Melody Maker, March 1, 1986: Difference between revisions
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Maybe, but I don't think that's very important. I think again that's holding it all too much under a microscope. It's a very critical perspective. I don't think the general public feel that way. I'm not that important for them to think like that about me. I mean, if [[The Beatles]] went in a wrong direction, or what people thought was a confusing direction, it really sat heavily on people. Like, ''Magical Mystery Tour'' was seen as a ''national disaster''. Frank Sinatra was like that as well. If he went into an artistic decline, it affected a lot of people. People like myself, you know, I don't sell enough records, I don't have a big enough following for it to even effect the musical climate of the country if I make a bad record. But I don't sit around fretting over these things. It's a different world, it's a different business now. It's much more a sale of dreams. It always was, but there was perhaps more musical substance to it or artistic substance to it in the past. These days, there's nobody that's enormously popular and successful who is very good musically. I mean, look at George Michael. Music is only 50 per cent of what he does, and s the other 50 per cent that he does very well that makes him successful. There are people who are in the business of being famous, you know, and he's one of them. I'm ''not'' in the business of being famous. I just make records. I write songs. That's all I do. | Maybe, but I don't think that's very important. I think again that's holding it all too much under a microscope. It's a very critical perspective. I don't think the general public feel that way. I'm not that important for them to think like that about me. I mean, if [[The Beatles]] went in a wrong direction, or what people thought was a confusing direction, it really sat heavily on people. Like, ''Magical Mystery Tour'' was seen as a ''national disaster''. Frank Sinatra was like that as well. If he went into an artistic decline, it affected a lot of people. People like myself, you know, I don't sell enough records, I don't have a big enough following for it to even effect the musical climate of the country if I make a bad record. But I don't sit around fretting over these things. It's a different world, it's a different business now. It's much more a sale of dreams. It always was, but there was perhaps more musical substance to it or artistic substance to it in the past. These days, there's nobody that's enormously popular and successful who is very good musically. I mean, look at George Michael. Music is only 50 per cent of what he does, and s the other 50 per cent that he does very well that makes him successful. There are people who are in the business of being famous, you know, and he's one of them. I'm ''not'' in the business of being famous. I just make records. I write songs. That's all I do. | ||
''The critics of your last [[:Category:1984 UK Tour|tour]] with The Attractions seemed pretty much unanimous in agreeing that it sounded like you'd exhausted all possible permutations with the group and the most immediately sensible thing to do would be to | ''The critics of your last [[:Category:1984 UK Tour|tour]] with The Attractions seemed pretty much unanimous in agreeing that it sounded like you'd exhausted all possible permutations with the group and the most immediately sensible thing to do would be to retire gracefully... | ||
Yeah, but we've always had reviews like that. We had terrible reviews even when we were really successful. When we were actually ''pop stars'', in '79, when we were actually on the covers of the glossies and everything and we were having consistent Top 20 hits. You know the way critics always like to knock whoever's in the charts when they play live. We got all those reviews: "Oh, it was a machine-gun kind of delivery, they couldn't wait to get to the next gig..." The fact was that we were all out of our minds all the time. | |||
''But the criticisms of the last tour went beyond that: they were basically saying that you and The Attractions were in a rut, that you sounded jaded and tired and really needed a break from each other... | |||
That might have been true. We were just working on a kind of neurotic nervous energy towards the end. We ''were'' totally exhausted. I was particularly exhausted. I'd worked literally from, like, the first week of January until that tour ended in October. I think I had five days holiday that year. | |||
''So you recognised that maybe you were by then at a fairly critical junction in your career? | |||
Allan, I'm ''always'' at a critical junction in my career. | |||
''But how did you respond to this crisis, what did you do to get out of the rut, out of the routine? | |||
Well, if you're really afraid of something, I think that sometimes all it takes to remove that fear is to actually admit that it exists. It happened to me once before, around the time of the ''Get Happy!!'' tour. I was going to quit then, I'd decided that that was going to be the last record and I really didn't know when or if I'd ever make another one. I decided to take six months off after that year. And it was almost the minute that I stopped feeling as though I was being compelled, either by myself, or the circumstances or just the routine, that I decided to carry on. All the dread went out of it and I immediately started writing furiously again and it suddenly became very clear to me what to do next. It was pretty much the same feeling this time. Once I realised that I didn't ''have'' to make another record that year, or the next spring or whenever, the way forward just became very clear. So I didn't quit. I didn't actually ''stop''. In fact, I immediately went out and did another solo tour, which was a lot freer, you know. | |||
''So it was during your solo tours and working with T-Bone that the ideas for ''King Of America'' were formulated? | |||
Basically, yeah... but the way you're phrasing it makes it all sound very serious, like we were plotting it all along. It wasn't quite like that. In fact, what happened was that I just started thinking more about the songs and much less about the records. And, because I was concentrating on the songs, as I started to write it became clear to me that I had to write very, very simple songs. I started taking out all the musical kinks. As I've said, the story-telling technique was already there in some of the songs on ''Goodbye Cruel World'', but it was out-of-focus. I was aware in retrospect that I hadn't been weighing the words properly, I hadn't been making them clear enough. So I thought, if I'm going to tell a story, then I shouldn't perhaps rely so much on the grammatical pin-boll and just say it clearly. Particularly, once I'd decided that the music should be really clear and simple, it seemed inappropriate to weave any kind of too mysterious a tole. Also, the things I wanted to say were suddenly very clear to me. And suddenly in some way, I don't know why, it just seemed a lot easier for me to say something straight out. Even the songs that aren't stories, that are just expressions of a feeling, the love songs of one kind or another, they're very, very straightforward. | |||
''Sometimes, it's seemed that your facility for language has had a muddling rather than clarifying effect in your songs. | |||
Oh yeah, you can just lose yourself in words. You know, sometimes deliberate obscurity is a good device, at other times it's just bloody annoying. I don't think that there are many obscure lines on the new record. I think the lyrics are very, very clear. When we were doing the album, one of the things T-Bone wouldn't let me do was tinker with the songs. That was one of the neurotic diseases left over from the unsuccessful Attractions recording sessions: my tendency to tinker with a song, even as we were going along. There'd be nothing wrong with a song, but because we didn't get it in three takes, I'd start re-writing it, and sometimes I wouldn't make it any better. But that's one of the things I avoided on this album, because I knew all the songs were basically written properly. I knew they were all finished, and I knew they were saying exactly what I wanted to say. I mean, there are no hidden meanings on any of the songs on ''King Of America''. They just say it straight out. Like, "I'll | |||
Revision as of 20:23, 15 June 2013
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