Giants track by track

Giants is nearly upon us and I thought I'd give you a few details about each of the album's tracks:

ANOTHER CAMDEN AFTERNOON This was originally inspired by an article JJ read about a mugging that took place in Camden where the assailants actually ran down a woman in their car to get her bag…we wrote the music then eventually shed the lyrics apart from some backing vocals…there’s a lot of guitar in this…very greasy…very British…

FREEDOM IS INSANE You should never throw anything away…this was an idea JJ had that was left over from the Suite XVI writing sessions. We rented a house in Cornwall for two months and wrote 30 songs…I came down one morning and he’d been up for hours staring at the sea and writing this…I think it’s one of his best vocal performances ever…

GIANTS A song about captains of industry and how the world we live in today was shaped…and it’s pitfalls…”I’m glad my fathers’ not here to see what happened to men like him”…great line that says it all…and a nice guitar riff too…

LOWLANDS This was inspired by the first acoustic tour we did with Neil Sparkes in Holland and Belgium in 2007, and one mad night in particular when we were driving back from a gig to the hotel we were using as a base. We had plenty of brandy and primo Dutch weed and started to record ourselves accapella making up a song. Dave was in the front singing the keyboard parts, I was singing bass parts, JJ was singing the melody and Sparkes was keeping time on a champagne bottle with a broken drumstick…our tour manager Gary Knighton was laughing so much he could hardly drive and was getting secondarily stoned…you had to be there really…very funny…

BOOM BOOM A different feel from anything the band has done before…a sort of Stonesy rhythm with a jangle and a bit of swagger… about a girl…well there had to be one didn’t there?

MY FICKLE RESOLVE Some lovely laid back brush work from Jet here and Dave doing his trippy Euro Female style thing…JJ played acoustic bass on this and as with most of the album we tried to keep it as stripped back as possible…I like the lyrics on this one too, and Daves’ solo at the end is sublime…

TIME WAS ONCE ON MY SIDE JJ sang the lyrics down the phone to me when he first wrote them and I knew we’d have to make a song out of them…great words and Neil Sparkes providing some tremendous conga work, especially at the end…one of those songs that just barrels along and feels great you know?

MERCURY RISING This song reminds me the most of mid 80’s period Stranglers with a bit of production and a lovely swirling keyboard riff…JJ provides a ‘motif’ bass line which keeps the whole thing together and I do my best Beefheart impression on the vocals and slide guitar…don’t know how to describe this one…wacky? One of my favourites so far…

ADIOS (TANGO) This a heavy metal tango sung in Spanish…no really…I love this…

15 STEPS We’ve spent, off and on, nearly three years down in Bath preparing, sifting, rejecting and writing these and many other songs…there are loads that didn’t make it, and at times it was gruelling and very difficult…On these occasions when I went upstairs to bed I found myself counting the number of steps to the landing…and there were 15…15 steps to heaven and the salvation of my room…This song is purely about the wonderful old house we lived in writing this album…and some of the things that occurred there…

I hope you like it, I'm sure you will...

BAZ/ 13th January 2012