Well, I suppose this had to be written about one day…there’s been a lot of talk about it, much at the time, and a lot more since. While the facts (and dirt, if you like) will always be between just the 5 of us, the result, whichever way you slice it, was that it was Paul Roberts’ last album with the band…a band he’d fronted for 16 years, good or bad, indifferent or striking…never boring… Sad yet ultimately inevitable, an album did eventually find its way out of it all…and this is my potted take on it…
When I’d joined the band 6 years before in April 2000, Paul had already been there for a decade, and they were tight. There were a few ‘new boy/ old boys’ things obviously, how couldn’t there be? But after everything they’d been through and survived, they were still together…and a team. During the About Time UK tour of ’95 and the European leg of the Written in Red tour in early 97, when the band I was in at the time were guests, we’d become friends and had kept in touch…calling each other from time to time, and Paul even coming to see us one night at the Borderline.
My first tour with the band was a blur…I auditioned, got the job, and was on the road in Europe 10 days later. Paul helped me through all of that, and much more over the 6 years we were in the band together. As we ploughed our way through the next few years on the road, we all began to get a feel for each other obviously…and there were a few little dints and cracks that started to appear and show themselves occasionally…and you’d expect that too…we lived together an awful lot. We’d had a very successful album in Norfolk Coast, and the time spent writing and recording it will always be a very treasured time, for all of us I know…new beginnings often are. We worked incredibly hard during that time, and no one helped me through it more than Paul.
When it was time to start collating stuff for the next record, we all tossed our bits and pieces in, as we’d done with the last one, and arranged some time together to start sifting and rejecting at our HQ in Somerset. There were tensions in the house and Paul wouldn’t stay, electing instead to drive the 180 mile round trip every day from the south coast where he was now living, a practice he’d started during the Norfolk Coast sessions which were now an accepted part of his routine…there was a wall going up. My thoughts at the time were, we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot from the success of the last album. There were a few good songs and bits left over from the sessions for it… and as any musician will tell you, you never entirely throw anything away. We had ideas and impetus, but it was becoming more difficult to all be in the same room together for the time necessary time to work on all the stuff we had…it was fucking frustrating to say the least.
What I do know was that there was a padded envelope on the doormat one morning with some songs from him on a CD…but such were the tensions between him and JJ in particular at the time, it was never opened while we were there. When it was eventually opened and played we already had most of what we needed…having said that if there had been anything absolutely killer on it, it would have been used I’m sure. There wasn’t…but I suspect Paul knew that anyway. This only led to more disruption, and recording the songs for the finished album dragged on mercilessly.
Personally I just couldn’t understand why he wasn’t prepared to make the most of the platform we’d been given, what with the success of the last album and all…but Paul just got more and more frustrated and I think we all knew something had to give. He was also incurring the wrath of our beloved road crew, who were his very dear mates…and things came to a head when he turned up to record one day having not bothered to learn the words to the song we were doing…unusual for him…he was usually the consummate pro, always giving it 100% with whatever we were involved in, and never settled for anything second best…even during the most stressful times. It was the beginning of the end. Usually you have a set of lyrics written on a stand in front of you for reference, but that’s all they’re there for…you don’t read them verbatim as you sing. I wasn’t there, but Paul apparently sang like a robot…maybe he was making a point…the producer complained, a meeting was called, and Paul quit.
He was given some time to think it over and make a choice…go on the road for the next 4 months with an album he felt he had no real part of, with a band he was becoming increasingly distant from, and with a crew who didn’t want to work with him any more…or leave for pastures new with a clean break and blank canvas…I think anyone would have done what he did next in that situation to be honest. He’d completed about 2/3 of the record, and there are versions of the finished songs with his voice on them, and some typically good Paul vocals, but he’d just had enough…and to those ends, so had everyone else…16 years and he was gone. I was shocked but not surprised if that makes any sense…upset but not fazed. He was my mate and I know to this day he thinks I was complicit in his leaving, that there was some kind of under handed conspiracy to get rid of him…total bollocks…that just proves he never really knew me at all. He worked so hard to ostracize himself, but it would’ve blown over like all the other disagreements of the past if he’d stuck in…I agreed with everyone that something had to change and thought he’d given up…we all did…a real shame considering we were following up a successful record and needed to bond together more than ever.
At his last gig at Rock City in Nottingham in December 2005 a few months before, he’d stayed out of the way of all of us and didn’t speak to anyone before, during or after the show…he’d made a few gestures to the crowd during songs that people picked up on, then got into his car and drove away…rolling it on his way home and completely writing it off…thankfully he was unhurt but his mind was clearly somewhere else…and so it proved… It’s been 10 years since all that happened and I still think about him often…a process I’m pretty sure isn’t reciprocated…whatever…He’ll crop up in conversation or we’ll play one of the songs he originally sang on and I’ll try to think about how he interpreted it…but no one can walk far with a stone in their shoe, and he had to leave…if for nothing else but his own peace of mind.
SUITE XVI - TRACK BY TRACKUNBROKEN I remember JJ bringing this in one day. I think he had most of the chorus, and a few scraps of a verse. He started playing the verse bass line and I instinctively thought of a Nirvana style guitar line…a kind of loud/quiet/loud thing. It was obvious this would be a rocker of some description, and so the guitar is raw and dirty…I remember it being bollocking loud in the studio when I was recording it. JJ’s lyrics were autobiographical, and I liked the way he balanced it up with both good and bad elements. We decided to give it some light and shade vocally, so it’s me singing the chorus…somehow it seemed more amusing to have a big shaven headed northerner singing about wearing suspenders…to this day I’m not sure if that line was thrown in for effect, or whether JJ has actually done it…he hasn’t said…but knowing him…
SPECTRE OF LOVE I mentioned earlier about my personal issues, and this song reflects that for me…it’s about, and for, my daughter. Writing about things so personal, and letting the whole world see them, has always been a bit of a poisoned chalice. Its catharsis laid bare for the writer, and can sometimes come across as syrupy and sentimental…I didn’t want that…I’m not given to that publicly, but the turmoil I was in was all pervading and I had to do something I guess. By the time this was released my little girl was 2 years into a 5 year vow of silence against me…5 years without talking to me…she’s super stubborn like her dad, but even I hadn’t expected that…suffice it to say that I was caught in the usual rock and roll trap, and came out the other side a single man…my son was only very young, but my daughter was a teenager…she had a lot to say on the matter…
SHE’S SLIPPING AWAY I was reading in the paper one day about a chap who’d had an argument with his girlfriend. The row developed into a full blown fight and eventually he’d punched her and she’d fallen to the ground…hitting her head on the fireplace. There was blood everywhere in the sitting room and he couldn’t rouse her after a considerable amount of time had gone by…so he did what any self -respecting cowardly woman beater would do…fearing he’d killed her, he took her outside and buried her in the garden. Trouble was, she came round…and with a light dusting of soil on her face, and screaming, hammered on a neighbours’ door…he opened it to find a banshee covered in blood and mud and obviously stricken with horror…I thought it would make a great song…
Paul and I wrote the lyrics and it’s an example of a song with a very repetitive riff that just keeps going around the same chord progression for pretty much the whole thing. We introduced light and shade to differentiate the verses from the chorus’, and JJ switches the bass line around to punctuate that too, but the chord pattern is the same. We wanted to tell the story with and not distract from the narrative too much. Just before the guitar solo, which I played with a dropped D on the bass E string, the producer gives it a bit of the devil by detuning my voice on the word ‘soul’ to give it a demonic twist…you can also hear me laughing into the guitars’ pick up during the solo too…the little Gibson Melody Maker I used has at some time had the pickup taken out of it and put back in the wrong way round, which gives it a slightly microphonic tone sometimes…so I laughed into it and we kept it in… Listening to it again I can’t remember why we had the coda at the end on the fade…maybe just to change the pace…
SUMMAT OUTANOWT Meaning ‘Something out of Nothing’ in a northern/Yorkshire/ Lancashire type accent, as if you didn’t know, this was one of the first songs JJ and I had written in Cornwall the previous year. I remember the core bass line and guitar hook coming almost at once one night when we were jamming, and when I woke up the next day JJ had most of the lyrics…about a relationship he’d had with a girl in his youth who made mountains out of molehills, blowing everything out of all proportion…we’ve all been there.
The line about ‘the bad Albino’ came from the Da Vinci Code movie which we’d seen on a tour bus somewhere, and ‘the rabbit horror show’ from Fatal Attraction, and he just tried to get in as much ranting as he could, to show his anger…worked very well. I remember him sitting with his bass for hours in the kitchen working out the bass solo in the middle…honing it and streamlining it…then I joined in at the end on guitar and we had the whole middle eight. This was the first song to be recorded I seem to remember, and there’s an amusing out take of Paul venting his spleen…he either couldn’t get the words right, or was showing his frustration at somebody…either way you wouldn’t play it to your mother… A proper arse kicker this one with some great playing.
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN I remember a huge argument over this one. It brought the days’ work to an end with people walking out and refusing to come back. JJ had written it but Paul just wasn’t delivering it the way he wanted. Paul would always put his own spin on our lyrics, and mould them to himself…which is what you’d expect, but the cracks were widening by this time and I seem to recall the pair of them goading each other…both over reacting on purpose, and it just blew right up…2 crimson faced blokes right in each other’s faces…the day’s work was over and me and Dave went to the pub and Jet went home…dunno what the other 2 did but neither of them were there when we got back.
As a result this was one of the last songs to be recorded…and it changed almost beyond all recognition by the time we did. It started life as a medium paced rocker I think, but we were bored with it and it got shelved. By the time we looked at it again we were a 4 piece and wondered if we couldn’t give it a total overhaul. JJ had written the lyrics about George W Bush…Dubya to his detractors, and the ongoing war in the Middle East, and the more mellow direction we took it in suited it very well. I was determined to try and work out just 1 guitar part with as few overdubs as possible. There’s also a great atmospheric solo from Dave, with a counterpoint guitar behind it which I’d forgotten about until just now…but remember working on quite a bit to get it right…Paul plays percussion on this too…and I didn’t realise how much I liked this song until 10 minutes ago…
SEE ME COMING This was a piece that JJ had written for a Japanese animated version of The Count of Monte Christo, called Gankutsuou, which means The King of the Cavern. I think we just liked it and appropriated it for the album…I can’t remember the exact details, but as this was already released and part of a movie soundtrack, maybe we just liked the idea of having it on the album. In any case, I like the verses, and the turnaround rhythm, where we shout out the name of the lead character in the movie, E-D-M-O-N-D…the guitars are further up in the mix for this one too, which was a bit different… There are probably a few too many bleeps and keyboard effects in this for my liking if I’m honest, but overall a pretty good track, and one which I’ve not heard for a good few years…enjoyed listening to it again.
BLESS YOU (SAVE YOU, SPARE YOU, DAMN YOU) Driving along in the car with a friend one day around this time, the discussion turned to children’s nursery rhymes. There’d been a programme on the radio about the significance of some of them, the sign off being about ring a ring a roses, atishoo atishoo we all fall down…and it’s supposed connection to the Great Plague of London in the 17th century, which killed almost a quarter of the city’s population…but which is still unfounded. The conversation then turned to another saying from the same period, Bless You (you’ve sneezed once), Save you (twice), Spare You (thrice) & Damn You (you’ve sneezed 4 times…you’re dead)…I thought it was a great subject for a song.
I wrote the lyrics pretty quickly and JJ and I wrote some music, and there it sat for a while. I liked the idea of an old rock and roll song style intro, and came up with the chords…that kind of old doo wop feel to the rhythm at the top of the song…the first verse continued along and when it came to the first chorus I thought some female vocals would be great in there. During our time in Cornwall the previous year, one of the girls in the estate agents where we’d rented the house, turned out to be very musical and had a fantastic voice…lovely quality to her voice and a great command of pitch. We’d gone down to the local pub (The Bullers in Looe) one night to an open mic night and heard her sing…what a voice…I knew she’d be great for this song. So we called her and she came up and did a great job of making the chorus haunting and very atmospheric…it wouldn’t have had half the impact had she not sung on it…so thanks again Lucy.
The middle eight was a delight to arrange and play. JJ came up with a great chord sequence which was basically the intro chords in double time, then more added until they told a story all by themselves. Then Dave worked out the fantastic Elizabethan style baroque melody, and underpinning it all was some brush work by Jet that appears to go completely against the grain when you hear it on its own, but works beautifully…it goes right across the rhythm…I’d heard him do it months before and hadn’t let him forget it…it really works in this section. Then we thought we’d do the whole thing again only this time with a full band behind it…I got a bit bluesy at the end, pretty un-Stranglers…but it seemed to fit and the consensus was to keep it…no rules in this band… This is one of my favourite songs on the album, and one I still play acoustically when occasion allows…
Counterpointing dark subject matter again with a jolly upbeat tune and melody seemed to be key here, and we rattled this off in no time once we’d worked it through. It’s not easy playing as fast as this and keeping it tight, and we’ve been playing it live recently too…a first… As an aside, this was the song I mentioned earlier that Paul hadn’t learned before coming in to sing…ironic in that he singled it out in a demo playing session we’d had months earlier as a real contender and couldn’t wait to get his teeth into it…another sign I suppose of how disenchanted he’d become…
BARBARA (SHANGRI-LA) This was about my first ever girlfriend. I met Barbara when I was 15…there were a lot of firsts involved... She wore a particular perfume, can’t remember the name but can smell it even now…and I haven’t seen her for over 35 years. One day during this time I was at home and needed to rescue something from the attic. I was rummaging about through an old box I didn’t know was there and found a bag with some junk in it. I tipped it out and one of the things I saw was one of those perfume tester bottles you can get…not knowing what it was I unscrewed the cap and had a sniff…and there was Barbara in my minds’ eye…the smell took me straight back all those years…I couldn’t believe it and it had such an effect on me I told JJ about it on the phone the next time we spoke…"you should write a song about that” he said…
We tried all kinds on this, and it went through loads of adjustments and arrangements and even titles before we found it. I played 12 string Rickenbacker on it, I think you can still hear it somewhere in there…but I was floundering with the arrangement for days before JJ and I sat for a whole day on it and pulled it into shape…I had a real blank on it but he could see what I couldn’t. This was one of the first songs we recorded I seem to remember, and I also remember Dave getting hold of a theremin to try in the middle…giving it a ‘Good Vibrations’ vibe…but they’re so unpredictable and difficult to master we ended up using a virtual one instead…much more stable and user friendly…the original one is still kicking about somewhere though…saw it not long ago… Wonder sometimes if Barbara has ever heard this…
I HATE YOU The topic of much discussion at the time of its release…and he still won’t say who it’s about…though we all have our suspicions. This was an acoustic bash along that JJ came up with one afternoon…not sure when…don’t think he had it in Looe. Anyway he played it to me one day and I fell about laughing telling him we should use it. I’d just got hold of a Fender Stratocaster, not a model of guitar I have too much love for, but thought it would be great on this as a kind of Johnny Cash pastiche. This is an absolute blast to play. Jet’s brush work on this is superb and he really kicks it along in the up tempo sections. I’m pretty pleased with the harmonica I played on it, and JJ’s vocal is great, as is the walking bass line at which he is so adept…sitting right in the pocket with the drums. There was a jews, or jaws harp lying around and for a laugh I started playing it under the harmonica solo one day…never thinking it would be used…came in the next day and there it was in the mix…
The lyrics came pretty quickly, but I laboured long and hard to try and find the right guitar riff…it sounds simple on the record, and it is, but therein lies its power. It took a day of just playing it over and over until I found it…the test is always playing it to the band, and once they got their hands on it, it came to life…I knew it would make sense, but everyone working on it shifts it, and it pulls and pushes and moulds itself in to the finished article…took a little while, and there were quite a few different mixes of this until we found the right one… I’m very proud of this song. It’s actually really quite simple, but Dave’s keys and the driving bass just smack it along, and the chorus is really just one word…I like that…
This album signalled another turning point for the band…one that until it actually happened, we didn’t really see coming. It was my first stab at lead vocals, good or bad, and marked JJ’s return to lead vocals after a 16 year layoff. We went out and played a show 3 weeks after we became 4 again too…and that surpassed all our expectations. It took a while to get used to…but not too
long…by the summer of 2006 we had it down…and this album helped start yet another new era for us…
BAZ/ 14th SEPT 2016
