Bit dreamy and off my head after working nights. When I wrote this I did it singing in Ivor Cutler’s voice but when I tried to record it like that I discovered that I simply am not as good as he was at singing, so I had to change it back to my usual weedy voice.
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If you’ve ever seen Peter Greenaway’s excellent Drowning By Numbers you’ll recognise the idea of enemies gathering under the water-tower. If you haven’t, you could think of it as a metaphor for bad Karma.
I wrote this track in bright sunshine, at midday. I recorded it hours later in the middle of the night. Weirdly I wrote it about someone else but listening now it could just as easily be about me!
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Awwww. I didn’t hardly spend any time at all on yesterday’s one, so I’ve made a bit more of an effort today specially for you! I thought I’d write something about a subject which songwriters tend to ignore – how sad it is when you break up with someone. It’s called “Sad Night”.
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I had the idea for this song because I was talking to myself yesterday, and I realised that it was quite a strange thing to be doing so I thought I’d see if I could work out who the voices were. It turned out there was one who was kind of like a nurse and one who was like a soldier in bed and then some who were like a greek chorus. I suppose that’s quite usual.
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I went to a book club meeting for the first time ever today. We talked about this and that, analysing the work in question. So here’s what this song means.
Ha ha cluster bombs are the devastating munitions that a friend of mine uses on MSN. It goes:
Me: Now you’re just being insensitive
Her: HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
The rest of the song is obvious and self-explanatory.
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Back refreshed and sunburned I went to the music shop to buy strings and ended up buying my first ever guitar (I’ve been learning on a borrowed one). It’s from Canada and isn’t a semi-acoustic like I thought I wanted to get, just a boring old electric-acoustic.
Anyway, you know how you get one tune for free whenever you buy a new instrument? It just comes popping out when you sit down. Well, this is that.
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Yeah, I know. But I didn’t have any time at all to do this, and I still wanted to do it, so I just stood there and tried to play it and sing at the same time.
(Oh dear. When I listened back to this track today it didn’t sound anything like I had imagined it, so I’ve recorded it again!)
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I wasn’t in the mood today and really this was going to be a very short little computery sort of thing, just to get it out of the way. But then some ideas came and before I knew it I had another song with singing. I mean, I know it’s not really singing, but, you know, vocalising, words.
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I got my lovely Bass Guitar back yesterday so I started writing a song with it, but it was shit and now it’s nearly time to go to work so this is a quickie based on something I wrote in my notebook on the train yesterday.
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My friend Pippa gave me two cassette tapes today, they were demos that I recorded in the 80’s. I was in a band then but I didn’t write songs myself, apart from this one track.
Picture the scene in our dingy Balham flat as I wrested with a Casio keyboard, a Copy Cat tape echo and a Fostex 4-track recorder, playing snippets of film sound-track from an ancient cassette machine. Little did I realise I would one day etc etc
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