{"id":511,"date":"2011-05-11T05:17:57","date_gmt":"2011-05-11T10:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=511"},"modified":"2015-12-16T14:07:09","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T14:07:09","slug":"martin-newell-interview-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/05\/11\/martin-newell-interview-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Newell Interview, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill Kopp:<\/span><\/strong> Are there any real drums on English Electric<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin Newell:<\/strong> Bits and pieces, yes. You know, I never spilled the beans about what happened on The Greatest Living Englishman<\/em>. I\u2019ve never told anybody: there were some real drums on it, but mostly there weren\u2019t. Andy Partridge<\/strong> produced it, and he knew how to sort of blur the edges of things. You\u2019d be surprised at what was real drums on there and what wasn\u2019t. There were some real drums on there, but very little.<\/p>\n

\"\"When we had the original Cleaners From Venus — the tape-era Cleaners \u2013 sometimes we had real drums. MGMT<\/strong> just covered one of my tracks, \u201cOnly a Shadow\u201d; [the original version of] that one had real drums on it. I wrote the tune around the drums.<\/p>\n

Lol, the drummer, had sort of fallen in love with this girl in Bath. He moved down to Bath, and he came back for a weekend to collect some books or something. Or maybe to change his shirt. So I sort of pinned him down and said, \u201cCan I have a day with you in the kitchen?\u201d\u2019 So we set up a drum kit with three mics, and I recorded him doing five beats. And then I wrote myself around them. So Lol really should get a writing credit on that.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> When you go out to the shed, do you have the song\u2019s whole arrangement in your head, or does it unfold as you record?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> I have not a clue what\u2019s going to happen, usually. I come from an old-fashioned approach. An orthodox thing about me is that I believe a song should sound like a song, even when it has only one voice and one instrument. Whether it be a piano or guitar or mandolin, you should be able to take that tune to a pub and play it. You should be able to play it to three people or whatever, and have them say, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s good.\u201d If you can honestly take the songs out that way, then you can record it.<\/p>\n

The one area where I am a bit fussy is in how I write the song. And I like the idea where we\u2019re finishing it, and we don\u2019t get the fade quite right, and I can\u2019t be bothered to do the mix again. So I just say, \u201cAw, fuck it. Just leave it like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> With a few exceptions, you’ve operated totally outside what people call the music industry for most of your entire career. <\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> Yes, I have. And it\u2019s made me very poor. I think it was Groucho Marx<\/strong> who said, \u201cI\u2019ve worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Yet these new records are available on Kool Kat. So, what changed: the industry or you?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> Ray Gianchetti<\/strong>\u2019s a really good guy. But I\u2019ve dealt with record companies a lot. It\u2019s just that now, my instincts tell me who to deal with. I still deal with mavericks. Some guys in Brooklyn called Fixed Identity have released five hundred copies of one of my old records on vinyl. And then Burger Records over in Los Angeles have just released things of mine on cassette. They\u2019re reproduced two hundred fifty copies each of three seminal Cleaners From Venus tapes. In their original covers. They just remastered them slightly and put them out on cassette. Because all the kids are driving secondhand cars.<\/p>\n

Of those three labels that I\u2019m dealing with in America, Kool Kat are the most efficient. I gather that Ray is closer to my age. It\u2019s a proper record company, but with no music industry bullshit. He must have been \u2018round the block a couple of times. Like me. I\u2019m from Essex, which is near London. People in London don\u2019t quite think of us as hicks, but they think \u201cDon\u2019t fuck with them.\u201d So when I found out Ray was from New Jersey, I thought, \u201cWell, I can probably work with him!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"BK:<\/span><\/strong> You seem to possess a bottomless well of melody. In a perfect world “Call the Wrecking Crew” would be a huge hit. What would you do if, suddenly, your musical career sort of “took off” in a conventional way? I mean, if one of the majors came calling about re-releasing English Electric<\/em> and giving it a big marketing push, would you send them packing?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> At my tender age, what I would do is say, \u201cLook: You can have it as it is. Go out and sell it. And I will do you some interviews, and I will talk to people. But I am not going to jump through hoops for you. I don\u2019t want an advance; what I want is a big royalty.\u201d So, no advances; they pay me for what they sell. If they don\u2019t sell any, they don\u2019t have to give me any money.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t understand when I don\u2019t light up like a pinball machine when they offer an advance. I can\u2019t be bought like that. But I do<\/em> want money.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> You’re well known in the <\/span>UK<\/span> as a poet. Is there a difference in the manner in which you approach song lyrics as opposed to the words to a poem? And do you ever start something out as one and have it end up as the other?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> I\u2019ve pretty much given seminars on this. I think of poetry and lyrics as being related, but I think of them as being cousins that are allowed to marry. They\u2019re most certainly not brother and sister. When I write a song, I think, \u201cI mustn\u2019t approach this like a poem.\u201d It\u2019s got to be more spontaneous. There are just certain technical things: what word do I use at the end, the cadence of the thing. It\u2019s important that when you\u2019ve got a nice uppy, cheerful tune that the lyrics follow that.<\/p>\n

\"\"BK:<\/span><\/strong> Do you ever start out writing a poem and then discover that it\u2019s a song, or vice versa?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> No. Because when I\u2019m writing a song, I nearly always \u2013 in about 99.98% of cases \u2013 will write the words to the music. The music will have come first. When I have a tune, the first thing I will ask is, \u201cWhat season are we in? What is the mood of this? Is it angry, or is it about lost love?\u201d<\/p>\n

Or sometimes a title will suggest itself to me. There\u2019s a song on English Electric<\/em> which I really like called \u201cAll the Lights in This House.\u201d That one I wrote for my daughter. Because she was kind of coming in late, and things like that. And I just wanted her home. And at the same time I saw a film called Geisha<\/em>. And in the film there was a line about the Geisha having done really well: \u201cEvery light in this town was burning for you tonight,\u201d or something like that. So that was a real song about a real person. But I haven\u2019t written any other songs about her.<\/p>\n

The Rolling Stones<\/strong>-y one you mentioned earlier, \u201cCall the Wrecking Crew,\u201d that\u2019s [a story] about twenty years ago. I had had to move in with a friend whose girlfriend had left. I moved in, and the two of us were very bad for each other, really: \u201cWhat should we do: cook dinner or go out for a drink?\u201d I remember him knocking about to get the key in the fucking door, and things like that. One window pane got broken three times because he\u2019d have to punch it out to get back into his own house. He couldn\u2019t find the keys, though usually they were in his pocket.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Your music has what I’d call a timeless quality. What do you listen to for pleasure?<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin:<\/strong> Everything! Well, no, not everything. What have I got on at the moment\u2026this bloke called Jake Thackray<\/strong>. A lot of French stuff. High Llamas<\/strong>. Kimberley Rew<\/strong>; he\u2019s a friend of mine.<\/p>\n

continued<\/a>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on \"\" Twitter<\/a> and get notified
\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… Bill Kopp: Are there any real drums on English Electric? Martin Newell: Bits and pieces, yes. You know, I never spilled the beans about what happened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1417],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","tag-martin-newell","cat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9933,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/9933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}