‘PICASSO’S LAST WORDS’ STARTED AS A DARE. I’D MET Dustin Hoffman because he was filming Papillon in Jamaica, and we’d gone round to his house in Montego Bay.

He said to me, ‘Can you write a song about anything?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe.’ He said, ‘Just a minute,’ and he ran upstairs and came back down with a Time magazine article about the death of Picasso.

He then said, ‘See what Picasso’s last words were?’ The article reported that when Picasso died in April 1973, there were friends with him and his last words to his friends were, ‘Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink any more.’

Dustin asked, ‘Could you write a song about that?’ I didn’t know, but I had my guitar with me, so I hit a chord and started singing a melody to those words, and he was flabbergasted. He said to his then wife Anne, ‘Come here! Listen to this! I just gave Paul this, and he’s already got the song.’ The whole thought here was just the challenge of doing it for Dustin, so I was just concentrating on the words he’d stuck in front of me. And I think what was nice is that he’d obviously seen those words as melodic himself. He’s an actor, so he understands the rhythm of words, and I think when he read the quote, he might have thought, ‘This flows beautifully.’ It was a pleasure to do it, just to show off a little bit. I am lucky that it’s something that comes naturally to me.

I think the rhythm of the words itself influences how the melody might turn out. You want to get something that rolls along naturally and that’s interesting at the same time, but that also fits with the music you’re hearing. Sometimes you have to alter a word because it just doesn’t quite work with the metre, so you’ll look for something that says more or less the same thing but with an alternate word. Maybe now it’s a two-syllable word instead of the one-syllable word that didn’t work, or the other way round. It’s very important that the rhythm sounds natural. When it doesn’t, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

You really don’t think of these specific things when you’re forming the words, it’s not so self-conscious, but when Dustin dared me, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ve got to set it up’: ‘The grand old painter died last night / His paintings on the wall / Before he went, he bade us well / And said goodnight to us all’. Then it strays from the point, which is what a lot of my songs do, for who will ever know what Picasso did at three in the morning, but the lines sounded good: ‘Three o’clock in the morning / I’m getting ready for bed / It came without a warning / But I’ll be waiting for you, baby / I’ll be waiting for you there’. And then I could use his words: ‘Drink to me’.

In normal speech, which is presumably what Picasso was doing, it’s just something ordinary that was said earnestly: ‘Drink to me!’ But once it’s set down in a magazine, it’s halfway to becoming a poem, and someone like Dustin will read it and think, ‘Picasso’s last words. That’s a great quote.’ And I agreed. I’m always pleased when things happen like that.