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Darling Pretty
"Well in fact I recorded a song in America, and then
went back to Ireland to get the beginning, because I wanted to hear it
recorded, hear the melody played that way anyway, so then there was some
other music that was there and then I just chopped it off, so at the
moment there's just this intro which is with the whistle and harp and
accordion and the fabulous Donal Lunny on bazouki and Sean Keane on
violin, and again it's the same set-up except this time it had Derek Bell
from the Chieftains, and there's there's just that, plays the melody and
then dives into the same tune but done rock 'n' roll band style, so it
makes a kind of a link between whatever these links are supposed to be
between."
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Imelda "'Imelda' is just another rock
'n' roll tune, what I call kind of a portrait job, same way as 'Money For
Nothing' or 'Sultans Of Swing' or 'Rudiger', all of these tunes, they're
just songs about a type. 'Imelda' is really about a type, it's always
struck me as being pretty funny, just looking at the difference between
Naomi Campbell in all of this gear and some other people that waddle in
and out of the shops dressed from head to foot in it. So I really see it
as a type, it's always been a source of some astonishment to me I suppose,
that somebody could be dressed head to foot in something that adds up to
more than most people earn in a year. The 'Imelda' name does a lot really
in one word in terms of a type."
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Golden Heart
"'Golden Heart' again was recorded pretty much all
together, so I was thinking about maybe taking my guitar off and playing
it again properly, but I had a feeling from the session, so I just left
it. That's ... it's always a very exciting thing when you can keep as much
from the original session as possible on the record, and that's really
what happened- And it's just a love song."
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No Can Do
"'No Can Do' is a little bit like 'What's the worst job
you ever had?' and in fact this, in fact the warehouse, was not the worst
job I ever had, but came close to it. That started off more as a straight
rap style of a thing, and it just, the more I played it back the less I
liked it, and wanted to change it around into something else, so with the
help of Guy and Chuck we chopped it up and made it into something else,
and I just thought, I felt as though I hadn't done justice to it musically
so I wanted to just put more into it, I'd written it too quickly, and
originally it went into a kind of country blues thing that again I just
got rid of. Might want to do that on stage though, just extend it into
this other thing. But it's really about a time when I was frustrated and
wanting to be a musician and not being able to, it was that period where
there were a lot of people like me, in the warehouse as well there were
musicians, as well as a lot of other unfortunate people, and it's just
really about that period, I suppose, and people have often written tunes
about jobs that they did and really, that's I suppose a rather bad attempt
at doing the same thing, only it's not as good as 'Big Boss
Man."
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Vic And Ray
"'Vic And Ray' is another portrait job of some
paparazzi, but the lower end of the paparazzi spectrum, there is like a
pecking order of paparazzi apparently, and I was just a little bit
astonished that, always been mildly appalled that you could spend your
entire life waiting around and stuff. And you think well, maybe they've
got a mother in hospital that they've got to pay for or something, it's a
relevant thing, everybody's got to earn a living. I suppose it's just, I
feel so lucky and fortunate to be doing what I do, and I suppose I feel
sorry for them, that's really honestly what it is, although I have respect
for anybody that does a job well. But it's the idea of a life, it seems if
you've only got one life then you might try doing something creative or
lasting with it, you know."
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Don't You Get It
"Oh, 'Don't You Get It' is really, it's not about, even
though it says 'Don't you get it, I don't want to buy your car,' it's not
about a car. It's just the idea about buying an idea, it's the idea of not
wanting to go your way but wanting to go my way, and it just applies to so
many things, you know. If the record company wants you to do something or
other and you say 'No, I don't want to do that, I want to do it this way.'
And really, you could apply it to anything that you want, I think it's
important to be able to please yourself because I think if you can't
please yourself then you can't please anybody."
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A Night In Summer
Long Ago "'A Night In Summer Long Ago,' I suppose that
answers some genetic chip in me, I've always felt an affinity with old
Celtic music and I suppose it was the first music that I heard in
Newcastle, and borders music in Glasgow' when I was very small, and when I
was pretty small in Newcastle, it's just always been part of my
background, so when I've had to do things like 'Local Hero' or 'Cal,' I've
never had a problem getting into that melodic area and making music that
way. I just feel it's an attractive way to play, or an interesting way to
play, if you like, a love song, the idea that it's, if it's setting the
scene that's way, way, way in the past, that it can still be relevant to
situations now. You know, a man has still got to put himself in front of a
girl, boy puts himself in front of a girl and says 'Can I have this
dance?'. And the other thing about it is that the character in the song is
still puzzled at the end at why this beautiful girl should want to have
anything to do with him. So that feeling of being fortunate is still
relevant. I was talking to a guy the other day and he said he feels very
lucky to be with his girl every day and I said 'Well, you're a lucky guy,'
that's exactly what the song's about. I remember a keyboard player in Pat
Metheny's band, we were in the studio, a jazz musician, he was in one
studio and we were in the other, this was about ten years ago and he said
'Man, how do you get that stuff to sound that way, 'Local Hero', that
stuff sounds like it's a thousand years old."
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Cannibals
"Well, 'Cannibals' really comes from a combination of things, it's a touch of tongue-in-cheek with the 'Jungle Rock' influence from listening to so many old rockabilly records, being in love with Chuck Berry and hearing shades of 'Promised Land,' which is one of my favourite ever songs, and I've always loved that area, you know, same as 'You Never Can Tell,' Chuck Berry was about the first person I ever saw live on a stage, I was about 15, Newcastle City Hall, and I was just in some kind of heaven - so there's an influence there, it was before I'd really heard or studied cajun music really, but there's an influence there, and it's also bits of being a dad, and the sort of things that being a parent, and the sort of things that children say to you. And also my own dad said to me once when I woke up in the middle of the night, I must have said I was worried about cannibals and he said, 'Well, once upon a time there were cannibals, now there are no cannibals any more, go back to sleep.' So it's just a combination of all kinds of junk. Well, again, with 'Walk Of Life' it's the same thing, you hear a kind of cajun influenced thing happening except it wasn't played on the accordion, it was more a farfisa thing, "Walk Of Life,' but in fact 'Walk Of Life' was recorded by a cajun artist afterwards, Charles Mann had something of a cajun hit with it, I understand. It's just an influence that's there, it's just my idea of bliss is going home and playing the Balfour Brothers or, you know, hearing 'Promised Land', I mean to me that's just, you know 'Promised Land' would be the kind of song that if you were asked the question, 'Is there a song you wish you'd written well that would be mine, you know - or, but on the other side, away from R&B, it would be something like 'Raglan Road', which a traditional melody, not ascribed to anybody, words by Pete Kavanagh, so there's a combination going on with me and my idea of bliss is somewhere, I've said this before somewhere I think, but it's really somewhere where the Delta meets the Tyne - often when I'm working with a group, with a band I'll say 'No thirds,' which is the 'me' in the 'do-me-so-do' take the third out and you have something Celtic, there's a drone, but with the blues that moving third place, there's something about the meeting of black and white music that I just adore. Which I suppose has led to the joy that I get out of a lot of roots music, it's to do with being brought up with folk music and then getting involved in the blues, and going back, '20s, '30s, '40s, '50 and so on and so forth, so there's a mixture,
there's
just a glorious stew, for me."
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I'm The Fool
"'I'm The Fool' I like the sound of, I'm pleased that it
came out the way it did, I have to thank Chuck I suppose for that, and
Richard, we got good sound going with the acoustics and then took what I
call the Jurassic Stratocaster, this Jurassic Strat that Paul Kennerley, a
dear friend of mine, who's an Englishman who writes songs, lives in
Nashville and and he'd given me this Strat as a present, 1954, and I just
plugged it in and played the solo on it. It just, to me I like the way
it's worked in terms of the texture and the idea, and the idea is as well
that, just being genuinely sorry for something that you've done, just
having to face up to it, you know."
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Je Suis Désolé
"'Je Suis Désolé' just follows the cajun thing, again
just listening to a lot of cajun music I suppose and coming out with
something of your own. Because that's all we are, you know, we absorb and
squeeze something and something else comes out that's yours. And quite a
few of the songs on the record seem to me to have, for some reason, have
taken a moving theme, and this just ties up again with cajun music I
suppose, and I was down in Louisiana recording some of this stuff, and it
ended up being recorded in, this particular version ended up being
recorded in Nashville but with the Louisiana musicians. Sonny Landreth,
who I'd got to know quite well before, I'd been playing on his record down
in Louisiana anyway, and we started to try and record this, and Steve Conn
on accordion, who was in Sonny's band then, and Michael Doucet, who's a
wonderful fiddle player from down that way who Kennerley turned me on to,
and Billy Ware on triangle because you hear the triangle on this thing,
that's really a feature of cajun music, and I hope I'm not insulting
people who know about the music, but that's a very important part of it,
and then Michael Rhodes and Eddie Bayers, who are the bass player and
drummer, were in Nashville, so those guys came up and we just put it
together up there. And it was fun playing with Sonny at the end of it
because, you know, we managed to share some breaks going on out, because
it was a good vibe and it was rocking, and it was a good mood so we just
played out."
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Rüdiger
"'Rüdiger' is a German
autograph hunter, he was there the first time that we went years ago and
he's there now, as far as I know', that's just, I wrote the song about 12
years ago, maybe more, I don't know, maybe 15, and never could, never
really wanted to put music to it, never could find music to it that worked
and then I found it, and because it was just a good time for me, it just
seemed as though it wanted to have a tune. So there you've got an ancient
lyric, I never felt as though I had to change a word, so I didn't, just
for some reason, probably just because I was feeling good about things and
feeling productive, and out popped the tune for it, and the only
difficulty in the studio with that was, the first time that the guys
played it, they played it a little, 'cos they were so keen to be playing
it, it was like unleashing the dogs of war, so they played it a little bit
up, and it just had to be more sad, bring out the sadness a little bit,
went back in and there it was just like that, that's how marvellous those
players are."
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Nobody's Got The
Gun "Er, 'Nobody's Got The Gun' is just a song
about an attitude to relationships, it's as simple as that, and it's just
done in a way that I, a simple musical way that I kind of liked, it wasn't
going to go on the record originally and then Chuck saved it with a
magnificent mix, and Guy too, Guy did some stuff afterwards, these little
marimba things and we had fun just playing about with it. I've always, you
might just hear a tiny shade of Sam Cooke in there because I've always
adored that music, maybe there's a little touch of his influence there
and, 'Don't know much about history' feeling in the guitar playing,
obviously it's not in the vocal (laughs). I've known Vince Gill for a long
time, it's always lovely, I mean I first heard Vince when he was singing
backing vocals for people and I realised what a skill it was, especially
if you can't sing, you always feel a little in awe of people who can, I've
always been a great admirer of people who can sing like birds, Dolly
Parton and Vince, so yeah, Vince is singing on a couple of things, there's
also 'Are We In Trouble Now' he's singing on too."
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Done With
Bonaparte "Oh, I was reading about, first novels and
then historical novels and books about the period, I ended up once I
started writing 'Done With Bonaparte' I found that I had to even research
it, I'd be saying 'Could you lose an eye at Austerlitz and still go on the
Russian campaign if you were a French soldier?' and so on and so forth,
and asking questions of heads of history departments and things. It was
quite fun to be doing that, you start feeling like a halfway real writer
because you've actually got a genuine research question to ask - I was
interested in it for a number of reasons, it was interesting to me that
they called Napoleon 'The Little Corporal' and that's what they called
Hitler too, and there are the parallels with Yugoslavia and other things
going on, people being sold a dream, quite interesting to me that nothing
really changes. And as you get older of course the importance of history
increases, and you wish that you'd, well I certainly do, wish that I'd had
more of history, and I suppose because I didn't, I went on to study
English more, I'm more interested in history now then I was when I was a
kid. Just reading the - this must be incredibly dull to people who don't
know what the hell I'm wittering about - but reading about history has
actually given me quite a lot of pleasure, and you only really have
history-, the present is over as soon as it's happened and becomes
history, and the future we don't know anything about."
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Are We In Trouble
Now "'Are We In Trouble Now' is a falling in love song, but it's country style, country in its form except that Franklin, Paul Franklin, liked the way that the middle eight went and suggested that it just go out that way, which I'm eternally grateful to him for. And it was a real treat because we've got 'Pig' Robbins on piano, who's played with George Jones for many years, it was actually my pleasure to play with George not so long ago, that was just a wonderful experience. Quite a lot of my mornings I spent listening to old George Jones tunes. But anyway I loved the attitude on that, the piano playing is just something else...it's a country song, I suppose, kind of a country song, I'm sure it won't be covered over there but that doesn't worry me. It's the only one that I feel a bit embarrassed listening to it, I can live with most of the others but this makes me a bit embarrassed because a song of that sort of form, you'd expect to have a proper singer on it, and that was a problem, it was very hard for me to sing it, but because Vince is on the backing vocals it makes me sound almost halfway, almost there, but it's Vince that's making it sound better." |
