Chapter of the Week - Martin Carr On Songwriting
Dan was the singer and I was the guitarist. We were best friends. We lived together on Ullett Rd. in Liverpool and our hunger for music was voracious and far-ranging. We were great white sharks hunting for good vibrations in any waters. We'd play records, tapes and CD's through the night, contemplating a chess board, getting psychedelic, huddled around our portable gas heater.
The romance is only kicking in now i'm thinking about it almost twenty-five years later.
We smoked foraged dog-ends, drank bottles of Thunderbird Blue Label, gave each other scabies, sometimes had to break the ice on the loo to take a piss. It wasn't romantic at the time, trust me.
The music we listened to had mostly been inspired by tapes made by our friend back home, Richard Holland: King Crimson, Python Lee Jackson, Cat Stevens, PP Arnold, Killing Joke, Julian Cope, XTC, The Beach Boys, Jethro Tull, The Zombies, Love, Dave Brubeck, Tomorrow, Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, The Undertones, Argent, The Kinks, The Creatures… they were fucking astonishing compilations. As key to my being here waffling all this as anything. As everything, in fact.
We liked some of the bands we saw in town or at The Tivoli back home: Ride, Lush, Swervedriver, The Real People. None of them appeased our appetite for something as multi-dimensional as those compilation tapes, though. Well, maybe one band.
I'd bought Ichabod & I (1990), The Boo Radley's debut album, from Crocodile Records in Mold. I liked the name of the band. To Kill A Mockingbird was my joint 4th favourite book of all time. The album sounded like wet farts through distortion boxes. It wasn't very good.
I didn't hold musical grudges back then. I can't have done because I remember adoring their Every Heaven E.P. (1991). The Finest Kiss felt like weeping over a lost, first love. I had no idea how in thrall the band were to My Bloody Valentine or Dinosaur Jr. I wouldn't have cared. I adored it. I still do.
I remember liking their second album, Everything's Alright Forever. It impressed me with its scope and trumpets.
"We could do with more scope and trumpets, Dan…"
"Scope and trumpets… yeah… pass the bong."
It's alright. I didn't inhale.
I’d try and spot them when we were out and about in Liverpool, in Planet X or Chaucers, The Cosmos or Casablancas, Macs or Mardi Gras. Thing is, I didn't have a clue what they looked like. A bald one, a black one, a beanpole and a hairy one. Unless they were all there, en masse, playing Does This Hurt?, I wouldn't have stood a chance.
A warm affection turned into something close to an obsession when they released Lazarus in 1993. By then I'd moved back home and we'd dumped Dan from the band. I listened to Lazarus over and over again. It shared a similarly explorative philosophy to Screamadelica… dubby bass lines, unexpected developments, scope and trumpets.
The subsequent album, Giant Steps, is one of those that shaped me the most. Like Rich Holland's compilation tapes, Dave Haslam's DJ set when the Stone Roses played the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool and Mark Radcliffe's Out On Blue 6 radio show, it puffed my mind and my musical imagination out in a thousand different directions.
I would highlight the artists and records that Martin and singer, Sice, would name as influences in their interviews in the music press and go out and buy them: records by The Turtles, King Tubby, John Coltrane, Love, Public Enemy.
Unlike some of their contemporaries, they didn't come across as twats. They came across as fans, fans who'd made a gloriously, rickety, ambitious album that was reaching for sounds out the very top of the heavens, perched on nothing more than a few step-ladders that teetered on crackly amplifiers and a pile of very well-thumbed records. But I loved that: trying to build orchestras and symphonies out of spit and a fuzzbox. And, of course, scope and trumpets.
I saw them at Glastonbury in 1994 and I met Martin Carr for the first time. I bought him a Guinness and I interviewed him. He was lovely despite not getting me that Guinness back.
This pattern has repeated itself ever since.
I think Martin has some of the finest musical instincts of any human being I've ever met. Or heard.
The Boo Radleys made 3 Top 20 albums (including a number 1 album with ‘Wake Up!’) and 7 Top 40 singles. Wake Up Boo! broke the Top 10 in 1995 and has been comped onto as many ‘Greatest Indie Hits EVER’ albums as ‘There She Goes’.
It was everywhere in the summer of ’95: car stereos, caffs, hairdressers, supermarkets, indie discos, T.V. My bass player’s best mate, Crag, thought “you can’t blame me now, for the death of summer” was the stupidest lyric he’d ever heard. My daughter Ava says it’s her favourite of the multitude of songs I force on her on long car journeys.
It divides opinion as surely as it imprints itself on your conscience after a single listen. It’s melody rabies. Pop genius.
After The Boo Radleys faded out, Martin went hard left into electronic music (as bravecaptain) then, eventually, returned as a solo songwriter. His 2009 album 'Ye Gods & Little Fishes' is as beautiful as it was over-looked. His new (as I write this in September 2014) album, ‘The Breaks’, is a revelation.
Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Carr...
Was songwriting a calling for you? I grew up (musically-speaking) reading interviews with you and Sice where it was clear you were in love with pop music, the stories, the images and the songs themselves: was music ‘just’ a vehicle to be part of that story, initially at least?
When I finally got around to learning a few guitar chords (14/15) I immediately started to write songs. There were two reasons for this. The first was that I couldn't work out how to play other peoples’ songs just by listening to them and, secondly, I instinctively knew that if you were going to be in a band and get famous then you did it with your own songs. It didn't occur to me that the people I saw on the telly and heard on the radio might have had their songs written by someone else.
I can still remember the first song I wrote, a rather downbeat waltz about me not staying with a lover and telling her to leave, very confusing. I had never had a girlfriend at that point so I was still unsure how it worked. All I knew was at one point, somebody would have to go and it was probably going to be me.
Me and Sice started writing songs at the same time. He would come round to mine and we would go to separate rooms and pretend to write songs that we had already written earlier in the day, then we would play them to one another. His songs always sounded like songs in that they had a verse and bridges and a strong chorus and sometimes a middle bit. They were good songs and I can still sing them now.
Mine were a bit weird and formless and I was really into Dylan so I was writing about Russians and paranoia and stuff I had no real insight into. This was the mid-eighties though, Reagan and Yeltsin and Two Tribes, so all that cold war stuff was still valid but I remember my dad giving me one of the few bits of good advice he ever gave me upon hearing that song; he said “write about what you know, write about yourself”. Unfortunately it would be another seven years before I did that and I wish I'd started then.
Songs are diaries, signposts and memories. They tell us about ourselves long after we've forgotten who we were when we wrote them.
We didn't form a band for a few years and our first gig was mainly Sice songs, I think. He was the main writer until around 1988 when we got into Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine’s new direction and suddenly I found a sound to write songs around. I'm still not sure how that works exactly but I wrote everything after that. I had a clear direction. Before that we had no idea what kind of music we wanted to make, neither of us could play guitar that well, we liked such a diverse range of styles but despite this we knew something was going to happen.
I heard Jack Dee on the radio last week talking about this feeling of destiny he had even at his lowest points, well for us it was the same. We knew we were shit and that we had no direction and no plan but we were pretty cocky. There was no question of us doing anything else.
My songs were still about love problems but you would never have guessed. The language was oblique and the worst kind of mid-60’s Dylan doggerel that had none of his wit or scope.
The song that changed all that was 'Lazarus'. I didn't write that until 1992 but that was when I started writing with more, maybe too much, honesty and I was writing about my private life which unfortunately included other people's private lives and I took it too far the other way.
How much of your success as a songwriter was down to hard work, how much down to inspiration?
I think my successes were a combination of both but then I started to rely too much on inspiration. It had all seemed so easy that I forgot about the work we had put in the shitty jobs we had done in order to hire vans and buy gear, and the nights in writing songs while everyone else was out living it up. I stopped working hard in the late nineties I was drinking and drugging heavily and by 2005 I was finished.
I believe in the muse, I believe you have to protect and attend to it; the harder you work at it the better you are. Once you are out of the period – I would put it at your mid-twenties, when inspiration peaks – you have to put the hours in. You have to write ten bad songs to write a good one, a hundred to write a great one.
What, for you, makes a great song?
I can’t define that, it can come from anywhere. It can be played on any instrument or no instrument, in any style. They just get you. The best ones take a few listens to unfold and reveal themselves to you, they speak to you, know you. Music and songs exist in another dimension.
Do you have a song that you're particularly proud of, where you nailed it? If you do, which one and why is it your favourite?
There aren't many of my songs that I'm happy with, two or three maybe and they're mostly ones that make me feel how I felt when I wrote them. It’s usually the lyric that lets them down, I find it really hard work and sometimes I take the easy way out. You can’t do that, you will always regret it.
‘Wake Up Boo!’ was a big success, a bona fide hit single – did you write it with that express intention? Was it clear from its inception that it would be popular? What, do you think, made it a hit?
We had done Giant Steps and we were a big, just-outside-the-top-40, indie band and that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to be on Top of the Pops and be on Radio 1 all day and do something that my aunts and uncles and people I went to school and people I had worked with, something that they would hear. I only wanted to do it once and then get back to doing what we were doing, but there is no going back from something like that. I didn't know that then.
I wrote the chorus first, in a small crappy flat in Preston, and once I had that I worked really hard at the arrangement, harder than I've ever worked on a song. Conversely I took no time at all on the lyrics. It beggars belief how useless they are. We did a version of it and decided between us and with Creation that it wasn't right, which shows how seriously we were taking it. So we did it again and we did it properly.
I wish I had written brass parts down, I sent the players the track and vague instructions and was horrified when they turned up and played what to me sounded like the Jimmy Young theme tune. It was cheerful which was not what I wanted at all, so I flattened as many of the notes as I could but it was too late, we had run out of time.
I remember the week before it came out, someone at the top of Creation saying that they couldn't sleep, that if that wasn't going to be a hit then they didn't know what would be. Even so, I don't think any of us could have foretold its longevity.
In your experience, do the best songs come quickly, or do you whittle them out over weeks? Or - as I suspect - is it a combination of the two and difficult to generalise?
I tend to write in bits, I've always got four or five on the go. Sometimes they appear fully-formed and then it takes weeks for you to believe that its come from you. Eight out of ten times it's 'Abracadabra' By The Steve Miller Band. Sometimes they come while you're out walking, or listening to something, or when you can hear snatches of music from a distant building. I have to have a notebook and recording device on me at all times, these inspirations are fleeting.
Are you a disciplined writer? Will you set aside certain hours in the day for writing? Or is it more random than that?
I have to be doing something. It's not even second nature, it's far more innate. Whatever I'm doing, I'm doing that. People laugh when you tell them that but, somewhere in my head, I'm working and sometimes it can be very frustrating if I can't get away and think clearly.
Is 'randomness', a certain amount of anarchy, key to the spirit of rock 'n' roll, do you think?
Randomness comes with performance when writing, rehearsing or recording. You play a wrong chord or sing the wrong thing in the wrong place, whatever, and it might change everything so you give thanks and move on, but it's just an accident. You can't force it.
"There are no morals in songwriting. It's mostly about theft with a bit of 'you' sprinkled over the top." Discuss.
Only a person who has never heard any music can write music that isn't influenced by any other and it would be interesting to hear what that would be like. Sometimes you take a mood or a chord progression, a harmony, a beat.. but it's unforgivable to leave a trace and there is no excuse for writing something that sounds like its been copied directly from something else.
What fires your muse? Has it changed over the centuries?
How important is the music you hear in catalysing the music you make?
I go through periods of not listening to music at all, but I cant really tally that with any phase in my writing cycles. As I said earlier, anything can influence a song you're writing or kickstart an idea. Sometimes, if you're stuck it’s good to stick the radio on and listen to a random selection of music that might give you the idea that will get you out of the hole you're in.
You’ve gone through fallow periods where you’ve changed tack completely, switching from electric guitar to a completely electronic approach, then to acoustic guitar… were those seismic shifts about boredom / changing the landscape completely to find inspiration -- and did that approach work?
Around 1994/5 I stopped liking most of the music that I heard on the radio and I started buying old dub records and new electronic records like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as well really digging the Wu Tang stuff, in particular the Genius / GZA record 'Liquid Swords'. I had no interest in Britpop but I didn't consider reinventing the band as I should have done. The other members were happy doing what they were doing and we'd stopped hanging out and listening to music together.
I was drinking and hanging out on the scene instead of taking what I did seriously and meditating on new directions. We did C'mon Kids and I thought it was something different, but it was only if you compared it to other indie rock bands. My music bored me and by the time we came to record Kingsize the songs had no direction and there was no enthusiasm from the band or the label or the audience. I blew it. I blew it big time.
And even after that, when I couldn't switch the radio on in case I heard Travis or the Stereophonics or Jet, I didn't pursue the sound that was in my head, a kind of Kid 606 / Beach Boys thing. Most people didn't know what you were talking about if you mentioned Kid606 or Doseone in 1999/2000 and I went back to writing songs that were getting more boring and nobody was interested in them because I wasn't interested in them. A song displays the love and care that has gone into writing it, you can always tell when something is half-arsed.
I then made three albums where I tried to marry electronica and songwriting, not putting wussy little beats behind a tune but trying to integrate the two into something exciting but the budgets had gone and I was doing it at home on computer speakers and sonically the records were poor. I was still writing songs but eventually they dried up in 2006. I had started going to the computer first instead of the guitar or the piano and I forgot how to do it. The label dropped me and I was left with no management or band or anything for the first time since I started and I was depressed. I tried to write songs every day for months but nothing came, not one song and I just quit.
I suffered from a bad back in 2001/02, very painful and I remember going to the chiropractor who had to do that thing where they crack your neck at the base of your skull - it's hard to relax when you know that's going to happen, so she would say 'wiggle your toes' and I would wiggle them and she would crack my neck. because I was focusing on my toes my neck relaxed and that's what happened with my songwriting.
For two years I did something else, I bought a camera, learned how to use Photoshop and ended up doing illustration work for The Times but I still played my guitar every day and taught myself a finger picking pattern which, as I should have known, started me writing songs again. If you're stuck do something new, put a capo on, learn a new chord, play the piano – it makes a difference.
I managed to write enough songs for an album which came out in 2009 and since then I've worked myself back up to a level of writing that I'm almost happy with but it's taken nearly ten years to get to this point. The muse needs tending or it will go elsewhere and it may never come back. I'm pathetically grateful that it did because the songs I write now might not sell thousands but they feed my need to write them. I need to write as much as I need food and water and the output, which to the audience is the whole point, is secondary to the creative process. I love writing melodies, I love hearing the structure work itself out through me.
Are you consciously aware of songwriting conventions / structures, or does each song feel out its own shape as you develop it?
Not really. I know what a bridge and a verse and a chorus is but I don't feel obliged to use them for the sake of it. I've just recorded an album that has very traditional song structures because that was what I had decided to do and I paid a lot of attention to it, but I have songs that are quite formless and the work there is keeping them interesting to myself and to the listener. The songs write themselves. I know that sounds corny but it's like when a writer says that their characters start talking to each other, the song is there, you just keep playing until it takes its intended shape, like a sculptor chipping away at a lump of stone.
Can an idea you initially feel a little ambivalent about still flower into a great song? Is it important to keep your most withering critical faculties on a back shelf, early in the songwriting process?
Sometimes you can record a song that you're not sure about and the recording, the musicians, elevate the song into its true self but this won't happen with a bad song. Sometimes the recording reveals that the song wasn't much in the first place and you should ditch it despite it being something that you thought was great. Both happened to me during the recording of my current album.
Writers, of all different disciplines, hate the question: “where do your ideas come from?” Is that because you’d rather not risk over analysing what comes instinctively? I precipitated a very long bout of insomnia when I was in my early 20’s wondering about how, exactly, I fell asleep.
I don't know where they come from. It is a gift, if you want to talk in those terms, but you have to be open and receptive to them, you have to recognise them when they appear and that means working. But working can mean daydreaming, laying on your back on the floor of a quiet sunlit room, walking, sitting in the park, sleeping, all of these are an important part of creating and is what I miss most about my pre- fatherhood days. It is work, it's the most enjoyable, satisfying work but it is work and it's hard. Of course people think it's a doss but when you have this kind of magic under control, who cares what people think?
You said you weren’t sure that a book like this would help an artist, certainly with regards something as esoteric as songwriting. What did you mean?
An artist has all the tools inside them. There are no manuals. Some people must go through life not even realising that they can do this but if you're lucky enough to find it, you don't have to look any further.
The Boo Radleys’ albums are available via iTunes and Amazon. Giant Steps is a flawed masterpiece. The flaws are one of the many things that make it great. Martin is good for a round of drinks, too – my claim otherwise was a little poetic license. Or ‘a lie’ as they call ‘em in court.
The Boo Radleys - The Finest Kiss
The Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo!
The Boo Radleys - Lazarus
Martin Carr - The Santa Fe Skyway
Python Lee Jackson - In A Broken Dream
Fleetwood Mac - Man Of The World
Argent - Hold Your Head Up
The Creatures - Right Now
Love - Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale
The Turtles - Happy Together
King Tubby - King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
My Bloody Valentine - You Made Me Realise
Dinosaur Jr - Freak Scene
The Real People - I Can’t Wait
Aphex Twin - 54 Cymru Beats
The Boo Radleys - Barney And Me…
Martin Carr's new album 'The Breaks' is available now on Tapete Records. There's a beautiful vinyl pressing you can order here.
On Making Music is a guide to original music-making written by Adam Walton. It is available to download (.pdf) from http://onmakingmusic.co.uk
