cover painting by E Buchanan

Woodstock says:

It was something my sister said about Chrissie Hynde. We were watching her on TV and Alison said she looked as if her whole life had been a road movie. Meanwhile I was jealously checking out her teeth, and the following week in a pub in Suffolk I met a woman who worked for Chrissie Hynde's dentist in Marylebone. I remember thinking at the time that my life is a bit like a road movie too. The only difference is there aren't any cameras and I'm neither famous, willowy nor a brilliant rock guitarist. And I'm the wrong shape for leather trousers, even though I own three pairs. Someone I once knew described me as mad, bad and not very dangerous to know. Unless you're an American comedian.

England was written in Scotland while I was packing to go to Germany to see BB King. My sister Alison had challenged me to remember something about my childhood that I didn't just remember remembering. She thinks we select our memories and then recycle them till we only remember the habit of remembering them. Sometime after that I caught Glenda Jackson in the Perfect Englishwoman (I think that's what it was called) and for no reason in particular it reminded me of walking in Mill Hill Park with my mother and telling her I wanted to go to England. The real one. I still do, even when I'm there. I hid a couple of film titles in the song for fun. After I wrote the lyric I was looking for something on a shelf in my white room and a book fell on my head. It was a poetry book, and it had fallen open at the page with that Rupert Brooke poem in it. I didn't know till then he'd written it in Germany. The way Brian plays guitar in the bridge reminds me of the heavy smell of roasting coffee that used to waft over Mill Hill Park from the direction of Harrow on warm summer evenings. At that time I thought London was in that direction and Jamaica a little further on as the crow flew. It turned out the coffee smell was only coming from Bunns Lane anyway - not very far at all. I was born about fifty yards from that side of the park. But that was a long, long time ago.

If You is about someone who still gets under my skin if I'm not careful. There's always one. It happened to be him. It was in a previous lifetime. These days I try to be careful.

Happening is a friendship lovesong. I noticed way back that people look different when they are your friends. It works both ways, but it's easier to spot in others than oneself. It's a wonderful thing.

Make Love Part 2 is the only cover on the album. Jack Bruce and Pete Brown wrote it in the early 1980s. I fell profoundly in love with it then and vowed to record it one day if I ever got the chance. I called Pete to ask his permission and he offered to play on it. He ended up playing on most of the tracks on the album. He told me the lyric was inspired by a film called Missing, with Cissy Spacek. I'm such a bass nut it was a real blast to hear Colin underpinning it all. He changed Jack's bassline ever so slightly, making it his own, but we've stuck pretty close to the first of several versions Jack recorded. I play keyboards on this one. After the session Colin said he didn't understand why we'd never worked together before. I reminded him I'd been a journalist before, not a musician. It was one of the best compliments I've ever had.

Nothing whatsoever to do with that bloke out of T-rex, Mickey Finn is about a singer songwriter called Elias Fawcett who took something he didn't know he was taking, while his parents were away in August 1996, and never woke up. The Daily Express called him a promising young musician but they only mentioned it because he was with someone who was related to someone who knew Joan Collins. I wondered if Elias had ever had any other reviews. The first time I heard him play, at the 12 Bar Club, I felt like Jon Landau must have felt when he first heard Bruce Springsteen. I was blown away. Sadly, Not long after, so was Elias.

Between Us is a lovesong about a beautiful American whom I love deeply but am not in love with. For a while I got the distinct impression he thought I wanted more from him than he was prepared to give. In a way he was right - I wanted him to believe that I didn't, that was all. I think he probably does, now. There's a line by Pete in another song from Jack Bruce's Automatic (where he first recorded Make Love Part 2) that bothered me for ages - "Why didn't anybody tell me that you can love and still be free?" - so I've re-posed the question here, because I'm not certain you can, entirely. Either that or I haven't evolved enough to understand. I signed this song to Eaton Music for a while. They didn't do anything with it. I just fancied being with the same publisher as Harry Nilssen but by the time I signed the deal they didn't handle his stuff any more. I got a couple of nice lunches out of it, though.

Blind leading the Blind was written the day after Liam Gallagher got arrested for something or other. It isn't necessarily about that.

Tongue Tied is the story of my life. In a way. Everyone's got to write at least one list song. I once spent the night with a dangerous-looking American comedian who did a Rawhide routine (on stage, not later) and the bed caught fire (later, not on stage). You've never seen anyone run so fast. That's the half of it. I seem to remember there was an eclipse around then.

Road Movie was originally titled Summer Hysteria because that's the hookline. It's partly about men's fear of female sexuality and it's partly about a stiflingly hot day in Wherever, USA. I think it's my favourite song on the album. Ronnie Johnson's moody guitar completely captures the feeling I had in my head when I wrote it. It's the only track that all the Aliens are playing on.

I wrote Clone July in my kitchen in Edinburgh in March 1997. With all the talk of our neighbour, Dolly The Sheep, I'd said to someone in the pub earlier that evening that I wanted to clone July. I've always thought it would be a good plan to have three or four time-strands running concurrently. She said: "They call it California." So I went home and wrote a song around that, because I've always wanted to go there. Zoot and Ronnie turned it into an LA special in the studio. Pete brought in a special shaker percussion instrument that looked like a cat litter tray. He said it came from Mauritius, which I thought was nice because my father lived there when he was a little boy and my aunt was born there. Eaton Music had the song signed for a while but they didn't do anything with this one either.

Resolution was nicknamed Turnip when we were recording (something's gonna turnip tomorrow). Every day is New Year's Day. Marc got seriously creative with the programming here (I got the feeling he'd been straining at the leash for a while). Zoot plays the Buddhist wishing bell on this track: I think he's hitting it with a biro. I bought the bell for 30p in a charity shop on the way to the airport to fly down for the session. The look of intense concentration on Zoot's face when he was recording that bit was worth every penny.

Good Energy is partly about Reg Presley of the Troggs, partly about Zoot and partly just generally about friends who make you feel much better when you're around them. You can actually decrease your heartrate just by thinking about certain people. I discovered that when I was working out in the gym one day. A friend tells me it's something to do with Alpha waves. The first time I met Reg I was working for Radio One and he wanted to borrow my tape recorder to take to a conference in Dusseldorf about space aliens. I needed it myself, so I said no. It took all my powers of persuasion to get Zoot to do backing vocals on this track. We tried to get Brian to join in with the spaceship engine noises on his guitar but he can only make sweet sounds so the last thing you hear is Willoughby B noodling his way gracefully towards Alpha Centauri.

Bruise Jam is a blues jam. The lyric's about That Man again. Alexis Korner once said everyone's got their own blues. I guess this one's mine. One of them, anyway. We live and learn.

It was fun recording at the Fortress. It was a big ramshackle complex in an old council warehouse in Clerkenwell, full of deeply cool people doing unquestionably cool things. It felt a bit like a 1970s students' union. One morning Zoot turned up and nearly got herded into some videoshoot with Kate Moss. Downstairs Pulp were rehearsing for their next album. The first Sunday we were there I went into the canteen and met the refugees from a party that had started on the Friday night. A bleary person explained why I wasn't going to get any teas there that day. "Reason bein'," he said very slowly, "We've all bin up all night tonight. And I can't be fuckin' bothered." The second sentence was as fast as the first one was slow. I think he was building up momentum in case he keeled over before he finished saying it. He wasn't hostile, just asleep. So I had to go to Islington.

The next Sunday I went to Islington first and bought a tray of coffee and pastries. I had to get a taxi to the studio with them, but it wasn't that far. That was Ronnie's first day. I offered him a croissant but he said it was OK, he'd just had a plate of whelks. We'd finished all the coffee by the time we got into the studio because there was no-one there to let us in at that time of the morning.

Most of the time it was very hot there and there was a cat on the roof which periodically demanded entry through the skylight.

I did wonder, more than once, why everyone in the canteen looked as if they were members of the Verve. It turned out several of them were members of the Verve.

There was a good party there round about the time we finished recording. I don't remember much about it except that it was a good party.

They've knocked the Fortress down now, so Carm Studios had to relocate to Upper Islington. It's grim down North London.

 

F U (If You) is soon to be released on Ear Candy, a new compilation of original songs by worldwide artists put together by the Manchester (UK)-based Planet of Sound.

Between Us has recently been released on the Austrian compilation album BandUnion IV, featuring songwriters from five different countries.

Eight songs from Road Movie are to appear on the new compilation CD, Welcome to Planet Woodstock. Click on the cover picture for more details.