Which is your preference, writing, recording or performing live?

Without a shadow of a doubt, I would take performing, because that is where the music makes sense. For me music is something that is intangible and I like the beauty of it is, that it’s moving in time; you can’t nail it down, you can’t pin it down. And I think songs are at their most beautiful when they’re performed live and they just pass by you and it’s gone. And you have one of those sensations of ‘that was a beautiful moment in time and it’s passed through me and it’s gone.’ And sometimes when you’re just driving round you get a sensation like that, of being overwhelmed by something beautiful and then that feeling, like a lovely taste in the mouth, and then it’s gone. And that’s why music is endlessly fascinating and unattainable to me. Of course the music must come first but also because it’s such an enjoyable thing for me, and to see the enjoyment it can give very directly. You can make a record but you don’t actually see the reaction of people when they’re listening to it or what it does to them. But when you’re playing in front of people who are getting visibly lost in the moment, and you are too, it’s really an uplifting and life-affirming experience I think. I know if I’ve gone to see a live performance and it’s been an incredible one, I feel changed afterwards. I feel like I want to change my life, I want to make my life take on a different path in some way. And it’s because that person I saw performing inspired me so much, and opened up my heart to all those possibilities that I never had before. So that’s why performance is at the top of my list of what music is about – really. And I like the word ‘performance’ because of the happening of the music at that moment in time, rather than playing a recorded piece of music.

The second on my list would be writing, again because it’s something that happens in a moment in time when an idea is forming. It seems to come from nowhere, it seems to pass through you, and if you miss catching it and it’s gone. If you manage to catch an idea (like in a butterfly net or something), it moves through you and changes, and becomes something else – all that’s exciting for a writer because you’re moving with it in time. So you’re moving with the idea, making it happen, shaping it and then the time’s gone and it’s finished. And then you’ll never write that piece again - that quality of life and death of a piece. Whereas recording would come last for me because I find it a very painful experience, very difficult, very draining, I lose all my energy, everything is channelled so much it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. It’s racking in the sense that you have to keep having questioning yourself over and over again, ‘Is this right?’ and ‘Is it the best it can be?’ And then the fact that when you think you’ve written something you’re finally happy with (you think because you’re never 100% sure, or I’m not…) then you have to, at some point, stamp that in time and say, ‘okay, that’s the best I can do for now’ and forever live with that piece and never get to change it again. So that would come the last of the things to me. And of course we are bad at making final decisions anyway so having to make a final decision that something is as good as it can be is very difficult.

Was the new album written over a short or long period of time?

The period that this album was written over was very large really because I’m somebody who writes quite a lot of the time and I have a backlog of songs. And when I come to record an album I just select which songs feel right according how I’m feeling, what kind of record I want to make, what songs interest me most at that moment. So some songs for this new record were pulled from being two years old, some songs were written a couple of months before I started recording. So it’s quite a mixture. They were taken from different points of my life maybe two years ago when I was living somewhere entirely different. I like the fact that songs came from different eras and have very, very different qualities. I think on this record in particular, there are a lot of different moods going on but the common being that they were all finished off in the same environment, and maybe brought up to date with the additions I made. So the songs came from a couple of years of writing really.

How important is the role of a producer for you during the recording process?

The role of producing and recording is a very, very important one and I’ve worked with two or three producers in my time and they have an enormous impact on the way the record turns out. I mean obviously a lot of it is with me. I’m thinking of producers I’ve worked with in the past like Flood, Steve Albini and Rob Ellis on the last album STORIES – they were producers who you could bounce-off of or if you’re unsure of something you can really ask their opinion. Or if you’re tired one day, you can lean on them and say, ‘can we skip today because I’m really exhausted and I can’t think straight.’ They are a sounding board for your ideas and can be a source of ideas that you would never have thought of yourself, an eye-opener when you can’t see for mist. They are a very large influence, but also producers have a different sound. Flood has a sound that I can recognise instantly before I’ve read that he had. You can hear that something is a Daniel Lanois production… So it’s an enormous role and it’s always, since I started making records twelve years ago, been my ambition to one day feel confident enough to produce my own album without anyone else’s help.

This is the first time that I felt that I had reached that position, that I felt confident enough in myself as a human being that I could highlight my ideas and hopes and wishes for the record. I did a lot of the engineering of the record as well because many of the songs were recorded at my home on my four-track or my eight-track both of which are quite simple machines. I’m someone who likes to use simple machinery (I’m not very technical) and I like the beauty and simplicity of it… So most of the recordings I had taken to a point where they were finished, apart from the drums, basically. Then I chose to take that into the studio, transferred it onto a twenty-four track machine, and worked on top of it. I redid some vocals whose sound I wasn’t happy with, rewrote a couple of songs (two of the songs were restarted from scratch because it’s very difficult for a drummer to play on top of things that are already played, particularly if they’ve been done without a click - a lot of the songs weren’t because they were free-floating, so Rob Ellis had to free-float with me on this thing that was already recorded…) . So there were a couple of times when things didn’t work out and we had to start from scratch. But most of the songs were completed by myself at home and then the finishing touches were done in the studio.

**page*

The album artwork is made up of a collection of self-portraits. What was the inspiration behind this?

For a long time, I’ve wanted to have an album’s artwork that was purely pictures of me, me. me and me. Since I was at art college, and I think this is an art college obsession of examining one’s self. For example, when I was at art college I was plastering myself in plaster and I think it’s something that everyone at art college goes through. Since then I have always regularly taken pictures of myself in the mirror. I guess the document changes over the years and you can see yourself getting older, and you can remember the exact moment that you took that picture and how you were feeling. So it was a tradition I had started when at art college. And when I was thinking about the artwork for this record, years ago I had thought that I would love to have this collection of self-portrait artwork that would be very important to me; a document of my journey to this point. And like I was explaining about arriving at the point when I could produce myself and trust myself to make the record entirely by myself, then this felt absolutely the bright record to document my journey to now. And I’ve made it in a very simple way. That’s something I’ve discovered making it; that left to my own devices and production, I choose to make things sound simple, lo-fi, not like I thought I might do.

I originally thought that I might make it more sparkly, brush them up a bit and I found that every time I tried that I just took it all away again, I didn’t like it. But I discovered I preferred things more sparse, homespun, raw and sort of messed-up, not quite right, and that’s what I discovered. I actually didn’t realise that it was the way I like to hear things, and I hadn’t realised it before. I originally put the strange-sound of them down to that they were not finished but then the whole record ended up sounding a bit like that. It’s a very home-made sounding record I think, and then the artwork as a mish-mash of what I have been over the last twenty years (some of the pictures are a bit old) felt entirely appropriate for it. Having said that, I chose as the assembler of my pieces Maria Mochnacz who I’d worked with, again, since I was seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen. So she is part of my life, part of my journey and she felt like the person I could safely hand over all the ideas I had about the artwork, knowing that she knew me inside-out as a person. And she could assemble in a few she felt presented the images best. I didn’t want to be the producer of the artwork as I thought I needed an outside opinion to make it work.

How do you know when a song is finished?

Basically, when the music is working its magic on you, you know that it’s complete and doesn’t need anything extra. Having said that, there were songs that were already working their magic on me but for some reason I thought ‘I can’t just leave it like that because there are only three things on it; a keyboard, a voice and a strange clinking sound in the background, or something…’ So I thought I would try some things and so there are a few songs where I tried putting everything on it and then realised and took it all away again, and left it as it first was. And so you do know when a song is finished because it moves you in some way; it makes you excited or it makes you laugh, or it makes you feel like you’ve gone right inside yourself. It sounds finished when it stands up on its own as well. It stands outside of you and it becomes something in its own right, it doesn’t have to be attached to you any more; it doesn’t need its umbilical cord or whatever to you; it just floats off on its own. So there it is, it’s done, it’s finished.

**page*

Where do you find your inspiration?

I think as a person and as a writer I thrive on extremes, and I feel inspired by extremes in life. That has often taken me to various parts of the globe searching for something that’s going to throw me into the new, and into the now; taking me from where I was born, where I grew up and everything English that I know. So I’ve often done that and there are many places I would like to go to in the future. With the last record for instance, I did spend some time in New York which is almost the complete opposite to my home in Dorset, which is very quiet and very removed, and surrounded by wonderful nature and scenery. So it was almost the opposite to that. And now I find myself in Los Angeles which is almost the opposite to New York, and it inspires me in different ways, and makes me look at things in a different light. Next stop Russia, that’s what I say…

Where was the album recorded and why?

Well, this record was recorded mostly at my home in Dorset, most of the songs reached an almost completed level there. And then I decided to transfer these four-track and eight-track tapes to a twenty-four track machine and I did that in the neighbouring county of Devon. So it was a half-hour drive every day for myself. The beauty of recording it there was that it maintained the quality of feeling that the home recordings already had, because it was still very remote, nothing anywhere – no shops, no house – just a house on a hill. So it some ways it left the canvas completely clean for me to paint my own picture. There were no outside influences going in at that time of finishing the record, other than this is just what I am doing. There were no outside distractions, and I was free to concentrate entirely on continuing to capture the atmosphere that was captured on the home recordings.

Did you enjoy making the record

This was a very difficult record to make, probably because I chose to produce it myself - meaning that I did not have the luxury of somebody else to shoulder my doubts or worries. So, I shouldered them all myself and it was a completely draining, disorientating, exasperating, invigorating experience. All that rolled up into one, and I would do it again, I would go back and do it again but it was one of the hardest pieces of work I’ve ever done. The only other hardest piece of work was when I produced a record for somebody else. I do think that producing is really, really hard and I now have complete respect and admiration for the producers I have worked with, so much more than I did before. I now realise the extent of what they do and for both records I have produced (this one for myself and the other one for my friend Tiffany Anders), they nearly killed me… I couldn’t say that this record was an enjoyable experience. I think it was a journey that I learnt an enormous amount from, but certainly there were very enjoyable moments. When a song starts to work; when a song works its magic and is finished; those times are magical and so exciting, and life-affirming. So those times are very enjoyable but if I was to percentage that then you know that might happen two percent of the time and then ninety-eight percent of the time it can be just constantly hard work, really. But I also enjoy being completely occupied with my work. It was a mixture, I mean when I look back on it now it was a very difficult, hard and taxing time, and yet I’m so glad I did it – so glad. And I came out of it with something that was as good as I could have made it, at the time.

Who else worked with you on the album?

People I chose to work with me on this record, and that was a very difficult process actually because I knew I wasn’t competent enough as a drummer to play the drums (I did on a couple of songs but they were easy songs to play on). So I wanted a drummer because I wanted the songs to have that extra dynamic to them and there was no question as to who that would be. I’ve worked with Rob Ellis since the first album, and we’ve worked together for so long that we don’t need to communicate about what we are doing, we’re just on the same wavelength completely. I toyed with the idea of bringing in other players but then again, when I decided to produce it myself I decided that why don’t I go the whole way and play everything myself. So in the end I played all the instruments myself except for the drums, and then because the record seemed to be taking me down this very intimate, home-made feel, I chose to have as my engineer Head, who again I have worked with since I was twenty-one. He knows me, is my friend, is the kind of person I don’t have to communicate with for him to understand me or what I’m wanting. When I had decided the nature of what I wanted to make clear in my head, it was very easy just to choose those two people to work with - a minimum number of people who would not disrupt my own direction.

What was the objective behind the record?

Once I knew this felt like the right time to make a record that was very close to my heart, with as little interference from the outside world as possible, then the objective became to maintain that feeling of the intimacy of my home recordings. And to be true to the songs in terms of not putting things on them for the sake of it, and taking away anything that wasn’t needed.

The most important things were my voice and my story, and as long as the story of the song comes across, it’s working. If I could be as the listener in the old sense of the word, the way music used to be – storytelling – when people used to tell stories to each other. I wanted my stories to come across the best way that they could, and take away anything that gets in its way. That was the objective – to get my story and my songs across clearly to the listener, and to myself. And with the album I have a different objective. I think on my last album my story and objective was to make a very melodic, very lush, layered sounding record using many instruments, many melodies. And I wanted it produced in a very clear, clean, spangly, bright way. If you play that record against this new one, they are like opposite sides of a coin almost. And that kind of sums up the way I work very easily. I always want to go to extremes, how much more differently can I do things this time…I think that’s the base level that I judge myself against in order to keep myself producing new material and not just repeating myself which is something I live in fear of. There are obviously are limits within that, I’m always going to sound like PJ Harvey, no matter what I’m doing, but how far can I push that in different directions – like, ‘yes, it still sounds like PJ Harvey, but doing something we haven’t heard her do before.’ That’s always my goal.

Who do you make your records for?

I think primarily when I’m making a record, I’m aware mostly of how it’s affecting me, how the songs are affecting me and if they are moving me in the way that I wanted them to. So I think the first person I measure against is myself ‘cos if I’m not happy with the record then I might as well not do what I’m doing. You have to be true to your soul or you’re not going to produce music that is honest and authentic. If that’s not there, there’s no point in me doing this. Having said that, I do think as well that I’m not only aware of myself listening to the songs but other people. So I did have one ear open to the listener outside of myself, and did the song and the story come across clearly enough? For somebody who doesn’t know the songs as intimately as I do, it’s vital. I would draft in friends come and to listen to things, and grill them about it. But primarily it must be from my heart or it’s not worth doing. I was involved in THE DESERT SESSIONS annual recording project that Josh Homme (of Queens Of The Stoneage) arranges every year or so. And that was a very ‘freeing’ experience, and that gave me a lot of confidence about throwing caution to the wind and just seeing what happens, and which I do think I took with me in the studio, and especially with the songs that we worked on from scratch. Some of the songs on my record were recorded in so many different ways, and I would sing some songs twenty or thirty times before I would say ‘that’s it!’

Do you see your career as a series of discrete events or a journey?

I definitely feel like it’s my journey though music that is my life really. So it’s an ongoing, continually changing process, and the records that I’ve made are a reflection of that in that they reflect the kind of person I am at that point in my life, and what I’ve experienced. And they reflect how I’ve grown intellectually and how as I get older I observe things that are outside of me – in a different way. When you’re younger, you tend to look inside the whole time but as you get older you’re able to look outside of yourself and then that brings in all these new strands of information that you can use in your work – no matter what work it is that you’re doing. I don’t see my albums as separate things from each other, they are all part of a process, points in my exploration…

**page*

How do you feel people should interpret the album?

The album is an album, I choose not to talk about the songs separately from each other. I choose not to talk about the lyrics to the songs. The album is a body of work that’s just out there now, out of my hands. It’s for people to take what they need from it. I’ve completed my role now and I could explain what songs mean to me but that would be just one point of view. In some ways, the songs are quite separate from me. In the way that I like to listen to my favourite albums and project my own feelings and experiences onto those songs, I’d like that to be the case for people listening to my album. They can have the songs now, they’re not mine any more… I have my own opinion but would not want to influence other people with it.

As a solo artist, how do you choose the live band line-up?

Last year I did a couple of short tours with a three-piece band – myself on guitar, Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey. And I think that doing those two tours was very enjoyable but having the simplicity of a three-piece line-up again maybe did contribute to my love of simplicity going into the making of this record, and thinking about keeping it really bare, really raw and simple, and just let the songs come across in the simplest way possible.

Are you looking forward to performing the album live?

I really am looking forward to paying this record live. I love the thrill of performing and it’s where the songs make more sense. So I’m really looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to trying some new players who I haven’t tired before. I’m keeping to quite a small band of either three or four piece. I’m not quite sure the way it’s going to take shape yet but I am very excited about the prospect of trying new instrumentation, new combinations of instruments from what I’ve done before.

Do you enjoy playing new songs to an audience?

I will be in a situation, as before, when I will be playing songs that people haven’t really heard yet. Some of my dates are timed for before the record is actually out and I actually like playing songs that people don’t yet know. In fact, in the past I have often thrown in new songs that people don’t know and I like that because people listen afresh and are kind of a bit taken aback and are quiet and listen. I like that first shock treatment when you first hear a song, but at the same time the recognition that you see when you’re playing one of their favourite songs is unbeatable really. It’s great and so nice to see especially when people sing along.

Do you feel a sense of pressure as a result of the success of the last album?

I think that the last record that did very well for me. A lot of people bought that record and heard it which has in some ways put me in a good position with this new album. Hopefully those people will be listening out for what I do next and will want to go and hear it, and I hope that I will present to them a very different side to myself with a very different quality of music. And listen to lyrics that are different to what they’ve heard before. It’s exciting to me to think about the people who bought the last record and what they will think of this one because it’s a very different step.

Are you already thinking about recording your next album?

I find I’m very quickly thinking about the next recording and writing. After finishing a record I’m almost immediately thinking about what I will do next, and what I may be thinking of is usually different when I get there. But at the moment I’m thinking of exploring the idea of freeing up more, freeing up myself more in terms of not recording things that are carefully worked out beforehand but are maybe more spontaneous. And maybe involving myself and other players a bit more and seeing what that brings. And taking songs into the studio that are half-finished , more like sketches, and seeing how I finish them in a small space of time with the energy and excitement of playing those songs live with the band really quickly, and nobody knew the song very well… So that’s kinda where my head is at the moment, because I think I’m often frustrated with myself in wanting things to be so in order, and knowing what I’m doing and exactly how things should be. I’m very interested now at this stage of my life to try and break down that conformity that I’ve made for myself over the years.

At what stage in your life did you feel musically confident?

When I started playing the guitar at the age of eighteen, the point at which I also began writing songs, I wanted to play them to people immediately. I mean, any friend that came along I’d say, ‘listen to this song I’ve written.’ I’d then play it to them. I wouldn’t call it the confidence or the command, more the overwhelming desire to perform this song to somebody. It was like this drive to perform, I am a performer, I think, first and foremost. I’m a teller of tales and I want people to hear them.

Maria Mochnacz