WHEN I WROTE BLACKBIRD SINGING WITH ADRIAN Mitchell, I was doing a little tour with him, and I’d said, ‘Why don’t we resurrect that sixties thing where we’ll play a backing track and you recite a poem?’ He liked that idea, so we did it.

Adrian was my go-to poet, just because I knew him so well, so I asked him various things about poetry. Around that time I think I was trying to write something that was moving more towards poetry. I’m always trying to stretch myself, trying to push my boundaries a little bit, and to educate myself and not get stuck in a rut. If I’ve just written something very straightforward, like ‘It’s so sweet, oh baby’, then it’s kind of nice not to do another one of those immediately. I was in a poetical frame of mind.

‘Lightning hits the house of wax’ – I remember saying these words to Adrian and being quite proud of the phrase. The phrase ‘house of wax’ has various references. It could be either a Madame Tussauds or a place where they make records – wax being records, as in ‘waxing a disc’. I suppose the best-known ‘house of wax’ is the one in the 1953 horror movie by that name, which stars Vincent Price and is as hair-raising as a film can be. I didn’t have a specific house of wax in mind, and I can’t imagine that I was inspired by the gruesome Price murderer – that’s just not my thing – but I did like the idea of a house of wax.

As I read it now from a distance, I can see that it’s a very fiery first verse. I’m not sure I was consciously trying to go, ‘Wow, fire!’ You get on a train of thought, and things just come in without you noticing. The poets are about ‘To set alight the incomplete / Remainders of the future’. I think that’s just a way of saying ‘to clarify things’.

Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. California, 13 October 2016

‘Hidden in the yard / Underneath the wall / Buried deep below a thousand layers / Lay the answer to it all’. I just enlarged upon the image of women, screaming, running around, ‘Like wild demented horses’. The song itself gets quite dramatic. I had this little idea that the ‘remainders of the future’ were sort of buried somewhere in the yard, just like a hidden treasure. Meaning that we don’t know the answer to these incomplete remainders, we don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, here we are in the midst of the COVID crisis and we really don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve seen children completely at ease with masks, so this generation of kids is just going to think, ‘Oh yeah, everyone wears masks, don’t they?’

We had lightning, so we’re going to have thunder, and the thunder drowns the trumpets’ blast. It’s kind of like a film; there’s a sort of heraldic score going on and the thunder’s blasting it out, so it’s like a soundtrack to a film. I wrote this on a piano, so I didn’t build it so much while I was writing it, but more when I was recording it. I would think, ‘Okay, it should get a bit more dramatic here; the accompaniments should be a bit more dramatic and we should start to build it that way.’ We’ve played it live, but we had to have a large whisky and slap ourselves round the back of our heads to remember it. It’s moody. I like to play it, the band likes to play it, and some people in the audience like to hear it played.

In general, though, songs like this one don’t hang about in your repertoire, because you realise they’re the ones where people are going for a beer, and you think, ‘Well, let me just pull ’em back with “Lady Madonna”.’ I saw Prince and was quite unhappy that he didn’t do ‘Purple Rain’, but he was probably pissed to the eyeballs with ‘Purple Rain’. It’s a big decision you have to make as a performing artist – whether to just go with your own whims: ‘Okay, lads, tonight we’re just going acoustic, and we’re gonna do all these songs no one’s ever heard of.’ When you’re in front of fifty thousand Brazilians, you don’t get the feeling that that’d be the best thing to do. You think, ‘Well, I tell you what; let’s just do a couple of hits.’ So that’s what I tend to do, but if we’re in a little club situation we can pull out the lesser-known things and watch songs like ‘House of Wax’ come to life again.

These days we still do little venues, on purpose, if we’re getting ready for a tour or we’re between things. A couple of years ago we did Coachella; it’s a two-weekend festival in the California desert. You play on the Saturday, and then there’s a week off and you play the following Saturday. We wanted to keep up to speed, so we booked a little place called Pappy & Harriet’s, which is in the Joshua Tree area, near where Coachella is held, so our equipment was nearby. It was just a little, kind of honky-tonk club, held three hundred people, and it was good fun. It wasn’t a billed show. We just told people on the day.

We brought David Hockney along. I told him, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go to this place; you might enjoy this, David.’ And he brought his iPad and sketched a bit. He’s only eighty-three.