Where does the novice songwriter start? With only twelve notes to choose from, it has been said that there is nothing that hasn’t been done before. Perhaps that doesn’t matter? Modern pop music came of age in the sixties, after the bare bones of rock’n’roll were fashioned in the fifties, and one of the most primitive pop songs of them all, ‘Louie Louie’ by Richard Berry (performed by The Kingsmen), is also among the best. Thinking that I should take Lawrence’s advice and aim to fashion a song out of the irreducible minimum of ingredients, I dug out my old 45 of The Kingsmen’s 1963 smash hit and listened closely, to work out what went into it.
‘Louie Louie’ is remarkable for the fact that, while hearing it fills one with the raw energy of youth and the urge to both blow up the world and build a new one, it’s totally meaningless. When The Kingsmen performed it, were the words are unfathomable, with the result that they could be about anything that the listener imagines. ‘Louie Louie’ reflected the FBI’s natural tendency towards paranoia when the agency decided that, because the song was so good, it must be obscene. So a team was appointed to scrutinise the lyrics in order to find out whether it should be banned or not. They concluded that ‘Louie Louie’ was ‘indecipherable at any speed’, which any one of the thousands of teenagers who bought the record could have told them for free.
I knew enough about the guitar to play ‘Louie Louie’, which isn’t much of a boast. (It’s the first thing you learn.) The skill was the inspiration in coming up with it in the first place. That got me thinking about how much training you needed before you can start writing songs. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, friends since their schooldays in Croydon, knew nothing about the rules of music whatsoever when they formed their band, St Etienne, in 1991 – and when I met Bob Stanley fifteen years later, he still didn’t. Neither could play an instrument, they knew very little about music theory, and they certainly didn’t know how to read sheet music. They came up with the ideas for the songs and got other people to make them a reality. And quite possibly, to the irritation of all those musicians who have spent years of their life in diligent study and pursuit of their craft, they have had a successful career as purveyors of thoroughly English, sixties-tinged electronic pop.
The paradox of being in a successful band while not being capable of doing anything musical was brought home to me when I went to see St Etienne in concert on an autumn evening a few weeks after meeting Lawrence. It was at the Barbican, one of London’s most prestigious and stylishly modernist arts spaces, and there must have been over a thousand people in the sold-out, seated auditorium. The first half of the concert consisted of members of St Etienne’s backing band providing a soundtrack to a film Bob Stanley had made about the Lea Valley, an underused area in east London that was about to be razed to make way for a stadium for the 2012 Olympics. In the second half, the backing musicians were joined by the band they were supposedly backing. St Etienne’s singer, Sarah Cracknell, has a very good voice, and she held court centre stage, while behind her, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs stood behind trestle tables and computers with a few cables poking out of them, at which they stared intently. I think they may have been checking their emails.
Is it really possible to write melodic, hook-laden songs when you can’t even play ‘Happy Birthday’ on a piano? I decided to find out by spending an evening with Bob Stanley. Songwriting has been good to him. He lives in High Point, a graceful minimalist block built in 1935 in Highgate, north London, by the modernist architect Lubetkin. The three-bedroom flat he shares with his sixties-dressed, wife Annelise, is a shrine to modern living. There is Dutch wooden furniture with elegant contours, obscure eastern European film posters, and a wall taken over by books that revealed an inquiring mind: coffee-table editions on the radical architects Archigram, biographies of the Regency dandy Beau Brummel and novels by the pub-fixated writer Patrick Hamilton. Bob’s record collection is awarded its own room.
‘From the word go I’ve been conscious that, if I knew how music worked, it would completely change the way I write songs and I’ve decided not to do that,’ said Bob, polite, bright and rather awkward, as he sat on the edge of his orange sofa and poured us each a glass of wine. ‘Pete {Wiggs} has learned how to operate a studio, but I don’t even know that. I’ve kept on the same level all the time and my hope is that the songwriting can get better in spite of that.’
‘How on earth can you write a song, then?’ I asked.
‘I structure our songs by basing them around other people’s songs,’ he replied. ‘I’m a music fan, and I never wanted to be in a normal band that learns their instruments, goes out on the road, and then gets better over the years – I’ve never had the patience. I tried playing guitar once. It hurt my fingers.’
It was the democratising power of the sampler that allowed St Etienne to exist. In 1988 Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs borrowed a Roland 303 keyboard and made a track that was, by his own admission, ‘rubbish’. Two years later bands like The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses were taking the beats and the energy of dance music and applying them to rock. Bob saw that something similar could be done with pop. Most hip-hop was based around a sample of somebody else’s record, which was looped and used as a backing track for a rapper. There was no reason why pop couldn’t be made in the same way.
‘I wasn’t exactly being cynical,’ he said, ‘but I did realise that, if I could find a singer, and get someone to do all the things I couldn’t do, and then go into a studio with a bunch of records I liked and say to the engineer “make it sound like that”, it might just work.’
In 1990 Bob and Pete convinced a friend of Pete’s brother to sing a version of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by Neil Young. Another friend came up with a bass line for the song. Then they went to a bedroom studio in Croydon with a stack of old records and made the track in two hours. They knew a promoter called Jeff Barrett, who was about to start a record label called Heavenly. Bob and Pete played the track to him and he suggested putting it out on his new label, and it was in the British Top Ten a few weeks later. ‘The whole thing,’ said Bob, ‘was ridiculously easy.’
So it was possible for a non-musician to make a hit record, but Neil Young wrote ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’. I asked Bob how he came to write a song himself. ‘We knew we had to have a follow-up, and, at this point, we hadn’t written a song in our lives. So we picked up structures from songs we loved, and we looked in the free ads papers and bought a keyboard. We couldn’t actually play it, but we could make noises, and that, was enough.’
St Etienne’s first self-written song was called ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, which came into existence after they found a record by Gene Chandler called ‘Nothing Can Stop Me’. They borrowed the melody from ‘Eye Know’, by the New York hip-hop band De La Soul, and took a sample from a song by Dusty Springfield. From these elements they had their own song.
‘I feel that I should apologise for borrowing the structure of somebody else’s song,’ said Bob, of the plagiarism that made ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ come into existence. ‘And, to this day, we’re still making tracks by pilfering through our record collections. But then, what we produce ends up sounding completely different from what we were stealing from. That happens a lot. Apparently The Happy Mondays wanted to be like a cross between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.’
Bob’s sensibility, if not his musical ability, reminded me of Scott Walker. The Ohio-born singer fell in love with Europe and used the idea of it as his inspiration. Initially one third of The Walker Brothers, a semi-manufactured pop act transplanted to England in the mid-sixties and marketed for a teenage audience, Scott rebelled against the industry he was in, took off at the height of his fame to stay in a monastery on the Isle of Wight, and came back a changed man. What followed were four astonishing solo albums that took in existentialism, English-language versions of the songs of the tormented Belgian singer Jacques Brel, ancient Christian spirituality, and a portrait of Europe as a tragic but beautiful place where resignation and acceptance take the place of American optimism and vigour.
I had first heard Scott Walker’s music when I was twenty-three. I was at a friend’s house and he played Scott 4, the pinnacle of the singer’s achievement and a commercial failure that resulted in his throwing in the towel and making his next release an uninspiring collection of movie tunes. I had never heard anything like it. It wasn’t just the music, although that was wonderful: deep, sweeping strings, dramatic trumpets, and Scott Walker’s sonorous, dramatic voice. And it wasn’t just the lyrics: about the Stalinist regime (‘The Old Man’s Back Again’); a game of chess with death that describes the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s film of the same name (‘The Seventh Seal’); and a tender ode to the monks who had looked after Walker at the height of his fame-induced confusion (‘The Angels of Ashes’) – it was the mood that these songs created. They were miniature films, inviting you into a world that would enrich and fascinate you.
The friend’s girlfriend was a fashion person, quick to name-drop, belittle her boyfriend and talk about her own achievements. I remember her voice being like background interference as Scott 4 played on the stereo, and the two worlds that these voices represented could not have been more different. It was after listening to Scott 4 that I knew that time passed too quickly not to get on with addressing the question of what it means to be alive and see how fascinating the world can be.
‘Scott Walker was a huge influence on me because he writes about everyday things in a way that is vague but evocative,’ said Bob, uncorking a second bottle of wine. ‘He uses words you don’t usually hear in songs, and, because he was an American discovering European culture and art films and so on, he wrote about Europe in a way that he felt it should be, which is a very inspiring way to approach songs.’
Scott and Scott 2 consist of a lot of cover versions by songwriters like Jacques Brel and Tim Hardin, but a few originals, too: on Scott 2’s ‘Plastic Palace People’, Walker tells the story of Billy the Balloon, ‘a string tied to his underwear’ as he floats over the houses of the city at night after a boy lets go of him. And Scott 3 is a melancholic masterpiece featuring such redolent lines as ‘I’ve hung around too long, listening to the old landlady’s hard-luck stories’ (from ‘It’s Raining Today’); a romantic, idealistic ode to Copenhagen; and a moving story of a lonely transvestite called Big Louise (‘didn’t time sound sweet yesterday? In a world filled with friends, you lose your way’).
‘You can tell that Scott Walker reinterprets books and films by other people,’ said Bob. ‘That’s where his inspiration comes from. The thing to learn from Scott Walker is that you shouldn’t worry about writing a brilliant song that is relevant to everyone, and you shouldn’t worry about sounding parochial – or that the American audience won’t know what you’re singing about. His songs are specific. That’s why they work so well.’
It was getting late and it didn’t look like Bob was going to give me anything to eat, which meant that the wine was going straight to my head and affecting my mental powers. Our house in Peckham was on the other side of London, but all I could think about was material for songs and the fact that Bob Stanley appeared to exist in an attractive, ideas-led world where everything looked right and sounded good. On top of all this, he was a socialist, apparently. So, when he suggested that we buy one more bottle of wine and that I stay the night, I agreed that this was an excellent idea.
Bob left before I woke. I emerged from the bathroom with a towel around my waist to see his wife, Annelise, talking to a smiling middle-aged lady who turned out to be the couple’s cleaner. The bed in the middle of the living room floor had been cleared away, but there were still three empty bottles of wine by the sofa and my clothes randomly scattered around the room. The woman gave me an embarrassed smile and Annelise stuttered a quick response.
‘This is Will,’ said Annelise, her eyes moving rapidly from me to the cleaning lady. ‘Bob and Will were here last night getting drunk while I wasn’t even here at all. I hardly saw you, did I Will?’
‘No, no you didn’t,’ I mumbled alcoholically, and the lady said: ‘That’s all right, I don’t mind. Please don’t mind me. I’ll get started in the kitchen.’ It was only after we left the flat that I realised Annelise was trying to make it clear to the cleaner that she hadn’t just walked in on an affair. We made a quick exit, had breakfast in a greasy spoon on the Archway Road, and I thought about how grateful I was for an illumination into Bob Stanley’s way of writing songs, even if it wasn’t for me. As Hugh of St Victor said sometime in the twelfth century: ‘Learn everything. It will all come in useful somewhere.’
Bob Stanley’s approach to making music while knowing absolutely nothing about the rules of music whatsoever offered an entry point into songwriting, but I already did know something about music, albeit not very much. I needed to keep it simple and try to write a song that tapped into ageless aspects of human experience. So I decided to go back further. A lot further – all the way to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when a Bavarian monastery produced a collection of 228 profane and secular songs called the Carmina Burana.
The Carmina Burana comes from the wild student scene of twelfth-century Europe, when the inauguration of the earliest universities marked a shift from the spiritual and moral education of the cloistered monk to the training of a professional class to meet the new bureaucratic and legal demands of church and state. Students came from all over Europe to study in Paris (theology, arts and law), Bologna and Pavia (law), and Montpellier and Salerno (medicine), and they were united by their knowledge of Latin. The Carmina Burana was to reflect this new culture – a twelfth-century renaissance – in songs. They cover drinking, comradeship, satire, high-minded love (occasionally) and bordello lust (often).
Protected by king, pope and/or emperor, the students were a privileged section of society, free to travel throughout Europe and land the best jobs after their studies. The Carmina Burana was a product of the world of these gilded youth at the beginning of their careers, when they didn’t know what Fortuna would have in store for them and satire was a good defence against insecurity. Not yet embroiled in the corrupt practices of the legal, clerical and ecclesiastical professions, the students were also in a position to parody their supposed betters. Walter of Chatillon’s first poem in the Carmina Burana touched on this:
Give and it shall be given unto you
Thus says the text
At the Curia it’s the case
That he who pays wins
For the want of money
Codrus loses his action.
The Carmina Burana was the protest music of its day and Walter of Chatillon was the era’s Bob Dylan. Often the songs are more straightforward in their rebellion:
Down with study! Books away!
Come and learn a sweeter truth
Finding pleasure in the play
And the greenery of youth
It’s the pride of old professors
To engage in serious things
And the joy of youth (God bless us)
To prefer venereous things.
And it wasn’t just the students who were enjoying venereous things. There were reports of convents in twelfth-century Verdun in France where the nuns had given themselves up to prostitution to help pay the bills, while, in Canterbury in 1171, Clarembald, the abbot-elect, was discovered to have seventeen bastards in one village. The bawdy songs of the Carmina Burana were enjoyed by those inside the monasteries – and were even written by some of them, as there were only so many people literate in Latin – as much as those outside them.
Alongside the students and the clergy, the third group involved in the creation of the Carmina Burana were goliards; a brotherhood of wandering minstrels who sang its songs in taverns and town squares. The goliards were the bohemians of their day, standing outside of society and mocking its conventions while also bringing bawdy poetry to people otherwise tied up with survival, sin and church. One of the goliardic songs in the Carmina Burana is by a jealous lover who has lost his beloved.
Tender in years,
More radiant
Than Venus’s star,
Weep for her mind’s
Dovelike sweetness then,
Weep for her serpentine
Bitterness now.
Men who ask for love
You drive off with a harsh word,
Men who bring you gifts
You warm in your bed.
You order them to go away
If you get nothing from them –
You welcome the blind and the lame
And delude illustrious men
With your poisoned honey.
The goliard has surely gone mad in his bitterness. Did the blind and the lame really have money for prostitutes in the twelfth century? How come his woman had dovelike sweetness when she was with him, but serpentine bitterness as soon as she was with others? The reason is that madness is at the heart of love and betrayal, and, as such, at the heart of the song. The goliard’s song is so modern! It’s exactly these sentiments that have been inspiring the vast bulk of the songs that make up the twentieth-century songbook. It became clear that inspirational material has essentially remained the same for the last 1,000 years, give or take the odd world-changing invention. This song by an unknown and probably drunken goliard has a similarly acerbic tone to Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’. And the message is the same as ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’. While Marvin Gaye sings of being ‘about to lose my mind’ through the rumours that have been circulating about the infidelities of his former lover, in a later stanza the goliard behind this song manages to give some advice to his estranged woman about keeping her affairs under wraps in the future: ‘Whatever you do, do in darkness, from the lids of rumour’s eyes.’
The best songs tap into an element of human nature that is universal, even if the details, as in Scott Walker’s songs, might be specific. There are few adults on the planet who have not felt the sting of romantic rejection or betrayal, which is why songs on this subject are so enduring. The pain of heartbreak is even more intense and enveloping than being in love, and it is a fast-spreading disease that courses through the veins of the afflicted.
I was twenty-one and just out of university when my heart was first broken; a necessary rite of passage before one can go on to engage in a lasting and deeper relationship. We met when I was still an undergraduate and I had been rather blase about this very attractive and intelligent girl, and her jealousy had been irritating. Then the tables turned as she made more friends, starred in plays, and generally became her own person. When she had arrived at university I had a room in Marble Arch and a ready-made social scene. Then I left university, got a job in a health-food shop, and moved in with my mum. The relationship collapsed soon after that.
A broken heart is the biggest inspiration in the history of song. You try to make sense of your feelings, as the person you loved becomes the fount of all that is wrong in the world. You were fine before you met them. Why can’t you cope once they have been and gone? And, when you are heartbroken, you don’t really think of your former lover as a real person, more a focus for the dark corners of your own identity. The goliardic song was a product of that conflict of emotions and it is part of a long and rich lineage. The poisoned honey of love will never run dry and people will never stop writing songs about the bitter taste it leaves.
I listened to Scott Walker’s records that evening. Bob Stanley had told me that immersing oneself in interesting films, books, art and people was always going to provide inspiration, but I also wanted to add that depth of feeling that I heard in Scott Walker and the charm and personality that Nico and Lawrence had. Besides, the goal was to write and be able to play a song, and I needed some concrete advice on what worked and what didn’t. Listening to Scott Walker’s delivery, and the conviction he brought to the words he sang, made me realise that I needed to talk to a singer.
Good singers know whether words can be delivered or not, and whether a line scans properly, and how to write a song at the right pitch. As it happened, I had a friend who was making it as a professional singer. Mara Carlyle was writing her own songs and covering well-known ones in unusual styles. A few months earlier there had been a big hit called ‘1 Thing’ by an African-American/Korean R&B singer called Amerie. She sings at the top of her range, giving her voice a frantic quality that works with the hysterical mood of the words. Mara had recorded a version of ‘1 Thing’ in her poised English way, thereby turning the song into something entirely different. She lived an interesting life, too: when she wasn’t performing live or making records, she worked in a homeless shelter in central London.
Mara was staying in a tiny flat at the top of a Georgian town house in Queen’s Park, north-west London. She made porridge and tea and spoke a little about her life and music. Growing up in Shropshire, where her father was a musician and music teacher and her mother played piano, she was regularly hauled up on stage from the age of six onwards to sing in folk clubs and play violin in classical concerts.
‘I’m one of those people who can get a note out of any instrument, but I’m not particularly good at any of them,’ she said as she poured the kettle. ‘I hate practising, and singing is the only thing I have really worked at.’ The family did not play records at home but sang together from sheet music, and her two elder brothers formed bands before they were in their teens and Mara would beg to be allowed to sing with them. She had been deeply immersed in song, and had understood its language and world, for her entire life.
I asked Mara how much of her time was taken up with music. ‘In my head, all of it,’ she replied. ‘But I have a day job, I don’t have a manager, and I’m not ambitious in the conventional sense. I’m as happy getting drunk and singing madrigals with friends as I am being on stage.’
She had recently done a tour with Willy Mason, a very young singer-songwriter from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, who had been getting a lot of attention, and the two of them had been talking about how so many musicians become jaded and end up hating what they are doing, but still do it anyway. ‘I told Willy that if it ever gets to the point where it stops being enjoyable, jump off. Forget about success if you find yourself resenting the thing you once loved more than anything. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he did soon after we had that conversation. He abandoned the tour and nobody has heard of him since.’ She sighed. ‘And he was really going places, too.’
My main problem was melody. I don’t think I really understood what it was.
‘A melody can come from any number of places,’ said Mara. ‘I’ll hear a bird song in a certain cadence and it triggers something. And one of the things I learned from classical training was the importance of how the words sound with the music, particularly from the singer’s point of view.’
‘Do you mean that you should write a song with a singer in mind?’ I asked.
‘No, more that you should be aware to never let words compromise the song. If it sounds awkward, get rid of it. I hate it when you hear lyrics that have been written beforehand and then they have been stuck onto a piece of music that clearly doesn’t fit.’
I wasn’t aware that there was any other way of writing songs than this. So far I had written some words, then played some sort of a tune, and then jammed the two together.
‘Mozart was a total genius when he wrote for singers,’ she continued. ‘He knew exactly which vowel sounds are easy to produce at what pitch. “Queen Of The Night” in The Magic Flute is very high, but it’s really easy to sing because it’s just a vocal exercise – if you had to say words over that it would be impossible, so Mozart made it wordless. He knew the voice so well that everything in his work can be sung. That is the sort of skill and understanding that is rare to find in modern song-writing.’
Mara explained how the classical composers would give the words extra meaning by putting the right emphasis on them. She cited Purcell’s ‘I Blame You Not’, in which the line ‘my heart is broken’ is given tenderness and depth by the way the singer will elongate the vowel sounds on ‘heart’.
‘The music has to be right for the words, and the only people doing that in the modern age are the really good rappers,’ she continued. ‘They’re not using melody, but they use rhythm in the same way, finding a way of delivering the language that gives it force. That’s what I miss; that thoughtful marriage of the meaning of the words and they way the music expresses them.’
It seemed that the best songs, or at least the ones that become standards, are all about ease of delivery. ‘The consummate songwriters, like Bacharach and David, Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin, wrote songs that anyone could sing,’ Mara explained. ‘David Bowie’s songs haven’t become standards, brilliant though they are, because they’re designed around his own voice and they’re hard to interpret. I have the feeling that I write songs for my own voice, too. But anyone can sing “Every Time I Say Goodbye” because it’s just there.’
We had eaten our porridge and drunk our tea. Now seemed as good a time as any to foist ‘Until Daylight’ on her. I warned her that my singing might leave something to be desired; she bade me continue nonetheless. So I launched into the lilting tune. I finished it with a two-chord vamp and a strum.
‘It sounds like you’re going to have your wicked way with someone in a wood,’ she said.
‘Not in a wood, in a cottage!’ I snapped, irritated that she had not instantly grasped the meaning of the words. ‘It’s a song from a woman’s point of view. She’s in the cottage boiling the rice, frying the fish, chopping the wood . . .’
‘I’m glad she’s frying the fish and chopping the wood,’ said Mara. ‘No gender stereotypes in this little cottage . . . What can I say?’ She frowned. ‘No, really, what can I say?’
As if she had just pulled out a chocolate in a jar full of empty wrappers, her face lit up. ‘That’s it – there’s something casual about it. It goes up and down, rather like a Bob Dylan song, and some people could see that as quite charming.’ Then she frowned. ‘But the melody isn’t well defined and the chorus bears no relation to the verse. You have this pleasant little tune going on and then this horrible chorus comes in out of nowhere and completely ruins the feeling.’
‘But I wanted to have some sort of contrast,’ I said, beginning to realise that, with this criticism mirroring what Lawrence had said, trying to defend the chorus was looking like a lost cause.
‘Yes, but there either has to be a good segue or the two sections have to have a relationship with each other. There are certain keys that make sense against one another and others that don’t. This falls into the latter. Why don’t you explain the song to me a little more and we’ll see if we can work it out.’
‘OK. She’s being flirtatious, and they’re having a nice cosy time in this cottage, and the suggestion is that they will sleep together. She’s saying, “How about it?” There is a hint of regret because they’re doing something they probably shouldn’t, but none of that will matter until daylight.’
‘Right. That’s really important in terms of emphasis. The first line is “Close the door, what do you say”. So, to get the message across, you want to put the emphasis on “say”.’
Mara said lyrics should be sung as they’re spoken because inappropriate emphasis means that the song has no conviction. For this reason a songwriter must not cram too many words in, as it will make it impossible for a singer to get them across naturally. She said that I had a lot of words in ‘Until Daylight’.
Mara agreed to sing it the whole way through anyway, and she did have a great voice. It seemed odd to have this rather unprofessional little song carried by a professional singer. I liked the way NJ sang it, but she was from my world and on my level, and, of course, she was my wife. When Mara sang ‘Until Daylight’, it didn’t seem like mine any more. Which, come to think of it, was probably a good thing.
‘Maybe it’s not so bad after all,’ she said, as we finished another round of the song. ‘What I find fascinating is that you are not a singer – in fact, your voice is terrible – yet you did have the vague shape of a melody there and you knew what you wanted the singer to do. How can you not be able to sing something, and yet know where the melody should go?’
‘I didn’t think I did know where the melody should go.’
‘But you obviously do, otherwise the song couldn’t exist,’ she said, looking perplexed. ‘A song without a melody is not a song. It’s very strange . . . I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has a worse voice than you who has even attempted to write a song. You’re trying to run before you can crawl and that’s why your songs are coming out in strange ways. Most people spend years practising “Frere Jacques” on their guitars before they get to the stage of coming up with their own material.’
‘I haven’t got that much time left. I might be dead before I get to write my one great song.’
‘We all might be dead before we do that, mightn’t we?’ she replied. ‘I don’t think this is your one great song. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to go.’
Three hours had passed and all we had come up with was a slightly better way to sing the words. Mara seemed to think that this was good going. ‘Any piece of music that’s good always takes ages to get right,’ she said. ‘You really to need patience if you’re going to do this.’
And with that she began to prepare for a video shoot she was doing that afternoon. As she combed her black hair, she told me about her latest plan: to steal the song structure of the barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales Of Hoffman and play it in a country style on her ukulele. ‘I might be nicking the whole thing,’ she said, ‘but it will be unrecognisable.’
Originality is an elastic concept. When I first picked up the guitar, many of the guitarists I spoke to claimed to have no knowledge of the rules of music, to be totally self-taught, to have never had a guitar lesson, and generally to have reinvented the wheel. But they knew which chords worked well together, based on laws of music that even humanity did not write.
‘My ex-husband wouldn’t listen to anything for months on end when he was recording an album for fear that he might be inadvertently influenced by what he heard,’ said Mara, as she collected keys, travelcard and make-up and prepared to leave the flat. ‘That confused me. How do you write if you’re not surrounded by noise and sounds and music? Where does it come from? You are taught by what you listen to.’
We managed to get out of the door. Mara agreed to meet up again, and, before we went our separate ways, she asked me what I wanted for my song: to write a hit, or to write a song similar to the ones I like.
‘To write a song similar to the ones I like,’ I replied.
‘Then you will be taught by what you listen to just as much as you will be by studying songwriting. That’s my last piece of advice for the day: listen carefully to the music you love.’
Before going to bed that night, I wondered if anyone had ever written an entirely original song, or if, indeed, one existed. Led Zeppelin have been criticised for taking old blues songs and changing a word or two to claim them as their own, as have The Rolling Stones, but those bands created a unique sound and style even if their roots are derivative. And who knows where Muddy Waters or Mississippi Fred McDowell copped their tunes?
Thoughts of Led Zep and the Stones led me, just before sleep took over, to the great songwriting partnerships: Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Page and Plant. It was time to look up an old friend who had been lying low for the past few months. But should it be Hodgkinson and Doyle, or Doyle and Hodgkinson?