The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters - Softcover

Rachel, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250051290 ISBN 13: 9781250051295

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2014

Synopsis

A collection of brand-new, in-depth, and revealing conversations about songwriting with some of the world's most-noted hitmakers

THE ART OF NOISE offers an unprecedented collection of insightful, of-the-moment conversations with twenty-seven of the great songwriters. They discuss everything from their individual approaches to writing, to the inspiration behind their most successful songs, to the techniques and methods they have independently developed to foster their creativity.

Contributors include:

Sting * Ray Davies * Robin Gibb * Jimmy Page * Joan Armatrading * Noel Gallagher * Lily Allen * Annie Lennox * Damon Albarn * Noel Gallagher * Laura Marling * Paul Weller * Johnny Marr * and many more

Each interview is approached with depth of understanding―of the practice of songwriting, but also of each musician's catalog. The result is a collection of conversations that's probing, informed, and altogether entertaining―what contributor Noel Gallagher called "without doubt the finest book I've ever read about songwriters and the songs they write."

The collected experience of these songwriters makes this book the essential word of songwriting―as spoken by the songwriters themselves.

About this title

About the Author:

DANIEL RACHEL is a writer and musician. He wrote his first song when he was sixteen and was the lead singer of Rachel's Basement. A specialist in Forum Theatre direction, he lives in north London with his partner and three children. The Art of Noise is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

RAY DAVIES

 

And just when I wanted no one to be there / All of my friends were there / Not just my friends / But their best friends too.

Behind Ray Davies is the celebrated British music hall tradition: an era of song, laughter and alcohol. Music hall was riotous and unconstrained by the Royal Patent which regulated legitimate theatres, and its songs told stories in the folk tradition. Rogues, wastrels and criminals were remembered and even celebrated on the Victorian stage, like ‘Sam Hall’ or George Leybourne’s comic character ‘Champagne Charlie’. The created persona is also a characteristic of Ray Davies’s songwriting. Just as the revered Vesta Tilley was the first music hall star to dress as a man, so ‘Lola’ was the first male pop character to dress as a woman. The molly houses of eighteenth-century London streamed with cross-dressers and effeminate masculine personalities. Following in the tradition, music hall stars were able to offer a contrast to contemporary prudishness just as modern pop can challenge archaic attitudes. Hoxton-born Marie Lloyd sang the saucy ‘She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before’. This story of a naive country girl arriving wide-eyed in London has echoes in the Davies ballads ‘Big Black Smoke’ and ‘Polly’. His songbook runs riot with sexual ambiguity as well as an eye for male vulnerability: ‘Out Of The Wardrobe’ and the more directly gay and fancy-free figure of ‘David Watts’. The Kinks, as their name suggested, played theatrical camp.

The London of 1860 had conspicuous parallels with the world Ray Davies would mirror in song a century later. More than 50,000 prostitutes were earning a living on the streets of the capital. The city was rife with disease and filled with an awful stench from the Thames, and tens of thousands of families lived packed into one-room tenements. Charles Booth’s study of the working class revealed that almost a third of Londoners were living on or around the poverty line. In 1966, at the height of the media-proclaimed Swinging Sixties, the disparity between excess and bare existence was equally shocking. When England lifted the World Cup at Wembley the nation’s number one singalong was ‘Sunny Afternoon’. Davies had conceived the song in stark contrast to the mood of the age. Behind the knees-up rousing chorus the song attacked in subtle, cutting verse the big fat momma, symbol of an all-consuming, taxing government, and the drunkenness and cruelty of a broken-down aristocrat. ‘Dead End Street’ reflected the country’s failings with equally devastating observation, referring to a crack up in the ceiling and family nourishment limited to bread and honey. The song was reminiscent of Fred W. Leigh and Charles Collins’s standard ‘My Old Man’, which told of a couple fleeing from the burden of unpaid rent. Davies’s compositions offered musical gaiety to sweeten bitter tales. The naked E major descending scale of ‘The Money Go Round’ robed itself in vaudeville delivery whilst attacking the theft of intellectual property. ‘All Of My Friends Were There’ described a disguise of shame with a worn moustache and parted hair. Out of the circus rhythm, falling notes in F major release the song’s joviality into a beautifully segued half-time melancholy. Wit was a Davies tool of anger handled with precision blows.

The great British songwriting legacy is traditionally in defiance of the establishment. Like Jagger and Richards, the outspoken Davies paid little heed to convention. A century earlier Harry Clifton had accepted payment from factory owners to write songs encouraging employees to graft, but ‘Work, Boys, Work and Be Contented’ reflected a very different mood from the industrial world of the Sixties. Davies voiced the grievances and plight of the neglected working man. His songs recognized the hardship and struggle at the propping-up end of society. ‘(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman’ was a song of escapism from strikes and bills, whilst the celluloid dreamer of ‘Oklahoma USA’ asks all life we work but work is a bore, if life’s for livin’ then what’s livin’ for? Davies’s songbook is a chronicle capturing the pulse and heart of the British working man. His stories show the realities with telling insights from everyday life, and his observations blend quaint and humorous storytelling with damning indictments of authority. He tells of prosaic characters and their everyday rituals, such as taking afternoon tea or roast beef on a Sunday, watching football or negotiating the weights and pulls of emotional attachment. His words are accessible and easy to understand, and there is a magnetism in the song construction that is deceptive in its simplicity. One of The Kinks’ greatest achievements was The Village Green Preservation Society, celebrating a nostalgic image of a disappearing world. The village green acts as the focal point for the characters of ‘Walter’ and ‘Johnny Thunder’, representing a decaying of innocence. But it was not just a fondness for the past and the last good old-fashioned steam-powered trains that informed the album. There was an underlying sense of hope, determination and an ache for change. As the Seventies dawned, Davies would take these desires and re-examine his relationship to pop music.

The fountainhead of Ray Davies’s imagination is London. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ conjures the unique atmosphere of the city’s famous river. It is the nearest pop music has to Impressionism in art. The paintings of Whistler and Monet depict the fog of London shrouding the Thames, and Davies too draws the dirty old river with strokes of enduring symbolism. His eye for detail came from an art-school background. As a student at Croydon Art College he regularly crossed Waterloo Bridge, and this, coupled with a brief period as an in-patient at St Thomas’ Hospital where he was able to watch the river flow, provided the idea for the song. His simple storytelling and eye for life’s everyday detail bring to mind Hogarth’s paintings and the fiction of Charles Dickens. Davies, though, connects with his audience via the highly accessible channel of popular melody. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ rests on three sets of five-note melodies working their way lazily down one octave. Another inspirational Londoner, William Blake, published in 1794 his collection Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience. The poems juxtapose the contrary states of humanity that interest Davies: good with corruption; childishness with adulthood; sexual purity with lust and jealousy. Two centuries may divide the writings, but the common ground is clear. Like Blake before him, Davies is keenly attuned to the city and the human beings who inhabit it.

In 1964, the newly elected Labour government, the first in thirteen years, boasted a straight-talking prime minister with a Yorkshire accent. The Kinks, too, traded on accent. Davies sang in his natural north London voice, establishing a semi-spoken delivery. Equally characteristic of The Kinks’ early releases was the group’s instrumentation. The sound of Dave Davies’s guitar on ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ was revolutionary. Both songs rested upon raw driven chord movement, abrupt key changes and fierce staccato. Fifty years later Metallica re-recorded ‘You Really Got Me’ for Ray’s collaborations album. It represented a homecoming for heavy rock’s founding influence. Before the invention of foot pedals to change frequency dynamics at the press of switch, Ray’s younger brother experimented by skewering a knitting needle into his eight-amp guitar speaker. Dave’s home-modelled Green Amp, once fed through a Vox AC30, emitted a cacophonous distorted effect. It was ahead of its time and defined the early Kinks sound.

The Davies brothers were born at 6 Denmark Terrace, Muswell Hill. Raymond Douglas arrived on 21 June 1944 as British troops advanced through Italy. Three years later David Russell Gordon completed the family of two boys and six girls. ‘Come Dancing’, written by Ray four decades on, and adapted in 2008 as an award-winning off-West End musical, nostalgically revisited his childhood memories: his sister dancing at the local Palais and he the unseen observer at the window watching two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate. Tragically, on the eve of Ray’s thirteenth birthday, his older sister Rene collapsed on a West End ballroom dance floor and never recovered consciousness. Her present to him was a Spanish guitar. It was the birth of Ray’s complex relationship with music. The front room of Denmark Terrace offered a new space for night-time revelry. It was the home of the family piano and later the gramophone, and the room of entertainment, particularly when the boys’ father came home drunk from the pub over the road. The finger-picking country-and-western-styled two chords of ‘You Really Got Me’ were radicalized with dramatic key shifts and repetition on the front-room upright. Davies would increasingly construct ideas at the piano. He told Melody Maker in 1966, ‘The chords come first. The lyrics grow from fitting words to sounds … I’m not a good piano player. If you are reasonably good on an instrument and use it to compose on then you tend to get too complex—and that doesn’t work in pop music.’ Ray and Dave had served their apprenticeship in north London free-and-easies. In 1960 The Ray Davies Quartet, augmented by school friend Pete Quaife, performed their first shows, playing local dances. The band name changed from The Ramrods to The Boll Weevils to The Ravens until a settled line-up with the addition of Mick Avory on drums signed to Pye Records as The Kinks on 23 January 1964. Within a year the quartet was celebrating a trio of number-one singles.

For the next four years Davies’s rapidly developing conversational tone demanded centre stage. Band arrangements become subservient to narrative storytelling. ‘Where Have All The Good Times Gone’ recalled Daddy didn’t have no toys and mummy didn’t need no boys; ‘Well Respected Man’ reflects Fifties conformity and class, but the main character secretly adores the girl next door ’cause he’s dying to get at her; ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ points to the writer’s interest in subterfuge: they seek him here, they seek him there; ‘Situations Vacant’ addresses upward social mobility and ‘Mr Pleasant’ superficial domestic happiness. Ray was the cruel observer with a fragile vocal delivery: if I can’t have you to myself / set me free. The writing revelled in the elasticity of language: my poor rheumatic back / yes, yes, yes it’s my autumn almanac and was sparing in the use of the word love. Davies brought an emotional and intellectual core to popular music delivered with subtle satire and social commentary. His trick was to favour imagination over reportage. Unfortunately in 1966, the American Federation of Musicians of the United States withheld permits, preventing The Kinks from touring the country. The Davies brothers’ historical infighting on stage had fallen foul of an Anglo-American union agreement. In 1969 Ted Dreber, assistant president of the Federation, told Rolling Stone magazine that although there was no reference to the band on file the ‘reciprocity agreement allows either union to withhold permits for a group if they behave badly on stage or fail to show for scheduled performances without good reason’. In ‘Americana’ Davies described the problem slightly differently: … the English beat group known as The Kinks are banned from America / Their licence to perform has been revoked indefinitely, before centring the disagreement on an altercation with a television union representative: You with your red hunting jackets and your yellow frilly shirts … you’re never gonna work in America again. For Ray it was a disastrous and at the same time pivotal moment in his career. He responded by going underground. What emerged was exploratory and adventurous writing rewarded with commercial wilderness. Spirituality undercut ‘God’s Children’. Loss, depth and maturity blessed the endless and sacred ‘Days’. The successful writer ‘Sitting In My Hotel’ dressed in satin strides and two-tone daisy roots … writing songs for old-time vaudeville revues was a sumptuous piano ballad with unexpected movement of chords and melody. As the Seventies began the American ban was lifted but Davies has always felt that The Kinks were denied their greatest opportunity. The country would embrace the band again, culminating with a performance (including the appropriately titled ‘Give The People Want They Want’) to a sold-out Madison Square Garden in 1981, but the momentum of the Sixties had been irrevocably crushed.

The British Music Hall Society motto, ‘cherishing the jewels of Britain’s musical past but actively supporting the interests of the future’ might have been created for The Kinks. Much of the extensive commentary on the band’s work would have you believe that Davies’s writing career halted abruptly sometime around the end of the Sixties, then briefly reappeared in the early Eighties, before conducting a valedictory tour in the 2000s. Music chart statistics do a great disservice by suggesting that success is directly linked to artistic achievement. The songwriting of Ray Davies dispels this notion single-handedly. After a breathtaking run of magnificent singles in the Sixties, he began to look outside mainstream expectation. A series of records investigated the possibilities of the long-player and its relationship to popular music. They were bold and daring explorations. Soap Opera addressed the privileges of fame, using spoken-word links. Schoolboys In Disgrace was a collected song cycle examining education whilst Preservation I and II took Davies’s theatrical leanings into scripted character parts. The release of Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) in 1969 coincided with The Who’s rock opera, Tommy. The two albums, though vastly different in conception, embraced a thematic song cycle reminiscent of Italian cantata. But whereas Pete Townshend began to sidestep the structures of the popular song, verse, chorus, middle eight, Davies remained episodic, allowing each song to work independently within the greater theme. In his twenties Davies had taken orchestral lessons and their influence has affected various of his projects since. A commissioned piece, Flatlands, in the early Eighties, recorded with the Britten Sinfonia, used a choral offering to evoke the atmosphere of the Norfolk landscape. The Kinks Choral Collection in 2009 allowed long-forgotten gems such as the yearning ‘Celluloid Heroes’ and the suburban conformity of ‘Shangri-La’ to be arranged for the Crouch End Festival Chorus. Noel Gallagher employed the same voices in his debuting Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in 2011. It was a clear tribute and a reminder of a 66-year-old’s influence in the new millennium.

In conversation Davies has consistently and perhaps deliberately given his songs ambiguous interpretations. X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography was a master class in veiled truths and opacity. He is like a crossword: the pleasure is found in the challenge, not the personality of the game-setter. Meeting for our conversation was a flirtation of phone calls, theatre visits and backstage bonhomie. Ray has a kind, inviting manner and is a tease when explaining the songwriting process.

Carol Ann Duffy suggested in an interview that words take on a greater value when they are typed because in print they seem more glamorous and important.

Strangely enough, thinking back to ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, that was typed out, first draft, never changed...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1250051290
• ISBN 13: 9781250051295
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528