with Martyn Barker during a recording session in 2008
At the beginning of my career, I think I saw myself as a singer, not a singer songwriter. As a teenager I wrote poetry and English was my favourite subject at school.
Because Tom Waits didn’t decide to write a whole catalogue of work for me, or I didn’t find my Bertolt Brecht of the eighties and nineties, I fell into writing myself. At first I was embarrassingly bad and wrote such obvious sixth former type lyrics. Some of those songs are on my first album, and were my first co-writes. The first song I co-wrote, with Alastair Gavin, was a song called Cry. It was a song about the end of a long-term relationship with a mad painter, and because I was so honest with it, it was quite a complete song. The song didn't see the light of day for a long time and eventually cropped up on Heaven.
Because Tom Waits didn’t decide to write a whole catalogue of work for me, or I didn’t find my Bertolt Brecht of the eighties and nineties, I fell into writing myself. At first I was embarrassingly bad and wrote such obvious sixth former type lyrics. Some of those songs are on my first album, and were my first co-writes. The first song I co-wrote, with Alastair Gavin, was a song called Cry. It was a song about the end of a long-term relationship with a mad painter, and because I was so honest with it, it was quite a complete song. The song didn't see the light of day for a long time and eventually cropped up on Heaven.
The songs that I co-wrote with American in-house producers that were on the payroll of whatever record company that I was signed to, were pretty crass. My lyrics were fairly obvious and embarrassing - a finger down the throat job, but somehow the music allowed me to be remotely credible. I somehow got away with it and was allowed slowly to develop into a reasonable writer.
I have found wonderful songwriting partners in Martyn Barker, Calum MacColl and Johnny Brown and more recently, in Dominic Miller. I have grown to love the process and I’m afraid I don’t spend hours on it, it happens almost immediately and comes fairly complete when it comes.
My favourite way of writing is to go to the gym, do my hour on the cross trainer, think about life, love, the state of the world, catch a bus to Martyn Barker’s house (a short way a way, in Wimbledon) have a cup of tea, lunch, a chat about life, our families, then upstairs to his little studio where we usually have about 2 hours left before school pick-up time. This pressure suits us as we have always without fail written and recorded one song with the beginnings of another, before we leave to collect our various children. This is how most of Love and Pain and the new, as yet unreleased albums, have been written.
I have found wonderful songwriting partners in Martyn Barker, Calum MacColl and Johnny Brown and more recently, in Dominic Miller. I have grown to love the process and I’m afraid I don’t spend hours on it, it happens almost immediately and comes fairly complete when it comes.
My favourite way of writing is to go to the gym, do my hour on the cross trainer, think about life, love, the state of the world, catch a bus to Martyn Barker’s house (a short way a way, in Wimbledon) have a cup of tea, lunch, a chat about life, our families, then upstairs to his little studio where we usually have about 2 hours left before school pick-up time. This pressure suits us as we have always without fail written and recorded one song with the beginnings of another, before we leave to collect our various children. This is how most of Love and Pain and the new, as yet unreleased albums, have been written.
I am pleased that I have grown into a decent songwriter and find that it heals me to write about my life and then allow it out into the world either on record or live at concerts. Songs are for everyone to make of them what they will. They don’t belong to any one person, they definitely don’t belong to me.
