Оригинал:
1.Kriegsspiel (Wargames)
A warning. An angry beginning. I began by thinking this might be some kind of war album, an assault on complacency, or the idea of how I can be at war with myself. I had a few songs which were definitely an attack on the apathy of my generation. Those that just turn on the tv, see 2000 people get killed and then go and play on the Wii and go on myspace and facebook and lose their brain to the vapid digital world. What if the war games they play were real ? It felt like there needed to be some waking up, coming from the point of view that things aren’t just about pleasure and fun. It’s an angry start and that felt right for this album. This leads to . . .
2.Hard Times
A commentary. Me impatient for some action. I can get pretty angry when I want to. It was originally going to be the title of the album. It’s a phrase that’s hard to resist, especially at the moment, but it ultimately didn’t represent everything the album touches on. It sounds like people might not expect me to sound, with the guitars that I usually try and avoid. It was written when I was on tour and I was looking out at an audience and as much as I love them somehow I was wanting more from them, more than them just standing there looking at me waiting for me to do something. You’re trying to tell a story from the bottom of your heart and talking about trying to change and individuality and identity and you start to think that none of it is ultimately happening. People are dressing differently, they’re looking like they want to stand out and change things, but there’s no sign of anything ideologically changing, just signs of fashions changing. So I’m just begging my audience - show me some revolution, show me some change, I can only sing about it but can you please show me something, change something, do something be active, don’t just go home and talk about your Converse shoes on Facebook, do something. I guess I’m really influenced by meeting Patti Smith and her not being afraid to ask people and to challenge your audience and say, get out there, do something and change the world; I can’t do it, she can’t do it, we can only ask the audience to go for it.
3. Oblivion
A dark fable. Oblivion is quite an odd song which was based on a monstrous black dog like animal called the barghest which was like the Beast of Bodmin Moor but for Lancashire. And that led me to write a hunting song imagining this boy going out to find this mythological beast, about a son asking his father if he can have a gun to hunt the beast. And then it became something else. I started to travel a lot in America and I remember having a one night stand with someone who had a gun by their bed, literally on their bedside table and just getting really interested in how everybody has a gun and everybody has a weapon of some kind in America. There’s this kind of mythological thing that they’re trying to protect themselves from, the monsters that are out there somewhere. They show their guns off, as though you would be interested in them. I started thinking about this person who’s gone on this big mission through the desert into Iraq with his weapons to go out on a killing spree. His country has given him a gun and permission to use it. There’s a point where he fires a bullet and realises that this destructive part of himself, this male destructive testosterone part is his own destruction, this thing that’s destroying him, rather than other things around him. His own gun is turned on himself in a way. Tilda Swinton comes in as the voice of hope, get back up, what the hell are you doing, what are you so afraid of.
So it’s a whole story within three minutes basically that was originally a mythical Lancashire thing which suddenly turned into a gun toting Texan boy going out to Iraq to kill people and Tilda Swinton helping him back on his feet . . .
4. The Bachelor
A title track. Me as a kind of pig farmer. The Bachelor is my duet with Eliza Carthy. I wanted to find original lyrics to set to some Appalachian poems that I had found. There was this one called The Turtle Dove which was about a pig farmer who says a turtle dove is a bird that exists in two parts, like a love bird, and when the other bird dies then it just spends its whole time crying for the other one. He’s singing to the turtle dove saying poor little turtle dove sitting up in your pine mourning for your own true love. The Bachelor really set the theme for this album - it was something I was really feeling at the time. The Pig Farmer is basically saying, look at my empire of pigs and all my hogs and my farm, but he’s not going I want to find someone to give my love to or where’s my true love, he’s going who’s going to feed them when I’m dead and gone. He just wants to meet a wife to marry and she can look after everything when he’s dead.
I came back from a long tour and thought, I have no wife, I have no kids, I’ve made a lot of money. I sat in this flat in Kensington looking at my harpsichord and my piano and my instruments and my empire, my farm my pigs, all my albums and the success I’d had in America and there was no one to share it with, no one. All my friends had given up on me because I’d been away for so long. It’s one of the most extreme views you could have on love, you just want someone to look after you. It’s an old misogynist way of looking at love, getting someone to do your washing or your cleaning or look after your kids or whatever.
So the duet with Eliza I thought it would be great to split it into two… it wasn’t just about masculinity, it also came from a female point of view where they’re both singing the same songs like a bachelor and a bachelorette, so I split it into a real Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra duet, well my version, like an English folk version . . . and the beat in it is sampled from the Northampton Conker Festival. The witch men there are like Morris dancers but they’re a lot scarier, they’re like blacked up they’re really intensively pagan and dark, lots of pentagrams, and the wives play the accordion and the button concertina and they just smash these big suggestive sticks. They’re banging away with these big phallic sticks like they’re smashing into masculinity and I thought it was a perfect drum beat for that song. 5. Damaris
A big ballad. The loss of love. Sort of autobiographical. Again. I did a lot of album recording in a church in Brede near Hastings. This is an album getting to grips with my English roots, my father’s side of things, so we traced the family back to a family of ferret catchers in Brede in West Sussex and I found this story Damaris which was a tiny grave with just the name Damaris on it. I went and asked the vicar about it, and he said she was a gypsy girl, maybe black, definitely an outsider of the time, she fell in love with a catholic, the vicar’s son and of course they wanted to get married and he had to say no because she wasn’t catholic and she died of a broken heart which was another term for suicide at the time. She died at the end of the garden which was where he buried her and put this wooden cross.
I just thought there was something so wonderfully tragic about this girl that desperately wanted to love, to be in a relationship with a boy but she was denied her because of his faith… maybe because he was a Catholic, but he could have been gay or the boys father might have denied her because she was a gypsy or black, and something gets in the way of love, a big, unavoidable split down the middle something that has often happened to me, a block between you and love . . . and the vicar's son is on her grave mourning for her and desperately wanting to be with her on the other side.
Добавлено (02.08.2010, 22:47)
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6. Thickets
A travelling song. Me losing myself and needing to find myself. I wrote it when I lived in Hackney and I was cycling through the marshes one summer and looking at all the wasteland and you’ve got all these old stock cars but they’ve got like thickets growing through the rusted metal, and blackberries and flowers, so there are beautiful things growing out of this wasteland. It’s a slight tribute to The Wasteland. I’d heard TS Eliot reading his poem The Wasteland with this wonderful, wonderful voice. I wanted to use that but we couldn’t clear it with the TS Eliot estate, So I got Tilda Swinton in to recreate that sort of atmosphere. I was trying to do a song about addiction basically and about desire and things like promiscuous sex or addiction to a substance or alcohol or anything, it’s like negativity and bad things that grow around you and these are like thickets that you have to break through.
I’ve indulged in a lot of things in my short life so far and there was a certain time in 2007 when I was extremely thin, really couldn’t eat properly, not looking after myself at all, and just literally focusing on the next show and being extremely hedonistic and reckless with my body. There was a point when I just looked in the mirror and I looked really pale and deathly. Tilda plays the voice of my mother saying what the hell’s happened to you, snap out of it. It doesn’t end positively. I don’t respond, not yet, it just gets worse, I’m wrecked, the thickets keep growing, it gets worse and the travelling continues. The positive end comes later.
7. Count Of Casualty
A wake up call. Getting to grips with my new circumstances. When you’re in a really self destructive mode that a lot of other things come to light as well. You start to fight with your surroundings, with yourself. I became a lot more political and a lot more antagonistic and anarchistic, to feel that I wasn't just moping around going ohh I’m fucked up. It’s actually like a new character gets triggered at that point, you become a lot more likely to go on a political rally or to become more argumentative with you friends, it just happens hand in hand, especially when you’re very single you become more likely to become vegan or go on an anti fur rally. You’re searching for some kind of meaning in any way you can, something to cling on to.
Count of Casualty features a gospel choir and it was written at a time when I was thinking about America during Bush and that general slide into corruption – they have a good president now so I changed the president bit to about what its like in Britain now and our prime minister and thinking about, wake up everybody, have some knowledge of your English politics and count your casualty, which is your casualness to society, your apathy.
8. Who Will?
A sex song. Of sorts. I originally wrote it for my catholic aunty, Great Aunt Patricia, hence the church organ. Aunt Patricia was a nun and telling the story adds a bit of comedy to it and I try not to say it before I perform it now because people just won’t stop laughing. Basically she had ovarian cancer which isn’t funny, but the whole thing with nuns is that they wait their whole life to have sex with Jesus, or meet Jesus on the other side, that’s why they stay celibate so that they can be brides of Jesus.. But they stay celibate and the problem is, when they hit about 50 or 60, because they haven’t used their sexual organs there’s a big, big risk of them having cancer so almost like their celibacy and their desperate waiting for their true love and the one who will fulfil their desire kills them in the end. I thought it was a great song for a bachelor or a bachelorette to sing - who will penetrate my tightening muscle, who will cut across my thickening skin. The lyrics are deeply sexual… I think Aunt Patricia will appreciate the song . . . she was quite forward thinking.
9. Vulture
Another song about me. And sex. There was a point when I was so desperately single I ended up getting a little bit promiscuous in Los Angeles. I was waiting to go on the Jimmy Kimmel show and had a week where they paid for me in a hotel and I ending up meeting this Satanist and one thing led to another… I’m a real voyeur, as a writer I know that’s one way of writing off a promiscuous sexual experience, but it really was voyeuristic, I was very interesting in how Americans think Satanism is the opposite of the Catholic church but actually it’s the same thing. Extreme Catholicism and extreme Satanism are in a way alike. One wouldn’t exist without the other. It ended up turning into a very debauched few days, but just listening to this Satanist blabber on for two days was fascinating…
And I think as a writer there’s that need to have experiences. That’s why I appreciate Joni Mitchell, because she’s constantly recounting experiences she’s had whether she’s enjoyed them or not, whether she was actually interested or not. It’s part of my job as a writer to always be searching and researching. And I guess in LA I thought, I’ve got a week off, so let’s get satanic. And then I felt really dirty after it. I felt really like I needed a good cleansing, something to bring back my innocence. I was thinking about vultures, like mythologically vultures come, take dead meat and the vulture is a desert bird and I’d done a lot of driving through Arizona desert and from Las Vegas and really doing all the old American routes and thinking a lot about desert mythology and the LA forest fires were burning and it’s called the Santa Anna winds, and it’s a wind that comes every year at the end of summer and he was talking about how Satanists actually believe it’s Satan coming to burn down Hollywood and it’s a beautiful old Native American thing, the Santa Anna Winds so I was begging, the song’s begging for the Santa Anna winds to come and burn this idiot down and lead to the resurgence of life…
It’s got my mum on it. I was calling her from LA, like ‘Everything’s Fine yes, I’ll be home in three days’ trying to sound really sober and really together and she was like ‘What’s wrong?’ and I’m like ‘No, I’m fine, everything’s great, I’m going to be on prime time tv, it’s great, it’s great’ and I put the phone down and like I’m dying, like hearing voices in the air conditioning and trying to hold it together and I think that’s one of the spirits of this story, trying to hold it together through depression and debauchery and singledom and all that stuff.
10. Blackdown
A confession. Black Down is the transition, my answer to the dreadful decadence of Vulture, so it’s returning to England and finding my father was ill, and it starts with a spoon solo by my mum actually and this is probably favourite song I’ve ever written. It’s about my link to my father and it’s the responsibility that comes with feeling these selfish feelings but knowing it’s slightly childish and naive, it’s got to change. I want to support my family better, I want to make my sister proud, I want to make my father proud, and I want to – it’s a return to my family really after everything, all the shit I caused when I was a teenager and the reckless behaviour of my early 20s and thinking I wanted the pop star life. Black Down was like going ok maybe it’s time to take control of my desire and my life and to get a good grip and make my father proud, even contemplating what will happen when I die one day, do I have to do a will , things like that, I’m extremely morbid! But thinking about these things…And if there’s any place to do it for me it’s in a song, not with a therapist or a best friend, always put it into song.
I studied a lot of English reels for this and worked with Eliza, she did the field solo and we got an English pipe organ and we actually hired English marching drums from an old army marching band, had those in the studio; so it’s like looking out over Sussex and the sun breaking and you’ve got your dad there and you’re trying to make them all proud and yes I’m going to get back together and pull myself together…
Добавлено (02.08.2010, 22:47)
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11. The Sun Is Often Out
A suicide song. The Sun Is Often Out is a very tricky one. An old friend of mine, Stephen, had committed suicide, throwing himself into the Thames. He was a poet, a really wonderful person, did one book of poetry… nobody really knew why he did it, and I thought about my time with him and I was almost questioning him, like why the decision to end your life, and when I first wrote it I didn’t really feel much hope myself, and I was very unsure about even recording it. Although there are lots of explorations on this album of darker times and dark feelings and negativity, I never want to inspire that emotion in any body else. I want to go there and I need to go there as a song writer but I have a cut off point where I don’t want to actually inspire that emotion in someone else; I want them to explore it and maybe feel some empathy, but not to bring people down, you know? I actually want to give them hope but saying no matter how bad things get you can always life yourself out of it.
12. Theseus
And then Theseus leads on from that because it ends with me asking Stephen was your work art so heavy that it wouldn’t let you live? So it ends on death and then Theseus is Tilda coming in saying this is a message of hope, asking the hero to keep on going. I was almost thinking about if somebody was in the same situation and how would you stop them, like a Samaritans phone line, like stop, but without doing it in a really ‘don’t do it it’s really bad’, trying to do it like, wait a second, have a think,about life and the beauty of the world. Theseus was a song I wrote a long, long time ago actually and I forgot about it and I did it on a radio show about 6 years ago and people had been sharing it as a bootleg and I’d always wanted to do it with full strings, so I brought it right up to date and I did it as a split with Tilda, she speaks everything that I say…
It was at that point after all the promotion and all the touring, all the tv shows, sort of becoming the pop star I always though I wanted to be - I thought I had found what I was looking for and I tasted that success, but I’m sitting in an empty house with empty gin bottles and no one to love, and all those human qualities I’d lost. How was I going to find my way out of that maze? I have to find a way . . .
The final songs on the album are becoming positive now. I think that’s the great thing about making an album, that you can have 4 songs that are about the problem, and 4 songs about the recovery or the resolution. And that’s what I tried to do with the sequencing of the album and I have done with I think every record, try and tell some kind of story. I mean the story is pretty superficial on the last album, but the first record it was everything from gender dysfunction to really being beaten up to losing my virginity when I was 12, I really went on a journey there, and this one for me feels like a return to that, just to be as honest as possible and unforgiving with all the subject matter and my own feelings.
Stephen’s suicide was a real turning point for me during my writing process. I thought that’s the last negative thing I’m going to let affect me. Stephen’s act of suicide was really for me the point of seeing a poet and seeing somebody wallow in so much melancholy that the act of exploring solitude and melancholy destroyed him. He went with the whole mythology of a self destructive poet and for me it got to the point where I’m not going to write another song about my own self-destruction. It’s time to really focus on a different aspect of life. It's time to come back to life.
13. Battle
A recovery. And that brings you out into Battle which I guess is the mission statement of this period, getting really sick of ignorance and conservative ideas and homophobia and depression, getting tired of chasing excitement and ending up feeling more and more lonely, battling all these things.
Basically I asked Alec Empire to come up with a certain style of music, which was a totally new way of working for me I said right I want a full on heavy metal track, almost like a football anthem and I came back that night and I wrote the song on top and it was a total co-write collaboration.
14. The Messenger
An ending. And a beginning. The Messenger me looking back at the journey I’ve done since I was 15 and the things I’ve learned. I remember writing the melody for this song when I was 14 on my first laptop on Clapham Common, with a bottle of lemonade, singing into this microphone and I thought I was going to rewrite it now for being 25 so it starts off leaving for the road at 15 and looking back at 25 and after exploring all these dark things being actually really proud of what I’ve done. It’s my no regrets Edith Piaf song basically. I’ve done all this, I’ve made a mess of things, I’ve done crazy, stupid things, I don’t regret a thing, and I’m ready to go out travelling again and see the world but this time from a position of strength. It looks back on all my journeys through the desert and the open road and looks at all the positives, the moments that I can never regret because in a way they have led to me being who I am now. It’s a love song to all the positive aspects of my life as a traveller and a musician.
