Category: music

Feel

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I proudly unveil a new Eleventh Hour track.  This song is a slight departure in the way it is skewed a tad towards the lord of the dance – but give it a listen… it has all the hallmarks of the Eleventh Hour.  This tune punishes.  Pure, unadulterated energy – a necessary contrast on an album that is shaping up to be chocker block full of hits!

Was taken out by my auntie and uncle today.  Had one of the best meals of my life!  Seriously impressive!

Great food.  Then came home to finish the mix of Feel.  It has been a good day.  The Eleventh Hour album is now 9 tracks long.  I have it playing as I type this and it sounds like a greatest hits collection!  Ha ha!  I know – I’m full of it!  Well… literally actually.  Completely bloated.  I forgot to take a picture of the starter but it was a homemade fish cake with Hollandaise sauce.  Really scrumptious.

I’m really accomplishing things this year.  2010 will be a year that sticks in my head.  I can for various reasons remember likewise 1995, 1997, 1998.  This year will be the year that I nearly completed an album start to finish.  Also, not just any album… but an album that is wrapping up a love of music and delivering it to anyone who wants to listen with a hug and a kiss.  I am flowing, embracing the moment, producing a stream of music.  It has helped greatly that Bill has taken some of the weight off my shoulders lyrically, but I am also expressing my feelings through the music.  There is joy in some of these tunes.  And gold in them there hills!

An accumulation of all that I have heard and all I have experienced.  There has been no need to jump on any bandwagon or pay any attention to the current fad.  I am just giving you my heart and my soul (knowing wink to any Mitchell and Webb fans out there!).  This music is proving to be so original.  I have, in my own humble opinion produced a few classic tunes over the years.  I would place Out of the Low Times and Purple Planet Place right up there.  My lyrics to an old song called Feeling New also bring a tear to my eye when I hear them.  But this new collection of songs – this new Eleventh Hour album is just something else.  It is exciting.  It rises above the mire.  There’s no Oasis clone here.  No-one’s trying to be the next Kaiser Chiefs or Arctic Monkeys.  There’s no Dubstep going on.  These songs have no interest in whether Cher or One Direction win X-Factor.  These songs stand alone.  I give them my total and utter respect.  The best music of my career.  And I have in Bill perhaps the best lyricist in the world.  Now, as I’ve said before… I believe that when I want to, I can write a lyric as good as anyone – but with Bill on board I don’t have to.  I can put emotion into the music.  Emotion is something that can be lost in the modern era.  Seriously.  The everyman out there probably doesn’t realise how soulless music production has become.  We’re not talking about the Beatles recording a whole album in a day anymore.  Or Led Zeppelin knocking their debut off in 30 hours.  Modern music production is a machine.  In fact, while you’re reading the next paragraph stick on Pink Floyd‘s Wish You Were Here.

Okay, (hopefully Welcome to the Machine is now playing in the background) modern music production is a machine.    Watch old documentaries on Abbey Road with the Beatles messing around, or Jimi Hendrix recording anything.  Beautiful era.  I didn’t live through it… but like many of my generation we have grown up listening to a lot of Beatles and Stones.  Those documentaries are what we got into music for.  Well… let me tell you… it’s all gone.  We live in the Pro-tools/Logic age.  For those of you who don’t understand I can put it simply:  Music is now made just as you would type a Word document.  Music is recorded into a computer and displayed on the screen.  You can then cut and paste to your heart’s content as quickly and easily as a student cheating with his essay!  This whole process has made music as sharp as glass.  You can cut yourself on the cleanness, the precision.  But the side-effect is that it is a little too tidy.  Like a really annoying neighbour’s front lawn!

Well… I have produced a collection of songs in my little studio that I feel knocks aside this assessment of modern music production.  I have my own style.  I reckon I can call myself a “Music Producer” now.  My songs have warmth, vitality and intensity.    I’m perfecting the wall of sound that I have been building for years.  Unlike me today, my wall of sound is not a bloated beast.  It is full, yet nimble.  And so endeth my rant about whatever I’ve been ranting about.  I wish you all a full, yet nimble week!

on the fiddle

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I was listening to Wogan on Radio 2 this morning.  Okay… my girlfriend was listening to it, I was hovering nearby making toast.  But anyway, Seth Lakeman was being interviewed.  He also performed a few of his songs – including another spectacular rendition of Kitty Jay.  Well, it took me back to the times we played together, and then to the songs I was writing around that time.  This is a site that is documenting the creation of my new album. In fact it is currently documenting the creation of two albums.  I find it interesting to reflect on the intervening years.  What has changed in my approach to crafting a song?

In those heady days of the early noughties I felt I had the world in the palm of my hands.  I wanted to create lush soundscapes, beautiful walls of sparkle.  I wanted to take your breath away.  I wrote from the heart, but I did write the lyrics in a slightly cryptic manner – I wanted to take you with me, but I wanted you to have to hear, to listen, to think.

So, what’s changed?  What are my songs about today?  Hmmmm.  Well, I want to create lush walls of sound. I want to take your breath away.  I write from the heart.  But today, I don’t so strongly feel the need to hide behind the lyrics.  I am who I am.  I say what I say.  I feel my music has come on in leaps and bounds.  I am producing music that surprises me.  Music that can hold its own with anything out there.  But the most important thing is that the music ebbs and flows.

I have been working on the latest Eleventh Hour song today.  Bill and I have a winning formula.  I tend to write the music and Bill tends to write the words (with a little overlap here and there).  When it comes to this album the ability to concentrate on the music has been a revelation.  I have produced a collection of songs that I feel are up there with the best.  I have been able to create emotions and stories with sound.  And I have been so lucky to have Bill as the other half of The Eleventh Hour.  He is the best lyricist I have worked with bar none.  Okay, he’s the only lyricist I’ve worked with ’cause I’ve always written the words myself before – but I mean that I read his lyrics and I just think “wow”.   Seriously good stuff.  He’s up there with the best of them!  So, I listened to our ‘album so far’ through today and it just blew me away.  My music and his words are the perfect fit.  The album flowed by and in a split second it was gone.  Half an hour of the most intriguing, intricate, exciting music I’ve heard in a long time.  And it’s mine!!! Ha ha.

So, as I was saying… I was working on the latest song today.  I’ve pretty much mixed it.  It has a beautiful ending.  A real “heart fluttering” ending.  An ending which probably places the song at the end of the album.  The final track.  I was mixing the song, mixing in Bill’s contribution of multiple layers of chimes and whooshing sounds… and the song became something else.  Not just a song that we’ve created… from nothing.  No.  The song became its own entity – right before my ears.  A truly gorgeous massage of sound, swirling, rising, falling and dying.  Music has to die.  The perfect end to what is shaping up to be my perfect album.

Anyway… I buttered the toast, Seth played Kitty Jay, and I raised a cup of tea to him.  We have both come a long way in those years.  A life in music is one of trials and tribulations.  Of great ups and depressing downs.  But one thing always remains a constant.  Music is you. You are your music.  Everything life throws at you becomes your music.  There is no spoon.  But there is always a guitar.  People may ask what ‘inspires’ you to write a song.  But that isn’t the right question.  The question should be “to what extent does the song write you?”.  It’s a loop.  Chicken and egg.  All the clichés.  My life is laid bare via music.  The new song will be posted soon.  Don’t you guys let me down.

writing a song is easy

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The way I write a song is similar to a collage.  Sound upon sound.  Textures.  I come up with an idea and I try to make the idea come to life.  But it doesn’t always go to plan.  That’s just the way it is.  For my latest song I wanted to get a raw, stripped back sound.  Just a guitar and a voice.   So I plugged the Telecaster into the Orange amplifier.  Two simple chords – G and C if you’re interested.  And then a voice.  Job done…

Or not.  The Telecaster sounded a little weedy and instead I had to resort to my ol’ faithful – the acoustic guitar.  I then found that if I stuck with the acoustic for the bed of the song, I could bring in the Telecaster in the latter half as a duvet.  So, I’ve barely started and I’ve got 4 tracks of guitar.  I tend to double track guitars, panning one to the left and one to the right.  Panning – the positioning of a sound in relation to the listener –  is a science in itself. I may talk about it at length one day for any budding musicians out there.  Panning is a fundamental and often misused weapon in the producer’s arsenal.  Panning can pull an element of sound ‘in’ and ‘out’ of a mix. 

So I now have a sketch of the song with just guitars – acoustics coming at you from the left and right, electrics coming at you from the left and right.  It’s quite a long song and I enjoy ‘kicking in’ in the latter parts of a song.  The way I achieve this in this latest song is to leave the song pretty naked for three minutes or so… and then to kick in with bass and drums together.  The intention is to take the listener by surprise.  Okay, the surprise is ruined if you write a description of the song on the internet before you even let anyone hear it… but this is a site that exists to describe what it means to be a songwriter.  We have tools.  It can take years to learn these tricks of the trade.  To be honest, even as a young band you’re likely using a lot of techniques without actually knowing it.  You’re picking up little tricks from listening to your favourite bands.  It could be Nirvana, it could be Jay-Z.  The point is that even a novice knows the basics – the fundamental rules.  Then you spend a few years understanding the rules… until eventually you learn to break those rules.  And then if you’re lucky you come to the realisation that rules are there for a reason.  Then you finally exist in a space where you don’t know anything anymore.  Totally perplexed, you write the greatest songs of your career… because you are writing from within yourself, and nothing else matters.

So I have guitars, bass and drums.  My style is to then lay on a whole symphony orchestra.  I don’t HAVE to do this.  But this is a sound that turns me on.  It’s a set of rules that I have created.  I know what I’m doing.  The orchestra is an important colour in my sound palette.  I like epicness.  I strive to achieve epicness.  I am taking part in a battle against the planets to produce the ‘most epic song’.  I’ll let you know when I think I’ve created that song.  Be warned… the day may never come.

Ah… then my friends, come the lyrics.  The most important part of a song?  Well, they can be.  They certainly can be.  But they can also be incidental to the ‘sound’ of the song as a whole.  I’ve lost count of the number of songs where I’ve misheard and then mis-sung the words (I’m pointing at you – Beatles songs!!!).  It never really mattered.  Lyrics often mean the world to the songwriter and very little to the casual listener.  The devout fan however… well, perhaps that’s a different story.

Stay tuned to hear the finished song.  I can’t let you know too much more at this point.  I’m not sure which direction it will take during the final lap.  It should just run round the track and straight across the finishing line – but my songs do have a habit of turning 90 degrees, heading out of the stadium and to the nearest hot-dog stand where they hang about discussing the latest shenanigans on the Apprentice.

Try and Get Some Sleep

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Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmm //drum roll!!!

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for!  The latest The Eleventh Hour song.

The song is called Try and Get Some Sleep, which is pretty apt given the work it’s taken to get this song on a slab of vinyl.  //violins.  We are excited about this song, and we are excited by this song.  I have to set the scene.  I’m Keith Richards or Joe Perry or Slash or (insert swaggering ’60s/’70s influenced guitar player) – hammering out a solid guitar riff.  I’m thinking open air stadium.  I’m slamming those chords, the wind blows… it’s a beautiful summer evening, there’s a breeze.  The sun is about to set.  Bill is clutching the mike stand.  Not because if he lets go he’ll fall… but in the kind of way all singers do when they want to be a bit ‘Mr MoJo RIsIn’.  The crowd have already been lapping up the ‘hits’ – a girl removed her shirt to Escape Plan… but this is the one they’re all REALLY waiting for.

So… I’m slamming out that 4 on the beat riff.  The drummer is twirling his sticks waiting for the point where he enters the song with a wham, bang and a thankyou.  Then I remember that Bill needs the tambourine.  With a quick flick of my foot (I’m still playing that riff remember), I hurl that tambourine through the air and Bill catches it like a pro.  He’s obviously into baseball – I’m more a cricket man therefore I’m more into the afternoon tea!  The song KICKS IN!!!

The sea of people go wild.  And because they’re The Eleventh Hour fans it’s a very elegant ‘wild’.

This is a song that, for me, evokes the summer.  If you’re listening to it now, then may it brighten your winter.  But roll on next summer and this one will be roaring!!!

2010 (what do I get?)

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A glance at my recent accomplishments shows two albums on their way to completion.  All Monsters and Dust is so very nearly there.  My collaboration with Bill Ryan that is The Eleventh Hour is in touching distance of the halfway point.

It is so easy to overlook your achievements.  This is especially easy in the music business, and believe me, I am a specialist in overlooking my achievements.  But a scan through the songs I have posted in 2010 so far reveals many highlights.  To be fair, in songwriting terms, probably high points of my whole career.  And that is a great thing for me to be able to say – it certainly means I haven’t reached the top of the hill yet!  😉

Reconstruct a Memory is a smart song.  I think it was described perfectly by one commentator as being ‘angular’.  I like that.  In a world where we are striving to produce ‘phat music’, I like that I have given you the opposite.  I like that it is a song that pushes a few things forward… gives you a few things to think about, musically speaking.

Dorian Gray is a song that took a long time to complete.  But complete it I did.  The song actually has roots stretching back to the early 2000s, but it was a song that never really had a purpose.  It did however have a soaring, roaring synth riff.  I knew that I could make that tune into a special song.  Perhaps not special for you, the audience… but special to me.  A song that has been with me through thick and thin – forever remaining incomplete, untarnished, forever young!  Then the eureka moment!  The moment I named the album All Monsters and Dust… along with the theme of staying forever young, I realised I had a title – Dorian Gray – and therefore a theme.  There are elements of the completed song that were recorded so long ago, I would certainly do things differently now.  But that is not the point. The point is that the song finally breathes.  And that makes me proud.  Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t – but it makes me happy.  And that is worth it’s weight in gold!!! 🙂

Come closer is a little different.  More of a personal song for me.  Also a song completed in a much quicker time span.  One of those songs you either get or you don’t. Luckily the feedback on the song has been pretty universally positive.  So for the moment, the song has a place on the album.

Those three songs are the primary songs I have completed this year for the All Monsters and Dust album.  It has been a collection of songs that has catalogued and defined my recent life.  An album has many purposes, some of which I may explore in the future, but I would consider this album to be something of an autobiographical effort.  Spilling my life and feelings into song.

Moving on through 2010 I collaborated with a great musician from the US on a song which became Where We Go Next.  The music for the song was written whilst I was in Africa, and it was an epic project in every sense.  From a pure music point of  view I was working with ‘found sound’ – that is, real sound, recorded and used as instruments.  I was tapping wine glasses and shaking Corn flakes boxes.  Then Bill would send me vocal files and I would take the song as a whole and mix it seamlessly.  We were both so happy with the resulting song that we decided to make the collaboration permanent.  Hence the creation of The Eleventh Hour.  The band had to be formed.  We couldn’t just leave it at one solitary song.  We had a gut feeling that there was something more to our collaboration than just a simple ‘guest spot’.

‘Meeting’ Bill has been a musical highlight of 2010.  We realised that Where We Go Next was a pretty special song.  So… what could we do next?  I opted for a more streamline, 45 rpm approach – resulting in the song Mean Machines. To be honest, we haven’t looked back since.  We have taken the ‘single’ ideal and refined it with each song.  Through Escape Plan and Pitfall we have produced sounds that capture and frame our imagination.  We hope that the songs therefore appeal to you, the ‘general public’ – but that isn’t really so important to us.  I know it’s a cliché, but these songs really have to make Bill and I happy.  Anything else is just a bonus.


So… 2010 has been an interesting year so far.  A most productive year in fact.  I have written many songs, played alongside many great musicians and played many a rocking gig in my time.  But this year has been rejuvenating.  As Alan Partridge would say “a breath of fresh air”.  There are times in a songwriter’s career when you feel you have said all there is to say.  You have poured your heart out too many times, to the point of being empty.  I have felt this.  But an evaluation of this year – 8 months – surprises me.  A listen through the track listings of the two ‘albums in progress’ reveal songs that I would place amongst my very best.  But if this rambling is for any reason – then that reason is to prove to a musician who could have felt jaded, that there is life beyond the obvious.  There is life beyond the initial love songs.  There is life beyond the revenge songs and the songs fuelled by hate.  There is life beyond everything past.  I am enjoying 2010.  If even a single one of you out there spends a couple of minutes of your life listening to any of my songs then that makes my year.  Roll on this final third of 2010.  I raise a glass of wine to all of you!!!

Ready, Set… EXPLODE!

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The Eleventh Hour. 6 songs now complete. I’m sitting here in my studio listening through to what is effectively half of the future album. I’ve got to say that it is a really great listen – just a cool collection of songs that push things forward. The latest addition is called Ready, Set… Explode! It rocks hard, although that shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you any more! It’s another song to be played with the top rolled down driving through the countryside in the summer. So, all I need now is a convertible and the time to go driving in the countryside. And some sun! This collection of songs is certainly shaping up to be THE album for next summer! (which also gives us time to actually finish it!)

I’ve made a start on the next one already. I told you that I’d be busy for a while! I’m going with the flow of the ‘summer anthem’ vibe and getting down and dirty with some meaty guitar riffs. The only trouble at the moment is it gets uncomfortable wearing the top hat in the studio. The sheer heat. Sweat dripping in my eyes. The real worry is the spandex I’m gonna have to wear when I’m recording the drums! I’m really enjoying this song-writing spell though. The mojo is with me. Ha ha. I will update you further with the progress of the new one when I have got my rocks off… honey.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Ready, Set… Explode! It is another fabulous The Eleventh Hour song. Great biting lyrics from Bill and a performance worthy of alternative rock gold. Class.