyway she got bored after ten minutes and fucked off. I watched her waddle meanly up the road like a Glaswegian raspberry, happy she was gone so I could concentrate on my disgusting breakfast. Disgusting or not we still had to pay for it and when the time came I offered to settle except that my wallet had gone. The raspberry, that miniature giant, had taken it damn her rapacious minces to hell and back. I couldn’t believe it, I felt foolish, sick and annoyed. I really did want to beat her up, roll her into the road so she gets squashed by a bus and then spread the resulting wrinkly jam on the walls of the local old folks home for massive midgets as a warning. Adam was very nice about the whole thing of course, he paid the bill, tried not to giggle and found us a cosy bar where I could drown my sorrows. I cancelled my cards which was easy, all you have to do is listen to the same piece of rotten music for thirty five minutes, then give your details and wait another ten listening to the sound of a tapping keyboard. Ditto for the police.
So predictably I spent the rest of the day drinking, ending up in a curry house with the others and a man named Moff who I know through Twitter and had I’d met up with earlier and had enjoyed spending time with. It’s not the wallet she stole, or the cards or the photographs, receipts, driving license etc She stole another piece of goodwill and that is in short supply these rotten days. She owes me and I will collect.
Woke at 5.30am. I could hear Sonny shouting from his room which was normal but something wasn’t quite right. Mary was breathing gently beside me, lost in a house of dreams and as I got out of bed the whole room span around me and I had to sit straight back down. My stomach was cramping and I felt sick. I’ve had food poisoning recently and that’s what it felt like. I got up slowly, Mary woke up and we took Sonny downstairs for his breakfast.
As the morning slipped by I felt progressively, worse still Mary had taken the van to be serviced and it had taken far longer than expected. I was home with Sonny so by the time the prearranged meeting time spun around I hadn’t packed or even showered.
Finally we left around midday. Steaming up the M4 in our beloved Mazda Bongo. The band is me, Bernie on drums, Mark on Bass and Stuart on keys. Bernie played on ‘Advertisements for Myself’, ‘Ye Gods (and little fishes)’ and has played live with me in the past. I’ve known Mark since I moved to Cardiff, he owns the studio where I record and rehearse. He is also one of the sweetest men I know. Stuart plays with Mark and Bernie in the band Vito.
Soon after joining the M4 I had to concede that I was too ill to drive and Mark took over. I napped, bent almost double in the front passenger seat that had been pushed forward with the weight of our gear and bags. We arrived at the Royal Northern College of Music, a hushed, velvety space on the Oxford Road. We dumped the gear on the enormous stage, found the dressing rooms and plugged all our machines in. We used to get into dressing rooms and start demolishing the rider, we wouldn’t have had anything to plug in but now everybody is armed with laptops, phones, sat nav, bluetooth speakers, electric mangle etc
The Webb brothers turn up. I haven’t spoken to them for four or five years and it’s great to see them. There’s James, Justin and Christian plus Cornelius who I’ve not met before. Glen Campbell’s son, Cal, is drumming for them and Englishman Tim is pedal steeling. Romeo Stodart from the Magic Numbers is also part of the line up. No sign of Jimmy, apparently he doesn’t show up for soundchecks. Fine by me, I’m scared of him.
I don’t feel well at all at this point, my guts are performing acrobatics within their rib ringed arena and I can’t stray too far from the gents. I just want to do the gig and go to bed. The sound onstage disappears, only to reappear elsewhere, the floor monitors are important now, to pin down this elusive noise and make some sense of what’s going on. All this will change once the audience take their seats, the sound will settle. I no longer fret about such things. I don’t fret about anything anymore; I know the songs, I trust my band so other than unforeseen technical dramas there isn’t much that can go wrong. I don’t have to worry about my voice because i don’t smoke anymore and haven’t had a hangover for over a year.
We go on early, just after half seven. I can see that my mum and my sister and her partner are here just as the lights go down. It’s very quiet out there. The soft seats rise up in front of me, occupied mostly by middle aged couples and I find that I actually prefer this to the squall and chat of a normal gig crowd. I find it easier to collect and pace myself. I feel relaxd and rwlly enjoy the concert. We’ve started playing ‘Good Life’ as well which is one of my favourite songs to sing (odd that I got Sice to sing it on record). The audience listen and are appreciative, the boys think it was the best we’ve played and I manage to sing in tune and not break anything. Win.
I get back to the dressing room just as Jimmy Webb arrives. I’m introduced to him by Justin and he fixes me with a steely glare and says he is pleased to meet me. I am scared of him. He is a formidable presence.
I head down to the bar to have a drink with my family, Bobby Boo has turned up with his lady, Claire (they missed the gig) and I decide to try and drink my way through my illness. Never the best idea but one that my limited imagination often pushes forward when decision times comes around. I spot my old friend Andy Jones who used to run a great record shop in Liverpool called Pink Moon. I bought many records there that I still cherish today. It’s great to see him albeit briefly as he has a train to catch. The rest of us chat in the bar, Mark, Stu and bernie join us and we decide to head off the Big Hands and get smashed.
The whole crew gig bar Jimmy ends up in Big Hands, Bobby Boo manages to steal, smash or knock over everybody’s drink in the club and gets thrown out, nothing changes. We stay until they close and then pile into the kebab place next door. By this time I feel alright and demolish an enormous kebab back at the apartments.
Apartments? Oh yes, Mary booked the hotels and discovered that it was cheaper for us to stay in an apartment for three nights (we now have two days off) than in a Travel Lodge so we’re swanning about in a swish Deansgate Apartment block, getting kebab everywhere and lowering it’s market value every minute we’re here.
Then, bed.
I’m really made up to be involved with this. Starts in Manchester tomorrow. Tour diary to follow…
Playing this Wednesday night in London, predominately an acoustic affair I will nonetheless be playing with bass and percussion and two backing singers. Unfortunately, Stuart, the organ player can’t make it so you’ll have to hum those bits to fill out the sound. The live thing is sounding great at the moment, I played at the Swn festival in Cardiff last Thursday and it was one of the best we’ve done. I’ve got the balance just about right for once and the sound is rich and full.
After Wednesday I’ll write about upcoming dates including the Jimmy Webb tour during which I’ll write a tour diary. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all that free time but my guess is that sleep and songwriting will be involved, the two things which I’m desperately missing out on at the moment. Not that I’m out of ideas, no suh. I have about forty unfinished songs of varying degrees of quality on the go and I’m very excited about the next record.
Ok, see you Wednesday ..
Nathan Penlington is a magician, poet, writer and stand up word chucker. He is cleverer than I am but we share a love for words and music and visual thinking. You can check his stuff out here and here and all over the place.
1. Where are you? Describe your surroundings
I’m in my small basement flat in Hackney. I’ve been a voracious reader since my teens, and I’m continually inspired by novelty, but now that means the book piles are fighting it out with the coconut monkeys, obscure board games, and magic props. I guess I now live in that magical forgotten street brick-a-brac shop I imagined I would find as a child.
2. I always imagined that Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ was written about a visit to an art gallery and if you know which art gallery it was you would be able to unlock the imagery contained therein. Do you have any pointless theories?
Perhaps the definition of being creative means you constantly have pointless theories. I have always kept a notebook, and I have always kept all of them. My teenage diaries and notebooks though are particularly full of pointless, intellectually brooding, and ridiculous theory. I’ve just pulled one off the shelf at random to make sure I’m not making that sentence up. This is my teenage theory of Nowism™: “Simplifying to the extreme I define Nowism™ as increduality toward postmodernism with its great academic and cartoon antiheros, and its great Coca-Cola™ sponsored nil:nil penalty shootouts. You do not live in the dust of the hundred years dead. You live here, and you live now. Let the dead worry about the past. Embrace Nowism™ before it embraces you”. I think that speaks for pointlessness itself.
3. My son puked his tea all over his mum’s shoulder this evening which I thought was quite funny until I realised she was wearing one of my best jackets. It reminded me of when we were teenagers and couldn’t go to parties without Sice chucking up the four cans of Mackesons that he’d bought for the occasion. Sometimes we didn’t even get out of his kitchen. I once got so drunk on whiskey when I was fifteen that I ended up in next doors house and everyone had red eye, like photograph red eye. I threw up in my sleep that night and my dad threw me in the shower where my sister tells me that I kept on telling him to piss off. The next morning all my posters turned their heads to stare at me and I wasn’t allowed any tea. Another time I lost the keys to a car he had borrowed to take us to Blackpool. My brother and I had to sneak out of the hotel and walk back up the Golden Mile looking for them but we never did. Another time I, well, you get the idea. What grim memories of childhood are etched onto the inside of your consciousness like primitive wall paintings depicting my dad chucking spears at me?
You should keep the jacket as it is, and show it to Sonny when he is older. Once me and my mate Kriston bunked off sixth form and went to the Offy. By ten o’clock we were sat on a bench near the cut drinking cheap vodka, by twelve o’clock I had passed out on the bench. Kriston shook me awake so we could move before everyone came out for dinner. I sat up quickly, and projectile vomited all over his favourite suede jacket. He refused to clean it, and wore it for years with the stain on the shoulder. He said it was a badge of honour. Mind you, we were into Bukowski at the time.
I was born and brought up in Rhyl, North Wales, which means my brain is full of grim childhood memories, and I guess inversely for most, particularly of the summer. I started my first job when I was thirteen, working on the crazy golf and trampolines, for 65p an hour. Trampoline duty was the worst, I don’t know how many times I had to mop the springs and rubber after some kid had pissed themselves in jumping excitement.
4. I’m listening to ‘All Around My Hat’ by Steeleye Span which I loved when I was a kid. it’s fucking awful. Are there any songs/bands/films/cereals that you can’t understand why you ever liked?
The first records I remember buying were early-to-mid Shakin Stevens, including The Sunsets albums, but stopping abruptly at ‘Lipstick, Powder and Paint’. I even collected Hula-Hoop packets to save up tokens for a t-shirt with his face on. I like the Sugababes and The Supremes, I like them even though I want them to be better than they actually are. The Supremes’ ‘A Bit of Liverpool’ must be the worst Motown album ever made. But maybe age decreases your sense of embarrassment, sometimes, even now, ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles shuffles its way onto the hifi, and I don’t even flinch.
5. I love listening to Richard Brautigan read his poem ‘Boo, Forever’
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a top
I’m haunted by all the
space that I will live
without
you
It sounds like he’s rattling a stick inside a bucket as he reads it. What poets/poetry influenced you?
Brautigan’s reading voice really surprised me the first time I heard it. It’s like he has the voice of an automated telephone service and words are stitched together from pre-recorded vowel sounds. But his simplicity of language, his playfulness, and the lightness with which he conveys sorrow and loss is something I try and achieve in my own writing, even in its most experimental form. The British equivalent is the novelist BS Johnson whose attempts to create a new form to reflect the content of each of his books means his work is also very close to my heart. I tend not to separate poets out from other writers, as some of the most poetic writers have avoided writing poetry. And so many twentieth century experimentalists, particularly those of form, are a constant inspiration; JG Ballard, WS Burroughs, Milorad Pavic, James Joyce, Edward Packard, Raymond Queneau and George Perec.
6. I’ve just flicked through a copy of Huey P Newton’s ‘War Against the Panthers’ looking for inspiration. Enclosed within it’s pages I discovered a piece of paper with Richard Sonnenfeldt’s signature on it. This was sent to me by a friend a number of years ago, a friend that I fear I have neglected somewhat recently. I will rectify that immediately. What was the last occasion on which you suffered guilt?
The death of someone that you have been close to in your life, will always make you feel guilt. It is a sign of how important they were to you. My mate Kriston died at the beginning of the year, and although we had been close for years, we just hadn’t spoken to each other for quite some time. Time and distance tends to do that. All you can do is acknowledge the guilt, swallow it, and move on.
7. I need an assistant but I can’t afford to pay them. If I had a assistant I would make more money and would be able to pay them. What should I do?
There is a government drive to encourage volunteering. I think it has something to do with them trying to staff the Olympics as cheaply as possible, and them not wanting to give anything actual back to the community. You could probably get funding to ‘employ’ a volunteer, which you could use to pay them until you earn enough money to actually pay them. In that way no one looses. And there might also be one more person wearing a tabard at the 2012 opening ceremony.
8. Today I feel like John the Baptist as depicted in Geertgen Tot Sint Jans’ fifteenth century painting ‘John the Baptist In The Wilderness’. As well as being a stunningly beautiful painting, one of unusual depth for it’s time, it speaks to me of melancholy and uncertainty; of being trapped with a space without constraint. How are you today? Is your path forward clear and true or a roundabout filled with brambles and wee bitey things.
I’ve just been to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, our kitten Kook, who is teething, took a flying fanged leap at my ankle and drew blood.
9. I did a remix for Kid 606 a couple of years ago that he liked. I even sang on it. What’s your proudest achievement?
When I was a child my Dad used to play us ‘Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of The Worlds’ every Sunday. The fear I felt running to school on Mondays, pretending the lampposts were Martian tripods, is etched into my very being. A wrote a poem about it, which includes a short bit of the Narrator’s introduction, which I performed on BBC Radio 4. So, technically, I have been Richard Burton in Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of The Worlds on Radio 4. Even with my over active imagination, no one would have believed at the beginning of the 21st century that that was possible.
10. On the 21st March 2000 Alan Bennet wrote in his diary ‘Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia - though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so consumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.’ Is there anyone that you cannot stand. Somebody who’s viewpoint is diametrically opposed to yours and who’s very existence is a daily effrontery. At the minute mine is the bloke who parks his car outside my house when he has his own garage and DOESN’T EVEN LIVE ON MY STREET!!!!!
I was talking about this very subject with a friend on the way to Wales a few weeks ago. It was decided that everyone needs a nemesis. The difficulty is finding someone you respect enough to hate with venom. I’m currently writing a new show about the world’s most famous psychic who, unfortunately, already has a worthy nemesis. But the world of psychics, mediums, and clairvoyants is full of con-artists and frauds eager to exploit the sick and vulnerable, any one of which makes my blood boil.
Sorry friends. Mary and Sonny are both ill and I have to stay home and be a good father. We’re rearranging another after Green Man, I’ll keep you posted X
Amish Rake Fighter on 2009.07.31 08:57
Congratulations on a lifetime commitment to making shitty music.
Nothing beats that disposable flaming Boo Radley shit though, what fucking annoying crap that was
