I’m back in London to rehearse for the summer festivals. I was in NYC for a few days, where I’m fascinated by the slew of shops, cafes and bars that appear almost daily in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, yet look like they’ve been there since George Washington discovered Brooklyn. One day there is an old bodega or an empty car repair shop, the next day there is a place that seems like it was there for a hundred years, with mirrors distressed by age, ancient flaking gold leaf signs on the windows, flickering lamps, floorboards worn down by ten thousand footsteps, pressed tin on the roof and Ancient Artefacts on every shelf. It’s a phenomenon you find a little of in other cities, but nothing like in new Olde Broolyne Towne. I don’t know if there is a term to describe it, but I call it “Faux Past”. If you find yourself in that plot of land between the Newton Creek, BQE and Broadway and discover a dive bar selling PBR and micro-brewed IPA that wasn’t there a week ago, or a wee boutique selling vintage ephemera that wasn’t there last month, or a dusty old diner selling organic burgers with arugula, blue cheese and walnut salad where the wait staff all have stunning tattoos and Edwardian Levis held up by braces/suspenders (apart from the Latino guys who actually make the food, bring the water and clear the tables) that you could have sworn was an empty funeral home last time you passed… and want to describe it to your pals, it would be something like: “I was in this café/bar/shop on Driggs between 7th and 8th. It’s cool, really Faux Past, yeah super old and shit, the chick behind the counter has the name of the place tattooed on her back on the footplate of a massive steam locomotive riding between her shoulders, yeah, a bit like the ‘Rembrandt’s Radio’ tatt the guy from that place on Franklin has on his arm. Cool. See you at 6. We’ll go check out that band.”
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I have enjoyed the Walcott/Padel/Duffy press-coverage of the last few weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen poets on the front page before. Usually they’re lucky if they make the obituaries, so it can only be a good thing. I’m a fan of Carol Ann Duffy and while I can wait to read her birthday poems for the Princes Royal or their horsey birds, gawd bless ‘em, I’m glad that more people will enjoy her writing. It is funny, beautiful, moving and, as poetry should be, completely unpretentious. As for Walcott and Padel… well everyone loves a good bitch-fight (it’s why we read the NME) and this one is a beauty. I imagine something similar happened in the early 19th Century – “Yeeees, he has a way with a stanza, and I give it to you that his mighty sense of meter is only trumped by the magnificent metaphor, but he’s a dirty old sod, that Byron, terrible wandering hands – can’t leave him alone with the missus, never mind young female students… except there aren’t young female students are there? They’re not even going to get the vote for another hundred years are they? Oh well, pass the port will you? What do you think of this one about the daffodils?”
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The USA tour was great – thank you to everyone who came out to see us, especially to those of you who travelled for miles and miles, like the girls in Tempe Arizona who were already waiting in the carpark with get well messages for Nick written on their windscreen as the tourbus pulled in with the rising sun. Thanks also to Born Ruffians who were great to watch each night. Oh, yeah and as this seems to be turning into a thank you list, thanks to all of the stage invaders at the Paradiso in Amsterdam for not nicking anything. You could have got at least 20 Euros for each of the tuners and a hell of a lot more for a Moog or a guitar. We appreciate the appreciation.
I’m sitting in Heathrow with an hour or so before my flight to Seattle so thought I’d put up a wee post. We’re heading off for a tour of North America, with Born Ruffians playing most of the dates with us, as well as appearing on Jimmy Kimmel and David Letterman. Coachella is in a few days and we’re playing on the same day as the guy I got my middle name from and Leonard Cohen, who I’m particularly looking forward to seeing. My ex-ex-girlfriend was obsessed with Leonard Cohen and used to give me tea and oranges on the unmade bed of her candlelit room, singing along to every word. Her ambition was to be one of his backing singers, but now works with the great Alasdair Gray instead, who recently had a long-lost mural rediscovered underneath year of wallpaper in a New Lanark pub.
We played Later With Jools Holland last week and were sitting in our dressing room at BBC centre on the day of the show when a guy with a pork pie hat wandered in.
Hi, I’m Lynval, I’m just having a look around.
Hi I’m Alex, I’m a big fan, this is Paul, Nick etc…
I realised who he was straight away. He was Lynval Golding, guitarist of the Specials who were also appearing on the show.
The last time I was in this room was when we played Ghost Town on Top Of The Pops in 1981. We played the show, came down here and split the band up. I haven’t been here since.
I love playing Later. I can’t think of another show where you hang around with legendary musicians like that. Carole King was on the show and hearing her sing those beautiful songs a few feet from me was incredible. It was the first tv show we ever appeared on and we were terrified. The show usually starts with all the musicians jamming together which was a wee bit intimidating, especially for Bob who had only picked up the bass a few months earlier.
It’s a jam in G said Jools.
WTF does that mean?” said Bob.
Paul pointed at the third fret of his thickest string and told him to hit it in time with the drums. This time we opened the jam, with Bob playing the line from Lucid Dreams, telling the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Carole King, The Mummers and The Specials that it’s in C sharp minor. You’ve changed, Bob. You’ve changed.
We have covered Heisa Ho, by the Dutch punk band De Kift, who are covering Love and Destroy themselves for a split single. Both versions are very different from the originals. De Kift are writing songs for a musical version of The Master and Margarita, which inspired the lyrics for Love and Destroy – the chapter when Margarita flies over Moscow, destroying the apartments of the enemies of her lover. The lyrics of Heisa Ho were based on the song from Much Ado About Nothing about the treachery of men: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more; Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea and one on shore; To one thing constant never. Oh aye, it’s true ladies, it’s true. Dream Again from our last album was based on a song from the Tempest - Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears and sometimes voices. Nick had written some music for a friend of his who was putting on a production of it. The song and sentiment are beautiful, but you feel like a bit of a burke trying to sing Elizabethan English with a rock group, so the lyrics were rewritten.
When we were at the NME awards I met Victoria Little Boots. I’ve remixed her great new single New In Town as a version called No-one Is Safe. I made it in a similar way to the Blood lp of alternative versions of our last lp, which Domino has just released. It’s still my favourite way to listen to the record.
It’s almost thirty years since the first British general election that I can remember. I vividly recall asking my mother who she was going to vote for as she was getting ready to go to my school which was a polling station for the day and being frustrated because she said it was a secret ballot and so wouldn’t tell me. She put her lipstick on and after pausing said all that really mattered was that it wasn’t going to be her. Unfortunately, she was in the minority. It was the first act in a two part drama that was completed in 1997 when Tony Blair invited the cream of Britpop to Downing Street to clink their champagne glasses with his and toast the death of British Socialism.
I’ve just got back from Australia and was awake at 4am with a jolt of jet lag. It was a great tour down-under and the audiences were fantastic. Thanks for the support – literally in the case of the Palace, Melbourne when I leapt across the gap between the stage and barrier and was caught. The Falls, Sunset Sounds, Southbound and Rhythm and Vines festivals were great. Hogmanay in a UFO in Lorne may have been the highlight. The most novel experience had to be being bitten by a poisonous spider in Busselton, Western Australia. I put my jacket on and thought I’d been stung by a wasp that had crawled into the sleeve. When I looked at my arm, there were two pinpricks at the centre of a swelling lump on my forearm. It felt like I’d had an injection, a cold sensation seeping along under the skin. I didn’t think much about it until my arm started to stiffen, but a passing doctor was very reassuring: the last person who died from a spider bite in WA was in 1955. I sat in my room, had a beer, watched Jaws on the telly and forgot about it. By the time of the gig the following evening it was fine.
Jaws still terrifies me. I first saw it when I was about eight. My dad let me watch it if I promised that I wouldn’t have nightmares. I had nightmares for a fortnight. I’d forgotten what it was that freaked me out so much until I watched it again. It wasn’t the head falling out of the bite holes in the hull of the semi-submerged fishing boat, it wasn’t Richard Dreyfus holding up the severed hand in the mortuary and it wasn’t Captain Quint sliding down the deck of the sinking Orca, blood flowing from his screaming mouth as the teeth closed around his chest bursting his lungs in a froth of tissue and terror. No, it was the mother calling for her son on the beach after everyone had scrambled from the shallow water, standing by the shredded li-lo saying “Alex! Alex! Alex?” That’s how good horror works, through simple selfish empathy. We are terrified when we share the terror, when we feel it's us who are vulnerable too. The idea that huge sharks ate wee boys called Alex was pretty extreme. It took a couple of weeks to be reassured that a great white was unlikely to swim into the bedroom I shared with my brother in a damp cul-de-sac of suburban Edinburgh.
It was perfect: seeing the great white bite made the white back spider seem trivial.
A few weeks ago Dan and I went to John Dent’s studio to master the lp. John has been mastering records for a long time. During his first engineering job, David Bowie walked into his studio with the reel for Jean Genie under his arm. He mastered records by Bob Marley, Motorhead, and The Clash.
Every stage of recording affects the character of the sound. Everything: how thick the strings on a guitar are; what type of valves are in an amplifier, the shape and size of the room in which it was played; how far the microphone is from your mouth when you sing; the type of microphone used; even whether the mixing console has transistors made with a nickel core or an iron core. In the same way, the method used for storing the sound has a massive impact on its character. Music played back from a CD sounds different from music played back from a vinyl record. It’s like watching a film: listening to a vinyl lp is like going to the cinema, a CD is like HD TV and an MP3 is like watching it on Youtube. It’s the same film, the difference is in the amount of detail.
Recently there has been discussion about the amount of compression on contemporary recordings. Compression is a technique where loud moments in the performance are turned down automatically. This makes the quiet moments seem louder in comparison. This is very powerful, but when overdone makes the sound harsh, expressionless and unmusical. We haven’t used too much compression mastering this album. This means that it won’t be as constantly loud as some modern records, but it also means that it will have a greater dynamic range - when we play softly it stays quiet, but when we play hard, it gets really loud, more like the way music sounds at a live show. If you want the overall level to be louder it’s simple – turn up the volume on your stereo. It sounds better that way.
This clip above shows us making a test pressing, to see how the music sounds once it has been transferred to vinyl. The final cut wasn’t filmed, as the digital camera would have interfered with the sensitive equipment. You can see John Dent, his assistant Jason and Dan ‘Lairy’ Carey, our producer. I’m behind the camera. John is making the cut onto acetate, using the lathe. At 1.25 he puts it on the record player to see what it sounds like when played back. I like Dan’s reaction – it reminds me of how he was whenever something good happened during the recording. When something terrible happened he’d ask for poison in his tea. Fortunately that only happened once. He recovered.
This is the cover of our new LP.
The photograph was taken by Soren Starbird by the side of the Barras in Glasgow. We’re shooting a series with photographers we like in different cities we end up in. The Ulysses cover was taken in Brooklyn by Guy Eppel and we were in Paris and Warsaw with Youri Lenquette and Joe Dilworth recently. They’re shot as imaginary crime scenes, invaded by the photographer. A slice of night frozen by flash. Weegee as
Cindy Sherman.
Two strips of tarmac walk into a pub. Order a half and half each. Then another. There’s something edgy about them. Two very hard strips of tarmac. Chasing whisky. Looking for trouble. There’s a bad vibe. No-one will make cat’s eye-contact with them.
Suddenly the door of the pub is kicked open. In walks a long thin strip of red tarmac. The two other strips drop their drinks and run for the bogs. Red strip has a Red Stripe. Says nothing. Leaves when he’s finished.
Ten minutes later the other tarmacs gingerly edge out of the bogs and return to their stools. One says to the barman:
Has he gone?
Aye, why? What’s your problem? I thought you two were supposed to be hard.
