Last one, then it’s the album next Friday, then I’ll shut up! This one is really special to me, because it is such a good example to me of why I fight in my life now for people to recognise the importance of the musicians (as in, not the ‘featured artist’) to the recording process. It was the one that changed most from tiny little acoustic thing, to (I think anyway) epic Talk Talk style burst of pent up emotion.

I wrote this one – from what I can remember – on the bed in my room in our house on Monkgate in York. I loved that room… I used to sit looking out the window on top of the spare single mattress that doubled as a sofa, watching the world go by towards the Minster, and dreaming of touring the world, and all the stuff you imagine will happen when you make a record you don’t release for 20 years. There was a threadbare 30-40 year old faux tiger skin carpet, and when we moved in there there was no bed, but my brother managed to get a bed from a house clearance that had this amazing headboard with an art deco clock in the centre, with attached walnut (? I think?) bedside cabinets. Rounded off with the obligatory lava lamp and joss sticks holder pumping out the least lavender like lavender smell of all time. That bed lasted until my policeman friend jumped on it from 6 feet in the air at 5mph and snapped the leg, at which point it spent the next two years propped up with the collected letters and ‘table talk’ of Martin Luther between about 1520 – 1540. I’m sure he was turning in his habit.

I’m not confident now where I was coming from with it – I know I meant it as a laugh at yourself send up of myself initially, having uncoiled a moment of post socialising anxiety… something Catalina knows I’ve always suffered from. Having hated my primary school I taught myself to dive in as fast as I could to avoid an anxiety build up in a lot of social situations, and for as long as I can remember now, I love being in the middle of friends or strangers, but then often would swing violently the other way later and be eaten away by it that night (something that pops up on The Dress Rehearsal too but anyway) and until recent years wouldn’t be able to sleep for dissecting every comment I’d uttered all night. All power to CBT and EMDR (thanks Herj!) for helping me out of that hole. Songs have always been a gentle way of letting people know what you’re really like. It was about the parallel oneversation going on in my brain and long afterwards, that was there underneath all the chat. I think though, the lyric in the end became more about the landscape in which I’d feel those things – the exhaustion of turning the newspaper every day on York market where I’d get my morning bacon buttie and seeing how people like Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney were creating a world where no one felt safe any more. And yet, you realise you’re doing nothing in your actually safe little life in a gorgeous historical northern town to change anything, and you can’t help but feel ridiculous.

Anyway, it started on the 4 track as this whispered, acoustic little late night gremlin. Some time later I spent a week in the Lake District at my friend, and our guitarist Chris Farrel’s family home where we cleared out the living room and set up for the week to see if we could make magic happen and come out with an album of stuff. I’d never feared for my life like I did getting there… going around those windy little lanes in a giant, rotting white splitter van that was made of 74.6% rust as the light faded, and for which the 70 something year old driver ‘Trucker’ had been paid I believe £75 to take us all the way there, half asleep. It was excruciating, he talked and talked and talked, and if he didn’t talk he almost nodded off at the wheel. So while Jamie and Rob slept soundly in the back, I had to sit in the front fearing for our lives, and run with the conga of conspiracy theories, mild sexy or racisty stuff, and sound interested for hours upon hours while my brain squealed like a tube rail.

What seems even more ludicrous now is that we somehow got a full size Hammond B3 with Lesley in there and down the slippy stone steps into this lovely house with countless amps, PA etc. Now, not as much music happened that week as it should have, and it became known for the ‘Iron Man Challenge’ which resulted in a trip to hospital with a cracked bonce for one of us, after about 39 hours straight with no sleep, fuelled by anything wet that had an abv. Not me I might add, I flaked well before that at around the 20 hour mark. But there was a moment later in the week, when frustrated that we hadn’t managed to come up with anything, I noodled this one I’d got stored away, and it all just sort of happened, and luckily the old portable minidisc player got it all. I loved that moment with those people, in that rehearsal space as much as at any other time in my life I think.

We did a couple of demos using the approach from that trip – one with just Chris and I with the lovely Glenn Skinner that actually took a really different but arguably more modern approach to it I really liked, but the final version we ended up getting with the band who played on the record (including Chris) down at Whitfield Street, the old CBS studio that went bust. Now, I don’t want to say I’m an albatross, but it was the last recording ever done there, and the other project I was working on with Matt Deighton was the last ever mix in studio 3 (Young At Last and Parting Shot).

My chief memory of those sessions outside of my own music was that The Darkness were making album 2 in the upstairs studio. I only bumped into them a couple of times, but they were as lovely as you could be, and I remember there was an issue with Justin having an obsession with the Pinball machine just up the road in the arcade on Goodge Street, and not enough recording was going on. He sauntered in without a care in the world with no top, excellent beer belly and frayed blue jeans one afternoon about 4pm – I remembered him being bare feet too, but that might be the imagination at work. The best part of that project was that it was being produced by former Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, and I remember as clear as day a conversation with the receptionist who I got on great with, where she was not sure at that moment how serious the request was from him. Turns out, very. He’d asked for a number of golf umbrellas to be made available and if memory serves, had drawn out a to-scale diagram of where and at what angle they were to be placed so that he could have the air conditioning up nice and high, without it ever blowing on him. I can’t imagine how they blew through £200k on that album! I was at the Darkness’s album launch in Camden for the first album too strangely, I think as a guest of my friend who worked with them. It was glorious. The only drink you could have free was Jack Daniel’s, so it was a messy room, and they were so drunk when they arrived that they were carried in, in star shapes by two to a person, and plopped on sofas. Stayed for a bit and were carried straight out again! Everything I ever saw of them was authentic, just a bunch of friends and siblings having the time of their lives playing the music they loved. First time I heard them I thought it was a piss take, but turned out they really were just doing it all better than anyone else.

It was a tragedy that Whitfield Street Studios went the way it did. I’ll never forget wandering down there the day the builders took hammers to the immaculate acoustic wood panelling that had cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds to put in. Absolute artistry from the carpenters, smashed to smithereens by balls of unbaked clay and turned into bloody offices. It had been owned at the time by the great Robin Millar who was very kind to me and a great many others, a wonderful music person about whom I have one of my most embarrassing David Brent/Alan Partridge stories (on my part) but that’s not for today! I’m hoping if I never tell it again he’ll have forgotten. The place was run by my dear friend the afore mentioned Dave Anderson who was producing my stuff. On the day they auctioned off all the gear, I managed to bag for my impending place a pair of LA-3A’s, an 1178 and a Tube TECH MEQ (well, that one was Dave’s) as well as a U87 which I still have to this day, though it’s a little bit Trigger’s Broom as I had to get all the insides swapped out for new parts by Sennheiser (‘new as in unused, but original period parts from the 70’s when it was from I think). £900, so the joke was on me.

I remember on the day that there was a strange murmur when the mixing desk from Studio 3 came up in the auction. I remember it being the SSL as I think the Neve was in Studio 1. I was reliably told at the time that these were the figures, but you never know with these things. I do remember what it went for on the day though: Expecting huge sums for it, it was a shock that it went to a Dutch geezer for as little as £60-65k. He couldn’t believe his luck. What he hadn’t accounted for however was getting it out of there the next day. When it was put in there, it was airlifted by a crane through the giant hole in the wall where the windows were about to go and had been there ever since the studio opened. After a week of panic because the studio was about to get smashed up by builders, he had to accept a £30k loss and sold it to Mark Thompson at Funky Junk for half as much, who then hurriedly cut it up into channels to get it out. Nice bit o’business, which made it all the more puzzling to me why you’d see a person I’m certain was Mark on Hornsey Road on my drive into the studio each morning in Wood Green a year or two later, and he’d be picking up cigarette ends and squirrelling them away before heading into the office. We all have hobbies I guess. Always seemed like a good guy to me, and heaven knows we love eccentrics in our business. But I always had a strange urge to anonymously send him a packet of Benson and Hedges as a nice surprise. But that studio sale… Years to collect all that gear together, one piece complementing the next; each with it’s own job to do on every aspect of the recording process. An art in itself, putting all that together. And then dismantled and lost in a week.

But back to Song For A Loser… The recording itself was glorious… the huge, cavernous studio 1 where they usually did film soundtracks. A stunner of a piano – Steinway I think – and then all the good stuff, real Hammond, huge amps, vintage Neumann, AKG and Coles mics on stands that you could hang an orangutan off … and then all the lights turned off. I spent the majority of my 30’s when I was on my own hiding in the dark listening to Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock – I had always loved Mark Hollis’s solo record, and the pop Talk Talk stuff, but Matt got me into these two and I never looked back. The making of them in Phill Brown’s brilliant book Are We Still Rolling is well worth a read. Song For A Loser was as close as I ever got to that, and I’m so glad it came before I had heard those albums or it would have been too contrived I think. There’s so much emotion in the electric guitar, and was never sure if Chris was channeling me, himself or a bit of both; but between his raw nerve endings, Tim Weller and Mark Smith pinning it down and Mike Rowe adding his own class to it, the steps in between, and the little half notes, it came out better than I could have believed. Every time we talk funding at the charity, or are talking about the plight of musicians these days, these moments are burning in my throat. To write a song is one thing, but when you hear it transformed totally by the skill, soul and guts of proper musicians is the most spectacular thing anyone can ever do for you. I have more respect and gratitude for these musicians who did that for me on song after song than anyone in the world, because they ARE the world builders. Often they build to your design; but those moments where they forget to look at the plans, they are the dust and spark that create art from craft. Their innate knowledge of how things hang together, and their ability to bend around the rules without the stitches popping so you can be truly yourself as a songwriter and artist, is the greatest skill in the music business imho. And yet, these days, so few artists can afford to take the whole band on the road. Many now take ‘stems’ of the recorded performance and they trigger them on an SPD or laptop via keyboard to fill out the sound. Musicians are losing work, and their performance is being broadcast in public in their place – and STILL, in 2024 PPL pay them no royalty for this. What’s the official line? Because those stems don’t have an ISRC. So… give them a fucking ISRC! Excuse the language, but why is NO ONE fighting this corner more audibly or visibly? We can do better! We have to protect the art of the session musician, the professionals who study for a decade or more to get to the level required. If session fees are on the floor, and they’re being replaced by recordings of themselves live, how does it remain a viable career?

All those things a musician learns playing on a Prince or Sheryl Crow, or Lewis Taylor record, those moments they remember solving a problem on an Oasis or Bryan Ferry or Mick Jagger record, learning from legendary artists, producers and other musicians, those are priceless gifts to a young artist on his first record – those tips and tricks and different approaches grow you as an artist and a writer, and a performer; and you lose that in a world of play-everything-yourself, with loop packs on your laptop. When we lose the happy accidents of our musical brothers and sisters, we lose limbs from the soul of the songs.

Please, funding bodies, rights bodies, take this into account. So many records wouldn’t be a patch on what they are without our world class lineage of pro musicians. Session musicians. Whatever you want to call them. There is no more wonderful conversation than the pre recording, coffee and pastry chat of session players at 10am. I miss it more than anything in the world.

If you want to support people like that and you don’t work in music or know what the hell I’m on about with PPL and all that, well, you can still donate to Help Musicians who are there for musicians like this at all stages of their careers in good times and bad. Every penny counts, and their donations all come from music lovers, musicians, music orgs or people working in the industry.

Ok, if you got this far, the lottery number for next week are…

I’m off to get my dinner all down my shirt.