The song don't necessarily remain the same

I have been writing songs since I was 14 or 15. I started writing lyrics before I could play guitar. Mostly about the end of the world.

It was the early 1980s and new tensions between the US and Russia inspired the so-called Second Cold War and resumed talk of nuclear war. The threat seemed very real. I was fascinated. Not by the politics but by the idea of Armageddon and a post-apocalypse planet Earth. I even bought my Dad a copy of a book called the Fate of the Earth for his birthday. He didn’t read it. I did. Well, not all of it because it went on a bit. I was particularly attracted to the idea of being the only remaining human being after the apocalypse; I had a song called Adam and Eve Mark II which I don’t need to explain to you.

Once I could play guitar, writing songs became a more complex process. But I loved it. I started keeping a notebook of song words and ideas. Once I had finished a song I would neatly write it all out and proudly look it. Then I would make some scribbled changes; and have to write it all out neatly again.

I quickly got to the point that I always had a song on the go in my head. At about 20, having moved to London with my band then called 1967, the necessity to write songs increased. We played gigs more often and hearing so much new music we changed musical styles and hairstyles with some frequency.

As the songwriter I could stay one step ahead of the band but learned quickly to deal with the frustration caused by the speed with which I was able to deliver new songs for arrangement and inclusion in the set. The set, once rehearsed, like a football team on a winning streak, didn’t need changing too often. Songs waited patiently on the bench, some never ever getting a game.
For the next twelve years or so, I wrote constantly. I always had a few song ideas on the go at any one time. Sometimes songs would take weeks or months to complete. Other times, I would write them in one sitting in a flash of inspiration, often on the way home from a night on the tiles. In the back of my mind though I think I was aware that I had to strike while the iron was hot. This prolific output might not last forever. The angst would turn to acceptance and grumpiness, the unrequited love would hopefully one day be requited and the self-indulgence would ultimately become time spent alone at home.

By my early thirties I started to write less. I was less inspired to write songs. I could make excuses. So I will. The band was playing less often so there wasn’t such a need for new material. I was settling down. I got married. We had a kid. And I wasn’t going out half as much. End of excuses.

My interests turned back to art, which I had pretty much renounced in favour of rock ‘n’ roll at 19. With the encouragement of my wife I returned to art school. I’ll get to the point in a minute.
The point is, earlier this year with a new band in place, I began to feel the need for new songs. I wrote a few. And I was in the lucky position of having a back-catalogue that I could cherry pick the best bits of. So one day I was listening to some old rehearsal recordings, made around 1990/91 and there was a group of songs which comprised our set at the time that I thought were really strong. None of these songs made it to the recording stage nor did they survive long
enough to make the set that we were playing when as 67 we got signed in 1993.

I figured these songs might be worth dusting down and playing they were so strong. The problem was that I felt uncomfortable about their lyrical content. Now I wrote these songs. But I obviously wrote them with a major twenty-something’s hard-on and after listening to too much Led Zeppelin. They were the stuff of cock-rock. I didn’t feel comfortable singing this kind of stuff. So I decided to try rewriting the lyrics to one of them. After playing with various ideas for weeks and feeling like I was getting nowhere, I felt inspired by the mood my wife was in on returning from seeing her family in California. She had jet-lag, which she treats by sleeping for a week and was feeling just a little blue about being back in miserable grey old England. So I wrote it about this. Bright young California vs. the dull old England; careful to make it clear this was how she was feeling not me. I would never be so unpatriotic.

It was funny because my bass player, who had played on the original song, then entitled Cleopatra, couldn’t remember the song or the bass line for the life of him - it was nearly twenty years since he had last played it – so I taught him to play his own bass line. I halved the length of the original verses and a new three and half minute pop song was born. Its new title is less concise: Post-California English Winter Blues. For a song that was written 20 years ago, it’s got quite a contemporary, White Stripesy sound. It’s now our set opener.