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Why Aye Man
“One
of those tunes that comes for a number of different reasons. It actually
means “Well, of course” in Geordie, “Why, yes.” You still hear it
all the time. Jimmy Nail was shooting the new “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet”
series, and he happened to be saying that the North American Indians, in a
lot of their music, they sounded just the same. That’s what put the idea
in my head. That, and Seamus Heaney sent me a copy of “The Spirit
Level”, his lovely book of poems that won the Whitbread prize. He’d
written on the inside ‘To Mark, keep your level high.’ I was thinking
about that too. On a building site you could always tell the brickies and
the carpenters by their spirit levels and I was always fascinated by my
dad’s spirit level, I was always looking at the little green bubble in
the middle. I was really writing about the period in which the original
“Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” was set, it struck me as ironic that there were
refugees going from here to Germany, not just to Germany of course, they
were going all over the place. So it’s a bit of a mish-mash, the whole
thing, but I found myself writing about the Thatcher period. It wasn’t
written as anything to do with the new TV series, in fact they just took
the chorus, which is only three words anyway, and used that for the end.
Jimmy was telling me he’s sure it’s going to be a St.James’ Park
[Newcastle United FC ground] terrace song, which is territory I’ve been
in before, in fact the Theme from Local Hero is the United theme tune.
There was a little spell when it was dropped, when Ruud Gullit was running
the team, but as soon as he went, it came back again, mysteriously…”
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Devil Baby
“I was reading about sideshow live freak shows. It really just comes
from whatever I happen to be reading at the time. The devil baby was one
of the exhibits and it struck me that the current chat shows on
television, like the Jerry Springer show, are a TV equivalent of the same
kind of thing. So it was really just a little reflection on that. It
starts from the point of view of someone who works in the sideshow area,
then it moves to ‘CALL 1-800 IMA FREK’ if you want to get on the
Springer show, which was a true thing, you could do that. So it’s just
putting two periods next to each other and looking at the similarities and
differences between them.
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Hill Farmer’s Blues
“I spent a lot of time in the hills of
Northumberland. I spent a bit of time doing farm work myself, so hill
farming, although it’s a worldwide thing, is something I associate with
Northumberland. Actually, there’s a line in it that goes “Going into
Tow Law”; well Tow Law’s actually in County Durham, but it’s very
close. Whenever I’ve driven through Tow Law I always got a feeling,
can’t really explain what it was, but the power of the name always stuck
with me. Recently it was the time of foot and mouth, and it was on my mind
a lot, how hard it was. We were reading about suicides of farmers, and
then I thought if I could make it work for everyone, your farmer in the
song could be from where you come from, even in another country. So I’ve
tried to make it work for everything and anywhere. Most importantly,
I’ve tried to make it work for me.”
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A Place Where We Used To Live
“There’s a lot about home, and I suppose it’s the nearest I’d want
to get to nostalgia. It’s just a place where we used to live, that’s
all it is. With the last album when we were doing the press kit, I went
back and looked at my little house where I grew up, and the back lanes I
used to play in. I tried to find my first little school, and it wasn’t
there. Then I went on a trip with someone else back to her little school,
not so long ago, and that’s what got me thinking about it.”
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Quality Shoe
“I saw a sign on a store somewhere in London, and it wasn’t a good
shoe store, but the sign above said Quality Shoes and that sparked it off.
It’s from the point of view of the salesman - it’s kind of my little
tribute to 'King Of The Road'. I was lucky enough to meet Roger Miller
shortly before he passed away, and it was a very pleasant experience.”
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Fare Thee Well Northumberland
“Like ‘Why Aye Man’ and ‘Hill Farmer’s Blues’ it starts off
like a folk tune. It could be Northumbrian or a borders folk tune. It’s
just Richard Bennett strumming on his bazouki, then there’s a harmonica
and a Delta or Chicago style piano, then I start playing some electric,
and we’re in the blues, so it really just travels inside itself. I like
that, if you can bring that off.”
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Marbletown
“This is a solo voice and guitar thing. I’ve got a semi home studio in
a little mews house in London, and there’s a little back bedroom in
there that sounds really good, so I’ve done quite a lot of work in
there. ‘Marbletown’ I just did with the Martin and a couple of mics.”
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You Don’t Know You’re
Born
“It’s a very British expression, in the States they don’t have it.
So it is what it says it is. A phrase can strike a note, it could be just
two or three words that somebody says, or sometimes it’s a place, which
collides with you. I’ve no idea when the gong is going to go off or why
it goes off, but it just does.”
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Coyote
“Probably ‘Coyote’ comes from watching cartoons with my kids. I
always loved Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and this song is actually
sung from the point of view of the Roadrunner, but the funny thing is my
sympathy is with poor old Coyote. I don’t know what it is about him, he
just keeps on trying. It’s a human thing, that endless,
back-to-the-drawing-board thing that appeals to me. Even though it’s
sung from the Roadrunner’s point of view. The Roadrunner is kind of cool
too. They’re both cool.”
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The Ragpicker’s Dream
“The Ragpicker’s Dream itself I just invented. To me as a guitar
player it has a number of different meanings. The first time it’s a
bottle of whisky. I’m more driven to write about the fringes of life,
I’ve always been drawn to that.”
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Daddy’s Gone To Knoxville
“Again, it follows a theme I’ve always been interested in, which is
following a place where people are familiar with the names, and looking at
it from the point of view of the past. Just the last few years, these
places have boomed. The Gallatin Road in the first verse - you see the
traffic reports in the States and you see the rush hour traffic. On screen
they’ll be saying ‘The Gallatin Road is very heavy, there’s an overturned truck on Exit 9’ – well that was once just a little
track, and not very long ago either. The development is frightening, and
you start to wonder how long the wilderness is going to hold out against
all this civilization. And I was thinking about Chet Atkins and his early
music life, I think that was on my mind too, the endless backward and
forward movement. So again I was using geography from Tennessee and
putting it back a few decades into a much more innocent era.”
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Old Pigweed
“I was learning about stews, like you do. One of the things I learned
was that pigweed, which is a wild plant, was often put into Mulligan stews
but it had to be young pigweed, the young plant. And I thought, somebody
must have put old pigweed in it, it must have happened, and then somebody
would be saying ‘Who put old pigweed in the Mulligan?’. So really that’s all
it is.”
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