IF MY YOUNGER BROTHER MIKE OR I WERE PROCRASTINATING with some homework or a job, or if there were some horseshit in the street he wanted us to pick up – and it’s hard to imagine now, but there still were horses on the street when I was a kid – my dad would hand us a bucket and a shovel and say, ‘Go and collect it.’

He was right; it was a very wise thing to do. He would use the manure in the garden, and it made the flowers grow really well. He loved gardening, and he used to grow flowers like dahlias, snapdragons, and lavender. But it was very embarrassing for two young kids, having to pick up the shit. We’d say, ‘Dad, no; the ignominy of it!’ If we tried to put things off or say, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ he’d say, ‘No, do it now. D-I-N: do it now.’ My kids all know the expression. I’ve told them my dad said it: ‘Don’t put it off. D-I-N.’ Mind you, I always thought ‘D-I-N’ was a perfect name for a record label. Din. The noise.

‘Do it now, do it now / While the vision is clear / Do it now / While the feeling is here’. That’s the message my dad was giving us, and it was as true then, when we were kids, as it is today. I think it puts the finger on it exactly: you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through, so the next day you don’t have to think, ‘Was that the right thing to do?’ You’ve shown your cards, you’ve spilled your guts onto the page and, like it or not, there it is. I am all for that way of working. When we first started writing songs, we didn’t have the luxury of putting it off till tomorrow. Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.

With dad Jim and brother Mike. Liverpool, early 1960s

It’s true in other creative endeavours too. I did a lot of painting in the nineties, and nearly always I would do them in one sitting, so it would be three or four hours at the easel making that painting, because I found that to come back to it was not fun; it was like a problem to solve: ‘What was that mood I was in? What was that vision I was having? What was that feeling that got me this far?’ Whereas when doing it just in one go, you’ve solved enough of the problems and you’ve answered enough of the questions and, lo and behold, there’s your painting, or there’s your song. You can mess with it later if you want to, but you don’t have to come back to it and think, ‘Oh, what was that vision I had for this?’ ‘Do it now while the vision’s clear’ is a good piece of advice.

A friend of mine who’s a British painter was looking at my paintings, and he said to me, ‘Well, that painting style is called alla prima, which translates as “at the first time”.’ When it’s applied to painting, I think it means ‘in one session’. You don’t endlessly paint over it, like a lot of great painters do, which for me would have removed the fun, and I was painting for fun, I was painting to have joy. I’ve read about the lives of painters, and a lot of it sure ain’t fun. They’re bloody driving themselves crazy. I read a biography of Willem de Kooning recently and, with at least one of his pictures, he was at it all year. It turned out very well, of course, but it was just endless, endless questions. He was getting drunk, he was going crazy, he was leaving his women, he was just having a crazy life to get this one painting right. That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me, and I’ll always hear my father, maybe no longer yelling, but whispering in my ear to get on with it: ‘Do it now.’