Mojo - The Music Magazine

The godfather of righteous jazz-pop lullaby takes MOJO’s Danny Eccleston through his recently reissued back catalogue.

For Pt. 1, click here...

The collected Eps are an amazing listen. Can you tell us about the spoken word piece, Pigs (In There)? How it came about?
It’s more or less a totally improvised thing. My sister-in-law at the time lived in the country and had got used to the way it operated; I was a townie, I didn’t look at fields as they didn’t have any girls in them. I was shocked to find it was like a open air factory.

A lot of your music comes from a political place. Can you see political pop returning as the recession bites?
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a particular onus on musicians to be political. You have to be able to do something constructive – like benefits for the miners’ strike, which were primarily a way of raising money. Artists don’t create political climates on their own – they respond to people – and things simply aren’t as bad as they were. People are more aware of cruelty to animals, and Fair Trade – remember how deeply radical that used to seem – and also colour prejudice has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream. Those battles have been won. Although racism isn’t dead, racists don’t rule the world anymore. So, despite the fact they still want the left destroyed, the important things that some of us were trying to do have been successful.

Back to our Wyatt novel – another interesting chapter is “The Hit Singles” (I’m A Believer, 1974; Shipbuilding, 1983). What was that like… being a pop singer?
Well, most of what I do is pop music. I mean, I’m not Shostakovich or indeed Charles Mingus, so I can’t do that stuff. If you cut a song down to two minutes-odd, not too many long solos, have a recognisable kind of beat, you’ve got a sort of pop song. What I don’t like is the competitive aspect of the pop world, the charts and that, getting to Number 1 or Number 4, it doesn’t interest me, I’m too posh [laughs]. I do like making little records, three or four minutes long. But I never went out of my way to do it. I’m A Believer was the suggestion of Simon Draper at Virgin and Shipbuilding happened because I received the cassette in the post from Clive Langer and Elvis Costello, who wrote asking if I’d do it and I said, Yeah! In a way, I’d have liked to have done more proper pop records, but I don’t seem to have gone that way. I think it’s just my dislike of competition; it’s not really ideological, I just find it silly. I don’t go around saying that it’s Mingus at Number 10 and Miles Davis at Number 9...

Dondestan (1991) is another landmark album. It’s the point you start co-writing with your wife, Alfie [Alfreda Benge].
Alfie would always be writing poetic stuff down, and I would just incorporate these things into a record. Of course, she didn’t offer them, I just nicked them. It was a clause in the marriage contract: “To have and to hold, and to allow full use of any songs I may write…” [laughs] Sometimes she’d disapprove, like when I wrote [Dondestan track] Shrinkrap or stuff about not being able to get to sleep. She thought that was trivial and not worth Mostly though, she was happy, except on Catholic Architecture, which she said I had made sound too religious and angelic – not good for a deeply anti-religious song!

Why did you remake it [as Dondestan Revisited] in 1998?
Well, the original stuff was done in a studio around here [The Chapel Studios, Lincolnshire] with a severely limited budget, due to the fact that I don’t sell like a rock star or rock musician at all. I spent most of the time actually recording, rather than the mixing and the editing, which is in fact the most enjoyable element of making a record – you know, putting everything together and getting the best sound out of everything. So years later that’s exactly what I did; I just wanted to spend a bit of extra time in the studio with the original recordings, with a bit of editing and nip and tuck, mainly because it had been nagging at me at the back of my head that it was still a sketch of a record that I hadn’t quite made.

Yopu recently collaborated with [French electronica artist] Bertrand Burgalat, on a single called This Summer Night. How did that come about?
He’d already asked Alfie to write some lyrics on a previous record; in fact there’s a brilliant video of one of her songs that she did with him called Spring Isn’t Fair. More recently, he asked again and sent her some demos, which she couldn’t work out the melody to, as they were sort of atmospheric backing tracks, so she asked if he minded if I nailed down a tune on them, to help with lyric writing. So I ended up writing a tune and sang it with her lyrics on the demo, which we sent to him, and when he heard it he asked if I would mind actually singing it on the record. I agreed, but on the proviso that he did a bit of singing on it as well! Johnny Bradshaw at Domino heard it and thought we should bang it out as a single when we did all the re-releases as a bonus track; then Hot Chip offered to do a re-mix of it, so it’s become an unlikely, unsolicited, spontaneous moment. What I really liked was that Alfie warned Bertrand that she didn’t do love songs… looking at me bitterly from the corner of her eye, [laughs] but then she writes this song about a one-night-stand on a beach with a gay ’70s disco feel, and there I was singing it! Life’s full of little surprises and that’s what makes it fun.

So do you think there might be more from Disco Bob in the future?
Well, Alfie does say that she wishes that I would do more tunes that you can dance to. So if Alfie has anything to do with it, I suppose that yes is the answer to your question!

So if the reissue campaign has been your project for 2008, what is there for 09? Another Wyatt album?
Well, I don’t like to predict things, nor can I, but I really like doing stuff with [Israeli sax player] Gilad Atzmon, who has recently made a great strings record with Ros Stephen – the violin player from Tango Siempre – which starts off like Charlie Parker with strings and then goes off all over the place. We’ve been in touch a lot and get on well, so I hope to follow the relationship up, but I’ve got no idea how it would end up.

Tango. Gilad Atzmon. Strings. You. Sounds like a good place to be…
(Laughs) Well, it does give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside, but I’ve never been one to let people know ahead of time what’s going on in my head, because I’m sort of superstitious. My lips are sealed!

Interview by Danny Eccleston