I could really feel and hear and see nature again, it started to take over. I think the lockdown was actually hugely influential in a way, as all the quiet made me appreciate nature in a way I hadn’t done for quite some time, maybe ever. The writing process was actually the same as it always is, but because I knew I didn’t have any live work for the foreseeable future, we just created all this space. However, when we could finally all record again together, it was like the first day of school after the summer holidays. It was a very odd process, but it worked. If I couldn’t record with the band, I’d send the recordings to them and they’d play their parts and then send them back. As ever, I recorded them all in the studio down in Surrey, just me and a guitar singing along to a click track. So I started working away, chipping away, trying to put together a new batch of songs. I had about four or five tracks left over from On Sunset and they were just lying around, unused. MM: I assume you recorded your new album during lockdown? Everyone starts out copying other people. Our first songs would have been nonsense songs, just “My Baby Love Me” stuff… But, like every other fledgling songwriter, I just started off by aping other people, like The Beatles did, like Dylan did. I was actually very passionate at the time, but I didn’t have the skills to articulate that passion. They were very basic, just us taking our first steps as songwriters. PW: When we started to write songs we just used to pinch a lot of The Beatles songs. What was your writing process in the early days? But I’m learning a lot about The Beatles’ recording process, though. Whenever I walk in through the doors I still get a funny feeling. There is a photograph of me aged three months on one of the sofas in the studio, so I was there before I can remember being there. MM: You know, I’m directing a documentary about the history of Abbey Road Studios at the moment, so I’ve been taken back to those times. But your dad’s band was the catalyst for all of it. So by the age of 14 we were playing pubs, working men’s clubs and social clubs with The Jam. Well, I didn’t know it could be a career, I just knew I was going to do music. There was never any doubt in my mind that’s what I would do and, even at around 12, I thought that was definitely what I was going to do for a living. It was just me and him and then we just gathered up people as we could find them. We started a band and we just learned together and we just kept swapping whatever we’d learned in the week, swapping back and forth. PW: As soon as we – me and my mate Steve Brookes – learnt the three or four chords. MM: When did you actually start writing songs? And as soon as we learnt enough chords we stopped the lessons and we just start doing it ourselves. Me and my mate had a few lessons for a bit and got a few weeks in, but the guy was trying to teach us how to read music, so we got bored with that. From the time I saw The Beatles I loved music and then when I was around age 12 I started trying to learn to play guitar. I had some of the singles, because my mother bought them, but the first time I saw them was the Royal Variety Performance in 1963, when I was five. Mary McCartney: So, Paul, when did you become a Beatles fan? When you were 12? Prior to that, they were just Beatles copies.” Anyway, he cut a version of it, but it was funny to hear a proper American singer doing this tune that I wrote when I was a kid, trying to ape this soul R&B thing, and then hearing it done properly, you know? But that was probably the first proper song I wrote. And then years later, Dean Parrish, who was really famous on the Northern soul circuit, he did ‘I’m On My Way’, a big Northern tune. That was probably the best song I’d written up to that point. “I wrote this soul-sounding tune in my mind, called ‘Left, Right And Centre’. “There’s a good song I did when I was about 16 and I was going for a heavier Otis Redding phase,” he told me. He still has no interest in suffering fools gladly, but his recall, when asked nicely, is terrific. Accused of being “difficult” by music journalists when he was young, all he really was was shy and inarticulate. Weller is one of the most self-aware artists of his age.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |