Andrea wakes me in the middle of the flight, in the middle of the night, and tells me to come and see the mountains.
We’re just over the halfway stage of a 10-hour flight from Heathrow to Bangkok. I come back to life slowly, having been half asleep listening to music (Gil Scott Heron's Winter in America, which for some reason spooks me and gives me trippy, unsettling dreams). The cabin looks the way all long-haul flights look at the halfway stage – dead bodies in various poses scattered to the left and right, some with headphones, some with books spread open on their chests, some with eyeshades, with mouths agape, hunched in positions that you know they’ll regret in the days to come.
I’m groggy in the extreme. My brain can just about stand long haul flights - it’s my arse that gives me the problems. Despite the relatively comfortable seats provided by Royal Thai airlines, it feels like I’ve been sitting on a concrete block in the bed of a pickup truck coming up the Glenshane Pass for two and a half hours. I’m kind of glad to get up and walk around.
It’s almost completely dark in the cabin, with the occasional glow here and there of a laptop or a reading light. I’ve kicked off my shoes, and the pair of us pick our way gingerly up the aisle to the back of the plane. We stand near a little fold-down seat that is reserved for crew members. There are sleeping passengers all around us, and the lovely Thai cabin crew moving around among them in graceful silence. We must be close to the outside of the fuselage here, or there’s some air conditioning unit below – I can feel the cold under my feet through my socks.
Look at this, she says, and she lifts the window shade – blinding daylight floods in. I had totally forgotten that outside, of course, it’s broad daylight. Still on London time, it’s half past three in the morning and the crew have pulled down all the shades to create an artificial nighttime so we can sleep and arrive refreshed.
But outside the sun is blazing down on an extraordinary landscape. It’s a vast mountain range, capped with snow, shading down to deep sandy plains below, where wide, slow muddy rivers make their way across vast distances.
We ponder where we might be, and can only conclude that we must be over one of the ‘Stans’ - Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan... or perhaps Kashmir. In the distance we can see the icy contours of what logically must be the foothills of the Himalayas. It’s magical, this landscape below us, rumpled and veined - like silver paper used to be when you unwrapped chocolate bars in childhood.
After a while, we begin to see what look like settlements below, but we can’t determine their use – we can make out lots of little square structures, perhaps enclosures for sheep or cattle, lots of them clustered together. From here they look like little desk staples fallen onto spilled cocoa powder. Occasionally there is the glint, from a corrugated iron roof, perhaps. We take some pictures through the cabin window, and resolve to check the maps when we get a moment, and try and work out what we’ve seen.
We pull down the shade, and make our way in almost total blindness back to our seats, dazzled by the sunshine on snow and the bright band of clouds in the distance to the north. There are still four hours to go...
The closing scene - in ballpoint pen.SOMEONE ONCE said that the single most boring thing you can hear in the world is the conversation that begins: ‘I had a very strange dream last night...’
If you believe that’s the case, navigate away now.
My anxiety dreams have been fairly constant companions over the years. I can’t quite explain why I have them – I’m usually a fairly well-organised and balanced guy, but once a month or so I kick myself awake with my heart hammering. In the dreams a clock is always ticking. A gig or travel deadline looms – there’s a performance, and I’ve booked the entire band, but forgotten to tell the drummer where to go. Or I’m in an airport, wandering round the gift shop and suddenly realise I have left my suitcase somewhere stupid. Often there’s a mobile phone, but when I try to dial numbers, I find that the keypad is scorched and melted or the numbers are so small on the dial that they’re unreadable.
Stuff like that.
I hit a weird low/high last week. In this sleep movie, I’d been booked to play in a variety concert in a school on the outskirts of Belfast. An old red-brick school with tiled floors and shiny green walls and proper railings. There were literally dozens of acts – the event was going on all afternoon and evening. My father had picked me up at a bus stop outside Queen’s University and dropped me off at the school. I wandered around backstage and said hello to some familiar faces. And then I realised with a cold chill that my guitar was still at the bus stop.
Panic immediately set in – My father was still on the road, I thought, and had no mobile phone. I started trying to book taxis to take me back downtown to get the guitar. But none of the taxi firms had cabs available. It was okay, said the stage manager – ‘you’re not on for hours yet’. So I borrowed someone’s car – and as I tried to drive through the city, I came across all kinds of obstacles: Suicidal drivers, band parades, roadworks, multiple traffic collisions involving buses, entire schools of children crossing the road. I was thwarted at every opportunity, and started to panic about missing the gig, so I eventually turned back and resolved to try later. It’s OK, said the stage manager, as six foot women walked around backstage wearing feather headdresses. You’re not on for hours yet.
It was starting to get dark. My palms are sweating even as I type this. Somehow I got a cab and went back to the bus stop. The street outside Queen’s was now silent and dark, and the bus stop was - bizarrely - locked up, and dark as a garden shed. I peered in through the windows but could see no sign of my guitar or case in the darkness. I called the bus company. No-one answered the phone. It felt like it was getting close to the time when I would have to go onstage. I made my way back to the school, where the acts were now thinning out.
A strange thing now happened. The conscious part of my brain told the dreaming part that there was no real cause for concern – ‘the guitar is absolutely safe,’ it seemed to say, ‘in the room right beside this bedroom where you are asleep and dreaming this. When you awake, it will be right there on a stand facing the door’. And the figure of myself in the dream seemed to calm down. I strolled around the backstage area and found myself outside in an open area between two buildings. My friend, the pianist John McCullough was there, grabbing a breath of fresh air and waiting for his next appearance – he was playing with several of the performers who were on the bill. I mentioned the weird anxiety of searching for the guitar and panicking, when in fact everything was safe. He smiled at me and nodded.
- Yeah, he said. We wondered when you were going to wise up about it.
I asked him about the driving up and down to the city, the taxicabs, the phone calls to the bus company, racing back and forth from the gig.
- How long have I been doing this? I asked.
He looked off into the distance and then straight at me with slight pity.
- It’s been about a year, mate.
A year? The show had been going on for a year – hundreds of performers and audiences, right round the clock – morning, noon and night - for a year, and I’d been up and down the road a thousand times looking for my guitar before I could go onstage. I was stunned.
I remember thanking John and walking away on my own, through one of the buildings and out the other side. I came out of a door onto a set of concrete steps that led down to a pavement and a road. I sat down. Behind me there was a single storey, long, long school building: Red brick, slate roof with old-fashioned twelve-panel windows, and in front a low wall and railings. The building stretched off into the distance for miles and miles to the left and right without end. And across the road, lit occasionally by streetlamps, the grass also stretched endlessly in either direction, rising up from the pavement to form a hill, and into deep darkness beyond. It was completely and utterly still, a dark, warm, quiet summer night. I was conscious that behind me, on the other side of the building, lay the city, the glow in the sky, and before me was the country – endless empty miles of grass, trees, earth, darkness. And not a soul to be seen or heard in all of it.
The vision was so strong that I scribbled and scratched for days to catch it on paper and give some sense of it – and the above drawing was the closest I got.
Benbane Head from Dunseverick Old Harbour by Maurice Orr - 5' x 7', Fishleather, oils on canvasARTISTS ARE always supposed to stretch themselves in some way, they say – well I managed to pull myself into some strange shapes this year, by composing and recording a soundscape for an art exhibition by Maurice Orr.
‘The Screaming Silence of the Wind’ is on show at the Braid Arts Centre in Ballymena until October 29th, and will be on tour to a series of venues after that, including a visit to Flowerfield Arts Centre in Portstewart in 2012. Wherever it goes, the slightly strange 20-minute suite I put together will go with it.
I first met Maurice when he brought a series of Australian landscapes to Flowerfield Arts Centre a couple of years ago. He was very taken with the idea of having some appropriate sounds in the gallery to accompany the images. Maurice is a bundle of energy, a passionate and driven man who just twinkles non-stop. He’s an inspiration and a truly gifted artist – and I find it almost impossible to say no to people like that.
In a swift but probably illegal move, I downloaded a couple of MP3s – a sound effect of some cicadas and a didgeridoo track, mixed them together and created a 45 minute loop that repeated all day in the gallery. It was pretty effective. Looking at the blazing colours of the pictures with the noise in the background made you feel strangely sunstruck and thirsty.
Maurice at the lectern on opening nightAnyway, fast forward a couple of years and Maurice becomes the first artist in Northern Ireland to be commissioned by the Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad. Unlimited celebrates disability arts, culture and sport.
During a four week residency painting the extraordinary landscapes of Iceland, Maurice was struck by two things – firstly the similarity of the Icelandic coastline to that of his beloved Causeway Coast. The second realisation came after visiting a fish processing factory.
One of the by-products of the process are the fish leathers – the dried and cured skins of the fish, which feel soft and leathery and wonderful and can be died and used for clothing, shoes etc. Maurice began painting the skins and laying them on the canvases alongside his traditional brushwork.
The results are stunning – huge canvases that work as major works of art, but which are designed to be stroked and touched. At the opening night last Thursday, blind visitors ran their hands over the canvases and listened to the accompanying audio descriptions. In the background, the sounds I recorded to accompany the images played on a loop.
The fishleathers on display at the opening of the exhibition‘A blind lady once asked if she could touch my paintings,’ says Maurice in his introduction to the work. ‘Watching her explore my paintings with her fingers was a significant moment of realisation for me. Perhaps I should involve other senses, not just sight, to evoke atmosphere and convey ideas. I looked for ways to make my music more sensory, through the use of music and touch.’
Maurice and I met several times and he played me samples of music that he thought was appropriate. It was a huge challenge for me – the biggest hurdle I had to get over was that all the structures had to vanish. All of my songwriting rules had to go out the window. So I found myself listening to what sounded like droning, unpredictable atmospheres and thinking... It needs a melody. And some percussion... And a chorus...
But less is more. The results are very sparse – the sound of a howling wind with one lone piano playing some ascending repeated notes in search of a home chord. Some shimmering minor-key rumble with distant drums appearing at random. Maurice is thrilled with it, and so far everyone who has walked round the exhibition has been very complimentary.
I love these - the quick oil sketches of landscapes that Maurice completed in all kinds of weather in the wilds of Iceland.It’s been a wonderful experience – I hope it won’t be my last. Many thanks to Maurice for asking me, and for the support of Ballymena Borough Council and the Mid Antrim Museum for making it happen. At the minute the only place you can hear the music is at the exhibition. If I decide to make it available or downloadable, I’ll let you know.
This exhibition is part of Ballymena Borough Council’s programme of events to celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. Braille, large print, and audio MP3 players are available for this exhibition. Visit the Braid website for further details: http://www.thebraid.com/exhibitions.aspx
IT’S HARD not to get all your fuses blown by Apocalypse Now, no matter how many times you may have seen it.
Before the lights go down at the QFT, I take a quick look around me and see an audience that is almost totally male, of a certain age. It’s picked up a reputation over the years for being such a boy movie, after all. Some of them are here in packs, groups of four or five buddies taking their seats and settling themselves in again for the long ride up the river. You can sense their lips moving in time with the famous lines: ‘some day this war’s gonna end...’. The guy beside me chuckles low and soft under his breath in recognition as Willard intones the opening words: ‘Saigon... shit’.
Each time you see Apocalypse Now, you feel immersed in that world of heat and madness and chaos again. However, this was my first time to see the movie on the big screen – and it surprised me what a ravishing thing it is. The colours and the lighting are nothing short of superb. There are several moments when everything is seen through coloured mist, or in dappled light through leaves, that are breathtaking when seen on a big screen. The light on the water as the boat sails upriver into the night. The central performances remain impressive and the setpieces are still as spectacular today as they must have been when this first hit the screens in the early 70s.
The action scenes involving Robert Duvall’s airborne cavalry, remain some of the best sequences from any war film I’ve ever seen: Random violence and madness on an enormous scale, with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ as the soundtrack.
There are many more things you notice though, when you get the chance to pay attention, in a silent theatre, away from the distractions of the phone and the family - and the million other things that get between you and your concentration when you watch a movie at home.
I notice most of all the back-to-front construction of the film. It offers up its biggest setpieces in the first half – the first exposure to Robert Duvall’s unit, and their subsequent attack on the beach, and then the dazzling concert with the Playboy bunnies, way up river.
All of those are given away in the first half. Now, the years spent watching a million movies tells us that blockbuster films always build and build and build, towards an enormous climax. Instead, Apocalypse Now gets quieter and more philosophical, deeper into the jungle, into personal madness - and it becomes a very intimate, one-on-one meeting of minds between Willard and Kurtz. Note how the methods of killing become more antique as the movie progresses – we open with napalm (ordered in by radio like a pizza delivery), rockets, bullets and grenades - and we progress through to arrows, spears and finally knives.
As a piece of art, reducing the scale as the narrative progresses is a very interesting approach. As a movie, it’s an enormous gamble to take with the flimsy attention spans of a modern audience. These days, you can be sure that no major studio would allow the film to go out in this state. There would have been calls for a mammoth showdown, an apocalyptic bullet festival with a ten-minute moral tacked on at the end before the credits.
Instead, Kurtz is slain in a shadowy, obscured way – and he puts up no struggle. The film turns convention on its head the further along it goes. We move from daylight into darkness, from outer chaos to inner madness, from slash-and-burn warfare to close-quarters one-on-one conflict, from all-out war to an intimate human sacrifice, from The Rolling Stones to TS Eliot. The characters move out of the sunshine and into shadows, from the city and civilisation into the jungle, from the delta into the inner landscape. They put camouflage paint on their faces and lose touch with their identities. The last scene is Willard walking calmly through the silent, massed warriors, before getting back onto the boat and slipping away into the darkness. The face of a stone idol watches as the screen goes to black and the titles come up.
Towards the end of the film, there’s a scene with Kurtz reading from TS Eliot, and a brief reference to his famous line – ‘this is the way the world ends... not with a bang but a whimper.’
Having seen the film again for the first time in years, the line felt more and more appropriate: a sense of intimate, shadowy ends to extraordinary and dazzling stories.
LAST NIGHT'S car journey home was a welcome reminder to me of the importance of Paul Simon in my life.
In particular, it was a reminder of the importance of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, his 1973 solo album. I was listening to the just-released, beautifully remastered and expanded version of the album, which has come out on mid-price this week.
I also purchased the brand new Paul Simon album, So Beautiful or So What, which is a typically sunshiny, African-influenced, percussion-drenched affair. But I’m afraid like so many of Simon’s recent releases, it is refusing to leap out of the speakers and grab me.
There Goes... is a different proposition entirely, though – from the moment those crisply-remastered drums rat-a-tat at the start of ‘Kodachrome’, I’m hooked again. It takes me back to the late 80s, when I bought a scratchy vinyl version of this album in a charity shop and it became one of my major favourites.
By that stage I already had Graceland, and like everyone else of my generation, I’d grown up listening to Simon & Garfunkel. And I was under no illusions about the main’s writing abilities. Even in my teens, beginning to take literature seriously, I knew that ‘America’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ were as worthy of the word ‘masterpiece’ as any epic poem or Shakespeare play.
In a charity shop in Antrim I found Simon’s eponymous 1971 solo album and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and I bought them out of curiosity, and (I suppose) to fill in the gaps between Bridge Over Troubled Water and Graceland (I always one of those nerdy ‘fill the gaps in the collection’ kids).
The thing about There Goes... is it’s such an uncool invitation to the listener – it has that AWFUL title, the kind of album title some granddad record company executive would have dreamed up. It also has what I believe is the worst cover of any Paul Simon album – that high-school-art-project style collage which supposedly represents each of the songs pictorially.... Ugh.
But there are so many glorious songs on there – ‘American Tune’, which will remain one of Simon’s greatest achievements, ‘Take Me The Mardi Gras’, ‘Something So Right’, one of the best love songs ever written, ‘Loves Me Like a Rock’... But also glorious little gospel nuggets like ‘Tenderness’. It’s wonderful. Lyrically, I believe Simon is treading water a little bit here. On the next album, Still Crazy After All These Years (also out on midprice this week), he would start stretching his muscles, reaching for images that would bite deeper. And that incisive, smart writing would continue through One Trick Pony and Hearts and Bones and beyond. Here, ‘American Tune’ remains the high point for imagery – ‘the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea...’
But I hadn’t realised how much Simon has seeped under my skin over the years. As I was listening to ‘Was A Sunny Day’, I realised how much I’ve always coveted his images and his use of language: ‘not a negative word was heard, from the people passing by’, he sings. And I realise one of my recent songs contains the line ‘people stand aside as you go walking by, negativity just dies upon their tongues’. The shared sense of a street scene, people moving, sunshine and positivity. Of course, there’s no way you’re conscious of these things happening, but it’s interesting that it enters you in 1987 and stays there without you knowing.
And the whole thing is soaked in the soulful, groovy atmosphere of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where much of it was recorded with the famous Muscle Shoals house band – pianist Barry Beckett, bassist David Hood and Roger Hawkins on drums. If you take Simon’s vocal off ‘Take Me To the Mardi Gras’, it could easily serve as a Staple Singers track. The drum sound and the arrangement and vibe are deeply familiar.
(If you want to know the value of remastering, listen to the sound the Dixie Hummingbirds make in the closing moments of ‘’Tenderness’ and tell me that’s not audio heaven – to be closely followed by the ravishing sound of the acoustic guitar which opens ‘Take Me To the Mardi Gras’... My ears can die happy now)
A couple of years ago, I had the honour of visiting the building where this album was recorded. With a Sunday to kill in Nashville before we caught our flights, Ralph McLean and I had been invited on a road trip down to Alabama by David Briggs of ASCAP. Briggs is a Muscle Shoals native, who has spent a lot of time in these studios over the years.
The site of the former Fame Studios, 3614 Jackson Hghway is the same space where the Stones recorded ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’ and much of the Sticky Fingers album. It’s a long, fairly featureless shoebox of a building that stands behind a patch of grass at the side of the highway. The frontage is covered in stone cladding that gives it a kind of prehistoric, snakeskin look. Across the road is an old, old cemetery. They say that if you go right down in the back of the building, you can see Mick and Keith’s names where they wrote them on the wall.
The building is now privately owned, and on the Sunday we visited, the drapes were closed and no-one was around. So we stood where they stood, we posed for pictures in front of the building and we got back in the car and drove off, our Muscle Shoals pilgrimage ending as the light started to fade.
About half an hour later, with my eyelids drooping in the backseat as we made our way back to Nashville, we passed a highway sign. I took out my phone and texted Andrea, back home in Ireland: ‘I just crossed the Alabama-Tennessee state line,’ I said.
1977. I WAS twelve years old. A strange piece of graffiti appeared in my neighbourhood. On the gable wall of my Auntie Pauline’s house, someone with an aerosol can spraypainted the words ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ across the bricks.
(for those of you who missed this period of rock’n’roll history, the Sex Pistols' troubled one and only 'proper' album bore the title ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols’)
In late 70s Harpur’s Hill, Coleraine, there was no shortage of graffiti, you should understand, but this was something of a departure. It didn’t mention football teams, or seem to include any sectarian ambition at all. I didn’t know it at the time, but it spoke for a generation for whom ‘ambition’ was a meaningless word.
I haven’t been round that way in years – maybe it’s still there…
I never got the Punk thing when it was happening. I was too young, and those guys scared the living daylights out of me. I was still listening to The Carpenters or Leo Sayer at that point, I imagine, or my parents’ collection – Simon & Garfunkel or Glen Campbell. A few years later, I plucked up the courage and bought the Sex Pistols’ single ‘Silly Thing’, when McLaren put out the barrel-scraping ‘The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle’ album. By that stage of course, it wasn’t really the Sex Pistols any more. Johnny Rotten had left the band and Sid Vicious was beginning the slow motion car crash of his last year.
Punk was a badge of cool at my school, Coleraine Inst. By then, of course, it was all over and it was 'safe' to be a punk, like professing to have worked for the Resistance after the war was over. It was an all-boys grammar school where the sons of middle class businessmen flirted with the outward signals and codes of a gang that would have pissed in their flower beds and shot their Labradors, given the chance. Looking back it was kind of absurd to see these sons of car showroom owners, captains of the First XV, sporting 'Anarchy' badges. But at some point, I suppose, we all have to stand apart from the generation that went before.
By the time it caught my interest, it was already over, and everything was being called 'New Wave' – Talking Heads, The Jam and so on.
It’s been utterly fascinating to read England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s story of the era – a well-written and pretty exhaustive account of the punk movement, as seen through the shape-shifting role-play games of Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols. The book does for 70s Britain what Iain McDonald’s remarkable Revolution in the Head did for The Beatles and the 60s – it’s an unputdownable social history of the time, and shines a light on a dark little corner of contemporary culture – an alleyway where you could quickly get your head kicked in if you weren’t careful.
One of the early pieces of artwork associated with the Pistols was Jamie Reid's publicity image for ‘Pretty Vacant’ – two buses, with destinations clearly visible above the windscreens: ‘Boredom’ and ‘Nowhere’. Not a good time to be growing up – lengthening dole queues, failing social services, the sense of pride that followed the Second World War on the wane and nasty public housing.
As for the Pistols, the early explosion of energy and pent-up bored aggression quickly hit the brick wall of the establishment, where record sales figures were deliberately manipulated to prevent 'God Save the Queen' going to Number One. And all of the councils across the country closed ranks, preventing the band from playing anywhere. Meanwhile, the internal tensions of the band threatened to pull it apart at any second, and their relationship with McLaren was an awkward dance of domination, threats and instability.
This is a wonderful book, but it often makes for uncomfortable reading. Towards the end, I felt like an onlooker at the exhausted, blood-soaked end of a bullfight, as Sid Vicious came apart in public, Rotten sued McLaren and together they let everything freewheel off a cliff. And everyone stood back and watched as the world they had created smashed and smithereened into pop history.
The movement they had created spun off within two years into something else entirely – s scene that had to be based on something with a more long-term future. And THERE was the ticking time bomb that lay at the heart of the Punk aesthetic. The whole point of it was that it couldn’t, by its own definition, last. It was all based on short punches to the solar plexus. And to succeed meant that you had actually blown it. This was the dilemma that The Clash had to face up to. The fact that they actually had an interest in selling records, and making a long term career out of it, meant they had somehow sold out on the early promise – the conviction that punks were losers, going nowhere, and they therefore spoke on behalf of all the losers, the nowhere kids who had been rendered voiceless by their own society – fit for the dole queues and not much else.
Here’s Savage's key paragraph on the subject:
'However, contained in this package were problems which would take years to work out. How could you be tough and a loser at the same time? How could you play with right-wing imagery and not get trapped by it? How could you take a script from Rimbaud and avoid the mythological trajectory of that poet's life? Built into punk from the beginning was not only a tendency to self-destruction, but a short shelf-life. Despite what many of the groups professed, the movement enshrined failure: To succeed in conventional terms meant you had failed on your terms; to fail meant that you had succeeded.'
Note: The fact that McLaren died last year has rendered this edition of Savage’s key text already out of date, so you can pick this up in HMV for less than a fiver. It’s hefty, but if you have even the slightest interest in this rich little slice of pop history, I urge you to make the investment and stick with it – it’s a must-read.
(This completes the series of blog posts about the new songs... thanks a million if you've been reading for the last ten days. I hope you've enjoyed the journey)
ON THE JANUARY trip to Nashville, I was still recovering from a bad flu and chest infection that had laid me low at the start of the year. The city was frozen, with snow along the highways and no-one coming out to the gigs. The trip was a mixed blessing – some of the shows were uplifting experiences and others felt like a waste of time and energy. And sometimes you couldn’t tell one from the other until you were on the way home.
I had tried to line up some meetings. One e-mail contact who had promised a meeting stopped answering my e-mails as soon as I landed on US soil. Another hot contact turned into an e-mail that bounced back. Two others didn’t answer their phones. All entirely typical Nashville. I was visiting one of the remaining leads, a contact, at his office in the city – and we began talking about the music industry.
- How many songs have you written? He asked me after a while.
I considered for a second. About... 49, 50? I said.
He nodded and thought for a while.
- How many of them, if you were honest, do you think are suitable to pitch to publishers, labels, recording artists and agents in Nashville?
(How do you answer that question? The songwriter is the LAST person to ask – the most finely crafted thing you think you’ve ever written could lie DEAD ON ITS BACK as far as the audience or the industry is concerned. It’s almost impossible to tell)
I wracked my brain. I thought about songs that I thought had potential. I tried to imagine Garth Brooks singing them. I imagined Faith Hill singing them. I imagined Kenny bloody Rodgers singing them.
- I’m not sure, I said honestly, after a pause. About nine or ten?
- Hmmm... How long are you here for?
- Until Tuesday.
- Tuesday, huh? He said, and looked out the window.
- You see, he said, starting to explain gently, the guy who brought you here today in a CAB has 25 songs ready to pitch to the industry, and he’s here banging on my door 365 days of the year. You’ve got NINE... and you leave on Tuesday.
I know he was only trying to give it to me straight, in case I had some rose-tinted version of the Nashville fable in my head. But the enormity of the task suddenly became clear. You’re a songwriter, and everyone says you should take your songs to Nashville. But of course, the blindingly obvious thing that occurs to you every now and then is... They’ve already got a million more songs in Nashville than they know what to do with. And every hopeful kid who gets off the bus brings another couple of dozen. It sometimes feels like trying to knock down the Empire State Building by throwing rocks at it. I’m not saying songwriters shouldn't go to Nashville. But they should all be aware when they arrive of how many other people got here the day before they did.
I remember going back to the hotel and looking out the window at the snow on Broadway, and this song kind of unfolded itself in about an hour. I felt very dispirited, and I missed my baby and I was convinced that the best thing I could do was just go on home. Because whatever I was going to do would start with me. It would start in my own hands and heart, so I should just go home and do good work.
Within a week of coming home, I was in the studio making a start on the album. And this was the first track we recorded.
The musicians on this track are:
Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars
Clive Culbertson – bass
John McCullough – piano
Paul Hamilton - drums
NASHVILLE SNOWFLAKE - lyrics
From my hotel room in Nashville,
I see it starting to snow:
both sides of the Cumberland River and Music City Row.
Falling on the sleepless and the homeless,
on the geniuses and fools,
on the parking lots and the backyard swimming pools.
And it makes me miss my baby,
a little bigger than the day before.
And whatever was important between us, is just a little more.
CHORUS:
Every song is a snowflake that wants to live forever.
WHEN I WAS growing up on the Harpur’s Hill housing estate in Coleraine, my parents had a friend who lived nearby who would call round every now and then, sitting in the kitchen smoking with my mother and drinking tea. I don’t know how she became a friend. Maybe one of those conversations at the local shop that turns into a companion, I don’t know. I must ask my mother.
In that way that families do, we started referring to her as my ‘aunt’, although there was no family connection at all. She was a lonely, tragic kind of figure who had already lost her husband, and who herself died way too young. I have a shapeless memory of her as a figure in a fur coat who handed me 50p coins every now and then and at Christmas, bought me inappropriate gifts for a 12 year old. A Jim Reeves record. Six pairs of socks. A joke book.
The reference to The Great Escape was the memory that the movie - starring Steve McQueen - was on Ulster Television every three or four weeks, usually on a Sunday afternoon. And like all boys of my generation, I never tired of watching it. I must have seen it eleven or twelve times and I'd still watch it if was on telly tonight. But when visitors called on a Sunday, you always had to turn the TV off - and if The Great Escape was on, that was just... awful. To sit on the sofa sipping tea and answer questions from older relatives about how you were getting on at school, when you KNEW that right at this moment, McQueen would be roaring across the fields on that motorcycle, leaping towards that barbed wire fence and freedom.
Harpur’s Hill wasn’t such a bad place to grow up – there’s a picture here of me with my cousin Hazel, standing outside the house on Hawthorn Place. I’m wearing my Stoke City Football Club top. That’s a whole OTHER story.
When my mother and father and I first came to the estate, moving over from Killowen on the other side of the river, we lived in the maisonettes near the shops, and they could be grim. I was very young, and have murky, vague memories of dark alleyways and being surrounded by railings and concrete.
Then we moved to ‘the Wimpy’. So-called because it was built by Wimpy Construction, it was an extension to the main Harpur’s Hill estate that consisted of endless ribbon streets and back squares, all named (apparently) after freighters that used to come into the harbour at Coleraine. We were on Hawthorn Place, but there was also Silverthorn, Blackthorn, Quickthorn, Redthorn... And each of them had multiple personalities: Blackthorn Place, Blackthorn Close, Blackthorn Avenue, Blackthorn Terrace... it was a nightmare trying to find anyone. The houses were breezeblock and pebbledash, constructed without central heating, as I remember.
The layout of the estate threw up strange patches of greenery – triangles, trapezoids, long rectangles - and we would bravely throw down our jumpers and try to imagine them as football pitches. Quite often there would be a telephone exchange cabinet in the middle, or a lamppost to be negotiated as you lined up a free kick.
I grew up in front of the TV, lying on my stomach doing my homework while toasting my feet at a three-bar electric fire, one eye on my sums and the other on Blue Peter or Scooby Doo. I was an only child, and I had a big bedroom at the back of the house that overlooked the back square, so I could see what all the kids of the neighbourhood were up to.
(I could also occasionally see an attractive neighbour who brazenly sunbathed topless on occasions. That’s something I haven’t seen from the back window of ANY house I’ve lived in since)
I’m digressing. My ‘aunt’ passed away suddenly one afternoon while I was out at school. The whole drama was over and gone by the time I came home. I remember feeling a fleeting sadness. I think that in dealing with death, teenagers cross a line around the age of sixteen. Before that, they don’t quite have enough connection with family friends and relatives for death to really sting. They shrug, and they stand at funerals tugging at their collars. After sixteen, they’re tasting adulthood - and death is like the ultimate opportunity to gush tears and get all morbid and philosophical. Some of them write poems and turn into Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe.
I don’t remember it making a big impression on me, but the narrative and the set design must have stayed with me over the years. Once I started writing this song, it gushed like an oil well. It began life, believe it or not, as a slow waltz called ‘Yesterday’s Whiskey’. But it quickly became this Young Dylan pastiche. When we recorded, I battered hard on a tambourine for four and a half minutes and my arms ached for days afterwards.
On the day that my ‘aunt’ passed away, a bunch of concerned neighbours kicked in the front door and found her literally dying on the kitchen floor. This would have been 1977 or 1978, in the pre-mobile days, when only a couple of people per street would have a telephone connected in the house - so you used the phone box up the street. The one at the top of her street had been so badly vandalised that it was unusable. My dad remembers running down the street to the next available phone box, knowing that precious seconds were ticking away. By the time ambulance arrived, it was too late.
I drove up around the estate a few days ago, but I couldn’t find for sure the street where she lived. Once I left the immediate streets where I lived, my grasp on the geography of the place was slippery. I could find our old house, and the back square where I played. I could even remember most of the names of the people who lived in the houses backing on to the square. I could look up and see my old bedroom window. I could find the triangular, sloping patch of grass where we played football. All of it seemed a lifetime ago. Which of course, it was – three and a half decades. It’s funny how much you hold onto when you think you’ve left it behind, all those years ago.
The musicians on this track are:
Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars, percussion
Clive Culbertson – bass
John McCullough – electric piano
Paul Hamilton - drums
THE GREAT ESCAPE - lyrics
Well she came from good people, but no-one was with her,
and she moved to our estate to get her act together,
and if our lives are a novel, hers was torn at the edges,
sitting crying in the kitchen, smoking Benson & Hedges.
They were painting up the kerbstones for the 12th of July
My mother said I couldn’t join in, but she wouldn’t say why.
She wore this fur coat that always smelled kind of funny
And every time she came around she would always give me money
And at Christmas she’d get blue and let the film unwind
Sad tears and bad years and Blue Nun wine
We called her my aunt but we never were related
She gave me a Jim Reeves record, I don’t think I ever played it
(Welcome to my world)
Did we still win the war?
I was sleeping on the sofa when they called the final score.
And I’ll miss ‘The Great Escape’ for this.
Somebody blow me a goodbye kiss.
She’d lost her husband Willie to a heart attack,
and she was told she’d go the same way if she didn’t cut back.
Everything in her house was made of plastic and nylon-
when you looked out her back window there was a fence and then a pylon.
Sometimes the house was spotless, other times it fell apart:
Tobacco stained ceilings and the Sacred Heart
(Hail Mary full of grace)
Did we still win the war?
I was sleeping on the sofa when they called the final score
And I’ll miss ‘The Great Escape’ for this.
Somebody blow me a goodbye kiss.
I was just a little kid but I knew it couldn’t go on,
I came home from school one afternoon and she was already gone.
The neighbours came running and they kicked down the door,
and they found her lying gasping on the kitchen floor.
When your heart’s that big and broken, it can’t always be trusted.
My father ran to call for help, but the phone box was busted.
(Is anybody there?)
Did we still win the war?
I was sleeping on the sofa when they called the final score
ANDREA AND I moved to Belfast in September of 2009, and we rented a tiny little house on Hillfoot Street in Strandtown in the East of the city.
By the time we crammed our furniture and books and my guitars in, we found we had to go through doors sideways. We shared a spare room as a study, and when we worked together we would sit almost literally back to back.
I’d never lived in a city before, and I became intoxicated with it in the first few months. The limitless possibilities of where to go, things to see, the buzz of the traffic and the happenings.
It was an Indian summer, and we seemed to be spinning through the city on our bikes all the time, rattling down Mersey Street and under the Harland and Wolff cranes, making new friends and trying new places for coffee, for drinks.
It was the first time we’d made a new home together, and it felt like our first big shared adventure. With Andrea it always feels like that. It felt like we had taken ownership of the place – hence the line: ‘We’ll walk this city hand in hand, from Strandtown to the Holy Land, and all the restaurant windows shine down on our plans’.
Musicians:
Anthony Toner, acoustic and electric guitars, harmonica
WHEN MY DAUGHTER Sian was in her teens, she went through a phase of going out to Kelly’s night club in Portrush on the weekend. It was a huge club complex with about eight bars and venues, and it attracted vast crowds every Saturday night.
The worst thing about going to Kelly’s was always the struggle of trying to get home – by the time she was leaving, there were no cabs to be had. I used to beg her to just call me, even if it was three in the morning. I would rather have got out of bed and driven over to pick her up than left her to hitch a ride home with some random stranger. But occasionally she would wander in at dawn, soaked to the skin, having walked four miles home in the rain in her Converse sneakers.
And the lyrics are all about that north coast nightclub scene, and the great little rock bands that blossomed up there in the early 90s. I got the phrase ‘it’s hard to believe that they’re still unsigned’ in my head and it wouldn’t go away. It’s ironic – there are fewer places to play than ever up there these days - and even less chance of anyone getting signed.
The musicians:
Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars, percussion
Clive Culbertson – bass
John McCullough – piano
Paul Hamilton – drums
Linley Hamilton – trumpet
David Howell - saxophone
STILL UNSIGNED - lyrics
It’s too cold to be out in her Converse sneakers.
And her head aches from standing too close to the speakers.
Now she’s out in front of the club with the oblivion seekers,
and the taxis are passing her by.
She got a mark on your neck from a boy who kissed her,
and then he said she went to school with his older sister.
He sort of offered her a lift, but he must have missed her,
and now it feels like it’s starting to rain.
CHORUS:
Oh the band are so cool, but they’re still so young.
They make everything sound like they’re having fun.
And when they sing, you can taste the water turning to wine -
It’s hard to believe that they’re still unsigned,
it’s hard to believe it but they’re still unsigned.
She should’ve taken that ride with somebody’s dad,
with the radio playing something warm and sad,
and he’d be teasing her about how many drinks she had,
and trying to look down her dress on the sly.
CHORUS
It’s just two guitars and bass and drums.
They keep rocking all night ’til the kingdom comes.
And when they bite down hard, they could really hurt someone.
SOME YEARS AGO The jazzy, bluesy licks you're hearing on this track come courtesy of the fabulous Mr. Ronnie Greer.I heard about a school party – some end-of-exam celebration - that had gone out to one of the bars in Coleraine. Alcohol is an accelerator – it can make happy people giggly, tired people fall asleep, affectionate people can get horny. Deep thinkers develop frowns – they lean on the bar and they tell their life stories. They invariably have some kind of important message for you, if they can only get to it.
But alcohol can get angry people into all kinds of trouble. And under the happy-go-lucky exterior, some of our kids are carrying heavy burdens of anger around with them.
Half way through the night, one of the girls came out of the washroom with her arms all criss-crossed with wild slashes and deep scratches.
It was pretty obvious that the injuries weren’t life threatening, but in a matter of minutes, they had all suddenly become actors and actresses in her self-created melodrama. It seemed like the only appropriate thing to do was follow the opening act with the second. So they rushed her to casualty, where she wailed and wept about her life and her ongoing predicament, and the rest of them stood out in the car park with her bloodstained mobile phone and tried to get hold of her mother.
The image never left me, and as I was writing this song, I embellished it with other stuff I’d heard over the years. Every generation has its own share of the wild-eyed and the luckless. And poverty and lack of opportunity and loneliness still do the same things to people as they’ve always done.
On a lighter note, as for the wonderful guitar playing on this song, it’s my dear friend Ronnie Greer. The first time I met Ronnie I was a fan – I’d gone to see his band on a number of occasions, which at that time featured Kenny McDowell on vocals, and I was always blown away by his playing – he swings mercilessly, has great tone, great licks, and never wastes a note. He’s always had a great band, too – Alan Hunter on bass and Colm Fitzpatrick on drums.
A few years ago, John ‘Doc’ Doherty and I opened for Ronnie’s band at a blues festival in Antrim. A few months after that, Kenny left the band, and Ronnie decided to do a series of gigs with special guests. I was delighted to be asked to sit in as guest on slide guitar for a gig in Bryson’s. I went along for a rehearsal with the band and things locked together so neatly that he asked if I would consider joining permanently. I delightedly accepted, and I’ve been there since - and it’s a joy to be part of that line-up. I get to hear this dazzling guitarist - for free.
I’d been thinking for ages that I’d love to have him playing guitar on one of the albums, if I had a track that was appropriate. ‘Way Too Dark’ seemed to call out for his approach. Arriving at Clive’s studio, Ronnie admitted he didn’t have much studio experience, and was unsure if he could deliver what we needed. He went into the recording room, set a Fender Champ on the floor, tuned a Telecaster, plugged it in and selected the neck pickup. Clive set a Shure SM57 microphone in front of it and we rolled the tape. He was perfect, and he was done in about 25 minutes. Good as he had been from the start of the track, Clive and I stood with our mouths open as he pulled out those sliding jazz chords at the end. Every lick went higher and more interesting. Also funky and fantastic on this track is John McCullough on electric piano.
As I insert the lyrics for this track, I’m reminded of that teenage girl with bandaged arms.
We should be talking to our children. Constantly. About everything. Giving them as much time as we possibly can. Because I believe this is a terribly hard time to be young. Forget all that ‘you never had it so good’ bluster. Kids are adults with L plates on, and they’re lonelier, more frightened and lost than they’ve ever been. You can send a million texts and Facebook posts and give them a million gadgets – it doesn’t fill the darkness. They’ve grown up in a media-saturated world that continues to show them untold wealth, fame, glamour and success – and pushes them to measure up to it, over and over and over. And when they’re in their bedrooms and the screens go dark and they take the headphones off, they’re even more lonely and scared than before.
The musicians on this track are:
Anthony Toner - acoustic and electric guitars
Ronnie Greer - electric guitar
John McCullough - electric piano
Clive Culbertson - bass
Paul Hamilton - drums
WAY TOO DARK- lyrics
Your little friend from school has got the flat next door, and there’s a baby, but the boyfriend doesn’t visit anymore. He went to London, like it was the land of milk and honey, now he lets it go to voicemail when she’s tapping him for money. She sees people on the TV holding champagne glasses, with their teeth and their nails, and their perfect little asses. And she looks out the window at the blocks of flats, and wonders what you have to do to get a life like that...
CHORUS: Sometimes she lights up like a Christmas tree, sometimes she’s here and gone, just like a spark. Sometimes she twinkles like a little star, when it’s already way too dark.
She gets low and she gets high, and it ends up in a crash. And she shows up at your door with her wrists all slashed. She’s wired and she’s wild and in tremendous pain, but she’s way too cute to actually open up a vein.
CHORUS
They told us all we had potential if we just stuck to the tracks, but it’s hard to concentrate when all your luck slips through the cracks. She always thought her family was living with a curse, When she opened up her eyes that’s what she whispered to the nurse.
I MET MY old friend Willie Gregg by accident in Ground coffee shop in Coleraine in the winter of 2009. Willie’s a walking inspiration. He’s one of those fabulous roman candles that Kerouac talked about: 'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles'.
Willie runs a charity, www.williesorphanfund.com, that raises money for the orphans of the tsunami that devastated Thailand on New Year’s Day 2005. He never stops moving, and never stops smiling. His hugeness of heart blows me down sometimes, and every time I part company with him I find myself trying to pull all the luck and love and goodness in the world down on his shoulders.
Anyway, on this bitter October morning, We started off with smalltalk and without making a conscious decision, we ordered an extra cup and sat looking out at the huddled people walking around in the rain as the windows steamed up and the cups and saucers rattled around us.
Both of us talked about old relationships that had gone wrong, business deals and high hopes that had gone down in flames. And both of us reasoned as we swirled the remaining coffee in our cups that the only thing you can do to survive is to move on – to the next thing.
As I pulled my coat on and headed for the car, the opening lines occurred to me: ‘Bad decisions, oh where do you start? Time and money and affairs of the heart. Let it go or let it tear you apart.’ I sat in the car with frozen fingers and scribbled them into a notebook. By the time I closed the notebook, I reckoned that Willie had made it to the next thing already, while I was still in the car park. I came across a piece by Raymond Carver (left) a few weeks later that nailed the whole thing deeper into my heart:
‘breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, get up... and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.’
The musicians:
Anthony Toner – guitars, vocals
Eilidh Patterson - vocals
Clive Culbertson – bass, vocals
Paul Hamilton – drums
John McCullough – piano
Walking Down the Line - lyrics
Bad decisions, oh where do you start?
Time and money, and affairs of the heart;
let it go, or let it tear you apart,
trying to hold back time,
just walking down the line.
Things you wish you’d said, things you might have heard,
the well-intentioned and the downright absurd -
they flap around you like those bad news birds,
trying to hold back time,
just walking down the line.
The kind of luck you want just comes and goes -
slips through your fingers and between your toes -
hold back time, just walking down the line.
Some you lose and some you win.
But we’re still the people that we’ve always been,
THE SONGWRITING PROCESS can take many interesting turns. And the best turns of all are sometimes those that happen out of sheer weird accident. This song came from a misheard lyric. I was driving one afternoon and listening to a song called ‘June’ by the excellent songwriter Jeff Finlin (right), (it’s on the album ‘Original Fin’, which I highly recommend) and I was singing along. He was singing ‘with my head in the clouds and my heart somewhere east of belief’, and I THOUGHT I heard him singing ‘east of Louise’.
I immediately thought, what the hell is he talking about? There’s no Louise in this song... Of course when I reached my destination and pulled out the lyrics I realised my mistake. But the phrase ‘East of Louise’ had stuck in my head and there was no way of dislodging it. I scribbled it in the notebook and resolved to come back to it.
But the questions wouldn't go away. What kind of person was this Louise, if everything happened slightly to the east of her...? Louise herself is, like so many of the characters in my songs, based on a number of people that I know or have known. The central guitar figure in the song has been knocking around for several years, and was initially much slower.
I had tried to record this with drums and the full band, but it seemed to work at its best with just me and the guitar. I overdubbed a snappy little bluegrass guitar solo, which I'm delighted to say was the first attempt and the first take. I have no idea where it came from, and if I ever have to replicate it, I will be in serious trouble.
Musicians - Anthony Toner, guitars, vocals, percussion
EAST OF LOUISE- lyrics
We all know that she’s bright,
but sometimes she just doesn’t pay attention.
The stuff you talked about last night,
she’ll look like it’s a subject you just mentioned.
She stops outside the station, and she ponders for a minute -
there’s a train that’s leaving soon, she wonders if she should be in it,
and decisions such as these,
happen slightly to the East of Louise.
She tells herself she’s lonely,
an isolated queen in a city castle.
She was somebody’s one and only,
but somehow it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
But hey, relationships can wither, the least said the soonest mended-
she wrote it in a letter, but she never got it sended.
And love is like a breeze
that passes somewhere to the East of Louise
And I think I’m falling for her...
I lay my pearls of wisdom before her,
but after ten minutes they just bore her
back to tears.
While she struggles with a laptop
I make coffee and I offer my suggestions.
She says she’s lost a thousand e-mails
from potential lovers asking the same questions.
And I tell her, ‘love’s another virus, it can eat your heart alive-’
and she takes it off the desktop, but it stays there on the drive.
'Feel the breezes in the leaves above you - the here and now, and the ones who love you...' The one and only Stephanie Young: at one with, er, nature, actually.THE PLAYWRIGHT STEPHANIE Young is a hurricane that blows through me every now and then. One of Andrea’s oldest friends, she has been a huge inspiration and encouragement to me over the last four years. She’s an enormously talented writer with razor sharp comic timing and a heart huge as the moon.
When I was writing the songs for the Sky for Every Day album, I remember discussing lyric ideas with her and Andrea between wine glasses and dirty plates at the kitchen table. She stayed with us in Coleraine for about six weeks, and during that time I was writing songs in the kitchen while she worked on her play in the spare room and Andrea was script editing in her office upstairs and preparing to direct a play for Nuala McKeever. I remember thinking that we’d created this little factory of creativity, and it was like a teenage dream come true, being surrounded by artists at work.
Stephanie lives in London and it’s always like getting my batteries recharged when we get together. She came to Belfast last Christmas and we skipped and giggled through the snow together. A few years ago, Stephanie made some big decisions about her life that roused a riot of emotions in me – I was fearful for her heart, I was exalted by her choice, excited at the enormity of what she was doing, and intrigued all at the same time. The bones of this song emerged.
The first time she came over to stay with us, we visited Belfast, and as I came out of some doorway, she and Andrea were walking towards me on Botanic Avenue, the sunshine coming down through the trees on them both smiling, and I was so hugely happy that they were both in my life. The first verse was aimed at both of them, I suppose: ‘Everybody in the world should know your name today – you can feel your little toes upon the rungs. People stand aside as you go walking by – negativity just dies upon their tongues’.
I remember at the time I was listening over and over again to Iain Archer’s lovely album Magnetic North (left), and this guitar pattern and melody seemed very Archer-esque to me at the time. The song was a Christmas gift to Stephanie in 2009, and I recorded a completely solo version for her then, with just me and the guitar. I’d never thought of it as something for the rest of the world. But in the months that followed, I would find myself playing it every now and then, and it grew on me. When I considered it for this album, I had an idea that I wanted to expand the sound, so I was already thinking of using a drum loop and some horns and harmony vocals.
I can’t imagine anyone sounding better than Eilidh Patterson on it. We were supposed to fade the track while Linley played the trumpet solo, but his playing was so gorgeous that we kept every note. That’s why it ended up lasting five and a half minutes. I had hoped that this would be the one that we pushed out to the radio stations, but I reasoned (probably quite correctly) that the minute any radio presenter saw that it was over five minutes long, they wouldn’t touch it. In pop terms, we still live in a three minute world. Maybe less.
(She and another of our best friends, Christine Mofardin, have put together their own production company and they're working on a short film that will use some of this music. For a treat, read Stephanie's beautifully written and often hair-straighteningly funny blog. Click RIGHT HERE)
The musicians are:
Anthony Toner – guitars, vocals, percussion
Clive Culbertson – bass, vocals
John McCullough – piano
Eilidh Patterson – vocals
Linley Hamilton – trumpet
David Howell - saxophone
FINALLY - lyrics
Everybody in the world should know your name today.
You can feel your little toes upon the rungs.
People stand aside as you go walking by,
negativity just dies upon their tongues.
Feel the breezes in the leaves above you,
the here and now and the ones who love you.
Finally, you find home – and it’s a state of mind.
Finally you find home – it’s been here all this time.
Every step you’ve made has brought you here today.
Every choice that you made, right or wrong.
And you live in light and love and fear today.
Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you strong.
And you wonder why it took so long to
figure out where you went wrong, then you see...
Finally, you find home – and it’s a state of mind.
Finally you find home – it’s been here all this time.
What you were looking for has finally found you:
The world wants to put its arms around you, finally...
THE IDEA FOR the chorus of this song came to me, in true songwriter fashion, in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Nashville, on my first ever trip to Tennessee. They had put us up in the very plush surroundings of the Hermitage Hotel. After a 14-hour journey, we still found energy to hit the honky tonks and have some beers. I was convinced it would knock me out, but I remember going to sleep around 1am on the first night and waking up again at 3.30am, wide awake and buzzing with jetlag.
I seem to remember sitting propped up in a vast bed, facing a giant blank TV screen where I could see my own reflection. I had my little Moleskine notebook and just started scribbling. At one point there was the sound of a train whistle, way off in the distance. That might have been my imagination, though.
(I also remember that the same writing session – very brief but intense - was the one that generated the line ‘hope the days outnumber the nights’ that became the central line in the song ‘Well Well Well’)
As usual, I was feeling grateful (it’s my default mode these days, I think) – here I was in this wonderful hotel, propped up on heavy pillows, with performances to look forward to and my creative juices flowing. And my head was filled with images of dark and light, day and night, negative and positive - the idea of the light shining below the door, and being positive in your approach to what might lie on the other side: ‘If there’s a light below the door, you should open it for sure...’
(Incidentally, I just remembered that I came back to the hotel early one night on that trip, and Ryan Adams was standing in the lobby, talking animatedly to a roadie... he looked rather grumpy about something, and I figured it probably wasn't a good time to interrupt)
The chorus ran around in my head for a couple of years – and the song didn’t make it onto the last album. It was only when the little John Prine-ish guitar figure (the first thing you hear as the track starts) fell under my fingers one morning that I realised the two parts were meant to be together.
The verses were a kind of warning to an old friend of mine not to listen to the bad advice she’s been taking from so-called friends for a number of years: ‘It’s your heart – and nobody knows it more than you.’ As it turns out, she doesn’t know her heart as well as I thought she did. Despite our confidence, most of us probably don’t.
Recording it was a joy – with Eilidh adding such grace with her harmonies and John McCullough playing gorgeous piano, it remains one of my favourites on the album.
The musicians on this track are:
Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars
Clive Culbertson – bass
Eilidh Patterson – vocals
John McCullough – piano
Paul Hamilton – drums and percussion
GRATEFUL- lyrics
You don’t mind drinking, but you hate the coming round,
and you don’t mind flying, but you hate the coming down,
you’re glad to land - anywhere that ain’t too hard.
Your broken heart’s a perfect crime, and you go looking for clues.
But you turn up nothing, and it gives you the blues,
you should know - you catch yourself red-handed every time.
CHORUS:
I know the story of love,
and as for eating humble pie, I’ve had a plateful.
If there’s a light below the door,
you should open it for sure...
And if it’s luck that saves your ass,
just be grateful.
Your friends mean well, but there’s always a price,
you get to pay for all this free advice,
it’s your heart, and nobody knows it more than you.
They get a secret little kick from your hard time-
they like reading the cards on the roadside shrines,
BEDFORD STREET IS always busy – it’s the main route down to the city centre from Belfast’s south side and the maze of streets around Lisburn Road and Botanic that are home to so many of the students attending Queen’s University. Maybe that’s why everyone I see on Bedford Street these days seems to be younger than me.
After the long winter, all of these dark northern cities get a twinkle in their eye when the sun comes out – I imagine the same happens in Newcastle and Glasgow. I emerged from Harlem Cafe (right) one bright afternoon, blinking into the sunshine, and found Belford Street was unexpectedly filled with people in love.
Couples were strolling down past the BBC and the Ulster Hall, arm in arm, hand in hand, like characters in some 80s romantic comedy set in Central Park. And as they gazed into each other’s eyes and laughed at each other’s jokes, the first line of this song came to me: ‘All the happy couples that you meet, walking up and down Bedford Street...’
The only piece of music I had to fit the lyric at the time was a slow, terribly quiet little progression based around major sevens with a couple of diminished chords, and for a while I ran over it on a Spanish guitar, whispering the melody.
It was still unfinished the following March, when I had to suddenly produce it, like a half-baked cake, during a writing session in Nashville. I had three co-writing sessions lined up for the trip, each of them with established songwriters in the city. The first and the third went really well – but I came unstuck in the middle. I had something else half ready that I thought would be ideal for my more experienced friend, but he seemed less than impressed.
I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not actually like it – but I was taken aback when he kind of sniffed and checked his phone for messages.
- Hmmm... What else ya got? He drawled at me as the chords rose and disappeared into the high corners of the room like a bad smell. And the only other thing I had was ‘All of the Above’. I was immediately convinced that he wouldn’t be into the whispered sweetness of what I had in mind, so I made a plucky attempt to beef it up, and took it up a few semitones. It came out of my mouth like a complete stranger, like something I had no connection with.
He didn’t buy that, either, and it remained unfinished. I footered with it for months and then, with the album deadline coming up, I went for broke, pumped it up as much as I could and even wrote an arrangement for horns. With electric piano and tambourine, it has taken on a kind of soul vibe that I hadn’t imagined way back in its ‘Spanish guitar’ phase... Songs can take on lives of their own when you’re not looking.
The song was inspired by a couple of people that I knew that seemed to have anti-love magnets round their necks. It sounded to me that they regarded love as a power struggle, a dance of domination and submission where the partners often switched roles without warning – hence the idea of being the hand instead of the glove.
The musicians on this one are:
Guitars, vocals, tambourine – Anthony Toner
Drums – Hammy Hamilton
Bass, vocals – Clive Culbertson
Electric piano and Hammond organ – John McCullough
I saw a wonderful quotation last night - on the website of the singer songwriter Sam Baker, a wonder in his own right. It was a quotation from one of my favourite authors, E.L. Doctorow:
'Writing is like driving in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'
I just had to share this WEIRD little picture with the world – but I think it deserves an explanation. I was walking up to the corner shop on the morning of the Royal Wedding a week or so back, and on the way past this house, there was the most adorable, human-faced little poodle leaning on the back of the sofa, looking out the window with what appeared to be a smile.
I remarked to myself about the incredible happy face of this little hound and, as I had my phone with me, I considered taking a snapshot on the way back.
The dog was still there as I made my way home, so I fished my phone out of my pocket and took aim. And just at that moment, as I squeezed the button, the thought flashed through my head that I shouldn’t be taking pictures of people’s houses, and that perhaps I’d be spotted and could end up with an angry householder on my hands.
So I decided not to, and turned the phone away and put it back in my pocket. Somehow, though, a picture was taken. And when I looked at it later, it appeared to have snapped just as the phone was moving, and somehow the light was twisted as the lens opened and closed. So I’m left with this strangely bent-out-of-shape portrait of a happy little poodle peeking out between the curtains. The bay window was square, and the railing in the foreground was, I assure you, completely straight.
And if I stood there for the next six months wiggling my phone back and forth I would never be able to achieve this effect deliberately.
Sunday February 20th - International Arrivals, Belfast International Airport: A small crowd is gathered, waiting for passengers to appear from the Newark flight. At the front, ahead of everyone, a woman stands in complete stillness, staring fixedly at the door, holding a ‘Welcome Home’ balloon that spins slowly in the air conditioning.
She holds one end of a small ‘Welcome Home’ banner, the rest of which extends three feet to her right, vanishing under the arm of an older man (her father? an older brother?) who leans against the wall. The rest of us check our watches and shift from foot to foot, watching her from behind as she remains motionless, with her eyes on the door.
In ones and twos, passengers emerge, bearing their trolleys of luggage or their small, well-packed cases. In turn, they look harried by the long flight, or well rested. Or they appear neutral and expressionless, jet lag already starting to seep into their bones as the time adjustment starts to reveal itself.
In the middle, here comes a family unit, an ordinary-looking bundle of man, woman, small child in a pram. Our lady goes to pieces. From behind, you can see it as an involuntary gasp, a barely-perceptible lean forward as the knees buckle slightly and she begins to shake and weep. Approaching the pram, she picks up the child, a small exhausted boy, and bundles him tightly in her arms, her face streaming. Then she and the rest of the family group, smiling weakly, move towards us, with the pram and the luggage trolley.
Released to the floor, the little boy waddles off between the strangers, clutching the ‘Welcome Home’ balloon, which gently bumps against our shoulders as we continue to wait.
The woman – thin, pale, groomed – continues to weep and shake, wiping tears from her eyes to either side, as they gather up the little boy. They all make their way towards the exit, like an emotional hurricane crackling with energy, the oblivious child at its centre. And in a matter of seconds, they are gone.
The Bluebird Cafe is one of the most famous venues in the city, the place where some Big Names were discovered. From the outside, it’s a fairly nondescript cafe in the middle of a strip mall out on the Hillsboro Pike. But that adds to the legend, of course. It only seats about 120 people, so there’s an ‘exclusive’ feel to it. The walls are covered with pictures of the great and the good. Monday night is for those at the other end of the ladder, however – those who are willing to queue for the chance to sing a song. I reckon it can’t do any harm to join a queue like that...
By the time I arrive at 5pm, there’s already a line of about 25 people hanging around outside with guitars. When the doors open, you come in from the car park, write your name on a piece of paper and throw it in one of two baskets – one for ‘first try’ and another for ‘second try’ – people who queued last Monday night and didn’t get the chance to play. So second tries are selected first, and then names from the ‘first try’ basket are selected.
The venue is now run by the Nashville Songwriters Association, and because I’m a member and I’ve made a long journey, I’m told that I’ll definitely get a spot. So the names are pulled, and the rules are read out – no rambling introductions, no extended guitar solos, be in tune before you get to the stage, etc. And then we start. I’m up seventh.
After a while it’s clear that the variation in quality is enormous. Some are ready for the studio. Some have material that could definitely work, with a little polishing and shaping – but others are embarrassingly bad. They come with their guitars and their pages of lyrics, and sometimes with their accompanists. And up they go, gulping into the spotlight with their guitars and their high hopes. Many of them are a far cry from ready - can’t sing, can barely play. A few obviously don’t know how to tune their guitars.
The ones who show a glimmer of potential are the ones that break your heart. They start off with their mouths dry, and as they hit that high note on the third line, their voices crack a little with nerves, and then the throat tightens, that awful cold sweat starts, the fingers start to shake and the performance starts to unravel. I watch as one girl of about 17 makes the journey from hope to panic, to anger, then resignation and despair - in three verses. She’s just dejected, on the verge of tears, when she leaves the stage.
There are 53 songwriters slotted to perform tonight, in a three hour slot. The room is all steamed up with hope. This is the dream business we’re in, and you have to wonder what an awful steel-toecapped kicking some of the singers give their own dreams - in the three minutes between stepping up into the light and walking back to their tables.
There’s not a lot more to say... I get up there and deliver ‘Well Well Well’, get my round of applause and go back to the table. And now I can say ‘I played the Bluebird’. Me and 52 others. I wanted to do it, of course, but afterwards, part of me wanted a chance to talk to those dejected young hopefuls and tell them to... slow down. It’s okay to take more time, to get ready, to build up your performance muscles... Being in the spotlight doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at any destination – it’s just a part of the journey, a glimpse from the car window as you roll through. In spite of what X Factor and American Idol tells us, artists aren't made overnight. And if you’re serious about it, it gets easier. And the queues get shorter.
(This is the last of the blogs from the Nashville trip - thanks for visiting & reading...)
Andrea wakes me in the middle of the flight, in the middle of the night, and tells me to come and see the mountains.
We ponder where we might be, and can only conclude that we must be over one of the ‘Stans’ - Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan... or perhaps Kashmir. In the distance we can see the icy contours of what logically must be the foothills of the Himalayas. It’s magical, this landscape below us, rumpled and veined - like silver paper used to be when you unwrapped chocolate bars in childhood.
