Since I started to sing in tune as soon as I could speak, much to my parents’ pride, I was aware of these beautiful twin flames of our cultural heritage. Aged five, my favourite music was acoustic folk and big band jazz, mainly because my two first (donated) records were The Spinners and Glenn Miller.

While my older brothers rocked out to white music – Deep Purple, Springsteen, The Who, Bowie, I and my schoolfriends, half of whom were the sons and daughters of immigrants from the West Indies, Africa, India, Pakistan, Cyprus both Greek and Turk, mostly preferred black music – Motown pop, sweet soul, and the blissfully tuneful reggae of Bob Marley.

Mixed race fraternisation was normal in 1970s and 80s sunny Croydon, though we suffered the same institutional racism which led to the Brixton riots as well as high local membership of the BNP. I hadn’t studied the history of music at that point, but I knew my social history, including the story of Wilberforce’s fight for abolition, and it was no stretch for me to enjoy emerging militant black consciousness. But before race became truly politicised via rap, music created its regular miracle in our hearts, instilling love for blackness in our essentially white British culture. Many bands of the time were not just paying homage to black music, but were truly infused with it. Even between polarised tribal extremes, skinheads and rastas, there was an occasional coming together via the guitar – the Isley Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, very few remained unmoved by these masterly tours-des-forces.

As we grew out of our school uniforms and into civilian clothings, we got disco and ska. Heatwave, KC and the Sunshine Band, Stevie Wonder would all be turned up on our always-on kitchen radio, along with the Specials, Madness, Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Parliament and Funkadelic weren’t on the radio – I traded album loans with the dapper Ken French to experience psychedelic funk in all its otherwordly wonder.

I know now that these outward ripples of black music, from Jazz to Soul to Pop to Rock, were echoed all throughout the developed world, Europe and America and elsewhere. A friend of mine, Ashley Slater, Canadian by birth but brought up in California joined the British Army at 16 years old, partly to afford his musical training. In the barracks, he told me, at first he was the only one playing and digging Earth Wind and Fire, to the disquiet and derision of his fellow squaddies.

It didn’t take long in this musical hothouse for the exquisite brass arrangements, beats and harmonies to win over these hardnut whites. They ignored the afro hair, the ludicrous costumes and the disco glitter – the music was too good. They even started diggin’ on James Brown, saying it loud, black and proud. By the time he bought his way out of the army, to sign a deal with Island Records, they were converted.

As colour and race has become less of an entertainment business novelty and more of an everyday marketing ploy, the cross-over tradition became less apparent, but it is still significant. My enduring love of funk, as well as much music in other traditions stems from a hybrid blending of cultures, the opening up of new avenues for exploration.

Many of my favourite artists retain some pronounced elements of blues and jazz and dance music, where it collides most beautifully with western folk or classical academic traditions – Prince, for example, and latterly Little Dragon, who are actually a Swedish band with a Japanese singer, Yukimi Nagano. She has a superb voice which seems at once both east and west, and the music lays her artfully modern, soulful, poignant melodies over stripped-back cool electronic funk. It’s as good as anything I have ever heard, and it defies pigeon-holing – just the way it should be.

I don’t believe that music will ever be contained by boundaries for very long, because it is so connected to what makes us tick on a soul level. That doesn’t mean disempowered kids in grinding poverty won’t look for music which speaks to them in a language which can be understood, disregarding all other forms in their passion; but it does mean that the rawness of oppression will still have the power to invigorate and transform the subtlety of the orchestra, and that the Devil, having the better tunes, will still find his way into church.

The image is of myself playing Richard’s guitar several hours into a wake.

Recently, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of attending several funerals. I’ve not been with hardcore drugs gangs, suicidal goths or trick motor cyclists – there just happened to have been a series of deaths this year. It’s a sad by-product of being in one’s 40s.

I’m quite used to being with my Generation X peers, hanging around, socialising, making merry, and being creatively spontaneous, but it’s quite another thing having to conform to society’s expectations after all this time. Few of us are even married.

Sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing and mostly we don’t care, but in doing what feels natural, we are stripping away the hackneyed remnants of centuries, and in being true to our punk generation, we’re returning to more elemental ways of expression. The fact that we are re-inventing rituals doesn’t even occur to us, but that is what we are doing.

I feel that the future of my own performance should include ritual in some way – not constructed from other rituals, but emerging from the realities of life as it is lived.

The only performer I have ever seen who has really pulled this off is David Byrne, during his arty Talking Heads days. Somehow he managed to absorb as well as model charismatic movement and gesture – in particular the wonderful video for “Once in a Lifetime” shows this clearly, with dress, choreography and declamation all orginating from Pentacostal preachers.

Studying the process he went through to arrive at this extreme artistic end point, it shows me that he used a process of observation and instinct. Like many artists he also found a sympathetic working partner, in his case Brian Eno, whose biggest gift seems to be becoming an effective catalyst for others, exploring with them their expressive outlets, pushing not just the envelope but the entire stationery shop, and often arriving at quite remarkable outcomes.

Both Eno and Byrne are from an older generation, but they still speak directly to mine. Their legacy which we cherish is the inventive flair and fearlessness which distinguishes them from so many conservative artists.

If I were to model myself on Byrne, that would be missing the point entirely, but he shows me a means by which I can navigate to find my own new ritual space.

Take it away, Dan Bull.

I find myself anticipating the memorial with some nervousness, since the event will be held outside in a woodland burial ground. To the rescue: my trusty Peavey battery-powered practise amp, bought from a penniless busker, which should do the job of providing volume without distortion to the assembled.

I have mixed feelings about this obviously, but it will be good to be with my family. The family as a whole is secular and so we are putting together a farewell event with a minimum of ritual. Nonetheless I feel that we do need some ritual elements in our collective farewell.

Funerals are for the living, not the dead. Music should say something about the man as well as about our feelings for him, and music should be able to speak of specific personal history, as well as express and release emotion.

So far I have a shortlist which includes George Gershwin, Lonnie Donegan, Humprey Lyttleton and Ella Fitzgerald, whom both my parents loved. They heard Ella sing in a packed concert at the Ashcroft Theatre, Fairfield Halls, Croydon.

I’m also going to have to add Marty Robbins to the list. He was one of my musical connections to Dad, after listening to his records had conditioned me to enjoy country music and gunfighter ballads.

My family have already decided that there should not be a preponderance of black or gloom, and I know that playing El Paso by Marty will raise a few smiles. The world he conjured up was a desperate one, full of tragedy, love gone awry and heartbreak, much like our own, if only we were prepared to see it.

You might want to read part one first

I distinctly remember the moment I realised I was singing a song which I had not written down or learned or planned, and which until that time had not existed, at the height of a live performance, during an encore in a small club in south London.

It had been one of those gigs which everything had conspired to wreck, but which despite or possibly because of frayed nerves, fallings out, fears about money, band members not showing up, broken instruments, strings missing and illness, we had collectively pulled off with a triumphant flourish. The audience were ours, dancing and cheering, the bar staff were grinning, the place was packed and people were still trying to come in from the cold outside. We were for that moment the focus of all the happiness in the world.

Being open to the moment, and caught by the spell, the words and the melody arrived without hindrance, and I was the conduit for the music, the singer and the song. It was freedom, and it was wonderful.

I am a writer, a crafter. In my previous collaborations with other musicians I was frequently the one with the techniques born of intense study and the benefits of education, bringing shape and harmonious order to the chaos of creative soup. I had often admired those gifted, confident souls who could just rock up, grab a guitar, and improvise a song on the spur of the moment. My own songs were born more privately and slowly, with much scribbling of pen on paper and the starting and stopping of audio recorder.

I knew that this wasn’t about quality – my crafted works were every bit as good – but I also knew that until then, somehow, I lacked the confidence just to let it out, uncensored and unchecked. It was the difference between swimming and sinking, between diving and a belly-flop. Once I had done it, I knew that I had just opened a door into the past and the future, and that it was not religion, or drugs, or academic study, that was the key, but music itself.

In the many years since finding that true freedom, I have found various ways to get into the zone. Stillness. Listening. Waiting. Trance. Dance. Movement. Playing music, listening to music, depriving myself of music. I still write like I always did, piece by piece, but, many times, I just open the door and let out whatever is in there, no matter what it is. It’s a great way of finding out who you really are.

Art Blakey the renowned jazz drummer said:

Music is a river, it must keep changing and flowing, or it will stagnate

Along with Art’s wisdom goes the oft-repeated theory that the mixed, mastered and released recording never sounds as good as the demo, the popular justification for which goes something like this: working to a script (including the structured, orderly recording process) kills spontaneity. This is not true, of course, per se, and I have heard many demos which, thrillingly inspired and raw though they may be, are far inferior to the polished recording. But likewise, the old adage about not being able to make silk purses from pig’s ears also holds true.

There is also an older concept, which echoes throughout Zen Buddhism, that the writing down of things in order to describe and define them fixes them in one place and thus limits them, robbing them of some essential essence. But even this kind of spontaneity that Zen aspires to requires the rigorous discipline of meditation and mental training to achieve.

So, written or improvised? We have the best of both worlds. Many classical baroque pieces from hundreds of years ago, give directions for soloists to improvise entire passages of play. In all live music at the highest level, variation in interpretation is expected and celebrated, and some for some genres, jazz and rock in particular, improvisation is the mainstay. Musicians treat recordings (either audio or dots on paper) as a point of departure, as a reference, not as the best or most ultimate definition of a piece of music.

To arrive at the best, most of the time, we need to find a balance between the planned and the improvised.

The map is not the territory. No matter how “perfect” a recording may be, every time the music is played, or played back, it is different, for reasons of the human environment, cultural context, acoustics, air temperature, and most importantly of all, because musicians are different.

Children, total beginners, people who don’t consider themselves musically adept can all equally well come up with staggeringly beautiful melodies, and poignant lyrics which express truths at the heart of the human condition, but they will be enjoyed, then forgotten. What differentiates a writer from everyone else is the compulsion to record, to distil and set down the concepts from which the music flows so that it can be repeated. And yet, without performance, there is nothing.

As a writer, I am most interested in what happens when you don’t try to dam the river, but rather, let music be your raft, the vessel to take you and those with you into places which are inaccessible by other means. For me this works well as a balance to the techniques I have learned and invented. The best improvisors have spent all their lives mastering their craft, but in the moment, none of that knowledge is conscious, and it is not actually even necessary.

Performance is creation, and creation is learning, finding out where the music wants to go and going with it, from the beginning of time, to the end of time.

What great fortune musicians have.

When music was written down, the coded instructions, note pitches, intervals, pace (Andantino, Prestissimo) became an idealised fixed point of reference. When recording became established with the invention of the phonograph, recorded performances of music became the de facto reference point(s) for all other renditions. The song was now tied down, and wandering too far from this location would give the academic cause to make a judgement that the song no longer remained the same.

Now, bringing this into the modern age, we observe fragmentation happening as recorded music moves once more away from “permanent” versions and into multiple. But remixes, mashups both licit and illicit, cover versions and reduxes all rely on the reference back to an original, i.e. a first finished, mixed and mastered recording. Even the rough demo of the song refers retrospectively to a future “perfect version”.

Recordings have done much to spread appreciation of music, to advance cultural exchange and understanding, but placing recordings at the top of the musical (financial) tree has had a major side effect. The invention of the camera caused the once widespread skill of drawing to practically disappear in the broad population, and similarly, recording and playback devices have removed the commonplace playing of instruments and singing together (there is historical evidence for this.) We have diminished the role of music and our collective sense of it by coming to rely on recordings rather than performances as the musical fountain from which we drink.

The recording is only as good as the performance it captures, and the performance is only as good as the song, (mind-blowing jazz versions of “Three Blind Mice” and death-metal cloned blasts of anger being exceptions to this rule) and even if the recording is good and the performance worth studying, it is as stuck in time as a butterfly on a pin.

Recordings are really just snapshots of a particular location, just a single view from the musical hill. Shifting your feet a couple of inches, moving your eyes and ears in another direction gives you a different experience of the same location. Look, there’s a golden eagle, which we wouldn’t have seen if we had kept looking at the sunset.

When we started Rise and Shine, our songwriting show, by writing and recording songs about the news along with our audience, we were letting people into the act of creation. Creative improvisation, songwriting, arrangement and production are fascinating to many people, but the strange thing that happened to me was during this time was that my concept of the centre of music shifted.

Essentially, our live performances were producing the songs, but because we were simultanously broadcasting interactively and recording, the act of writing was captured along with the end results. It made me think about where the song really lives. I felt that adding broadcast to the normally closeted processes of writing and recording restored the energy, and returned music to its natural communal function.

As I produced and worked each song into its “finished” version, I recalled thousands of live performances where a combination of practice, musical discipline and being alive to the possibilities of the moment had produced sizzling, hair-raising, inspirational performances which communicating directly to the audience had a value which words struggle to express.

One of my favourite ever music quotes is from the Incredible String Band:

Music is an energy which runs from the beginning of time to the end of time, and musicians are lucky enough to get to play it

People who follow gurus and teachers call this raised level of contact “transmission” – the transfer which happens in the presence of the master. Listening to a fiddle player down the pub gives you something of this, and watching the best surround-sound video recording does not.

However much you appreciate a wonderful recording, you know that any applause you give will fall on ears deaf to your reaction. In live performance, our responses are registered, responded to, incorporated. Just picture the reactions of those around you if you were to clap and cheer after hearing one of your favourite tracks on an iPod!

Transmission is a two-way process, requiring the ears and eyes of the performer as well as the audience. The simple internet broadcast of spontaneous performance as it gave birth to repeatable musical structure, aka songwriting, did achieve a more elevated state of communication than simple playback to a largely passive audience.

Experimenting with the Rise and Shine show, writing this blog, and reading, has really set me thinking about how music works, and what it is that we are seeking from it on the internet, what it is we are likely to get, and beyond that, the value of writing and recording songs and music in general.

There is more to this train of thought to come in my next post.

Quincy has worked with at least dozen of my favourite artists, including Count Basie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Chaka Khan, Paul Simon, and Prince.

Best known for producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the African famine fundraiser We Are The World his modus operandum seems to be working with great joy, famously putting a sign on the studio entrance: “Check your ego at the door”.

As well as producing one of the biggest albums of all time, he is a direct and much-sampled inspiration for Trip-Hop, that downtempo, chilled moody genre which emerged in the 1990s, which draws on a far more subtle and intimate musicality than his later Hollywood successes.

I loved Les Nuits by Nightmares on Wax since I first heard its spine-tingling intro and it didn’t take me too long to trace the roots back to Quincy. Listen to the original and then to the music which is inspired by it.

If I could take one thing from Quincy and transplant it into myself, it would be his string arrangements. American Tune by Paul Simon has a haunting, classical chord progression which is elevated by Quincy’s understated strings, turning his muse on the moral collapse of his nation into something far more meaningful than just a protest song.

Peerless.

Top of this City is as good a song as I have ever written. It was the middle of the deep recession of the 1990s, record bankruptcies, unemployment, and a discredited government, and the words flowed from the situation I was in personally, and from observations of the suffering all around me. Not at all sophisticated and cool, it is naive, warm and approachable. I’m usually critical of my own work, but I love this song just as passionately as all the music that does it for me.

Based around a lilting country guitar riff with a classic pop structure, it is deceptively simple and short, coming in at around 3 minutes 30 seconds. The beat isn’t really that funky but it bounces, the bassline is folky, almost jug band. The melody follows the chords, descending in the verse, and ascending in the chorus. The middle eight is short and mournfully sweet, injecting the blues which are always there, hiding behind the brightness.

I also love this song for autobiographical reasons.

For the best part of a decade, my favourite co-writer and best friend in the world was Kevin Goldsborough, a tall, kind, fragile man, 6′ 4″ craggy blond from Yorkshire viking stock. Kevin’s unique musical ability was natural and largely untutored, and born from daily hours of playing any instrument he could get his hands on, his huge fingers flying intuitively around the fretboard, the keyboard and drum kit. He was cripplingly shy, and yet had a leonine extravagance to match Mick Jagger. He sang in a Bowie-like baritone which accent was his by dint of having grown up in the same area of suburban south London. His sense of rhythm was funky, he could rock, he had the blues, he was a soul man, he had a sense of poetry and of humour, and his taste was broad and various.

My musical marriage with Kevin was a wonderful affair which produced song after song. As well as completing many of his own compositions, he was capable of providing riffs, basslines and chord progressions for which I had no problem writing melodies and lyrics. He also gave me license to arrange and produce to my art-heart’s content. Kevin was prepared to go the extra mile, and he would also somehow combine patience for all my ideas with straight honesty. If he ever said, “that’s not as good as before” he was pretty much always right.

In our heyday, we would come together and effortlessly write and record beautiful songs between noon and teatime with no fear of blank canvas. Seeking to please only ourselves and one another, we pleased thousands. It helped that musical ideas were pouring out of both of us, so that if one was not particularly inspired, the other would pick up the baton. When we were both on fire, we were unbeatable.

Writing Top of this City, pictured a young child in the middle of chaos, watching her family chase dreams, lose jobs, and fall apart, and recalled my own feelings as a child growing up in the recessions of the 1970s on Crystal Palace hill. I would climb up the fire escape to the top of a building, and gaze down from the flat roof upon the ant-people and toy cars. Rising above my problems, in my secret place, I found a peace there which I later understood to be a basic form of enlightenment.

The trick was to draw this experience in simple lines and primary colours, in keeping with the childlike simplicity of the song:

My mama’s sick, my dad’s been fired
By the boss he once admired
And my big sister looks so tired
As she waves goodbye to all her desires

There’s a place I know
I go sometimes
‘Cause it looks so pretty
Looking down on this city…

As well as being about family breakup and childhood depression, the song also provided me with a way of “getting above” the problems in my own life. Writing and performing with Kevin and the band was to last only 18 months more, as his health deteriorated, and I was becoming truly messed up by a “difficult relationship” with a woman. I don’t have a big sister – that’s a reference to the great well of sadness and grief I was discovering in my damaged lover.

Sometimes, when you write a song, it’s a sublime collision of thought, feeling and real life. There’s no predicting the discovery of these precious gems – they just arrive when they do, formed by circumstances, and as a writer all you can is keep your writing pen sharp, and your ink ready for the moment.

As the original track came from Rise and Shine, Andrew Lagowski and I went live online on Tuesday evening and collaborated on a piece called Heat, based as usual on a news story – this time, the North Korean nuclear test.

This is a free MP3 download, with high quality versions costing $1.00 US.

I needed to create a minute-long soundtrack for this video which I produced and to my delight it came out well, probably because I was being utilitarian and making quick choices along a very directed route.

I decided to finish the track and put it out with no further ado, which is the way of electronic dance music. It’s a wonderfully freeing way to work.

But in actuality, it can be far worse than simple rejection. One of the unfortunate by-products of the ludicrous marketing which corporate commerce typically creates to sell music is the public perception that artists must all be big-headed egomaniacs who therefore deserve to be put down. Articulating antipathy is one thing, but it often goes much further, encouraging the kind of personal cruelty by which music journalists make their names and sell newspapers. To put yourself on stage is to attract heckling and derision, simply on the basis of taste. I often think that musicians are no more than bus drivers – they sing a song which takes you on a journey. If you get on the wrong bus, you don’t attack the bus driver – so why character assassinate a musician, just because you don’t like his music?

My ambition before I turned 33 was to front my own band and have hits, so I gigged several times a month and spent the rest of the time writing and rehearsing. Paying your dues, they call it, and it’s tough learning to maintain this activity and at the same time deal with the rough and tumble of the business, the arseholes and the idiots and the careless comments, especially when those careless idiot arseholes are yourself. Abuse however can often teach you more than adulation, if you can learn not to take it personally. I rapidly adjusted to the reality that my audience wasn’t everyone elses, but it was nonetheless there, and that taste was highly variable even within genres, and I had enough confidence and self-belief to keep on going.

At a gig in Camden’s Dublin Castle, I met a bleached-blonde rock chick who told me she was an agent. She approached me in the golden ten minutes after we came off stage and enthused about the band and our songs. Come and see me, she said, I will get you gigs. So, I agreed to drop by her office in Tottenham Court Road with demo tape.

A few days later, I grabbed a cassette and recorded three tracks I was working on – a couple of up-tempo strummy guitar numbers, and a more experimental slow soul song, in which I sang falsetto. I was pretty pleased with the production on this 4 track demo, having dropped into a session in a professional studio and heard it over the monitors, where it sounded better than the £100 per hour track my friend was producing, to his mild embarassment.

Rock chick greeted me cordially, invited me to sit down, lit a cigarette, and we chatted about the band and the music business. I pulled the tape out of my pocket and she stuck it on the office sound system. First up was the slow song – I figured she’d seen the band, she knew the fast ones, give her something to show we had more in the bag that pub floor fillers. Within 30 seconds, she turned to me and said,

I really hate this kind of shit. It isn’t you, though, is it? Is your stuff on the other side?

To say I was surprised was an understatement. I made goldfish movements with my mouth but no words emerged. I said that it was me, and started to defend the song – but met her cold eyes and the words just dried up. As I made my excuses and left after five deeply uncomfortable minutes of pointless small talk, I had the presence of mind to take the tape with me, but my skin was burning, my child slapped, beaten, humiliated and sent home.

Over the next few days, it haunted me. Why the change? I expected her to at least listen. It was brutal, complete and utter instant rejection, so completely the opposite of her reception a few days earlier. Maybe she was out for blood – some people get their kicks from doing that kind of thing. Maybe she just genuinely hated that song, or my singing. I comforted myself that if she didn’t like it, she certainly wouldn’t like a great swathe of our material, and I soon stopped worrying about it, and found another agent – but I didn’t forget it.

Several years later, I listened once again to the song, recalled the hard-bitten woman, and I immediately knew exactly why she had hated the song. It is introverted, conceptual, eccentrically stylised. It has weird poetry in it. It’s about vulnerability, it was dealing with the romantic failure and emotional exposure of a disastrous love affair, and difficult to grasp, inconclusive personal lessons, which she certainly was not at all interested in.

She didn’t want any of that arty soul shit – she wanted unsubtle masculinity, bravado, a blast of pop rock energy, just like she’d seen us perform – no wonder she couldn’t even listen to more than a minute of it!

As the song says,

So do you think they’d adore you
If you were more organised?
Well learn this lesson now, then
This cannot be summarised…

The joy of the Eurovision Song Contest is the clash of cultures as each country attempts to produce a song which other entirely dissimilar countries will like, and the only way to enjoy this camp festival of fun is to not take it seriously, but with 42 countries competing for the right to host the next show, thousands of television hours in every country, and lots of cash for everyone taking part, of course, it is completely serious.

This year was a revised Eurovision, rescued somewhat from the partisan voting which means countries vote fot their neighbours by arriving at the results via a combination of 50% audience telephone voting and 50% “expert panels” – though the make up of the panels was anything but clear. Alternative commentary from Ewan Spence in Moscow via audio recorded at the Final Dress rehearsal and Twitter added to our enjoyment. Even bewildered Americans were dragged into watching the three hour show via internet.

This year like many previous years, most songs were centred on the circus / fairground musical thread which binds Europe together. The beat of Eurodisco which predominates derives far more from oom-pah bands than Detroit. Despite this lowest common denominator and a tendency for hilariously bombastic stagecraft, standards ranged from the instantly forgettable to the sublime.

Norway’s Fairytale song won hands down. Written and performed by a 23 year old Snufkin look-alike, with the sonority and harmonic cadences to appeal to east and west, it struck a chord across ethnically and musically diverse Europe. Jade and Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s UK entry did passably well, but with a rather understated stage show, and a song modern and American in style, the UK would never win.

My personal favourite for straight musical reasons was Iceland’s entry, sung by Yohanna, notable for a strong, uplifting vocal melody, chiming harmonies and classic pop-rock structure. Lyrically it was remarkably similar to the winner – his a fairy tale, hers a fantasy – typical recession fare – unsurprising in these troubled economic times.

I think this song is somehow reminiscent of Tasmin Archer’s big hit, Sleeping Satellite. What do you think?

For a couple of years, I enjoyed a great gig in Mondello, Sicily, which is a holiday resort of that beautiful mediterranean island which the Italians enjoy. The booking was 3 weeks to a month long, usually in one or two clubs, in February, out of season, so the venues were full of locals rather than tourists who would have expected a set full of covers. We were booked on the basis of our dynamic live show and all original songs.

My band at the time consisted of myself on lead vocals, keyboards, guitar and anything else I could lay my hands on, my writing partner and friend Kevin Goldsborough on bass and guitar, a 16 year old Ross Godfrey, who went on to star in Morcheeba, on guitar, his dodgy friend Nick on sax and percussion, and Sophy Griffiths on vocals and acrobatics. A drummer would have eaten up our funds, so we replaced live drums with loops, which I created myself from rehearsals, and programmed beats. I used the playback element to enhance the arrangements, which gave us a bigger sound, and kind of made up for the lack of kit. It was a modern sound for the time, and mostly the gigs were a riot.

She was the greatest thing that ever happened to him,
Tender as a girl can get
It would ease your mind to know, but you won’t ever
If she told you now to go, you would forgive her…

“Angel” is a song I wrote to fill a gap in my band’s live set, designed to get the crowd moving. The laid-back Sicilians were there to watch, listen and socialise, but we could generally coax them onto their feet. This song, which describes the siren call of sexual promise, quotes one of the most inspiring pop / rock musicians to have emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, David Bowie.

Aside from giving me the ability to co-write with one of my musical heroes, the song is a collaboration with Kevin Goldsborough, who supplied the wonderful melodic bassline, which moves from dark and brooding in the verse to cheerful and uplifting in the chorus. We wrote hundreds of songs together, until it became second nature. Kevin’s musical clarity and expression remains a sublime part of my life. Funnily enough, he comes from exactly the same part of London as Bowie, and when he sings, listeners often pick up on the similarity. It’s the south London vowels.

With “Angel” I wanted to introduce layers of meaning, making the song accessible to the listener without knowledge of the other song, whilst adding another dimension to anyone who did have knowledge, which illustrated its meaning on a meta-level. I don’t think it matters that few people would get this – it is in the song for seekers to find – so long as it works on the simple level of tune, narrative, groove. Falling under a musical spell is an analog to falling under a sexual spell, commanding the soul and demanding that the body moves.

I quote Bowie’s song both indirectly by referring to it lyrically, by interpreting it in the arrangement, and also directly by incorporating it into the chorus. I’m not going to tell you which song I quote – if you know, then leave a comment, and I will fess up. This is a demo with a live vocal, recorded on a four track tape machine, so it’s a little bit rough around the edges sonically, but that is forgivable. It is a decent representation of how the band sounded live, and I think the recording is good for all that.

Worth watching every second of this video’s 9:23 beginning with the great Frank Zappa, this is an analysis of how marketing breeds out innovation in music.

Update: here’s an interesting (and lengthy) analysis of the video by Cynical Musician (often a good read). As to whether he’s right in his criticisms, be sure to make up your own mind!

After the song was written, to my great delight, Otir and Virginie both provided French versions of the lyric, which is about Parisian landlords exploiting poor students for sex. Virginie worked hard on making the lyric flow and sang a guide. The original contains French but is 90% English, and sang in male voice, and since the song is about exploitation of women, it’s appropriate to switch gender.

Today Jule, an American female singer is going to sing the French version. I’m fascinated to hear the results.

Post script: Session went really well, and we’ve got a great female French language version recorded. I also shot some video of Jule explaining her personal connection to the issues in the song which I’ll post soon.

This claim on publishing has become relatively commonplace. Whatever the merits of the work, the craft employed, or the song’s sweet completeness, stars (via their lawyers and managers) make a smash-and-grab raid on all earnings, including publishing, so that they will continue to benefit as long as the song is generating revenue.

This kind of thing has been going on since publishing began – the Berne Convention
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works dates back to 1886. Writers when they start out are usually desperate for any kind of success and largely ignorant of their rights, and this makes them easy targets.

I can understand the “get it while you can” mentality in the den of iniquity that is the music business. It’s as if artists are still haunted by the bad old days of tiny payments as the music industry grows fat by deducting endless amounts for spurious reasons, winnowing away at their hard-earned income. Believe it or not, CD royalties are still subject to “new technology” deduction brought in in the 1980s, and on what basis can downloads be subject to deductions for “breakages”?

Nonetheless, this particular form of artistic cannibalism fills me, as a writer, with genuine ire. From the elevated position of the star, their attitude is simple. We are your gateway to wealth, therefore we can insert our claim on the publishing revenue and if you don’t like it, we’ll use someone else’s song.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that the world is going to be different from the way it is any time soon. But, the worst thing about this practise is that it is not being questioned or resisted, and the bigger the star, the more aggressive the lawyers, and the more certain that writers will be squeezed out of their fair share. If you’re an established writer nobody will attempt to extract part of the royalty due to you for your work, but if you’re less well known, then it’s almost guaranteed that the attempt will me made to deny you some percentage of your future earnings from your hard-won intellectual property.

I can make the distinction between an artist who picks up a song and develops it or alters it substantially enough to bring it to commercial success, by adding lyrics, or by including new melodies, for example. But, the job of making a song into a commercial recording is called Production, or Remixing, and these important activities have their own slices of the pie. Hands off mine!

It’s not enough to take a song, add beats and noises which suit your style, super-impose a rap and a three note riff, and then say,

Hey, I re-wrote it! I want 50%…

Have I ever given part of my publishing to an artist who had nothing to do with writing the song? Yes, but it was small enough not to be painful. Did I regret it? No. Did I think it was wrong? Yes. Would I do it again? It depends – not if I can avoid it!

In the end, it comes down to choice. Diminished revenue is one issue. Would you rather have 100% of a song which doesn’t sell, or a lesser amount of a big hit? But, there is also the important issue of authorship. If you give some part of your song publishing to the artist, then they are forever associated with the creation of the song. Is that going to help or harm your career? It’s a tough call, especially when the rewards are temptingly large.

Photo from here.

Surely I shouldn’t be watching this right now, since David Bowie is a PRS registered UK artist and YouTube and PRS are in dispute and all the music is blocked. Not this though, thanks to @lagowski for the steer. Mind you, Bowie has advocated and pioneered the use of music on the internet, and like Prince, and a select band of enlightened “old style” artists has seen the value of digital music sharing: an essential route to new fans, along with radio, tv and playing live. If they have never heard you, they can’t like you. For artists with something to say, it’s also a direct channel to the people they love the most – their fans. Do not underestimate the power of disintermediated uncensored mass communication.

This is a pretty rousing live version of the classic Bowie song, his rock anthem par excellence, but you can hear the march of a thousand gigs in the performance. Bowie uses his mature voice in a unique way though, what energy. I’m a big fan of Bowie’s “trilogy” songwriting period: Low, Heroes, and Lodger.

The first single I ever bought (aged ten) was Space Oddity.

/end fandom.

The music in this video is totally dominated by the bass – you can pretty easily make out the song, but this recording is not a candidate for a live bootleg. But I love these unusual, fly-on-wall recordings, and this is a great one.

BassCam view of Sledgehammer in Monterrey, Mexico from Tony Levin’s Road Diary.

Thanks to Ian Shepherd for the steer.

There is an inevitability about teenage rebellion which normally means that if they don’t follow along like clones, sons in particular strike out in the opposite direction to their fathers. Thinking about it now, the music I chose to turn up loud in the family home once puberty was well-established – Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Brian Eno, and a slew of loud new wave, reggae and ska acts – must have sounded like the distortions from hell to my 1950s music-loving popski.

Viewing my dad’s glittering pantheon of musical stars from my protective teenage bunker, Elvis Presley I didn’t really understand at all, associating him with the middle-aged, gaudy, fat Las Vegas crooner and endlessly tedious Saturday afternoon films, rather than the lean mean hip-swiveling sexuality that got him banned below the waist. I could take him or leave him. Lonnie Donnegan’s Jack of Diamonds high-speed skiffle was fun if you were five years old. But, my dad’s country music caused my head to hurt and my ears to complain, and I would state bitterly that I was bound to fail my exams if he insisted on giving his music an airing of a Sunday evening. The pathos was completely lost on my hormone-addled teenage mind, and all I could hear was wailing, depression, tragedy, and twanging guitars.

How wonderful and how strange therefore, to find myself in later years not only appreciating country music, but realising that certain elements of country were deeply embedded in my own songs.

Harmony singing is something I have always done, and I became aware of the harmonic differences between the white folk tradition and the black blues tradition early on; also, the rhythmic differences were clear to me. I clearly recall being ten years old and explaining syncopation to a music class, being mildly astonished that some of them couldn’t hear the difference between the on and the off beat. Later, I joined the school folk club, which meant we could remain in the music room and learn songs like Frankie and Johnny. Nobody taught us the harmonies for these songs, we just knew them. It is this miraculous fusion between black and white, blues, gospel and folk which gave us most of the popular music we currently enjoy.

I am just a country boy from Croydon, kicking at the chickens in the yard…

I would sometimes launch into this country music parody at art school, but it was there that I returned wholeheartedly to the music which I had once suffered, and on a visit home, asked my dad if I could borrow his copy of Marty Robbins’ El Paso to copy onto cassette tape. Country music had snuck inside me, and there I was, recalling every word, rejoicing in the narratives, the pain, the blood, and the joyous, lilting, latin-tinged melodies.

It’s more than a nod to my heritage, this love affair with country. It’s the rawest expression of living dirt poor that white music has yet produced, and while my own background wasn’t deprived, we were just two generations on from being in servitude to the wealthy and this knowledge was burned into us. Plus, being poor is no determinant of suffering, as many a rich suicide will tell you.

I don’t try to write traditional country music, and so I imagine that purists won’t like it too much. I just try to call it as I see it, and write about my own experiences, as always.

This song, Walking on Water, is an oblique narrative about wanting someone but not liking them, experiencing mixed feelings of desire and repulsion, moving from the early stages of delight in a romance to the later stages of betrayal and loss. Perfect country material.

Dan Brittain and I decided to put a couple of days into this project, and not to follow the usual Rise and Shine show format three hour deadline. That meant we could work steadily, and piece the song together with more care. Having time to revise and develop sections was great.

First, the song is deliberately based on the Earth Hour campaign’s call to action. The two verses are from the different perspectives of a poor rural subsistence fisherman in some low-lying place in the world, and in verse two, from a homeless urban beggar.

Second, we tried to make the chorus deliberately simple, almost a children’s sing-a-long, without being too toy town, or too Disney, and yet rejoice in what it is, a straightforward call to ecological action. I landed without preconception on the word GREEN. I wanted to combine an up-and-at-’em chorus with a meaningful lyric, and I think we succeeded.

And, what does it mean, to be green, to go green? To me the message is clear: we must face up to the need to reduce energy consumption now. We must make our politicians act responsibly, quickly enough to save us. We are rapidly exceeding the planet’s capacity to maintain a human population, let alone the other species we may bring down with us.

Lastly, is it really an anthem? I think a true anthem has an irresistible, hymnal chorus, which this doesn’t have, but it does have a lot of energy and a good tune, and I’m particularly pleased with the ending.

It’s like IRC meets the whole world

In this largely text-based world live many writers, songwriters, musicians, and alongside them, many businesses concerned with all three. @ravenousraven is collating songwriting tips, and @ianshepherd is dispensing music production and mastering advice.

Music Notes deals with sheet music, and – Monica Valentinelli aka @music_notes on Twitter – has written a cool article for their blog on yours truly.

Back in April 2005 I wrote an article about a marvellous song called “The Object of My Affection”. I wanted to find out who actually wrote the song, and sure enough, I got comments which helped me find out. Or so I thought, because today, a third claimant has shown up to add to the story. Was it Jimmy Grier, Coy Poe, Pinky Tomlin, all three of them, or Loyd Loewen?

I have this song on marvellous junk store vinyl, as part of an album called “Songs That Brought Sunshine Into The Depression” by the Hollywood Sound Stage Chorus. Back then I wrote:

Songs generally sell well in a depression. When the shit hits the fan, the share prices plummet, and the economy takes a dive without a breath and doesn’t come back up, then songs are sometimes all we have to keep us from despair. Songwriters know all about this. There are a few individuals in the songwriters’ fraternity who write smash hits and never need work again, but believe me, these are the exceptions, and for every one of those numinous beings, there are ten thousand grafting away at the songfactory.

Even a huge hit doesn’t avoid the financial ruination of the taxman, unwise choices of leisure activity, and that expensive marriage / divorce, and many is the time I have heard of, and known, surprisingly wealthy songwriters being on their uppers once again. The rollercoaster of the economy exactly matches the ups and downs of the creative life.

Original article is here.

There are many examples of original music referring to other pieces of music, either by directly quoting in a new arrangement, or by developing an idea further, embellishing and producing variations. Mozart, Beethoven and a host of other composers took folk tunes as the starting point for symphonies. Roy Orbison (I just learned from Elvis Costello on BBC4) stole a melody from Schumann.

All this is normal, and fine, and there is certainly nothing wrong with an honest steal. But what of dishonesty? It becomes more difficult when expert musicologists are produced in court to determine legality. There are famous cases of plagiarism – Andrew Lloyd-Webber has been accused of stealing several times over the years, from Puccini (settled out of court) to Pink Floyd, and December 2008 saw a dispute between guitarist Joe Satriani and Coldplay. Whatever the various merits of the cases, it’s not surprising that big money artists attract this kind of legal battle.

An old showbusiness dictum applies:

Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ

Musical value has been determined since the early 1900s on rules which attribute most value to melody and lyrics, but this western academic system doesn’t reflect the actual value of musical elements in contemporary pop. Post-jazz, black music has dominated and infused all music, in which rhythm is the most important, main ingredient. If pop songs were costed based upon rhythms, and royalties paid out for their usage in the same way lyrics and melodies are paid for, people like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry would be multi-billionaires from the thousands of songs which use rhythms which they invented, or at least, first recorded.

A stack of modern music – beginning with dance, but extending to all kinds of contemporary music – not only takes melodies, rhythms, riffs and sounds from music, but uses recordings made by other artists as a building block for an original composition.

This re-use of other artists’ work via audio collage is commonly called sampling. Pop music composition started to heavily use sampling in the early 1980s, as computer technology became affordable. AKAI samplers changed pop music, and are responsible for many existing stars, Norman Cook aka Fat Boy Slim among them.

When James Brown became aware of how many tracks were using a sample of his recording of “Funky Drummer” which features Clyde Stubblefield on drums, he engaged an entire team of lawyers to track usages and sue, a shrewd move which significantly increased his income. Stubblefield, who reasonably claims to be the inventor of that groove, gained only fame.

But it isn’t simple. Whilst these days, writers and artists are more savvy, copyright laws still differ from place to place, even within the (mostly) law-abiding developed nations. In the US the concept of “fair dealing” and the right to parody make certain re-usage permissable. It’s a widely-held but mistaken belief that such rights exist everywhere, but they don’t. In the UK, no such exception exists, although it has been suggested by the Gower Review.

Personally, I love music which uses raw sound as building blocks to make something new and find much of it delightful. But, unlike some people, I mostly dislike tracks where an old song is merely “updated” by creating a new recording, the new artist’s label paying for the right to use the sample of the original, and then producing a bass-heavy, highly compressed “modern” song, which is usually a rap, and which usually only uses the old hit’s “hook” repeated ad nauseum. All that serves to do is line the pockets of the original artists, as the young pretender basks in the shine of older artists’ talent. It often reduces the sublime to the crude.

Other times, you hear songs in the charts which have been clearly written around a loop which is no longer there in the finished mix. This is a replacement for real music, in the same way that fast food is a replacement for nutrition.

On the other hand, even the most uneducated listeners can sense musical authenticity and authority, they prize this over almost everything, and they don’t really care whether an idea is stolen or not. There have been some great, almighty, inspired steals by artists like Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Eno and Byrne, and DJ Shadow. I think we need an updated appreciation of this great art of borrowing, and new legal definitions, to accomodate and respect this kind of hugely popular art.

I listen to lots of music which includes samples, but it’s all original in some essential way. I don’t like copy cat songwriting or singing, though, I find it utterly vapid.

If you mix the old capriciously and unexpectedly with the new, something wonderful can emerge. I also use samples in my work. I use them consciously, aware of a history that goes back to Musique Concrète, which is as broad as it is deep. I also quote from other writers and composers, most recently a passage from Vaughan Williams 6th Symphony which I scored by ear and re-arranged to suit a title sequence.

Back in 1994 I was doing a lot of eco-campaigning, and at the same time, listening to 1950s and 1960s TV themes. I had a brief hit with a remix of Captain Scarlett theme, written by Barry Gray, but that story is for another time. One tune I had a lot of fun with was the theme from Robin Hood, written by Dick James, which spent eight weeks in the pop charts in 1956, reaching number fourteen.

My version is called Robbin’ Hood, and it tells a story which I want to put on video. The Sheriff’s men show up and cause havoc. Robin Hood’s men come and see them off, and a celebration ensues. But while everyone’s partying, the Sherriff’s men sneak off into Sherwood Forest, and start to cut down the trees where Hood and his Merry Band make their home, and they have to hightail it back to safeguard their environment.

The moral of the story is: don’t win the battle, but lose the war. Or maybe it’s: look after your trees. Or, maybe it’s don’t forget to close the door on your way out. Either way, I really enjoyed putting the tune together, which features the very talented Kevin Goldsborough on acoustic guitar, myself on guitar, jews harp, percussion, chickens, swords, horses and crickets.

The official release is 11:44am GMT March 20th 2009, which is the exact time of the Spring Equinox.

It’s been a labour of love as well as hard work. Mostly I’m happy after a break to go back to song recordings, and bring them blinking into the light with the aid of cleverness, but in some cases – especially when you’re mixing three per day – it’s a pain. You have to regularly rest your ears, or the mixes sound bad, it’s simple as that.

Funnily enough, the song I most enjoy after all the extra production attention is one which I found difficult to write at the time (wasn’t feeling too well) – Money to Burn, which lambasts our culture of insanely excessive wealth and specifically the Forbes rich list.

The reason I found this song hard to go back to was that it’s a an angry protest song, and while I get the point of such songs, full shout mode isn’t a place I like to inhabit. But, like plenty of people, I love loud, aggressive songs in the right place and time. Rage is a part of the human experience, as is outrage.

Money to Burn is well written, the performances are good, I like the intro by @Langley and it was actually great fun to remix. It’s very much in the style of Beastie Boys hip hop, with trashy guitars, nice beats and samples, and megaphone vocals ripping the piss out of super-rich snobbery.

Now of course with taxpayers money being donated by the truckload to busted bankers, it’s become fashionable to poke the rich with a sharp stick. Back in March 2008, most people still hadn’t quite cottoned on to the appalling state of capitalism.

All the songs will be up and ready for tomorrow’s official launch, and we’ll have a party in London in April to coincide with the physical release of the album.* I’m also looking forward to hearing some remixes – Lagowski is on the case.

* CD and DVD

I met Mark Crook when I was 11 years old, and I met Andy Carroll when I was 21, and I have written with both of these talented musicians many times, but this song was the first time I managed to combine both forces. It was very simple. I visited Andy in his studio, he gave me three loops and phrases. I brought them back to the writing studio I shared with Mark and he played some country-tinged acoustic guitar over the groove we constructed. I had free rein to improvise the melody and lyrics.

The music seemed relaxed and open, warm and welcoming, so I provided an appropriate scenario. I pictured a traveling salesman who misses his wife and yearns to return to the comfort of her arms, making a relationship work in the day to day struggle of life. A song of love and marital fidelity could be a bit of a cliché if approached in the wrong manner, and since crass sentiment is something I tend to avoid like the plague (a serious challenge when you’re writing pop songs) I needed to be sincere and write from my own experience of playing gigs, living on the road and missing my partner.

I tried not to make it too gender-specific, and I included some thoughts I was having from reading Eckhart Tolle.

My lover caught the oblique references to our relationship and this became a favourite. She loves the line “As the evening sunlight softens…” and repeats it with a soft look in her eyes. The power of songwriting to seduce will be another post… Another friend of mine who fell in love with this song is Kate, and I was very touched when she asked to use the song in a photo DVD she made for her son’s wedding. That’s when music is at its best, embedded in real, life-defining moments.

But you have to be careful. When the people around you are aware that at any time they might become the subject of your work, it can make things uncomfortable for them, so I try not to analyse or discuss lyrics with friends – I don’t want my normal human relationships to become stilted. You can usually find a way to say things indirectly most of the time, in any case, which is usually better for poetry.

This song is deliberately long, like the landscape through which our protagonist is traveling to return to his love. I do have a shorter edit, but it doesn’t work. I like the big space in the verses, the pauses which allow the words to sink in, which are great to sing, and between you and me, I think the chorus is one of my finest, because everyone can sing along.

And even though this road goes on and on
Cold mornings, nights are weary, days are long
And though I travel far, we stay so strong
This road leads back to you, where I belong

If you want to use this song or any you find here in your music podcast, blog or broadcast, you probably can, but please ask me first.