Interview for Club Sandwich

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My Brave Face

“The first single off our album is going to be one called ‘My Brave Face’, which me and Elvis (Costello) wrote together…we… started writing songs from the ground up that neither of us had any pre-conceptions about, and one of those…was called ‘My Brave Face’ and it was good…it’s got a kind of ’60’s-ish feel: the best thing is to listen to it.”

Our pleasure.

Rough Ride

“I was going to work with Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson, and I’d heard that Trevor takes a long time… so it seemed to me that it might be a good idea if we could try and limit him to a short period and see what we could get done… I said well I’ve got this crazy little thing that you won’t like, it’s called ‘Rough Ride’. He said I love the title already…it grew from a nothing little 12-bar and by the end of the second day we’d mixed it, which is pretty unheard of these days… they came back with a tarted-up version, and I said well I think it’s a Paul Goes To Holly wood… type of thing, so we kept the original.”

You Want Her Too

“I said to Elvis, ‘Look, this is really getting a bit me and John!…I’m going ‘I’ve loved her so long’ and he’s going ‘I know you did, you stupid git!”… The intro and the fade we decided to have a… strange carousel thing we’d worked up. It was a silly little idea of mine that I think works…I’d had this idea about a little guitar thing that Hamish had played in the instrumental bit: I’d always been hearing it like a big brass band. So we actually got a big band in one morning, and it’s the ultimate tease, because…as soon as you’re into them they fade!”

Distractions

There’s a nice story about this… I heard an album a few years ago by someone off Prince’s label. Paisley Park, called the Family …And there were some string arrangements on it that were really interesting… I thought’ Wow, great. I wonder who this is?’… it said Clare Fischer…So I said to Linda, ‘These arrangements are incredible and it’s this Clare Fischer…some LA chick, I think’…and while she thought it was this kind of great, blonde LA lady she didn’t like them. We found out, actually, it’s this guy who’s about 50 years old, who’s got a grey beard and he’s a great fellow.. .So then Linda was saying ‘I love these arrangements, I love this guy’s work!’ That’s wives, you know!… he did an arrangement which I love, it’s very Hollywood and it’s very… like Doris Day movies, which is a very strange little area, you know, but it’s lovely.

Geoff Emerick is co-engineer and the guitar solo is by Paul.

We Got Married

“It’s like a celebration of marriage… So often people shy away from subjects like marriage… They concentrate on puberty. Well, at the age of 46, puberty’s fairly far away! The game is up, folks!…I do actually start it in puberty: ‘Going fast, coming soon/We made love in the afternoon/Found a flat, after that/ We got married’. That reminds me of John and Cynthia at art school… Dave Gilmour’s on there playing lovely guitar. I like it. It’s kinda grown-up.”

David Foster is on keyboards and Dave Mattacks (last used on Tug Of War) is back on drums.

Put It There

“‘Put it there’…was an expression my Dad used to say when we were kids. He used to hold his hand out and say, ‘Put it there if it weighs a ton’… My Dad died over ten years ago now, but you remember those things with affection, you know. And so I wrote a song about that, which I think will become one of my favourites.”

George Martin orchestrates, Geoff Emerick is in there again and the result is slightly reminiscent of ‘Blackbird.’

This One

“The song is basically a love song – did I ever say I love you? And if I didn’t it’s because I was waiting for a better moment… ‘There could never be a better moment than this one…’, and the words ‘this one’ kept coming back to me as ‘this swan’, and I got off on that… The image… was like one of those Hare Krishna posters that I used to see a lot in India…this little blue god…Krishna, who’s riding on this swan floating over this beautifully clear pond with lovely pink lilies on it. It’s a very spiritual, tranquil picture, and although I don’t subscribe to any particular religion, I draw on the nice moments from a lot of them.”

The engineers are Geoff Emerick and Matt Butler and Judd Lander plays harmonica. Very direct.

Figure Of Eight

“Very spontaneous, very rough; another two-day effort with Trevor…The vocal is live, which I like with all that roughness… There were certain conditions… that I put on them (Trevor and Steve Lipson). And… they made me do stuff that they hadn’t heard me do recently… it was great, I really enjoyed it.”

Eddie Klein assists Steve as engineer. Another direct track.

Don’t Be Careless Love

“We have stuff that I wrote with Elvis, and we recorded it ourselves, to see if we could just get a kind of energy in there and stuff…They were nice tapes, but they weren’t making it. So I re-recorded them with Mitchell Froom, who’s the American guy who did Crowded House…we kind of fixed one of the recordings Elvis and I had done (‘Careless’), because we liked the vocal and we just needed to fix it up a little bit.“

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Ou Est Le Soleil

“A very wacky thing where we decided to make something up…Trevor said ‘Have you got anything for one of the verses?’ I said ‘Well I’ve got this really silly idea…’, which is like just some French words that say ‘Ou est le soleil? Dans la tete. Travaillez.’ Those are the complete lyrics…So we’ve got this silly French dance track now, which I love!”