Looking for the Heat

We’ve given a lot of interviews during the last few weeks before we set off for the USA and there seems to be a recurring theme – why are we doing this, starting all over again….? We talk about this a lot because whatever anyone might think, it’s not easy…. I mean, hey, let’s take a look at the basic pitch……………….. Two guys who have been around for quite a while decide to form a new band, don’t play any of the old hits, don’t use the old brand names and worse, spend the last 5 years giving the music and artwork away for free….. ”You’ve gotta be kidding me” said the Man behind the desk…………………………………. So why do this when so many of our contemporaries, who let me make clear, we don’t judge in any way and sometimes sneakily watch in envy, are on the reunion tour, the circus is in town again, feeling so young and fabulous when they play the old hits because it feels like giving everyone what they want – feeling the adrenalin rush when the opening chords ring out to that roar of recognition and apart from all that, it sure as hell pays the bills…. well, both me and Mj both know it’s a hard one to resist…………………….. But that was not the way for us. The collaboration that started so long ago had somehow got back on track, the time was right when 5 years ago I told Mick I had written some lyrics for a song called M.P.Free, about the revolution that was about to envelope us all….. ……… We’d never really written anything together before, we’d watched each other write with our former songwriting partners (even made the tea while the other bashed out a classic in the other room – but that’s another blog!). This time Mick spontaneously said, “you know, I could write a tune for that..in fact I could write a tune right NOW” taking the sheet of lyrics from me – and he did………………. And then we wrote another ( Why Do Men Fight), and then another……………… And amazingly the magic we both remembered from before had returned – the thrill, that incredible feeling that I cannot describe to you, when words laying on a flat sheet of paper become a living breathing thing that then goes out there into the atmosphere and maybe touches people……………………. After writing and recording a new song we’d sit outside in the car on the way home playing the CD over and over again, just the two of us, before we went back to our families and we felt …well, special, whole, relevent but more than anything, weirdly fulfilled because as we both know, writing songs is our reason for being and this new stuff was starting to sound good………………………………… But we never sat down to form a band, we sat down and started to write songs, new songs about who we are and where we are at this point in our lives and I think we have something to say ……….which is why we decided to do this………….. I mean, if you haven’t got anything new to say by now, haven’t learnt anything after all this time, what the hell are you going to be singing about unless it’s the old songs which don’t necessarily reflect where you are now……and that’s not to say we’ll never play those old songs again, maybe we will one day, but first we have so much more to do…..

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