A Song in a Day

I was sitting on sunny Marylebone High Street this morning and up walked Gary Kemp – it was fate because just last week I was listening to these 2 songs recorded on a couple of similar sunny days….

A while ago now Mj and I were at a London club – the Cuckoo Club in Swallow Street, a great corner of London’s Piccadilly Circus.  It was one of those rock and roll moments. Actually I think Mj and I had gone there to see Dirty Pretty Things or maybe some party…damn these things blur into one these days…

I’d always liked Gary Kemp and his manager Steve Dagger...we’d spoken over the last, oh ten years or so about writing songs, writing songs as grown ups instead of the kids we were in our first bands, about how maybe it was possible to form new bands even now.  I remember going to one of Spandau Ballets first gigs in London in a tiny Cinema and now I come to think about it a show at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham – all these well before my Sputnik years. I liked their songwriting.

I always wanted to work with Gary in some way and I knew the feeling was mutual.  Funnily enough he always reminded me of Billy Idol for some reason – he has the same super enthusiasm for everything and engaging way……  Mj and I were well into the Carbon/Silicon years of recording now and feeling pretty much on top of our game that night at the Cuckoo Club.  Anyway, drinks flowed and we fell into talking with Gary who’d just turned up… and somehow we said let’s record something together.  Immediately I said lets write a song called…”Maybe that’s the meaning of Life” … you know, a play on the kind of stuff you talk about on Jack D. when guitarists are hanging out together late in a club… …but this time we resolved to actually do it….and set a day for the following week.

Here was the plan – and again it was something Mj and I had discussed a lot – to put ourselves under pressure to see if we could just come up with something on the spot – with someone we’d never written with before.  I mean Mj and I always write real fast, but there’s usually some time thinking about it.  But for this session, we would turn up at 3 p.m and by 8 p.m we would have a song….done. That was the plan.

Sure enough that’s what happened.. we all turned up – I programmed up a beat, we grabbed guitars and the piano and everything just flowed.  Gary sang great – he had a great chorus tune idea which we soon had recorded- Mj sang a great verse… and by 8 p.m we had recorded the song.  It’s different from our usual stuff – which is what makes it fun for us.

And we came back again a couple of weeks later and did it again. This track was called “The Inconvenience of Truth”…same recording plan….. and then………well…

We kept listening to them over the past year or so and we’ve always really liked  them, so last week I thought we should just put these tracks out there, what the hell. Again, just for the fun of it.

And then I saw Gary today, he was as friendly as always and he agreed – just put them out there.  So now you can hear the results of those two frantic sunny days a while back.  Its a magical feeling when you record something like that, just doing it, no preconceptions or reason why – no record company or radio or release schedule – just making music together.  Pure bliss.

Have a listen.

****Both tracks are available for free download from the MP3s page…..