First Last Anything

FLA 16: Jonathan Coe (25/09/2022)

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(c) Josefina Melo

Jonathan Coe, born in Bromsgrove near Birmingham in the early 1960s, is one of the great contemporary comic chroniclers of British life and society. His highly enjoyable, incisive and thoughtful novels frequently include material about films, television, politics, the media – and from time to time, music, of which he is an enthusiastic listener and sometime participant.

 

He read English at Cambridge University’s Trinity College at the turn of the 1980s, before completing an MA and PhD at the University of Warwick. His first novel, The Accidental Woman, was published in 1987, and his subsequent acclaimed titles have included What a Carve Up! (1994), The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001) and its sequel The Closed Circle (2004), The Rain Before It Falls (2007), The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), Expo 58 (2013), Number 11 (2015), Middle England (2018) and Mr Wilder and Me (2020).

 

I should also mention here that Jonathan wrote one of the most remarkable literary biographies I have ever read: Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson (2004), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction the following year.

 

Jonathan is one of my favourite authors, and I have met him in person a few times, so you can imagine what a thrill it was for me when – with the impending publication of his fourteenth novel, Bournville, this autumn – he accepted my invitation to come on First Last Anything. We discuss his love for progressive rock and French classical music, as well as how he began creating music of his own in his teenage years, and why music can be more powerful than words.

 

It felt like the ideal way to end this first run of FLA, although may I assure you it will return, in 2023. I hope you’ve enjoyed all these conversations. Thank you for reading them. And thank you to all my guests.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When you were growing up, before you started buying music yourself, what music did your parents have in your house?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

My main memory is easy listening. Radio 2 would be on – this is in the 60s.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was this pre-Radio 1, when it was still the Light Programme?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I suppose so. Radio 1 started 1967. But the first piece of music I can remember my parents having on single and me liking, was ‘Tokyo Melody’, the theme music – probably the unofficial theme music – for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, by a German guy called Helmut Zacharias. That was on heavy rotation in our house at that time. So I would have been three.

 

I also have a memory, probably my earliest memory, of being in a pushchair, and my mother singing a Beatles song as she pushed me down the street, but maddeningly, I can’t remember whether it was ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ or ‘She Loves You’. It was one of those two – probably ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

 

The first piece of music that I can really remember getting excited about, which was as much a visual as a musical thing, was seeing Arthur Brown singing ‘Fire’ on Top of the Pops in the summer of ‘68, when I was seven. That just blew my mind. I’d never seen or heard anything like that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s quite an arresting sight, that ‘Fire’ clip, one of the very few Top of the Pops extracts from the 60s that still exists in the archive. I’m trying to imagine seeing that at the age of seven.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yes, it was the sight of Arthur Brown in his flaming helmet, but also the music as well – the heavy organ sound, that sinister Gothic sound, which I suppose set me on the road to prog, in a way.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a fork in the road in popular music around 1968, isn’t there: pop or rock. There was another fork in about 1986: house and hip-hop or everything else. But there definitely seemed to be that crossroads in ’68.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Although I then did go into pop, because I became a huge Marc Bolan and T Rex fan in the early 70s, my first real musical love. My first gig, in fact, was T Rex at the Birmingham Odeon in ’74. Just on the decline, after his glory days.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess by ‘74, the mass of teen pop had moved on to… The Osmonds, David Cassidy, and then the Bay City Rollers a little bit later.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

‘71–‘73 was the peak for T Rex but I worshipped them during those years. When I saw them [28/01/1974], Marc’s trousers were so tight that they split on stage, causing great excitement in the audience.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Given you saw T Rex in Birmingham, it made me think about the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games recently, and how they had a really wide range of Midlands bands from down the years: Black Sabbath, Dexys, Goldie, Musical Youth…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

UB40?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Of course. But it made me think how Birmingham isn’t necessarily viewed as this big musical hub, the way Liverpool or Manchester or Sheffield are.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Well, all the names you’ve mentioned there, from Birmingham, have nothing in common really, musically. Richard Vinen has just published this big book about Birmingham, Second City and he devotes quite a few pages to the musical scene in the 70s and 80s, and it’s just very heterogenous, you know? I was never a Sabbath fan, but I would have liked The Moody Blues. And later on, Duran Duran, Dexys… there’s no real ‘movement’ there. More a coincidence that they all came from the same city.

 

One local musical celebrity who doesn’t get talked about much anymore was Clifford T. Ward (1944–2001), the singing schoolteacher who taught at the same school as my mum for a while. He had a hit with ‘Gaye’, and he was a really good singer-songwriter. There’d be stories about him in the Bromsgrove Messenger.

 

I grew up in Worcestershire, in the Lickey Hills, and didn’t know then that Roy Wood, from The Move and briefly one of the ELO’s founder members, before forming Wizzard, literally lived a mile away from us, down the road in Rednal. I would not even have known that the ELO came from Birmingham.

 

 

FIRST: THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: ELO 2 (Harvest, 1973)

Extract: ‘From the Sun to the World (Boogie No. 1)’

JONATHAN COE

At the age of 10, or so, I was a retro rock’n’roll fan. My grandparents had an original 78 of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and this was a kind of sacred object in our family mythology, which we assumed was worth thousands and thousands of pounds. So I bought a Bill Haley compilation on Hallmark Records [Rock Around the Clock, 1968] and I also got into Chuck Berry, just buying greatest hits albums, so I knew his song ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. And then [in early 1973] I heard this weird version of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ which started with that clip from Beethoven’s Fifth, which turned out to be by the ELO.

 

So I thought, Great, I love this, I’ll buy the whole album on cassette – my preferred format back then. I had no idea that what I was buying with ELO 2 was a full-blown prog album, just five tracks, all about ten minutes long, and with lots of time signature changes. And all this did something strange to my ears. I thought, ‘I want to hear more music like this’, and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ quickly became my least favourite track on the album. So I got into all the other stuff, and I suppose I was a bit disappointed when Jeff Lynne took the band in a much poppier direction.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of the earliest memories of TV I have – and I’ve never been able to confirm it – is that one afternoon, for some reason, there was an ELO concert on BBC1. Maybe they’d cancelled something at the last minute, sports coverage or something, because I’ve never found what it was or why it was on. This was 1975, maybe ’76. I was five or six.  

 

I don’t think I’d ever seen a rock concert on television before, actually. I know now that ELO had done a live LP in America, and there’s something on YouTube they did for German television, but how on earth would that have been on BBC1 in the afternoon? It’s one of those half-memories you can’t nail down. I feel like that character in your novel Number 11.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The one who’s looking for the lost film, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how did you fall for prog? I think you particularly gravitated towards the Canterbury Scene, right?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The big prog bands I never particularly liked. I never had any Emerson Lake and Palmer album or Yes album – although my brother was into Rick Wakeman, so we had his solo albums. I immediately went for the fringes of prog, and in a way that chimes with my taste anyway. I always seem to be drawn to the fringe figures, who seem to then become the major figures for me.

 

I suppose my entry point there was The Snow Goose by Camel (1975). I can’t remember how that became such a desired object for me. I think there was a buzz around it at school. I can remember seeing it in the local WHSmiths in Bromsgrove, and I circled it for weeks and weeks thinking, Am I going to buy this album or not? Eventually I did. I really liked that record and still do.

 

On Radio 1, I was listening to John Peel, but also the Alan Freeman Saturday afternoon rock show which played a lot of Gentle Giant, Soft Machine, Caravan. Like a lot of people, my gateway drug to the Canterbury Scene was Caravan because they were popular and more melodic and more accessible. I heard ‘Golf Girl’ one night on the John Peel show and a Caravan compilation album had just come out, Canterbury Tales (1976), which included ‘Memory Lain, Hugh’, a particular favourite. Around that time, Pete Frame did a ‘Rock Family Tree’ of the Canterbury Scene, which suggested so many connections that it gave me my record-buying programme for the rest of the 70s.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Those incredibly detailed, beautifully realised Pete Frame Rock Family Tree illustrations were like a forerunner of the Internet, a way to make musical connections.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yes, you could piece it together, I suppose, by reading the music press, but those Family Trees were the only places where all the information was gathered in one place. Another thing that gave you a lot of information in one place was a book called The NME Book of Rock (1975, edited by Nick Logan and Rob Finnis), which was sort of the first British pop reference book, as far as I remember. I had a couple of paperback editions of that.

 

But yeah, as you say, otherwise, your findings and your quests for this kind of music were very random and haphazard, which in itself was part of the pleasure, of course. There’s this perpetual debate about whether it’s better to be able to find things within five seconds with one click, or whether it’s more exciting and romantic to have to traipse around half a dozen record shops looking for something.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s been interesting for us to have both those experiences. They both have good points and bad points.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Generally speaking, I think, as consumers, as punters, we’re better off now. It’s probably not as good for the musicians, of course.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to avoid analysing anything in your novels as autobiographical, but I was thinking about that section in The Rotters’ Club, itself named after a 1975 Hatfield and the North album lest we forget, where Benjamin visits the NME building. Did you ever do anything like that in your teens, try and get into the music press in that way?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

No. Absolutely not. I’ve seen it reported that I was one of the people who applied for the NME ‘hip young gunslinger’ job that resulted in them hiring Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, but it’s not true. I was so untrendy back in the 70s – still am, really. I wasn’t even an NME reader or a Melody Maker reader. I was a Sounds reader. Before it turned into a kind of full-blown heavy metal paper in the late 70s, Sounds was good for Canterbury Scene stuff. It wasn’t as snobby about that as the NME was, or as serious and muso-ish as the Melody Maker was. And John Peel had a column in Sounds back then, which I have to say was a big influence on my writing style. It was one of the highlights of my reading week.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And he used to review the singles in Sounds quite often, didn’t he? He backed quite a lot of singles you might not expect him to have done. You may remember he had a nickname for Tony Blackburn, ‘Timmy Bannockburn’…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

That’s right.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Once he reviewed ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’ by Ann Peebles, and mentioned it had been ‘Timmy Bannockburn’’s Record of the Week on the Radio 1 breakfast show, and with some sincerity said something like, ‘Quite right too’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

One single I was obsessed with in the 70s was ‘I’m Still Waiting’ by Diana Ross, which I also heard on the Tony Blackburn show. He used to play that a lot.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That came out as a single because of him. He’d been playing it as an album track and persuaded the Motown label in Britain to put it out as a single. Funnily enough, that single wasn’t a success in America at all, and nor was her other British number one, ‘Chain Reaction’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I had a real fascination for those rare, occasional, slightly melancholy minor key songs that made it into the British charts. ‘Long Train Running’ by the Doobie Brothers is another song I’ve always loved – again, there’s a minor key.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

On the subject of ‘I’m Still Waiting’, those records in the early 70s where they use orchestras, especially woodwind. You hear lots of oboes on American soul records. That Stylistics record, their best one really, ‘Betcha By Golly Wow’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I bought very few singles in the 70s. I was an album buying person, but you’ve just reminded me, I did like ‘The Poacher’ by Ronnie Lane, precisely because it has a beautiful oboe figure, running, running through the song that grabbed my attention immediately.

 

Though clarinet and bassoon, there’s not so much of those on pop records. ‘Tears of a Clown’, that’s got a bassoon.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to think. [During the editing of this piece, I discovered that the bassoon on ‘Tears of a Clown’ was played by Charles R. Sirard (1911–90), from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I also suddenly remembered a second number one hit featuring a bassoon: ‘Puppet on a String’. It feels a shame that there aren’t more bassoons in pop music.]

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You mentioned in one piece of writing, a while back, that your ideal early profession was ‘composer’. Obviously, that’s interesting given that you write novels, have done for decades. I’m struck by the similarities and differences between composing and writing. They can both liberate you in different ways. They can both do something that the other cannot. Is that how you feel about the two things, and were you composing in the early days, as well as trying to write novels?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

The key thing is that I was intensely shy as a teenager. Part of the reason I went for fringe music, I think, was to sidestep all the musical arguments that were going on at school, and not be a part of that. I could like bands that no-one could criticise me for liking because they’d never heard of them and they didn’t know what they sounded like. The other kids at school were forming bands, but I couldn’t really handle that social dimension of rehearsing together in a room and asking people to join.

 

I was having classical guitar lessons, and my teacher wanted us to play a duet, so I started wondering how to practise for it, between the lessons. I had an ITT portable cassette player, recorded my teacher’s part on the tape, and then played along with it. As soon as I did that, I realised: Wow – even if I can’t play in a band, I can play with a tape recorder. And then if I get another tape recorder, and recorded those two parts, then I could bounce them down and then start multitracking. So I started working on these ever more elaborate duets – at first – and then trios, and then quartets. And then my mother traded in her piano for an electric home organ, so we had one of these terrible home organs in the corner of the sitting room.

 

I never composed, really, because although I can read and write music on paper, I find it a very difficult, time-consuming process. But when I started multitracking, in the mid-70s, and I was modelling myself on Mike Oldfield – who wasn’t one of my favourite artists, but I did like his records. And that’s what I realised I was doing: solo composed and solo performed music. I carried on doing that for years, until the late 80s when my first novels started getting published. And I still have all these recordings from that period, which I’ve digitised, so there’s about 40 or 50 hours of music there – in terrible sound quality. [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And there are three albums of your compositions that are out there now.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

On my bandcamp page, there are two albums, if you like: Unnecessary Music and Invisible Music. And there’s a little EP of other pieces an Italian producer heard and remixed. But what I must talk about for a few minutes is something incredible that’s happened in the last couple of years:

 

Those bandcamp albums are mainly digital re-recordings of some of those old pieces, and an Italian musician, a drummer and bandleader called Ferdinando Farao, heard them and liked them. He runs a twenty-piece orchestra in Milan called the Artchipel Orchestra, and they specialise in doing big band arrangements of Canterbury music, Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine tunes and so on. And to my amazement, they took half a dozen of these pieces and did new arrangements of them – and they’ve performed them four times in concert now. The last time was in Turin in June this year. They even persuaded me to come on stage and play keyboards with them. So finally, in my sixties, I’ve become a live performer. There’s a little clip of the Turin show on YouTube. It was a fabulous night, one of the best nights of my life:

JONATHAN COE & ARTCHIPEL ORCHESTRA at Torino Jazz Festival, 12 June 2022

JUSTIN LEWIS

The first novel of yours I ever read was The House of Sleep in May 1998. I was given the beautiful hardback edition of that as a birthday present, and tore through that, and then I quickly worked backwards, bought and read What a Carve Up!, and then your much earlier, first three novels – which were quite hard to find at that point.

 

I wanted to ask you about two of those very early novels because they both touch on the subject of music. In your first novel, The Accidental Woman (1987), there’s a footnote near the end of the book which says, ‘Instead of reading this section, you should just play the end of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata in F Minor.’ Now, at the time, I didn’t see this as a joke at all – but I was not in a position to take it completely seriously, on the grounds that I had no immediate access to this piece of music! [JC chuckles] More recently, I’ve been able to read it again and play that sonata – thanks to the Internet. Does it feel strange to look back at your pre-Internet work with the sense that things were out of reach at the end of the last century?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Well, there’s a couple of things there. It’s very interesting that you read that passage in The Accidental Woman in 1998. Soon after that, Penguin bought the rights to those books and reissued them, in 1999 or 2000.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, I think my copy was published by Sceptre.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

And for those Penguin editions, which are the editions now still in print 22 years later, I changed that passage; I looked at it again and thought that was a bit pretentious and wanky. But now I’d like to change it back because I kind of stand by it! In the Penguin edition, it just says something like ‘At this moment, what was running through Maria’s head was the last movement of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata.’ Whereas, in the (original) Duckworth version and Sceptre version, it actually says to the reader, in a footnote, ‘Don’t read this, just listen to this piece of music instead.’ Which is more what I really meant, because of the tone of the book – it sounds like a kind of arch joke. But actually, I was perfectly serious about it.

 

What I was trying to express there, was that you can say something much purer and more powerful in music than you can in words. It’s as simple as that, really. Words get in the way because they carry meaning, they’re semantic, whereas music brings you much closer to the emotion that the composer is trying to express. So the music that I play or improvise – because I’m kind of embarrassed to use ‘compose’ – and the books that I write are actually completely separate from each other. As you may know, I’ve made attempts over the years to combine words with music, working with the High Llamas and with Louis Philippe, always fascinating, enjoyable and fruitful collaborations. But in the end I decided that didn’t really work for me, because the two things, I think, are so different that it’s best to keep them apart.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I must admit, I always sigh with relief slightly when other people who work with words say that they prioritise music over lyrics. [Agreement] Am I right in saying that it’s the music you go for first?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

If I’m listening to a song which engages me musically, I just don’t hear the lyrics – the singer might as well be singing ‘lalala’. I don’t notice the words at all. It’s not that I don’t like Bob Dylan, but it’s why I didn’t listen to Bob Dylan because everybody said, ‘He’s a genius lyricist’…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t get him for years – I do now – on the grounds that he was ‘lyrics first’. But the lyric is the thing I get to last. I probably get the arrangement sooner.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I listen to quite a bit of French pop music – Orwell, for instance – and one thing I like about that is I don’t really know what they’re saying. [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s incredibly liberating, that. Well, hopefully, they’re not saying something terrible! But you get a sense that really you’re reacting to the sound.

 

Another of your early novels that I revisited recently, having not read it for a long time, was The Dwarves of Death (1990). And that one was written when you’d actually been in a band in London.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

We were called The Peer Group, a band I formed with some student friends in the mid-80s. The idea was to play a jazzy Canterbury, Caravan-y kind of music, but for various reasons, that didn’t work out. We weren’t really skilful enough musicians, I think that was the problem. Because I was writing quite tricksy music in odd time signatures, which I thought was a clever thing to do – so we mutated into sounding a bit like Aztec Camera or Prefab Sprout or The Smiths at their most melodic. Melodic, jangly guitar music, I guess. We did very few gigs, really, I don’t even know whether they got into double figures, actually. We just seemed to rehearse endlessly in cold, draughty South London rehearsal studios, which was the atmosphere I was trying to capture in The Dwarves of Death.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In that novel, you write about the detail of music in a humorous way, without trying to get too bogged down in technicalities. What were some of the challenges there, and do you think you’ll ever write a directly musical novel again?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

It’s a long time since I read The Dwarves of Death. I always think of it as my weakest novel, so I don’t like to look at it. But what you’re saying rings a distant bell with me now. There is quite a lot of technical stuff about the writing of music in there, and I think there’s a tune called ‘Tower Hill’, which is threaded throughout the novel, [and which appears in the form of musical notation]. I was very young, you know, and I thought I was being very adventurous and doing something terribly interesting by putting a lot of technical stuff about writing a jazz tune into a novel. It just feels a bit gauche to me now.

 

If I was to do something like that again, I would do it differently. For instance, Calista in Mr Wilder and Me is a composer, but you hear very little about the kind of music she writes, or how she writes. I think it’s better really to leave it to the reader’s imagination – but I remember being quite insistent at the time with Fourth Estate, the publishers of The Dwarves of Death, that they should include the musical notation in the text, and they were very accommodating about that. Because really I was an unknown writer, it was a low print run, and there was nothing much to lose by doing it. When I met and interviewed Anthony Burgess around that time, I had a copy of The Dwarves of Death with me, and when I showed him the musical notation, he was very jealous: ‘My publishers won’t allow me to put music in my books! How did you persuade them to do that?’ I think it was because, you know, I was just Jonathan Coe; he was Anthony Burgess and there was probably more at stake in his publications!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Not long after I read that book, I discovered BS Johnson, because a friend gave me his novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry as a birthday present, and of course that led me not only to his other books but your terrific biography of Johnson’s life and work, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004). Which I urge everyone to read! In its introduction, you talk about how novelists can put anything into a novel, the form determines it. I used to be obsessed by form, even more than I am now, perhaps. I suspect had Johnson written about music in depth, he might have tried to do something like you did in The Dwarves of Death. I know you were very influenced by him in your early novels – was formal experimentation at the forefront of your mind with that one?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yeah, subconsciously, that was very much going on, I think. Also, I was young, still in my twenties, and kind of hilariously, I thought of myself as a slightly rebellious literary figure who was going to shake things up. And throwing a whole lot of stuff about music into a novel was part and parcel of that aesthetic for me.

 

For me, though, what is more significant about The Dwarves of Death: it was the first time I wrote a book where some of the passages read a little bit like stand-up routines. I know this isn’t an interview about comedy, which is my other great love aside from music, but although I was never really going to shake up the form of the novel the way BS Johnson had done – I was never as adventurous as that – I knew I was trying to bring some of the energies of British pop culture, and especially comedy, into the literary novel. Which I think I continued with the next novel, What a Carve Up!, basing it on an old early 60s Kenneth Connor movie  of the same name. That was my little stab at doing something new and radical.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of my favourite things you did in terms of form was the footnotes section in The House of Sleep.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I remember the spur for that. It was about 1996, I was doing some research for The House of Sleep in the British Library, reading a book about sleep. And I just jumped from the number in the text to the footnote at the bottom of the page, and landed on the wrong footnote – and what I read was comically inappropriate. So I thought it would be funny if that happened again and again and again.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s brilliant. It feels in a similar spirit to that Two Ronnies ‘Mastermind’ sketch written by David Renwick [BBC1, 01/11/1980] where the contestant keeps answering the question before last.  

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I never thought about that sketch when I was writing it. I can see the similarity now. But the thing I’ve done that is closer to a Two Ronnies sketch, or was more consciously influenced by them, is the crossword scene in The Rotters’ Club. The character named Sam is trying to do the crossword and his wife is reading the love letter from the horny art teacher, and they’re working at cross purposes. And there is a great Two Ronnies sketch [Christmas special, BBC1, 26/12/1980] – they’re in a railway compartment with the bowler hats on and everything, and Barker is doing The Times crossword, and Corbett is doing The Sun crossword, and the two things keep getting mixed up. Do you not know that sketch?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I should know it. It’s been a while since I’ve properly watched them back.

 

LAST: LOUIS PHILIPPE & THE NIGHT MAIL: Thunderclouds (2020, Tapete Records)

Extract: ‘When London Burns’

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’ve worked with Louis on and off for many years, and indeed you cited a section of his lyrics in What a Carve Up!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I did, yes.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

A song called ‘Yuri Gagarin’.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

In the late 80s, when I was in The Peer Group, the student group I mentioned earlier, we were sending demo cassettes around to record labels. And we sent one to Cherry Red, because we thought we sounded like a Cherry Red band. But for some reason, it fell into the hands not of the main label, but to Mike Alway at él records, which was a division of Cherry Red. And he gave a curious kind of response to this; he said, ‘I think you’re trying to sound like a few artists on my label, so here’s a bunch of their records.’ I think he was trying to say, ‘Try and sound a bit more like this.’ The artists were Marden Hill, Anthony Adverse… and Louis Philippe.

 

I listened to this Louis Philippe record, Appointment with Venus, and just thought it was beautiful. I could hear in it not just the pop sensibility that I loved, but lots of echoes of Ravel and Fauré and Poulenc – my favourite classical composers. So I started following his career and then I wrote to him and asked, ‘Can I use these lines from your song, as an epigraph to What a Carve Up!’ He was very happy about that, said yes, and then a few years later we met at one of his gigs, and became good friends. I wrote some lyrics for a couple of songs on his albums, and then we did a record together for Bertrand Burgalat’s Tricatel label called 9th and 13th (2001). He also made an album called My Favourite Part of You (2002), for which I wrote the lyrics for a song called ‘Seven Years’. He’s now joined up with a band called The Night Mail, and a couple of years ago they made this beautiful album, Thunderclouds.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m so glad you’ve recommended this, because I’ve been playing little else, these past few days.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

He’s a great songwriter. The strange thing is, he now has this parallel career as a football journalist and this huge following on Twitter.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Football is not something I follow, so I knew nothing about that side of his career!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I’m just so glad that he’s back making records and doing gigs again – as is he, I think.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How do you discover new music now?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I was thinking about this. You know, for everything that the Internet offers us, for me it doesn’t seem to work as a way of discovering new music, unless it’s personal recommendations that people have passed my way on Twitter. But I’m a bit sad and ashamed that I’ve discovered so little new pop music in the last 10 or 15 years really, and a lot of what I have discovered is old stuff that I’ve just never heard before. For instance, I just started listening to Brian Auger – how have I never heard him before? There’s this vast discography to explore, but a lot of it is, you know, 50 years old now. So I rely a lot on the kindness of strangers, really, and people just sometimes sending me CDs that they think I might like. A journalist in Spain a few years ago pressed into my hands a CD by the Montgolfier Brothers. Do you know them?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It rings a bell, but…

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Roger Quigley (who died in 2020) and Mark Tranmer, You’d really like them, I think.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Must check them out.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

That led me to discover all their records. The person who wrote the music for them is called Mark Tranmer, who also had a band called gnac, who do ambient instrumentals… But it was just a chance encounter with a journalist in Spain who was kind enough to read some of the things I had written about music and think, Oh, maybe Jonathan would like this.

 

I use the Spotify algorithm and if I like an album on there I will scroll down and click on the other things that it recommends. Sometimes it works – sometimes it doesn’t.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the past, you’ve described music you listen to when you’re writing, and that’s ranged from Steve Reich to drum’n’bass instrumental music like LTJ Bukem. What seems to work for you during that writing process now, or do you now in fact prefer silence sometimes?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

It’s kind of stopped working for me, the idea of listening to music while I write. I nearly always write with silence. Sometimes a piece of music, usually a piece of classical music, will get me into a mood which is appropriate for the scene or the chapter that I’m writing next – but I will then turn it off and write the scene in silence. The way music and writing combine for me now is, I sit here at this desk to write and I have a piano [to my right] so I can swivel around to play the piano if I get bored with writing. So those two activities complement each other, but I rarely listen now to music while I’m writing.

 

You know, I’ve even become increasingly grumpy about the whole idea of having music on in the background anywhere. Even muzak, library music, lounge music. A lot of thought and creativity and talent and inventiveness goes into that music. And you should sit and listen to it, rather than just using it as background.  

ANYTHING: HELGA STORCK: The Harp and the French Impressionists (1969, Turnabout Records)

Extract: Claude Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp in F Major, L. 137: II. Interlude. Tempo di Minuetto (Wilhelm Schwegler (flute), Fritz Ruf (viola), Helga Storck (harp))

JONATHAN COE

I went to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, quite a posh school, and we had a dedicated music building which was full of practice rooms and a concert hall. And upstairs, there was a place called the Harold Smith Studio. I don’t know who Harold Smith was! But that had a library in it, a record library, and that was where I lived really, for two years in the sixth form, even though I wasn’t studying music at A level or anything like that. Which is where I discovered this record called The Harp and the French Impressionists, which included Ravel’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’ and Debussy’s ‘Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp’.

 

I put this on, and just thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. And also, all these records I had been listening to, like The Snow Goose by Camel or certain Genesis albums… I thought, they’d basically been ripping off all their best bits from these guys, these French classical composers from the turn of the 20th century. And at the same time, I discovered Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, via an album by the group Sky, remember Sky?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I do, my dad had one of their albums.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

My mum had one of their albums. I didn’t think much of it really, but in the middle of one side, there was this one tune, which was just fantastic and I thought, wow, one of the guys in this band is a really good composer. So I looked at the credits, and it was someone called Erik Satie, who apparently had written this piece 100 years before, but which still sounded incredibly modern.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I knew the ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’ because I was studying it for flute. Thinking about it, that might have been my introduction to French classical music. I think the Debussy sonata is meant to be the first prominent work for that specific combination of three instruments, flute, viola and harp – it’s not absolutely the first, but the first major work. A real breakthrough.

 

 

JONATHAN COE

Yeah, it’s just an absolute masterpiece. I mean, I have lots of big blind spots in music, I hardly listen to 19th century classical music at all, but from 1888, as soon as Satie uses those major seventh chords in those Gymnopedies… everything starts to make sense for me again, and then that led me into Poulenc and into Honegger and all those other French composers of that period. And it always makes perfect sense to me that Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel in France, because although there’s a kind of a deep-rooted Englishness in his music, through the folk tunes and so on. I also hear a kind of Ravel-like delicacy in a lot of his orchestrations. So I fell in love with Vaughan Williams’ music at that time as well, and have been listening to him constantly ever since.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your next novel, Bournville, is out shortly, right?

 

 

JONATHAN COE

There’s almost nothing about music in that book! A bit of Herbert Howells and that’s it. No, actually – I tell a lie – there’s a huge section about Messiaen and his Quartet for the End of Time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you’re into music, you can’t help it!

 

 

JONATHAN COE

I can’t. It’s everywhere, isn’t it?

 

 

—-

Bournville was published by Penguin Books in November 2022.

Jonathan’s fifteenth novel, The Proof of My Innocence, was published by Viking in November 2024.

Jonathan’s website, with further details of all of his books, can be found at jonathancoewriter.com. 

To hear some of his music, you can visit his bandcamp page: sparoad.bandcamp.com

You can follow Jonathan on Bluesky at @jonathancoe.bsky.social.

 

FLA PLAYLIST 16

Jonathan Coe

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: HELMUT ZACHARIAS: ‘Tokyo Melody’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZteHNQZcQQM

Track 2: CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN: ‘Fire’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLG1ys2CGcI

Track 3: T REX: ‘Get It On’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyzWDl0nz00

Track 4: CLIFFORD T. WARD: ‘Wherewithal’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMGg6dNT90

Track 5: THE ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA: ‘From the Sun to the World (Boogie No. 1)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVGv-avRA64

Track 6: CAMEL: ‘The Snow Goose’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0cJVEtxJo

Track 7: CARAVAN: ‘Memory Lain, Hugh/Headloss’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ReI3YpEzs

Track 8: DIANA ROSS: ‘I’m Still Waiting’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAZh4Sccsk

Track 9: RONNIE LANE: ‘The Poacher’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFvN1i8m4bU

Track 10: SMOKEY ROBINSON & THE MIRACLES: ‘The Tears of a Clown’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4heHLbchPKk

Track 11: SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Minor, Op. 80: I. Andante

Viktoria Mullova, Piotr Anderszewski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe76VJ1NsIk

Track 12: THE HIGH LLAMAS: ‘Green Coaster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XhZYSYv4c

Track 13: LOUIS PHILIPPE: ‘Seven Years’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tha_vQz_ZBA

Track 14: ORWELL: ‘Courbes’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0YxqCew8_Q

Track 15: JONATHAN COE: ‘Tower Hill’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e8AFPk2wp8

Track 16: LOUIS PHILIPPE & THE NIGHT MAIL: ‘When London Burns’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQi4hpr8f2s

Track 17: THE MONTGOLFIER BROTHERS: ‘Be Selfish’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zag2USOkcOA

Track 18: MAURICE RAVEL: ‘Introduction and Allegro’, M.46

Gerd Starke, Helga Storck, Konrad Hampe, Endreas Quartet

Track 19: CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp in F Major, L. 137:

II. Interlude. Tempo di Minuetto

Wilhelm Schwegler, Fritz Ruf, Helga Storck:

Track 20: ERIK SATIE: Gymnopedie No. 1, Lent et douloureux

Anne Queffélec:

Track 21: JONATHAN COE: ‘Empty Mornings’

 

FLA 15: Helen O’Hara (18/09/2022)

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(c) Natacha Horn

In the spring of 1982, the violinist Helen O’Hara had two job offers. One was to join the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra; the other was to join Kevin Rowland’s Dexys Midnight Runners as part of their string trio, the Emerald Express. The release of the single ‘Come On Eileen’ and album Too-Rye-Ay made up her mind; the single alone would sell well over a million copies in Britain, and top the charts all over the world, even in the United States. Helen became Dexys’ musical director for their third album, Don’t Stand Me Down (1985), which received a mixed reception on release but has become widely and justly regarded as a masterpiece.

 

Though best known for her work with Dexys, Helen has had a busy life and career in music both before and after. For five years in the mid-1970s, she was an integral part of the Bristol music scene in bands like Gunner Cade and Uncle Po, but then turned her back on pop to study at the Birmingham School of Music (now the Birmingham Conservatoire). After the dissolution of Dexys, she went on to work extensively with Tanita Tikaram – most famously on her breakthrough single ‘Good Tradition’ – and most recently with Tim Burgess. In the summer of 2022, Helen and Dexys returned to the spotlight, performing ‘Come On Eileen’ at the closing ceremony of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games.

 

Helen has an excellent new memoir published this autumn, entitled What’s She Like, and I was delighted that she accepted my invitation to come on First Last Anything to choose some milestone recordings. As well as talking about her experiences in both the classical and pop worlds, she reveals why she stopped playing music for 20 years – and why she resumed.

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the opening chapter of What’s She Like you mention singles in your house that your siblings had and so on. But what records did your parents have when you were growing up?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Mainly classical records. Nothing unusual – Beethoven, Mozart… Tchaikovsky – whose Piano Concerto No 1 played by Van Cliburn was a particular favourite of mine. Nobody has beaten that version for me. Not just because it was very good, but because I heard it so much, it becomes ingrained in you at a very young age that ‘this is the best’.

 

My brother Tony, seven or eight years older than me, was the one buying the records and a big influence on what I heard. And Top of the Pops was on telly so I was exposed to other pop music which was making a huge impression on me, over classical music.

 

FIRST: PJ PROBY: ‘Maria’ (Liberty Records, single, 1965)

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the first record you bought yourself: PJ Proby. A kind of forgotten name now, really, but in his time, an absolutely massive pop star.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I can see why I was drawn to it. It really stuck out, mainly because of the orchestration but also because of his voice. He’s very theatrical. In fact, he was an actor for a while, I think, so his diction is absolutely amazing, but he’s got this drama in his voice, and he sings it as if he’s in a musical or an opera, telling the story. And of course, the song is from West Side Story.

 

It just blew me away really. Because I hadn’t heard anything like that before. Because my brother was already buying music like the Stones and the Pretty Things, which were my favourites anyway, I could buy this because it was more unusual.

 

I would have been nine, which is quite young to wander down to a record shop that’s about a mile away, with your pocket money and buy a record by yourself. It was just that incredible, proud feeling of owning this record – and he was a very good-looking bloke as well, so maybe that was part of it too! He had his hair in a ponytail, didn’t he? And then he got banned – from TV, radio, theatres – for splitting his trousers onstage, twice.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a few versions of that story, but I read that apparently it was ‘accidental’ the first time, and perhaps ‘not so accidental’ the second time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

So he was well ahead of his time in terms of ‘how do I get publicity and censure?’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think it was the ABC theatre chain that threw him off the package tour, but his replacement was some bloke, then unknown, called Tom Jones.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

And Tom was pretty wild, wasn’t he? Probably didn’t deliberately split his trousers, but came close to it!

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you started playing the violin when you were about nine?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Nine, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You say in the book that you didn’t find it easy to play early on, indeed, have never found it easy. Presumably part of the appeal with the instrument is that that you can’t really take your eye off the ball. It requires commitment. It requires constant practice.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think I just accepted that it was my instrument, and it was going to be difficult. I was so sure of it. It is a difficult instrument to play well, but I’m also extremely critical of myself. I wish I wasn’t, because I beat myself up an awful lot about any performance I do. And then when I listen to other people, I never have that criticism of them, I can be objective! Because it’s live, it’s human. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously you started in the classical world, and you were in youth orchestras as a teenager. It sounds like you were already interested in ensemble playing, but perhaps individual expression within a group of some kind. Did you ever think you would be a solo violinist, in the classical world?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

No, never. Never thought that. I always thought of myself within a group, preferring to be embedded in the group. I mean, if you’re the leader of an orchestra, as I sometimes was, you might have to take a little solo or something. But I much preferred being part of an ensemble.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And clearly you still love classical music, but I sensed in What’s She Like that the classical world back in the 60s and 70s could be a bit stifling, with little tolerance for any other type of music.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

That’s how it felt, especially later at music college, because nobody seemed to listen to pop music. It was very rigid – it was just classical. Now music colleges, from what I can see, are open to all sorts of music – for example, they might have a jazz department. They recognise that instrumentalists could go in many directions – as much as anything, it’s about getting work, and so you’d be encouraged to play in musicals, or opera, or be a session violinist or whatever. I think they’re a lot more open minded now. I was still at college when I was recording Too-Rye-Ay with Dexys [in spring 1982], and we never mentioned it to the college, partly because they wouldn’t have given us the time off to do it, but another was that they’d have been horrified. Now, it’s very different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting how your memoir reflects these compartments of your life. You’re fully committed to something for two to three years, and then you move on to something else completely different. And that’s the pattern. But there’s still this sense of continuity throughout – you go back to things, to work with people again, after a long period of time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think you’ve got it. Yeah. Hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes, although not intentionally.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What also occurred to me: you come from quite a large family anyway, but all your musical exploits for years came with groups, large groups, orchestras. I might even suggest Dexys was an orchestra, certainly at the point you joined, with all the different sections.

 

And you write a lot about the people in music who have inspired you – some of them famous names, but others are fellow students, teachers… In fact, I don’t know if you remember this, but when you first got into the charts with ‘Come On Eileen’, you did a Q&A with Smash Hits magazine and they asked you your biggest musical inspiration. And most people in those Q&As would say David Bowie or Bryan Ferry or whoever. And you said Andrew Watkinson, your violin teacher. Who’s gone on to quite a career himself.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Oh, that’s really sweet. He was a real inspiration. Yes, he plays with the Endellion String Quartet now.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It really chimed with me at the time because I loved pop music, loved reading Smash Hits, but I also was in orchestras, I was a flautist, and I used to wonder how I could be in a pop group playing an orchestral instrument. But I thought that was such a cool answer – you didn’t choose a pop star, but your teacher. And to see you on Top of the Pops playing an instrument associated with the orchestra, I thought it was so cool.

 

In fact, in your book, you recall being about 13, trying to imitate the violin part on ‘Young Gifted and Black’ by Bob and Marcia. Well, when I was 13, I would – on the flute – try and imitate your violin parts on Dexys records, especially ‘Come on Eileen’ and ‘Let’s Get This Straight From the Start’.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Oh wow, that’s amazing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I would try and bend the notes the way you would, try and work out how to do that. I’ve waited forty years to tell you that!

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Ah, thank you so much, Justin. But it’s a great way to learn, isn’t it? When you play along. I remember playing along to some Roxy Music when Eddie Jobson was on violin.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes! The Country Life album.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I was even doing that in the 80s when The Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues came out, trying to imitate Steve Wickham, who’s a very different player to me. I still do it now, play along, because you can always learn a lot from somebody else’s style, can’t you?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Absolutely. What also comes across very clearly in What’s She Like is the importance of communality in music. How at secondary school, your music teacher ensured that all 600 pupils took part in the school concert, not just the really musical ones. Do you agree there’s musical potential in everyone?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, I do. We’ve all got a heartbeat. Some people will be more musical than others, but often it’s whether you get the chance. I was also very lucky, when I was growing up, that we had free peripatetic music lessons, and everybody was offered a free lesson on whatever instrument, so that was amazing. My secondary school music teacher was quite young, probably in his mid-20s when he took on the job as head of music and he just seemed to spend all this time at school, encouraging everybody, and he would get cross with us if he thought we weren’t giving 100%. But that was cool, he was showing his passion for the subject. So, everyone had to sing in the concert we did, at the Colston Hall in Bristol. A lot of the boys didn’t like it – but they still all turned up! However, I think everyone admired him, and it felt good in that ensemble. It’s like being at a football match – you feel good when everyone sings together.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

All the while, you were influenced by violinists in bands: Jimmy Lea in Slade, Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris in Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. And when you joined bands in Bristol, in your late teens, long before Dexys, where each album would be radically different from the last, you were already in groups that would change their style a lot. For instance, Uncle Po – with our mutual friend Gavin King… you’re a soul band (under the name Wisper), then you’re jazz rock for a bit, and about 1977 you become a new wave band. Did it feel easy to reinvent the band’s sound like that?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Very easy, very easy. Uncle Po were good musicians, good singers, good harmony singers – and we were very serious about what we did. We rehearsed for long hours, and we played live so much, and if you’re a good musician, you can adapt to different musical styles. I mean, it wasn’t like we had to be outright jazz or something, but within the different genres of pop or rock, we didn’t find that difficult. When punk and new wave happened, it shook everybody up, didn’t it? It was really exciting, people seemed to come out of nowhere, venues were packed and there was a real energy from the crowd. I’m very grateful that I was around at that time, and all that touring with Uncle Po prepared me for what was to come later, with Dexys, and gave me confidence. I would otherwise have been a bit nervous. I also learned a lot from the other guys in these bands, who were older and more experienced than I was.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So then in 1978, you enrol at the Birmingham School of Music. Suddenly you’re back in the classical world. What elements of the classical world do you think have helped you in the pop world, and vice versa?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

From youth orchestras, I learned to work as part of a team, and to listen, but also to take directions from the conductor. I suppose Kevin in Dexys was like a conductor in many respects, with the ideas he was asking us to play. Because as you know, one piece of classical music can sound very different depending on who the conductor is. I’ve just finished making a playlist of all the music mentioned in my book – 209 pieces. What I found fascinating was deciding which version of a Beethoven symphony or violin sonata I should use. I went to Spotify and there are loads of different versions, so finding the ‘right one’ that touched me… It was extraordinary how different they all were, different tempos, different moods. And working with different conductors and different teachers as well also taught me about various approaches, to respect differences, and be open to trying things.

 

Also, in classical music, focusing on detail is absolutely crucial – dynamics, subtleties… and so when I came into the Dexys world, it really was like a pop equivalent of classical music in how they approached rehearsing. Incidentally, I did notice in college that a lot of classical musicians didn’t have a very good sense of rhythm. I remember in violin sections, people speeding up a lot, and finding that quite irritating. I think I probably had a pretty good sense of rhythm – drummers in Uncle Po and before them Gunner Cade helped to solidify that.

 

At the School of Music, I did feel different to the other students. I went in at 21, 22, and I hadn’t played with an orchestra for five years, and that’s quite a long time. I wasn’t feeling very confident, and I was aware of having to do a lot of work beforehand to catch up. I didn’t know what the standard was going to be like, so I was practising for hours and hours – I had this real fear I would be rubbish compared to everybody else. And I was fine, actually, but you don’t know that when you’re going into the unknown. And I hadn’t been reading music for four or five years – I’d been playing by ear. There were things that surprised me there – some musicians found it hard to do things like put chords to a melody. I thought everybody could do that, but obviously not!

 

I learned so much from other students, particularly one called Adrian, who I shared a desk with in my third year, who was the most beautiful player. I was really lucky going to Birmingham – it wasn’t too daunting. I don’t know whether I’d have got into the Royal Academy of Music or the Royal College of Music, but say I had, I think I would have found that quite intimidating, because they apparently had the best players, and the standard might have been so incredible. Birmingham, I felt I could fit in, the staff and students were lovely, so I’m really grateful about that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you felt you could be yourself?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I kept my past very secret, really, because I didn’t think anybody would get it. I really felt I had to be in the classical world to improve, and I didn’t want to be tempted back into pop music. I had made this decision to do three years of hard study.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In your final year, 1981/82, out of the blue, there was a knock on your door, and it was two guys from the Blue Ox Babes, the Birmingham band, and who had an affiliation with Dexys Midnight Runners. Did what happen next, in those two bands, come as a surprise to you? Because presumably you were thinking you might stay in the classical world?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I kept an open mind, but the reality of it was, by that post-graduate year, the fourth year, I hadn’t been playing or even listening to any pop music, and I knew I would have to try and earn a living through music. I didn’t want to teach, and so the obvious course was to get a job in an orchestra. That’s why I started doing auditions. I’d have probably been quite happy doing that, being the sort of musician I am. I would have probably tried to engineer situations where the music was interesting and stimulating. I was offered a job from the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, and had I gone to Spain, it would have been great, I think. I’d have probably played a lot of Spanish music, learned Spanish, seen a bit of the country, and travelled through music. In that fourth year, I bought a Teach Yourself German book. That was my thinking: learn different languages, travel the world playing my violin.

 

But the Blue Ox Babes and then Dexys a little while later just blew everything out of the window. Because I am a pop musician. The music I mostly listen to is pop music. I absolutely love classical music and I go to classical concerts, but in my heart… if I had to choose… it would be pop music.

 

Sometimes I think you put yourself in situations where these things can happen, and the doors open, and you seize the moment and go with your gut feeling. Even if people are saying, ‘Don’t do that’, or ‘I’m not sure’, you listen to your heart and make a reasoned judgement.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And even if things don’t work out the way you expected, or how you wanted, you still learn something along the way.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Exactly, Justin, exactly. For instance, my first teacher at music college was a guy called Felix Kok [1924–2010] who was the leader of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. A great teacher, and he offered me a gig with some members of the CBSO and other players, a freelance gig playing songs from films like Star Wars, at the Town Hall in Birmingham. I accepted. At the rehearsal, I realised I was way out of my depth. It was a three-hour rehearsal, sight-reading the music, and you might remember in those days, music for films and musicals were handwritten, not printed out – so it was very hard to read handwritten music for the first time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember that very well!

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

After the rehearsal, I stayed on at my music stand to work on the music a bit more, and the conductor came over and said something like, ‘You could do with a bit more practice’. And it was such a horrible way he said it, but he was right, and that was a very hard lesson, but one that made me really think about what I should accept in the future. That is what the professional world was like with orchestras. I grew up a lot that day.

LAST: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS & THE EMERALD EXPRESS: ‘Come On Eileen’ (Mercury/Phonogram, single, 1982)

HELEN O’HARA

Dexys’ record label at the time, Phonogram, was in New Bond Street, in London, and we’d get a bunch of copies of ‘Come On Eileen’ – but I would end up giving them away to friends or family. And then one day I realised I didn’t have any myself! Which I thought was a bit of a shame. I mean, I could have bought one on eBay, I suppose.

 

But one day, recently, I went into my local Oxfam shop in Greenwich, to buy a birthday card. On the way out, I saw this rack of albums and singles and for some reason – because I don’t do it normally – I flicked through them. And halfway through, there was the ‘Come On Eileen’ single sleeve staring at me. And I smiled, it just felt so amazing. I picked it up, it was in perfect condition. And it was weird, because you know, it’s 40 years on, and there’s also a remix of it out now as well. It felt magical. So, I’ve got my ‘Come On Eileen’ single back.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’re so familiar with this song now, but I can distinctly remember when I first saw and heard it. It was on Top of the Pops, 15 July 1982, it was number 31 in the charts, and would soon be number one. I was already aware of Dexys from a previous few hits: ‘Geno’ and ‘Show Me’, although I somehow hadn’t heard ‘Celtic Soul Brothers’, your debut with the group.

 

But I had never heard ‘Come On Eileen’ and that Top of the Pops, in the best possible way, was a complete shock. Years later, one journalist wrote that ‘Come On Eileen’ had now joined the pantheon of songs – like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – that are so familiar you forget how unusual they are. Was there a moment when you thought, ‘This is it, then’?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

When we got that first Top of the Pops, I think, the one you saw. Everything did happen very fast then, became a bit of a whirlwind. Yeah, it is an extraordinary record when you really start analysing it. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In terms of structure, especially.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

The music is so orchestrated, cleverly written. The use of instruments… it could be a modern piece of classical music. Kevin is a genius, really, and Jim [Paterson] and Billy [Adams] and Mickey [Billingham], they wrote it too. But I don’t think any of us thought it was going to be a hit. We wanted it to be!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know everyone says pop music was brilliant when they were twelve, but I was twelve in 1982, when some fairly leftfield records could become unexpected massive hits. Did you ever think of yourself as a pop star? Because to me, you were one.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

You know, I never really thought of myself as a pop star. I was a musician in a band, that’s always what came first. I’ve always found the issue of clothes and image quite hard, and I was glad that Kevin took control of that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It actually takes a lot of energy, that side of thinking.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s a huge amount of energy, and I admire people like Kevin and Roxy Music, who come up with these amazing clothes and outfits and things – it’s part of their art.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With pop, it is about the music, but with so many bands I’ve loved over the years, it’s also about the record sleeve and the band’s attitude, and so on. In the book, you mention how you kept sending back the Don’t Stand Me Down album sleeve again and again because it wasn’t quite right, and this kind of thing really does matter, I think. Because you’re making something that people are going to treasure.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Especially in those days, absolutely, Justin – because we were mainly buying albums then, as it was pre-CD. It’s like those covers the Stones did – the 3D cover of Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, or Sticky Fingers with the zip. But yes, it was great to be a part of a band where, as well as the music, all the visual aspects – the clothes, the artwork, the choreography – were very important. Equally, you can play music with somebody who says, just wear what you like – and that’s fine too.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Another thing with Dexys – the mythology. I remember the story that was ‘designed’ for you, that Kevin saw you at a bus stop in Birmingham holding your violin case, and he asked you to join the band. And I bought into that completely at the time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Did you? Oh, that’s amazing. Brilliant.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And obviously it didn’t happen like that, although the way you joined the Blue Ox Babes the year before was pretty out of the blue. That there was a knock on the door and two guys asking if you’d like to join a band. It’s not what you expect.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

With me resisting initially. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What did it feel like to be famous, so suddenly?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I found it very strange. When ‘Come On Eileen’ was number one, I was still living in my student flat in Birmingham, still getting the bus, and you find people talking about you and pointing at you. I felt extremely awkward in that situation.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because what do you do?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Exactly. Really, all you can do is get out of where you are. It didn’t feel like a threat, but it’s a very different sort of attention to when people are at a concert, listening to you, even if they might be shouting or screaming or whatever… But when it’s ‘real life’ and you just popped out to get some milk… It wasn’t the kind of attention Kevin was getting, but the bits I did experience felt uncomfortable. And I felt it again much later, when my boys were at primary school and I was anonymous. I’d agreed to do this interview for a TV documentary [Young Guns Go for It: Dexys Midnight Runners, BBC2, 13/09/2000]. The next day I went into school, and people were bringing albums in [to be signed]. I was totally shocked they’d found out, and they were also beginning to treat me slightly differently and I just thought, I’m the same as I was yesterday.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It must be weird. There’s a version of you out there that is you, but it kind of isn’t you. It’s not even a distortion… it’s just that you were in that video, but that’s not the full, real you.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s one reason some people can’t cope and why they get out of this business, I suppose. But I liked that theatrical element that Kevin had created – the Emerald Express name for the string section, the fact we had all different names. It was a bit like being in a musical. It was just a slightly different character, but nothing too different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

People rather like stories like the bus stop story, because of that idea that anything could happen.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s quite romantic, isn’t it, as well. You can meet anyone at the bus stop.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In August this year, you were performing ‘Come On Eileen’ at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. What keeps it fresh, playing it, do you think? You’ve rearranged it a number of times now, right? It’s in a different key, for a start.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, it’s a bit lower, when we did it in Birmingham, we took it down a few tones. ‘Eileen’ is incredibly high originally, something Kevin said he hadn’t considered when he first wrote it. He didn’t really consider the keys for his voice when he wrote anything in the old days, so to suit his voice now, we re-recorded the track. Kevin was the only one performing live, at the Commonwealth Games. I went into a studio to record the three violins for the track. And you know what, Justin? When I played, I felt like I was twentysomething again. When I came home, I sent a message to Kevin and to Pete Schwier, the engineer, telling them I just couldn’t help playing with the same energy and excitement that I felt when I originally recorded it. And it will always be like that. I was on a high after that concert for days afterwards.

 

What’s interesting is that Tanita Tikaram has changed a lot of her keys as well. Exactly like Kevin. They’re mostly lower keys but with one song, she’s moved it up a tone, interestingly.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’ll talk a little bit more about Tanita in a moment, but I wanted to just ask you about Don’t Stand Me Down. And what becomes clear, reading about the making of that album, was despite the length of time it took to make – and obviously your relationship with Kevin ended during its making – it still sounds like there was an immensely harmonious working relationship with that record. And it was completely different to everything else in 1985.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think a lot of people were probably not surprised that it was a bit different, but it was radically different. And the conversation thing, the talking, having a 12-minute song [‘This Is What She’s Like’]. We knew it was different, but it just felt right. We were so immensely proud of it, and still are. So when it came out, and didn’t get the reaction we’d hoped for, it was disappointing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you did a fair bit of promotion too for it. You were on Wogan, big live BBC1 show, 7 o’clock [13/09/1985. Fact! The other guests were Jackie Collins, Penelope Keith, Fascinating Aida and Kenneth Williams].

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

We played ‘Listen to This’ on Wogan, which in hindsight, perhaps should have been the single because it was three minutes, and a great song. I had to count it in to Kevin – I had a little earpiece – because it starts with Kevin singing before the band comes in. I had to give him a count-in, on live television. I remember thinking, I’ve got to get this right!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And am I right in saying that on Don’t Stand Me Down, you were Dexys’ musical director as well as their violinist? Can you outline what that role entailed?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Apart from co-writing some of the songs with Kevin and Billy [Adams], I would discuss the arrangements with them, and rehearse the band before Kevin came to rehearsals, to go through the basics of each song, to run through the parts and write out parts for musicians. Kevin didn’t have to be there all the time, he was often doing promotion, so the MD could often get a lot of the work done, fine-tuning things. It also meant that Kevin didn’t wear his voice out.

 

Often Billy and I auditioned musicians without Kevin being there. We had problems finding the right drummer for the album. We went to America, to Nashville at one point. After rehearsals, in the evenings, I would listen back to recordings I made that day and pick up on points where I thought we could improve the next day. And because it was a big band, with musicians from America, I would help to answer their queries. I took on a liaising role as well, between musicians and the management, which wasn’t my job, but that was fine. And then with live work, the MD’s job is to make sure everyone’s on it every night. Anything that wasn’t quite right the night before, you might rehearse in the next soundcheck. Kevin gave me a lot of responsibility and trusted me to look after the music.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how did you start working with Tanita Tikaram, a few years later?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Paul Charles had been Dexys’ agent, and he had discovered Tanita at the Mean Fiddler, in Harlesden, a really great music club. After I left Dexys, he called me up to tell me he’d found this amazing singer/songwriter and they wanted violin on her single called ‘Good Tradition’. I was working on my own album project, and I wasn’t a session player as such, because you just didn’t do that with Dexys, but I thought, This does sound exciting. Paul sent me her demo and I really liked the song. So I agreed to the session. It was recorded at Rod Argent’s studio, he of Argent and the Zombies, who was producing it with Peter Van Hooke, the drummer from Mike and the Mechanics. I played my parts, made up a solo which they liked, and they liked all the other parts I’d written for it. From there, ‘Good Tradition’ became a hit, and then Tanita and Paul put a band together. I was with her for two to three years, and I played on her next two albums.

 

Then after the hiatus of my not playing for 20 odd years, and getting back with Dexys, Tanita asked me if I would be musical director and violinist for her Ancient Heart retrospective show at the Barbican. So it came back full circle. She’s great, it’s like when I work with Tim Burgess now. With both of them, when they walk into the room, the sun comes out. I can be myself when I work with them.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So why did you stop playing for 20 years? Was it a case of ‘all or nothing’?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

There was an element of that. When I had my first son. I was still doing a little bit of playing in the first few months, for example with Graham Parker. And then, quite quickly, a few months later, I was pregnant with my second son, Billy, and I was exhausted. There were only 15 months between my two sons. I was tired, and work had been very intense for many years, but also, I just wanted to be home with them. I didn’t want anyone else looking after them or bringing them up. I didn’t want to tour and be apart from them for weeks on end. The other reason is that when I was in my 30s, I was beginning to feel a bit old being in a group, a weird thing to say now, but it’s how quite a lot of us felt at the time. Also, the violin is difficult, particularly if you’re not practising it a lot, and I felt every day I was losing more and more of my ability.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what was the catalyst that made you go back to the violin?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Both my sons went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. My elder son Jack studied technical theatre and my younger son Billy was studying the drums. I was going to watch shows that they were involved in. Billy had been in bands at school, so I was seeing teenagers in bands again, which brought back memories, of course. So, I was missing it, but not really admitting it.

 

Then I went with Billy to see a Dexys show at the Barbican, for the One Day I’m Going to Soar album. It was great, but I felt like I could be back on stage because I knew all the old songs. It just made me think, I’m really missing this, my children are doing what I used to do. I heard a song before the gig, The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’. Back at home, I put that CD on and that was the point when it got beyond my control; I got the violin out, and I sort of knew then that I was ready to embark on a slow journey back. But it also felt really exhilarating. I knew I’d be rubbish and I was rusty but, in my heart, I was still that musician. It was about muscle memory and confidence. I don’t regret stopping for a minute. Every second I was with my kids, I just really treasure that, and maybe – as you suggested earlier – I do compartmentalise stuff in my life. Maybe that’s just how I operate. I had been doing other things as well, part-time jobs – and studying a humanities degree for the Open University. That made me come out of my shell a bit more and meet people, as I’d lost confidence with people as well. It was a bit of a slow comeback, but I knew I’d be alright.

 

ANYTHING: PHILIP GLASS: Akhnaten: ‘Hymn to the Sun’ (Decca Gold/UMG, 2018)

Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jonathan Cohen, Les Violons du Roy

HELEN O’HARA

An opera singer I know was singing in the chorus of Akhenaten a few years ago. And she said, it’s really great, I can get you a cheaper ticket in a good seat. I didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded interesting. Within the first few minutes, I was just knocked out, I couldn’t believe this wash of sound. I was just mesmerised, under a spell. But also, this particular production used the Gandini Jugglers. They are part of the rhythm and they’re juggling in interesting ways, in time to the music. And then there are the costumes and the beautiful countertenor voice of Anthony Roth Costanzo. The opera hasn’t got any violins in it – it’s violas, cellos, double basses, so it’s this very dark, rich sound. That’s part of the incredible scoring. Anyway, it’s coming again, early 2023. I thoroughly recommend it, Justin, it’s at the Colosseum, English National Opera. The same production, with jugglers.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That sounds fantastic, I must make a note of that. And you’ve also selected ‘Belle’ by Al Green, and I believe this was a big influence on how you approached creating and writing Don’t Stand Me Down.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, in 1983, when Kevin and I were going out together, he played me ‘Belle’ and some other Al Green songs, and I really started to understand the groove, and the sort of drummers that he was using, and that style of playing. There’s a lot of space in the music, and so when we were working on Don’t Stand Me Down, Kevin was saying, ‘Well this is the rhythm section we want, we want that style of drumming.’ It was a real eyeopener for me. I’d always been into drummers – Charlie Watts was one of my favourites, he’s not really an Al Green-type drummer, although he sort of is because he plays behind the beat. I think I had a natural disposition towards that sort of playing, rather than – say – heavy metal drummers which is not really my thing, much as I admire that style of playing.

 

So that’s how that came about. And then we were lucky enough to find Tim Dancy who had played with Al Green, when we saw them at the Royal Albert Hall [13/07/1984, with the London Community Gospel Choir]. I said to Kevin, ‘That’s our drummer’, and Tim came over, recorded a few songs with us, and did the tour as well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What’s so clear throughout What’s She Like is you remain a fan. When you remember encounters or meetings with people or collaborations, whether it’s Willie Mitchell or Vincent Crane or Nicky Hopkins, your excitement and awe really comes over.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I still can’t believe that Nicky and I worked together. It’s almost like two lives. ‘Did I really play with him?’ I still pinch myself. Now I’m working with Tim Burgess! I’ve never taken it for granted. I still feel the same excitement I felt when I first heard ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ in the sixties, and I hope it continues.

 

 

—

Helen’s memoir, What’s She Like, was published by Route on 1 October 2022.

 

You can access her related 209-song playlist on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/55tJslj4iEEvdX2X4hIgcz?si=0b9498e1cc804c8a

 

To mark the 40th anniversary of Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay, a remixed version of the album, subtitled As It Should Have Sounded, was released by Mercury Records on 14 October 2022. 

 

Helen continues to collaborate, on record and live, with both Tim Burgess and Tanita Tikaram.

 

You can follow Helen on Twitter at @oharaviolin, and on Bluesky at @oharaviolin.bsky.com.

FLA PLAYLIST 15

Helen O’Hara

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 23:

Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso

Van Cliburn/Kirill Kondrashin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frxZjSG8lMs

Track 2: PJ PROBY: ‘Maria’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX1wDV3ENF8

Track 3: FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D 810:

‘Death and the Maiden’: I. Allegro

Endellion String Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNULkV5lyHE

Track 4: BOB AND MARCIA: ‘To Be Young Gifted and Black’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscozSAumgs

Track 5: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Let’s Get This Straight from the Start’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqJlhXcW8X4

Track 6: SLADE: ‘Coz I Luv You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONQPB9HTP5c

Track 7: MOTHERS OF INVENTION: ‘Directly From My Heart to You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB3HdC-Iums

Track 8: UNCLE PO: ‘Screw My Friends’ – Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGNeg0beo4s

Track 9: BLUE OX BABES: ‘Walking on the Line’ – 1981 Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkDGkyLZQI

Track 10: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS AND THE EMERALD EXPRESS: ‘Come On Eileen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BODDyZRF6A

Track 11: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Listen to This’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fRW4g52a7w

Track 12: TANITA TIKARAM: ‘Good Tradition’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAbgrq4TPT8

Track 13: TANITA TIKARAM: ‘Thursday’s Child’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RRCXqO8i9M

Track 14: THE BAND: ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w69ZVHpjYAk

Track 15: PHILIP GLASS: Akhnaten: ‘Hymn to the Sun’

Anthony Roth Costanzo/Jonathan Cohen/Les Violons du Roy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8dEk1KXu0g

Track 16: AL GREEN: ‘Belle’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjEHoz1r3bs

Track 17: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Old’ (As It Should Have Sounded 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWtJbelz7o

Track 18: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘This is What She’s Like’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o94-YJlyCa4

FLA 14: Lynne Phillips (11/09/2022)

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Lynne Phillips is a piano teacher who for over 25 years has guided students – both beginners and restarters – through rudimentary, intermediate and advanced lessons. Born in Swansea (as was I), she was raised in High Wycombe and studied Music at Cardiff University and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama – and indeed still lives and works in the Cardiff area. I first met Lynne in the mid-1990s when we were both working in the same record shop and she was our go-to classical music expert.

 

One of Lynne’s core beliefs in teaching is inclusivity and flexibility, notably with neurodivergent pupils. We talked about this, as well as musical self-expression, the problems with memorising music, why musical study is about enjoyment, and – of course – her particular First Last Anything musical favourites.

 

 

—–

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What music did you have in your house when you were growing up, before you started buying music yourself?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

My dad was quite into jazz, and my mum liked the classical side of stuff, so there was that mishmash. We used to go to concerts – I went to see Nina Simone, can you believe? She must have been like, ninety! Did I just imagine that? I think she came to High Wycombe. I must have been 14 or 15.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s amazing when you remember seeing these legends. I saw Buddy Rich with my dad in the early 80s. And I was watching TV one night with my mother, there was a clip of Ella Fitzgerald and my mother suddenly said, ‘Your father and I went to see her in Cardiff once.’ In about 1964.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Humphrey Lyttelton and Helen Shapiro, I remember seeing them. Every time I’d see a jazz band, I’d focus on the pianist. That would have been my dad’s influence. And my mum was more, ‘Let’s go to the Barbican and hear pianists.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Can you remember who you saw there?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I can’t, apart from Joshua Rifkin playing ragtime. And I loved Vladimir Ashkenazy, I’ve always had a big thing about him playing.

 

 

FIRST: CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS: Carnival of the Animals (1975, Classics for Pleasure/Music for Pleasure)

Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Gibson

Extracts: ‘Pianists’

NB: This recording that Lynne bought is not currently available on Spotify, so we’ve gone with the Kanneh-Masons’ recording from Carnival, released in 2020.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Something I never knew about Carnival of the Animals. It was never performed publicly during Saint-Saëns’ lifetime. Only private performances. He thought it might be considered a bit frivolous.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I didn’t know that. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s like it was his novelty album. So how old would you have been when you got this? Everyone of our generation knows this music, I suspect.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I remember going into Woolies and being told I could have a cassette and my brother could have one too. This is before we had record players, we had these little cassette decks. And I remember picking Carnival of the Animals – I suspect because it had animals on the cover.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were you already learning the piano when you got this?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, because I started playing the piano when I was in America, and this would have been after we’d been back here a couple of years. I was still quite young. I used to listen to this a lot. I love the idea that you’ve got this Carnival of the Animals, and then you have a section for Pianists! As one of the Animals! [Laughs] Animals who just play scales!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a perfect suite for aspiring musicians really because all the orchestra’s represented. So whether you want to be a pianist or you like strings or the brass or whatever, you know there’s something in all of those things. ‘The Swan’ is probably the most famous thing from it now. This sort of music was used on children’s TV programmes like Play School a lot – ‘Aquarium’ would be used as background music for anything to do with fish and water. Weirdly, I half-associate ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac, this guitar blues instrumental from the late 60s, as a distant relative of Carnival of the Animals. And the finale of course got used for a while as the end theme to A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

 

 

—–

 

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Once I got to university in Cardiff, there were cheap concerts everywhere. Me and a friend used to sell raffle tickets for Friends of the Welsh National Opera. They’d go in, we’d see a little bit of the first act, but we’d have to hang around the front for latecomers, then we’d come out for the interval, and then in the second half, we could go and sit down properly. So I have seen an awful lot of last halves of operas.

 

Remember lunchtime concerts at Cardiff University? I remember seeing Rolf Hind and he was quite young then. And I don’t remember what he played, except for the encore, which was Liszt’s ‘La Campanella’ which is just fiendishly difficult.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was watching some of the Proms coverage, the other week, and it was Kian Soltani playing the Elgar Cello Concerto, which is obviously associated now with two or three particular soloists – Jacqueline du Pré famously. And he was brilliant, and afterwards they had that roundtable panel and Steven Isserlis was on it, saying how striking it was hearing somebody who had not leant on the recordings so much but had gone back to the score. It made me think a lot about how, before recordings there was almost certainly a greater variation of performances. I would imagine, as a performer, it takes quite a while to move away from that, and make something that’s your own interpretation while sticking to what is written on the page.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah. And getting that across to people is really hard. The score is the skeleton and it’s your job to pad it out. It’s not that there’s a right and a wrong way to play it, although there is ‘a wrong way’ obviously!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But it’s about finding your own personality, isn’t it?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Very much. When I’ve got a student who I’ve taught for quite a while, and they’ll still play things differently to how I would play them, I think that’s good, because they’re not just copying exactly what I do.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is that quite hard to get people to do that, to find their own way?

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, and I think it’s harder with exams as well because the exam board puts out recordings. So there’s this [feeling] that you’ve got to play it like the recording to get a good mark. I really appreciate them putting out those recordings – they should and it’s really useful for a lot of students.

 

But at the same time, some of them worry that, say, if they put a crescendo in there which is not written in the score, they might lose marks. Whereas if I was helping them prepare for a school concert or a festival, there’s no way they’d say, Would I be kicked off stage for putting that crescendo in there? There’s this weird sort of mentality with exam play, and even for students who only do the odd kind of exam are happy to experiment with lots of stuff, but when it comes to exam music, they see it as ‘there’s a right way to play this’ because it’s an examination. It’s quite a hard mindset to get out of.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I used to find, when I was learning the flute, I was doing Associated Board exams, and I used to almost see those exams as concerts.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think that’s a good thing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I never did brilliantly. A couple of Merits, I seem to remember getting 108 quite a lot. [Out of 150]. 

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I got Distinction [above 130] at Grade 1, and a ton of Merits [above 120], but you know… I scraped 105 on my Grade 8. That was just before I got into Cardiff University, and they needed Grade 8 and A level results.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I still hear pieces of music that I studied for Grade 8, and – even allowing for the fact they’re often edited and shortened for exam boards – I can’t believe I used to be able to play them. But exams – it didn’t help that the place where they held the exams were above a shop – still in business, I shan’t name it – where you couldn’t even browse, they’d snarl at you if you just wanted to browse the sheet music as a distraction.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wanted to ask you how you got started on the piano and how quickly did you progress and what were your ambitions?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I was about five, and I was taught in America initially because I was living in Vermont at the time. Very few of us can actually remember our early lessons now. We’ve got no context to go on. So it’s all about learning as you go.

 

I’m not sure to what extent music college teaching courses go into individual teaching of that age group. When I was working as a study skills tutor, I used to see essays about things like ‘how do you get someone to keep their arm up like that?’ or ‘how do you get a specific tone?’ but not so much something like ‘how do you teach a five-year-old without making them cry?’ Or ‘how do you teach a six-year-old who’s come to you, who can’t read properly yet? How do you get them to the point where they’re enjoying just sitting at the piano?’

 

So that seems to be the big gap [in knowledge], I think – the very beginning. But a lot of teachers won’t even take pupils under the age of 7 or 8.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

For that very reason? That children under that age can’t read properly yet.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, a lot of it’s that. Which is fair enough, if that’s who you [prefer to teach]. My starting age is 4. I don’t teach under 4.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was quite an early reader, and I don’t remember the process of learning to read. So I wonder if I’d be any good as a teacher who would be teaching reading skills because I can’t remember the struggle of learning them.

—–

LAST: VARIOUS ARTISTS: Parade of Disney Hits (MFP, 1972)

Extract: ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’

(NB: Again, this album could not be found uploaded anywhere online, so for now, here’s a link to the original Cliff Edwards and Disney Studio Chorus version of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Pinocchio.)

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I spent a long, long, long time when I was younger, especially at university and just afterwards, feeling I would be judged not just for my playing ability and my teaching ability, but also what I enjoy listening to. So it was interesting when you sent the email about this, and asked what the last thing I bought was, and it was that Disney album… Because at one time I’d have not admitted to that, and said something else.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were you always a Disney fan, or is it that these are nostalgic pieces?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

When we were young, if you didn’t see Disney films in the cinema, you had very, very little chance of actually seeing it elsewhere anyway.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

They weren’t shown on television. I still don’t think Snow White has ever been shown on British television. It’s probably on Disney+, no doubt.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Snow White’s got some of my favourite music. But Jungle Book is my absolute favourite.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Fantasia?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I like Fantasia, but it’s not new music.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Doh, course it isn’t! It isn’t original music.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

So I don’t tend to think of that as Disney music as such, as the kind of the animation that fits in with the music.

 

I’ve got a score that I bought on eBay years ago that I found recently when I was tidying up. It’s like a mishmash of songs from Snow White, a medley for piano and it’s just brilliant fun. I was playing it for weeks. It starts with ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ and then it goes into ‘Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go’, and there’s a great finale where all these different bits come in at the end. It’s just wickedly good fun to play music that’s so camp. But this particular record is a Parade of Disney Hits, it’s not actually officially from the films.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I just noted the MFP label, Music for Pleasure. We had an MFP album when I was growing up called The Geoff Love Orchestra Play the James Bond Themes, all instrumentals.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

So ‘The Bare Necessities’, ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Whistle While You Work’, ‘Winnie the Pooh’, ‘Heigh Ho’, ‘The Siamese Cat Song’. It’s got all those. But they’re not the original Disney versions.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you recently also got a forties compilation, Favourites of the Forties (MFP, 1982). I notice Carmen Miranda’s on it, Ella Fitzgerald too.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Doing ‘My Happiness’. And [pianist] Eddie Heywood, and I don’t know who that is, but he’s doing ‘Begin the Beguine’ which I love. Nat King Cole. So I picked it up because there were a couple on there I liked. I like 40s/50s music anyway. It was 50p! You can’t go wrong.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you have a vision early on of being a pianist?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

It was just something I enjoyed. Up until 18 or whatever, I don’t remember thinking, I want to do that as a career. I liked the piano, I liked drawing, I liked horse-riding…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I never quite understood why you had to make these big decisions at such a young age.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Sometimes I have conversations with parents who don’t say, ‘My child will only have lessons if they want to be a concert pianist’, but they do say things like ‘We’re thinking about her starting piano because she’s been plonking around on the neighbours’ piano, so can we bring her along and then let us know if she’s any good?’ And I think, ‘Who cares if she’s any good?’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So it’s more, ‘Does she enjoy it?’

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah. When you take a kid along to football classes, you’re not thinking of playing in the Premier League. Or with swimming lessons… although, actually, that’s more something people do so their kids don’t drown.

 

Going back a few years, I joined a choir, which was more like a chamber [ensemble] really because there were only about eight of us. A couple of us were professional musicians, but none of us were professional singers or had any intention of ever being so. We just wanted to get together.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Does that make things less ‘competitive’ then?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

It’s not so much about ‘less competitive’. Really, there’s less perfectionism. As professionals we kind of know what we’re aiming towards and there’s a difference in performance quality, perhaps, between a professional group of eight singers and an amateur group of eight singers, right? And there’s also a difference in what’s expected. So as amateurs, we were in it for the enjoyment of it – which professionals are also in it for. But there was never any point where we’d get ‘Well, you haven’t done your practice’ or ‘You can’t reach that note’. We all did what we needed to do, but there wasn’t this kind of high pressure to perform something really brilliantly. There was a pressure to perform something well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you were doing concerts?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, it was connected to a church, and me and this other guy were the only heathens there, so we would joke about that! [Laughs] So a lot of the concerts weren’t concerts as such. We would always sing sacred music in things like Christmas services, Easter services and we’d prepare for these kind of other things, which I never knew what they were, because I don’t really do ‘religion’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But you like a lot of religious music, right?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I really do.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So piano teaching. How did you start doing that?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I started teaching when I was about 14 which, in hindsight, was a terrible thing to do, and I don’t think I did my students any favours. My piano teacher at the time had some work she couldn’t take on, and she asked me if I would. I charged two quid a lesson or something ridiculous.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And this was… younger kids?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

One was six, one was seven, and it turned out the elder one was dyslexic, which is why she was really, really struggling to read music. I was having trouble with getting her to read anything at all, and then about six months later, I bumped into her mum who told me she’d been diagnosed with dyslexia. Which was quite a rare diagnosis back then. I think I was nice to the pupils, but I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Your teaching methods really do seem to prioritise inclusivity. Looking at your website, you teach anyone who is interested in learning. So that’s you know, kids of four and upwards, as you mentioned. Adults who can be beginners or restarters. And crucially, not just neurotypical pupils – or who are defined as neurotypical anyway. So you make a point of saying that you teach pupils with dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD etc. How quickly did it become apparent to you that neurodivergence could be better recognised and nurtured in music teaching?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Quite early on, actually. I would often get students who’d come from other teachers. And those teachers had said they were slow or couldn’t play well, and the kids had been getting frustrated, and the parents had wanted a change of teacher. And I was teaching them, thinking, I wonder if they might be dyslexic. This was, god, nearly 25 years ago, when my daughter was 11 months old. There was a nursery down the road, and so I put her there for one afternoon a week, and I’d have two students. That’s how it started – and then when I got another load of students, I’d [teach for] another half a day.

 

I don’t think it took very long for me to have this reputation where I could have a way with students who other teachers had either upset or dismissed. That gradually developed into my being regarded as someone who could teach the ones who didn’t get on with other teachers because they were autistic or dyslexic or the rest of it…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think everyone has the potential to be musical? Or can innately appreciate music, at least?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think everybody does. The question is whether the instrument they’re learning is the right instrument for them. Which it isn’t always. And also, how far they can go; how far they want to go. You especially find adults saying, ‘I’m tone deaf, I can never play anything.’ And I’m like, That’s bullshit. Let’s start with Middle C and we’ll go from there.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you think when people say that, that it’s borne out of a lack of confidence?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

A lot of it is that. And with much older people, they’ve come from schools where they were just told they were no good at music. I mean, our generation were as well, probably. I don’t remember, although I was told I was no good at sport.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yeah, I had that! But my dad went to piano lessons as a boy, and his teacher, and I’m sure this was not uncommon then, would rap your fingers with a ruler if you played the wrong notes.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I’ve still got students now who remember that happening when they were little.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With music lessons, it does require a lot of hard work and practice, but you still want to feel comfortable in order to be able to express yourself. I had good teachers when I was younger, but I had confidence problems. My flute teacher – who was lovely and brilliant – would sometimes say, especially in the early days, ‘Justin, you have to play louder.’ I would see ‘f’ on a score or ‘ff’ and think ‘well, how loud should that be?’ It was quite nerve-wracking for a while, and it took a bit of time to get past that.

 

So, in terms of accommodating difference in your teaching methods, with the kids at least, you’re probably talking to their parents. And the parents can sit in on the lesson with their children if the children wish, is that right?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, with a lot of the autistic students, some of the parents do sit in. We’ve just come out of the pandemic – supposedly – and having come out of that ‘everything is online/nothing is face to face’ world… I only started teaching face to face again a term ago. So [with online teaching], parents were there a lot of the time anyway, because they kind of had to be. A lot of kids need help with getting the right book out, finding the right page, being shown what I’m talking about. And also the size of many people’s houses being what they are…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, there are only so many rooms.

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

And you need the parent there for safety. But they don’t really have to be sitting next to the child a lot of the time.

 

Sometimes, though, my expectations of behaviour of specially autistic children is different from those of their parents. I will be very chilled out, generally speaking, when I’m teaching. So if I’ve got a kid who doesn’t want to do something, I’ll say, ‘OK, let’s do something else.’ But then the parent might interject: ‘You must do that because your teacher asked you to.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess it’s a difficult balance to strike because obviously, the parent is probably thinking, ‘We’re paying the teacher to teach’, and so they might have good intentions of wanting their child to co-operate.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think they’re trying to be helpful, yeah, but it’s difficult then for me to say, ‘Okay, can you not do that?’ Because I know that they’re trying to be helpful, but in the end they’re not, because the kid gets stressed out. A lot of the time, if I ask a student to do something, and they do something else, I kind of like that because it shows that either they’re being creative – they’re playing a different part of the music, for instance – but also, what’s the problem anyway? There are all sorts of reasons why I’ll just sit there and listen, even if what I’m listening to is nothing like what I asked them to do.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the unexpected can be the interesting thing. They might find something you might not have thought about?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Exactly. I’m quite happy to listen to somebody playing not what I asked or the wrong bit. Or the communication breakdowns that can happen with autistic children, especially when you’ve only there for half an hour, especially when you’re online. I’m fine: ‘Let’s just do that.’ But really, what we just discussed, that’s as bad as it ever really gets in terms of parental expectations.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was thinking also about how teachers can often learn something new and valuable in a lesson, often from an unexpected source. It suggests that there’s real communication going on there. Or when a pupil asks a question and the teacher says, ‘I actually don’t know, but let’s see if we can find out the answer.’

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And surely this is what curiosity is all about.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I completely agree, and I see the difference between kids from either home or school environments where they’re allowed to explore stuff, and kids from environments where they lack imagination and initiative and are scared to try things. It can get really frustrating because you’re asking people really simple stuff:

 

‘You know that says piano on the score, do you think you played quietly?’

‘I don’t know.’

 

It’s like I’ve got to tell them. Or:

 

‘Did you play a crescendo through that bit?’

‘I don’t know.’

 

There’s this fear that I’m trying to trap them, or that there’s a right and a wrong answer. But there isn’t. Even a question like:

 

‘Did you find that bit easy?’

‘I don’t know.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Even as a child who loved listening to music, I found early instrumental lessons hard, and making a cluster of notes on a page sound like a piece of music. I wasn’t very good at things like phrasing then, so I would read something absolutely literally on the page, but it would take a while for it to become music in my playing.

——

ANYTHING: STEVE REICH: Works 1965 – 1995 (Nonesuch, 2005)

Extract: ‘Piano Phase (1967)’

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Many of my favourites have been favourites for years. Although Steve Reich… I only started properly listening to about ten years ago.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Piano Phase’, which I think I already knew a little bit, really grabbed me.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

The score for it is really bizarre. It’s like a phrase, the same twelve notes, and then you play them over and over and over again. Somebody else is playing them. And then one piano starts playing it very slightly faster until it kind of loops around and it’s it lands on the next note in the phrase and it just keeps and then it loops round again, and it gets slightly faster and faster until the first note is the third note.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Sounds quite mathematical!

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, it’s really hypnotic to listen to, really bizarre, and I actually love it. I just remember quite a few years ago somebody showed me a YouTube video, which I’ll try and find of one guy [Peter Aidu] and he’s got two grand pianos.

LYNNE PHILLIPS

He’s doing one phrase with his left hand, and one phrase with his right hand, starting both together, and then his right hand has to speed up very, very slightly and then come back down at the same time and I’ve tried to play it, not with two grand pianos (because I don’t have two), but I can do about three phrases before I collapse in a heap and say, I can’t do this anymore. It is crazy hard. The concentration on his face.

 

And I also love listening to ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, might have come out when I was at university. I remember a friend of mine saying, oh, he’s found this amazing new music, but he’s using sampling. There’s something quite genius about the way he like splices it and it reattaches itself and splices it, and you can hear the beats of the pigeons’ wings.

  

—-

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I can’t memorise stuff. Every time I’ve tried to perform from memory, it’s gone horrifically badly. So I just don’t, now – and I’ve made my peace with that. I can memorise certain things. I’m really good at remembering things faster on a score. So I don’t have to have everything written in, by me. I can remember phrasing. But I tend to think of the score as like a script for an actor. All it is, is the words, some basic stage directions. You need to get away from it, either doing it from memory or – as I do – doing it from half-memory, where you’re sort of reading it, but you’re not really reading every note. You’ve got the shape of it…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You know it in your head…

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

And again, if it’s a script, it doesn’t say everything on it. So if you were reading it out, there’d be certain inflexions you’d include. Sometimes, naturally, you need a little bit of help, but you turn what is quite basic, like text, into something much more meaningful. But the point where that happens in music, I think, is so, so very different for everybody. Some people are like me, they can say ‘It’s there’ very quickly, I can see the phrases straight away. Or, as I’m playing it, I can kind of work out on the first run-through… I might make some changes, juggle things around a bit. But basically, I can instantly see, for instance, a hidden melody, or where phrases are, even if they’re not actually marked. And most people I teach know when they’re like that, so either they have to learn every single note, and have to be playing it well before they can start phrasing it like somebody who’s reading a script… Some people are instant, and some need to learn the words first before you can start inflecting it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I can remember, in the early days of learning the flute, my teacher would have to sometimes pencil in accented lines across certain notes, particularly in a run of semiquavers: ‘These are the important notes to emphasise’, when I was just playing them all equally.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes, it’s about the musical narrative, and about finding that journey. You start at Point A and you need to get to Point B and then from that point to Point C, to know where you’ve been, and where you’re going. Some people can do it straight away, and some can’t, and that’s fine. Some people need to have listened to the music in its entirety first, before they can even begin thinking about what the notes are.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how to interpret them?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Or just that they need the whole picture first before they can start breaking it up, whereas other people need to work on the broken-up bits before they can start. I’ve got a student who’s Grade 7, and she’s really talented and she’s one of the ones who needs to find the notes before she can build up. At the point she starts building up, that’s when it gets really good. So I think it’s all very different for different people and a lot of it I think depends on how well you read as well and that’s something that I’ve always found really easy. Not necessarily sight reading, because there’s a whole coordination thing there. I’m a good sight reader with certain things, but not with others. I’m fairly good if you give me a little bit of time to look it over, to process things.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So longer than an exam, say, where you have about 30 seconds to look over something.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

You’ll never find that in the professional world! You’d never be asked to sight-read something with 30 seconds’ notice. It’s so ridiculous.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I seem to remember you saying once that all this ‘playing from memory’ was Liszt’s fault!

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yeah, the bastard! [Laughter]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And so students were then expected to memorise everything all the time.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

Yes – why is there this kind of intense thing. You see concertos, at the Proms, and you see the orchestra and they can read from their scores, but the poor bloody soloist has to do it from memory. But the problem is, if you’re a good pianist, but you’re not a good memoriser, you never get to those heights of performing, because of convention. From a certain level, you start doing things from memory, but if you’re no good at doing that – which I wasn’t – it starts to cause big performance anxiety. Looking back at the times when I’ve done best in performance, I’ve had the music in front of me.

 

I mean when I think back to the hours and hours and hours I spent at uni trying to memorise little things so that I could perform them in a concert where it would be playing from memory. There was no point. If you can memorise, brilliant. But I just do not get this kind of obsession that we have to be able to play from memory.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t have to do that very often in studies. Presumably you did, though.

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

We had to play from memory sometimes, and I remember my final practical exams weren’t from memory. But there is a big pressure of being able to play stuff from memory because there’s this idea that if you need the music, you don’t know the music well enough.

 

Funnily enough, talking about memorising stuff, I could memorise John Adams’ ‘China Gates’. But I can’t memorise stuff like a Mozart sonata, which you’d think would be easier because it’s got a nice melody.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you know why that is?

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I think I’m just weird. [Laughter]

 

 

—-

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

I remember, in high school, around GCSE time, somebody came in about careers advice, and they had these questionnaires that you fill out, and then it comes back with your ideal career. And mine came back with ‘teacher’. I thought, ‘I don’t want to teach – horrible job.’ So that was that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was that because of how you felt as a pupil, though?

 

 

LYNNE PHILLIPS

No. I think, even now, the thought of doing school teaching fills me with such [dread]. One to one teaching, fine. Teaching very small groups, if I’ve got somebody else there as well. But oh god, otherwise… I know people who finished their university degree and went off to do their PGCE… And I was like, No. But yeah, careers advice. My friend got ‘ratcatcher’. [Laughter] And she’s now a teacher and school governor.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I suppose it beats the other way round!

 

 

—

Lynne’s website is at www.lynnephillips.com

You can follow her on Twitter at @teachypiano, and on Bluesky at @teachypiano.bsky.social.

FLA PLAYLIST 14

Lynne Phillips

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: NINA SIMONE: ‘Strange Fruit’ – Live in New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnuEMdUUrZQ

Track 2: SCOTT JOPLIN: ‘Solace – A Mexican Serenade’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KsF8-32rwI

Track 3: SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No 2 in C Minor – 2: Adagio sostenuto

Vladimir Ashkenazy/London Symphony Orchestra/Andre Prévin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEU4HTmx6Ak

Track 4–5: CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS: Carnival of the Animals:

The Kanneh-Masons

[‘Pianists’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoGwRZRlqxI /

‘Aquarium’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw ]

Track 6: FLEETWOOD MAC: ‘Albatross’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXeKi6ZkbOw

Track 7: CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS: Carnival of the Animals: ‘Finale’

The Kanneh-Masons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b43tnmCxFMY

 [NB: The LP of Carnival of the Animals that Lynne actually bought – the 1975 recording featuring the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gibson – will be uploaded to this if it becomes available in the future. Lynne chose the Kanneh-Masons’ Carnival (2020) as a favourite recent recording.]

Track 8: OLIVIER MESSIAEN: Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus: I. Regard du Père

Rolf Hind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1gJkIeNIFc

Track 9: CLIFF EDWARDS/DISNEY STUDIO CHORUS: ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QA039irFZE

Track 10: PHIL HARRIS & BRUCE REITHERMAN: ‘The Bare Necessities’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkozKQibnPA

[NB: These are the original Disney recordings. Lynne recently bought the Parade of Disney Hits (MFP, 1972) with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ by The Mike Sammes Singers and ‘The Bare Necessities’ by Ken Barrie. These recordings are not online, so for now, with Lynne’s agreement, we’ve gone with the original versions.]

Track 11: EDDIE HEYWOOD: ‘Begin the Beguine’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP2KzNNJ2v4

Track 12: STEVE REICH: ‘Piano Phase’ (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MArl7T-_As

Track 13: STEVE REICH: ‘It’s Gonna Rain, Part 1’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zuX6nRHNk

Track 14: JOHN ADAMS: ‘China Gates’

Nicolas Hodges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3EdxdrZa-c

FLA 13: Juliet Brando (04/09/2022)

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Juliet Brando is an artist, illustrator, copywriter, scriptwriter, journalist and author, with credits on publications such as Bizarre, Maxim, Huffington Post, Forum magazine (for which she wrote a regular humorous agony column), NewsThump and the BBC Radio comedy show Newsjack.

We first encountered each other online in the early noughties on various comedy and TV forums, although unbeknown to me at the time, she was actually also working as a singer and songwriter, doing a fair amount of gig and session work. We talk about that in this conversation, which we recorded in late August 2022, along with Juliet’s own First Last and Anything memories, and chats about earworms, mashups, and the safe space of cheerful music. Sadly, because this is a textcast and not a podcast, there is no way of fully reflecting the background contributions of Juliet’s endearingly vocal parrot, Digby. But he does make one particular cameo in the text!

Juliet was, as ever, terrific and amusing company in this, and I would particularly recommend her playlist as one of my favourites in the series so far.

JULIET BRANDO

When I was very, very small, maybe a baby or toddler, apparently I used to dance to ‘Super Trouper’. My mum had been a massive ABBA fan, when she was younger, and a massive Beatles fan too. She had loads of Beatles memorabilia that would probably be worth millions these days. But when she was a teenager, she decided that she’d grown out of The Beatles. So she had a big Beatles bonfire and burned every last bit of it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What?

 

JULIET BRANDO

I know. Yeah, she regrets it now. She decided she was too old for the Beatles. Very much a teenage girl thing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This brings to mind the Disco Demolition Night in Chicago [12/07/1979] where there was this mass burning of disco records.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Oh really?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There was this big hatred rock fans had for disco in the US, particularly, and it was all egged on by some radio station

 

JULIET BRANDO

I’ve kind of inherited this slash and burn mentality. I’ve never burned any music, but things like old writing, old diaries, old drawings, things like that. I’ve not done this in years, but certainly in my teens and twenties. Every so often I’d have a big old ‘oh fuck it all’ moment and just burn everything I’ve written or drawn. I think it’s like a snake shedding its skin. When you’re doing anything creative like writing, every so often, you have this massive impostor syndrome moment where you go, ‘It’s all shit’. And then start again from scratch.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a healthy element in that, sometimes, or can be. Although I think it’s not so much about destroying but wanting to forget it a little bit. That whole thing of, how do you compartmentalise things a bit? I’m quite bad at change, I’ve realised, because I see it all as a continuous thread, everything is connected to everything else.

 

—

 

JULIET BRANDO

I’ve got a younger sister, two years younger than me, and I can remember when I was probably about seven years old, we had a 60s night in the house, because my parents had a lot of 60s vinyl, especially French music. We dressed up in 60s clothes and makeup – or some kind of child approximation of it – and we were allowed to drink some wine and, yeah, listen to music my parents put on.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What sort of French music was it, can you remember?

 

JULIET BRANDO

Stuff like Richard Anthony, Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan… Hugues Aufray, and Marie Laforêt. Although not Johnny Hallyday, they thought he was naff! But even before my parents got together, they both really loved French culture, especially in the 60s, and then when they got together in the mid-70s, found they had a lot of shared interests.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Radio 3 on Saturday morning, about 7.15, do a sequence called ‘Croissant Corner’, where listeners can request French music of all kinds, so they play three in a row. They’ve had Françoise Hardy, Charles Trenet, stuff like that. Very sad music, some of it, but really great.

—-

FIRST: TASMIN ARCHER: Great Expectations (EMI, 1992)

Extract: ‘In Your Care’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, I’m presuming it was ‘Sleeping Satellite’, its big number one single, that got you into this album.

 

JULIET BRANDO

It definitely was. I didn’t have my own money before that, so I’d have to rely on birthdays and Christmases to get music. But when Great Expectations came out, I had my own money, bit of pocket money, babysitting money…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a good album as a whole, actually, isn’t it. What were your impressions of it at the time, then?

 

JULIET BRANDO

The song I used to play on repeat was ‘In Your Care’. Certainly as a teenager, having problems at school, and so on, that song really was one that I played over and over, in my own little world. A lot of her lyrics seemed to have a depth to them.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘In Your Care’ was the follow-up single to ‘Sleeping Satellite’ – I’m not sure it got played very much on the radio, what with a chorus that started ‘son of a bitch, you broke my heart’. All the royalties for that single went to ChildLine.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I didn’t even realise it was a single! But it was the track on the album that really grabbed my brain.

 

—–

 

JULIET BRANDO

At middle school, we had very basic music lessons, but they didn’t really have a lot of equipment. So if people wanted to learn piano or violin or anything like that, they had to…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Go private, effectively?

 

 

JULIET BRANDO

Yes. But I always loved music, listening to it. By secondary school, a lot of my friends were into boy bands, very poppy stuff, which wasn’t really my thing. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Bros, New Kids on the Block?

 

JULIET BRANDO

That kind of thing. I was a bit of an outcast at school anyway. I was the weird kid with an off-brand Walkman listening to Kate Bush, and early 80s Depeche Mode. But when Tori Amos first appeared on the music scene, I was obsessed.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, that first album, Little Earthquakes, was a big album for me as well.

 

JULIET BRANDO

And then I had to buy everything she did, you know. I’d go to the back pages of Melody Maker and Record Collector and see if I could track down anybody who could get me bootlegs or live recordings on cassette tapes. I was about 13 or 14. I’d found this artist that I loved so much, whose lyrics I found so meaningful. And I just had to kind of follow that as far as I could go.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I take it you discovered her Chas and Dave covers? (She really did cover ‘London Girls’ and ‘That’s What I Like’ as B-sides in 1996.)

 

JULIET BRANDO

Oh, definitely. All the singles, all the B-sides. There was a guy, I think he was based in Wales somewhere, who used to somehow get loads and loads of bootlegs, live recordings. I’d send him a cheque through the post and he’d send me all these cassette tapes and packages.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you still buying Tori Amos records?

 

JULIET BRANDO

I am, but the latest one [Ocean to Ocean, 2021] has got so much grief and sadness in it, a lot of it is about the loss of her mother… it’s beautiful and so good, but a bit too raw for me.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You were talking on Tim Worthington’s podcast Looks Unfamiliar about ‘Breathe’, the cover version you made of the Télépopmusik song. But it does sound remarkably close – a compliment by the way, because I really like that version as well.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Well, it took ages in the studio to try and get the tone of my voice to sound exactly the same as Angela McCluskey’s voice on the original. According to Last FM, I didn’t exist, so I put it up on my YouTube channel.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m so glad you did!

 

 

JULIET BRANDO

I worked with a lot of producers back then on various iterations. Most of them never saw the light of day at all, but ‘Breathe’ ended up being used on everything. It was a whole day in the studio, but I was never told where the song would end up. And I kept hearing it. Chill out compilations, even TV shows. It’s on Six Feet Under! I think it was cheaper to licence it out. I only got paid £150!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If only you’d held out for a percentage!

 

JULIET BRANDO

I had no bargaining power. I was young, I was skint!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But presumably you were pursuing this work for a while.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I just wanted to make my own music. I worked with some really good producers for my own stuff, even though I didn’t have a great voice, and I wasn’t massively musically talented. But basically I got picked up by a manager at a gig I was doing when I was a teenager and he said he’d manage me. So he set me up with some really good producers, but also to get to make demos with them for free. A lot of that involved doing things like testing vocals for songs for much bigger artists. Demos for all sorts of stuff… So yeah, ‘Breathe’ was one of the rare ones where I got paid at all!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Given you weren’t learning instruments, how did you get into songwriting, and how did it that process work when you were collaborating?

 

JULIET BRANDO

It was instinctive. Whenever I was working with musicians, I’d sing the vocal line, and I’d tap out the rhythm, and I had very basic, slightly clumsy keyboard skills. So I could figure out chords in my head, but it just took a while to make them into something other people could hear or understand. And often when I was working with producers, they’d have some sort of backing track already, or some semblance of one in mind. And I’d put lyrics over it. But mostly we’d jam until music came out.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So were you a solo artist or in a band, or was it a bit of both?

 

JULIET BRANDO

A little of both. I was in a band when I was about 18, and that’s when I got picked up by the manager who wanted to work with me as a solo artist. I had to have ‘the conversation’ with the other members of the band, two other guys, and they both had other stuff going on anyway.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how would you describe what the music sounded like?

 

JULIET BRANDO

It was a bit like trip-hop, which I loved. Portishead, Tricky, Moloko, Morcheeba… Ruby…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh agreed on all those. Ruby were great. That was the woman out of Silverfish, wasn’t it? Lesley Rankine.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I’ve got all Ruby’s stuff, I love it so much and they’re still putting out music now and it’s brilliant. Their first album definitely was one of my really big influences. With my first band, I wanted to push our sound in that direction, but the other guys… one was driving towards house music, and the other towards guitar rock. So it ended up being a clash of all of those things, and we didn’t really have a direction as such.

 

When I was doing solo stuff, I was trying to push it towards dark trip-hop roots, you know?

But it was just before Evanescence and that sort of scene… Nine Inch Nails, nu-metal, away from that trip-hop style. So we ended up being more metally. I had a backing band by that point.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What were you called?

 

JULIET BRANDO

I was called Fae Magdalene. I’ve actually googled myself just to see if there was any trace of me. I did some big gigs in Germany, in Manchester, a lot around the south coast of England. Sometimes record company people would be in, but that was a nightmare. It was in the early noughties when all these Simon Cowell-type programmes had first become popular. There’d be these A&R people, standing at the back with their arms folded, looking angry and unimpressed, and then smug and dismissive. It was the worst possible audience and as somebody in my early twenties, I was not very emotionally resilient at the time. I was just trying to do something I loved, to make a living wage out of it, but I was just not strong enough for the music industry.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Very few people are, really, I think. And the experiences of the last couple of years where nobody could go and do gigs for a long time really did expose a lot of vulnerabilities, especially as very few people were making money out of recordings in the first place. I mean, I think streams have probably killed the pop band, at least in the British/American world. It’s all solo artists at the top end.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Yeah, it’s really strange how much the industry has changed – even without COVID – just in the space of a few years. But I remember in the early 2000s, on the motorway with my then manager, I was playing a recording of a live gig by PJ Harvey. And he just scoffed at it. ‘Well, she wouldn’t get signed now.’ She should always have been signed. Always. She’s a genius.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think people just got a lot more cautious and conservative. The thing about all those things like Pop Idol and X Factor. They’re never really about music. They’re about television. [Agreement] I mean, some talented people have gone through that machine, but the trouble is, the whole thing is predicated on a guarantee that people will buy the music at the end of the series, and even that is prone to all sorts of variables. And you can’t guarantee that because, really, nobody can predict what will take off. The public can get behind some quite unusual things sometimes, which completely derails the idea that there’s some magic formula.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Yeah, and because those TV shows are so gladiatorial… that kind of influence, the way musicians and music were talked about behind the scenes… that all spilled over into where I was making music. There was so much pressure to be thin enough, and confident enough. It became all about the saleability of it, not about the music itself. And I just fell to pieces a bit when I was about 23. I thought, This really isn’t for me. This is not something I can keep doing. And I mean, I genuinely wasn’t talented enough, either musically or my singing voice. I loved writing music, but I think I would have been better placed to write it for other people.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Music isn’t always directly about pure musical talent. Which is not to do her down, but take Madonna. Not the greatest voice in the world, but it’s about the determination and concentration on image. All of which is obviously valid.

 

JULIET BRANDO

 My sister went through a brief Madonna phase. I bought a single on tape for her! ‘Crazy for You’ [the slightly remixed version, 1991].

 

And it’s like going back to the Beatles and bonfires. Madonna sheds her skin every now and then. She just reinvents herself, constantly keeps moving.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Working with whoever the up-and-coming producers are.

 

JULIET BRANDO

As well as keeping up with what’s going on in the queer scene and underground scene. I like it when people do this. I’m thinking maybe Taylor Swift will go down this route, but also people like Björk who got really big and poppy but then went down these weird musical corridors and made whole albums of throat singing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was just thinking of the Medulla album! I seem to remember she did a song from that (‘Oceania’) at the Athens Olympics (2004).

 

JULIET BRANDO

I love her weird stuff. Just a really unusual sort of experiment that goes to really unexpected places. And I’m not a big Taylor Swift fan, but I can see that she’s very talented and good at what she does. I like that she drops an album occasionally that’s totally not her usual style. I have a lot of respect for that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if that’s what Billie Eilish is going to do as well.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Everything I’ve heard by her has been really good. I know little about her music or about her, but I know that if I got into it, I think I’d be a really big fan.

 

—-

 

JULIET BRANDO

Because I’ve been going through some tough times, there are a lot of songs that would make me cry, like that new Tori Amos album I mentioned earlier. My safe space is Cuban music, which I first got into via Kirsty MacColl.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh yes, ‘Mambo de la Luna’. What’s that album called?

 

JULIET BRANDO

Tropical Brainstorm (2000). I love everything she did. I got into her music fairly late, and through a series of coincidences which are gonna sound really, really odd. Her music was always around in the background, but I’d never really properly listened. And one day, years ago, near Christmas, I was sitting in a pub with my sister, and ‘Fairytale of New York’ [with the Pogues] came on the jukebox, it was just on autoplay as it was the afternoon, nobody else was in there. And suddenly, we just stopped talking. As soon as Kirsty’s voice kicked in, as if we were hearing her voice for the first time. It was kind of revelatory: ‘Fuck, she’s amazing.’

It was like a sort of weirdly religious experience. And then we got home and it was on the news that she’d died [18/12/2000].

 

And that was the start of a whole series of events and really, really weird coincidences that led me to buy everything she’d ever done. I ended up being friends with various friends of hers and family members of hers, and her sons… even down to one of her best friends ending up as my lodger last year. The world is a small and strange place, and somehow Kirsty is in the algorithm, and all the strange coincidences led me down a kind of rabbit hole.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

She had lots of label trouble, especially in the 80s, she was on so many different record labels in the end [Polydor, Stiff, Virgin, ZTT, V2]. The first time there was a compilation of her stuff was Galore, which was a great compilation (Virgin, 1995). Unfortunately, you still tend to hear her cover versions (‘A New England’, ‘Days’) rather than the stuff she wrote herself.

 

JULIET BRANDO

She was an amazing writer. [Agreement] Lyrically, she inspired me more than anybody, certainly in my twenties. Her lyrics were so clever and funny, on the verge of being comedy songs, but with equal depth and heartbreak. People have compared her to Dorothy Parker and it’s a good comparison: funny, sharp, cutting lyrics.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I suspect she would have been an amazing tweeter. But the roots of her interest in Cuban music seem to stem from ‘My Affair’, from the Electric Landlady album (1991). Not a big hit, but it was a surprise, a very unlikely direction for her to go in.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I don’t use Spotify, and so for my car, I just put a load more songs on a USB stick every few months, so my car playlist has been growing and growing and growing. And it’s mostly Cuban music, or Afro-Cuban music, or upbeat, tropical Kirsty songs. And a record I recently got into was this:

LAST: VARIOUS ARTISTS: Putumayo Presents: Congo to Cuba (2002, Putumayo World Music)

Extract: ‘Canto a la Vueltabajera’ by Alfredo Valdes

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s impossible to feel downhearted with this sort of music, isn’t it?

 

JULIET BRANDO

That’s exactly it. A deliberate shove to my own mental health, to try and listen only to music that will make me feel more upbeat and happy.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Cheerful music is seen as a little unfashionable, isn’t it? Pop music in general, there’s something uplifting about it. Anything that’s seen to cheer you up is not really viewed as great art. It’s like the eternal question: Why do so few comedy films win Oscars?

 

But you were telling me before we started that you don’t know what the lyrics are. And I think, more than a book or a film, once we hear a song, our own experience colours what that song is, and what it means. You can’t necessarily do that with a film, but you definitely can do it with a piece of music because the moment of that music completely and instantly associates itself with something in your life, whether it’s that holiday, that person you fell in love with… Sometimes it’s a bad experience. But even just hearing one line, one word of it, can take you right back.

 

JULIET BRANDO

It’s fascinating. When I was growing up, and certainly all the way through most of my 20s, I always felt that lyrics were the most important part of a song, the part that spoke to me the most. But I think it’s because I had quite severe clinical depression and anxiety – it’s sort of hearing me cackling in the background – but I could relate to it in such a way, it spoke to the heartbreak and anxiety I was feeling. I don’t know whether you’d call it a breakdown, but I went through a really bad time towards my late twenties. I found I couldn’t listen to music with lyrics at that point because it would just hit me too hard.

 

More recently, I’ve been going through something similar – different sorts of fears and bereavements. I could only listen to instrumentals for a while. I think there’s a sort of mass trauma with all of us at the moment. We’re going through some really strange times and I think my safe space is delightful, happy sunshiny music with lyrics in Spanish. Even though I know some Spanish, I almost don’t want to be able to understand fully what they’re saying. They all feel like summertime and fun and serotonin and dopamine. Good brain chemicals.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I almost was tempted to put some of the lyrics into Google Translate to see if I could work out what the songs were about. And then I thought, ‘Maybe Juliet would prefer not to know what they mean.’

 

JULIET BRANDO

I actually have done that with some of them. They seem to be about quite nice things anyway. But I love that I’ve slightly misheard them in some cases. You know Buena Vista Social Club? There’s a song called ‘Pueblo Nuevo’, a song about a ‘New Town’. But I slightly misread it, so when it came up on my car playlist, I thought it was about ‘New Paul’. Somebody called Paul! [Laughter]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s all about Pablo, almost!

 

JULIET BRANDO

I misread it as Pablo! [Laughter]

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Congo to Cuba, as the title suggests, by the way, seems to reflect this passing of a musical baton back and forth between Latin America and Africa. As I understand it, it’s some Latin melodies got taken to Africa, that music then became Africanised, and then that version gravitated back to Latin America. So it’s like this ongoing conversation where the music kept getting embellished.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I love that about it because listening to so many of those tracks has got me into different African music that’s just amazing. Like there’s this Congolese band called Mbongwana Star. They have a song called ‘Malukayi’. I still haven’t been able to find a whole album by them, because it’s the only song by them that I’ve got.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I have established there is an album. It’s called From Kinshasa (released 2015, World Circuit Limited Records).

 

JULIET BRANDO

I found ‘Malukayi’ on YouTube, put it on in my car, and the bass on it is so strong that it makes the whole car rattle. I’m pretty sure I’ve blown my speakers now because that bass is just so odd.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s got that great electronic pulse underneath it.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Exactly.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It appears that some of the group is French, so they’ve mixed Congolese and European music.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I know very little about them, but that song… As soon as I heard it, it just hit me so hard. It made me want to dance. There’s something so powerful and fizzy about it, it reminds me of when you put an Alka-Seltzer in a glass. There’s something so delicious and energising about the sound.

 —–

ANYTHING: VAN McCOY: ‘The Shuffle’ (1976, single, H&L Records)

JULIET BRANDO

I remember this distinctly from very early childhood. I must have been very, very, very young at the time because it was a post-natal exercise class my mum went to, maybe after my sister was born. And this woman was instructing these mothers to do all these exercises. Like doing the bicycle legs… all these exercises to prop your belly and your pelvic floor back together. So I remember ‘The Shuffle’ as a song they were exercising to, as a tiny child. The notes in it, the way the chords move in it, it’s like audible serotonin. [At this point Juliet’s pet parrot, Digby – a sporadic contributor to quite a bit of our conversation – voiced what sounded like approval!] That’s Digby shouting!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

He’s a big fan of Van McCoy! With ‘The Shuffle’ I have two massive associated Proustian rushes. One is a family holiday at Amroth Castle, Pembrokeshire, when I was seven, when the single was originally out. And the second Proustian rush I get is of the 1990s, when it was the theme tune, improbably, to Sport on 4 with Cliff Morgan on Saturday morning Radio 4. It used to be on after the Today programme, about nine o’clock, and before Loose Ends, I think.

 

But what amuses me about that is that, generally, with themes to sports programmes, the theme tunes, are punchy, urgent, epic, lots of brass. Whereas with this: what sport is it meant to be accompanying?

 

JULIET BRANDO

Could be dressage!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

[Laughs] Unless the footage is meant to be all in slow motion. Or maybe for bowls coverage.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You mentioned you are prone to earworms, and I get them too, in a big way. Do you understand how all these fragments assemble in your head? Sometimes they turn into collisions, which fascinate me, and sometimes irritate me.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Often it’s a brain glitch for me. I actually have had to just mix and make some of these in real life, but often my earworms are two songs overlaid with each other. My brain is always trying to make mashups that don’t yet exist. I seem to do it subconsciously, but then I think the only way to kind of get this out of my head is to mix it in real life. One I made was the Grandmaster Flash vs. Peter Gabriel. Every time I heard ‘White Lines’ I would hear ‘Solsbury Hill’ and vice versa. I couldn’t understand why my brain was doing this, but every time I would hear one, I’d hear the other. Simultaneously in a mashup that doesn’t yet exist, so during one of the lockdowns I had to create this as a mashup. And it works. It really works.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s specifically impressive because they’re not even in the same time signature! ‘Solsbury Hill’ is in 7/4, I think?

 

JULIET BRANDO

I know! I had to make it because it was like some sort of mental glitch!

JUSTIN LEWIS

Sometimes with earworms, I find myself joining two songs together. Like Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, when she sings the title, I find myself adding ‘In the summertime…’ from ‘Sunny Afternoon’ by The Kinks. They’re not even in the same key, but I find myself singing it anyway.

 

JULIET BRANDO

Bruce Springsteen. Every time he sings ‘Baby we were born to run’, my head goes into the Blockbusters theme.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I can definitely hear that! On the EggPod Beatles podcast, it came up that someone had done a mashup of ‘Come Together’ and the Grange Hill theme. It works perfectly.

JUSTIN LEWIS

But it makes me think, as you’re talking about these examples, especially when you’re actually putting these mashups together, you’re a producer, essentially. It’s almost like how a producer works in the studio.

 

JULIET BRANDO

I stopped doing mainstream music industry stuff back in about 2003, I was burnt out, but I was a jazz singer for a while, did some gigs in Germany with a band. But then I started making stupid mashups and weird songs, sampling weird things, just not for any commercial gain.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a creative exercise, isn’t it?

 

JULIET BRANDO

I’ve got a whole YouTube channel full of silliness. You know that period of Covid, early 2021, when everybody got into sea shanties? I realised how well some of the sea shanties fit with the backing tracks from Nineties 90s rap and hip hop. This is ‘Wellerman’s Paradise’:

Juliet’s website is at julietbrando.com

You can follow Juliet on Twitter at @sliderulesyou, and on Bluesky at @sliderulesyou.bsky.social.

—–

FLA Playlist 13

Juliet Brando

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: ABBA: ‘Super Trouper’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BshxCIjNEjY

Track 2: Françoise Hardy: ‘Il Voyage’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iw8uCAbejw

Track 3: Tasmin Archer: ‘In Your Care’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5r8QlX_Eqo

Track 4: Depeche Mode: ‘Waiting for the Night’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrpRzdvp5U

Track 5: Kate Bush: ‘Waking the Witch’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlZmpe-svno

Track 6: Tori Amos: ‘Silent All These Years’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSYr0etDzRM

Track 7: Moloko: ‘Dominoid’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y8vmDxpTUI

Track 8: Ruby: ‘Paraffin’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SifLUDfEGJ8

Track 9: PJ Harvey: ‘The Wind’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmOMuBYEejc

Track 10: Björk: ‘Oceania’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnTE2e341g

Track 11: Kirsty MacColl: ‘My Affair’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjRyZcePVoI

Track 12: Alfredo Valdes: ‘Canto a la Vueltabajera’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FY7cpDWVmo

Track 13: Balla Tounkara: ‘Le monde est fou’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II0w1JAh-ns

Track 14: Buena Vista Social Club: ‘Pueblo Nuevo’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OagCWe_oer8

Track 15: Mbongwana Star featuring Konono N°1: ‘Malukayi’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJCwfjl_sXc

Track 16: Van McCoy: ‘The Shuffle’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO5NZMwfTDg

 

FLA 12: Ian Greaves (28/08/2022)

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Fifteen years ago, the writer and editor Ian Greaves and myself were going mad. We were spending most spare minutes of our lives researching and eventually writing a 700-page book about the long-running BBC Radio 4 topical sketch series, Week Ending. We know. The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, Berkshire, became a semi-regular workstation for our frankly ludicrous project.

 

Prime Minister You Wanted to See Me? – A History of Week Ending took us a whole year to complete. Two things, I believe, kept us going. One was the knowledge that we were undertaking a subject that genuinely interested us – how do you find new and exciting creative talent in radio comedy? The other was the amusement that we were obsessively cataloguing and analysing every single episode (1132 of them) of a programme that we never actually liked that much. The writer and critic David Quantick (FLA 6) was kind enough to give it (we think) a glowing review for it in The Word magazine in early 2009, ending his piece with the phrase, ‘makes the Domesday Book look like Baby Spice’s autobiography.’ There’s one for our headstones.

 

I first met Ian Greaves, online and then in person, in 2000. He was and is much younger than I am, and was already frighteningly well-informed on broadcasting in particular. He appeared to have seen far more television than even I had. We would work together regularly over the next decade or so, on articles, doomed book pitches and ultimately Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me? We often take the piss out of ourselves for writing that book, but we remain immensely proud of it.

 

Together we also worked as consultants on Lucian Randall’s acclaimed Chris Morris biography, Disgusting Bliss (2010), and separately we contributed chapters for No Known Cure (2013), an assembly of new, exclusive essays on all things Morris.

 

Subsequently, Ian has contributed to many Radio 4 documentaries and series, and to BFI Screenonline. Plus he has compiled and edited some magisterial anthologies. The Art of Invective (2015, with David Rolinson and John Williams) presents highlights and curios from the playwright Dennis Potter’s extensive archive of non-fiction, while One Thing and Another (2017) is an incredible collection of Jonathan Miller’s writing on everything from humour to opera to surgery to theatre. ‘This stunning collection is a must,’ was US talk show legend Dick Cavett’s reaction. Dick Cavett!  

 

One subject Ian and I have always chatted about sporadically, although we’ve rarely written collaboratively on the subject, is music, and so I knew I wanted Ian as a guest on First Last Anything. Partly because I’ve often wondered how he became so immersed in what can be some of the noisiest and most uncompromising music around. But also because he is forever tremendous company and makes me laugh a lot.

 

In August 2022, one Sunday, we spent about 90 minutes exploring Ian’s itinerary from novelty childhood records, through pop epics, towards what you might call The Music of Sound. Enjoy!

 

——

IAN GREAVES

My persistent memory of the first record I had was ‘The Birdie Song’ [by The Tweets]. I’ve got a cousin, Mark, who’s a few years older than me and my elder sister, and I know him very well these days, but back in the Eighties he was this sort of distant figure who would ask for a Tom Waits album at Christmas from the family. He’s remained good on music ever since, but I’m sure he delivered ‘The Birdie Song’ to me. Maybe he didn’t want it in the house!

 

I’d listen to the charts with my sister. Keith Harris and Orville, ‘Orville’s Song’, that was a record we very much approved of. I’ve never really had any snobbery about novelty records, and I’ve always quite liked comedy records.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’ve got to start somewhere, as a listener. Hardly anyone at the age of four is going to be at the 100 Club watching The Clash or whoever.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

And my parents had records. A great bone of contention in my dad’s life was that his dad got rid of all his Beatles albums as a sort of punishment – and he was a fan throughout, although I think he went off them a bit when the drugs kicked in.

 

But if my dad is reading this, the Beatles album in our house was Rock & Roll Music, the original double LP from 1976. And I’ve got that copy right here! [holds aloft] A weird collision of stuff. But I’ve always had sympathy with Alan in I’m Alan Partridge where he says his favourite Beatles album is ‘The Best of the Beatles’. I always say, ‘Oh I don’t own any Beatles records’ in a slightly posturing way, as if to suggest that the scenic route is more enjoyable. But it’s really because I nicked this off my dad. I think I only heard Abbey Road two years ago. They’re fine. [Laughs] I hear they’re good.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

They’ll go a long way.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

So my dad had The Beatles and Ray Charles, I adore Ray Charles, my first connection with jazz really. I was slanted to the poppier end of my parents’ collection early on: ABBA, Queen, Motown compilations, there was a great 60s rock and pop CD collection… wish I could remember the name of that. Later, as a student, I was hoovering up mood albums. People like Al Caiola, who I still really love. But it transpired that my mother actually had things like George Shearing albums, Dave Brubeck. I imagine I was put off by the covers when I was younger but later I would put them on to minidisc and take them back to university with me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did anything happen with musical instruments and tuition?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I probably lasted two piano lessons. Back then, if it was something I was really interested, I’d be really good at it. Anything so-so tended not to get that treatment.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What sort of age are we talking there?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

About 12.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

An age where it could go either way: obsession or apathy.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

And because I was 12 in 1990, we’ve neatly arrived at the year of my first record.

——

FIRST: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT Records, 1984, released on CD, 1985)

Extract: ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’

[NB: During the early years of Trevor Horn’s Zang Tumb Tuum label, especially 1983–85, numerous versions of its releases appeared in the shops, with different mixes, sleeves and contents. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s singles and first album was no exception – the CD version of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which came out nearly a year after the LP and cassette versions had a noticeably different running order, including this first 12” version of ‘Two Tribes’ rather than the three-minute single. More recent CD reissues of Welcome to the Pleasuredome have reverted to the running order of the original LP, and so this 12” version (subtitled ‘Annihilation’) can only currently be found on compilations.]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting that you bought a copy of Welcome to the Pleasuredome on compact disc in 1990. Holly Johnson had been a fairly big solo artist a year earlier… but why this, and why then?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

My memory is that my dad had definitely subscribed me to the local record library. You had to be registered by an adult for some reason, so whether they were stocking Derek & Clive albums, I don’t know. But that’s how I discovered The Goons, borrowing things like Tales of Old Dartmoor, those 70s issues with loads missing off them. And I definitely heard Holly’s Blast by borrowing that, too.

 

But the reason for ‘Two Tribes’ is very specific. On 1 January 1990, Radio 1, they broadcast The Top 80 of the 80s, the best-selling singles of the decade, all in a six-hour block, hosted by Alan Freeman and Mark Goodier. I taped the whole thing and it was a good way of consuming pop music cheaply. A real mixed bag. Like, ‘Coward of the County’ by Kenny Rogers was number 78.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of the darkest number ones ever.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

And very near the top was the ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’… Nine minutes. I listened yesterday to what I think is the standard version of ‘Two Tribes’, and it sounded a little ordinary. But when I listen to the ‘Annihilation’ 12-inch mix, there is no other version as far as I’m concerned.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Just before it came out as a single, in 1984, Frankie said something like, ‘Radio 1 will play it to death’, as if to over-compensate for the banning of ‘Relax’ a few months earlier. And they did. In one week alone, in July 1984, ‘Two Tribes’ was played by Radio 1 twenty-five times.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I bought the CD of Pleasuredome with a voucher for my twelfth birthday, so this is March 1990. I dragged my dad down Woolworths, to help me use this voucher. Which I assumed entitled me to the CD automatically, but it actually entitled me to something like one-tenth of the price. My dad was slightly annoyed by this point, but we’d got this far, so he just bought it for me anyway.

 

I don’t know what happened to that original CD, but for recent reissues they’ve changed the running order: just the single version.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, now it just duplicates the running order of the original LP and tape. But the first time I heard that ‘Annihilation’ mix of ‘Two Tribes’ was on Peter Powell’s show on Radio 1 because he used to count down the new Top 40 on a Tuesday teatime, and when he got to number one, he played this much longer version instead. Quite often, it was common with 12” versions back then to hold back the main song for as long as you possibly could – and it’s five and a half minutes before the main vocal arrives.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I wasn’t used to remixes, and it’s actually a terrific way of discovering the art.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As a teenager I was obsessed with how things worked, how they fitted together, and the 12” mix is like laying bare the components of the song. The bassline is there, uninterrupted, there’s that guitar riff exposed, which is buried when you hear the song on the radio. And some of this was merely a way of extending the track for the sake of it, to fill the space, but it’s like an inventory of sound.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Like an Airfix kit. It’s perfect for that age, really. Also, it was tapping into all the things that would interest me in music. It’s such a clatter of a record, so busy, so much happening that you can’t really take it all in at once. It’s got samples in it but they’re not samples.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, it’s Patrick Allen re-reading or reading slightly different versions of his own commentary from the Protect and Survive government information films.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Panorama had covered them earlier [If the Bomb Drops, 10/03/1980], they were public knowledge, and so there was nothing to stop Patrick Allen revoicing them, but it has the effect of being a sample, so it’s also commenting on something that was emerging in music at that time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And having Chris Barrie from Spitting Image and A Prince Among Men doing his Reagan impression, but using that impression to read out extracts of statements from Castro and Hitler.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

And getting it on to Radio 1 without any citation. You either know or you don’t. I may have done more homework for this than I needed to, but I listened to the whole album again, and it is not a good album. And there’s also this 3-CD Frankie collection called Essential, which came out this year, but it’s already in the bargain bins. So many mixes. It’s got all but the last two tracks from [the second album] Liverpool which by any measure does not reflect the meaning of the word ‘essential’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

No.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Also, I never want to hear ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ ever again. But Welcome to the Pleasuredome’s four singles are all great, even if the title track tends to get forgotten.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Way too many covers on it.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

‘Born to Run’ is like: Can we expose ourselves to the fact that we do not have Clarence Clemons, because boy does it show.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of ZTT’s big ideas in the early days was to have a cover version on the B-side of every single, an experiment which lasted until ‘The Power of Love’, when Frankie reportedly flat-out refused to cover The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

The first Frankie session for Peel, end of ‘82, is a sort of primitive funk-punk. And the early version of ‘Two Tribes’ – everything about the arrangement is all there. I wish I could hear more of that side of them because the song structures are really interesting.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The big question with ‘Relax’ was ‘how much did Frankie play on it?’ and I’ve seen Trevor Horn quoted as saying that because ‘Relax’ ‘needed to be a hit’ – because the label was getting started – it needed to have this epic production sound, and I suspect the real ‘Frankie group sound’ would not have been as big a hit.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

No, they’d have been a cult band like 23 Skidoo or something. I don’t know what my dad thought he was doing, really, letting me have this album! All the sleeve art – I’d forgotten the ‘bang’ symbolism is sperm. I wonder if that made it easier for me later to get into bands like Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle and Coil…  who used sexual energy – and often gay sexual energy – as a central theme.

 

But the other thing about Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and what you said about quotations – they’re putting in references for you to work out. A more obvious version of that would be the Manics who are like a reading list with guitars. Take The Holy Bible, the only album of theirs that I really really love. Probably my first awareness of Pinter is on that album, and Sylvia Plath – and I was the right age for all of that stuff too. [“I spat out Plath and Pinter”¸ ‘Faster’]

 

And musical threads. If you discover The Fall, as I did when I was sixteen, then you will discover Beefheart, the Monks, Can, the Groundhogs (god help you if you get Groundhogs albums), Henry Cow…  They covered Henry Cow… How many people have covered Henry Cow?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think I first knowingly heard The Fall in about ’84, doing ‘C.R.E.E.P.’. You were telling me that this festive John Peel Session from December 1994 was the moment you fell for them.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I tuned in because Elastica had a session, that was pretty good, they were doing Christmassy stuff. And it was the first Festive Fifty I heard.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which was the sort of listeners’ poll Peel held every Christmas.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Where I first heard ‘Dirty Epic’ by Underworld, which was obviously thrilling. But above all, in that show I heard The Fall, with Brix Smith who I love, returning to the band and being fantastic. (I was there the night after she walked out again. My first Fall gig, and they didn’t even make it to the stage.) But no-one can truly be prepared for their Peel Session version of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ because, outside of Brix, it’s not often you hear a female voice on a Fall record. Which is Lucy Rimmer.

 

I put that Fall session on a tape for John, my mate, who I’ve known since ’89, and we’d swap records all the time. He became as much of a Fall fan as I did, and I do not judge him for this, but the next day he thrust the tape back in my hands and said, ‘That was shit.’ [Laughter] This horror that anyone considered that to be music. But eventually he realised that The Fall is as much a sort of organised chaos at its best as [Beefheart’s] Magic Band ever were.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Together, you will remember, we interviewed Stewart Lee live on the radio, on Resonance, nearly 20 years ago. And he said something like, ‘The first time you hear The Fall, you think, “Oh my God, what’s that? It’s awful”, and then a few weeks later you hear the same record again, and you think, “Oh my god, what’s that? It’s brilliant.”’ It’s like getting used to a cold bath.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I did like The Fall immediately, but I thought it was absurd. I stuck with this rule for years, and it’s always true: if a Fall album doesn’t make you laugh, then it’s not a good Fall album, and sadly that began to happen in the 2000s. I think there’s still great stuff in that period, and I saw loads of gigs, but it does kind of drift for me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the humour is the key to it?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, because Mark E. Smith’s a contrarian, isn’t he? So you either get into that or you don’t. But his phrasing is funny. His choice of words is funny. The noises he makes are funny. For my dissertation at university, I did ‘Lyricists from Manchester’ so I interviewed John Cooper Clarke, Howard Devoto, Vini Reilly – and eventually Mark. That was an experience. I tried to get answers from him about a couple of songs and he just refused. He could be a bit of a self-caricature at times in interviews, but it was a game for him because he wanted you to work a bit.

 —-

LAST: DEREK BAILEY: Domestic Jungle DAT (2022, Scatter)

Extract: ‘DAT Edit 5’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I had a number of thoughts on this.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Can you tell me what you made of it?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I listened to bits and pieces. The ones I especially enjoyed was the Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass album he made (1996). I was just fascinated by the idea of this guy who would have been – what? – in his sixties by this point…

 

 

IAN GREAVES

He had a bus pass by the time of recording, yeah. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

…And improvising guitar over pirate radio stations in London playing drum and bass. Is that about right?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Essentially. That album was done in a studio, and he’s playing against tapes done by someone in Birmingham to get around the whole kind of white label copyright grey area. With the release I’ve picked, Domestic Jungle DAT, no-one seems to care about that! [Laughter] And also, Shazam helps these days so we know what things are. I’m not sure if Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is the first Derek record I bought, but it’s one of the earliest. It’s still got the receipt in it. It’s on John Zorn’s label Avant. I bought it in Virgin in Leeds, so I’d just started university. 4 October 1997, one minute past four. £17.99. And still to this day, if I see a first pressing of a Derek Bailey album in a shop, I just buy it. Regardless of the price, almost. I just want everything by him.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When we were setting up this conversation, you used the word ‘elemental’, so it obviously really made a fundamental impression on you.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

It cuts to the heart of my non-musicality, while also being very interested in music. You know when Blur came to John Peel’s house and he said the reason he hadn’t played their records before that was ‘dangerous amounts of melody’. [Laughter] I’m not against melody, that would be a ridiculous position, but my default is kind of noise, I suppose, and sound.

 

Derek Bailey, early in his career, used to work in the orchestra pit playing for Morecambe & Wise. But when I first heard him, he was playing with a very noisy Japanese group called Ruins on Radio 3’s Mixing It, recorded at the Purcell Rooms [03/04/1997, transmitted 14/04/1997]. There was this exoticism, and implied seriousness, and also people were being allowed to do this. [Laughs] And I’d listened to metal, I’d loved Iron Maiden as a kid and all that sort of thing, so that was fine, but in the middle of this maelstrom, there was this man outdoing them. And then I found out: Oh, it’s this old guy from Yorkshire. I instantly know when it’s him playing.

 

I am aware that people hear improvised music, and think, ‘It’s just a load of noise, they’re just making it up.’ But that line ‘between thought and expression’, as Lou Reed said – it’s such a short line with Bailey. There’s loads happening, and instantly. He joked somewhere that he’d spent almost 50 years of his life tuning up in public. [Laughs] Which is what it may sound like to people. Here he’s listening to those pirate stations, playing jungle, and remember this is a 65-year-old man in his living room in Hackney. There’s no artifice here. Later on, he referred to jungle as ‘fast as fuck and really shifting’.

 

There’s two things there. The ‘fast’ – that’s the speed his brain still works at. But the ‘shifting’ – he loves to perform with other people, not to trip them up or argue with them. A lot of improvisation is quite conversational, but often with Derek, he’s trying to drag everyone out of habit. There were very few musicians he would continue to play with over many, many years.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So was the frustration that collaborators would lapse into their default way of playing, and he would get impatient or bored?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Totally, totally. He was going off to Japan in the 70s, finding guitarists, and other new people to play with. Evan Parker, the saxophonist, would do that as well. They ran a label together, were touring together. Bailey’s discography is enormous. There’s lots of good solo records, but I think his best stuff is with percussionists, and probably his best records are with Han Bennink, his most enduring collaborator, because Han would play anything. Ostensibly, he’s a drummer, but whatever happens to be in his vicinity gets played as well, so when I started to hear those records, it freed up all my notions of what music was. And it wasn’t jazz either. I think there’s this kind of interchangeability when people say ‘improvisation’ and ‘free jazz’, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. We need Philip Clark [FLA 4] here to explain that properly!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve found a few really great quotes about Bailey, or from him. He wrote a book, you will know, around 1980 called Improvisation.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

A brilliant book. Based on the radio series [Tuesday afternoons, Radio 3, Feb/Mar 1974].

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Aha! Like Hitchhikers Guide.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Exactly like that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This is from The Guardian review of the book, and it says of him, ‘He’s not interested in the competitive spirit, which drives so many jazzmen now.’ So it’s not ‘Right now I’m in the spotlight, it’s my turn’, fine as that can be, but he appears to have no interest in that. It’s all about ‘the conversation’, rather than a soliloquy.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, and it’s important to say ‘conversation’ rather than ‘argument’. Sometimes if it’s loud, it’s assumed it’s hostile. But it’s often not.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

This quote is from the LA Times, in the 1980s, which describes him as ‘pursuing sounds and textures, rather than melody and rhythm’. Melody and rhythm are prioritised in music, but the sounds, the textures, are also key, whether or not they’re connected with the melodies or the rhythms. I mean, some of the most famous pop songs ever written have all sorts of splurges of noise in them, but we don’t necessarily think about those things.

 

Phil Oakey once said that when they first got synthesisers in the Human League, the equipment didn’t come fully programmed or even constructed so they had to work out how to get a sound out of them.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

You know Robert Rental and Thomas Leer made this album The Bridge (1979), which got reissued by The Grey Area earlier this year. That came originally from Industrial Records: Throbbing Gristle, I think just for a laugh, gave them some money and equipment and sent them off to the studio for a week. And they literally had no idea how to get the thing to make noise. They ended up making a fairly good album at the end of it.

 

I should just say, by the way, because there may be pockets of Derek Bailey Twitter, who will be appalled. Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass is a divisive record among the fanbase because it’s not the purest stuff. And we’ve waited until 2022 to get the real thing – Domestic Jungle – which are tapes that he’d either send out to friends or make for himself of him playing along to jungle stations.

 

The point is: I’ve chosen a Derek Bailey record with a tune on it. And that’s unusual – he didn’t do much in the way of tunes. Gavin Bryars managed to get him to play one every now and again. But that was about it. Derek’s on ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’.

 

But Domestic Jungle is not just a 65-year-old keeping up with jungle. On that track I’ve picked out, ‘Edit 5’, he’s saying, in a broad Yorkshire accent, ‘Come on, lad, faster!’ [Laughter] He’s infuriated, because this kid is keeping him back. When Derek speaks on his records, and sometimes it’s him just chatting to the audience or plugging his record label, you get such a powerful sense of his personality. And he has an often comic way of playing guitar against his speech as well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You kindly sent me a copy of the interview he did with The Wire in 1998, for the feature ‘Invisible Jukebox’, where the guests get played records with no context, or identification, and have to react… He gets asked about what it would be like to hear his own work in a lift, I think [Laughter], and he says: ‘Imagine you’ve got to pass a bit of time. It would be nice to play this in a railway station. It’s just something to listen to instead of being reminded of something.’

 

Now that made me think about how we react to art of all kinds. Do we react to art as ‘something new’, or as ‘this is like that other thing we know’. So much of my approach to hearing new music centres around ‘what are my reference points’, because I have so much past music in my head all the time. It’s very hard to get past that. Do you have that, or have you been able to free yourself?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

No, I haven’t freed myself from that and I think it happens retrospectively as well. I have this awful habit of listening to older music at the moment just because I’m buying so much older stuff. It sort of worries me that I’m not listening to enough new stuff. I listened to something this morning and I just thought, ‘Oh this is just that, that and that’, a combination of three things, and when I was 18, I thought that album was the bee’s knees. Which is unfair, because, you know, Bowie was a magpie. That’s pop and it’s how it goes. You could listen to, say, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, which I think is a terrific album – and you could say, grumpily, ‘Oh, that’s just Bowie’s Lodger, and that bit’s Liquid Liquid’, but it’s a DJ trying to turn the music he plays into an original piece of music. It’s turntablism through the prism of a band. And you can ruin this kind of stuff for yourself if you overthink it.

 

People just have influences, and it comes through and it’s inevitable. And yeah, one thing that is increasingly obvious as I get older – and you’ll know this – is that my reference points mean nothing to anyone half my age.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, this has been happening to me for some time now!

 

 

IAN GREAVES

The alarm bell was when I realised I was writing books about things that appealed to mostly people who’d be dead… So… that was a problem. I thought, I might need to just wind this back about 30 years.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And that’s going to get even weirder for the people behind us, believe me.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

It’s a common culture thing as well, isn’t it? You can’t help but key into all the stuff that you and lots of other people your age have enjoyed over the years: songs, films, catchphrases… And popular art feeds other popular arts. I don’t think this has really addressed your original question! But I still react to the past all the time, and it’s fine. I don’t get upset about it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I find it harder to work out what I think on one listen now. Which reminds me of a direct Derek Bailey quote where he said he hated records. Once you’ve done it, what’s the point of listening to it?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

One thing missing from that Wire piece, because he hadn’t quite started doing it then, was that at the turn of this century, he was just making too much music. He would mail out CDRs to friends of him playing and talking, instead of letters, and then he started to do print-on-demand CDRs of concerts and whatever else. And I think he’d be mortified – he died in 2005 – that those CDRs still work!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That they’re supposed to have obsolescence.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, and he probably quite contentedly used poorer resources for them as well. I just think that’s funny. But yeah, these CDRs go for a fortune, and you buy them, thinking, ‘…Is this gonna play?’ [Laughs] But then, maybe in this case, a CDR that skips and jars is fitting.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

He’d probably love that.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Yeah. I love it when people say what dead people would love! [Laughter]

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So roughly when did you start to explore this very different direction of music?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I was at college. It was 1996/97. And I got a job in a record shop. A couple of years earlier, when I was getting into other bits of Radio 1, going to second hand shops… I went to a record fair, and they had a collection for sale of the first 90 issues of Q magazine [covering autumn 1986 to early 1994]. So I bought them, and honestly, I think I read them all within six months, and then – like a firecracker – I was off.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You had your map.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I had my map, and I’m pretty sure the reason I got a record shop gig was because I now had a working knowledge of a lot of different music. I don’t think I’ve listened to George Thorogood and the Destroyers since Live Aid, but I could wing that conversation, you know?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Record shops before computers: it required a lot of knowledge from us underpaid staff.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

A copy of Music Master [big doorstop of a catalogue], that was it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And your own memory.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

And your opinions.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And between you all, you could work out most things.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Our folk section was very strong, Blues and prog, all that sort of thing in our back catalogue, but I was there as the young guy who knew about the ‘young stuff’. I’d get all the college kids chatting to me. One of them brought in a comic strip of me once – it was of me getting annoyed about them not knowing enough about industrial music. [Laughter] They did it in such a way that they probably thought, ‘This will wind him up.’ I actually loved it. Still got it somewhere. I was like Douglas Hurd buying a cartoon of himself.

 

I worked in that record shop when Be Here Now came out, and I took the day off, because I couldn’t stand the idea of serving people who’d be buying it. I went to Newcastle for the day, to my favourite record store, Surface Noise – and we just listened to Ivor Cutler and Beat Happening and whatever else. So my idea of a ‘day off’ was to go to another record shop! That’s fairly dysfunctional.

 

Meanwhile, I was reading The Wire magazine, listening to Mixing It. And both the Derek Bailey and the next record are sort of cheats, as my ‘Last’ and ‘Anything’ came to me – as artists – at about the same time. I like your premise for this series: what’s changed your listening, or what’s changed the way you listened. Which I think is what Tim Gane of Stereolab said about Nurse With Wound.

——

(Link to Scatter page at Bandcamp.)

https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/track/dat-edit-5?from=twittercard

—–

ANYTHING: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: Crumb Duck (1993, single, Clawfist) 

Extract: ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, as I understand it, you are – certainly were – a big Stereolab fan anyway. But then you’ve become perhaps a bigger Nurse With Wound fan.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Oh god, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And we should probably give a content warning here about some of their music and certainly some of the artwork, particularly if someone is hunting down sleeve designs.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Yeah, don’t do what I did, in the 90s, before the Internet. I asked my parents one Christmas for two Nurse With Wound albums, in amongst all the other presents and the Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

No!

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Innocently! One was A Missing Sense (1986) which has quite an odd cover, but it looks like a painting I guess so it was just about acceptable. But the other was The 150 Murderous Passions (1981), which was a collaboration with Whitehouse, and I can’t fully describe the cover. I think you’re just going to have to find it for yourself in the comfort of your own home, and definitely not on a work laptop. And that Christmas Day, I don’t think we even had a conversation about it. I think we just moved on very quickly.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did they wrap it?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Well, they must have done! Honestly, you’re unwrapping it, you’re thinking, ‘This isn’t very Christmassy…’ But ‘Animal or Vegetable’ is another record I’ve chosen for potential conversation purposes. This is not the best Nurse With Wound record, or the best Stereolab record, and it isn’t my favourite record of all time. But I think it does connect to a lot of things.

 

My first Stereolab record was Refried Ectoplasm (1995), which was a collection of seven-inch tracks and rarities, and the rarities had all had handmade sleeves or been in very limited runs and were consequently very hard to get hold of. In the middle of this compilation there are two songs. One is ‘Exploding Head Movie’, a kind of remix of part of ‘Jenny Ondioline’, which had been on the album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (1993). What a title. And the B-side is ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’, the bit in brackets being a quotation from Faust’s ‘It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl’.

 

I don’t think I’d heard of Nurse With Wound. I heard this, this 13-minute thing, and then Steve Stapleton (who essentially is Nurse With Wound) was on the cover of The Wire pretty soon after [Issue 160, June 1997], my first issue of The Wire. I was still somehow absorbing everything and hunting down everything that was being mentioned, and he sounded like an incurable record collector who was more than twice my age, so I thought, ‘Well, he’s probably alright.’ Then I was down on the Darlington town market record stall one Saturday and they happened to have this Nurse With Wound collection called Crumb Duck which also featured these two tracks from the Stereolab collaboration. So it was like this divorce, basically, with the same tracks on two separate artist collections!

 

Again, some Nurse With Wound fans will be very disappointed that I’ve chosen Crumb Duck because it’s got rhythm, and when Steve Stapleton had started to use rhythm, around 1992, lots of the fans thought, ‘I’m not having this’ because it had been very noisy or very weird or very cut-up music for a long time. I mean, my favourite NWW record is The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985), which is 40 minutes of just relentless cut-up – and very funny with it. It’s my ultimate record because – even though I’ve probably heard it 100 times and know it really well now – a lot of the appeal of this kind of music is that it’s so overwhelming, and it’s often so tuneless [Laughs] that you can never feel like you’ve drawn the map of it in your brain. You can’t recall it exactly, and so it always has this ability to surprise you.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It sounds like a puzzle you can’t solve, perhaps?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

A very big jigsaw, but it’s taking you ages, and every time you get up in the morning, some poltergeist’s taken all the pieces apart again and you have to put it back together. [Laughter]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill every day.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

That is me getting through a Merzbow box set, that’s right.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We met in the early 2000s because of our interest in comedy, and broadcasting, and so on, and it struck me how much of 90s comedy on the fringes – late night radio and TV in particular – traded in the surprising, even the unsettling. Was that part of the appeal with this kind of music?

 

 

IAN GREAVES

It all goes back to the Goon Show records. I think you’re onto something, mainly that I have never been of the view that all avant-garde music is serious. I like it when it’s got a glint in the eye or a sense of humour, and you’ll have heard in ‘Animal or Vegetable’ those two minutes of complete madness, which are just obviously meant to be funny and astonishing. It’s not that boring Paul Merton whimsy, it’s rooted in dada. It’s got a kind of intellectual edge. It scalped me. Changed me forever.

 

We’ll get back to your question [Laughter], but it drives me mad when people are at concerts for this kind of stuff at places like Café Oto, where it’s a full house, and I’ve heard things that I think are hilarious yet no-one else there is laughing. Jandek – how do you describe Jandek? Every album sounds like a suicide note, but he was doing a show at Oto once where he had this kind of John Shuttleworth big keyboard, and he was playing it the way Leonard Cohen does it on I’m Your Man [the album]. There was something in his phrasing, and I just said to my mate, ‘This is clearly supposed to be funny.’ But for everyone else it was ‘We’re watching Jandek, we’re not supposed to laugh.’ No! We’re supposed to be having fun.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Music is often sold to us as relaxing, reassuring, familiar, benign – all well and good. But it tends to be written off if it’s funny, perhaps because people don’t quite know what to do with humour and music, or with the disruptive in general. It might not be for everybody, but nobody questions cinema’s role in reflecting the unsettling aspects of life.

 

 

IAN GREAVES

Loads of film music nowadays is like Nurse With Wound or industrial, quite strange or directly avant-garde music. We went to see Nope last night and that’s terrific. Mica Levi, the stuff she does, Cristobal Tapia de Veer who scored Utopia – the Channel 4 series. For a long time, we went through a period in film and television where soundtracks were ostensibly classical music. But way before that, when I was growing up, it was radiophonics… Anyone from about… 1958 onwards was subjected to that in the mainstream of the BBC. You ask the KLF and the Orb and that generation, and that’s what they were all listening to. That’s the music that corrupted them. It was the Doctor Who and the Sea Devils music – Malcolm Clarke.

 

David Stubbs, who wrote that book Fear of Music asked ‘Why do people get on with Rothko but they’re scared of Stockhausen?’ I think in truth people accept this stuff osmotically, but they don’t necessarily know it. What about cartoon music in the 50s and 60s! Pierre Henri would fit in on those, you know.

 

 

—-

 

 

IAN GREAVES

I don’t think I’ve told you, or anyone, this before. I was nearly blinded by a seven-inch single when I was twelve or thirteen. We were in the school assembly hall. There was a teacher at the other side of the hall. There were six or seven of us just arseing around in that pointless destructive way that children do. And there was a box of scratched seven-inch singles, which I think had been used for country dancing lessons. So already a relic of a thing to be doing. Screamadelica was out; we were doing country dancing.

 

There was a lad who shall not be named and also, I can’t remember his name. They’d already been snapping the edges off the records, and some of them still had airborne potential. And he just started throwing them, not in a deliberate [targeted] way like a bully would. But he just span it towards me, and it was probably one of the snapped-off bits on the edge that caught me, as near as you could have got just under the eyebrow… It cut me, not that badly, but the teacher was horrified, realised they hadn’t been paying attention. I never told my parents, I don’t think. They would have just gone spare.

 

I wish I could tell you what the record was. [Laughter] Does that count as my first single?

 

—-

Ian’s latest book is an utter treat: Penda’s Fen: Scene by Scene, about the 1974 Play for Today written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, published on 23 June 2025 by Ten Acre Films publishing. You can order it here: https://tenacrefilms.bigcartel.com/product/pendas-fen-scene-by-scene

Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me?: A History of Week Ending is published by Kaleidoscope.

 

Dennis Potter: The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953–94 (edited by Ian with David Rolinson and John Williams) is published by Bloomsbury.

 

Jonathan Miller: One Thing and Another: Selected Writings 1954–2016 is published by Bloomsbury.

 

You can follow Ian on Twitter at @GreavesIan. He is also to be found on Bluesky at @greavesian.bsky.social, and on Instagram as @greavesian78.

FLA PLAYLIST 12

Ian Greaves

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

(NB: Derek Bailey’s ‘Edit 5’ from the Domestic Jungle album is not currently on Spotify, but should that change in the future, it will be incorporated into this playlist. Meantime, you can access it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdRxUvrWUPQ&t=531s)

Track 1: THE TWEETS: ‘Birdie Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcUPje_0hk

Track 2: THE BEATLES: ‘Drive My Car’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alNJiR6R5aU

Track 3: GEORGE SHEARING: ‘One Note Samba (Samba De Una Nota So)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi4rcF0Vkw4

Track 4: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: ‘Two Tribes (Annihilation)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHFPuH5iEww

(Currently not available on Spotify.)

Track 5: COIL: ‘The Anal Staircase’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH9zK8tvK6s

Track 6: MANIC STREET PREACHERS: ‘Faster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl2Jv4dzFqg

Track 7: UNDERWORLD: ‘Dirty Epic’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phWYWpu5KUQ

Track 8: THE FALL: ‘Glam-Racket/Star’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHpf_7SIug

Track 9: THE FALL: ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ (Peel Session, TX 17/12/1994): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGMpTuHSEL4

Track 10: DEREK BAILEY: ‘N/Jz/Bm (Re-Mix)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah0MQm1Qe4w

Track 11: THE HUMAN LEAGUE: ‘Morale…/You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSbLpd-SSvI

Track 12: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: ‘Get Innocuous!’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GpLkFv-CKU

Track 13: STEREOLAB/NURSE WITH WOUND: ‘Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h56tXx8JHMI

Track 14: MALCOLM CLARKE: ‘Doctor Who: The Sea Devils’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwhTqTiOkG8

(Currently not available on Spotify.)

 

FLA 11: Jenny Landreth (21/08/2022)

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(c) Joe Thomas

When I started this series, one of the things I was aiming for when approaching guests was to escape from ‘the canon’, the stuff we ‘ought’ to like, in favour of music we love, where we can’t help ourselves. And in this episode, my guest and I tackle, head on, the issue of naff vs cool.

 

Jenny Landreth is a writer, script editor and friend. In recent years, she has written two excellent books in which she combines her beloved interests with autobiography and social history. Swell, a Waterbiography, is a memoir about her love for swimming, and her fascination with the history of women’s swimming. Break a Leg, meanwhile, is about amateur theatre, the world in which her own parents met in 1950s Birmingham.

 

Jenny’s career in television has spanned thirty years. She worked at Spitting Image Productions in the 1990s, and then in animation development at the BBC. Latterly, she has been head writer and script editor of the award-winning, charming and very funny CBeebies series, Hey Duggee.

 

One afternoon, in August 2022, Jenny and I had a characteristically lively chat for about 90 minutes on Zoom, and here are some of the things we discussed.

 

 

—

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

My dad lived in a family with five women, so he would often retreat to the front room. He had a very expensive stereo system and huge speakers which my mother hated, and loads of records, and was quite up to date with what people really liked and what was going on. But he liked Benjamin Britten, Sibelius, Norwegian… Anything that was vaguely gloomy, slightly dark, he liked that shit. [Laughter]

 

If you were going to do stereotypical gender divides, there was my father with the kind of Ibsen-like, dark, heavy, anything moody, thundery, difficult to understand. And then my mother liked the much lighter sound of Handel or Mozart… Which brings me on to Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, which relates to both my mum and dad, and belongs to various bits of my life.  

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know that you might not necessarily be from a musical family, but you are from a performing or theatrical family, right?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Yes, my father was the head of sound at the Highbury Theatre [in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham] for many, many years, which means he made all the show tapes for the plays – the opening music, interval music, and all the sound effects. He’d be up late into the night, just before dress rehearsals – and so I have very fond memories of splicing tape together. You’d go through that very satisfying Revox clunk as the spliced tape went through and so he was really interested in, and engaged in, music.

 

So my father had various compilation albums because he had to find music to play during intervals. And I loved this album of classical hits from the St Martin in the Fields Orchestra so much that when I went to uni, I nicked it and had it as one of my very few albums. I still have it somewhere, tucked away in a box – and my favourite track on it is ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’. Now, I suspect my mum would like this piece of music more than my dad because it’s not moody or difficult – it’s so cheerful!

 

When I hear this, I feel like I am performing it – not conducting it, exactly, but performing with my interpretative dance skills, Justin. [Laughter] When my oldest son was born, and my youngest sister Madeleine and my mum heard the news, early in the morning, they put that piece of music on. I’d been in labour for 36 hours, and they’d been waiting by the phone for that length of time.

 

So that gives it a sense of continuity to me: I can see my front room from childhood. I can see my dad. I can hear that piece of music playing in the Highbury Theatre – the curtains open on some amateur production they were working on, or some regal onstage scene. And I can also see the birth of my son and my mum and sister receiving the news with such huge elation, because it is a piece of music that engenders that kind of heart-swelling pomp.  

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you find that all your choices lean towards performance, a little bit?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

That’s interesting, it hadn’t occurred to me, but when I think of the people I really like… One of my current favourites is Christine and the Queens.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of mine too.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

My youngest and I are going to see her soon, at the South Bank. That has a very theatrical element, but if you said to me, ‘Do you like theatrically performed music?’, I’d just go, ‘Oh Christ, no.’ Because that’s showing off. And showing off is really uncool – instantly. Whenever people have tried to create a sense of theatricality rather than developed it more organically, perhaps.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So that slightly less is slightly more? I was thinking about this idea of how to interpret a song, and unfortunately this has been debased a bit by Louis Walsh saying ‘You’ve made that song your own’ and by John Lewis adverts slowing down 80s hits and taking the tunes out. But obviously when it works, there’s an art to it. And particularly a song that you don’t hear covered very often is always good like that.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

As I say, I do love a bit of interpretative dance. So maybe if a song is not providing it for me, I will provide it for myself. You know, I like flinging myself around the kitchen.

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Going back to your parents and your early life: Did your dad like any of the poppy stuff or the kind of lighter stuff as well?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I come from a Catholic family and my dad particularly had nine older brothers and sisters. So there were lots of nuns and priests in our family and I had one cousin who was a member of a silent order of monks. But he and my dad had an interesting correspondence about music, and my dad prided himself in liking and being quite racy in what he’d try. Like Focus [Dutch prog-rock band]… We thought this was so avant-garde. And he bought me my first LP. Getting my dad’s attention had a real value to it, and one way was to go and do sound with him at the theatre, sit at his shoulder, turning the pages of the script. And the other way was to play backgammon with him, in one of the family tournaments he’d organise. One year, when I was about 14 or 15, I won, and the prize he bought me was The Dark Side of the Moon.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which was something you’d asked for?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It was something I was interested in. It was quite an extravagant gift, to me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was so beautifully packaged, wasn’t it? It’s got that allure.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It has, and [as a gift from my dad], it felt quite symbolic: ‘We could talk about this’, you know? And we didn’t have money for albums, we had little tiny bits of money, but…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Albums were really expensive then.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

They were, and we were a red bill household. There just wasn’t money for sloshing around, so that felt like, Whoa, he’s really gone crazy… he’s bought me an album. You know how, when you only had four albums, you’d play the first side, then you flip it and play the second side. Then you flip it… and you’d know every beat, every breath, every microsecond, and there’s something really brilliant about listening to something, even if you haven’t heard it for ten years, and still holding that knowledge of it.

 

FIRST: LEO SAYER: The Show Must Go On (1973, single, Chrysalis Records)

JUSTIN LEWIS

And a year or two before you were bought Dark Side of the Moon, there was this single that you bought. It was the beginning of 1974, it was the three-day week, the telly went off early, you were in the dark, and this single, ‘The Show Must Go On’, was at number two in the UK charts behind ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ by Slade. So I guess people were longing for colour and flamboyance.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Yes – but it had a dark undertone.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Leo Sayer became regarded as a bit naff, but when he started… Do you know who he opened for, who he supported on their 1973 tour? Roxy Music.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I knew I was cool all along. You say ‘he became naff’. I thoroughly disagree with that. I didn’t think he’s naff.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, perhaps ‘was perceived as naff’.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Not until much later, and we’re looking with hindsight at this time. I don’t think the same level of cynicism existed then. Maybe when punk came along – maybe by 1980 you wouldn’t say you were listening to Leo Sayer, but at the time he was big, I just think people were much less cynical. They might have looked askance at his performance, but I don’t think they were cynical about his ‘naffness’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

He always had a great voice. And something like ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’ – I can hear the roots of Saturday Night Fever in that, I’m convinced. Maybe I’m saying he became viewed as ‘middle of the road’, but that’s not how he began.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I agree, I don’t think he started off that way either. But let’s bring up somebody else who’s been ‘naff’ for a million years, who I’ve always really loved. Gilbert O’Sullivan. I loved him at the same time as I loved Leo Sayer, but I think I was much more aware of him becoming extremely ‘naff’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Some of it, I think, was how they were presented on TV. You probably wouldn’t see Gilbert O’Sullivan on, let’s say, the Old Grey Whistle Test. But you might see him on, say, some Saturday night variety show. Doing ‘Nothing Rhymed’ which is brilliant.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It is brilliant, yeah. And then there’s another dude I’ve loved for years, from when I was 16 and a bit of a hippy: James Taylor.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And James Taylor would have been on the Old Grey Whistle Test. But here’s the weird thing about those Saturday night variety shows – some quite unusual guests would turn up. Seaside Special, for instance. Ian Dury was on that, 1978. Doing, I think, ‘What a Waste’.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Jesus, great, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

On a bill with Plastic Bertrand, Boney M, and Sacha Distel. And in the case of Leo Sayer, he got his own variety show after a while. Although Dusty and Sandie Shaw also had those in the 60s, at the height of their fame.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

But with Leo, I was looking back at the whole clown makeup. It’s horrifying, Justin.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It is a bit, yeah. His vocal performance is pretty intense as well.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I happily watched that, I think it was a formative influence on me, and now I think, ‘Jesus, that should have a warning on it’, because it’s really disturbing.

 

But the thing about it is: early 1974, I was nearly 13. That seems so late now in terms of music buying, in terms of having access to things. My kids were buying music from a much earlier age, but as I say, we didn’t have that. I did get pocket money and I always had Saturday jobs.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You had older siblings, right?

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I have one older sibling and two younger. So you know there was very little spare cash, but certainly until I was 13… apart from listening to Ed Stewpot’s Junior Choice, or watching Seaside Special-type things, but I didn’t have a record player of my own, so the need to own things… I mean, we’ve just come full circle ’cause again the need to own physical things isn’t present among young people now. My youngest buys CDs; they love Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and just bought Lou Reed’s Transformer, but also recent ones like Schlagenheim by black midi and MOTOMAMI by Rosalía. A mix of old and new.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And as I understand it, they’ve introduced you to something that I hadn’t heard before, and it’s one of my favourite discoveries in this series so far. How had I never heard this before? The Roches, ‘Hammond Song’. It’s got something like 5 million streams on Spotify, but I had never knowingly heard it until a couple of weeks ago. It’s from 1979.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Doesn’t it sound super contemporary? I just love that kind of folk vibe, but without that sense of earnestness that lots of it has. It has an edge to it. It’s slightly churchy, Quakery. There’s lots of things going on in it. You could imagine that little travelling circus… If I was going to run away and join a band, that’s who I’d have chosen.

 

As you mentioned, it’s very much aligned with my youngest, Joe, and we play that in the car on whatever journey we’re going on. They went up to Leeds a couple of years ago to start a degree there – dropped out, and now on a very happy path as an art student – but we made a Leeds Playlist for the car journey there. A mix of things they like – so, Mitzki, Self Esteem, Caroline Polachek – and things I like. And then, things we like together, so Harry Styles, of course, and  all the classics – Stevie Wonder, Tracy Chapman, and we do a fine, fine singalong to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’.

 

But ‘Hammond Song’ is one of our absolute favourites. It’s like Our Song. Lots of close harmony, some discordant harmony, not quite going where you think it’s going. Little bit of guitar coming in…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

By Robert Fripp, it turns out! Who also produced it.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I didn’t flippin’ know that!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I would love to be able to sing like the Roches.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I don’t play that song every day, that would be really foolish, but I play it a lot, choosing a different harmony line to take, and I love to get the harmonies absolutely spot on – if I get it wrong I have to go back to the beginning. It all feels like reading a book to your kids and having all the accents off pat, with a different accent for each character. It feels like a very satisfying piece of expression, and I absolutely love it. It’s so classy.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It made me think of Kate and Anna McGarrigle a little bit. Harmony and sparse instrumentation.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Fabulous, I’m very glad to have introduced you to it.

——

LAST: PARCELS: Day/Night (2021, Because Music)

Extract: ‘Comingback’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I knew they were Australian, but I did not know they have relocated to Berlin.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

The fact they have gone to Berlin, it’s an odd cultural combination, but it clearly really works. My beau played them to me, thinking I’d like them, and he was absolutely right. He’d heard them described them as ‘Chic meets Steely Dan’. But they sound like neither of those things. It’s more ‘Daft Punk slash Scissor Sisters’ to me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The singer, oddly enough, made me think of Morten Harket, he’s got that purity.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

That’s a very fine comparison. Hardly anyone else I know has heard of this band, so I have no markers, and it’s not that I need them. I mean, I’ve talked about Gilbert O’Sullivan, Leo Sayer, James Taylor… clearly I’m not fussed about being cool, but with Parcels, I don’t know where they fit on any scale.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes. I wonder if they have a particular demographic, to use that awful term.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Am I going to be horribly naff or terrifically cool, liking this? I have no idea, but what I do know is I absolutely love it. I’m seeing them in Amsterdam, and I’m quite excited because it’s going to be a great big performance, loads of backing singers…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a real warmth to the Parcels’ music, though, makes me think of summer… well, I guess it is summer.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

They’re just great songs. They’re a bit Daft Punk-y, and I know we take the piss out of Daft Punk now.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do we? Where’s this come from?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

There’s that kind of ‘oh you’ll be liking THAT song next’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is that because of ‘Get Lucky’? Is that what’s done this?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I think it has. And we all know that hearing something too much can kill it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, yes.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

But secretly, if you heard it now, you’d be happier for it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh, I think so. But then, what do you do with new pop music when you get to a certain age? You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. If you announce you like something new, you get the ‘How do you do fellow kids’ meme, and if you continue to just listen to what you liked in 1980, you get, ‘Oh keep up Grandad’. What are you supposed to do?

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

We’ve worked that out quite well in my house because both the kids listen to things, very often with headphones on, and I hate that I don’t know what they’re listening to. So I’ll say to them, Let’s hear what you like, because I want to know. And my oldest son listens to a very eclectic range of stuff – he introduced me to the El Michels Affair and Faruz, for instance – but equally, he will say, ‘Mum, have you known about Kate Bush for years?’ Or, when I went to see Pet Shop Boys in Berlin, recently, he said, ‘Do I know any of their songs?’ And I said, ‘Yes, you know some of them,’ so I played them. And he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ But because he hasn’t sat and listened to it being played in that considered way, he’s just heard it in clubs and pubs without absorbing it or choosing specifically to listen to Pet Shop Boys.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I guess there isn’t really one entertainment system that plays all main pop music.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Actually, I listen to FIP Radio. A friend introduced me to it. Do you listen to that?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a French station, isn’t it? I have heard it a bit. It does play a lot of different stuff, doesn’t it.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

And also you can have, jazz, world music, I think they have to play a certain amount of French music. When you said you listened to Radio 1, I tried that, and I really really liked it for about two hours, spread over a couple of days, and then, I thought, I’m really tired. It’s alright to be sixty-one and not listen to Radio 1 all the time. But I’d much rather have Radio 1 than Radio 2. Even though I’m in the Radio 2 demographic.

—

ANYTHING: MATHILDE SANTING: Breast and Brow (Megadisc, 1989)

Extract: ‘Torch Song’

JENNY LANDRETH

In the late 1980s, I used to work for a music promoter called Serious/Speakout in London and at various festivals. In those days, world music was a thing, and there’d be the Palmwine Singers, Sweet Honey in the Rock, lots of Richard Thompson, the Glenn Branca Symphony for 100 Guitars. So quite an interesting range of musicians and Mathilde – this gorgeous Dutch singer, big in Europe but not so huge here – was one of those people.

 

I also [from 1986] used to run a women-only club night, at the time the biggest in Europe, at the Brixton Fridge called Eve’s Revenge. It was really successful, so lots of women performers would come and do gigs there.

 

Anyway, Mathilde fitted into that kind of world, and I used to publicise her tours because I had contacts with a kind of wider audience of women… I used to write for a magazine called Everywoman [launched 1985], and I used to do occasional bits for Spare Rib and City Limits. So I used to publicise her tours, and I just absolutely love her stuff. I think some people might describe it as ‘quirky’, which makes me feel slightly ill. Maybe she’s a ‘torch singer’, I find it hard to categorise her.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I used to see her mentioned in magazines a lot, but I can’t remember hearing the music on anything on the radio at the time.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

She’s got a really beautiful, clear, striking voice, and a couple of albums were just absolutely my soundtrack from the 80s onwards, and I still play them all the time, try and introduce her music to people. Some of it’s a little bit cute for me now, but there’s a distinctive edge to it that I absolutely love. She just did a set of covers of Joni Mitchell songs and I think she’s one of the few people that I would say could do that, partly because she’s an older performer now – I think she’s slightly older than me, perhaps. I think it needs that sense of gravitas to allow you to be free enough to make something your own, yes? Oh God, I just absolutely love her.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Breast and Brow has some interesting choices of material for her to record. It’s interesting how nearly all the songs either have a North American background or a British background. But it has a European sound, it’s got some very sparse arrangements, which I really like. And not quite exclusively songs written by men – you’ve just pointed out the Joni covers album – but most of the covers she’s done are written by men. She’s done a Randy Newman covers album. She’s covered ‘The Word Girl’ by Scritti Politti, which I was unaware anyone had ever covered. ‘Wonderful Life’ by Black. Lots of things, aren’t there? And not just pop songs, but standards from the Great American Songbook.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

That’s what I love about her, that kind of eclectic dipping in and out. But my song that makes me cry, even just thinking about it, is ‘Torch Song’, a cover of a Todd Rundgren song. I’ve tried listening to his version: ‘Is his version better?’, and it’s just not. She turns the song into something so different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, I agree. I mean, I love Todd Rundgren’s version, but I know what you mean entirely.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I can listen to his version and go, Oh yeah, that’s nice. Perhaps it’s all that emotional connotation and connection and meaning. You know, that’s been my heartbreak song forever. I think it’s a heartbreaking song and you can feel that in the way she sings. Did it make you want to cry?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It definitely moved me, I didn’t actually cry. But then, do I cry at music as often as I used to? I’m not sure. I think it does move me more nowadays.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I’m the reverse, I cry so much to music now, but this is because my youngest child would say, Mum you only listen to really sad songs. This is all reminding me of how much I love women singing Fado, these sad Portuguese songs. Do you know that?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I don’t. I must make a note of this.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It’s so heartfelt. Can I recommend Mariza to you? She’s a huge Portuguese star. But anyway, I listen to that Mathilde song and I know that’s about heartbreak that I’ve experienced. And this sounds really self-indulgent, but I occasionally like to wallow in that, you know: ‘Let’s refresh those really sad feelings not because they’re great feelings to have, but it’s like, That was kind of emotional.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I mean there are things that I do play, where I feel very sad listening to them, melancholic. But sometimes music hits you from different angles anyway – sometimes, you just think: that’s incredibly beautiful; other times, they sadden you. In a previous episode of this [FLA 2], Suzy Norman chose Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and we ended up talking about how ultimately some of the saddest music ever is strangely uplifting. You’re alive, and you’re here to celebrate the fact that you can even hear this sad music at all.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Just that kind of expression, the kind of vocalisation and physicalisation of that music leaves you feeling really satisfied, so you might start in one position, you might have a really good cry all the way through, but having experienced it and expressed it and physicalised it in some way…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s cathartic, you’ve been somewhere with it.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Sometimes it’s about reflecting on sad things that have happened, not that are happening, you know. I don’t think it’s bad to sometimes get in touch with those feelings, however painful they were at the time. And now you’re dealing with a homeopathic version of them: memories of feelings, rather than the feelings themselves. When I heard ‘Torch Song’ this time last year, I would have had to stay in for a week with the curtains shut, and now I’m remembering that from a completely different place – and I think that’s really valuable. It’s fine to say, I’ve cried so much to that song, and I’m still crying to it. From a homoeopathic place – I do hate homoeopathy, but you know what I mean.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Let’s reclaim the word.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It’s a useful word. The memory of things, rather than the things themselves.

 

 

—-

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I initially asked you to come on this, and you were one of the first people I approached, you were a little hesitant. And I wondered how much of this is about having one’s opinions or preferences judged when it comes to music.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, with a sense of personal shame. I’m sure, if I was to explain this situation, this feeling of being judged, I’d get, ‘Oh, you’re really over-dramatising, that never happened, that’s on you, that’s nothing to do with me’ – and I have to take some of that on board; I do have a tendency to nail myself up on the cross and go, Don’t mind me. But all through this conversation, I’ve been saying, ‘Is this cool? Is this not cool? Is this terrible? Is it not alright?’

 

It’s quite upsetting to not have the confidence to say, ‘I really like James Taylor’, without thinking, ‘Oh my god, that’s horribly naff’ because through lots of my life, that’s [been judged]. When you put stuff you like on in the car, you hear a sigh [from the family], and they say, ‘Oh just let her have that for half an hour, and then we can have what we want.’ Which would be something aggressive… might be Sleaford Mods, who would be my absolute most hated band. That wall of male aggression coming at me. You know me, Justin. I’m a political person. I’m not a softy. I don’t require being treated like a delicate lady. But there are just some things that I find super-aggressive, and they would be one. So it would be, ‘Let her have this, and then we can have Sleaford Mods, the proper music.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Ah yes, ‘the proper music’.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

And I’m sure that’s not done deliberately, consciously, manipulatively. But there was definitely a sense of ‘my taste being naff’, and I would indeed say, ‘My taste is naff’, maybe as a way of defending myself. When George Michael died, it was Christmas Day [2016], and we were with my neighbour Nina – both of our families had got together – and we were having a Wham! session because, fucking hell, George Michael and Wham! were tremendous. [Agreement] And the guys at the table and our sons were all, like, ‘How long do we have to tolerate this for?’ Now, maybe I’d have done the same if it had been something that was not to my musical taste. Maybe if one of the Sleaford Mods had died and they wanted to have a half-hour session of their greatest hits, I’d have done the same thing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s no Sleaford Mods Christmas classic, I don’t think.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I feel like my musical taste has had to be under a rock, and so I’m often at a loss to know what to play: what I like, what I don’t like, and judge myself with it being cool or not cool, as I have done many times during this conversation. Being able to say ‘I don’t like Sleaford Mods’ feels like quite a radical thing to say, ridiculously.

 

But what’s really hit me – and I’ve been contemplating this only this week – is that I do exactly the same thing to my mother. The stuff that she likes, I’m like ‘Oh let her have it’ – she’s a huge Cliff Richard fan. I did a compilation for her 90th birthday last year, so I made a playlist for her party, and it’s fucked up all my algorithms. Lots of Cliff Richard, but some Dolly, lots of ABBA, you know. Her favourite song is ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’ and that’s the song she wants at her funeral.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s a great tune.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Oh it’s a terrible tune, Justin, come on!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was seven when that came out; that is always going to be a part of my life.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

My mum, who is a tiny person, if ever that comes on, she’ll start jogging, doing her little dance, and all of us – her four daughters – kind of do that ‘eyerolling thing’ too. And so, when I’ve had that done to me, I’m just a generation away, really.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s funny how when people talk about their formative experiences with music, if they have the two parents, it’s nearly always through their dads: what their dads liked, what their dads played. You don’t hear about their mums quite so much, and what the mums liked. I remember my mother being given the Barbra Streisand album Guilty for Mother’s Day one year, when I was a kid. The album the Bee Gees wrote for Streisand. And, for shame, we just took the piss relentlessly. And even though I was a child, at the time, I still feel terribly guilty we did this. Especially as we didn’t do this with music my dad liked.  

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Yeah, the dads like the ‘difficult’ – as in ‘interesting’ – stuff, whereas the mums liked the fluff? That’s been my experience, in my adult life. I used to try and initiate this rule that the driver chose the music. So there were times [when if I put something on] that it wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but there was a kind of general eye-rolling, but if I eye-rolled about anything else…  There’s one rule for them, another rule for me. But now I can play terribly naff things if I want and it’s completely fine. And maybe a small part of that is because my beau now is much more open about what constitutes ‘taste’, so I feel much freer.

 

I’m not a fan, you see. I really have a scattergun approach to what I like. If someone said, ‘What’s your favourite band?’, I don’t have an answer, and I’ve never really done deep dives into one thing.

I just like what I like, it’s like the approach to art: I don’t know much but I know what I like. Whereas people who are fans, who can state with confidence, ‘Actually, I think you’ll find, the third album was their best album’, and you think, ‘I don’t fucking know. I don’t really give a shit.’ And they think that you’re placing yourself beneath them, but really you’re looking at things in different ways. I don’t have a top ten list of my favourite films or books, because I like a whole swathe of things. My brain doesn’t make lists.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Once you have a favourite top ten, or a favourite anything, maybe by putting a lid on that, you’re stopping yourself from discovering something new? Because tomorrow, you might hear something else new that’s amazing.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

How can you have the same list every day? You’d get bored. My top ten list today would be totally different from my top ten tomorrow. Because I haven’t filed it all away in a filing cabinet, I’ve experienced it in a more visceral kind of way. I haven’t catalogued my likes and dislikes.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s honest! You’re not really supposed to say, ‘I like a little bit of everything’, that’s seen as a bit of a cop-out.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

I’m not presenting myself as the expert on X, Y or Z. I love listening to music. Sometimes I prefer silence. I love songs for reasons that will be different from your reasons because they will have resonated in a different part of my body to the way they’ve resonated in yours. Because we were different from the minute we took our first breath.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of my bugbears was that ‘guilty pleasures’ scene about 20 years ago where the tastemakers suddenly bigged up mainstream but not very fashionable pop hits that a lot of us had liked for years.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

It’s quite entertaining to watch people who have been quite disparaging about your choices suddenly discovering artists that you’ve quietly loved for a very long time. Like when Gilbert O’Sullivan was on Tim Burgess’s Listening Party, and everyone was like, ‘It’s safe, I can come out now.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Better late than never. Obviously you could go the other way and say, Nobody’s opinion counts for anything, you could take that too far. But another reason I wanted to start these conversations was to put myself in a slightly vulnerable position by putting myself at risk with not always knowing about something, and being faced with the unfamiliar by guests.

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

And potentially not liking things. I mean, if you hated one or more of my choices, I wouldn’t have gone, ‘You’re wrong’, but ‘We feel differently’, and I think there’s a lot of people ready to go, ‘You’re wrong’. I know that people will read this and go, ‘You don’t like Sleaford Mods, you’re wrong’. But I like knowing what critics think, it helps me to work out what I think, and I like to know where things fit. Throughout this whole conversation I have shed all vestiges.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Let there be no shame about any of this ever again!

 

 

JENNY LANDRETH

Let’s never be ashamed of things that move us or stir us. Even if somebody else might judge them.

 

 

 

 

—

Swell, a Waterbiography is published by Bloomsbury.

Break a Leg is published by Penguin Books.

You can follow Jenny on Twitter at @jennylandreth. She is also on Bluesky as @jennylandreth.bsky.social.

FLA PLAYLIST 11

Jenny Landreth

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL: ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’

Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Neville Marriner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRhnaOIB9M

Track 2: CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS: ‘5 dols’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fqIumOsWYw

Track 3: CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS: ‘Tilted’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RBzsjga73s

Track 4: PINK FLOYD: ‘Us and Them’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90j3lOXNvU

Track 5: LEO SAYER: ‘The Show Must Go On’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6gEkfwozhE

Track 6: GILBERT O’SULLIVAN: ‘Nothing Rhymed’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGE6gzkMAfw

Track 7: GILBERT O’SULLIVAN: ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU3ubk8u7dA

Track 8: JAMES TAYLOR: ‘Sweet Baby James’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2x0fPgAj_Y

Track 9: JAMES TAYLOR: ‘Fire and Rain’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbD7lfrsY2s

Track 10: THE ROCHES: ‘Hammond Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA-U5H4VoX8

Track 11: HARRY STYLES: ‘Sunflower, Vol 6’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUUElxEGo0U

Track 12: PARCELS: ‘Comingback’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj0kFlrUNm0

Track 13: PARCELS: ‘Outside’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRReZlLzrU

Track 14: EL MICHELS AFFAIR: ‘Ala Vida’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xl23QMXLQ

Track 15: MATHILDE SANTING: ‘Torch Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEA5uoMj1Vw

Track 16: MATHILDE SANTING: ‘It May Not Always Be So’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foNTNV4b5Jk

Track 17: MATHILDE SANTING: ‘Too Much’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywovR0e6heE

Track 18: MARIZA: ‘Melhor de mim’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UDZH_Htpq8

Track 19: GEORGE MICHAEL: ‘Heal the Pain’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwGlhJV75Vc

Track 20: WHAM!: ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIgZ7gMze7A

FLA 10: Peter Curran (14/08/2022)

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I am forever telling Peter Curran that the BBC’s Greater London Radio, for which he presented daily shows for most of the 1990s, is probably my favourite pop radio station of all time. Even though I only lived in London for the last three years of its existence. You never knew what record it would play next, always a compliment in my book.

 

In Peter’s thirty-year broadcasting career, notably for GLR and BBC Radio 4, he has interviewed an estimated 10,000 people. As well as narrating and producing documentaries on a variety of subjects, and producing a wealth of audiobooks, he has teamed up with the playwright, director and former stand-up Patrick Marber for eight series (so far) of Radio 4’s very funny nocturnal conversation, Bunk Bed. Peter has also been a drummer in rock bands, most enduringly for PiG in the late 70s and for much of the 80s.

 

One afternoon, and evening, in June 2022, we chatted over Zoom about his career and musical tastes. And here’s some of what we discussed – beginning with what was playing in the Curran family home back in 1960s and 1970s north Belfast.

 

 

—-

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Growing up, we had lots of Frank Sinatra, and my mum was a big fan of Neil Diamond, but my parents were also cursed with Music for Pleasure and Top of the Pops albums, which cost a pound. Myself and my five sisters would buy them for Christmas, and my parents would manage to summon a smile as they tore open the wrapper of another ageing crooner from the 1950s bought from the bargain bucket. That was basically how their Christmases were spent.

 

But they had some quite interesting records – they had this Reader’s Digest box set which I suppose a lot of families might have had in the 60s. There were albums called Music for Dining, Music for Cocktails, Music for Relaxing, Music for Mornings. It was sort of pre-Brian Eno kind of ambient music for absolutely every moment of your day [Laughs].

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s how Music for Airports must have got its title! And on Spotify, you get all these mood playlists now: Chillout. Music for Running. Not a million miles away from these Reader’s Digest records.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yes. They were definitely selling a kind of aspirational lifestyle. The covers were very vivid: women in these wasp-waisted skirts and men in these lounge suits, smoking a fag. So it was a combination of reassuring people who were worried that they maybe didn’t have the ‘right’ furniture or the ‘right’ carpets or the ‘right’ food or whatever. A bit like an Abigail’s Party vibe – by sticking on this album, it would suddenly create the mood for cocktails, and then you’d change it over for your dinner. And then I suppose at the end of the night you’d play Music for Relaxing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Previous guest David Quantick’s parents were also in the Reader’s Digest book and record club. So there was clearly a wave of… well, okay, there was you, there was David, that’s two households. [Laughter]

 —-

FIRST: DAVID BOWIE: Aladdin Sane (1973, RCA)

Extract: ‘Time’

PETER CURRAN

This was the first album I bought without adult supervision, I was 13, and I was just enchanted. The cover was so sexy, he was this sort of androgynous creature, obviously nude, and they airbrushed out his privates. And then I put it on, and it was just a seductive, strange place. It had echoes of stuff I’d heard as a kid on old black and white films that my parents would watch, a bit Jacques Brel, sort of German Weimar, you know, that sort of piano. A little bit ‘Lili Marlene’. And yet there was this alien-looking character doing this with crunching guitar riffs and lyrics of soiled glamour.    

 

It’s funny how the lyrics have developed over the years, why it’s always been with me, sort of my whole life because I didn’t understand fully what he was writing about until later on. That first track, ‘Watch That Man’. ‘There was an old-fashioned band of married men/Looking up to me for encouragement…’ I just thought, Wow, wouldn’t it be brilliant to have [that] instead of adults giving you orders? Looking up to you to give you encouragement. It just sounded an impossibly powerful world.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m trying to imagine what it would have been like to hear at the age of 13, because I didn’t hear this for a long time. My version of Bowie in the 80s was a very different thing, and I always feel slightly fraudulent in that I can never quite call myself a Bowie fan, because that would suggest I had this moment of revelation and I didn’t really have that. Only in the 90s did I properly investigate, and Low is my big one, but obviously all the 70s stuff is fascinating – and actually the 90s stuff too.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Everyone talks about their moment of first seeing David Bowie on telly, but mine isn’t the usual one of him and Mick Ronson putting their arms around each other. It was a bit later – I was watching Top of the Pops [BBC1, 18/05/1973] and there was a specially recorded video for ‘Drive-In Saturday’ which has disappeared. I’ve never seen it again, I’ve searched for it. But I remember these incredible Californian bright colours, all saturated and bleeding into each other, and a boy looking very pale in the back of convertible. And there might even have been a TV in the car or a video player. ‘Like the video films we saw’? Nobody had a clue what those would have been.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When you were just saying now about all the little motifs from films and old music, I suddenly realised when I was listening to the title track – is Mike Garson in his piano solo referencing ‘Rhapsody in Blue’? There’s one bit where he gets really close to it. You know the bit?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Maybe that’s something all Bowie superfans already have discussed into the ground…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Because it was recorded in between American tours, and the songs were written on American tours, I think when he got Mike Garson in the studio, he wasn’t sure what he wanted him to do. He wanted him to do something and I think he started doing this sort of, you know, tasteful jazz Blues American songbook accompaniment. Which was quite sort of slinky, and then [buck daft] with the improv stuff at sort of Bowie’s behest. I suppose the other thing was, it was one of those records that was quite subversive because the surface shimmered a bit but there was much dirtier stuff, more interesting stuff musically and lyrically underneath it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It feels like a really tense record, moreso than Ziggy Stardust, to me, although maybe that’s just hindsight, the thought that he might not do this kind of thing for much longer, and move on to something else.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

It’s all about what it’s like to be a rock star. He’s now officially David Bowie Superstar, and there’s the sex and drugs and he’s already sounding jaded even though he’d been ultra-famous for not that long.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re not supposed to do that in a pop group, really – once you start writing about ‘being on tour’…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

But I think it was sort of the role play. The fact that he was playing a role could have entitled him so you don’t know if it’s Aladdin Sane… I think Bowie described it as ‘Ziggy goes to Hollywood’. So in a way, yeah, it’s through the prism of this rockstar character, but also through him as well.

 

I mean ‘Cracked Actor’ was the rudest song. For me, at 13 years old. ‘I’m stiff on my legend… crack, baby crack’. It’s really, really rude. But you could just see that this is why he wanted to be a star. It’s so full of arousal but also insincerity. ‘Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead.’ It’s like these amazing things are happening, and yet he’s really cynical about why people are doing these things.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wonder if it’s partly because he had those years before he was famous. I wonder, had he become a big star at 17, would he have been able to write that? He knew what it had been like to be obscure before ‘Space Oddity’ – and actually even after ‘Space Oddity’. For a couple of years, there weren’t any more hits.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, as my friend and colleague Patrick Marber remarked, he had these try-outs, everything from folk to English whimsy and psychedelia, which all failed, and then suddenly in ten years just knocked out these classics, one after the other.

 

I remember speaking to Lindsay Kemp, the great mime artist, designer and choreographer. He was a huge influence on Bowie and he was saying that he really got that ‘time is not on my side’ idea that he and Bowie had talked about. You know, the fleeting nature that the art’s what people will remember, you will be dead comparatively soon, compared to how long your art might last. So make the art matter.

 

But the song ‘Time’ itself – I’m still kind of marvelling at it. You know, he’s waiting in the wings – it’s dramatic. It starts with that little piano – when you expect Liza Minnelli to come on in a spotlight for Cabaret, that sort of burlesque-ish parody, that barrelhouse piano.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, in fact, Cabaret had just happened, hadn’t it? The film, that was ‘72 so that would fit in terms of influence.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Aladdin Sane is connective tissue to so many other musical and cultural references. Even just the song ‘Time’, aside from the rudeness: ‘Time, in quaaludes and red wine/Demanding Billy Dolls/And other friends of mine.’ I didn’t know what that meant for years until I read about the New York Dolls, and discovered that Billy Dolls is a reference to the death of their drummer Billy Murcia (1951–72).

 

But it also connects with the artist I’ve loved since I was a little kid and that’s Elvis. I love the way Bowie does an Elvis impersonation. Because ‘Time’, aside from the deeper meditation, it’s about standing at the side of the stage, waiting: ‘We should be on by now.’ But in the line before that, he goes [Elvis voice], ‘Well, I looked at my watch/It’s at 9:25/I think, oh god/[Dylan voice] I’m still A-live.’ So he references Elvis and Dylan. To know that Bowie was still a massive fan of the artists he loved, and wanted to do nods to them, even though he was being looked up to as a great artist himself.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The early 70s seems to establish that first wave of postmodern pop music, drawing on its own back catalogue and creating something new out of it. It’s made me think of the first Roxy Music LP, and the opening track (‘Re-Make/Re-Model’) where it stops dead, and there’s the ‘Day Tripper’ bass riff. And then it stops again and there’s Andy Mackay on sax quoting ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ and then, there’s a little bit of the ‘Peter Gunn’ riff. And Bowie does something similar in drawing on this archive from his formative years.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

The playfulness of Bowie doing an Elvis impersonation – I know lots of people have done it since, but that was the first time – apart from on ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’ by Andy Stewart – the gold standard. And when you’re a kid, you think artists are all individual and very distinct from each other – yet here’s what felt like this lovely fraternal nod.

 

And I must mention Mick Ronson here, his musical director and guitarist on the album. the sound of his guitar was just out of this world – particularly on ‘Cracked Actor’. That sort of distorted grunt, like an old Spitfire engine starting up… I’m going to use a terrible phrase Justin, and will only use it once, but in terms of melodic rock, he was just an absolute screamer on guitar. He was brilliant – did all the arrangements and produced most of Lou Reed’s Transformer album too, and died skint because he got no share of the proceeds from his incredible work with Bowie.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m sure you’re still a big Bowie fan, but have you dipped in and out over the years?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Unfortunately, I’m one of those tedious people who thinks that Tin Machine were awful. But his late flourish was fantastic, and the last album, Blackstar, was amazing. I’d heard he was really ill. But it was quite something, for this arch stylist to go out with just a bigger heart and a more soulful impact than many artists would ever manage. His philosophy and soul was writ large. What a way to sign out.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s almost forgotten now that there was this two-day window, when Blackstar came out, and Bowie was still alive. I’m glad I got to hear it (only once, admittedly) while he was still around. And I didn’t immediately clock its full significance, even though I knew he wasn’t well. But because there’d been The Next Day, which I’d also liked, I still somehow didn’t think of this one as The Last One. I wasn’t listening as closely as I probably should have been. But it meant, that waking up on that Monday morning (11/01/2016), it was like, Jesus Christ. Especially because it had just been his birthday.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Just having those few days to hear it with him still on the planet was beautiful, you know – rather than being overburdened with the epitaph.

 

 

—–

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Going back to your teenage years, presumably, you were going to see gigs in Belfast?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely, that sense of occasion and coming together. I mean, that certainly existed in Belfast, you would literally go and see anybody. I think the first band I saw was Dr Feelgood, when I was fifteen. [Ulster Hall, 19/10/1976] A guy in my class’s father ran a little print shop in Belfast and I think we’re at a safe enough distance now to say that his big brother who worked there would run off another sheet of tickets which were not to be resold, but were discreetly handed out to friends and family… [Laughter]… So we saw a lot of people at a heavy discount.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’re fifteen, you haven’t got a lot of money…

 

 

PETER CURRAN

And it was a very limited number! He wasn’t doing it as a racket. But in Belfast, during the Troubles, at a time when you were swivel-eyed most of the time, avoiding particular streets or parts of town, a gig was like this anonymous communion, it was ironically quasi-religious. There was nothing hippyish about it, though. You could come together.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You also had a new commercial radio station in Belfast: Downtown Radio. Did that cater for new bands, because I’m just wondering how you started on that itinerary as a drummer?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

In about 1978, there was suddenly lots of really interesting music – Gang of Four, and Public Image Limited, particularly – so I took to the kitchen stools with a pair of drumsticks, and joined a friend who was quite an accomplished singer, and piano player, and a 14-year-old bass player, so we formed a band, called PiG, and various other people joined and left. But our first live performance came out of sending a demo to Downtown Radio. They used to have a DJ called Davy Sims, who’s still on the go, and who subsequently became a production executive. He used to have a show where he’d get local bands sending in tapes for session. He was kind of a cross between John Peel and Mike Read, which is more appetising than it sounds.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In PiG, you all had names ending in Pig. Something Pig. You were Deadly Pig, right?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

That was our homage to the Ramones, who we loved. So we also just used Pig like a surname. We were nothing if not derivative, Justin! But we got to be in the same room as some great bands, regardless of our own failings, musically. We got some support gigs because we played virtually for free. We got to support Dexys Midnight Runners when they played Belfast [Queen’s University, 07/03/1980], and we had to share a dressing room with them. We were spotty teen herberts and there were all these men in there…

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s the other thing, there were a lot of them in Dexys Midnight Runners.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

There were nine or ten of them, but even though they were only a few years older than us, they were definitely men. I just remember the sight of Big Jim Patterson, the trombone player, just putting a bottle of Bushmills Whiskey to his mouth, and taking a couple of hefty glugs. And they were so intense. That was the shocking thing. We were just shuffling in the corner, like we were outside the headmaster’s office or something. But with them, the room crackled with the degree of focus – they were going out to play, there was no messing around, and there was just this fantastic, visceral, athletic musical performance. And at that moment, you realise: We are never gonna be a band like that. That is a band.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are there any PiG recordings online? I couldn’t find any. It’s the hardest band name in the world to Google. You can’t even put ‘PiG John Peel’ into Google, because obviously Peel had the nickname ‘The Pig’ for his wife – on the grounds that she snorted when she laughed.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Well, we were fairly well aware of that, and also that he loved Public Image, and we loved Public Image.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How would you describe the sound of the group? Did it change over time?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

It changed a lot. I’ll give you a sort of timeline. A bit like Public Image; a bit like a punky Ben Folds Five; a kind of Jam-type band; and then into a Chic/Talking Heads area.

And then into a kind of amorphous, undistinguished, noodly… we had a brilliant flute and keyboard player. The closest we ever got [to making it] – I went to see Geoff Travis at Rough Trade because he got one of our demos, and he used the deathless phrase, ‘Are you determined to keep that singer?’ And out of misguided loyalty we said, ‘Yeah, we certainly are.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you kept going quite a while.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, we had lots of different line-ups. It was just a nice way of seeing the world, playing the Edinburgh Festival, doing the music for a few plays, so it was just thrilling, playing live music. That strange weightlessness – suddenly, you feel that if you’re on stage playing with people, space and time open up and you can walk around inside seconds… it’s a lovely kind of suspended reality. Even you know, if you’re sweating your guts out behind a drum kit in some stinky pub in West London, like the Fulham Greyhound.

 

After PiG split up, around 1986, I was asked by Terry Bickers to play drums in a new band called The House of Love. They weren’t even called that at the time; they’d just started. I was living in Brixton, in Coldharbour Lane, and they were rehearsing in a kind of clothing warehouse down the bottom of the road. Maybe this is the reason why they asked me – I was the convenient drummer! I turned them down, and it was probably a lucky escape really, although I really loved Terry and some of the music was great.

—-

LAST: BIG THIEF: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (Big Thief/4AD Records, 2022)

Extract: ‘Change’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I didn’t know this at all. It’s one of these times where I discover a new group, to me, and find they’ve made five albums.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I was in a similar position. It’s got an infuriating title but it’s a lovely album. They recorded it in, I think, four different contrasting places around the United States, and they would check into studios or cabins, and try and be fed by the atmosphere and the vibe of the place, and allow that to inform the songs. You get different shades of America in it and I just like the way it’s quite inventive and innocent, without being twee.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I first put it on, I was thinking, ‘Oh this is quite folky, sounds a bit Nanci Griffith, quite nice’, and then the next track is not that, it’s a bit scuzzier, and then the track after that is a bit more countrified, almost with a kind of cajun influence… So when you just said now about its different recording locations, that makes sense, because it’s not just different styles, they actually sound different. 

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely. It reflects those different (I’m going to use that terrible word) ‘textures’, that location can bring. You normally don’t get that on an album, but it’s very distinctive here. They went to small, intimate, downbeat places. There was one in Colorado, one in New York – and I can’t remember the other two locations, but there were different recording engineers, so they brought their own [identity] to the overall sound.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So how did you come across it, and how do you find new music generally?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

A lot of stuff is by chance. Just reading about bands in the traditional manner. To be honest, I think I was slightly ruined by playing songs on the radio for 10 years every day – that it became an actual job. I mean, the fan is still there, and I’m still buying music. But I don’t do it with the sort of zeal that I once had because I don’t have to be across everything.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

They strike me as exactly the sort of group that Greater London Radio would have gone for, back in the day [PC agrees]. What were your beginnings at GLR like, back in ‘91?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I was Tommy Vance’s programme assistant on drivetime, lighting his cigars, and so on, and then the first regular gig I got was doing the classic rock show in the evenings, sitting in for a few people. But instead of concentrating on the job in hand, I would flip a switch so I could overhear the feed from downstairs in the basement studio. And down there, Chris Morris would be editing together his GLR show, with all the brilliant cut-up interviews, and archive and music. Unprofessional of me, but what a thrill.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And then, you moved to Sunday nights – I think on one edition you had both some lot called Radiohead doing an early session, and some bloke called Tim Berners-Lee – and then it was daytime. I didn’t live in London then, I was way too late for the era where it was Chris Evans and Danny Baker and Chris Morris, although Baker had come back to GLR by ’97… but you were a key part of that daytime schedule right through the 90s. It was Gideon Coe at breakfast, Robert Elms mid-morning, Fi Glover and then Andi Oliver after lunch, and you at drivetime.

 

And as a station in general, you had a very eclectic and unusual music policy. This was pre-6Music, and even pre-XFM for a while, but I remember one afternoon you came out of the 4pm bulletin with your first record which was a Pixies record, ‘Gigantic’, and it was still quite a shock to hear that on daytime radio. This doesn’t sound extraordinary anymore because 6Music do this kind of thing all the time now, but in 1997, it still did. And even the playlisted records were interesting; it felt like a complement to Radio 1, which I also liked.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

The playlist was an A, B and C-list, and we’d only have to play two playlist records an hour.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My god, was that all?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, we were allowed to pick the rest of the rest of the records ourselves.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Even only a decade later, that had flipped round completely. I remember Adam Buxton being asked about his 6Music Saturday show with Joe Cornish, and he said, ‘We get two free choices an hour.’ Even Mark and Lard on Radio 1 afternoons used to have a jingle voiced by Kylie Minogue which announced, ‘Mark and Lard. At least four good records a show!’ In other words: four records they could choose themselves. But it’s nice to hear that with GLR, it wasn’t an artificially adventurous set up, it sounded like you really could bring in a box of records spontaneously and play mostly what you wanted.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Absolutely. When I started off at GLR, I was bringing in and playing my own records from home, because they didn’t have a lot of them in the library. I wasn’t exactly youthful when I started, but believe it or not, I was seen as having a more youthful kind of collection than most of the other people there. So I had the advantage of having comparatively young people’s records that weren’t in the charts: new wave, electronic, reggae, disco, indie or experimental.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was always a little surprised GLR didn’t do better with the listening figures, because I assumed people wanted to hear that variety of music. But I have a feeling that most people really do prefer to hear the same songs. One theory I have now is that people like singing in the car to songs they know.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

Yeah, with life being so unpredictable, you want the comfort of familiarity. And also, GLR didn’t fit the template of BBC local radio, so when it died [March 2000], it rebranded and there was a lot less music, more chat and phone-ins. And the figures went up. BBC London gets around half a million now, has done for years, and GLR was more like… 300,000, and that was when they were the only game in town. But unfortunately, the BBC didn’t appreciate who was listening to it. As well as the music, the current affairs and local news aspect was really strong. GLR should have been a kind of exception to the norm in BBC terms, in terms of the local radio rule. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Bearing in mind, I didn’t really hear GLR till 1997 when I moved to London, so I only heard the last three years.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

You were very kind to give it the time of day! [Laughs]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But what I liked particularly was the way it said: Here’s a city where lots of things are happening every day. It felt like Time Out: arts, music, comedy, films. But it didn’t assume you had lots of money, so even though you couldn’t go to everything, you felt like you were being given a sample of what London was like that day. The interviews were diverting enough so that even if you didn’t manage to get that book or you didn’t get to the exhibition or the play, you got some insight anyway. I bought a lot of books out of the interviews in your programme. And it actually sounded like you had all read the books.

 

 

PETER CURRAN

I think the station wore its duties as a public service broadcaster quite lightly, but at the same time was very aware of listeners. I certainly saw myself as a fan of music and films and books, so could act as a conduit for the listener who might be into the same sort of things. It was civilised stalking of people whose work I was fascinated by. What a thrill to provide a service of getting to be in the same room as these wonderful artists and creators.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you get a sense of who your audience was?

 

 

PETER CURRAN

There’s no point in pretending not to blow the trumpet. Lots of guests who came in said they listened to the shows. There was Peter Cook, Terry Jones, Derek Griffiths from Play School, and Hugh Laurie. The first time I interviewed Michael Palin, a total hero from childhood so I was almost trembling, he said, ‘I’m one of your regular listeners.’ [Laughs]

 

And when GLR was threatened with closure (1999), Michael was really kind. He agreed to be the subject of this Time Out campaign to get well-known people to champion it all. It was a lovely sort of endorsement, especially because it was our duty to do playful, well-researched interviews with people and celebrate their work. Despite our small listenership, we could sometimes get big names because we appreciated what they did.

—–

ANYTHING: THE O’JAYS: Back Stabbers (1972, Philadelphia International)

Extract: ‘When the World’s at Peace’

PETER CURRAN

I was nineteen, and I was working in America, as a maintenance man in motels, in Wildwood, New Jersey. One of the motels was called the Bristol Plaza and it was run by this lovely old Jewish couple, Sam and Clara, who still had their numbers from the concentration camp stamped on their arms, and they actually met when they were teenagers, and the camp was liberated just before they would have died. So Sam was very lively and very aware of how life is fleeting, and so he was always shouting at people to hurry up.

 

I worked alongside a guy called Julius who was a Vietnam vet, and as a Black guy who grew up in Chicago, he had quite an interesting take on American pride in the military and stuff. He had been in the underwater demolition squad and so there were a few interesting tales there, but he and I used to stand for hours folding towels in the laundry for the motel. He introduced me to The O’Jays’ music. We had this little cassette player and I would bring cassettes and play him music and he played me music. And he would play me ‘long hair music’ as he called it. And I’d be, ‘I didn’t think you’d be into hippy stuff!’ – but no… ‘Long hair music, like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and stuff’, because classical composers had long hair. [Laughter]

 

He was brilliant. He introduced me to The O’Jays’ music and he played me this album. It’s fantastic for lots of reasons. For people who don’t know it, it’s got a few hits: the title track, and ‘Love Train’. It’s got Gamble and Huff songwriting and production – that Philadelphia soul sound, very lush strings, different from the Detroit Motown sound. There’s an element of the Philadelphia sound that was ‘leisure songs’, but this album created the illusion of lush, sumptuous soul records that you could get down to with ‘your lady’, or leave for a loved one to listen to. To really understand how you felt, but couldn’t put into words. And you imagine tonnes and tonnes of people doing that when that album came out.

 

It came out just after What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye and some of the songs have that same concern about racial violence and inner-city deprivation and so forth, but also you get the broken-hearted loverman stuff as well. Eddie Levert, the lead singer, had been a big fan of Mario Lanza when he was a kid, and he once said, ‘I’m going to hold the notes till their whole heart breaks’ in tribute to Mario Lanza. I love that.

 

The way they break down the vocals into stabs and yelps is quite arresting, even worrying – and obviously a lot of it is technique – but it really brings you up short. It’s so courageous to not just keep the song rolling along, keep the arrangement going, keep the orchestra going. I love when they hit upon some repetitive vocal phrase that can work: here it is again, here it is again. Eddie Levert does this ‘The song is moving on, but no, I’m staying to reiterate this phrase, I’m gonna reiterate this phrase, I’m gonna bang it home…’. It becomes this powerful, mini-mantra in the middle of a song, and it takes such confidence to be able to do that. Never did anyone wallow with such power and broken-heartedness as Eddie Levert and his co-conspirators in the O’Jays.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With Bunk Bed, in the grand tradition of radio comedy shows, you have a catchphrase of sorts. But instead of ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ or ‘Stop messing about’, it’s you or Patrick saying to the other, ‘I’ve got something to play you on my phone.’ [Laughter] It’s a really interesting approach, surprising the other person and surprising the listener too. ‘What’s it going to be this time? Kingsley Amis on Monitor? “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols?’ It feels like the one element of the programme that you can pre-plan.

 

PETER CURRAN

I do love the archive element. It’s good stimulation for us, and good for the listener, just to widen the frame of the conversation. If I play Patrick something he won’t have heard it before, and I won’t have heard what he plays me. Sometimes, it dies horribly and prompts nothing except a sort of grunt, but in fact even the grunt of dissatisfaction works and so we leave it in the edit. I remember playing Patrick ‘There Ain’t No Pleasing You’ by Chas and Dave, and I suddenly said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind, that isn’t producing a sense of delight’, and then he goes on to dig into that and is superbly condescending about it… That kind of loss of confidence and belief is always a joy to witness, if not experience!

 

It’s just an interesting way of sharing strange stuff with the listener, but also we’re genuinely sharing it with each other because it’ll hopefully prompt something and we never know. I think that’s the thing ‘cause because it is improvised.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And as you’ve said, you can’t see each other’s expressions because you’re in the dark. One of my favourite moments in it comes when Patrick plays you ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ by Esther and Abi Ofarim, a number one hit from 1968, and I enjoy that about 30 seconds in, you say, ‘Yes, I think we’ve got the idea there.’ [Laughter] I think you said your parents had this record.

 

PETER CURRAN

That’s right. There’s a really horrific video of them miming the song, while touring around the West End of London, Piccadilly Circus, with bowler hats and doormen, and this faded swinging London air. When Patrick played it to me, I felt a certain terrible heaviness, even though I was lying in the bed. I felt like I had a weight on top of me.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s very difficult to feel relaxed to that record, isn’t it? I first heard it in the early 80s, I was 11, and we were on holiday in Snowdonia in a camper van, and this was on… it must have been Radio 2. And I can remember hearing it and thinking, ‘I want to get out, but we’re in a moving vehicle.’ [Laughter]

—-

Bunk Bed‘s eleventh and final series was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 during February and March 2025. Most of its episodes can still be heard on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b060cdyj. From time to time, Peter and Patrick have been joined by some special guests on the spare mattress, who have included Kathy Burke, Cate Blanchett, Harry Shearer, Don Warrington, Jane Horrocks, Andi Oliver, Rhys Ifans, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Guy Garvey & Rachael Stirling.

Peter is the founder and executive producer of Foghorn Productions, and its website has links to several of its other documentaries and series.

Peter continues to work on BBC Radio 4 regularly, via Pick of the Week, Saturday Live and various documentaries. In March 2025, his hour-long collaboration with Tony Phillips, No Blacks No Irish, about the history of the notorious ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ sign was broadcast as part of the excellent Archive on 4 series. You can find that here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028kwb

You can follow Peter on Twitter at @curranradio. He can also be found on Bluesky at @petercurran1.bsky.social.

—-

FLA 10 Playlist

Peter Curran

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: DAVID BOWIE: ‘Time’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDP9jLwzh0g

Track 2: DAVID BOWIE: ‘Drive-In Saturday’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABWNOEwC9A

Track 3: ROXY MUSIC: ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-zSnO7sbXg

Track 4: ANDY STEWART: ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7Izh2dOUM

Track 5: DR FEELGOOD: ‘She Does it Right’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDFshGOUb-g

Track 6: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘There There My Dear’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZwWnXuB_eg

Track 7: BIG THIEF: ‘Change’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTIzsTv1ENY

Track 8: BIG THIEF: ‘Time Escaping’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkIvGej2WyI

Track 9: PIXIES: ‘Gigantic’ (Single Version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0id6tY9AY8

Track 10: THE O’JAYS: ‘When the World’s At Peace’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dP3ik52Gqg

Track 11: THE O’JAYS: ‘Back Stabbers’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRyh2s1oWwM

Track 12: PETER CURRAN AND PATRICK MARBER:

‘Bunk Bed: Series 4 Episode 1 – HG Wells’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b091wb3b

 

FLA 9: Cheryl Frances-Hoad (07/08/2022)

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(c) Brant Tilds

The daughter of a flute teacher, the acclaimed and prize-winning composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad was born in Southend and grew up in rural north Essex. Cheryl initially learnt the flute, but soon moved on to the cello, and in the late 1980s, at the age of just eight, secured a place at the Menuhin School in Surrey, which had been founded by Yehudi Menuhin in 1963. Present at her audition was William Pleeth (1916–99), not only one of the most eminent British cellists of the twentieth century, but also the teacher of another much-loved homegrown cellist, Jacqueline du Pré (1945–87).

Cheryl soon became fascinated by composition rather than by performance. In her mid-teens, in the mid-1990s, her life changed when she won the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition. She went on to study music at Cambridge University, and Kings College, London where she completed a PhD in composition. 

Since then she has written an incredible volume and variety of music for piano, cello, violin, ensembles and orchestras, singers and choirs. Many of these works have been collected on a series of CDs for the Champs Hill label: The Glory Tree: Chamber Works (2011), You Promised Me Everything (2014), Stolen Rhythm (2017), Even You Song (2018), Magic Lantern Tales (2018) and The Whole Earth Dances (2020). Her most recent release is the download Excelsus (2022), a suite for the cellist Thomas Carroll. Others who have recorded her works include the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, the sopranos Jane Manning and Sophie Daneman, the tenor Nicky Spence, the pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam, the violinist (and previous FLA guest) Fenella Humphreys, the oboist Nicholas Daniel, The Schubert Ensemble, the London Mozart Trio, and the Rambert Orchestra.

Cheryl has won three awards from the Ivors Academy, including – in November 2022 – Songs from the Wild, her song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra.

I had a delightful and interesting chat with Cheryl in July 2022 over Zoom, while she was based at Merton College, Oxford, where she has been a Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts since 2021.

 

One of the many things we discussed was her recent commission, ‘Your Servant, Elizabeth’, which was inspired by the text and music of the sixteenth-century English composer William Byrd. The piece was given its world premiere as part of the Platinum Jubilee Prom at the Royal Albert Hall on 22 July 2022 [see links at the end of our conversation], performed by the BBC Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Barry Wordsworth. Previously, Cheryl’s compositions have been given world premieres at the BBC Proms in 2015 and 2017.

 

As well as discussing Cheryl’s First/Last/Anything selections, we also talked about creativity and inspiration, the melancholy of video game music, why pop and dance music can be an intense form of escapism, and why composing music that’s easy and fun to perform can sometimes be underrated. We hope you enjoy our conversation. 

 

—-

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I didn’t set out wanting to be a composer – I really wanted to be a cellist until I was about fourteen. I think it was just ‘cause I was so shy that it was some way to have some kind of voice, I guess. But when I was fourteen, I wrote the Concertino for Cello, Piano and Percussion, and when that one won a prize at the BBC Young Composer Awards, that, I guess, made me take composition more seriously.

 

I was still very serious about the cello. But from that point I started being asked to write pieces, and it coincided with also getting things like stage fright. And so I basically stopped practising the cello, and got in quite a lot of trouble for that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You were still at the Menuhin School at this point?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Yeah. I rarely, rarely play the cello now. I keep wanting to take it up again and I really should, but I just never get around to it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I may be assuming an autobiographical element to this, so stop me if I am, but there’s something you wrote called Katharsis, which I gather was influenced by Saturday night talent shows on TV, and I couldn’t help but make the connection of your stopping performing and wanting to be a composer. Did you sense some of the pitfalls that could happen to performers? Was that what inspired that, or were there other factors?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Bizarrely, that was what David Cohen, who was commissioning it, wanted it to be about. But basically, for years I felt really, really guilty about giving up the cello because the cello was my life, you know? I felt like I’d jilted a parent or a child or something, so that piece was really more based on my life as a cellist and the pieces I played.

 

There is a minuet with sort of florid cackling wind, which is based on that slightly sycophantic schmoozing you have to do if you want to get a job. I did enjoy that element of it.

 ——

FIRST: ALEXANDER BAILLIE/PIERS LANE: Shostakovich/Prokofiev: Cello Sonatas (1988, Unicorn-Kanchana)

[Unfortunately, this album is not currently on Spotify or YouTube. If it reappears in the future we’ll link to it. In the meantime, Cheryl as an alternative choice has suggested the following Alexander Baillie recording:]

ALEXANDER BAILLIE / JOHN THWAITES: The British Cello (2017, SOMM Recordings)

Extract: Benjamin Britten: Cello Sonata in C major, Op. 65: I. Dialogo

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Early on, my mum was just amazing at taking me to concerts and buying me music and all that kind of stuff. And she took me to a concert by Alexander Baillie, so I bought that Shostakovich/Prokofiev CD at his concert.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was that in London?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

No, somewhere really rural. It would have been 1986 or 87. It might have been Haverhill in Suffolk, halfway to Cambridge, which has a really decent venue. I have no memory of the concert whatsoever except that I loved it, and I remember it was my first ever CD and Alexander signed it for me. I remember really loving those pieces. The thing is, I was probably trying and failing to play them at the time. [The disc was] something to inspire me I guess, and it really worked as well as those are some of my favourite pieces to date. You know, for cello they were wonderful. I couldn’t sing them to you now, but if it starts, I still have it from sort of memory. You know, when I was young.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Can you hear inspirations from this music in your own compositions?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I’ve studied harmony and counterpoint and all that stuff, and musicianship, but because I was composing such a lot, everybody just let me write stuff and I really learned through writing, and all the music I was playing really fed into it. I remember playing some Benjamin Britten when I was eight, a tiny short cello piece called ‘Tema Sacher’ and being really thrilled by that. It was basically all the music I played so I didn’t listen to any music. Because we were too busy practising all the time and playing music. I don’t really remember listening to music at all. It wasn’t like nowadays where people have a piece, and they listen to recordings of several people playing it. I bought a lot of discs of cello music, so I must have listened to this stuff, but the really embarrassing thing is that I rarely listen to music. I always enjoy it when I do but I don’t have a need to do it at all.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s logical, though, in a way. When I interviewed Fenella Humphreys for this series, she said that if you’ve been playing music all day and your brain’s been hard at work on it, the last thing you’re going to do is go home and listen to more of it. You might listen to some entirely different kind of music, perhaps. Even for me… I worked in record shops for nearly 10 years when I was younger, and you’d go home sometimes and relish listening to nothing for a bit. If you hear music non-stop all the time, in a weird way, it stops being special.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Yes, and the problem with being a composer is that you tend to listen to music to get ideas for your own stuff, so I find my mind wandering. I start thinking, ‘I could do that?’

 

But in answer to your question, basically, my music is connected to Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Shostakovich, Prokofiev. I feel very connected to that canon, and I want my music to do the same thing that that music does: to move you and engage you, and be satisfying to listen to and to play. Those are my aims, and I feel in line with all those people.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How do you compose then? At the piano?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I can’t compose without the piano. I’m here at Merton College, we have a drawing board on the piano, on this desk here, and that’s basically it. I’m writing a piece for girls’ choir and organ at the moment, a Magnificat and a Nunc Dimittis for the girls’ choir here at Merton, so I can improvise – once I’ve got one idea, I run with it. With the Magnificat I’m writing at the moment, I’m virtually just improvising and putting it down on paper because I’ve got one idea and I’m just running with it.

 

But other stuff is much more involved. I’ve got lots of working out for my Prom piece, which is based on a piece by William Byrd called ‘O lord, make Elizabeth thy servant’ [originally composed 1580], and so I really analysed that and things like that, and then copied out the Byrd – and so it depends on the complexities of the piece.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Do you find it starts with a melody or a motif?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Sometimes. But it can also come from a painting. There’ll be various starting points, but it’s usually sort of like an idea or a mood. Or a colour – I don’t have synaesthesia but I do have vague associations with colour, so if I know there’s a piece about a painting we’ve got very strong colours in, that will sort of give me a starting point. You have a chord, and then, I basically just noodle around on the piano and then if something good comes up then I will of course go back and analyse that, and see how I can develop that. It’s a process of intuition and analysis.

 

I’m resident at Merton College, Oxford, at the moment, and I’ve written one Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for the choir. And for that I talked to the assistant chaplain here, as I’m not steeped in the church at all, and he talked me through the Mag and Nunc, and what he felt about it. Some of the things he said just really, really influenced the piece: for instance, the sense of wonder that I think Simeon has in the Nunc Dimittis, and then I just tried to create a chord, that sounded wondrous and that led to the inspiration. I mean, I didn’t actually know that the Nunc Dimittis was representing the experience of a particular person, because I didn’t know its context in the Bible, so that really influenced the solo tenor line at the beginning.

 

And then, with this girls’ choir I really wanted… I read the surrounding bits of the Bible, where the Magnificat is [in the Gospel of Luke] – and realising that it’s Elizabeth who was with child and Mary is very happy. And so this is a very very cheery Magnificat. ‘For, behold, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.’ So I just thought, I’m gonna do something very jolly about a wriggling baby which just felt right, and I also wanted to write something wriggly in the organ part so I just came up with this motif, and put some stuff over it. 

 

I wanted it to be suitable for the particular constraints of the singers – so, not too many parts, not too much harmony – but I went to hear the girls rehearsing and singing a piece that was very florid, very melodramatic, and they did that really well, so I thought, well, I’ll do that. I wanted to write something appropriate, obviously, with a religious element, but also fun, so thinking about the girls and the girls’ choir… Mary was fairly young, wasn’t she? So to have a more joyful, youthful Mag – you know, why not?

 

With things like songs, you can just write certain things in. For my Prom piece, I wanted to contrast the two different styles or voices, of Queen Elizabeth and William Byrd. Queen Elizabeth is quite understated, not operatic, so it’s based on the speech rhythms. Whereas William Byrd is much more churchy, because – as I say – it’s based on a piece he wrote called ‘Oh lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen’, and I had to base it on both the text and the music of it, so for that piece there were lots and lots of different influences.

 

I quite enjoy, with commissions, having very specific briefs. William Byrd is wonderful music, but what can you add to it, you know? Being in that position forces you to be a bit creative. When I was trying to find a way into it, I used some of Queen Elizabeth’s speeches, and listened to 14th century music, but I also read some popular science books, including a book about memory and how memories are formed, which led me to wonder about somebody who has been in the job for so long. Meanwhile, I also looked a lot at William Byrd’s polyphony, so I was going back to trying to work out counterpoint. And then, because I wanted to expand the Byrd, there’s some bits where he has a six-part contrapuntal section, and so I managed to fit in seven parts in one bit, which pleased me, for geeky composer reasons. If you can do six parts I can do seven!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You mentioned that you don’t have a background in religious or church traditions. Is that liberating in a way, for you? I’m trying not to use the word ‘irreverent’, but presumably it means you can bring something different to it.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Yes, I would hope so. I mean, attending the Menuhin School – would you call it multi-faith? Because it was sort of a faithless school, very secular – because there were people from all over the world from all different backgrounds, and mostly no religions. So I’m very different from the composers who were choirboys, who knew all the psalms by heart. But there are so many very evocative words in religious texts – and that appeals to me.

 ——

LAST: BERNARD HUGHES: Precious Things: Choral Music (performed by The Epiphoni Consort, Tim Reader) (2022, Delphian Records)

Extract: ‘Perhaps’

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

He writes really well for voices so it’s all really singable. I think it’s very original, adventurous but immediate, it can be whimsical and amusing, but also incredibly moving. It has all the things that matter. The first song, ‘Perhaps’, where he writes for children’s voices, it’s a simple tune but it’s a beautiful tune. It’s what I also love about Benjamin Britten – for me it’s emotionally engaging, really well written, idiomatic, and loads of really inventive yet immediate ideas, that really grab you and make you want to listen.

 

And the Psalm! I love the psalm. ‘Psalm 56’! There’s so many boring settings with psalms that are just so unengaging and dour. But this leaps off the page. I’m not religious myself, but it makes you identify with the text much more than a lot of other [psalms] that are really respected in the canon, you know?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a little bit on Bernard’s website where he was talking about the ‘Precious Things’ section, the precious things of which are gold, helium and crude oil. And of course helium is a finite thing, so it ends with this solo soprano who does this sweep to the top of her range as if helium is leaving the planet. It’s brilliant. Not what I was expecting. Classical music can be as surprising as anything.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s amazing to hear that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Anything is possible!

 

 

—–

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I obviously wanted to ask you about some of your other work. There’s often quite a lot of playfulness in what you do, like ‘Game On’ for instance, which is for piano and Commodore 64. How did that come about?

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I was a composer-in-residence at Rambert Dance Company, and I got to know the pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam really well. She was really into vintage 80s video games, and I said, Wouldn’t it be fun to do something like that. So we applied for some Arts Council money, and got it!

 

I mean, I’ve never played video games myself. But there’s something very evocative about it all. We were just chatting, and the first movement (‘Nash’) is sort of based on economics. The Nash equilibrium. I remember watching lots of lectures about it on YouTube from Yale and coming up with these number grids from which I would generate the notes. It’s sort of a fun, different thing to do, really, a different sort of sound world to experiment with. And mainly because Yshani was able to do it.

 

I wrote the music – she gave me a breakdown of what I could write, but then she programmed it on the Commodore 64. She’s such a brilliant pianist, and she’s always so well-prepared – she did that second movement (‘Robots Will Rule the World’), which is really rhythmically complicated, without a click track. It was an opportunity to explore another sound world. I’ve been wanting to do more electronic stuff for a very long time but basically I never learned it at school because I’d been writing other stuff, and I don’t get round to doing anything musical in my spare time. For the third movement (‘Lament’), Yshani sent me some of her favourite video games. There was a game for the Commodore 64 called ‘XOR’ (1987). You chase a thing around a maze, and it has this 8-bit music…

There’s something really tragic about that music, and I found myself cooking and playing this thing on repeat and singing melodies around it, and I thought it was incredibly moving and emotional. I guess that’s why I like other kinds of music – you find something that really moves you and affects you.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think on one level, video games (especially old-school ones, for some reason) have these incredibly tragic worlds where the protagonists are just stuck there, forever and ever. It’s ironic that some of them actually use classical themes. ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ being used in Manic Miner, for instance, or Tetris for a while used JS Bach’s French Suite No 3. It’s taken more seriously as a genre now. Did you hear Charlie Brooker on Desert Island Discs a few years ago? He chose some video game music: Jonathan Dunn’s ‘Robocop’.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Did he? And of course there’s a video game Prom this year.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Of course! That’s right. [Broadcast, BBC Four, 05/08/2022] And another piece that you wrote involving Yshani was called ‘Pay Close Attention’, and that leads us nicely into…

 —-

ANYTHING: THE PRODIGY/Experience (1992, XL Recordings)

Extract: ‘Out of Space’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember I was working in a record shop when the first white label of ‘Charly’ turned up. I was listening to a lot of dance music in those days, some of which was getting more expensive and lavish, and then suddenly this guy in his bedroom has made this crude thing – in a good way. When did you first hear this album?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

When did it come out?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The album came out in ’92.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I wouldn’t have heard it then. I heard it when I was 16, 17. I don’t know how I got into it. I mean, Keith [Flint] lived very near to me in Essex, so maybe I just heard about it in the news, I can’t remember. But really, what I love about dance music is the way that it just takes over your body. I just went to see the Prodigy, for the first time, actually – and it was great in many ways, although it was the 25th anniversary tour of a much later album (The Fat of the Land) and I prefer Experience. I just love the way the music completely absorbs you, the way you can feel it vibrating through your lungs. I mean, I always have to go with the most high-tech earplugs for my hearing, but I like the immediacy and the way it totally grabs you, I really love that about pop music and dance music. To be honest, if I really want some kind of emotional catharsis, I’d probably listen to more pop music than I would when I’m not looking for subtlety or finesse or complexity. I like the simplicity of it as well, the directness, the sort of trance-like state you can get in. I want to be able to grab people in that way with my music. I like the harmonic directness of it, and the rhythm.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It seems that, in a way, the worlds of pop and classical are closer together than they were. I’ve always followed lots of pop people on Twitter, I suppose because that’s my background, but I’m following more and more classical background people now, and Radio 3 people, and I’ve come back to classical music with a slightly greater understanding than when I was growing up because it didn’t feel like you were being taught about it in quite the right way.

 

 And there was this big divide between pop and classical back then, the two were set against each other. ‘Classical music is staid, it’s slow, it’s for old people.’ And then, from the other side, you got ‘Pop music is tuneless and cheap and meaningless.’ And I didn’t like either stereotype. Those kinds of views seem less common now, or less clearly polarised anyway.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s not so different. Do you think people don’t think classical music is still old and boring? I don’t know.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Hard to say, but I just think people might be introduced to it in a slightly different way now. You have a situation now where Radio 3 and 6Music sort of meet in the middle at times. 6 will play things that verge on ambient or classical, 3 will experiment with electronic and rock a little bit. And Radio 3 did sometimes experiment with the experimental end of pop music, but it feels like it happens more fluidly now.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

That’s a great thing about iPhones and Apple Music playlists, isn’t it?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The possibility of chancing on something, yes.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m going to ask you now about some of the specific pieces you’ve written. You’ve just put out the Thomas Carroll ‘Excelsus’ set as a download, which I’ve been loving.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Oh, thank you.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I discovered that you wrote it back in 2002. I read a quote where you said, ‘I tend to write in the moment’, so how does it feel to revisit something you wrote 20 years ago like this?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Fine, really! To be honest, I sometimes think the music I wrote back then is better than what I write now! I had been composing for so long by then – I was 21 then, and I’ve been composing since I was eight. So I’m remarkably unworried about my old stuff, it’s so long ago that I can like it for what it is.

 

It’s very hard [to play], too hard, insanely hard, and I don’t really write music like that anymore… unless it’s for somebody who wants something really difficult. To be honest, that piece is so hard that it doesn’t get done very much. And it sounds amazing on the disc – Thomas just did a fantastic job! But that was back in the day when I thought that performers had nothing to do except practise my music. Then I realised that they did have lives other than stapling themselves to my art! [Laughter] I quite like the seriousness of it, you know. I like it for what it is. Sometimes you just compromise a bit when you’re older, because you realise that something has to be rehearsed in this amount of time, and so you write something that’s easier than it should be sometimes, because you want it to sound good and if it isn’t played brilliantly, it sounds pretty rubbish, right?! I mean, I have had performances of my pieces done which are so difficult, but I sort of admire this sort of uncompromising attitude of that piece, you know?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think especially when you’re young, it’s about pushing the limits. Which I still think you do, by the way, with music, but there’s different ways of achieving this, I suppose.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Exactly, and you know when you’re young, at that age, you think that every piece has to be your masterpiece. I still think that every piece has to really express what you want to say, of course. But going back to this girls’ choir Mag and Nunc I’m writing at the moment, my primary concern is that they have a good time singing it. It’s not about my grand artistic statement, right? I want them to enjoy it because they might have to sing some rather dour things, and it would be nice for them to have something fun. But I never would have done something like that in my twenties, when it was all ‘my grand artistic statement’. It’s too tiring to do that all the time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There are a few compilations of your work out there – did you compile the running orders yourself?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

No, Champs Hill are a charity, and they incredibly generously made the CDs and the promotion of them, they covered that. But I had to raise money to pay for the musicians’ fees and the recording engineers’ fees.

 

For my first disc, The Glory Tree, which was recorded 2007, maybe 2008, I applied for some funding on a whim and got it – and then I was stuck because I only got half of it, and had to raise the rest of it. Life was a bit hard going at the time, working very hard for very little money, having one performance of everything… I never thought, What’s the point?, but you start to go in that direction. But then, suddenly, the recording was four days of musicians treating my music like it was the most important thing in the world. It was just the most unbelievably affirming thing – and then when the disc came out, it got amazing reviews, back when you got proper broadsheet reviews. And so I became addicted to this experience. But I have spent months and months and months fundraising for those things. I exhausted every funding avenue there was.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You obviously do a lot of background research for your compositions, and your inspirations come not only from history, but art, literature, contemporary events. Do you just get an idea of a story – you read about it, and think, I could write about that?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Just today, actually, I’ve been in touch with a poet, because I’ve had a little commission for female voices for next year. And I’ve never had the opportunity to set his work before, and so this little three-minute piece has come up, and so he’s stored in my memory bank. I don’t have his books with me here in Oxford, so I just texted him, and said, Do you have any poems that would suit this, this and this? He sent me some, and I really like one, so it’s: Great, I’ll set that!

 

I wrote a clarinet quintet called ‘Tales of the Invisible’, after I went to this talk at the Presteigne Festival given by this author called Nicholas Murray. He was talking about borders and travelling, and I just had that in the back of my mind.

 

Often, I just see things on telly, or hear them on the radio. Have you seen that series on BBC, The Art That Made Us? Honestly, that Spong Man at the beginning! I’ve been just obsessed with Spong Man, because he’s just so emotional, right? Looking at that pain in that man, from like thousands of years ago, it’s so striking, and so I have him in the back of my mind. Same with when I went to this talk at the Presteigne Festival given by this author, Nicholas Murray. He was talking about borders and travelling, and that eventually led to me writing a clarinet quintet, called ‘Tales of the Invisible’. And then there was the London Oriana Choir. I was their first composer-in-residence and they wanted to explore the theme of fertility, not a subject that particularly inspires me, so I had to actively try and find poems that inspired me that had something to do with that, tangentially.

 

Or, for instance, the piece I wrote for the 2021 Three Choirs Festival: ‘Earth Puts Her Colours By’. It was in memory of somebody, a guy who I knew a little about, but had never met. I tried to find a poem that would be suitable, so I got down all the poetry books in my house, and went down a Google trail…. But in the end, the poem I found for that was in the back of one of my mum’s poetry books that she had when she was young. So I do actively search for things to fit certain briefs.

There’s a poster at the train station for the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I haven’t been to it yet, but the poster is just incredibly beautiful. It’s a jewel of a mouldy lemon. It’s called ‘Bad Lemon’, by Kathleen Ryan.

Basically this artist has done mouldy fruit, but made them out of opals. Staring at this poster, I really want to write a piece inspired by that in some way. But I find being inspired is really easy. You just have to look at something close enough. If I look hard enough at the wood grain of my desk, and the covering in it, you can do something about that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You don’t strike me as someone who would ever get writer’s block. Or do you?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

No, I haven’t had it for a long time. I had it when I was 15 after I wrote my piece for the BBC Young Composer. I decided that I was writing too fluently and so I tried to plot out what would happen in every five seconds of the music and it just completely stalled me for a year.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, a novelist friend of mine likes starting out not knowing the ending, because if you know too much before you start, part of the fun is gone. Do you find that?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Yes, I think so. The composer Judith Weir said to me, when she was examining my PhD Viva, ‘Some of the commentary was so pedantic’, because I think I was trying to be intelligent, you know, and prove that I was really thinking academically about all this stuff. And actually, you should just go with the flow of it more. Being here, in this room in Oxford – I’m just writing – and you get paranoid if you’re either not intellectual enough, or not immediate enough. Whereas I’m just writing a hell of a lot of music – I’m very lucky at the moment in that I’m writing full time. The thing is, if you do get stuck, you can just rely on technique for a bit, and then that will inspire you in the end.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what about ‘One Life Stand’, which was interesting to hear and read about. Which you worked with Sophie Hannah on. It made me think about reinterpretations and new adaptations and also why art continues to be important because you can do something new with it. Because I gather that the original libretto, which I’m not too familiar with, is ‘of its time’, shall we say.

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Of its time, yes! That was with the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston. There’s this beautiful music, by Robert Schumann, from 1840, based on these poems by Adelbert von Chamisso called Frauen-Liebe und Leben (Women’s Lives and Loves) (1830) and I guess what you have to do is believe in the feeling. Because in the last one of the songs, her husband dies, and she says, ‘Well, my life is over’, and obviously nowadays that is old-fashioned, but one can identify with that. But Jennifer was annoyed by singing that song cycle with this beautiful music but the whole focus of the original libretto was getting a husband and having a baby. [So we used the poetry of Sophie Hannah instead.]

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the time you’ve been a professional composer, I’m assuming things have got better for women composers in this country?

 

 

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s definitely got better. I was really lucky, right? Because I went to the Menuhin School. I was like a chubby ginger kid who was into music and was composing, and it didn’t even occur to me that I was a woman composer. My idol was Benjamin Britten. I just wrote music, I didn’t hear music by a woman composer until I was… twelve or thirteen. But I was in a very specialised environment, so if I could be helpful to teenage girls who feel they need to see somebody who’s like them, that’s great. I’m totally fine with that, and I can see how if you’re not in a music school, or from a minority, that becomes much more important. I’ve certainly benefited from being a woman composer – sometimes with funding that’s only open to women. There are lots of women composers now, and you know there’s so many initiatives to make people more aware of women’s music. I mean, there’s nowhere near equality, but we’ll get there.

——

Much, much more about Cheryl, her career and her music at her website: www.cherylfranceshoad.co.uk.

You can follow Cheryl on Instagram at @cherylhoad, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CherylFrancesHoadComposer, and on Bluesky at @cherylfranceshoad.bsky.social.

The download of Excelsus, performed by the cellist Thomas Carroll, is available from Orchid Classics.

Although the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis we discussed in our conversation is still work in progress, you can hear an earlier set of Cheryl’s at the following link [Choral Evensong, 28/04/2022, the Merton Canticles, performed by the Merton College Choir]. The Magnificat begins at 15’40”; The Nunc Dimittis at 21’25”.:

 

Cheryl’s ‘Your Servant, Elizabeth’, while not yet commercially available, was performed and broadcast at the BBC Proms concert event A Royal Music Celebration, live on BBC Radio 3 on 22/07/2022, and televised on BBC Four and iPlayer on 24/07/2022. The concert is no longer on iPlayer, but you can now hear ‘Your Servant, Elizabeth’ here, performed by the BBC Singers with conductor Barry Wordsworth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq_YFw-Vt7c

Gaming Music at the Proms was broadcast on BBC Four on 05/08/2022. Again, this concert is no longer available to watch on iPlayer.

Since my conversation with Cheryl, her Cello Concerto premiered in May 2023 in Glasgow with the soloist Laura van der Heijden, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. van der Heijden also performed it at the 2024 Proms.

In October 2024, Cheryl was elected Visiting Fellow in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, holding masterclasses with students and composing an anthem for the Chapel Choir to perform, to mark (in 2025) 40 years of women being admitted to the college. She has also been Composer-in-Residence at the Musikdorf Ernen, Switzerland, during 2024-25.

FLA Playlist 9

Cheryl Frances-Hoad

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD: Katharsis: I. Prelude

David Cohen, Paul Hoskins, Rambert Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kor1d08K–M

Tracks 2–6: BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 65

Alexander Baillie, John Thwaites

(Dialogo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainTyZGw6CY /

Scherzo-pizzicato: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBNsy-KShJI /

Elegia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIywU6l1kps /

Marcia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ozi2uBTqnQ /

Moto perpetuo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPVSz0icSw )

[NB As mentioned above, Cheryl’s first purchase was actually a disc of Shostakovich and Prokofiev by Alexander Baillie and Piers Lane, but unfortunately, this isn’t currently on Spotify or indeed YouTube, so Cheryl chose another recording by Baillie.]

Track 7: BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Tema “Sacher”

Julian Lloyd Webber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYiILyHroYU

Track 8: WILLIAM BYRD: O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth

The Tallis Scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2_cinaHfBs

Tracks 9–13: BERNARD HUGHES: Precious Things

The Epiphoni Consort, Tim Reader

[Perhaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKr4BN2GW_M /

Psalm 56 /

Precious Things:

I. All the gold in the world.

II. Helium.

III. Crude]

(The selections from Bernard Hughes’s Precious Things, apart from ‘Perhaps’ are not currently available on YouTube.)

Tracks 14–16: CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD: Game On

Yshani Perinpanayagam

[I. Nash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GoU64DZmM /

II. Robots Will Rule the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu3p5HLCC5g /

III. Lament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH3vt3-1gAo ]

Track 17: CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD: Pay Close Attention

Yshani Perinpanayagam, Christopher Jones, Gemma Sharples, Kay Stephen, Anna Menzies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70aF8YrspGg

Track 18: THE PRODIGY: ‘Out of Space’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NJKyBRD7fc

Track 19: THE PRODIGY: ‘Charly (Trip Into Drum and Bass Version)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRJ607uXA40

[This version not currently available on Spotify]

Tracks 20–21: CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD: Excelsus

Thomas Carroll

[I. Requiem Aeternum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SQBkxISNKc /

II. Kyrie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP1Ae-vy0M0 ]

Track 22: CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD: One Life Stand

Jennifer Johnston, Joseph Middleton

[VIII. The Cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g8A4omZJag ]

FLA 8: Kirsten Parnell (31/07/2022)

/ whenisbins / Leave a comment

Copywriter and blogger Kirsten Parnell (@kirstofcomms) has been one of my Twitter corner’s most entertaining presences for some time now, and I’ve also long been a fan of her blog, inbetweengirl, where she has written thoughtful and funny pieces about all sorts of subjects: creativity, feminism, politics, relationships and much more besides. As if that wasn’t enough, she posts some of the finest dog photos around.

 

In April 2022 (with a few subsequent revisions and updates, in July 2022), we had a most diverting chat on Zoom about her First Last Anything music choices, and amongst other things, addressed the power of music when you’re a teenager, lyrics and language, separating the art from the artist, and guitar lessons.

 

—-

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What sort of music were you exposed to before you bought your first record?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I remember my mum playing a lot of Celine Dion. I have a vivid memory from school of a trainee teacher, who had to interview certain children. I was a real swot at school, had a real work ethic, and it’s only gone downhill since. And the actual teacher said, ‘Oh talk to Kirsten, probably thinking, ‘She’s a little swotty weirdo, she’ll come out with some great stuff.’ So the trainee teacher asked me, ‘What music do you listen to?’ And I said, ‘Celine Dion.’

 

But my uncle Tom was a big influence on my taste. He was and is a massive Bruce Springsteen fan. He was playing Born in the USA to me in the car on cassette when I was eight. He’d say of the title track, ‘Oh everyone thinks it’s a patriotic song, but it’s not if you listen to the words’, and so I was parroting that to people then, and probably sounding completely insane.

 

But also when I was eight (1998), my uncle took me to my first concert. The Spice Girls at Wembley Stadium. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That’s a really young age for a first concert!

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

We go to gigs like all the time, me and uncle Tom. He never had kids himself, and I think he was probably quite keen to have the experience of taking a daughter to a big concert.

 

Another thing he played in the car – and I will forever be grateful for this – was Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, and I don’t think he [had this intention, consciously], but now I think it was really clever of him playing me that record before my teen years. I was like, ‘This is just something else! Who knew women could write songs like that and sing songs like that!’

 

He was into a lot of American artists: Sheryl Crow, quite a lot of country, real variety. Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty – in fact, I remember thinking with ‘Free Fallin’’, ‘That’s only three chords.’ I was 11 or 12, had started playing guitar, and that was the first thing I taught myself to play.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My nephew’s first concert when he was seven was Bruce Springsteen, who he loves, partly because his mum’s a huge fan, and it was a three-hour concert.

I wonder if he’s going to find it all concerts from now on are going to be a let-down or maybe they’re just over too quickly. Have you seen Springsteen live then?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I did see him. In fact I only really got into him then. It was a gig in Hyde Park [14/07/2012]. That only came about because my uncle called me up on the day, his friend couldn’t come and so I came instead. I was finishing my Masters at the time, so anything to get away from writing a dissertation. Springsteen had Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine on with him. My friends knew their stuff, and I didn’t, it just all sounded very angry to me – but I hadn’t realised what a guitarist Tom Morello is. They did ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ with this incredible big crunchy guitar solo. I’m not an obsessive Springsteen fan like my uncle, but that day, I suddenly got it. He had so much energy, and that particular performance just blew my mind. I said to my friends, ‘Tom’s a really good guitarist’, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we know.’

 

But of course, the big story at that Hyde Park gig was Paul McCartney came on at the end. In the papers the next day, the headline was that they had cut the sound because they’d gone over the curfew. I remember there being a sense of outrage: you don’t cut the sound on Paul McCartney.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously I have to ask you if you saw McCartney and Springsteen playing ‘Glory Days’ at Glastonbury the other week [25/06/2022].

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

It’s funny; I’ve never been keen on Paul McCartney, nor have I really ever been wild about the Beatles. (I know, I know.) Years ago, we had a family friend who I believe worked briefly with the band – some sort of studio engineer or something – and he never spoke highly of Paul. And that got lodged in my head when I was a child, so I never really bothered with The Beatles much, but now I live with a man who’s got Liverpudlian family, so I’m not allowed to speak ill of The Beatles.

 

I watched Paul’s Glastonbury set and loved it – and when he brought Bruce on, it was like being a kid again. Bruce’s gravelly voice was the soundtrack to my childhood. And that ‘Glory Days’ riff will always take me back to being in my uncle’s car, the Born in the USA album on cassette. 

—-

FIRST: THE CALLING: Camino Palmero (2001, RCA)

Extract: ‘Wherever You Will Go‘

JUSTIN LEWIS

You wrote a tremendous blogpost about this record so I’m going to try not to cover the same ground again. The Calling were quite big for a bit. Best Pop Act at the Smash Hits Awards, I have discovered. Did you wait for a few singles to come out before shelling out for the album, and make sure you liked it?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I have a feeling that I was very impatient and impulsive and just bought it off the strength of that single. It was summer holidays, 2002, in Horsham and I said to my group of girlfriends from school, ‘I’ll meet you in McDonald’s afterwards’ – and I went into MVC with my pocket money. Twelve or thirteen pounds.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which is a big investment when you’re that age. Looking at the track listing, there’s one track called ‘Final Answer’. And Who Wants to be a Millionaire was the big thing at the time, even in the States.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

It’s not even a good song! It’s a patchy album. But ‘Wherever You Will Go’ led me to start playing guitar. When I first heard that intro – which is a very soft kind of fingerpicking pattern on the guitar – I thought: I want to play the instrument that does that. Yet I had had no interest in learning an instrument – no-one in my family played an instrument, and my only interest in music had been in listening to it.

 

But when I was learning, one thing I was really clear about: I never wanted to take any exams. If you learnt an instrument at school, it was pretty normal to do the grade exams, but even at the age of twelve, I was adamant that I was not learning guitar to take grades. I just wanted to write songs, and as soon as I’d learned about five chords, I thought I could do that.

 

Obviously to look back on the stuff you wrote as a young teenager, it’s just mortifying. But I did stick at it, and obviously you have to write a lot of crap before you get good – no matter what kind of writing you do. I can think back to the stuff I wrote by my early twenties, and I don’t find myself wanting to cringe myself inside out.

 

A couple of weeks ago I had this little idea for a song in my head all day. I haven’t felt like that for about 10 years. I picked up my guitar, felt very rusty, but I can still do a little bit. I don’t do it nearly as much as I should, but that is very much a question of time.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So were you in bands back then?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

There was a ‘battle of the bands’ at school. We never did very well. It was basically an excuse to just hang out with my friends and do something that looked cool, I think. We covered ‘Hand in My Pocket’. We had this incredible singer. I think her name was Izzy, she was having proper lessons, and then we just made her sing an Alanis Morissette song.

 

Later I was in a duo with my friend who also played guitar, but the one time we tried to write a song together, when she gave me a verse and chorus, I just rewrote everything she’d written. So I decided early on in life, I’m not built to collaborate.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And could you read music?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

No, no. Playing guitar, you don’t have to be able to read music ‘cause you can just read tabs, which is obviously with the six strings, and so I’ve never learned to read music. I’ve got away with that. I think they tried to teach us reading music at school – what crotchets and minims are, but I couldn’t identify them now with a gun to my head.

—-

LAST: LISSIE: Live at Shepherd’s Bush Empire (2011, Lionboy Records)

Extract: ‘In Sleep’

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I’ve seen Lissie live a few times, and again just recently. I’ve been familiar with her since her first album came out, which was 2010. She sounds amazing, when recorded, but live, she’s something else. She can really belt out a song, and she’s got quite a husky element to her voice – which obviously sounds great live.

 

The day after my first date with my (current) boyfriend Jonathan, he made me a playlist (yes, even though we are both well over the age of 15) and there was a Lissie track on it. Now, I’d had a fair bit to drink on the date, so messaged him when I saw the playlist and asked if we’d discussed Lissie the night before, adding that she’s one of my all-time favourite artists.

 

His reply was roughly, ‘No, but I’m a huge Twin Peaks fan and she performed it in the third series and I really liked the track.’ I got very excited and sent him a list of all my favourite Lissie songs, and now he loves her as much as I do, so she’s kind of become (part of) the soundtrack to our relationship.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a very Stevie Nicks quality to her voice.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Yes, in my opinion, she’s the natural heir to Stevie Nicks. I won’t let anyone talk me out of that! I feel a bit protective of her – ‘Why don’t more people know about her?’ I don’t know what’s happened to Lissie in terms of being marketed over here, but something got lost along the way. It happened to KT Tunstall too. She’s in that mould of female singer-songwriter, but the musicianship on all her records is top notch and I don’t understand why she’s not massive. The only time I’ve heard her on the radio is Radio 2. And it pissed me off in a sad, nerdy way a few years ago when the band Haim got really big, and were being lauded as ‘Fleetwood Mac-esque’ and I thought, Lissie was doing this years ago. Maybe it’s just because Lissie is late-thirties now, and maybe it’s more appealing to market a young band of sisters. I don’t know.

 

At this recent show, they played this song, ‘In Sleep’, which is one of her early singles, and her guitarist just did his thing for a couple of minutes. I just love a wailing guitar solo. So the following day, that was the moment I wanted to remember from that gig. I can’t get enough of guitar solos, so I had to download that. I’m pretty sure on the recorded version of ‘In Sleep’, the guitar solo always gets cut for radio – but it’s the best bit!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s funny how the instrumental solo has almost disappeared from mainstream pop. The rap has replaced it. In your own guitar playing, by the way, did you ever ‘go electric’?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I did, mostly under pressure from my guitar teacher who was like, You’re not going to get better unless you learn to do more improvisation and lead guitar stuff. But I’m not a natural improviser, never really had the confidence to be a lead guitarist. I will happily watch the most lengthy, indulgent guitar solos, but I have no desire to be doing it myself. I was always destined to play rhythm guitar in the background, and I prefer to just watch the people that can do it.

 

ANYTHING: DESSA: Castor, The Twin (2011, Doomtree Records)

Extract: ‘Mineshaft 2’

KIRSTEN PARNELL

With new music, I very much rely on recommendations from friends – especially my friend Natalie. Frequently she will send me a song by a female artist and it’s a song about being let down by a man and we’re both: This is our thing.

 

I’d never really listened to hip hop or rap at all, but Nat had seen Hamilton and I hadn’t, and she got me into Dessa because of the Hamilton mix tape, which was various artists covering songs from the musical, doing their own interpretations, or artists doing songs that hadn’t made the final cut. And Dessa performed a track that didn’t make it into the musical, a song called ‘Congratulations’. It could easily have been slotted into the musical, and it would be all the better for it! It’s just a really great song.

 

With ‘Mineshaft 2’, the entire framing for the song is a warning to her younger self. I heard it about two or three years ago, and then I just went through her back catalogue. The opening line is: ‘Fifteen years from tonight you have to make a decision, the greatest love of your life’s gonna call during dinner…’. And then later on: ‘I used to sing on the roof outside my windowsill/And I came hoping some ghost of me would be here still.’ I don’t think it’s an accident that this song resonated with me the moment I heard it.

 

I love what she does with words. Before anything else, she’s a writer. She wrote a really good book called My Own Devices, which is a collection of essays, but a memoir really. She’s published a couple of poetry collections. She does a podcast called Deeply Human for the BBC World Service… She has said what drives her is just being able to do stuff with language. And music is one more way of her doing that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a really great quote from her in a newspaper article, and it made me think of you and what you’re doing. She said, ‘Hip hop is the music genre that prizes linguistic achievement over all others. It’s why I took to writing in the first place.’ And just like all types of writing, it’s very hard to get that right. And it also made me think of this huge wave of singers who rap and rappers who sing, and once upon a time, that wasn’t very common at all. The first person I remember doing both on a big hit song was Neneh Cherry. ‘Buffalo Stance’. The verse is a rap, the chorus is sung. A lot of people do that now, to great effect.

 

I remember there was this attitude towards rap back in the day that it wasn’t music. What I’ve always found unbelievable about rap – and I realise I sound like someone’s grandfather when I say this kind of thing – is how rappers not only remember it all, but can deliver it with that kind of conviction and attention to rhythmic detail.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Dessa once said in an interview that the reason she does everything she does – sings, raps, writes poetry, has written a memoir, has a podcast about human behaviour – is that she refuses to “pick a lane”. It’s satisfying, I think, to find out what other types of writing musicians can do. And encouraging, in a way – as a copywriter who’s good at writing short comment pieces but who is also trying to teach herself to write fiction, it’s inspiring to see other writers spread their creative wings.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Have other lyricists influenced your writing style, do you think?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

The singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore (who also records under the name Afterlight) changed the way I thought about lyrics. She was another recommendation from my uncle, when I was about 13, and I’ve followed her career ever since. Her earlier work was very wordy – lots of her early songs could stand alone as poems, really – but her lyrics have become less… cerebral, I suppose, and oblique, and more accessible over time. Now I think about it, Gilmore and Dessa have something in common: they seem to approach music words-first.

 

—-

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What about music as inspiration for your writing, rather than lyrics? You’ve told me that you need to have something instrumental on.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I like background noise, I can’t really write in total silence, but there isn’t really a relationship between the writing and what I’m listening to. If I’m writing something quite urgent and pressing, the soundtrack from the TRON: Legacy film, by Daft Punk, is really pacey and very motivating. Other than that, I play Classic FM – although if something by Vaughan Williams comes on, I have to stop and focus on that. He’s the one composer that I really engage with, but I don’t really know why.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The Lark Ascending is always number one in the Classic FM Hall of Fame listeners’ poll, isn’t it? It’s funny to think that Classic FM was set up as a sort of classical version of a pop station: here are the hits, here are the ‘famous bits that people know’ of classical music. So it’s the ‘Toreador’ song from Carmen, or classical music from film soundtracks or whatever.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Funnily enough, I’m not especially fussed on The Lark Ascending. ‘It’s too popular!’ When I was a teenager I was absolutely that kid: ‘It’s too popular.’ Whereas I love the ‘Romance’ from the Serenade in A minor – it’s annoyingly hard to find on Spotify, but around the 4:12 mark, it starts to build to this really beautiful, stirring climactic moment that sounds to me like pure joy. I also love Dives and Lazarus. I haven’t actually listened to that in ages, but you’ve just reminded me how much I love it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I always enjoy reading your highly entertaining blog but have you other writing projects in mind at the moment?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I have been trying to finish the draft of a novel for over two years now and I’ve now written the ending. I haven’t written it chronologically, because I knew that writing something that big would be difficult, so I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and it’s all about filling in the gaps.

 

I’ve never run a marathon myself, but people always say, about Mile 21, you hit some kind of emotional wall: you’ve done so much, but you’re still not quite at the end. It’s hard to maintain motivation, especially with a full-time job and bits of freelance work and other things I want to write.

 

—-

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m going to quote your blog now. ‘Listening to a record in order is still like getting to know new friend or lover discovering what makes undefined, angry, wistful, sad, delighted.’ One of my rules of this series is that I’m not judging any choices (unless invited to) because I think music is one of the most personal things to people. You can’t help what you like. I’ve never been keen on the term ‘guilty pleasures’.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

I’m sure Nigella Lawson said something like, ‘Why should you feel guilty about anything that gives you pleasure?’ I agree with that wholeheartedly. My musical guilty pleasure – and the only reason I feel ‘guilty’ is because it’s bad feminism – is I really love John Mayer.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think we all have at least a handful of people where we have to separate the art from the artist. How do you separate the work of John Mayer from John Mayer?

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

He’s what I’d call a musician’s musician. I think he’s more well-known in the US, but the people over here who do love him tend to be musicians. He’s an incredible guitarist – I’ve seen him live twice and each time cried at least once over one guitar solo or another. And he plays with really good musicians too – the first time I saw him live, as the John Mayer Trio, I went with my boyfriend of the time who was (indeed, still is) a drummer, and he was more excited about seeing drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino.

 

I love the way Mayer covers a variety of genres while always sounding distinctly like himself. There’s the standard male singer/songwriter stuff, there’s the folky album (Born and Raised), there’s the bluesy-rock stuff from the Trio, and there’s his latest record, Sob Rock, which sounds like an homage to the 80s, and sounds like Mayer is having a good time and not taking himself particularly seriously.

 

My stance on ‘judging the person or the work’ is something of a cop-out: everyone has to decide what they can live with. Mayer has definitely said some offensive things in interviews (though not for a really long time) and had a reputation as something of a ladies’ man, which I think put people off him or at least distracted them from his musical output. He had such a reputation a few years ago for just working his way round the women of Hollywood.

 

[But against that,] I have to go: I’m so sorry, I still quite like John Mayer.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I wanted to ask you about music lessons at school because you were telling me that the environment didn’t sound very inspiring for you.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

They were always on a Friday afternoon when you were at your least engaged.

This was up to year nine, the first three years of secondary school. And then I shockingly didn’t take music as one of my GCSE options. My guitar lessons weren’t at school, but with an external teacher, and I just didn’t enjoy it anymore. I’m only musical on one instrument, and even then, ‘musical’ is doing a lot of work.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I was the second-last year at school to do O level music, that’s how old I am, and I just went back to look at what was different about the GCSE course, when they brought that in, 1987, and one of the key aims was ‘to expand beyond the Western classical tradition’. Now I love classical music, but it can’t just be that, particularly not if you’ve got a mixed ability class who are not all going to be in the school orchestra, or even go on to be professional musicians. You might get one or two of those in a class. But most are not going to do that, and you still have to find some way to engage them. My music teachers at school were, like, older than my parents and the idea they were going to say, ‘Well, today, we’re going to examine the work of Joy Division.’ It wasn’t going to happen.

 

Music was set up almost in the same way as PE as a kind of punitive form in that if you didn’t already seem to show promise, God help you really.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

Unsurprisingly, I hated PE – that was just so stressful. The only thing I was good at was hockey. No explanation why, no idea, but that was fine. Everything else. Just an exercise in torture.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There was this threat of punishment if you weren’t good enough. And the curriculum of music when I was doing it: it was basically, classical, hymns, the odd folk song, and that was about it.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

And that canon would have nothing to do with your actual experience of music in the real world. I’m now trying to remember what music we studied in those classes. I don’t remember if we covered any classical music, but nothing stands out. For some reason, we studied the song ‘Cry Me a River’, the torch song from the 50s, recorded by Julie London.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The definitive version.

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

And also I remember spending an awful lot of time learning about Glenn Miller. I mean, no disrespect to Glenn Miller, but I think that is just baffling. Given that this was a bunch of twelve-year-olds in about 2002.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I gather that in the 90s, they had Help! by The Beatles and The Works by Queen on the GCSE syllabus. Whereas we’d studied Lieutenant Kijé by Prokofiev in 1985/86, which did have two very familiar themes in it. One of them got borrowed by Sting for ‘Russians’, which was a hit around the same time, and another section, ‘Troika’, you always hear at Christmas because it’s in Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’. But no mention was made at any point that these had a connection to recent or current music. There was no acknowledgement about how it all linked up. And I think sometimes you have to try and join the dots, because studying and understanding classical music is a lifetime’s work.

 

—-

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

In my teens there was a singer called Michelle Branch, again from America, who had this one big single, ‘Everywhere’, which quite a few people would recognise. Like Alanis Morissette, she was a female singer/ songwriter, big gutsy voice, lots of guitar-driven stuff. So completely my thing. As soon as I heard that single, again I bought the album, loved it and then came the second album, listened to that a lot.

 

And then she did that record with Santana, ‘The Game of Love’, and then she didn’t do anything for about 14 years. She kind of disappeared. She ended up, I think, changing labels, and she met the drummer from The Black Keys at a party who remembered her. ‘What are you doing now?’ And in the end they agreed he’d finance whatever she did, so that he would own the rights to it, and now I think they’re married with children so, it worked out.

 

But with that third album she finally toured in the UK, 2017-ish, and I saw her in London, and I was super emotional because obviously when you discover music when you’re a young teenager, as I was when I discovered her, it gets into your blood, and you’re so alive to it. To go to that gig in London, finally, and just feel like I was there with my teenage self.

 

For a long time, I had a theory – and I still feel this – that the music you love as a young teenager stays with you, because you discovered it when you were particularly receptive to, for want of a better way of putting it, art that made you feel things. Imagine my delight when a data scientist tested out this theory for the New York Times:

 

 

[Sample extract:

 

‘Consider, for example, the song “Creep” by Radiohead. This is the 164th most popular song among men who are now 38 years old. But it is not in the top 300 for the cohort born 10 years earlier or 10 years later. Note that the men who most like ‘Creep’ now were roughly 14 when the song came out in 1993. In fact, this is a consistent pattern.’]

 

KIRSTEN PARNELL

There’s another interesting example from that piece. The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ is a favourite song of women who were 41 when the research was done [2018] – they would have been 11 when it was released. Essentially, the research found that for men, music taste forms between the ages of 13 and 16, and for women, it’s slightly earlier – between the ages of 11 and 14. Which maps on to when puberty happens!

 

I find that little study reported in the NYT so pleasing. Falling in love with music at that age – 11–14 or thereabouts – is such a pure thing, and when as an adult you return to your teenage favourites, you’re back there in an instant. A lot of what I write is either for my teenage self or for the daughter I might have one day (I have to write it down because as a former teenage girl, I know how unwilling they are to take advice). I think we neglect the fragile, porous teenage selves we carry with us at our peril.

 

 

—-

You can follow Kirsten on Twitter at @kirstofcomms and on Bluesky at @kirstenp.bsky.social.

Her blog can be found at inbetweengirl.com, and she has an occasional newsletter too.

FLA Playlist 8

Kirsten Parnell

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: ‘Born in the USA’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhWR4d3FJQ

Track 2: ALANIS MORISSETTE: ‘Hand in My Pocket’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUjIY_XxF1g

Track 3: TOM PETTY: ‘Free Fallin’’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWJXDG2i0A

Track 4: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND TOM MORELLO: ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad (Live)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-c6GphpAeY

Track 5: THE CALLING: ‘Wherever You Will Go’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAP9AF6DCu4

Track 6: LISSIE: ‘In Sleep (Live at Shepherd’s Bush Empire)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRE6emYwcqg

Track 7: DESSA: ‘Congratulations’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M54fw8zF-a0

Track 8: DESSA: ‘Mineshaft 2’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f-vO7Y9NHA

Track 9: DAFT PUNK: ‘The Game Has Changed’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IaOyp7KqbY

Track 10: AFTERLIGHT: ‘Stain’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp73RN9iS5k

Track 11: RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ‘Serenade in A Minor: IV. Romance – Andantino – Appassionato’

Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Martin Yates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRJNV9_M_IM

 

Track 12: RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ‘Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus’

Iona Brown, Kenneth Heath, Skaila Kanga, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBHgrR6Ft04

 

Track 13: JOHN MAYER: ‘Helpless’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOdN6utMgQQ

Track 14: JULIE LONDON: ‘Cry Me a River’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJEf2H0sHg

Track 15: MICHELLE BRANCH: ‘Everywhere’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoQ4aWHCct0

 

FLA 7: Alasdair Mackenzie (24/07/2022)

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Alasdair Mackenzie has been a writer, a DJ, a teacher, and for the past 20 years or so, has worked in politics; he currently works in Parliament as an outreach manager. I met him in April 1990, when we were students at Cardiff University, and he has been one of my closest friends ever since. We’ve been in a house share, we’ve worked in a record store, we’ve written together, and yes, we’ve talked a lot about music. When I first had the idea for First Last Anything, he very kindly agreed to participate in a test session to see if the format actually worked. We recorded it on the afternoon of 3 April 2022, and I thought it went so well that I asked him if he was happy for it to be included in the series itself. And he said yes.

 

We talked about all sorts of things here, and its wildly eclectic content helped me set the tone for all the episodes that have followed. I am incredibly indebted to all my guests in these early episodes who took part even before they knew – or even I knew – what the finished format might look like, but most of all I want to thank Alasdair, because without this pilot episode, I might not have gone any further. What really made me think the series might work, above all, was that even after knowing him for 32 years, I did not know anything about some of his defining choices. He still told me some things that surprised me.

 

(At one point, we discuss Eurovision, and obviously we recorded this before the 2022 Song Contest on 21 May, which – as almost everyone will know by now – was not only won by Ukraine, but also saw the best response in 25 years for the United Kingdom entry.)

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ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

As a kid, from the age of five or six into my teens, we listened pretty solidly to Capital Radio, before Radio 1 was on FM, and Radio 2 was a bit soporific for us. Capital was quite exciting back then. Its playlist was constructed along the lines of the demographics of London, rather than the modern method of commercial playlisting, editing tracks, minimising channel hopping. So there was a more creative playlist and a more creative roster – as well as daytime DJs like Mike Allen and Graham Dene, there was hip hop at the weekend, and after about 10.30 at night there was Dave Rodigan playing reggae. To this day, I associate reggae music with late night.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, even on Radio 1 you’d mainly hear reggae on John Peel, or The Ranking Miss P, also late night.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Yes. So by osmosis, I did pick up a lot of different sounds, but on Sundays, my mum and I would listen to the Top 40, taping things we liked, and by my teens I started doing my own tapes. But I didn’t buy records, I didn’t consider myself a fan of particular bands. I was just a magpie. You’d hear a song sometimes, that you’d never heard of, and think, I’ll tape that next week. And by next week, it had gone.

FIRST: TIM SOUSTER/Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1980, single, Original Records)

Extract: ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

The first time I came across The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was on television, rather than on the radio where it started. At that time, I would watch anything that was sci-fi on television or in films, so I was drawn to it, and just completely fell in love with it. It was funny, it was imaginative, and I loved the music. 

 

Much later I read about how Douglas Adams, with the earlier radio programme, brought a lot of his interest in music into the show – and the theme tune he chose was a piece of music called ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’ by The Eagles, on the grounds that it had a banjo in it and he felt that banjos evoked the notion of hitch-hiking. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The tradition of the troubadour, perhaps? It sounds a bit like a lute!

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

And as you know, the theme as was broadcast was not The Eagles’ version but by Tim Souster. I don’t ever remember having regular pocket money, so this might have been with a record voucher, but I bought it from a record shop in Stockport. This was 1980, so I was probably 9 or 10 years old.

 

The Souster version was an extract from the specially made album, not from the TV or radio series, and on the other side, it was the Peter Jones narration about the band Disaster Area, followed by a song purportedly by Disaster Area called ‘It’s Only the End of the World Again’. So although I had no recordings of Hitchhiker at the time, I had this wonderful little bit of it I could play, and also this rather unusual song.

 

Around the same time I bought an LP called BBC Space Themes which featured, among other things, the theme tune to Tomorrow’s World by Johnny Dankworth, which in later years at college I would play at the end of every DJ set, as the lights were coming up. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember it well. It’s got a fantastic flute solo. 

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

The full version is just superb. It was a brave soul who would try and dance to that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So that first version of the Hitchhiker’s theme that was commercially released had nothing to do with the radio programme at all. It was specially recorded. And Tim Souster had quite a career. Very little of it online now, unfortunately – a lot of stuff you can’t get easily.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I found one thing on iTunes. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Was that Equalisations, that combination of a brass ensemble and electronics? 

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Yes. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I liked that. And also, in 1970, he collaborated with a group called the Scratch Orchestra, who were opening act for the Soft Machine at the Proms, playing Ring Modulator. And in the 80s, it would appear, he did the music for the St Ivel Gold adverts. With a Michael Jayston voiceover: ‘Get your figures straight! Butter! Eighty per cent fat!’ I’d always assumed the music was someone like David Sylvian. You’d get quite avant-garde music in mainstream adverts sometimes. 

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

There were all sorts of musicians in the 70s and early 80s who did this kind of thing. My dad had an album by a man called Dave Greenslade called The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony. Essentially it was like a soundtrack to a story. So you had the story in a booklet with the LP and it was sci-fi. There were lots of quite quirky electronic musicians straddling that bridge between prog concept albums, also people like Tomita and Kraftwerk. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously the other thing with theme tunes in those days, is they’d be advertised at the end of programmes. ‘Viewers may like to know that the theme tune is available in the shops.’ They used to play TV theme tunes on the radio. At one point the theme to In Sickness and In Health by Chas & Dave was on the Radio 2 playlist.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

My girlfriend at the time, her parents had Radio 2 on, in the days when it was more conservative than it is now, and it would play the theme tune to Last of the Summer Wine.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I almost miss that. (I don’t really.) Or Ennio Morricone’s ‘Chi Mai’, from The Life and Times of David Lloyd George.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Which my mum bought.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Journey of the Sorcerer’ really doesn’t sound like an Eagles record, does it? It’s like finding out that the Blake’s 7 theme was really by REO Speedwagon.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

The music is such an integral part of Hitchhiker’s, or Hitchhiker as Douglas called it. He wanted it to sound like an album and there’s all sorts of really interesting pieces of music which they used, like Terry Riley’s ‘A Rainbow in the Curved Air’. The end sequence of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was inspired by ‘Grand Hotel’ by Procul Harum, as the sort of backdrop to it, although they weren’t able to use the piece itself. Douglas Adams was really ahead of his time – there’d been these big sci-fi films like 2001, with its incredible use of existing classical music, and the unique orchestral score of Star Wars – but to make a sci-fi comedy that used existing popular music… which is now a very voguish thing to do, if you watch something like Guardians of the Galaxy.

 

Hitchhiker has this contrast between mind-boggling crazy distances and the remoteness of space, and this very small human experience, which pop music reflects really well. I think unbeknownst to me, buying that single was actually not just the first step into a wider world of pop music, but a whole load of other things I came to really love later in life. So – an appropriate first choice of single.

LAST: GO_A: ‘Kalyna’ (2022, single, Brynza Music/Universal Polska)

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now, I didn’t really follow Eurovision last year, 2021, and so this came as a surprise.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

They were Ukraine’s entry. They’re called Go_A, pronounced ‘goa’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Apparently, means ‘go back to your roots’.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Under our radar, in this country, Eurovision has become a fascinating festival of music. And in particular Eastern European countries, since they started entering in the early 1990s, have brought their own music and cultural background into pop music. And to me, Go_A are one of the most interesting and exciting examples of that fusion that I’ve ever seen. Both their Eurovision song last year, ‘Shum’, and the one I’m selecting, ‘Kalyna’, are adaptations of Ukrainian folk songs. So the lyrics, the imagery, are very traditional, but they repurpose those into these very high-octane dance tracks. Maybe the closest in sound is that early 90s rave era, like The Prodigy. ‘Shum’, which they entered in 2021, was already a single and they rejigged it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And I think they edited it, because you only get three minutes at Eurovision for a song.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

There are two videos to ‘Shum’. There’s the Eurovision video, very entertaining, but the original video before it is amazing. It was obviously made at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, and the song is about spring. So in the video, they have hazmat suits, which brings that imagery of distancing and fear of infection. Then it ends with them joyously throwing off these masks and dancing. But they foreground the instruments. You’ve got one guy on synthesiser, another on tin whistle, and there’s a guy with some kind of drum-synth but he’s hitting it with a stick. So there’s this wonderful crash of very traditional music with contemporary music, and there’s this lead singer, who looks like she’s come from another planet, Kateryna, who’s like a sort of ethereal disco diva.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a particular style of singing she uses, which is known as ‘the white voice’, I believe: ‘controlled yelling or shouting’.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

That’s right, so it has this extraordinary power. And so when you saw them perform at Eurovision, they just absolutely blew everybody away. I have a false memory in that I thought they came second last year…

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Second in the public vote.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

And fifth overall. Yes, the winners were Italy, with one of their most popular bands, Måneskin, which is like Coldplay entering for the UK, and even that, while not really my cup of tea, was an extremely impressive performance. But ‘Shum’ is very evocative about coming out of Covid, and the arrival of vaccinations and things like that, and then when they did the video for the Eurovision entry, it shows the former site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which has got this extraordinary structure covering it over. Very much a sense of this bold, confident Ukrainian voice.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Where do you think your interest in Eurovision and in international music came from?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I grew up watching Eurovision with my family. At that time, the United Kingdom were regularly in the top three, and the songs were usually big hits. My sister became a huge fan of Bucks Fizz, who have undergone something of a reassessment in recent years – I think Bob Stanley wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian. They were possibly the last of the great British pop bands where all the material was written by somebody else.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Now you mention it, that’s a good point. There’s been the odd exception since – Girls Aloud, obviously.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

But Eurovision was never part of my mainstream love of pop music. It was self-contained, I loved it for what it was, Terry Wogan was still more witty than bitter about the scoring, and obviously there was that lovely unpredictability of live television. But as it evolved, into the late eighties, early nineties, it maintained my interest, and when all the extra Eastern European countries started to enter, I was really interested in what kinds of new music might come through this. Around that time, I had already heard The Wedding Present’s Ukrainian John Peel Sessions album, fell in love with that, and also got hold of The Trio Bulgarka’s album, so I was already very interested in Eastern European sounds and music. Very evocative, and for me, there’s also a weird overlap with dance music. There was also this Romanian guy, Toni Iordache, he played the cimbalom, hammers on piano strings, passion, crisscrossing rhythms and really odd sounds. I loved all that.

 

But the Eastern European entries gave Eurovision a bit of a shot in the arm. The songs submitted by the main countries who founded Eurovision were pretty lame, you were getting soppy Irish ballads, or the doo-wakka-day-type things. Most of those countries joining the contest were taking it incredibly seriously. The economic and political circumstances of their being part of the European Broadcasting Union means a lot to these countries, and the artists representing them to this day tend to be big stars in their own countries. We once saw this documentary about Eurovision [‘Nul Points’, TV Hell, BBC2, 31/08/1992], and one pundit was saying, ‘Why would you not have Right Said Fred entering for Britain?’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That was Bill Martin, who co-wrote ‘Congratulations’, and ‘Puppet on a String’.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

That’s him. We haven’t really taken it seriously.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Another thing in that same TV Hell documentary: you would hear types of music in Eurovision you weren’t normally familiar with. European pop music was seen as a bit of a joke, despite Kraftwerk and Serge Gainsbourg and so on. And obviously, Scandinavia is one of the biggest influences on world pop these days. One thing that happened is that, after ABBA won, there was a sizeable backlash from some people in Sweden who felt that Eurovision should be pushing for traditional Swedish music, rather than appropriating American pop music. And I can see both sides of that argument, but I like hearing things that are specific to a country. Obviously, these days you get a lot more of the same records being hits everywhere, and it wasn’t always like that. Also, it was interesting to see how different countries presented the contest on television. You heard different types of music, but you saw different types of television – Israel, say, would do it differently from… Denmark. There’s a bit more of a house style now.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I think one thing that needs nipping in the bud: the idea that Britain have not done well in recent years because we are disliked as a country or because of the Iraq war. Because France hasn’t done well either, or Germany. And they weren’t in the Iraq war. They’re the founding members, but they’re the ones who lost interest, and don’t take it seriously. Conversely, one of the things that became a pain in the arse with Wogan, was the countries voting in Eastern Europe for each other wasn’t political. There’s no reason why a Serbian would vote for Bosnia. It’s the music. The Eastern European acts who do well in Eurovision are massive stars in Eastern Europe and sometimes beyond. So they will put into Eurovision the people who are getting number one hits in their countries. And those hits will be played in Bulgaria, in Romania, in Serbia, in Croatia… It isn’t simply cultural proximity, because why wouldn’t Belgium give France twelve points every year, why wouldn’t Ireland give United Kingdom twelve points? It isn’t just cultural proximity. It’s not politics. It’s to do with the songs.

 

And then of course we come to the recent events in Ukraine, and I noticed that Go_A had released this new single, ‘Kalyna’, which is available to download. The proceeds from it are going to the Return Alive Foundation, and the group have also urged people to donate to the organisation. ‘Kalyna’ is about a rose, a broken kalyna tree was a sign of trouble and tragedy, and abuse of this tree was a shameful act. So this song chimes with modern Ukraine, while also looking into folklore. The group are touring this year, and the dates were delayed initially because they’ve been ‘fighting the enemy’!

 

It’s very powerful hearing these songs, at the moment. And it feels like a fitting milestone to me, having watched Eurovision since I was a child, not knowing as a child it was founded after the Second World War, to promote European harmony, co-operation and unity. Watching this very entertaining, often ridiculous, and very uplifting competition, going through all these different stages, the stage after 1989 at the end of the Cold War, taking us into this bigger Europe, and I think it still stands.

 

We’ve had Brexit, but we’re still part of that bigger Europe, so many of us still have experiences with people from Eastern Europe living in our neighbourhoods and being our friends and our colleagues, and now we’re seeing war in Europe in a way we haven’t seen for many years… all those virtues of Eurovision which sometimes seemed slightly silly are thrown into sharp relief. Seeing Go_A feels like a very powerful message of unity. So I downloaded the song partly because it’s a powerful thing, but also I really like them as a band. And Eurovision has brought me, even at 51, a new band. I would not have predicted that.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s nothing quite like hearing a brand new band, is there? It’s exciting.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Yes. And that same feeling happened with Metronomy, too, I remember The English Riviera felt like an important eye-opener, challenging and incredibly melodic. I am very pleased to say that, at the age I have now reached, I am still listening to new music, which is taking me to new places, and I hope that doesn’t stop.

——

ANYTHING: PETER GABRIEL: So (1986, Charisma/Virgin Records)

Extract: ‘Mercy Street’

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

There was a sudden moment when I really got into pop. During what would now be called Year 11 at school, I must have seen the video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ on the television and really liked it and really liked this song. And someone at school lent me everything he did, which led to me trying to find other records by Genesis with Peter Gabriel. And in those days, of course, no streaming, so you were basically borrowing people’s records and stuff out of the library.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Not long ago [26/03/2022] was the last-ever Genesis gig and Peter Gabriel was in the audience, and you said about that, ‘Can you imagine if he got on stage with them?’ The place would have erupted.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I think he probably didn’t go on stage for that reason.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Generous spirit.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Once I got So, things seemed to happen very quickly after that. I got into The Jam, The Police, The Clash, post-punk stuff, a whole range of things. I started buying music magazines. I remember reading about Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick, and thinking, That sounds like something I’d like. 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When I first met you in 1990, we obviously started to talk about music quite quickly – in fact you lent me the cassettes of the first two Thomas Dolby albums – and you appeared to have heard all music as far as I could tell. I must have asked you, when did you properly start buying records, and it was ‘about five years ago’. I was thinking, How have you done this?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

A big part of it was working at HMV. I got my first part-time job working there in summer 1989, and in those days you were allowed to borrow up to three items of stock at a time. Which was useful partly because sometimes something wouldn’t work, so it would have to be sent back, but also because it was useful to know about what you were selling. And you got a staff discount. In 1989, I was earning what then was one of the highest salaries on the high street. HMV and Marks and Spencer were the two best paid. It’s all relative, but it’s enough if you want to buy records. And I was living at home, I wasn’t paying any rent or bills, this money was going in my back pocket.

 

The other thing about working in a record shop, you learn about what people are interested in, even if you have no interest in it. You get to know about things. And I wanted to know as much as possible about the music, rather than the people.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting that you’re not, I think, really a musician.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Not at all! A mutual friend of ours once said to me, I’ve never known anyone with so many records who doesn’t play an instrument. I think If I’d been growing up in different circumstances, I would have been a drummer, or possibly a bassist. The rhythmic aspects of music are what I like the most, and it might be why the music I least like is hard rock, heavy metal, which feels very treble.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Going back to Peter Gabriel. I don’t think I’d heard one of his solo albums before So, I knew some of the singles. But I discovered things like ‘Milgram 37’ and was like, what’s Milgram? Turns out, it was, who’s Milgram?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Yes, and Kate Bush, via ‘Don’t Give Up’, so that’s leading me down other roads musically. And ‘Mercy Street’, probably my favourite track on that album, which led me to Anne Sexton. I went to London and found an American import of her Selected Poems [edited with an introduction by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George], which I still have. She’s still one of my favourite poets. So yeah, I mean, that album just opened me up.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Without wishing to paint the past too much as endlessly great, you did feel back then that artists in pop would reference books they’d read, films they’d seen. Not just their own lives, fine as that can be sometimes. Did you know who was going to be on ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Peter Gabriel?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

…I can’t remember.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Dolly Parton. Potentially a very different song. And unusually, for a classic album, the sequencing of So is now slightly altered. ‘In Your Eyes’, previously at the start of side two, is now at the end of the record. Where do you feel the song belongs?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

The other day, I was listening to it, I’ve got the remastered version, and the running order did catch me off guard, slightly.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

‘Mercy Street’ is not an obvious side opener, is it?

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

The original running order is very imprinted in my brain, so side two is a very different thing now to me.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Doesn’t happen very often, rejigging the running order of a major album.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

There’s Rumours which now has ‘Silver Springs’ [originally the B-side to ‘Go Your Own Way’] on it, at the end. That’s canon now.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I can’t think of any others apart from Morrissey ones, and let’s not get into that.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I went to see Peter Gabriel at Earls Court in 1987. My first concert, I’d just finished my O levels, that’s how old I am. I went on my own, and I was dropped off by my dad. He had such a great backing band, really impressive stage presence. And amazing lighting rigs – there was one point where he was doing, I think, ‘No Self Control’ and these lightings were kind of like hacking down at him like giant birds. He’s got a great sense of stagecraft, even when he wasn’t dressing up. And then the opening bars of ‘Don’t Give Up’ began, and I was thinking, ‘Well, how is he gonna do this? He can’t sing it on his own.’ But apparently that’s what he had been doing.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Singing the whole song.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

Yes. But on this occasion, Kate Bush emerges from the wings, wearing a big baggy jumper and leggings, like she’d just come from home. The whole place went crazy, because she’d not appeared live on stage in a big concert since 1979. It was an extraordinary thing to watch. But it wasn’t until after the event I realised I’d been present to something extremely unusual.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because she never did it again.

 

ALASDAIR MACKENZIE

I have a feeling she did it at an Amnesty concert that he did in America at one point. But it’s not normal. So I was very, very, very lucky to see that. In some ways, going to see Peter Gabriel at that time as your first concert was probably a bit of a tactical mistake, because it set such a high bar!

 

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You can follow Alasdair on Bluesky at @areamancm.bsky.social.

FLA 7 Playlist

Alasdair Mackenzie

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: TIM SOUSTER: Journey of the Sorcerer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lche9PlodJs

[The Spotify version of this playlist has the Eagles version as the Souster remake is currently unavailable on there.]

Track 2: THE JOHN DANKWORTH BIG BAND: ‘Tomorrow’s World’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC-cDQFO-C0

Track 3: TIM SOUSTER, EQUALE BRASS QUINTET: ‘Equalisation for Brass Quintet and Live Electronics’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzfE7jW0OGo

Track 4: ENNIO MORRICONE: ‘Chi Mai’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-81ftrB6SU

Track 5: PROCUL HARUM: ‘Grand Hotel’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LEG7a04K_s

Track 6: THE WEDDING PRESENT / THE UKRAINIANS: ‘Davni Chasy – John Peel Session’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iofwLmWaMNE

Track 7: TRIO BULGARKA: ‘Nauchil Sai Dobri’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzKO-iiX0aw

Track 8: TONI IORDACHE: ‘Ca La Breaza’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LQy6itfxEQ

Track 9: GO_A: ‘Shum’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBzdC8_RSfs

Track 10: MANESKIN: ‘Zitti e Buoni’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN1odfjtMoo

Track 11: GO_A: ‘Kalyna’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gOia6qznyQ

Track 12: METRONOMY: ‘Everything Goes My Way’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P2w_hq8YTk

Track 13: PETER GABRIEL: ‘Mercy Street’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYw9UrsFJa4

Track 14: PETER GABRIEL AND KATE BUSH: ‘Don’t Give Up’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjEq-r2agqc