them off the shelf and you're, okay, let’s try that trick, let me pretend I'm
Bob Dylan, you know, for this bit and pretend I'm Elvis or whatever, you
know and it often breaks the deadlock, just leads you into a good place.
Every time we come back to the album we kind of notice some little
detail we missed, like a little backing vocal idea or a little riff, a little
hook or some kind of clever orchestration, how do you go about
composing all those additional little parts?
Well, they just happen, you know, as you're making the record. You’ve
done the song and you put down the basic thing, but then if you want to
have something like an orchestration or you want to produce it a bit more,
then you can add things. Basically, just sitting around with Greg, I would
say, ‘you know what I think might be great with this piano, a harpsichord,’
and mix that in with the sound and we’ll get like a hybrid, it’s just good fun
to do that, instead of just putting a piano sound down. That’s okay, but it’s
kind of nice to sort of start messing with the tonality of it, you get a sound
you like, you go, ‘oh yeah, that’s better’ and that’s what we did.
Back in Brazil is a good example of that, isn’t it, you know, you’ve got
that samba style Wurlitzer, electric piano type thing and you’ve got the
electronic beeps kind of going on as well…
Yeah, well, that was always a hard one to crack because I'd written it on a
day off in Brazil, when I just happened to be on my own. Nancy had gone
to New York for something, so I happened to be just there on my own. I'd
done everything I wanted to do, I'd had a breakfast, I'd been to the gym,
so now I was just lounging around and there was a little piano in the, little
Wurlitzer in the suite I was staying in, so I started playing with that and
so I knew the basic thing, so I wrote the song there in Sao Paulo. Then we
came to record it and we couldn’t kind of get it right, we tried quite a few
things on the rhythms to get the feel and in the end, we got the one that’s
on the record and we were pleased with it. Greg put that sort of, [makes
beeping sound], little sort of thing and we put some percussion on it and
suddenly it just fell into place.
that and then Townsend got into it with Quadrophenia and I've always
enjoyed it, it’s a nice little thing. I did it in Live and Let Die, it’s just to
put these little sections in and go out of them into something else, makes
it a bit more epic, like you say. I'd written, Despite Repeated Warnings,
I'd seen that in a newspaper in Japan and I was looking at it and it said,
‘despite repeated warnings, so and so happened.’ I thought, yeah, that’s my
title, you know, so that was it, I did it and it became one of those episodic
epics, - hey, that’s a good title. It’s a bit hard to say when you’ve had a few.
[Laughter]. It’s a tongue twister, episodic epics, yeah.
Come On To Me, was another one that held up great with the older stuff
at the Abbey Road gig, it’s another kind of spicy lyric, that one, isn’t it?
Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, we all have these thoughts and for me, I often
remember, occasions and places where it was, and to me, that’s straight
out of the sixties. Some of the parties in the sixties, where you'd see a
beautiful girl and she'd just give you a sort of look and you’d go, ‘oh, I'm
on, I'm on or whatever,’ you know, and we all know about that! So it just
seemed like a good subject for a song and then once I got the idea - I saw
you flash a smile, seemed to me to say you wanted so much more than
casual conversation - and I was off. That was sort of how it happened in
the sixties at the parties, it’s just an imaginary thing and I write a lot of
those, like, little mini novels or little short stories based on something I've
seen or thought or done.
I remember George Harrison saying to me, ‘why do you do that, how do
you do that?’ because George’s songs, a lot of people’s songs are kind of
autobiographical. It’s just a way of writing that I kind of like. You know, in
this very room, I got taught by this teacher, Alan Durband, he was called
Dusty Durband and he turned me on to English Literature, so I kind of
read a little bit more than I had to. I got really interested in it and still am.
I like these little short story things, so I quite like it when I get into telling
the story about a girl in Brazil and how she's got a man and how he breaks
the date, because he's got to be working late. I just like these little things,
you know, and I do that.
We've always loved the way you use different movements in songs
though, if you go back to Band on the Run or Uncle Albert or
something, the way those sections fit together works so well. To listen to all of Sodajerker's conversation with Paul McCartney
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Yeah, it’s something I've kind of enjoyed doing, it’s something people
started doing in the sixties. There was teenager opera, it was like a sixties
thing where they start to have little segments, so I think a few of us got into Tickets are still on sale for his Echo Arena gig on 12th December 2018.
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