Episode 654 - Elvis Costello
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what the fucking ears what's going on i'm mark maron this is wtf this is my podcast welcome i want a special shout out because occasionally you know i say hello to people on their bikes or in their cubicles or on the treadmill or at the gym or cleaning up or painting or perhaps you're uh you're uh
Marc:finishing that sculpture or maybe maybe you're you're you're just uh putting the uh the final touches on that bunker stocking up those shelves with canned goods and jerky i don't know i don't necessarily think that's my audience but it's possible but somebody said how about those of us who are working in the lab
Marc:Well, how are you?
Marc:Welcome to the show.
Marc:Those of you who are busy at work in the lab, doing things with microscopes or vials.
Marc:I see smoking blue liquid in test tubes, perhaps dissecting things, maybe just moving highly dangerous things from one place to another, wearing a suit of some kind.
Marc:Welcome to you.
Marc:I'm glad you have headsets in that hazmat suit.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:Welcome, military people.
Marc:Yesterday was Veterans Day.
Marc:I got a little few emails, some tweets from people in the military saying thank you.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:A lot of nice feedback for the Lorne Michaels episode.
Marc:Some of you are saying, well, what happens now, man?
Marc:You got Obama, you got Keith, you got Lorne Michaels in one year.
Marc:What happens now, man?
Marc:Well, I'll tell you what happens.
Marc:I keep doing the show.
Marc:I've got Elvis Costello on the show today.
Marc:There's a lot of people that I admire and respect and I'm curious about their work, who they are.
Marc:I don't feel like I'm running out of people.
Marc:So we keep doing the show.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Did I mention Elvis Costello?
Marc:I did Elvis Costello.
Marc:So anyways, a little squirrely.
Marc:I'll be honest with you.
Marc:Driving around my car and I'm feeling relaxed because I enjoy driving.
Marc:But okay, I'm going to cop to it.
Marc:I'm thinking like maybe a little weed would be nice.
Marc:How about a little weed?
Marc:I used to smoke weed every morning.
Marc:I used to carry around a little one-hitter wooden pipe back before vapes and prescribed pot.
Marc:I used to have a little wooden box with a sliding top and a little wooden pipe that only fit one hit or so in there, and I'd tuck into phone booths.
Marc:That's the last time I smoked weed is where you can still walk down the street and tuck into phone booths to load up your little one hit pipe and do a little a little pull a little hit.
Marc:So I'm driving around thinking maybe a little weed.
Marc:And when you're a sober person, you're like, shit, man, I shouldn't be thinking about weed.
Marc:Where is that coming from?
Marc:I better get to a secret society get together and get straight with my my program.
Marc:But I couldn't figure it out, man.
Marc:I was feeling pretty good, yet I'm still thinking about smoking weed.
Marc:And then I put it together.
Marc:This is what happened.
Marc:I know why I wanted to smoke some weed.
Marc:I know what reawakened that urge in my mind and in my heart, because weed's pretty good.
Marc:So here's what happened.
Marc:I got a new car, right?
Marc:I got that Camry, the hybrid Camry.
Marc:Comes with Sirius Radio, which was on trial basis.
Marc:Then my buddy Dean Del Rey goes, oh, you was in the Grateful Dead channel?
Marc:Now, I don't know, some of you know this about me, but I got a deadhead in me.
Marc:I wear patchouli to this day, not because of the Grateful Dead, but because a witchy woman that I dated many years ago turned me on to the patchouli, and I've worn it ever since.
Marc:Been wearing patchouli about 20 years, so it's not necessarily associated with the hippie thing.
Marc:But I've been listening to the goddamn Grateful Dead channel on Sirius Radio almost nonstop every time I'm in the car.
Marc:So of course I want to smoke weed.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I had no idea.
Marc:It wasn't an immediate trigger.
Marc:It took about two weeks of listening to the same 14 songs in many different live versions over many different eras for me to start getting squirrely around the weed.
Marc:I blame Sirius.
Marc:I blame the Grateful Dead station for my relapsy-driven mind around the weed.
Marc:I got a handle on it, though.
Marc:I do like listening to the Grateful Dead sometimes, and I'm going to admit that.
Marc:That's a secret between us.
Marc:And I was reading Elvis Costello's book, He Enjoys the Grateful Dead, too.
Marc:I wish I would have got more time with him, but it was tight on the time.
Marc:I was tight on the time with that one.
Marc:I got another thing I want to tell you, but I'm nervous about talking about it because you asked for it, and I'll tell you about it.
Marc:Let me catch you up.
Marc:Let me catch you up on some stuff.
Marc:There has been a few people that have been thinking like, well, Marin's not as candid as he used to be or he's not talking about his wife or he's gotten too big.
Marc:I don't know what you think I'm doing.
Marc:I don't know what life you think I have.
Marc:You know, I wake up.
Marc:I've been interviewing people a lot.
Marc:uh and then i go right or i go uh i go i go to whole foods and i get aggravated i go to trader joe's and i get aggravated why maybe you're wondering why i'm still aggravated i don't fucking know man things are good but are they great yeah they're pretty great is it a day-to-day struggle for me to uh to keep my shit together mentally and emotionally yes am i still a little emotionally fucked up
Marc:Yes, I am.
Marc:Is that what you want to hear?
Marc:Will this make you feel better?
Marc:Am I seething with anger for no reason and no place to put it?
Marc:A lot of times.
Marc:Would meditation help that?
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:I haven't tried it yet.
Marc:Have not tried it yet.
Marc:Why am I holding out?
Marc:Good question.
Marc:Maybe because I'm attached to my discomfort.
Marc:Is that what you want to hear?
Marc:But also, I know there's some things going on with me.
Marc:Okay, I'll be honest with you.
Marc:I've been a little squirrely doing a lot of sets at the comedy store because that's what I do.
Marc:I'm a stand-up comic.
Marc:And I lost my shit.
Marc:Not on stage.
Marc:I lost my shit.
Marc:It's been a long time since I lost my shit.
Marc:It's been a long time since I felt the heat of rage gurgle up from my stomach, up through my chest, into my arms, and my eyes just go fucking red with fire intensity.
Marc:And I can't.
Marc:I feed my whole body.
Marc:gets enveloped in something that needs resolution.
Marc:What happened was a guy I know hangs around the store, comic, haven't seen him in a while.
Marc:He was around a lot.
Marc:I don't need to mention names because I don't want to.
Marc:But I hadn't seen him, and I was walking out of the original room into the back hallway.
Marc:He walked by me.
Marc:I go, hey, what's up?
Marc:And he just ices me, puts his hand up.
Marc:He goes, eh.
Marc:And I'm like, what?
Marc:And he just kind of walks by.
Marc:I'm like, what's the matter, man?
Marc:He goes, eh.
Marc:And I'm just like, I'm like, what the fuck?
Marc:And I just walked up to him.
Marc:I said, what, is there a fucking problem?
Marc:What's going on?
Marc:He's like, eh.
Marc:And I'm like, what are you fucking doing?
Marc:He's like, eh.
Marc:And I'm like, what the fuck is your problem, man?
Marc:He's like, eh.
Marc:And I go, I don't get what you're doing.
Marc:I don't get it.
Marc:You got a problem.
Marc:Let's talk about it.
Marc:He goes, no, why don't you just go back up the hall?
Marc:I didn't ask to talk to you.
Marc:I said, don't you fucking tell me where to walk or what to do, bitch.
Marc:I said that.
Marc:in a louder tone so now let me set the scene with you there are other comics in the hallway and there was a woman this woman molly an agent from uh icm who i talked to earlier in a very nice charming tone and she thought we were just kidding until she realized oh no maron's fucking losing it and i don't even know her so she scrambles off and he says why don't you scroll back through your twitter feed and find out and i'm like what the fuck are you talking about what are you talking about
Marc:And he says, you couldn't just leave it.
Marc:You couldn't just leave it.
Marc:You had to show that you had more power than me.
Marc:You just said, eh.
Marc:And I'm like, I do not know what the fuck you're talking about.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I didn't know it was you or whatever.
Marc:And I'm screaming.
Marc:He's like, you think this looks good?
Marc:You're yelling at a young comic.
Marc:And I'm like, I don't give a fuck.
Marc:What the fuck is your problem?
Marc:Why you treat me like a fucking asshole?
Marc:And he goes to walk off.
Marc:And I said, let me see if I can be honest with you because some of you feel like you're not getting honesty from me.
Marc:As he walked off, leaving me in a rage with no resolution, I said, you're a fucking cunt and you're not funny.
Marc:And I walked back down the hall and everyone in the hallway was like, don't look in his eyes.
Marc:Like, oh shit, mommy and daddy just lost it.
Marc:Just don't look in his eyes.
Marc:And I felt the rage kind of easing.
Marc:And then it sort of dissipated.
Marc:But, like, I felt bad because I didn't want to lose my shit.
Marc:But I also thought I was being, you know, provoked.
Marc:And he used to treat me like an asshole.
Marc:And I lost my shit.
Marc:And I had no recollection of what the hell he was talking about.
Marc:But I felt shitty because I don't want to lose my shit like that.
Marc:Then I go back to talk to, like, I was going back into the original room to do my set.
Marc:And I see that woman, Molly, and I'm like, hey, what's going on?
Marc:Yeah, that got a little out of hand.
Marc:And she's looking at me like, I don't know you and you're scary.
Marc:And I'm like, oh my God, I know that face.
Marc:I've seen that face.
Marc:But here's the fucked up thing about rage is that you're in it and there's people around.
Marc:And what does that look like?
Marc:How fucking crazy and scary is that shit?
Marc:And I felt fucking embarrassed because now I'm a crazy man.
Marc:It was just embarrassing, and that's what happens when you build it up.
Marc:You don't meditate.
Marc:You drink too much coffee.
Marc:You hold your feelings in.
Marc:Whatever the fuck it is, it happened.
Marc:I felt bad about it, and then I did my set, and I said, look, man, I'm sorry.
Marc:I don't remember what you're talking about.
Marc:He goes, okay, I believe you, and I'm sorry, too.
Marc:It got out of hand.
Marc:I'm like, I'm sorry.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I walked away.
Marc:It was like a very reluctant but genuine apology.
Marc:And then I went back home and I looked on my Twitter feed and, you know, somebody had said, you know, something he was added in this request.
Marc:Someone asked me to have him on the show and I said, eh, like I did know what I was doing and I was being a dick, but I didn't really think it would like cause that much trouble.
Marc:I should just get off Twitter altogether.
Marc:Because, like, I'm no different.
Marc:I'm the same way.
Marc:If somebody says something dismissive or shitty to me, you know, I get fucking worked up.
Marc:And, you know, this guy knows me and I know him.
Marc:And I said a shitty thing and I felt shitty about it.
Marc:And, you know, he was right.
Marc:But nonetheless, there's a little personal story about Mark losing his shit in.
Marc:in this great and prosperous time where everything should be going his way busy drained working hard overwhelmed ship builds up i lose my mind on some dude we made up but it's a little clouded by the fact that i was a dick and uh i guess i'm just wanting to tell you guys i'm still capable of that
Marc:And I'm sorry.
Marc:So that being said, we have Elvis Costello on the show today.
Marc:And I read a little bit of his new book, which is Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink.
Marc:It's out now.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:And I was excited to talk to him, but nervous because when I got to talk to people that have done a lot of work, you know, it's like, how are we going to get it in?
Marc:Well, he was running a little late.
Marc:And he got here, and we had literally an hour.
Marc:He got here.
Marc:He came with a guy I know, Eddie Gordetzky, comedy writer, and another guy.
Marc:And they come in, and I'm like, you need water, you need tea.
Marc:I always have tea on hand for my British friends.
Marc:and then he sees my espresso machine sitting on the counter.
Marc:He goes, what's that?
Marc:And I go, I can make you an espresso.
Marc:He said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So I make him a double shot of espresso, which eats into the hour.
Marc:He shoots it back like a goddamn shot of Jameson's, and we come out here, and he just, right out of the gate, we're fucking going.
Marc:We're up and running, man.
Marc:So this is a very packed...
Marc:An engaged hour with the maestro that is Elvis Costello.
Marc:And I would like to mention that, you know, I talked with Elvis.
Marc:This actually took place a couple weeks ago.
Marc:And we talked about blues legend, New Orleans artist, Alan Toussaint, who passed away this week.
Marc:RIP.
Marc:And I thought I should mention that because it had not happened when I talked to Elvis.
Marc:So this is my conversation with Elvis Costello.
Guest:Well, what do you think?
Marc:Well, Peter Green plays big in your childhood, right?
Guest:Yeah, but you know, I didn't even register him until he was in Fleetwood Mac.
Guest:I didn't know anything about him.
Guest:I'm a little bit too young.
Guest:yeah for the blues boom right yeah yeah i was a kid in where we lived was you know across the bridge from the station hotel right we lived just a 150 yards from the thames and uh it was all happening around the
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, if I'd just been like a teenager, I would have had a ball because it was, you know, over the bridge was the station hotel where the stone started.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There was a dirty old van that used to be parked in the next street.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That I never did find out because you'd never see them in the hours of daylight.
Guest:But they said it was the Yardbirds or it just could have been their road crew.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But as kids, we said the Yardbirds live in the next street.
Guest:And, you know, this van would have, I love Jeff or I love Eric.
Guest:I don't know whether.
Guest:Painted on there?
Yeah.
Guest:written in the dust or a bit of lipstick or something and and because they were just breaking out of blues into being a pop group yeah yeah and there was eel pie island that's just around the bend in the river yeah so this is a hotbed of you know sort of blues into psychedelic music going on all around me and i'm just you know i was 10 and 64. so you're just starting to see the hippies going and the long hair is going like that looks interesting
Guest:Yeah, but this is even earlier.
Guest:It's like 65, 66.
Guest:People are only just getting long hair.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Sort of long hair like the Rolling Stones, not long hair like Woodstock.
Marc:Well, it's sort of interesting, though, because I've read about 170 pages.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'm in.
Marc:You're in.
Marc:You're not cutting back.
Marc:And I think it's great.
Marc:Unless something happens at page 200 and it just falls to shit, I think it's a great book.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:I figured I'd hook him in early and get him in.
Guest:And as you can tell, I had no intention of going, I was born, I did this, my drug held, my conversion.
Guest:No, you go back and forth.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:Because you can read the other stuff.
Guest:I wrote 60,000 words of liner notes.
Guest:Of liner notes.
Guest:Of liner notes, yeah.
Guest:For various reissues.
Guest:Is that another book?
Guest:It's like episodic kind of telling of how we made the record.
Guest:So this is more like how...
Guest:how I heard music the way I did because I traced it back to seeing my dad when I was a little lad.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Well, I think what was interesting is you're saying that you missed that first wave, the British blues boom.
Marc:But because you grew up when you grew up, you sort of have access to your father's music.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then, you know, if you want to go back to the blues, you can.
Marc:But the music that was happening, I was very surprised to see, you know, what was influencing you.
Guest:Well, you know, my parents met in a record shop.
Guest:I mean, you know, if you're... Your mom worked there?
Guest:Yeah, this I'm talking about like 1949, 50.
Guest:My mother worked in a record shop from 1943.
Guest:She left school at 14.
Guest:That's the first job she got.
Guest:It's the only job she knew.
Guest:Of course, you had to learn the catalog inside out then.
Guest:You had to be able to recommend which is the version of this song.
Marc:Was it classical or jazz?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Popular songs of the day.
Guest:And they did have to learn.
Guest:Even a shop girl had to know.
Guest:They used to send her up to the Philharmonic Hall and you had to learn about classical music and
Guest:So she knew it.
Guest:She knew that.
Guest:And she just had an interest in dance band music, which was the pop music of the day, you know, through the late 40s and jazz.
Guest:And my dad was among the musicians coming in trying to play this crazy new music out of America, which was bebop.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, my dad, you know, has to his name that he was Birkenhead.
Guest:That's the little town opposite Liverpool.
Guest:Birkenhead's leading and probably only bebop trumpet player, you know,
Marc:there wasn't like a big jazz scene but you grew up with a musician father yeah and you knew that as you got older you knew the pitfalls of that well definitely and and uh but do you find that have you somehow broken the mold do you feel like well not in certain ways no i mean you know my dad was um he quickly found like a lot of jazz musicians that he could make
Guest:he happened to have a talent to be able to sing yeah so you know he wasn't he can't even tried to go to london yeah you know i would cat under his arm like dick whittington you know right and my mother got a job actually my mother did better than my dad my mother got a job in selfridge's department so big you know really fancy department store yeah and sold records there with my dad sort of struggled to get into jazz
Guest:So he took a job with a dance band, just playing in the section.
Marc:So that's how he ended up with, what was the name of that guy?
Guest:Joe Loss Orchestra.
Guest:And then they discovered he could sing, and then they pushed him forward.
Guest:He'll give you a couple of numbers as a vocalist.
Guest:And next thing, he was appearing on the annual polls of vocalists, and he got headhunted by one of the top bands of the day.
Guest:And they were a band based on Glenn Miller.
Guest:That's the kind of music.
Guest:But did he ever feel like a regret that he didn't pursue the more... I talked about it with him when he was a lot older, you know, because he knew all the names of all these great jazz musicians, the English ones, some of whom became world famous.
Guest:And, you know, they were his sort of pals when he first came to London.
Guest:But, you know, he had a really great career as a singer on the radio.
Guest:He didn't record very much, so I don't have a lot of examples of him singing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He sang on the radio every week.
Guest:And the way radio was set up in England then was very different than America.
Guest:We didn't have 12 or 24 hours of continuous pop radio at lots of different stations with different call signs.
Guest:We just had the BBC.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they had all these funny regulations, funny agreements that had been made between the musicians union and the performing.
Guest:They could only play five hours of music a day.
Guest:That's all recorded music.
Guest:Because they had live programming?
Guest:Because the rest of it had to be live to keep the musicians in work.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Of which, of course, my dad benefited from that.
Guest:And so the BBC had a lot of BBC orchestra, BBC this, BBC that.
Guest:But they didn't record it.
Guest:And no, it went out live.
Guest:It was just gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they were sort of like acted like a filter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And of course, the groups of the day, the recording artists were also obliged to go on to those shows and play live performances of the hits.
Guest:How they got exposure.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So when I was a young lad and I'd be off school, I'd go with my dad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was the thrill, you know, because I was going, you know, it's like take your kid today.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Take your kid to work day.
Guest:And you're in show business.
Guest:It was show business.
Guest:Yeah, well, I'd been to the dance hall with them on a Saturday and seen how it worked.
Guest:Then to get to go to the broadcast, the real hook for me to go there, as much as I'd like to see my dad work, was that there'd be a group of the day on who were more the music that I actually wanted to listen to.
Guest:Who'd you see?
Guest:Mersey Beats, The Hollies.
Guest:Oh, you saw The Hollies?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I saw The Hollies come in.
Guest:I mean, the guys who were in the band with my dad was about 37 then.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's old-timey in a way.
Guest:Some of the men in the band were maybe as much as 50.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But they all seem like, you know, old, when you're tearing it, you can't tell.
Guest:And then suddenly these scruffy guys come in carrying their own equipment.
Guest:And I've written in the book, like, I really remember Tony Hicks, the guitar player.
Guest:He just had a sweater on.
Guest:He didn't have a jacket on with a hole in the elbow.
Guest:I don't know why it's stuck in my head all these years, because I just went, oh, he's like a kid like me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was like a thing where just the light went on.
Guest:I could be like that, because I think he was only 18.
Marc:When you were writing the book, how much did you learn about yourself in the process of digging out?
Marc:Because for me to see that you were compulsively playing Neil Young music at the beginning,
Marc:I mean, is that something you've always carried with you and talked about?
Marc:Or did you realize things about yourself?
Marc:The fact that you were excited to see Little Feet, I found not jarring, but just sort of like, really?
Guest:Well, it's not really what people, you know, people get you a little, if they just know you a little bit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Then they just know that one type of music you play.
Guest:They don't ever think about what other music might be.
Guest:No, I can see it.
Marc:I mean, I can see it.
Marc:Like, it seems to me that, you know, you mentioned Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Little Feet.
Marc:And then you mentioned some country music.
Marc:I mean, it all seems to inform what you ended up doing your entire life.
Marc:Van Morrison.
Guest:It's just the way you hear it.
Guest:I just think some of it, some of the music that was in the house when I was just a little kid that's playing, your parents are choosing.
Guest:That's why I never heard rock and roll, because my parents were tuned in to...
Guest:They were tuned into Frank Sinatra and bebop.
Marc:But they didn't strike me as conservative people.
Guest:They weren't conservative.
Guest:It just wasn't interesting to them.
Guest:They didn't think it was bad music.
Guest:This was the other music that were more conservative.
Guest:And then my dad was obliged to learn whatever was in the hip parade, whether it was It's Not Unusual by Tom Jones or Like a Rolling Stone.
Guest:I mean, really, I know it's hard to imagine that they process these songs through these swing bands.
Marc:Did you ever cover It's Not Unusual?
Guest:I never did.
Guest:It just struck me.
Guest:What's new Pussycat would be more my speed, I think.
Guest:But so, you know, all the way through the 60s, I was hearing music two ways.
Guest:I'm hearing it on the radio like all my friends, and I'm hearing it in the front room, my dad learning it off these same records, many of them A-labels, advanced releases.
Marc:Would you have heard Burt Bacharach then?
Marc:Yeah, oh, definitely, yeah.
Marc:In your parents' collection?
Marc:No, no, no.
Guest:That would be something my dad would have brought home to learn.
Guest:I mean, the songs that, I don't know, sung by who, Billy J. Kramer, you know, singing Trains and Boats and Planes, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of course, all those songs were hits maybe once or twice over, because we'd get the English version, then we'd get the American original come out.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That's why all that music went in so deep, because we had English beat groups, as they were called, which were sort of the second generation rock and roll band, English ones.
Guest:The Beatles, you know, they got hold of Chuck Berry songs and Miracle songs.
Guest:But if you were a 10 year old Beatles fan, you thought they wrote those songs.
Guest:I didn't until I checked the credits.
Guest:I didn't know who wrote them.
Guest:I just knew they wrote songs.
Guest:I thought they wrote everything.
Marc:But it seems to me that when not unlike, I guess, a lot of people that when you heard the Beatles, you knew that something was magical going on.
Guest:Well, it hit me.
Guest:That was the first record I ever asked my dad for from the ones he would bring home to sing on the radio.
Guest:He was learning Please Please Me in the front room in 63.
Marc:And what was it?
Guest:Was it just the harmony?
Guest:I think it was the harmony.
Guest:I think it was the vocal harmony.
Guest:It's a peculiar sort of little vocal trick where there's just one note being stated all the time.
Guest:And it just did something to me.
Guest:And I suppose then you discover that you have certain dispositions.
Guest:And at 10, you don't analyze any of that stuff.
Guest:I don't know the names for music, musical terms.
Marc:And you spend time in the book, and it seems to be recurring through the book about the death of a friend of yours when you were a kid.
Marc:Well, that was a lot later on.
Marc:That was what really- How old were you?
Guest:17.
Guest:And you saw that happen?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What happened?
Guest:You know, we were just in a school annex, 300 yards, and he was just jokingly saying, give us a lift to one of the teachers.
Guest:He ran out in the road.
Guest:It was the sort of thing that you wouldn't expect to happen to a 17-year-old.
Guest:He just didn't see the car.
Guest:And, you know, it was very shocking to all of us.
Guest:And, you know, I think now when I look at it, he was, you know, a good friend.
Guest:And he was a photographer as well.
Guest:And, you know, there's a picture in the book that he took.
Guest:of us in the class, and I'm in the middle of this bunch of schoolboys playing the guitar.
Guest:And he was always getting at me.
Guest:You've got to sing Working Class Hero.
Guest:And I said, I can't sing that.
Guest:It's like I'm not working class.
Guest:My family came from working class.
Marc:So this is like 69, 70, 71?
Marc:It's 71.
Guest:And he was on at me about singing that song.
Guest:And he was like, it's really good because it says fucking in it.
Guest:And he'd like that.
Guest:He would get up and sing it in front of people and horrify them.
Guest:And I'd learned it, but I never felt convinced in singing it.
Guest:I said, John Lennon, he wasn't really working class either.
Guest:He was sort of like, I suppose the definitions are all different in England.
Guest:Nobody really had it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Very different kind of life.
Guest:And then, you know, after he died, I think I sort of... It just woke me up to the fact that you should do the thing you really love most of all, you know.
Guest:So you felt his... Because life was a little bit, you know, more fragile than you think.
Guest:Because when you're 17, you think you're immortal.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And just to see that happen in front of you.
Guest:It was a really, really... And, you know, it was...
Guest:Only very recently her sister got back in touch with me and gave me the picture that's in the book.
Guest:And she had heard that I was working on a book.
Guest:And that was really beautiful because, you know, she gave me this picture.
Guest:And I had no memory that he'd taken it.
Guest:I remember that he took photographs, but I never remembered that he took a picture of me.
Guest:And it just, you know, it was a nice connection to the way I was thinking about it.
Marc:And you hadn't seen her in 30, 40 years?
Guest:No, I still haven't seen her.
Guest:She just sent it?
Guest:We corresponded with one another, yeah.
Guest:It was his only sister?
Guest:You know, I don't even, you know, at that age, you don't talk about your families very much.
Guest:You just run into people at school, yeah.
Guest:Well, I think we didn't talk about our feelings and all that sort of stuff.
Guest:It just wasn't what you did.
Guest:Maybe we're English, you know, we don't really do that sort of thing.
Guest:And, you know, he was, like me, I think he was Anglo-Irish, you know, so it was a little bit of a different sort of combination, cocktail of emotions.
Marc:And do you think that in retrospect, outside of just learning the existential realities of life is short, that the grief of that or the shock of that sort of stayed with you?
Guest:No, no, I think it just...
Guest:I thought, I'm not going to go to college and learn to do something I don't really want to do.
Guest:My dad was a musician.
Guest:There'd been a guitar in the corner of my room since I was nine.
Guest:What kind?
Guest:Spanish guitar.
Guest:My parents and I went.
Guest:Nylon string?
Guest:It was originally.
Guest:And then I fucked it up by putting steel strings on it.
Guest:And when I was about, I don't know, whatever year, 19, I was 14.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Man of the World came out with Fleetwood Mac.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The real Fleetwood Mac.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And that was this... You mentioned a while ago Peter Green.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Peter Green was somebody that I saw him once in our local record shop.
Guest:He was like this hippie Jesus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He had this amazing look with a rugby shirt and this long hair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he sang in this really soulful way.
Guest:And I didn't know until later that he played in a legit blues band, you know, playing.
Guest:I just knew these records that suddenly hit.
Guest:And it was like he'd got hold of something from the blues and really made some original, I guess we'd call it rock music now.
Guest:It's heavy, though.
Guest:Nobody really called it rock music then, I remember.
Guest:It was sort of like progressive, I think.
Guest:There's something about the tone of his voice.
Guest:Yeah, and it was really, you know, he sang what I later realized was a little Willie John song, I Need Your Love So Bad.
Guest:That was the one that I, that's the only guitar solo I've ever learned how to play.
Guest:And I never could play it well.
Guest:That was from like one of the first two of the Fleetwood Mac albums.
Guest:There's only like three.
Guest:And that was after I've heard the song Man of the World.
Guest:And I suppose it appealed to a,
Guest:you know, romantic 14-year-old.
Guest:And just this, let me tell you about my life.
Guest:You know, they say I'm a man of the world.
Guest:It was a totally improbable song.
Guest:And somebody at my school, an older kid, I think, had the chord changes written out in chord symbols.
Guest:And I was so obsessed with this song that I sat down and took my guitar out, which I'd never bothered with, never learned to play one chord on.
Guest:and taught myself to play that one song at 17 or 14 14 14 yeah well the thing I think the power of like Peter Green's voice was it's almost heartbreaking somehow yeah and it's still one of my very favorite singers I mean very underrated yeah and he just wrote the most original almost like another version of rock music that never really got picked up by anybody did you ever meet him
Guest:and uh i didn't ever meet him to talk to because he's still around yeah he's i saw a picture of him recently looking well because he had a period where he was not well and i did see that's when i saw him i mean he he would appear yeah standing kind of like rather an apparition yeah not looking very well right and that was kind of heartbreaking because i'd seen him this one time looking really heroic yeah and and then just moved to pick up the guitar just because of what he played because of peter
Guest:I love hearing that.
Guest:And then I saw him later, you know, just standing in the street looking kind of almost like he was in a trance and not looking in very good shape at all.
Guest:And I think he had some problems that they eventually, you know, there's a BBC documentary called Man of the World.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:About his sort of guy finding him.
Guest:Yeah, and so I think it was one of those things of people misdiagnosing him and having him on the wrong medication.
Guest:People were quick to say, oh, it was excessive, and it may have been something.
Guest:But I don't know anything about that, so I can't say what the truth is.
Marc:I heard someone told me, and I don't know if it's true, that B.B.
Marc:King said that Peter Green was the only guitar player that ever made him cry.
Marc:Well, that's a... That's great.
Guest:For me, all the other guys who were sort of English blues guitar players...
Guest:i i they are all there's many admirable musicians among them but the only one that really moves me and i you know i've ever really spent any time listening to is peter it's peter green i'm i'm with you on that yeah yeah and he actually was the guy that inspired you to play guitar yeah even though i never wanted to play solo lines i mean it was that was the other thing it was like he was a songwriter yeah and he had this sort of strange fatalistic romantic
Guest:uh sound which appealed to me at that age and i still love the song and it has a little suspension yeah in it and these little tricks so once i learned all the chords i mean there might be nine chords in that song far more than you would ever have to learn from the average campfire song sure or a blue song yeah i never ever wanted to play blues in that way yeah
Guest:So I then found I could tear through all these songs, which up until then had just been on records, like I could play Beatles songs.
Guest:Oh, these are actually a lot simpler than I thought.
Guest:You know, they seem beyond me because when you're a kid, I think you just accept everything all at once.
Guest:You don't pick it apart.
Marc:So you're self-taught by chord charts?
Guest:Yeah, and then I bought these songbooks which had simplified changes because they were cheaper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they just were beginner's books.
Guest:And then my ear told me the chords were wrong.
Guest:And I'd sneak into the shop and look at where the diminished chords were and all these major sevens and learn gradually about harmony.
Guest:And also you learned how to play lead somewhere.
Guest:No, I never did, really.
Guest:You can play lead.
Guest:I just put my fingers anywhere and hope for the rest.
Good.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:No, it's true.
Guest:So you're always just a melody guy?
Guest:Yeah, in my head I can hear complicated harmony, and I still have deliberately not learned the guitar.
Guest:I never played scales, or certainly never blues scales.
Guest:I just play instinctively what I hear, and I think it's...
Guest:good having a complicated head for the accompanying harmony.
Guest:But there are some leads on your records.
Guest:Yeah, but they're all just sort of luck.
Guest:My old musical partner from Liverpool when I was 17 said every solo I launched into, I'd say I had a rabbit's foot in my jacket pocket to get me through it.
Guest:And I never thought of myself as a guitar player.
Guest:I couldn't get a job in anybody else's band.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But just some things I hear.
Guest:That's a gift.
Guest:And then I work out where they are on the guitar.
Guest:And I left the idiot part of the guitar playing be.
Guest:Because it's important.
Guest:I mean, that's the noble tradition.
Guest:Well, you find your feel through what you do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, that's like the big stupid riff is the thing I like.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that just works for certain kinds of song.
Guest:And then I can hear all the other stuff and arrange all the parts, you know, and tell people what to play or even I've learned to write it down.
Guest:But with the guitar, you want to really just keep that.
Guest:Keep alive the interlink ray, you know.
Marc:When you look at yourself in retrospect of your entire career, do you see yourself as a band leader to some degree?
Marc:Songwriter.
Marc:Songwriter.
Guest:That's what you call yourself.
Guest:Band leader, maybe second.
Guest:Arranger.
Guest:I guess that's what it's called, but I didn't think.
Guest:because i i was looking at some stuff and i was trying to figure out you didn't you don't you didn't do a lot of producing on your own right no it was not a thing you wanted to do i only ever wanted to stop other people fucking up the groups and i liked like the specials particularly that yeah i really loved them yeah and i you know i just i was between it was like the three or four weeks between albums or tours you know right
Guest:working pretty consistently then.
Guest:And I just wanted to make sure that nobody polished them up beyond what I loved about them when I heard them live.
Guest:And I just turned up the faders and they did it.
Guest:And you did the first record of the specials.
Guest:And the first Pogues record.
Guest:Same sort of thing.
Guest:It was like...
Guest:There were some parts I had to play, you know, because there were some players that could play really well and some players that couldn't play at all.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it kind of worked, you know, and it had this... Both those records were very similar, and they were just like electric.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Even though there were actually, in some cases, no electric instruments on it.
Marc:Well, there was a lot of acoustic stuff on that first record.
Guest:Yeah, but it was like...
Guest:Driven by the incredible words.
Marc:Yeah, it was a hell of a record.
Marc:So you were in a duo for a while with that guy you just mentioned.
Marc:What was his name?
Marc:Alan Mays.
Guest:Where did he end up?
Guest:He ended up in Austin, Texas.
Guest:We reformed our group last night.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:I was on this book tour.
Guest:Yeah, and I rang him up and said, you know, I've been showing pictures from trying to locate the apprenticeship of music.
Guest:And I said, I've got a picture of us playing to a bunch of totally bewildered looking middle-aged people at a poetry society in Liverpool in 71.
Guest:And I've got like a stripy sweater on, like a member of the Standells.
Guest:And he's like much more, he was always a more confident, more polished player.
Guest:and uh i said i've got and he gave me a demo tape that he had kept that was just the other day no he gave it to me ages ago and it was and it's you know i never i didn't know anything about recording it was a like tape recorder i got my dad i didn't know you're supposed to clean the heads right so that even though the thing is recorded in 1971 it sounds like it's recorded in 1935 you know it's like it's all muffly
Guest:What was the experience of listening to that?
Guest:Well, you know, I could hear who we liked.
Guest:Could you hear yourself, though?
Guest:On certain notes, just on certain kind of phrases.
Guest:And there's something that's just you're born with.
Guest:And when did you get back together with them?
Guest:Yesterday?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, you know, I'm telling the story.
Guest:It's a bit in the book where I'm saying, you know, some of the comical things that happened in your apprenticeship.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:And I thought, wouldn't it be great when I say this story, if I just pull the curtain back and then we do it right now.
Guest:And it was a joyful thing to sing again.
Guest:We just sang this song I wrote when I was 17.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And we sang a Van Morrison song that we used to do.
Guest:Which Van Morrison song?
Guest:Domino.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know you're a big Astro Weeks fan.
Guest:Yeah, but you could never play that music.
Guest:You couldn't cover that music.
Guest:It was the ones from, truthfully, the Boundless Street Quiet record was where I stole all the rhythms from my own is true.
Guest:But nobody kind of caught that because they were convinced I was something to do with the London thing.
Guest:you said something very interesting in the book about you know when you try to sound like somebody else that's where you might sort of happen upon your own sound because you're doing it badly that's almost certainly it yeah i mean i and you know i i would hear like uh you ain't living until you're loving by marvin gay yeah i didn't even know how many instruments were on that record even when i was a professional musician i thought it was an orchestra right when i went to
Guest:Hittsville to visit in the early 80s, and I found the room was only the same size of studios that I'd recorded.
Guest:I was astounded.
Guest:I thought, it must be a big cathedral of a place.
Guest:Because it just, in my imagination, it always sounded so huge.
Marc:Well, so when you were a kid, you were listening to that, or as you're becoming a more proficient musician, you're listening to the Motown stuff, and you're listening to... We never called it Motown.
Marc:I know.
Marc:What'd you call it?
Marc:We called it Tamla.
Marc:Why?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:It was just a convention.
Guest:But it had nothing to do with anything?
Guest:You can't trace that word?
Guest:It was Tamla Motown.
Guest:Tamla Motown.
Guest:And they said Tamla on the label.
Guest:On the label.
Guest:So there was a label thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When they were imported, they said Tamla.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's Tamla.
Guest:It was like, you got any Tamla records, you know?
Guest:I never heard Motown until much later.
Marc:Where did the love for, how did you get to country?
Guest:That was a little bit later.
Guest:I really loved The Birds.
Guest:I liked all those groups through the 60s, the English ones, obviously the Beatles.
Guest:The Stones more the later records, like Aftermath, not so much the real blues records.
Guest:Even before that, Aftermath, Between the Buttons.
Guest:Those, I definitely took them apart and put them back together in my own way.
Guest:But The Small Faces.
Guest:Not The Faces, The Small Faces.
Guest:Sure, with Steve Marriott.
Guest:The Kinks, because they tell stories.
Guest:And then the American group who really spoke to me first, of really all the 60s groups,
Guest:the birds and i liked everything they did you know when they were folk rock and then they were raga rock and then there was space rock and then yeah every record had another name and i suppose now i realize that was probably as silly as people when people i put my records out this is new wave right we never said that that wasn't made up by a and r man or something yeah but you never sought out to work with mcguinn i did you did one which record when plays on the first track on spike oh he did it's it's the three max yeah yeah yeah it's mccartney mcguinn and me
Guest:Was that a big day?
Guest:They weren't in the room together, but they recorded their parts separately.
Guest:I said in the book, you were jumping ahead, but after I made all the records for the Attractions, which were, for the main part, combo records, where we just played in the room.
Guest:What do you consider the last Attractions record?
Guest:Imperial Bedroom.
Guest:We all played together on the records.
Guest:That's really the last one.
Guest:Well, I suppose Blood and Chocolate is an attractions record.
Guest:But we're working kind of against ourselves there.
Guest:That's how it kind of sounds tense and good like it is.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because you're at odds?
Guest:Well, they weren't very happy about me working with T-Bone Burnett the year before.
Guest:That sort of blew.
Guest:We had already kind of run out of the formula of working together, and yet we couldn't break the habit.
Guest:It was the truth of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So what did, because I know, like I had Nick Lowe in here, and like it's very hard for me to manage musical history, especially, you know, someone who's been at it as long as you, and I talked to Nick, but I didn't, where did that whole, what facilitated the change that enabled you
Marc:to sort of be so defined in the moment that you were defined?
Marc:Because it seemed like the sound of England was changing, all the music that was coming out of there, the pop music that they were culling away, but you, The Squeeze, and a few other bands were honoring some very sophisticated pop music.
Guest:Well, the way I see it is that we had the 60s and all these very tight, short records, like the Small Faces and the Kinks and obviously the primary, the Beatles.
Guest:And then there was psychedelic music and then progressive and prog rock.
Marc:Was that ever your thing?
Guest:Never.
Guest:Yeah, couldn't see it.
Guest:And so the R&B thing really kind of carried me through and what they called wooden music, you know, West Coast American folk music.
Guest:Laurel Canyon stuff?
Guest:Yeah, more introspective.
Guest:So those two things for me were running along parallel.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I moved to Liverpool to finish my schooling in 1970.
Guest:and discovered that nobody in the school would admit to liking Tamla or Stax.
Guest:That was kind of as people were saying, that's music for divvies.
Guest:What's a divvy?
Guest:Sort of like leery, kind of stupid.
Guest:And I went, because I guess, you know, hooligans liked it.
Guest:You know, I went, no, that's what we've been doing.
Guest:You know, at different parts of the country, you have different tastes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I listened to a lot of Rocksteady and early reggae before the Rasta reggae kind of thing.
Marc:That was much more popular early on in England.
Guest:It was very popular.
Guest:It was like the second string music, really.
Guest:It was almost like another kind of R&B.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was like the underlying music.
Guest:We didn't get that here until much later.
Guest:It never really caught on.
Guest:No.
Guest:That's why Americans can't play it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so we had all that music.
Guest:That's the sort of teenage dance music.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like dub music, too?
Guest:What you call Motown.
Guest:No, long before dub.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and all these records on the Trojan label, long before we even heard of the Wailers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I went to Liverpool, and everybody was listening to psychedelic music.
Guest:They listened to whole sides of Pink Floyd.
Guest:It bewildered me, that music.
Guest:Did you think it was a waste of time?
Guest:It took a long time.
Guest:I knew that.
Guest:I like C. Emily play.
Guest:I love C. Emily play.
Guest:and on the lane and after that I just glazed over you know and Led Zeppelin I couldn't I thought if you want to listen to that why do you listen to Howlin' Wolf you know what I mean it's like it's okay yeah you know the first two records yeah it's it just it just I just couldn't get it so I went the other way I went super quiet and I liked all you know and well you know what's interesting about that is that you know who else was like that I had Huey Lewis in here
Marc:And Huey grew up in the hippie zone.
Marc:He grew up in like... In Marin.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And he was an R&B guy.
Marc:He didn't like the hippie shit.
Marc:And it turns out that the band he was with backed you on the first record, right?
Guest:Yeah, he was down at the pub chasing girls probably.
Guest:I don't know what he was up to.
Guest:Him and the two singers from Clover, I mean, this band was a sort of a cult band that had had a couple of records.
Guest:They were persuaded by my first manager, Jake Rivera, to come and seek their fortune in London at probably the worst time that an accomplished... The end of the pub rock business?
Guest:Yeah, the pub rock as it was called.
Guest:I don't ever... Again, I don't remember anybody ever calling it that.
Guest:What was that, though?
Guest:I don't even know what it was.
Guest:To you all in America, it's a very... I know that the... I came to understand that music was played in bars.
Guest:And so that bars sounded kind of cooler than...
Guest:But, like, who were the bands?
Guest:Well, they were bands like the one Nick Lowe was in.
Guest:Clover.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, Brinsley Schwartz.
Guest:You liked them, though, right?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They were the band that I really, you know... That was Nick Lowe's band, right?
Guest:Well, he was the main songwriter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the... And then, you know, Clover was this band that people whispered about.
Guest:Have you heard Clover?
Guest:Have you got... Your record was really hard to get.
Guest:It was an American band.
Guest:American band.
Guest:And they...
Guest:Really after the moment that they should have come to London, they were persuaded to come to London.
Guest:They were signed to a major record label, so they were doing better than me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was still working in an office, and I was making demos, really, for stiff records.
Guest:You didn't have a band.
Guest:No, I didn't have a band.
Guest:So they said, well, you can use the drummer.
Guest:and John McPhee, the guitar player, and Nick Lowell play bass, and he's going to produce these two songs.
Guest:And they saw something in that, and then I'd turn up at the office with a tape with another five songs on it, and then we'll record these four.
Guest:So now you've got to go.
Guest:We learned the first two just in the studio.
Guest:What was the first song you wrote?
Guest:Well, the first one I recorded was Radio Sweetheart, which wasn't on an album.
Guest:It was just on a B-side, and Mystery Dance.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, which was on mine.
Guest:It was true eventually.
Marc:That's actually the first song of yours, because I got your first record in a box of records that was given to me by, I worked at a restaurant, and the record store next door catered primarily to disco and dance music and R&B, and had all these rock records, and we don't know what to do with them, and I took them, and that was the year your first record came out, and I put it on, and I was like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Who's this guy?
Guest:this is amazing that's what we thought but you know it was but I'm a Chuck Berry head so mystery dance I was like that's the shit it was a rock and roll model you know and I had all these crazy ideas to me it was a novelty song right and I couldn't understand like a play on an old song it was sort of a play on an old song so I wanted to make it sound as modern as possible so I played it all down strokes I didn't want it to swing I mean all things that are completely wrong about rock and roll Nick just didn't ignore me and had the band play it the way he heard it and it came out sounding great
Guest:Well, he comes from that.
Guest:Him and Dave Edmonds, they bounce like that.
Guest:It was really a demo for Dave Edmonds.
Guest:It was a demo.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:You had it in mind for him?
Guest:Well, I didn't.
Guest:They did.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:They didn't really see how I fitted in because I didn't look like I should be in a group.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Anyway, they would then send me to the country to this house where Clover had been, because some of the guys in Clover had families.
Guest:So they were living in the getting it together in the country style out of this place called Hedley Grange, which had previously been used by Led Zeppelin and Bad Company and these groups to get it together.
Guest:I think Stairway to Heaven was written there.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:The words, you know, the ghost of Robert Plant would lurk in the West Wing.
Guest:But he's still alive.
Guest:That's what's weird.
Guest:Yeah, that was strange.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'd go down there, and I'd have to spend the night, and we'd rehearse the songs.
Guest:And you're just a little kid, in a way.
Guest:Well, I wasn't really.
Guest:I was working in an office.
Guest:I was 20, 21, 22.
Guest:Was that when you were working for the cologne company?
Guest:I was working for Elizabeth Arden.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the day, I was in an air-conditioned cubicle with a little computer, which is way, you know, it couldn't do anything your phone can do.
Guest:Yeah, right, sure.
Guest:Very primitive computer.
Guest:Took up the whole room.
Guest:Whole room, chatter away.
Guest:And I could bullshit like crazy about the computer.
Guest:It's not ready.
Guest:It's in a bad mood.
Guest:I'd make up all things.
Guest:Leave me alone.
Guest:I'm writing these songs.
Guest:And then I'd written all these tunes.
Guest:I'd take them down, show them to these guys who were way more accomplished than anybody I'd played with.
Guest:And they would play it back to me sort of a little bit different than I heard it in my head, truthfully, a little bit slicker, a little bit slower as well, more swinging.
Guest:And the common ground I found was the guitar player, John McPhee, and actually I knew he'd played on a Van Morrison record.
Guest:So that was exciting to me.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And their own records, the Clover records, I really dug them.
Guest:But they weren't the kind of music I was trying to write, which was a little bit faster.
Guest:So then we'd go up to this tiny little studio pathway.
Guest:And it was like, really, this room was generous in space.
Guest:If you imagine a whole band in a room of this size.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, of course, everything went... Every instrument went on to every other instrument, and that's usually a bad thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But for some reason, in this little space, the fact that the drums could be heard on my vocal mic created some sort of weird excitement.
Guest:And actually, when you go back and look at most of the historic recording studios... They're like that.
Guest:...that sort of has some freak thing, like sun is like that.
Guest:So you played all that live to tape?
Guest:Yeah, pretty much live, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think the only thing I dubbed on, say, Mystery Dance was the piano, because we didn't have a piano player, so...
Guest:I could just about play the part.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I couldn't do the sweep down the keys like Jerry Lee.
Guest:So Nick Lowe had to stand there with the drumstick.
Guest:And I said, now!
Guest:And he's like, he'd run it down the keys.
Guest:I mean, just totally held together with pieces of sticky tape.
Marc:But clearly the energy you brought to it and the menace of everyone on top of each other made it the electric thing.
Guest:When it's played loud to you and you've not been in a studio with competent musicians before, it's very thrilling.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Then you take it home and I played it on my little same tape recorder I was telling you about where I hadn't cleaned the heads for 20 years.
Guest:And I go, oh, it sounds a bit muted.
Guest:I remember coming home and thinking, oh, it doesn't sound quite as good.
Guest:Because it's not coming through these giant speakers.
Guest:In a studio.
Guest:A studio monitor.
Guest:And with Nick Lowe shouting, you know, it's great, you know, because that was his style of producing.
Marc:How did you build that relationship with him?
Marc:Like he saw you or what?
Guest:Well, I had been this kid that was sort of hanging around his group from, say, 73 to 76.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's what he said.
Guest:You were just hanging around.
Guest:I was just an annoying guy.
Guest:That's that guy again.
Guest:He's going to start asking me questions about songwriting.
Guest:And little by little, I kind of got, I've got something here that's okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the group he was in, they dug out a lot of old songs.
Guest:I had this mixture of lots of old songs going around in my head and the new ones I was trying to write.
Guest:And I'd beat somebody different every week.
Guest:I thought it was going to be John Prine.
Guest:Then I thought it was going to be Randy Newman.
Guest:Then I thought it was going to be Lowell George.
Marc:And I thought it was going to be- You kind of hear that on that first record a little.
Marc:Well, I mean, you did a reggae bit.
Marc:You did a sort of a country bit, right?
Marc:Allison is relatively country, right?
Guest:Well, to me, it was based on... Do you want to know what it was based on?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Based on Ghetto Child by what you call the spinners, what we call the Detroit spinners.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And then you had Mystery Dance, and then... That was really only... There were some rock and roll songs.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I could tell you who I thought we were sounding like, but of course, filtered through this American band...
Guest:It came out sounding kind of different.
Guest:And then when they eventually decided I was a recording artist and not just a backroom songwriter, they said, you've got to quit your job and we've got to form a band.
Guest:We're going to put this album out.
Guest:Can you go professional?
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you couldn't take that band.
Guest:Well, I couldn't take that band had already a tour planned and they had their own album coming out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I had a family, so I couldn't just... You had one child then?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I couldn't just quit and just do what I wanted.
Guest:I had to say, well, can you pay me enough money, the same money as I'm earning?
Guest:I wasn't earning a lot of money.
Guest:And they said, yes, we can.
Guest:And they gave me, I think they gave me £100 and a battery-powered amplifier.
Guest:And I went and bought back with the money that they gave me.
Guest:I went back and bought all the records I'd had to sell to pay the bills.
Guest:Just to get it back in your head?
Guest:Yeah, just to get a few records I had to part with.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Well, I think I'd had a couple of Beatles records that I'd had to get rid of.
Guest:I kept my with the Beatles, and I kept my revolver, but maybe I'd let Beatles for sale go.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So now, how much do you think you were driven?
Marc:Do you think that if you didn't have the family, it would have been a completely different life for you?
Marc:Because I talk to guys.
Marc:There's a difference between someone who knows they have to provide, certainly, and somebody who's just sort of like, nah, I can do whatever I want.
Guest:There's one side of my family that's kind of a dreamy, kind of doesn't have any sense of responsibility.
Guest:My dad, actually.
Guest:Then my grandfather, before him, he traveled as well.
Guest:He was also a musician.
Guest:He was a ship's musician.
Guest:But my other grandfather was like a guy who came out of the First World War and then never was out of work until he died.
Guest:And I'm a bit like him.
Guest:I've worked every day of my life since I was 17.
Guest:So lucky you got that.
Guest:Yeah, I've got that Protestant work ethic, yeah.
Marc:So to put together the attractions, what became the attractions, how did that happen?
Guest:Advert in the musical papers.
Guest:Do you want to be in a rocking combo or something?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:No time wastes.
Guest:They would have all these sayings.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you auditioned people?
Guest:We did.
Guest:We auditioned.
Guest:Pete Thomas was always going to be the drummer.
Guest:Yeah, I see him around.
Guest:He'd been living in... He's still playing with you now, isn't he?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:He'd been living in California for a couple of years.
Guest:He'd been playing with Jon Stewart.
Guest:Not the satirical Jon Stewart, the daydream believer.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And so he'd had an experience of living in Topanga and living in Marin.
Guest:And he'd been persuaded to come back to London, really, to be in my band.
Guest:And the other two guys we found just out of the want ads, you know.
Guest:and steve like it seems like your relationship with this band you know really sort of collaboratively built the sound that you become known for right i i yeah well i mean steve was a very accomplished musician even though he was very young he was much younger than us he was yeah i think he was 18. so he was like the wizard everyone was like oh my god i didn't have to really play anything that's what you say about guitar playing yeah when you got a guy you know to your you know to your right who's playing all these incredible things you
Guest:I let him take it.
Guest:And the bass player, Bruce, was also very active.
Guest:He didn't hardly play the bass, really.
Guest:He just sort of played it like it was like playing cello or something.
Guest:Always playing melodies, which were great.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And between us, we sort of, you know, a lot of great and particularly English rock and roll bands don't take the conventional roles.
Guest:Think about the who.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What kind of thing is that?
Guest:You know, you've got a guy soloing the whole time and another drummer, big chords on the bass.
Guest:And then, you know, this completely shouldn't make sense.
Guest:And we sort of took the confidence to go that way.
Guest:We didn't feel like we had to be like any other group.
Marc:So it seems that you are capable of very elaborate melodies.
Marc:Is that something that you did on your own, or did you kind of pick up stuff from the band?
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I wrote all the songs.
Guest:I mean, nobody else could write the songs.
Guest:Well, no, not write the actual lyrics.
Guest:Or the music.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:No, they couldn't.
Guest:None of them really.
Guest:Steve can write, but they were not songwriters.
Guest:And they could sometimes conceive parts, but they had to have the chord structure to do that.
Guest:So once in a while, I'd give them a riff, and they would syncopate it in some way.
Guest:You know, like there would be a little way to deliver it that became distinctive.
Guest:But the number of records in which they did that were much smaller than the ones in which I dictated all the parts.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:So you do Miami's True, this year's Model Armed Forces Get Happy, and that's like an arc of the attractions.
Marc:And then what makes you do a country record in the middle of all that, of covers?
Guest:A heartbreak, really.
Guest:I mean, it was like I'd made a lot of stupid mistakes on the road and got myself in a lot of trouble.
Guest:Like your dad?
Guest:I suppose it was.
Guest:I never ever thought, oh, you know, thanks, Dad, you made me do this.
Guest:Believe me, I never ever thought, you know, never blamed him.
Guest:No, no, no, but I mean, like, isn't it interesting to you in some way?
Guest:Well, I wasn't writing it down, obviously it was, because, you know, I later learned that perhaps it was something in him that...
Guest:we both had but and i knew it was there yeah and i could see it in some of the songs and it kind of pissed me off that i that i i wrote these things that which were predictions of the mistakes i made i mean allison and yeah yeah house and these early songs i sort of i wrote them almost like scare away the right ghosts you know you had a sensitivity to it to your own i wouldn't call it sensitivity
Marc:But I mean, in order to sort of know that you had that in your heart before it happened.
Guest:Well, it's something that's something that maybe songwriters can have.
Guest:It's not a very necessary and admirable quality, but it's, you know, I can see it now with the benefit of hindsight.
Guest:And then, you know, then you try to work out in the best way you can.
Guest:If you can't explain yourself and you can't be forgiven, then I suppose you work some of the ideas out and the complexity of it in lyrics, hoping that other people maybe get something from it.
Guest:I mean, the reason to sing about stuff out loud is not just to indulge yourself or to write your diary, because...
Guest:you're taking feelings or experiences you had and probably sometimes displacing them a little bit putting them in a voice of a character changing whether you're saying it in first person or third person well that's what always blew me away when i had nick in here and he played the you know the beast and me you know sitting right there on an acoustic like i always assume like man this guy's lived it but did he tell you the story did he tell you the story about writing it for johnny cash right in the middle of the night
Guest:And he tells a story about, you know, in the middle of the night, he was Johnny Cash, you know, in sort of, you know, sort of in sort of emboldened by maybe a few drinks.
Guest:He thought himself into the character that he was trying to create.
Marc:But that's the first time I ever learned that, that songwriters write in character.
Marc:Like, I never thought of that.
Marc:I always thought that everybody was a first person guy.
Guest:Well, there's a difference, isn't it?
Guest:I mean, the first music that I was aware of, I didn't know who'd written it.
Guest:It was like Frank Sinatra was singing I Put You Under My Skin.
Guest:But later on, when I got curious as to who wrote those songs and I wanted to write in that way, with that little bit of romantic distance, you discover that those songwriters put a lot of heart and soul.
Guest:And if you really get down deep into the biographies of...
Guest:Lorenz Hart and Johnny Mercy, you'll find all these really heartbreaking stories about what lies behind songs we take for granted.
Guest:They don't seem that personal because we've heard them so many times.
Guest:And their skill was to put everything they knew and felt into songs that could be universally understood.
Guest:When you get into the 1960s, you've got Smokey Robinson singing, I second that emotion, which is a catchphrase.
Guest:that summons up a load of ideas that you feel when you hear it.
Guest:And you've got Joni Mitchell singing the last time I saw Richard, which is describing something that's obviously a very literal scene that you can't actually say, I've lived that.
Guest:It's not like you're singing.
Guest:It's not an everyman kind of subject.
Guest:And I learned from both things.
Guest:I learned from all of those things.
Guest:I learned from Lorenz Hart.
Guest:I learned from Lennon McCartney.
Guest:I learned from Smokey Robinson.
Guest:But when the door opens in the 60s to very different ways to write,
Guest:the possibility of writing very specific experiences, you then have to judge how well you can do that.
Guest:And obviously, Joni Mitchell did it incredibly well.
Marc:What does that depend on?
Marc:What's the balance?
Guest:It depends on being a genius, I guess, which I'm not.
Guest:I don't know if that's true.
Guest:I have to work at seeing whether I can render the scene sufficiently emotionally recognizable to somebody else.
Guest:She actually wrote what one assumes are
Guest:very literal representations of certain exchanges.
Guest:They're too specific, the songs.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, Bob Dylan went from writing things that people stood and linked arms to sing, you know, like in the manner of Times Are a Changing or Blowing in the Wind, to writing a year later, Mr. Tambourine Man and It's All Right, Mar.
Guest:The possibilities, in the possibilities of song, completely change in just two years.
Marc:Visions of Joanna.
Guest:Yeah, and all these things.
Guest:If you're a kid growing up,
Guest:In the era of I Want to Hold Your Hand, it's a little bit different when the same singers suddenly sing in a song that goes, was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Guest:I mean, what the hell does that mean?
Guest:I mean, it kind of made me feel I was attracted to it.
Guest:But I was going, oh, I don't know about that.
Guest:It sounds kind of sexy, but kind of in a... You know, when you're 14... And you say you're not sensitive.
Guest:You're very sensitive to the power of these lyrics.
Guest:You don't think it's odd to kind of go... To grow up at the same pace as the... Just like that five or six years...
Guest:that separate you from being able to live that experience, from being able to hear it and recognize it, you know, going from childhood to teenage.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Well, you don't understand it, but you feel it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I knew it in, oddly enough, I knew it in sort of Burt Bacharach songs because people think of those as being very, you know, restrained and they talk about easy listening and all this nonsense.
Guest:Very sad, some of it.
Guest:Very tragic and kind of, you know,
Guest:Carnal.
Guest:Carnal.
Guest:But it's not in the words, it's in the music.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's the music that's working on you.
Marc:What is that?
Marc:Because he does a thing, and you would know, but there seems to be a progression that he does that involves chords that deliver something.
Guest:Well, he knows about tension and drama.
Guest:And he also wrote famously this song, Anyone Had a Heart, and people are supposed to have rebelled when he put the music down.
Guest:Because it's actually, when you look at it written down, it's lots of odd bars.
Guest:It's not in 4-4.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's funny bars.
Guest:And musicians would say, this is too difficult to play.
Guest:And his direction was, feel it, don't count it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if you sing it to yourself without thinking about where the bar lines are,
Guest:It makes complete sense.
Guest:And if you straightened it out, it wouldn't be tense.
Guest:And it wouldn't represent that desperation.
Guest:And that's what I learned from listening to him.
Guest:Of course, when I first heard the song, it just had a strange unsettling effect.
Guest:It took me years to understand what it was.
Guest:To unpack it.
Guest:And then try my pathetic way to kind of get that effect into any of my songs.
Marc:When did you start doing that?
Guest:Accidents Will Happen.
Guest:That was sort of a feeling that I was like,
Guest:If it could just get that tension where you just got to announce things just before that happened, not just like strum through.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And when you did it, like, so you had a country music producer produce Almost Blue.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So you worked through a certain amount of emotions through that.
Marc:And then Imperial Bedroom is just this mind-blowing combination of a lot of things.
Marc:It seems very different than the other Four Attractions record.
Guest:Well, maybe because we'd gone and I'd worked out, you know,
Guest:The heartbreak side I found represented in these songs I'd chosen that nobody expected us to record also gave me a break from writing.
Guest:I wasn't writing any songs for maybe three months.
Guest:I've listened to Beyond Belief hundreds of times.
Guest:yeah well then I'd worked out what I wanted to put on the next record and that was a much you know and then we also gave ourselves the liberty of this using it was the first time I used the studio like an instrument you know like and you had what Jeff Jeff Emerick Jeff Emerick the guy who did the Beatles stuff which Beatles albums did he do
Guest:Revolver and Sgt.
Guest:Pepper, most famously.
Guest:He did a lot of things.
Guest:But I mean, he had also worked at Abbey Road and worked with every kind of conceivable musician.
Guest:He'd worked with Judy Garland.
Guest:He'd worked with orchestras.
Guest:So he knew everything about mic placement and drama.
Guest:And he was a musician.
Guest:Did you learn from him?
Guest:You did.
Guest:It never felt like learning.
Guest:We were just doing it.
Guest:And we were kind of on a voyage to try anything.
Guest:You know, let's hire a harpsichord.
Guest:Let's, you know, let Steve write for an orchestra.
Guest:And it was, you know, we thought we were doing our sort of moment where you go in and you just let everything happen that you can imagine.
Guest:And Jeff was the one who had to make it.
Marc:So after Imperial Bedroom, do you separate your catalog of work into sections, like periods?
Guest:No.
Marc:Like what happens?
Guest:I don't really think in terms of albums so much.
Guest:I mean, I'm aware that, for instance, in America, people say, oh, that great track from Miami's True, watching The Detectives.
Guest:It's not on the album.
Guest:It was a single that came out between.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But because the record came out later, it was added.
Guest:And Radio Radio is not on this year's model either.
Guest:And what's so funny about Peace, Love and Understanding is not on armed forces.
Guest:Not as we conceived them.
Guest:The records had different endings.
Guest:We were one of the last kind of periods of groups that actually released singles that weren't supposed to be on albums.
Marc:Was there a point where you started to honor your own vision in light of the fact that... Was there a point where you said, I don't know if I want to chase making hit records?
Guest:No, I mean, quite the opposite.
Guest:I think after the freedom of Imperial Bedroom and imagining all these different types of songs from something like Beyond Belief, which is sort of a different blueprint for rock and roll, and something which had an obvious model like Almost Blue, which was written as if it were a standard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was trying to do all these different forms of songs that I heard in my head and I was letting particularly Steve and my own vocal arranging take it.
Guest:And then it still seemed to matter that we had something on the radio.
Guest:So we went to work with a producer that could...
Guest:sort of tailor our record to get, you know, over to a broader audience.
Guest:Which producer?
Guest:Clive Langer and Alan Wynne Stanley, and they made Every Day I Write the Book, which was a hit.
Guest:Huge.
Guest:But we also made Shipbuilding on the same record, which was a very serious song, and it came out of recent events, and it was written with Clive, you know, his music, my words.
Marc:What was the relationship with T-Bone like?
Marc:I mean, why did you seek each other out?
Guest:well i i think then we made one more record with clive and alan which was not so successful right creatively and i and i just sort of wanted to go back to how i did it which was just to write the songs on the guitar and yeah and just play them right i went out and did that and sort of oh this is this is this feels right you know and he was uh and he was there and and that led to you know maybe arranging the songs differently with the voice to the fore and uh making king of america
Marc:And then, like, when you started to do some of the ensemble pieces, the classical with the... Because I remember that came out, and in my mind, I was sort of like, what's he doing?
Marc:Well, I think people are going to say that, you know, I mean...
Marc:What were you exploring, though?
Marc:It was sort of out of your comfort zone, wasn't it?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Guest:Yeah, sure, of course.
Guest:Each of these things I've described, you know, Imperial Bedroom, some people were horrified by it because, what say it's got an orchestra on it?
Guest:And, you know, then they've gone country.
Guest:I mean...
Guest:to me it was like well the birds did this they went through all these things as they were following their feelings the beatles every record i remember as a beatles fan thinking oh they've lost it now this sergeant pepper what a load of rubbish and then i couldn't live without it you know right every record would come out and it would be such a shock because of the difference i i didn't think you were actually thought maybe yeah educated by the the the records i'd loved
Guest:I felt like the next record you made should be utterly different, not the same as the one.
Guest:No, that's absolutely true.
Guest:Even when it came to form, by that point, I started to listen to the songs that came out of classical music.
Guest:And I had friends, these young friends, who they played as vibrantly to me, in my mind.
Guest:They played with the immediacy that I didn't hear in some rock and roll music at that time.
Guest:So I just wanted to make some music with them.
Guest:And it's driven me to have to learn certain communicative skills, like the codes of music, to literally be able to write it down.
Guest:Not sort of like, so I can go on, put a professor's hat on.
Guest:It's still to just sing stories.
Marc:But was there a point where you were getting pressure to recapture whatever your last hit was?
Marc:You never had that pressure from a record company or anybody?
Marc:I tried it a few times, but it didn't work.
Guest:What more could they do to me?
Guest:I mean, it's never really been very successful.
Guest:I've been using their money to do what I wanted until the basic things of the record business dissolved.
Guest:I mean, I worked at it until... Isn't it gone now?
Marc:I think so.
Marc:I mean, we can still get music, apparently.
Guest:Apparently, yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I honestly, I mean, I have to give credit to the people who did give me the money to do all these different experiments.
Guest:And some of them, some of it was there were people that understood I was going to not going to keep to my side of the bargain if my side of the bargain meant making the same record already made.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And some people were horrified when we had it in King of America.
Guest:They took it and buried it in the desert, you know.
Guest:Blood and chocolate.
Guest:It's too distorted.
Guest:What about spice?
Guest:It's too distorted.
Guest:Like this chocolate comes out in 86.
Guest:Nirvana turned up in, what, 92?
Guest:Which is distorted.
Guest:Which is too distorted, you know.
Guest:I mean, it was...
Guest:It was just such an idiotic thing.
Guest:It's just music, you know.
Marc:There's nothing to fear, you know.
Marc:So let's talk, like, the collaboration with Burt Bacharach was, I imagine, an amazing experience for you.
Guest:Well, in a way, I'd learned all these things about the, you know, I'd get to kind of look over his shoulder and go, oh, that's how you do it.
Guest:But, you know, the more amazing thing to me was the openness he had to writing music with another person.
Guest:He must have loved it.
Guest:He'd never done that before.
Guest:He'd never done it.
Guest:Once before with Neil Diamond.
Guest:And other than that, he'd never written this volume of songs with anybody else.
Guest:Because we ended up having a musical dialogue.
Guest:People always assumed I would just be the lyricist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But our first song was really quite evenly proportioned contribution music.
Guest:Oh, that must have been exciting.
Guest:And, you know, instead of, like, being affronted by the fact that I was writing music, he, you know, that's the great thing about him.
Guest:The story isn't finished.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and i learned something from him in that way that you know you shouldn't think that you know how it goes because you might be surprised by the next thing you do you must say you must have got through to him if that if you were the first real collaborator you must have saw something but then you know then then equally he would get inside the phrases i'd written and go oh you need to move that note there and stretch the music i mean it was really getting within the very fabric of it that's beautiful and what about what did you learn from alan tusson
Guest:I didn't learn, but I observed tremendous grace, you know, in the face of what... I mean, our collaboration began somewhat bizarrely in the early 80s, where I was asked to record a Yoko Ono song, and he ended up producing it.
Guest:That was our first recording.
Guest:Then he was one of the many people on Spike, a record I made with T-Bone Burnett, where we describe it in the book as being like Lawrence of Arabia, only with less camels.
Guest:You know, it was like...
Guest:Everything that I could ever dream of, I tried to do it all at once, you know, sort of like a heaven's gate of music.
Guest:But there's many songs I love on the record.
Guest:I mean, it was just we went very widescreen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And probably one of the last records on that scale that any record company would bankroll, you know.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:um and then when i came back to work with alan tusson it wasn't you know it was right after katrina so it was very different circumstances i just i didn't feel like i had possession of those songs i just had a really great opportunity to see that he went back to work very fast and if it even if it made me sing and lead on that record we just went and recorded his catalog and a few songs that i'd written a few songs that we'd written together it was a unique thing to go back to new orleans and see him go back into a studio
Guest:when in the face of that devastation things were barely open you know there was one hotel open one studio open it was curfew at night part you know you'd drive through blocks and it would all be blacked out it was you know you it was it was very harrowing to see some of the scenes you know just just just you know and this is all the music that we'd ever loved you know and all the music was all joyful as well and you couldn't
Guest:I really imagine how that could happen.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That's what music's supposed to do in the face of that tragedy.
Marc:And the roots, what drove you to that collaboration?
Guest:Well, I made all these records, you know, and I worked with T-Bone Burnett again in recent times.
Guest:And when it came to about 2010, you could sense it was like the options were narrowing for making records.
Guest:You can make them, but you couldn't delude yourself.
Guest:It was going to be the thing that made your working life go around like it had been.
Guest:I mean, that was the way it was for so many years.
Guest:And then it changes.
Guest:But hey, before there were recorded records, people played music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when I started out, it was only 10 or 15 years after people would buy your songs for $50.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Outright.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then there's a little bit of time where it was a sort of viable business.
Guest:And then now it's supposed to be free.
Guest:And so I changed my mind about whether I had my responsibility to my young boys and my wife that I would make best use of my time.
Guest:And I decided that would be best on the stage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because by this point, I got more songs than I could play in one evening.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I could sort of tell a story out of those songs, however I did that.
Guest:You had a choice.
Guest:Yeah, I had one show where I used a big game show.
Guest:I had another show where I just told a story and took the component parts of the story from songs from my son.
Guest:I didn't imagine I would record again.
Guest:And the next thing I find myself, I'm in a little airless box in NBC making Wise Up Ghost with Questlove.
Guest:And they kind of tricked me in there, really.
Guest:But it was good because then you have to, again, you have to trust to the people that you're in the room with.
Guest:The way Quest plays the drums is utterly different to the way Pete Thomas.
Guest:It's not superior or, you know, there's not a competition.
Guest:It's a different kind of groove.
Guest:And it made me hear the way I place my words against it differently.
Guest:And it made me think, well, I can sing these outward-looking songs.
Guest:I don't have to be singing the deepest, darkest things about my own feelings.
Guest:I'm looking out at the world.
Guest:This is a bulletin.
Guest:This is a bulletin, what we're seeing altogether, what we're moving through.
Guest:That kind of record.
Guest:I hadn't made consistently one record like that.
Guest:And by the end of it, I sort of ended up writing one of the most personal songs.
Guest:I wrote a literal account.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:It's called The Puppet of Strings.
Guest:They sent me, you know, the way we worked was like, here's some music, okay, and I would write, you know, here's a beat, and I would lay the parts down, and then the roots would come in, and they would substitute their playing for my playing.
Guest:You know, I'd lay the bass down, and then Mark would play it, or the sousaphone would play it, and...
Guest:It was all arranged in a dub style, really like a dub record.
Guest:But on the very last days of recording, Quest and Ray Angry, who plays piano with him, sent me this beautiful melody, very slow beat.
Guest:And it didn't feel like really the record we'd made, but it was something else again.
Guest:And I don't know why, but I sat in my kitchen and wrote...
Guest:this very sad song about my dad's last you know my dad had passed like a couple of years before and i thought i'll never write about that it's too it's too harrowing you know and the it sort of was a a wonderful thing really because it must have been in there waiting to get out and i'd never had any reluctance to write about when things were painful or things
Guest:you know move me that i'd seen that you know songs like ship building yeah i'd never felt any inhibition but this i thought that's just beyond me to put that into a song before i knew what i'd done i'd written it and because i'd got a computer with you know a microphone and i'd sung it and then i hit then i found myself oh i'll hit send and send it to them and then i went to the studio next day and said that's the record
Guest:Oh, my God, that's beautiful.
Guest:So the recording is just the little mic, the little tiny little voice.
Guest:So maybe if I'd gone into the studio, I would have been, I would have overthought it.
Guest:I would have gone, oh, no, I can't do it.
Guest:No, it's too, I went in the next day, I said, no, we're not touching it.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:You know, because it was, you could tell that it was a, you know, and it was a very, I,
Guest:In the end, I only mention the track because it doesn't have to then be a hit record.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's the fact that it came into existence that matters.
Guest:When we sequenced the album, Wise Up Coast, we talked about opening the record with it.
Guest:I said, no, I don't want to hear about my father's death every time I put that record on.
Guest:I'm not even sure I want to put it on the record.
Guest:I'm just glad we made the track, because now it's out of my head.
Guest:It's out of my heart.
Guest:Did you feel relief?
Guest:I did.
Guest:I did because I knew sooner or later I'd write about it in some way.
Guest:And obviously when I wrote this book, I wrote about things I wasn't proud of and that I'd done publicly and privately.
Guest:And I wrote about stupid things that happened to me, you know, in the process of an apprenticeship of learning how to be in music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:being blown off in a club by Desmond Decker, the reggae star, coming up on my break and lip-synced five times to hit the Israelites.
Guest:And I learned from that, you know, you can steal the show even when you're not actually singing.
Guest:And when I went into making records, when I was writing this book out, I realized that the first time my voice was heard on the BBC was Live Aid.
Guest:I was just asked to lip-sync up until then.
Guest:Even though we were out every night killing and we could sing all the songs really well, they never trusted you to sing on the BBC because it was just too difficult to set the band.
Guest:That was some bullshit excuse.
Guest:So there was always this artificial thing that was part of being in pop music, in show business, starting with the name, the silly way I looked.
Guest:But when you get all the way through all this time, I've sung 400 songs I've written, so something like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Some of them are just songs for occasions.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:They're social music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like every day I write the book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a 10-minute job to write a song like that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Some of them are very harrowing to listen to, whether they be about carnal stuff or heartbreak.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And some of them are life and death.
Guest:Some of them, whether it's shipbuilding or whether it's this puppet song, they're about somebody's end.
Guest:And you can't shy away from those things because that's what it's given you to write about these things.
Guest:I've been fortunate.
Marc:Well, it's a beautiful job.
Marc:It is actually a beautiful job.
Marc:It's a very fortunate job.
Marc:You sort of embrace and accept the responsibility of being a troubadour.
Marc:And being out there and delivering all of your work at whatever pace or however you want to do it for people is a beautiful thing.
Guest:And the recordings are something that some people really... And of course, I wouldn't be here without... If your parents meet across a record shop counter, records are going to be important objects to you.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We can't pretend that they motivate the business of playing music live the same way as they did.
Guest:But that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist or we shouldn't create them.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Just for them to be as literally a record.
Guest:That's where the word came from.
Guest:And also the joy of the account.
Marc:Look, for me to be able to sit with, and I'm into vinyl again, for me to be able to sit and listen to Imperial Bedroom yesterday.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's beautiful, and I can do that any time.
Marc:You're not going to come play it for me in my house.
Marc:No, no.
Guest:I might go and play it in your local theater.
Guest:And that's probably why I love 78 records.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because they're even a closer step back into the past.
Guest:Oh, it's time travel.
Guest:They're playing into a horn.
Guest:And if you just think it in your head, they were just in that room, and there's no mixing or anything.
Guest:They had to make those choices.
Guest:And Little Richard records are the same.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you play a Little Richard record off of 78 to a bunch of kids, they'll go crazy.
Guest:And it's really like, this is music.
Guest:We had better band.
Guest:All right, we got to go.
Guest:You got to go do a gig.
Guest:I got to go do a gig.
Guest:It's nice to speak with you.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:So that was Information Power Pack conversation with the amazing Elvis Costello.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:You can also go over to WTFPod.com, see what's up.
Marc:Get a poster, get on the mailing list.
Marc:Not much on my schedule because I'm working.
Marc:I'm trying to keep my shit together.
Marc:I'm alright.
Marc:Incoming!
Incoming!
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Guest:.
Marc:Boomer lives!