SONGS FROM THE BLUE HOUSE - EXTRA SLEEVE NOTES

The repository for stuff we would have liked to put on the sleeves of CDs but couldn't because it would have cost too much...

"TREE"

Beartown Road

SK - I have a very good book at home called 'The House on Beartown Road' which I took a chance on and bought solely on the basis of a good review I read in one of the Saturday supplements, and I'm very glad that I did. Essentially it's the memoir of a woman who, rather than move her father into a care home upon the onset of his Alzheimer's, moves him into her home. Over the course of the book she describes the relationships between her, her ailing father, her new daughter and her husband, who gives up half way through and goes to live with his mistress. It's a bit of a tearjerker on occasion, to be honest. 

I live round the corner from Ipswich Cemetery and on Mother's Day the queue for parking goes on for miles - my lovely wife Hannah was moved to comment that "The cemetery's always full on Mother's Day" as we drove past once, and so when I came to write the lyrics to what had previously been an instrumental known simply as "Doobedobedo", I switched the scenario round so that it presupposed that there was a man who had made the opposite decision (ie stuck her in a home) and upon the death of his mother is to be found reflecting on the choice he has made. This isn't based on real life by the way, my Mother is (at the time of writing) in rude health and quite able to decide where she's going to live for herself. I did visit her mother, my grandmother, once in a retirement home where she was slowly but surely (and extremely contentedly) slipping away from us. "Did you bring this table?" she asked over tea and biscuits. In her mind she was twenty-eight again, and in love with a handsome young officer from the RAF who could crack walnuts with his fists. 'Grandpa', we called him. 

The tune came into existence way before all this had to be considered as James, Gibbon and I sat in The Snug at The Blue House one evening looking at each other for inspiration, occasionally smoking, sucking on a bottle of JHB each and strumming guitars here and there. Eventually we came up with the riff, chords and middle eight between us and when it came to recording it we decided to go for the whole big production number and in the absence of a kitchen sink, plumped for steel guitar instead. I played a rough mix to my friend Tony Shevlin one night while we were on our way to an Eagles covers band gig and he grinned from ear to ear all the way through, which proved that if on the one hand he definitely had a keen ear for a banjo-based Bernie Leadon-ism then he can't have been quite concentrating on the lyrics properly. I played a version of this at a Picturehouse rehearsal once and it sounded like an outtake from Neil Young's 'Ragged Glory'. Can't ask for more than that really, can you? I hauled my friend Wendell's enormously weighty Fender Twin all the way to Great Bardfield to record this and we ended up recreating the sound with some technology. Still, I think it enjoyed the day out.

JP - Thank you so much to Paul Read and Steven Mears for all the bits they did on 'Tree', but particularly for their harmony work on this one. It's a great driving tune, blows the morning cobwebs out nicely.

(Don't Fear) The Reaper

JP - We were scrabbling around whittling down the 16 songs we'd recorded during the 'Tree' sessions to a manageable album-length (oh yes, there's unreleased tracks!), and we'd even sent copies of the whole sessions out to a 'listening panel' of people,  from Mark Ellen at 'The Word' magazine to our mate Rob in the hope that they'd confirm that the ones we thought weren't quite good enough really weren't (they did). One grey morning I was as usual driving to work down the A130, the scene of some of my best flashes of inspiration over the past 3 years, when I realised that although we'd recorded this song a while back it'd never got too much of an airing. The album needed something with just this sort of pace, feel and dynamic and heck...we already had it in the bank!

I did feel that it needed a remix though, which meant that Simon Allen at the High Barn had to move  the multi-track audio files from the old hard drive to the posh, new, even more expensive one before we could get going on it. He agreed (somewhat reluctantly and only accompanied by the presentation of an invoice) to do so. I rang him on the appointed day and enquired meekly "How are you Simon?". I was told that if I'd asked four hours earlier the answer would have been somewhat less polite and very much shorter, but as it was he had now recovered from horrors of lead tangling and untangling, patch lead plugging, level checks, file transfer and so on. A day or so later I popped up there and we remixed it together. At the end Simon was beaming from ear to ear and declaring the whole thing excellent, which was a nice turnaround. 

When we'd finished, a thought occurred to me..."Simon, have you ever heard the original version of this?". He hadn't, so we looked it up on iTunes. He gave it about 20 seconds, leaned over and abruptly stopped it playing . "What's up?" I asked. "Yours is better" said Simon. Gotta love that man...

Her

SK - We were asked for a single, "something catchy", by the nice people who were going to put our album out and so, eager to please, we went away to ponder our ponderers, and this is the thing we came up with. The gentle encroachment of batterie into our hitherto acoustically rural idyll is fully completed here as our friend Mr. Paul Read makes a radio-friendly cut n' shunt of about four different James Partridge songs, riffs, middle eights and bridges into one good, clean wholesome whole which turns out to be quite jolly, and Tony Turrell sprinkles arpeggiated piano topping all over the fluffy bits. On TT's piano, there is no 'dusty end'!

JP - I wasn't terribly involved in this one, so I just hit the up-beats really hard in the verses and worry about if we're playing it too slow. Sounds fat on the album though...

In My Arms 

SK - This is regularly announced on stage as being our attempt to be the world's first forty year old boy band and, darvit, I reckon it's as close as anyone's likely to get. Luckily TT and James completely ignored my suggestion that we do "a sort of Strawberry Fields thing" in the middle and put in the very lovely part that you hear on the album. I get that a lot with those two and they're always infuriatingly right, damn their eyes! If anyone wants to know what "The overcoat of winters past and goodbye notes" is, it's bloody poetry, that's what. My wife really likes this song, however at gigs when we start playing it she is usually interrupted by someone asking if it's about her, and so never gets to listen to it all the way through. It is, by the way. And that's 'coquette' in the first verse, not 'cokehead'. You're listening to it differently now, aren't you?

JP - It is my honour to be allowed to sing the first verse and chorus of this song, which took no small amount of foot-stamping, I can tell you. I love it as if it were my own, perhaps more.

Song V

SK - We decided that there really weren't enough East Anglian country songs regarding the romance of the road and the struggle to just keep on the white line long enough to hit the county border by daybreak, and so this is our contribution to going part way to redressing that lack. 

This is the story of a guy who splits with a girl, joins a band, goes off on tour and wonders what the hell he's going to do for an encore, and is dedicated to Matthias Groth, who drove the bus, smoked Prince cigarettes and listened to Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel tapes almost incessantly while all these real events went on around him. He gave us all Pentangle t-shirts as he'd just finished touring with them around Germany and mentioned a very good singer-songwriter he'd just dropped off in London prior to picking us up. Many years later we got to know Essex-based guitarist, singer and songwriter David Hughes, who one night mentioned that he'd once done a great tour of Germany with Pentangle and been dropped off in London as the tour driver had to go up to Ipswich to collect a band before catching the ferry to Esbjerg…

JP - Well what can I say about this story? I was there for most of it, and it's all true; Shane and I did do that trip to Denmark and Sweden with our splendid band 'As Is', and I remember it all the better for this song. But yes, what rounded it all off and brought it up to date was sitting in Dave Hughes' kitchen in 2006, looking at his old photos before stopping suddenly and asking "Why have you got pictures of Matthias Groth in here?", before the whole synchronistic tale unfolded. David then spent a few minutes on the internet looking for Groths in Hamburg in the online phone book, and then a few more on the phone ringing startled non-relatives of Matthias before we gave up and had another drink. I can remember it as if were yesterday, not nearly 20 years ago - Matthias saying that I should check this fella's stuff out as he was sure I'd really like it. Eventually I did, and he was right!

Kings and Gods

SK - A misplaced gem from Helen and Steve Mears' brief but glorious collaborative past. Hel has been hankering after us doing this for ages now and so it seemed only fair to get the original guitarist in to do it justice. Steve earned the justly awarded sobriquet of "One Take" during the session for this one and was in and out of the studio so quickly he barely had time to let his tea cool down, which after watching us faff about all day on some other stuff, I think Engineer Simon was secretly quite pleased about.

JP - I am particularly grateful to Liz Townsend for the cello on this one - I hummed and lah-lah'ed what I thought the cello parts should sound like to her and she did all of that and more.

Incredible

JP - As you may have read on this site before, this is a very old song, from 1990-ish. It had appeared on a self-made SftBH CD single in 2005, as one of a few bonus tracks, which were all old stuff by Shane, Gibb, myself and various combinations thereof.  What we hadn't expected from that release was the positive response that this song got, even in its original rough-as-guts budget-recording form, laden with squawking fizzy guitars and wigged-out vocals. But like it they did, or least enough of them to encourage us to have a go at nailing it with the SftBH sound.

As musicians trooped in and gamely did their bit on this, I was struck first by their mild annoyance at being told "Just do whatever on this one",  just before being delighted as they all entered into the spirit of the thing and twanged, scraped and hit things in a nice set of linear improvisations. To quote Neil Diamond, "It's A Beautiful Noise" and I think we're all very pleased with how it came out.

The big noisy crashy bit after the line "Remember me like this..." was probably never ever going to be quite how I can hear it in my head, but it's pretty damn close.

Katy Did 

SK - Occasionally the working titles of bits and scraps that I record at home for later Blue Housing keep their names throughout the creative process and here we find Mr. Partridge dipping into Guy Clark territory with a beautiful lyrical narrative and a happy ending using the original scribbled title as a starting point. As throughout so much of the rest of the album, TT subtly enhances in the background. I wanted sound effects on this in verse two but we decided that hanging around a primary school playground with a tape recorder was more likely to get us a restraining order than a suitable soundtrack. Well, that and the fact that James flatly refused to countenance the idea. Mr. Gibbon shines on this one, with his vocals and various horns beautifully arranged and confidently performed. Gibbon is, indeed, our very own brass monkey.

JP - "Is it about Phoebe?" they all ask me. Phoebe is my niece - a fantastic singer based in Bristol who has guested with us once ( and I hope she will again). Phoebe's background is most certainly not that of the fictional Katy, except for the fact that she sings like an angel and did once live in a 'two-room shack beyond the back of nowhere much at all". That much she did inspire but otherwise no, it's just a story that was sparked off by Shane's working title for a set of chords, as described above.

Little Lies 

SK - This is one of James's that I've been very fond of for some while now, but has firmly resisted being properly Blue Housed for a frustratingly long time. In the studio we put guitars on, we overdubbed them, we dropped a piano part in, we rolled off the top end of the bass, we took all the guitars off again and put a couple of different ones on, changed the melody, the timing, the arrangement and eventually even added some drums. Well, I say 'we', I mean James Partridge and James Munson. There's a beautifully evocative phrase in "You've left your coat behind…." which always stays with me long after the song has finished. Parters was mucking about in the control room with a nylon-strung guitar while all this was going on, and came up with the splendid figure which now graces the instrumental bit in the middle. Ladies love this song, and indeed cool James.

JP - I would just like to thank Simon, Shane and Gibb for putting up with me while I arsed around with this one trying to get it feel right. In the end, 'less is more' was the answer.

Don't Lose 

SK - Brevity being the soul of discretion (or whatever) I didn't play on this. Here James and Gibbon are simply playing live in a darkened control room. If you listen carefully you can hear me holding my breath in the background.

JP - Recently this song came up in conversation with Helen, and I had to confess that I can't really remember what I was thinking about when the lyrics appeared. I think it's probably some sort of message to my friends in the event of my death, like a goodbye note before there's even been a bereavement.

Vanilla 

SK - Mr Gibbon is not a particularly prolific writer, but he came up with this tune all on his own and demoed it at home before giving James and I a copy and asking us if we had anything to go with it. During a bit of studio downtime (they were giving the air conditioning a good thrashing so we couldn't do any acoustic guitars) we recorded a safety copy so that we'd have something to work on later, and then started fiddling with it almost immediately. 

When the talented and generous Nick Zala came in later to overdub some pedal steel on some other songs he immediately spotted a gap in the arrangement and put down a very nice acoustic guitar part which, defying the laws of physics in some way, made the whole thing sound sparser, despite the fact that he'd just played an extra guitar on it. His next job was playing on some sessions for McFly, which I imagine presented a slightly different series of challenges. 

As ever when I manage to get the job of writing the words, there are many lyrical in-jokes, tributes and pastiche contained within - in the first four lines of verse two there are references to songs by The Waterboys, The Cornell Hurd Band, Guy Clark and Loudon Wainwright alone - there's no prize, but if you spot them all, do get in touch. This was intended to be sung by the guy referred to in Neil Young's "When Your Lonely Heart Breaks", but I was easier to get hold of and could read the handwriting on the lyric sheet.

JP - I adore this song, and although Nick Zala's work is exemplary throughout 'Tree', he really comes into his own here. Mind you, I happen to know that his favourite is In My Arms.

Risk 

SK - Another tune from the Snug sessions wherein James, Gib and Shane attempt to play the intro to a Del Amitri song while capo'ed at the ninth fret and get it hopelessly wrong. From such happy chances and accidents are mighty board game-centric anthems drawn. To this day there is no proscribed length for the ending, which if you see us play live you'll be able to tell by the nervous way Fiddly starts looking at James for clues after about five minutes of outro. The burst of heavenly choir towards the back end is an inspired Judy Dyble who came in for a morning, nailed the take and then was regally transported back to Oxfordshire, most of which she now owns. I think we managed to fill up all the remaining available tracks on the recording desk by the simple method of buttonholing pretty much everyone who walked past the control room during the sessions and getting them to sing on the end bit. Many thanks and apologies to those whose band meetings, rehearsals, sessions and coffee breaks we interrupted with our demands.

JP - This song has caught the the eyes and ears of a few folk as we've played it on the live stage (which is perhaps its natural home). It is a very personal song that nonetheless grapples with some universal issues, and I confess that I rarely get through it dry-eyed, as it can be quite intense singing it. A number of people have asked me if the lyric has anything to do with child molestation, and I would like to say definitively that it does not.

Come On #2 

SK - An old song re-visited after several successful live outings, this is probably the folkiest we get in terms of actual singalong tunes, and you can tell which ones we have been doing live for some time, because everyone is on them. The salty tang of the harbour is beautifully invoked by TT's faux-accordian and vocal gravitas is lent by one of our favourite singers, Paul Mosley (out've Moses, and Fear) who generously came in to the studio one Sunday morning and put his own unique stamp on the whole thing. I can never decide whether to sing it high or low, you see, and I almost always get it wrong and I knew Paul would be reet canny for the job if we could only persuade him out to Posh North Essex to do it. Luckily we could. 

Buried deep in the mix toward the end is an absolutely stunning bass run by Gib which I wish we'd soloed out so you could all hear it better. The word in verse two is 'succour', not 'sucker' by the way. There was already a song called 'Come On', hence the Bob-Zimmerman-style title, unfortunately this has led Tony Winn to refer to this one as "The Constipation Song". And him a Dylanophile.

JP - Just rollicking good fun, and with a great mate; you can't beat it.

"TOO"

Song III

SK - Written by way of e-mail with the fragrant and charming Helen Mulley. I wanted to do an ‘answer’ song – very much in the style of The Beautiful South – whereby one of the protagonists in a certain situation would present their POV and the other would respond accordingly, and fortunately Helen was up for the challenge. I adopted my persona, she adopted hers, and off we went. I already had the minor key clippity-clop rhythm for the verses, and once I’d edited our correspondence down to a series of pithy exchanges I added in a chorus, itself a tangential tribute to REM’s “Cuyahoga”, and took the whole thing round to The Blue House for dissection, at which point James, oddly for him, actually lengthened the choruses, Gibbon refined a few passing chords, and by the end of the evening we had a rough version ready to present to The Collective.

As well as the work which went into putting the thing together, the finished version relies heavily not only on the amazing chemistry between James & Helen which allows them to intertwine their voices in that special way they do, but also to the inspired interventions of Pete on the high, lonesome, keening harmonica and the abstract zither, as well as Tony’s redoubtable banjo picking.

As the small print at the end of films proclaims – any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental , however isn’t it funny the way life imitates art sometimes?

HM - Shane and I wrote the lyrics to this one via email (how terribly modern!); he sent me the first half of the verses and I came up with the 'replies'*. The main point I wanted to get across was that the lass who's being left behind is rather less distressed about the whole thing than the departing chap would have hoped - not that he's likely to notice. It's one of those conversations where participant A is so fixed on his own current state of mind that you just know participant B's responses aren't even registering on his radar. He's cast himself in his own little play and if she's got her own script, well, that's not really his concern, is it? James, Gibb and Shane then wrote the music one evening in the front room of the Blue House - the final version really hasn't changed much from the original demo (although James' solo has been through about as many incarnations as we've had gigs). I really wanted a Be Good Tanyas feel to the vocals - but dammit, I'm just too darn perky.    *Mind you, if you want an exegesis of the chorus , you'll have to speak to Shane…

JP - For me, this has a real sense of a successful co-write, with Shane and Helen starting the ball rolling (the epic e-writing session) and Gibb and I sticking our oars in later. A fine set of lyrics, and musically I like the way it just rolls along, smouldering all the way to the end with its dischords and guttural bass, before closing with a rattlesnake shake from Matt White.  I have no idea precisely what genre of music this fits into, and that's perhaps one of the reasons that I like it so much...so if you do manage to define it, do me a favour and please keep it to yourself... ;-)  

Antibike 

SK - It left my house as a 'Green on Red play the best of Exile on Main Street'-type thing before first Helen and then Fiddly twisted, turned and wrought the very living chords to their own ends and devices. Regularly introduced live with the phrase "…and tonight, direct from the Hot Tub de Paris…." Which I must stop doing.

HM - On the first SftBH album, there is a song called Bike, which basically says something along the lines of "Under normal circumstances, I'd travel a million miles for one of your smiles. However, I'm not as mobile as I used to be, so perhaps you'd be so good as to come here instead?" Antibike is the other side of that particular coin (hence the title - it's not that I've got anything against two-wheeled forms of transport). Banjo and, of course, fiddle, are particular highlights for me on this one - and may blessings rain upon Mr Kirk for coming up with the swingiest, catchiest riff that started the whole thing on its way.

JP - A really quite unexpected turn of style for SftBH, this song just sort of ended up sounding like this before any of us knew what was happening. 

Waste of Angels

SK - Helen's last gig before undergoing what used to be known as her 'confinement' involved an absolutely astonishing performance of this song in Norwich during the course of which I became convinced that the twins were going to arrive early, such was the intensity of her (ahem) delivery. Luckily someone in the audience videoed it and so I've been able to watch it again and reassure myself that I didn't imagine how brilliant it was the first time round - it really was that good. The last time I enjoyed it live that much previously was when our chum Matt was in the audience and having cocked an ear at the stage and peered round at the assembled, raised his glass triumphantly at the stage, gestured to his left and bellowed "Hey - this song's about that guy, right?!". On record, as it were, Gibbon creates a lovely atmosphere with his self-overdubbed brass arrangement within which Helen can really shine. The versions you didn't hear of this were a proposed vocal and beat box percussion-only take, and the entire brass band & vocal version, which I was really keen on and for which Gib has created an entire score but which we never really got round to organizing.

HM - As far as the lyrics go, all I'll say is that I was very, very angry. When it came to the recording, we had a - somewhat wobbly - vocal all ready to go; but on one of the very last studio days, booked for various bits of finishing off, I suddenly knew that I had a much better one in me. Phew!

JP - I had to do guide vocals for everything on the CD while were recording the songs for 'Too' and never got through this one without getting rather moist-eyed. It's impossible for me to say just how much I love the lyrics and their delivery. Somehow very English-sounding, Gibb's brass parts are evocative and pastoral, and when Richard's fiddle comes in I really start to melt. The song makes me think of the saddest things on earth against the backdrop of the most beautiful, like a heartbreak on the Sussex Downs or a crying child on the Long Mynd in Shropshire.

The Big Dipper

JP - After a drunken night out in the village with Russell, there it was, practically sitting on top of my house as I got to the brow of the hill. In the 200 yards or so to the front door I'd done all the words, and 45 minutes later there was a demo. This song owes a lot to Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, both of whom had been subject to heavy rotation on the CD player. Chris Jarvis' accordion really fattened it up and brought out the swing.

SK - Upon hearing the initial demo I remember mailing James a message to the effect that he'd just created the quintessential Neil Young (country sub-genre) song, which is ironic, because that's exactly what I've been trying to do for about the last twenty or so years. Reado added a big drum ("You don't think that's too Mungo Jerry…?") before a series of eliminatory auditions produced the final line up to perform the last, soaring harmonies on the line "Here…….at all…". For the record, in order, that's Me, James, Helen and Steve Constable.

HM - I don't do much on this one. Which is a shame, because it's a stomper. At gigs I always sort of want to whip out my flute and join in, but really, you have to draw a line somewhere. I can't even do the harmonies, because Gibbon does them. Beautifully. I do, however, sing the words "here at all" at one point.

Not That Kind Of Girl

SK - Is there any more depressing phrase in the English language than "I want to be famous"?...Well, there's "It's not you, it's me…" but that's generally more by association than intent, so no, not really. After a late evening and following morning suffering from a media barrage of so-called 'it' girls, page three models and celebrity slappers all sending out the same basic message of "Get these out and you'll get plenty of attention and boys will think you're really cool" (and what sort of filth is that to throw at our pop kids?). I finally snapped, went downstairs to the kitchen and while waiting for the kettle to boil smoked a cigarette and basically rewrote "My Favourite Things" only from the perspective of a forty-year old Julie Andrews who was living in Ipswich and was at that moment having a fag and making the tea. 

In this context, NTKoG can therefore be seen either as a proto-feminist anthem or a deeply misogynistic tirade - that's up to you to decide. By the time breakfast had been procured there was a cassette demo done and, as is the way with these things, it was dispatched to The Blue House for tweaking. The fragrant and charming Helen Mulley, whose job it was going to be to deliver these words, re-jigged a couple of things (for those familiar with the reputation of the area, I imagine the lyrics "I want a damned good thrashing at Portman Road" does have certain connotations, but it was still a disappointment when they went) and added a last verse which rather nicely counteracted all the negativity in the first bit. 

Catchy, isn't it? A nice bit of studio silliness was introduced as engineer Steve Tsoi solemnly added the sound of a nearly full football ground going "yaayyy-ooohhhh!", from a bit of video recorded on James' camera, and then digitally manipulated it into just the right place on the track to fit with the vocal. Ali Byrne has beautifully harmonized in the studio (and couldn't have been more patient and obliging while doing so) and Tony Winn really makes it burn with his fantastic banjo part - even more so live, by the way.

HM -  A Shane special - this one is fabulous to sing, once you've got the hang of fitting all of those words in. I added the final verse because I was worried that the protagonist would sound like a pushover, which isn't the point at all. By the way, I genuinely spent several nervous hours debating changing the lyrics before our gig at the Norwich Arts Centre supporting the Czars - but in the end I stuck to the Portman Road reference, trusting that the crowd wouldn't turn in anger on an eight-months-pregnant singer. I think we got away with it.

JP - A storming stomp written by Shane for Helen to sing. She added the last verse lest anyone think she was too nicey-nice. We generally receive a fair bit of audience participation to replace the cheering bit that's on the recorded version, which always makes us smile.

Ophelia

HM - Once again, this was the result of Shane passing me a tape with lots of lovely guitary bits on it and leaving me to grab one and twist it into a song, which the boys then took off for a final polish. It was written for someone who was going through a rough patch, despite being one of the nicest people on the planet. Good things do happen to good people; but a whole load of crap gets thrown at them too from time to time.

SK - When these tunes are merely scratchy, home-recorded glimmers in TDK or BASF's C-90 eye they usually have pet names so that we can identify and nurture them, or alternately cull them with the sort of brutality that Simon Cowell usually reserves for overweight shop girls from Peterborough who are attempting to cover 'Bright Eyes' on Pop Idol. One such hand-crafted instrumental gem was titled 'Ophelia', initially after Helen's character from stage faux-cowboy band The Perfectly Good Guitars (wherein I got to play Gram Parsons to her Emmylou Harris over a torrid duet of "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes in The Morning" a few times). At one early live performance grown men were seen to turn away lest their tears should fall in public at the point where James subtly starts harmonizing with Helen. Well, I did anyway - I was thinking of Gram & Emmylou again, and how pleased they'd have been.

JP - When we get this one right, it just soars.

On The Contrary 

HM - I wrote this a good thirteen years ago or so - and as it happens, Mary has indeed done quite a lot of dice-throwing since then. James' harmonies give the song a lovely bluegrassy feel and I'm also particularly fond of Radar's edgy harmonica, which adds some bitter to the sweet. Shane's main contributions are two-fold: first, he invented the pretty guitar twiddle that makes the whole thing bounce along most jauntily. Secondly, he made me sing the line: "…and you've got nothing to lose". I'd always spoken it before and in over a decade, no one else had ever pointed out how daft it sounded.

SK - Another song in which the actual title never appears in the lyric. That's me trying to play the sub-"Feel So Good" riff on the intro. Lots of people are inordinately fond of this song, which I find terribly frustrating as I didn't have anything to do with writing it, and if there's anything out there that's more important than my ego I want it tracked down and destroyed.

JP - I'm very familiar with this tune - it's been around the house for so long - and I think that sometimes I'm guilty of forgetting how good it is. Simple, unpretentious, heartfelt and honest.

Then There Was Sunshine

JP - Shane often gives me cassettes (remember those?) of guitar riffs that he's been playing with, marked with (as far as I know) fairly random 'titles' simply for identification purposes. Occasionally I'll like the temporary name and write the words to fit the title as well as the tune. This was one of those. I can't claim that this one was written about anyone in particular, but these days I like to think of my sons Joseph and Tev when I sing it.

SK - Our "This Is The Sea". Every group should have one.

HM - I haven't read James' notes yet, but I'm assuming he's already explained this one. Again, Gib's harmonies are great. My, what a range the boy has!

Forever

HM - I'm not the first to have done this, I'm sure - but this is about what happens in the days, months and years following "… and they lived happily ever after." Originally, it ended with the lines: "These are the moments that pay for it all/This is why we all believe in/Forever…", but James decided that things were dragging on a bit and, as is his way, lopped a chunk off to make the whole more palatable. I think the message is still there, anyway. For any anoraks out there, the second verse is an oblique reference to a short story by Norwegian writer Agnar Mykle, called "Briefest Encounter" ("I don't want to destroy any circle," she said. "I just want to enlarge it. Make it bigger and richer. And warmer. I did not know before today that one could do that…") You can find it in a collection called "A Man and His Sink" - and I thoroughly recommend that you do. It's one of my all-time favourite books.

SK - That lead guitarry bit was supposed to be a guide track for a mandolin which was to be overdubbed later, however we never got round to it and by the time Chris had added his Rive Gauche accordion answer part it was all hanging together rather nicely. There are some lovely lyrics in here, and I'm sure if you mail Helen she'll be only too pleased to forward you a copy of the last verse, which was ruthlessly excised at an early rehearsal.

JP - Another song of Helen's that has worn many pairs of shoes in our house. I was worried it wasn't working until Chris's accordion and some vigorous guitar strumming got it back on track. Gibb's bass wanders all over the place, riffing merrily - splendid!

Leaves

HM - Many, many years ago, Shane was messing about with open tuning and came up with something rather pretty, which he recorded on a tape and gave to me "because you sing sort of folky stuff". I duly wrote a song - but he never brought the subject up again and, being a shy sort, neither did I. After a while, I worked out my own chord sequence in ordinary tuning and bided my time. Eventually my little piece ended up at the Blue House and as soon as I heard James' "rough vocal guide", I knew that the song was finally complete. More trivia: yet another final verse bit the dust before recording - the lyrics to which were as follows: "So she leaves, and you stay/ With your pen and strings and, yes, the patience of the blind/ The truth that escapes you is, if you never look, there's only one thing you can find/ And your world gets smaller/ And the wall gets taller/ But no one will free you/ If they just can't see you…" Again, I think the song is improved by its absence (although the title, given by Shane, made a little more sense when it was there). What's the song about? Boys and their Fowlesian muses. Moths, the lot of 'em.

SK - One of the livest backing tracks to go down - I think this is the original bass, guitar, slide guitar and lead vocal from day one of the sessions and part of the dramatic tension evoked in the bridge section is down to Me, James and Gibbon all playing slightly different chords as we hadn't worked them out properly at this point. After consultation with our notes guru we decided to leave them all in as, technically, they all worked. Helen was singing this live until James put down a guide vocal which made my tummy go funny and which we retrieved even after he'd supposedly done the 'proper' one later. Pete's spacey electric slide is just wonderful, and I've now even got over the four hours we spent attempting an overdub which lasts approximately sixteen bars on the finished article, or twenty seconds to you. At one point engineer Steve had to go for a lie down and James was hitting himself repeatedly over the head with a clipboard. I'm not making this up you know.

JP - What a thrill to be allowed to sing this one! I managed to indulge my Leonard Cohen and Roger Waters wannabe fantasies in one song! This is indeed the 'rough' vocal take and as such is not really note-perfect, but the takes that were sung 'better' just didn't sound as good. I don't think I will ever forget the afternoon we spent getting the overdub Shane has mentioned right...not for as long as I live. At the end of that day I never wanted to hear this ****ing song again. I'm better now though...and no we're not going to tell you whose overdub it was...

Another Happy Day

HM - Now, this one was only ever lyrics for ages. I just couldn't come up with a tune that didn't make the whole thing sound hopelessly banal. Then Shane and Stephen Constable came up with a chord sequence and melody one evening while rehearsing, just for a laugh, really - and wouldn't you know, it turned out to be devilishly catching. Which I'm pleased about, because I always wanted the lines "It's an ordinary wonderful/ An earthly kind of magical" to be sung in public.

SK - Lovingly husbanded by the Partridge/Mulley production team, Kirk aims at a lead vocal which hovers betwixt Boo Hewerdine and Marti Pellow and, as ever, emerges like some kind of low-rent Steve Forbert (which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course). Words by Mulley, chords by Kirk and Constable (including a strange one that doesn't actually appear anywhere in the manual) and put together one evening at Kirk Central by all three. James came up with the idea to put some sort of rap coda together and our friend Matt White not only came up with the words (which he very generously submitted for our prior approval) but was patient enough to try them out in a variety of styles while we hummed and hah'd in the control room before he rattled off a few percussion overdubs* and was out by lunchtime. His beautiful wife Louise was meanwhile kind enough to sit quietly at the back while we borrowed her husband for the morning, unconcernedly provoking no little nervous perspiration amongst several members of the group, due to the combination of a very short skirt and a very low sofa. I think there might be pictures.                     *do you see what I've done there…

JP - It was about time Shane sang something of a 'serious' bent, lest he be mistaken for the class clown instead of the generous genius that we know him to be. He lends Helen's earthy, confident words with a fragility that gives you the whole picture. Matt White's coda vocal somehow manages to make SftBH briefly funky, and never fails to make me smile. I'd forgotten that it was my idea to get him in...I'm very pleased I thought that one up. The sort of ethereal 'bling' noise that appears just once as the middle eight turns over to the final chorus section is the noise that my camera makes when you turn it on. I'd picked it up to take a snap during the recording sessions, while we were listening to a playback of this song. When I hit the 'power' switch it just so happened to be at the appropriate moment, completely by accident. When I'd stopped jumping up and down like an excited 6-year old I was allowed to go and hold it up to a microphone and record it properly for dropping in to the track later. It shouldn't work, but it does.

Small Town

SK - Ah! So you listened all the way to the end of the CD? Good. You'll have spotted a couple of little extra things on the end there, yes? One of these is a song called 'Small Town' - recorded live to four track late one evening by Myself, Gibbon and Matt White as part of a previous project I was trying to pull together, some of which (as it turned out) worked, and some of which didn't - I like to think this is one of the former. The song kind of fits in with the general Blue House vibe as it features the sterling bass work of Gib, the acoustic intimacy of three people huddled around a couple of mics, and the Richard Thompson-y riff on 'D' that I've been trying to shoehorn in everywhere for ages (keen-eared listeners will have spotted it earlier on in "On The Contrary") however it lacks the editorial input from James, Our Glorious Leader™ which probably would have trimmed a verse or two and made the whole thing a lot more succinct (I did try co-writing a middle eighty-bit with my good friend and erstwhile musical colleague Tony James Shevlin once, but he put a key change and the phrase "I walk the lonely streets…" in, so I didn't get round to using his bits). It's a simple tale of boy meets girl, singer meets guitarist, river meets sea, you know the kind of thing, the most of which work on involved how I, a nice well-spoken English boy and Matt, a nice well-spoken American boy, were going to compromise on the pronunciation of the word 'half' in the chorus.

Tumble

JP - Yes, well done for getting all the way to the end! Written and recorded all on me lonesome in 1991, this is part of a solo CD I released in '92 under the pseudonym 'Daniel Martin' (the title and main character of a John Fowles novel that I liked, and still like, very much). You’ll spot that the theme is power, corruption and the ultimate futility of it all. But tyrants have families, and someone grieves when they die. To coin three clichés, ‘it’s tough at the top’, ‘absolute power corrupts - absolutely’ and ‘the bigger they come, the harder they fall’.

''(DON'T FEAR) THE REAPER" CD Single - Further musings...

(Don't Fear) The Reaper

JP - I just thought it would be fun to take such a well-known song and arrange it so it was led by a banjo. I know this isn't an original idea by any means, what with Luther Wright & The Wrongs' magnificent interpretation of 'The Wall' and the entire Hayseed Dixies' output, but it just really appealed to me.

Tony Winn's wicked 'jo picking at the end sends shivers down my spine, and the middle section has been pulled apart and put back together again with added classical romanticism by Tony Turrell (piano), Richard Lockwood (fiddle) and Helen Mulley (flute). To think I was worried about the middle section before we started. They just improvised away and made it fresh. Bloody excellent. A fine mix by Chris Bullen at the Barn makes sense of it all and I couldn't be happier that we did it.

SK - "Play the middle bit like 'Firth of Fifth'" I said to Tony Turrell. "Let's do the intro like this" said Tony Winn. "There should be an instruction book for this around here somewhere…" said engineer Chris Bullen. "Can't do Reaper without a cowbell" said Reado, firmly. "La la la la la" said Gibbon and Helen. Bong! Time for bed.

North of Nowhere

SK - Recorded by the mighty 'gods kitchen' (no capitals, no apostrophes, and way before the ravemongers appropriated our moniker) in Ipswich and at Gibbon's expense (gratitude, plaudits and bouquets well overdue…) this power pop titbit was probably our most popular crowd-pleaser and lent its name to a short collection of songs we released under our own steam.

I was working in a warehouse, the top floor of which was reached by a spiral staircase and up and down which I had to travel many, many times over the course of a night shift, fetching and carrying in order to feed the manufacturing beast next door's slavering maw. A girl who I'd been seeing had buggered off to London, taking with her my JJ Cale 'Shades' tape and leaving behind her toothbrush and a towel and the long nights gave me plenty of time to brood.

One night I had to fetch down a box of inlays for a video called 'North to Nowhere', a documentary about an expedition through the frozen wastes of the arctic, the futile purpose of which was to discover the north pole. Unsuccessfully trying to sleep through the day afterwards, I gave up and watched a documentary about Paul McCartney instead, in which he solidly defended the then Mrs McCartney, Linda, from slurs, slaggings and opprobrium of all kinds, and from all directions. I sat down to write.

I presented the song to the band at our regular Thursday night rehearsal and Helen Mulley, paramour of our guitarist, one James Partridge, and performing as flute player and occasional backing vocalist, queried one of the lines in the chorus. "No", I corrected her, "but 'Sadler's Wells' sounds better - we'll keep it".

JP - A lovely jaunty song with typical great Kirk lyrics that I'm pleased to be reminded I was at the inception of. I loved playing it then, and we have been known to play it live with SftBH, when sufficiently watered. I'm not on this recording, but I feel as if I was there.

Valentine's Day

JP - Actually written on February 14th 1991 when I realised that I really was going to have to ring up that woman and chuck her, and then mucked about with it by making up a character called 'Valentine' who fictitiously left a fictitious town and went away to a big fictitious city. Shane explains the lines that are emotive to him below, but I'm particularly fond of "Give my regards to everyone that noticed I was gone". Apart from anything else it's a great line to sing, it just rolls off the tongue.

So anyway, it turned out that she had been really horrible to me without me knowing, and  it was indeed the right thing to do.

SK - I was privy to a number of recordings made by Mr James Partridge and Mr Paul Read during their time as a musical duo, and James was kind enough to do me a compilation tape of the ones I liked best.

Once I'd moved to London I used to play it in the car quite a lot and when I was summoned home for work purposes it was playing as I drove out of town, saying goodbye to the new exciting life I thought I'd carved for myself and making an inglorious return to the comparative country hamlet I thought I'd grown out of. As the lines about "everybody missed him for a couple of days, but pretty soon the town returned to its familiar ways" came out of the speakers I blubbed like a girl at the very thought. Not a pretty experience, and one that I assume the denizens of Cricklewood High Street aren't overly keen to repeat.

I've always liked the massed guitars on this one and I'm pleased it's finally seen the light of day. Make of it what you will. I did.

Showtime

SK - When you're a hip-talking fast-strumming pop-punk songsmith, there's no room for sentiment. Well, I didn't think so anyway, but I did have some slow songs and so James allowed me to pitch up at his flat and record them on the condition that I did a version of Danny Whitten's "I Don't Want To Talk About It" at the same time (this was before you could just download songs you didn't own, kids…imagine…).

Being heavily enamoured of the new wave folk troubadour stylings of Roddy Frame out of Aztec Camera and simultaneously peeved at the indifference with which my then-band The World Service was being received by punters throughout the Woodbridge Road area I had resigned myself to getting even with them…Hah! James listened back to my attempt and dug out some sort of synthesiser from under his bed with which he then attempted to follow my Dylanesque chord changes (i.e. they change every so often with no real warning and pretty much at random) as I painted my masterpiece, lifting a Dylan line I'd once seen written on the sixth form common room wall (the subway was closed) while I was at it.

The song began to inhabit its own space as I wrote it, ending up eating itself by the last verse as I tried to explain what I was trying to do. It ended up serving its function one night at The Gaslight Club in Peterborough, where I managed to silence a particularly garrulous woman in the front row by the second chorus. No-one shouted "Judas!".

By the end of its life I'd started shouting "Back in the garage!" in tribute to The Clash's song "Garageland" and James had provided the keyboard player out of Europe with a couple of ideas he'd clearly stolen and then based a whole Euro poodle-rock anthem on.

JP - I just adore this song. I've never heard a better song about being a performer except perhaps another one of Shane's called 'Start One Of Your Own'. I always choke on the line "You don't wanna know how my heart and body ache...well nor do I". The recording is a little ropey, having been done in my kitchen, but the song shines through.

Incredible
JP - I just hope that if the person who inspired 'Valentine's Day' was ever a bit pee'd off  by that song, then she would at least take a listen to this. I doubt she'll hear either of course, but there you go. My excuse for the extraordinary guitar torture on this song is that I'd been recording for two days straight with barely any sleep, and the guitar and vocal takes for this recording were undertaken at the end of that mammoth session at about 4am. I was trying to make a sound that matched how I felt...I suppose that's what all musicians try to do...and this is one of those occasions when I came pretty close, despite the rather bottom-end-of-the-market recording techniques. I suppose the final mix of this was done at about 5.30am, which also explains a lot. But you know, apart from some dodgy singing in the middle bit, I wouldn't change a thing. Could have done, but didn't.

SK - The band 'As Is' is at this point two guitar players (one of whom is working in a record shop and therefore unable to play during the day and the other who virtually lives in a caravan-cum-studio in the middle of a field) and a drummer are desperately trying to finish a demo tape which is to be taken to California and played to agents by their manager. This, needless to say, is what they've been working for all these years. Given the state of readiness of the work in progress, the guitarist who has a day job hasn't bothered turning up, and the drummer has gone home. The one who has been pickling his fingers in surgical spirit, better to endure the agonies of fourteen-hour days overdubbing on a four-track recorder, works on into the night alone. The first time I heard this I said "Bloody hell". So did the Californians. If I remember him at all, I'll remember him like this.

The first CD 'SONGS FROM THE BLUE HOUSE' - More bumph...

All The Way To St. Dunstan's

JP - A piece of jaunty bluegrass-inspired frivolity, originally called 'Two Dogs F****** By A Hedge'. I've been listening to a lot of Alison Krauss & Union Station, and thought we could have a crack at something similar. Sadly we don't have the talent to pull it off terribly well, so it ended up like this. 

Bike

JP - Dunno really, just a reflection on being a bit older. Time was when I would walk for miles to get to the party, or hitch-hike down to Wales to see my sister. It wasn't that long ago that I would bunk a train up to West Runton on the north Norfolk coast to see the Dead Kennedys or somesuch, and then sleep in Cromer railway station waiting room on a damp concrete floor. Now if I go to a gig, I worry if there'll be anywhere to park. Frankly I'd rather be at a football match anyway.

SK - Interestingly enough (although clearly that’s a pretty subjective use of the term ‘interesting’, given the circumstances) each successive mode of transport in the lyrics would do quite serious damage to the preceding vehicle if it were to be involved in a collision with it for any reason. Hey kids, who knew?  “If I had a boat, I’d sail into your port” could well be interpreted as some sort of blues metaphor, if you were of that sort of mind, but I don’t think that’s at all intentional. James hadn’t even realised he’d done the transport thing so I don’t think he was up to that kind of smut.

Let's Do It Country

JP - Whilst I was musing about what Shane and I might do at our first get-together, I decided that there would be a song called 'Let's Do It Country', and made a few mental notes on how it should go. It worked out pretty much as expected. Then the missus got involved and took it up to a whole new level. It's about realising who you are and being happy with that.

Don't Ever Let It Go

JP - In a similar vein to Let's Do It Country, just a call for simplicity but on a less specific basis. I spent a few years in the world of 'National Sales', and although I dearly love all the people I worked with, I really did get bored with the golf days and the trade shows, pressing the flesh and pretending to be one of the movers and shakers. I really was terrible at golf, but always enjoyed the walk, especially at the one in Cromer (from sleeping in the railway station waiting room to losing balls in the gorse on the cliff-top...how ironic). With more than a smattering of atheist hope, this is to me somewhat of a Humanist anthem. And what a purty song. If I believed in such things, this would be the single (and no doubt flop appallingly).

SK - We decided quite early on that one of the sounds we liked was the  reassuring ‘Hovis’ sound of a silver band doing its thing gently in the background (cf Richard Thompson on “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” or “Al Bowlly’s In Heaven”) and Gibbon, as luck would have it, was an ex-member of the Woodbridge Excelsior Band (they supported Deep Purple once, you know) and so we persuaded him that a trombone solo in the break was what he really ought to be laying down. Since he had already revealed the correct title of the sort of thing we (or certainly I) were after (“It’s actually called the "From The New World’ symphony"), we locked him in the studio with Steve, gave him a deadline to get it right by and retired to Tesco’s. Some time later, when we were laughing like schoolboys at the racket he was making (and that Steve had already had to lubricate his horn – stop it at the back there!). We were about to open up the door and put him out of his misery when I chanced to take a quick look through the control room window. That sobered me up pretty sharpish, I can tell you - Gib, normally the most affable of fellows, was thunder-faced and clearly very, very cross with something. I suggested quietly to James that we keep out of sight, give him another fifteen minutes and make sure there was no giggling audible on the studio talkback. He rewarded us with exactly what we wanted – a lovely sound, and one which he explained to us later was extraordinarily difficult to do in the key that the song was actually in. Trooper!

Breaking These Rocks

JP - So, from out of nowhere came a song that could very nearly described as 'blues'. How distressing. But rather than being a tale of chain-gangs in the Deep South as it may appear, it was to all intents and purposes inspired by Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, who (some would say not unreasonably) emptied both barrels of a 12-bore into a couple of toe-rags as they attempted to take what little he had. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of gun law, despite being quite a good shot when I was younger,  but the fact that the guy spent any time at all in prison just doesn't sit comfortably with me. The two messages of the song are - if you want to go out nicking, expect some resistance; and if you as the victim do happen to possess a gun when the snidey little parasites arrive...just be careful. Country music...but my country.

SK - I wanted to do something in open tuning, as I’ve long been fascinated by the drones and weird chord inversions employed by people like Richard Thompson, and I’d been to a gig by Australian blues shouter and slide guitarist Stringybark McDowell in the week before we got together to write and rehearse, so I figured that while there was a bit of a hiatus in proceedings I’d tune down and see what happened. Naturally, instead of there being weird and interesting chords around which we could build some sort of Eastern-scale-inspired chant I ended up, as you do ,in open ‘D’, trying to play Ry Cooder’s theme from ‘Paris, Texas’. Fortunately James latched on to this, capo’ed up at the fifth fret and started howling like a man possessed. At one point it looked very much as if he’d nipped out to the crossroads outside the pub and made some sort of demonic deal – something along the lines of “I get your soul, you get four minutes of swamp music” – but it turned out that he was employing the blues tradition and making words up as he went along. The song was pretty much formed by the time we’d mucked about with it for fifteen minutes or so, and remains simple, rootsy and earthy. Make your own mind up about the lyrics; what you’re hearing on the recording is some (essentially) nicely brought up and well educated East Anglian boys attempting to sound like brooding, murderous loners (Oliver Reed probably would have played the central character if we’d filmed a movie of this in the late sixties or early seventies). The slide guitar sound is possibly a little too polite to convey this adequately (you do rather get the impression at times that there’s a luha going on somewhere in the background) but since, for reasons of almost painful attention to authenticity, we recorded the whole thing live and direct, even by our standards it’d be a bit difficult dropping a part in. The most blueswailingest harmonica going on in the background at the end is me wheezing in and out of a ‘harp’ which is ever so slightly in the wrong key, which means I had to suck when I should have been blowing and vice versa in order to get it to fit. Still, as they say, “You know how to play harmonica don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow….”

Statues

JP - The death of Diana Spencer and the resulting national grief held me in its grip, much to my surprise...it was a remarkable time, when I wept along with almost everybody else. Now I'm a very long way away from being a royalist, but I can't help thinking that she was some sort of force for good - despite, rather than because of, her bizarre marriage. This was written the day before a news story broke concerning the fact that a planned Diana memorial monument has still not been built. I didn't know anything about it, which makes this even more spooky.

SK - Employing the old ‘major to minor’ trick in the verses, this is one of the more surreall parts of the collection. There’s an odd feel to the timing, the lyrics are either oblique or obtuse and there’s a definite uneasy air about the way the whole thing hangs together. I find it dark, in a Lynchian kind of way, especially when Gibbon’s sparse ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ piano chords underpin the choruses. James has a lovely real-life delay on his guitar break, and although we tried a few different guitar and keyboard parts in the studio we ended up not bothering to record most of them. If we’d had a theramin I get the feeling that would’ve made it on to the final mix, but we didn’t, so…. This is the one track where Gib’s tasteful fretless bass playing is really emphasised. To James’s horror, and my resignation, he turned up with the fretless on day one of the recording, but managed to consistently hit the spot throughout the initial two days without resorting to any of that hideous Pino Palladino stuff that bass players like to muck about with so much. You’d hardly even know it’s there most of the time, which is not as easy as he makes it look, especially on some of the faster stuff. Since I’m spending most of my time up on the thin strings it’s important that there’s something good down at the bottom end, as it were. I was surprised when James told me what the lyrics were about (he’s not usually so forthcoming) but once you know, it all makes sense. Who'd've thought?

Special Kind Of Love

SK - The opening line, “Sally-Anne was a working man” and indeed the rest of the song, thematically, owes no little debt of gratitude to Ian Gillan’s ‘Sleeping On The Job’ from his ‘Glory Road’ album. Gillan’s irony-free lyric deals with a number of characters caught ‘sleeping on the job’ and also features the leather-lunged lothario’s rhyming of ‘ultrasonic’ with ‘gin and tonic’ a good few years before Oasis cottoned to the idea of covering pretty much the same linguistic territory with ‘Supersonic’. Ian Gillan once performed on stage at The Ipswich Gaumont with a cage full of Ipswich Town footballers, and Paul Mariner reputedly fell off his yacht somewhere near Shotley. It was James’s idea to split the song up, or at least cut it down, as we seemed to be spending an awful lot of time in these characters’ company. I imagine Sam Shephard has the same trouble with his producers, frankly. I think James would have done a better job on the singing as he’s intrinsically a better singer, but I was persuaded that my rustic twang was just what was required for this performance. And yes, that is a bowdlerized riff from ‘Substitute’ at the end there. Sally-Anne will have repeated any one of the lines from the chorus a hundred times during the course of her career, so I thought it only fit to pay her a little tribute. That there is a reprise to this song at the end of the collection owes a little to our need to supply a happy ending, a little nod to The Eagles’ ‘Desperado’, and a good way to get JP to sing on it after all.

JP - "Let's do something like the stuff on that 'Trucking Songs' tape we've been listening to on the way to footy" I said. "OK", said Shane. As far as I know this is the world's first transvestite-murder-mystery-bar-room song, and all because Shane sang "working man" instead of "working girl" by mistake at one of the early sessions. Apparently its something to do with some old fart out of Deep Purple.

Fragments

JP - A long list of stuff from out of my brain. Real stream of consciousness writing this, and its pretty pointless trying to explain it. The timing is by and large pretty ragged, but Gib's John Entwhistle-type brass stabs made me jump for joy and apart from complementing the Pete Townsend-type acoustic guitar frenzy, rescued the song.

SK - Knowing, and indeed being a small footnote in, James’s musical history I knew exactly the sort of thing that people would be expecting from us. Hence ‘Fragments’ is a riffy little thing where (in the sage words of one Malcolm Hawkes) you find a chord shape you like and then simply move it up and down the neck of the guitar a bit, leaving everything else ringing. Nice, isn’t it? The song is a bit of a curate’s egg when it comes to the SftBH project (or ‘stands out like a sore thumb’ if you prefer) but every time we think about dropping it there’s a little something which makes us hang on to it a bit longer – for me its usually the words, which in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way are some of the best things the Boy Partridge has ever come up with, in my opinion. I keep recognizing (or think I do) little, well, fragments – it’s all very cinematic, which I like in a lyric, and James has doubled up with some amazing harmonies on the lead vocal. Watch out for the little understated laugh at the end of the first verse just after the line “What a joke…”.  Arranging the whole thing was a bit of a nightmare as the three of us were all slightly out of time, in a slightly different ways, so we had to find who was worst (me) and drop them down in the mix slightly. James’s discord guitar was reflected and doubled by keyboard genius Gibbon in the absence of The Kick Horns, giving the whole thing an early-Waterboys feel (lest we forget, their whole first album was a series of Mike Scott’s demos). Or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, depending on your frame of reference. The choruses are pretty standard Kirky changes – the first time we ran Gib through it he played along perfectly, explaining that he’d been doing my stuff for years and pretty much knew where things were going by now, but there is a nice Stones-y accent on the A – it’s not just a suspended fourth, you know, there’s a fifth there too. Oh yes.

Follow Me

SK - There was a marvellous point  during the first couple of days’ sessions when Gibbon, in a Michael Caine-esque fashion said (and I quote) “Hold on lads, I’ve got an idea”. Having struggled with the deceptively simple, but finger-stretchingly inverted chords for ‘Follow Me’ for a while I’d come up with a take we could pretty much all live with. What Gibbon did was sit down at his keyboard, hit the ‘orchestra’ button, and put down a whole new part which transformed the whole song, arrangement-wise. He didn’t do any mucking about and I think he did the whole thing in about two takes. After the second one, I looked at James, who seemed to have something in his eye, and we both just nodded at each other knowing that this was just exactly what the song needed. In a truly bathetic moment, just as we were drawing short breaths and being lost in the moment, Gib’s voice came over the studio talkback – “Something like that? I dunno, what d’you think? S’that okay?”.

SK(2) - One of my favourite descending runs; an A, an E (but with an Ab bass note), a D (with an F# bass) and another E – combine that with a bit of what technical folk refer to, I believe, as a ‘clawhammer’ picking technique (I wouldn’t know, I really wouldn’t) and there you go. Hardly anyone notices that the chord sequence is a close relative of TRB’s “2-4-6-8 Motorway”, but then the connection isn’t immediately obvious, now is it? Various travails in the recording process had us experimenting with capos, dropping the key to ‘G’, provision of footstools of varying heights and attempting numerous drop-ins (simply employing a guitar player who could actually play the right notes, in time, and didn’t have a hangnail on the third finger of his right hand didn’t occur to us although I do seem to remember a suggestion that Mr Steve Tsoi, recording engineer and guitar player extraordinaire might be able to nail this part in slightly less than the three days it seemed to be taking – but I might have just imagined that) before we came up with a version we could live with. In retrospect, the squeaks and scratches serve to emphasize the very real and organic nature of the recording, and besides, once the strings come in you forget about my bit anyway.

JP - I surprised myself with the lyrical content of this one - some real slushy stuff. Crammed full of clichés, consciously and unashamedly so. We could have put more stuff on it, but the sparseness does the job.

Bless My Broken Heart

SK - Bless My Broken Heart was written on the back of the good ship Gundulph in the good county of Cork in Ireland and owes a great deal to The Waterboys song 'And A Bang On The Ear' in both sentiment and construction. All the people in it are real, and it was one of the great pleasures of my life to be able to play it at a session in Ireland a couple of years ago in a pub where pretty Irish girls and dark-haired handsome boys alike sang along. It felt like the song had come home.

JP - In  my brief time as a member of God's Kitchen (I was definitely sacked, after a drunken distortion-fest at a gig in London, although Shane denies this), which is Shane's longest running band by virtue of the fact that they don't play often enough to get fed up with each other, I was introduced to this song. Shane said howsabout doing it for SFTBH...and how could I refuse? Ramshackle and chaotic, I attempted to play percussion by using a plastic box as a kick-drum and hitting the top of the same box to get a clicky noise. Olly played spoons in one take with the mother of all hangovers. White as a sheet he was.

And those 'extra tracks...

These Days (Kirk) 

SK - I met a very special girl, wrote this about her and went round to Tony Shevlin's house to record it on his portastudio. Kilbey Mears added some backing vocals, we made one copy and I gave it to her to listen to. She played it to her Mum, who said that I sounded quite nice. Two years later we were married. Me and Hannah, that is, not her Mum. On our card Tony wrote 'May you always feel like Paul McCartney singing Helen Wheels'. Which was nice. 'A Song From The End Of The World' is on The Waterboys' 'Room To Roam' album, and 'Your special purpose' will be apparent to anyone who knows Steve Martin's film 'The Jerk' at all well- ("I've found my special purpose!!!").

Moon River (Mercer/Mancini) 

JP - Some time ago, a rebellious, anarchistic (and supposedly really quite hard) punk teenager watched Breakfast At Tiffany's for the first time and fell hopelessly in love with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. He cried at the wet cat, the spurned lover and many other things in the movie...but most of all he wept buckets when Audrey sat on the window-ledge and sang this song.

Over twenty years later in a studio in Essex, he had a couple of hours to fill and so browsed through the studio's big book of available backing tracks looking for something to sing, just for a laugh like. As he picked the tune out, the waterworks started up again; luckily the engineer was used to this and pretended not to notice. After a quick retake it made it on to the CD as a 'bonus' track. This has to be one of the most magnificent set of lyrics ever written, mostly because they truly mean whatever you want them to mean. And a melody to die for or even to...

SFTBH flautist and vocal accompaniment person Helen Mulley pitches in: -

Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2003. That means in two days time, it will be - wait for it - Wednesday, June 25th, 2003. Or, to put it another way, exactly one year since James and Shane sat in the spare room/office at the Blue (but not, at that time, blue) House and  wrote ‘Let’s Do It Country’, ‘Bike’, ‘Statues’ and ‘Fragments’. Not a bad haul, really, for one evening - although  James would probably point out that , in comparison to his legendary bottle-of-Jack-Daniels-under-a-bridge night - during which he wrote enough material to complete several albums (at least one of which would have been magnificent) - it was actually quite a gentle beginning. I do know that I was out until quite late and by the time I’d got back and gone to bed, they were still doing their stuff - and on a school night! After a decade or so of “we really should”s and “one day we ought to”s, there were songs. I fell asleep to the sounds of two guitars and my Boy softly singing.

And tomorrow, it’s the final day of mixing Songs From the Blue House. I’ll take a copy of it to listen to in the car on the 25th. There’s a kind of serenity there - James always was a fan of symmetry.

Anyway, seeing as websites are the sort of place where you can go off at mini tangents and do this sort of thing, I thought I’d knock out my own song by song rundown, from the point of view of a not-quite-neutral. Could be a load of old tosh, of course - but it’s my old tosh and anyway, songs are a bit sluttish in the way they  behave for the listener, aren’t they? Bob Geldof said that most people thought “I Don’t Like Mondays” was about getting up after the weekend and not wanting to go to work - and that was ok by him. So, if it’s good enough for Sir Bob, boys…

All The Way To St Dunstan’s

I tend to divide tunes up into two categories; those I could join in with on a first hearing at a session  (on me flute, that is) and all the rest. This little sweetie falls into the former bag, which is just one reason why I like it. Not that it wants a flute, mind, but there’s room for about six fiddles and an army of guitars, banjos and mandolins and one day it’ll be played like that. Possibly in a field.

Bike

This has always sounded Christy Moore-ish (or moreish) to me. Don’t agree? Well you just try singing along in a broad Irish accent and see if that raises an “aha!” James would probably claim that the lyrics are doggerel - or maggot - but the combination of grandiose romantic gestures  tempered with pragmatism is very Partridgian, nonetheless. If he had a plane, he’d fly around the world - but he hasn’t. So he can’t. I heard the track with banjo on it for the first time yesterday and  it really made those wheels go round.   

Let’s Do It Country

Music/life. Life/music. What to play and what to be. And, just as I once wrote a love song to ITFC, I suspect there’s some footie in there, too. It must be much trickier for fans of teams that play in orange. I love singing this - it’s like coming home.

The One About the Rabbit (Don't Ever Let It Go)

Many moons ago, James wrote a song called “Complications”. I reckon this is sort of the Platonic incarnation of that. It’s his 42 - and I’ve not heard a better one yet.

Special Kind Of Love

No one tells a story quite like Shane Kirk. Frankly, he could introduce a bilingual kangaroo and a crack team of basketball playing midgets, all called Eric, and I’d still believe him.

Breaking These Rocks

Now, this is interesting - an utterly modern story, continuing a long, long tradition of convict songs. It’s got everything - the relentless rhythm for the chain gang to work to; the gap after each line for the “I don’t know but I’ve been told” kind of echo; the subtly defiant lyrics which manage both to justify the actions of the singer and warn others away from similar behaviour at the same time; and the wailing harmonica at the end (that was my idea, I’ll have y’all know). Which only goes to prove that, as far as justice is concerned, plus ca change…   

Statues

Spine tingling stuff. Each time the boys add something else to the CD version, I hold my breath in case the spell gets broken - but they seem to know what they’re doing.

Fragments

I’ll wager I can place all of the images apart from one - well, you can fit a lot of talking into twelve years. I like it a lot, especially live, when it gets very spiky.

Follow Me

Yes.

Bless My Broken Heart

Someone - who doesn’t know Shane - was listening to this the other day and, when it got to the second verse, uttered the immortal line, “ooh, he’s still bitter about that one, isn’t he?”. And so would you be. You can never have too much alliteration in a folksy-country number, by the way.