Hooked on Beethoven
Alex James
Stephen Lipson, a record producer, lives in the village up the road. Well, he was very pleased with himself, glowing with satisfaction like someone who’d just finished a particularly abstruse crossword. Back in the parish after a couple of weeks in Los Angeles, where he’d been making the new American Idol record. He didn’t even bore me with playing the record itself like musicians always do, but he told me how he’d played everything on it because American session players are all muppets, and then four hours after he’d finished it, it was number one on iTunes. ‘And it still is!’ said Penny, his wife. ‘And top of the Billboard 100.’ For any record-maker, that’s a bull’s-eye.
I like that guy, Stephen Lipson. He’s had more number ones than just about anybody, and he’ll have plenty more, and still his name will remain obscure and that’s the way he likes it. On the whole, I find record producers more interesting than recording artists for that reason. They’ll have music on their tombstones whereas everyone else will merely have their name. Producers just get on with making records with the intensity and glee of children doing jigsaw puzzles.
I’m so over having famous friends, as I said to Robin Gibb on Wednesday. It’s worse than Christmas at the moment with all these summer parties. If I see Tracey Emin eating another canapé, I’ll scream. Anyway, I hadn’t realised Robin and his brothers wrote and produced ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘Night Fever’ in the same afternoon, a strong contender for the best day’s work ever, especially as they probably didn’t get up until lunchtime. Even then, the record company came and listened to the songs, said hmmm it wasn’t sure and suggested changing the words to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ to ‘Saturday Night’.
I guess it’s easy to miss music. I heard the birds singing in the garden today and had to ask myself whether they’d been doing it the whole time, which they had, of course. The Gibbs themselves didn’t realise what they’d done when they wrote those songs.
I’m being tossed around somewhat on a stormy sea of unfamiliar and overwhelming music at the moment and it’s doing wonders for my handwriting. I did a couple of days’ songwriting this week with a 19-year-old who’s just signed to Colombia Records. He has good hair. With hair as good as that, all that is required is a phone call to Professor Lipson and all the rest is a formality. Rather incredibly, the kid sang like Michael Jackson as well as having the hair. That doesn’t happen very often. It’s always hard to tell what’s going to happen on entering a recording studio. It’s a bit like going to New York. Just because you’ve been there before doesn’t mean you have any idea what’s going to happen next time. You go for a wander, turn two corners and suddenly you’re in a world you’ve never seen before. And sometimes it’s scary. Making music, one tends to feel that one knows everything or nothing. There is no middle ground.
I’d been listening to Bizet quite a lot and I was pretty certain I didn’t know anything, but I plugged in and suddenly it was the easiest thing in the world to make a big loud wonky noise. Julian started singing and waving his hair and the engineer was twiddling knobs and grinning like a madman. That feeling is better than any amount of record sales or audience approbation. Three guys making a noise no one’s heard before.
Listening to Bizet seemed to be doing wonders for my playing so I decided to give Beethoven a serious blast, starting with his First Symphony. I listened to it maybe ten times, and gave up, thinking I’d never be able to understand it properly. It was like trying to decipher birdsong. I didn’t feel like I was really hearing it. My concentration kept wandering; that’s partly why I listened to it so many times. Then I was picking some strawberries and it came into my head, the big hook, dub ba DAAH and it wouldn’t leave me alone. I’ve listened to it maybe 100 times since. Now I listen to it in my head. I even got the score, so I could follow it more closely. It’s almost too much and I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same again.
I’m not sure how good constant exposure to brilliance is for the ego, which is the only spanner in the songwriter’s toolbox. What the hell? Sink or swim, I’m going to start on some Brahms tomorrow.
Previous page
