Nobody’s Girl

Dangerous Times

March 6th and 7th 2025

I’ve written and spoken extensively about this period. I don’t think we need anything new, and I don’t think I have a fresh perspective.

So, here’s the first paragraph of Dangerous Music, which I wrote for Cleaning Out the Ashtrays fifteen years ago. Revamped very slightly.

>1994-5 was a bad couple of years. The details are sordid and I will not repeat them. Making Love Story took forever and much of that forever was not much fun. It seemed that my industry cohorts - my A&R and my management - no longer expected every rough mix I’d send to excite them, and they didn’t seem worried about demoralising me with their feedback. Maybe this was a healthy wake up call. It was certainly a wake up call.

We’d had one false start to the project; the infamous Sorcerer Sound sessions. A disaster, and an embarrassment, thanks, not to me not having sufficient material written, I had plenty, but rather to my ignoring it and choosing to work on various unfinished song sketches. Had it not been for Chris Hughes’ input and subsequent leadership, I’m really not sure what would have transpired. Chris’s position was unique - I trusted him, and so did David Bates, my A&R man. Chris suggested we decamp to a low budget studio, with him sitting quietly in the corner, and I was to demo the songs I had written, with no help except from Adam Peters, who was still technically the producer on the project. Chris and I would meet at Aggie’s on Houston Street every morning for breakfast, he wouldn’t go anywhere else after he’d seen Ellen Barkin there, and then we’d walk over to Dangerous Music in the East Village.

At Dangerous, thanks to this plan, I found out what it is I do naturally, and Adam found a way to work with that, rather than against it. We emerged from these sessions as co-producers. I’m a rotten pianist and Adam is great, but Chris was intent that if I didn’t play, then my fingerprints wouldn’t be on the work, something like that anyway, and my two left hand method did seem to work. Those first weeks weren’t easy but we did have a great deal of fun.

It was at Dangerous that Chris introduced me to Tim Hardin’s work. I’d never heard him before. The timing couldn’t have been better. I had a new infatuation and I could also see how full band recordings could be full of verve, guile, and beauty, while still being fragile and not worried about whether the beat was strong enough for the dance floor or the radio.

There was no real soundproofing in the live room, and the air conditioning was not up to much, so we took to recording with the windows open - the results of this can be heard when we decided to feature the street noise during the introduction to (what became the long version of) Traffic. What can also be heard is evidence that we were at last economising - by recording over old session tapes - at the end of ‘Traffic’ that distant piano is Adam playing Tom Petty’s Freefalling from the Bad Vibes sessions, 18 months before. I’m sure we didn’t plan that.

94 2

Mar 30, 2023

I'm not sure there's another notebook of mine with so many songs in it.

This is how this Notebook Project works - I go through every page of every book and if I see anything related to a song, even a nascent idea, its title goes on the Post It on the cover. Then when I'm done with that process I start with a song, find all the notebooks it's in, and photograph all the relevant pages. Occasionally trying to make sense of the process.

What's your favourite out-take from Love Story? Mine's probably Rain On The Parade, which I co-wrote with Steven Lindsay. I never quite made the album that it would sit on. Which is a shame.

An Angel Flew Between Us

Apr 8, 2023 and March 6th 2025

Unfinished.

This seemed so promising. I even noted Chris Hughes's positive reception of the track.

It's in 3 notebooks from mid/late 1993 to early 1994.

Then I stopped working on it.

I don't know why. It is a bit Goth…

I guess I prioritised other tracks... there were a LOT of tracks considered for the album. By the end there was enough for two albums. I only got paid for one.

Things were out of control, in this respect, in the mid-90’s. This was the age of the multiple format CD single release. I think if you bought all the versions of Like Lovers Do that were out there you got about 6 b-sides.

Casanova Smith

Jun 9, 2023

Casanova's Myth?

That seems to have been the idea.

At the start of the Love Story sessions this song was on the list, but we quickly moved on and it became another song that fell through the cracks.

Which is no great loss. It's not a classic. You may have heard the rough mix (the only evidence) on the LC in NYC box set.

This mix came from arguably my most disastrous recording session. Because I had a young child, our first, I chose not to tour Bad Vibes with a full band. Adam Peters, myself, and a few musicians including my friend Douglas McIntyre did some radio sessions and promo type club shows in Paris and Stockholm, maybe UK, too, I don't recall. I do recall the songs Unhappy Song, Sold and An Angel Flew Between Us were in the Paris Black Sessions set.

When we got back to NYC we booked studio time at Sorcerer Sound either late '93 or very early '94. Clearly I did have quite a few songs, or half songs, but for some reason we chose not to record those. Of the tracks chosen, only Casanova Smith was actually written, and the other song ideas were very vague. I guess I thought I could pull it all together in the studio.

Chris Hughes was around. Adam Peters was still technically producing. Stephen Irvine was drumming (he stayed in his pal Larry Mullen's apartment on Central Park!) and Neil Clark was playing guitar. Weird, I know! Douglas was playing bass but Chris fired him and we brought in Sara Lee of Gang Of Four fame. I distinctly remember Sara looking at me, at some awful juncture, in a sad and somewhat bemused fashion as if to ask 'What on earth are we doing here?'

I suppose this was the experience that prompted Chris to come up with the Dangerous Music idea. I'm still somewhat embarrassed to share this story.

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Be Careful What You Wish For

March 6th 2025

My guess is Bob Dylan never had a fancy home studio. He’s too smart. But I know I’m not the only artist to self sabotage by building one.

We had our dream home, and I ruined it. Honestly, it sounds overly dramatic, but had David Munns given me half as much money to re-sign to Polydor in 1991, I think things might have gone better. But no. He gave me enough rope.

These days I’m quite open about my GAS (gear aquisition syndrome) and seemingly unqunechable thirst for new gizmos. That’s who I am. But most of the time I’ve been able to use these instruments to create music and not let them use me. In 1992-3 it got twisted around. I had to learn to bias a Studer multitrack. No songwriter should be doing that. I had so much STUFF. I didn’t know how half of it worked, at least not to the extent that I could properly finess a sound or an effect, anyway. It was just cool shit. And it cost plenty.

That wasn’t a worry in 1991, or 1992, or 1993, but after Bad Vibes it was. And we lost it all. So it’s hard for me to have an entirely objective relationship with the record.

You have to fuck up to learn. Sure. But you don’t have to fuck up on the epic scale that I did. I’m at peace with it these days, but I have scar tissue. Mostly I’m just embarrassed by what an idiot I was. No, I didn’t have a studio guru to advise me. But I could have found one.

There’s no recording console up here in my New England attic. There’s no soundproofing. I don’t need it. If a car drives by while I’m singing I can sing that line again.

Eat Your Greens

Dec 8, 2022

Let's get this one out of the way quickly. This is one of a very rare breed - songs I wish I had never written. There are some poor songs on Bad Vibes, IMHO, but none I wish didn't exist. This, one the other hand... I guess I don't do flip very well.

Anyhow.

It was from the second group of songs written for Bad Vibes. Looking through the notebooks today I discovered that the first 5 were -

Morning Is Broken (working title Sweeper)
4MB (working title Bottom To The Top)
Love You So What (working title Macca)
Too Much Of A Good Thing (working title Do You Ever Wonder?)
Can't Get Arrested

and you can see the next 11 on the final page image, here.

It looks like Eat Your Greens (working title Eat Yer Greens, as in Yer Blues) was written over a couple of sessions, and possibly the final one was in the computer, as I see no lyric sheet, and no complete lyrics written out in any of these Bad Vibes notebooks.

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1990-1991 The Rhodia Years

January 9th, 2022 and March 6th 2025

I've been through all the notebooks and this is all I have for after The X Album and before Bad Vibes. Not very much.

Computer Age. Yes, there is that. Final drafts were probably printed. But it does seem that my confidence and fluency were at an all time high. I wasn’t worried. I was (arguably over) confident. I was writing songs (by my standards) very quickly.

I’m not suggesting that this a particularly strong group of songs. I’m just observing that it was assembled and fine tuned very smoothly, without self doubt or second guessing.

The Don't Get Weird Song Pool

January 16th, 2022

This is all the evidence I have.

Mean Bartender, of course, became To The Lions.

Sweet Lord Thing became The One You Never Had.

I have no idea what Dylanesque Waltz was...

Ditto Roxyesque Ballad (although I suspect that might be an old idea of Blair's which posted here a while ago).

Ditto E Riff R'n'R Thing - I see some scraps of a Sweetheart type thing in one of the notebooks, but there is no demo, and based on the scraps, this is a good thing.

The Pretty Arpeggio from the previous album pool of ideas was still lurking and I still wanted to make it into something called Like Lovers Do, but I failed again.

I suspect Dance/Rock became Pay For It.

Mannish Girl was briefly still in the mix...

Barry Strings? I don't know, but maybe it morphed with Gershwin Piano/Strings, which became Butterfly.

Walker Ballad became Half Of Everything.

Jim Webb became There For Her.

Right Track became Man Enough.

Green World became What He Doesn't Know.

And I think Margo's Waltz is the only song (ever) I didn't entitle - that was always Blair's working title and it worked with the lyric, I thought.

On the third sheet, which is from the recording sessions, it seems that Weird On Me was seriously considered as the album opener. Thank heavens that didn't happen...

Butterfly was called You Lied, until I completely re-wrote the vocal line and lyric.

And Tell Your Sister was still The 'L' Word until quite late in the proceedings.

The very next page in the notebook is the 4th sheet -

B-Side Thing (ha ha)

You've got to be

The stupidest girl in the world...

This is the only eveidence I have that I actually wrote She’s A Girl And I’m A Man.

Weird On Me

Jan 20, 2022

From two notebooks and 4 sheets removed from one of the notebooks, at some point (much easier to do with the Rhodias).

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In Constant Flight

Or so it seems, now, looking back. So, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I lost a few notebooks along the way. It’s funny how easily chaos can be managed when you have a little money, and people are invested in you not fucking up completely.

It was never the plan to stay in NYC. In fact my accountant said I shouldn’t. Management were initially excited about the move until they realised that much of the attraction of NYC was that it was NOT The UK, and my embracing of New York Culture didn’t exactly time well with Madchester, Screamadelica, etc. But I loved it, and once I’d met Fred, Quine and then my wife to be, I knew that it was the right place for me, at that point in my life, anyway.

This project feels very different to the preceding ones. And it’s as much a series of snapshots of that life as it is an album case study. With that in mind I’ve added my 1989 diary, as an addendum to an already long list of chapters.

Songs Ideas August And September 1988

August 19th, 2021

I'm always keeping notes of what I've got for each project, even today...

These two lists, I think, show the songs I was working on before and after leaving for New York.

Drive On, Or Driving Song, became 4th Time Down.
Skye One (Blair's working title is my guess, maybe also called Blair's REM by me?) became Ice Cream Girl.
Yet another attempt to write a song called Right Track... not sure what happened to that.
Euro Blair became I Confess.
Blair Happy Pop became The English Weather.
I'm guessing E9 theme is the beginning of Holier Than Thou.
And maybe my earliest try to write a song with Arlene in it... I tried again around The Negatives.

I Confess

July 6th, 2021

The first writing I did, post Commotions, was with Blair. The songs weren't intended for me to record, but I did end up singing on demos, in Glasgow, and we did rework the Shelly I Do recording for what became The X Album, it was ultimately released as a b-side.

These notes are from two notebooks, which seem most likely to have been filled concurrently. The first image is from book A, the rest from book B. The second image is dated 23/12/87. The Commotions were on Christmas break from touring, but we were still 'together' (we knew it would be our last tour). I guess I was already moving on. I'm happy to see evidence that I did something more than just drink away those final months.

Note the 6th image - I had already begun thinking about Sweetheart, it seems...

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• High And Low Hopes

• You Win

• Everyone’s Complaining

• Poons

• Old Hats

• I Hate To See You, Baby, Doing That Stuff, Take 1

• Why No Sign Of…

• Mr Malcontent

• Hey Rusty

• Jennifer She Said

• 29

• My Bag

• From The Hip

• Sean Penn Blues

• Big Snake

• Mainstream

• These Days

• From The Hip EP

• Mercy Killing

• Mainstream Tour Set List

  ---

High And Low Hopes

February 13th, 2021 and March 4th 2025

This is going to take a while.

Mainstream's identity didn't really solidify until about half way through the recording. There were many rejected ideas, some of them complete songs, some unfinished. Some of them subsequently morphed into songs on the album, many didn't.

There are notes citing My Bag and Hey Rusty as song ideas in the Easy Pieces notebooks.

I Hate To See You, Baby, Doing That Stuff was a rejected idea. I have no recollection of that!

Work on Mr Malcontent began in December 1985, right after the Easy Pieces European tour, in my bedsit/songwriting studio in Glasgow. Mainstream (the song) and These Days were written in our Highbury Hill (London) flat on my new Apple Macintosh home computer less than a year later.

We were also between ages. The analogue age was coming to an end. The digital was beginning. When Bruce Lampcov remixed Forest Fire for our best of album, I was sent the mix on a DAT tape. It was fantastically strange - there was no hiss.

Anyhow, there are 10 songs on Mainstream, plus the 3 recorded after Blair left, and there are several rejects which will need to be included to make this thing make sense. Wish me luck.

Addendum 2025 - In retrospect, it's easy to see how we were lost. Looking back at the Easy Pieces notebooks, I think it’s fair to conclude that I put everything I had into that record. I had almost nothing left in the aftermath. I was exhausted. But we were more successful than ever and there was demand for more. And, amazingly, I got right back to writing on the American tour (Poons, Old Hats). But what seems obvious today, is I didn’t know who I was writing for. I know, now, that I’m never much use if I don’t have an end product in mind. We didn’t know what band we wanted to be. That was the problem. Utimately we decided on the one thing we weren’t really very good at. I suppose you’d call Mainstream ‘arena rock/pop’. But we weren’t quite an area band. U2 and Simple Minds were. We were closer to The Go Betweens, when we played to our strengths, I think.

You Win

January 4th, 2021

I'm not going to research and publish the history of songs we didn't ultimately release, but here's a couple of lyric sheets for one we briefly had high hopes for.

Everyone's Complaining

March 6th, 2021

Here's a song like Jesus Said. Arguably good enough to be on Easy Pieces or Mainstream, had the albums gone in slightly different directions, but they didn't and it was lost.

Which is a shame. There's a lot I like about this song.

After Easy Pieces the first songs completed were Mr Malcontent, Old Hats and Everyone's Complaining. We performed the first two at Glastonbury, and the stadium shows we played with Simple Minds, then we went into the studio in Paris, with Chris Thomas, recording Mr Malcontent and this song.

One notebook page is revealing. At the time I was working on this I had prioritized 29, You've Got All The Answers, Poons, Girl on Your Arm (Jennifer), Genevieve, and Gone Fishing (Old Wants Never Gets). Only 29 and Jennifer made it to the album.

As we progressed with Ian Stanley, the album became more synth based, less jangle, and this song was left by the wayside.

I recorded a solo demo of the song for (I think) a red wedge thing when I first moved to NYC, on my fancy 12 track portastudio.

The Chris Thomas recording was finally released on the UMG (and then Tapete Vinyl) Complete Recordings Box Set.

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I was working on ON PAIN, I guess, when I wrote, and shared this.

A Blur

1985 really was a blur.
It was music non-stop.
We flew to America and played a sold out (except Providence) tour. Chris and Tina came to see us in New York.
We played huge festivals. Pretty high up the bills. Big venues in Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Lisbon.
Morrissey wanted to be my friend.
Our exposure actually exaggerated our success. We were everywhere, but we didn’t have any real pop hits.
Polydor wanted this to change, and so did we.
We should have taken a break. More than a week in Corsica, anyway. But we didn’t.
We allowed ourselves to be persuaded that if we didn’t follow up Rattlesnakes quickly, and take advantage of the Christams market we might be forgotten. Of course this was nonsense. But none of us came from money, and we didn’t want to blow our chance. So we just kept working. Thankfully I never needed drugs for this. I was literally high on success and fame.

We told ourselves that none of the songs on Rattlesnakes were written before mid 1983, so why should we worry? We’ll write more.
Well, we got very lucky with Rattlesnakes. And really, we got lucky with Easy Pieces, too. There’s only one real stinker on the record.
But there was always this feeling that we could have made a better follow up.

40 years later, I’m not so sure. I can nitpick. The singing is awfully mannered. The ‘sound’ isn’t as lovely as Rattlesnakes. But it’s a strong record and I no longer regret anything about it. Given more time, who knows? We didn’t exactly thrive when we had more time, the following year…

Perfect Blue

July 28th 2020 and March 3rd 2025

The first song written after Rattlesnakes.

Early notes suggest that there was overlap with Brand New Friend. Or maybe once I’d completed this without using the phrase I decided it was too good not to use?

My first Clairefontaine notebook was bought in Paris when we were doing promo and about to make our debut French performance. The shoe shop entry from the previous (Silvine) notebook is included to show that we were indeed in Paris when I was making these notes. The first page of the Clairefontaine book is maybe my first draft of the whole song. Did we play it like this? I do not recall... The set list entry suggests that we didn’t. Is there a bootleg?

The band went out. Hoping we could perform Perfect Blue (or Paris Blues) in Paris, I stayed in, at our hotel in Place des Abbesses, trying to finish the lyric. From this I deduce we had the basic song structure written already. I was still working when they got back to the hotel. They were noisy. Derek, our manager, was in the next room. I had to get the night porter to mute his TV. He was passed out with it on!

There you are.

I suspect I'm missing a little. The final image, I believe, is the lyric sheet from the Easy Pieces sessions.

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I’ve started.
It’s 13 notebooks and sundry loose sheets.
I’ll be updating this page as I get through the process of extracting the songs from the notebooks.

New York City Comedown

December 17th 2024

It’s going to be tough. It wasn’t the best time. See Difficult Pieces. The detail is there.

There’s inevitable overlap between this album (which wasn’t released) and The Negatives which, eventually, was. And consequently overlapping notebooks. Ideas which were unfinished in 1996 and completed for The Negatives. I expected a few of those, and Music IAFL, even. What I didn’t expect were several ideas which eventually ended up on Antidpressant, a decade later.

So it’s a conflicted feeling, looking back on this year. I was, for sure, all over the place. I would say that the ratio of bad ideas to good was close to an all time high. But there were lots, and lots of them. And between the confusion and the snivelling I still manged to crank out some decent work. Some excellent.

We’d just lost our apartment, where I had, idiotically, only 4 years before, installed a studio at a cost of about 50% of my net worth. How about that for confidence? We were in a small rented apartment, still in the West Village, and burning though our savings at a rate of knots. At some point, I suppose, I did come to terms with the fact that my career wasn’t in great shape any more.

By this point I was aware of the difficulty involved in addressing the here and now, and mostly, over the previous decade, I’d had litle inclination in this direction, and when I had, I’d hidden it under the third person, or some other guise. But here I was at 35 writing

In the prime of your life
At a time when a crisis is common in men
Old enough to know better

and

I was just hoping you might know
Where did my angel go?

and

… furthest from my mind
Was the thought of my refection
Coming back from the machine which said
Everything is gone
No more carry on
I was bound to fall
I had it all

And I said to my wife
Do you think I've said too much?
She said
Well, isn't that what your job is?

I took a studio space in Tribeca, unbeknownst to me, just around the corner from Sonic Youth, and I installed what was left of my studio there. I went to work 5 or 6 days a week. I had a family to feed.

It wasn’t all grim. The studio was part of a larger complex - Harold Dessau - my neighbour was (The The) Matt Johnson. I’d rehearsed at Dessau and made demos there before. They were good people. I had the Love Story touring band still in place - Neil, Rafa, Amanda and Chris. All great players. I still had Quine. It was a decent team. The weak link was me, but, for better or worse, I wasn’t aware of this, yet.

___

Across The Water

December 18th 2024

So, for an album which was never actually released as intended, maybe it’s almost appropriate to open with a song I never finished.

I’m starting with it because evidence suggests that it was the first idea for the project. The large purple plaid (tartan) notebook dates from the end of 1994 and also includes She Loves You which was one of the last, if not the last song submitted for the Love Story project.

There are a lot of loose sheets, mostly torn from other notebooks. I don’t know why, but I deduce, from this and the sheer volume of the notes over a lengthy time period, that I was pretty keen on this idea. And still there isn’t even a demo with a guide vocal. The instrumental demo is here.

What’s worthy of note, here, I think is how little headway I made with the lyric. The entries repeat the same phrases over and over again. Maybe there are small incremental improvements to the phrasing, the potential lilt. Maybe. But it’s not much. I often start songs with only a hint of an idea, maybe a phrase, or a feeling. But when the writing process is sucessful, this grows into something more substantial. I don’t think that happened here.

The song Fool You Are, which I’ll get to later, also deals with flight as a means of escape from troubles, sins, past, etc… I’m not sure I ever got that one quite right, either.

I didn’t have a ‘lyric guru’ I trusted at this time. I’d never had one. It had always been down to me to make all the calls. The one time David Bates tried to tell me that there were too many ‘babes’ and ‘babies’ in the Love Story lyrics I told him that he was the A&R man and I was the lyricist. He didn’t speak to me for quite a while after that. He was right.

In a year or so I’d meet Dave Derby and I’d start playing keyboards in his band Brilliantine. After a while I’d trust Dave to give me gut reactions to lyrical ideas. Just thumbs up, or thumbs down. I still trust him with this, and Chris Hughes, too.

I wish I’d had one of them around at this juncture. Maybe one of them would have said ‘maybe this isn’t such a great starting point for a lyric?’?

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It Begins

Oct 12, 2023

The 8th album in The Notebook Project.

Just 8 songs but plenty of stationery fetishism.

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A Notebook Project?

July 8th 2020

A little while ago I hosted one of those Twitter Listening Parties with Tim from The Charlatans, and Neil Clark. I dug out some old notebooks and took photos. Here they are again.
For a few years, now, I've been thinking about a notebook project, maybe a book, tracking the development of songs through the notebooks. I still have every notebook from 1983 until now. Maybe this could be an ongoing project. What do you think?

The Notebook Project is happening

Later, July 8th 2020

Damn. It's going to be a lot of work, and I'm not sure it can be an elegant compendium. The books are 3D, scanning may work sometimes, other times I'll need to take photos. I spent about 4 hours today separating the Commotions notebooks from the Post Commotions. But there are overlaps. I saw notes for 'I hate to see you', and 'Mercy Killing' from Mainstream notebooks...

I will not be commenting or analysing my methods. I will simply attempt to report the entries. Here and there there will be personal stuff, phone numbers, calendar notes, etc in the books which preclude me posting, but in all other cases, I will, even if I'm horrified by my process.

As technology evolved, my dependence on the notebook changed. Early days - everything was handwritten. By the time I made Standards, only the raw ideas were handwritten, the fine tuning was done in Scrivener (computer word processor app). So the volume of data available for this project will be less and less as we approach the present day. That said, I still have a pocket notebook, one one my desk here, and one beside my bed.

The process has begun

Jul 9, 2020

Our dining room table is the largest surface in our house that isn't the floor (my back cannot handle that), so dining room table it is. The Notebook Project has begun.

My 'Resume' 1982 or maybe '83

Jul 9, 2020

I already had the Forest Fire idea.  In The Thick Of It was a Casuals song so is would be late '82, maybe early '83. 

Note - Take me to the Church, and Are You Ready To Be Shocked?

Speedboat

Jul 10, 2020

It's well known that the song was inspired by the Renata Adler book, but looking at these notes, it's clear that there's more to it that that. There’s a synopsis! Very rarely did I do this. But it looks like I tried to plot out Speedboat like a short story. I got lucky. I failed. This is not a way I like to work anymore.

It's also clear from these notes and Rattlesnakes (the song) notes, I was intent upon starting a song with the phrase 'This is a story of wealth and beauty'. But I never did. Which, looking back, seems a good thing. I got lucky on this batch of songs. My editing was much better than my raw material. The final 2 images are the finished lyric which is definitely greater than the sum of its parts!

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