The Wave Pictures' Dave Tattersall gives Ragged Words a track by track guide to Instant Coffee Baby, out next week (05/05/08)
1. Leave The Scene Behind
We wanted to copy the cyclical minor key riff style songs of early Dire Straits, but obviously in our usual garage-y way. We even copied the faded-in intro of their ‘Down To The Waterline’, but with wammy bar backwards guitar. Backwards guitar is always fun. We like songs in the key of E minor, songs which have a simple blues-type structure and songs with ripping bass and electric guitar solos. Lyrically, the song elaborates on a fairly bland conversation I once had. The fiction is that the incident was dramatic and led to some kind of break up. We have always felt uncomfortable with other people’s desires to label us as belonging to some or other ‘scene’. Scenes are generally to be avoided. We love playing with other bands and musicians, but we were born out of the complete isolation of coming from a village in which there were no other bands, rather than a city band that come to exist through a scene. Consequently we have always been suspicious of scenes. Plus, they always seem to have more to do with clothes than music, and seem built to restrict the amount of different kinds of music you are supposed to admit to liking. They are also obsessed with the new. The new is valued above the special. So there is a certain pleasure in singing ‘Leave The Scene Behind’.
2. I Love You Like A Madman
Written on Christmas day, which is when this song is set. It’s a very sad song to me, but musically it’s a bit of a party number, which is a clashing combination that I like: there’s nothing sadder than a sad clown. For the first and possibly the last time, The Wave Pictures have a horn section. Darren Hayman conducted them through the Studio’s glass window. We were recorded live and did this in one take. I like the riff. It’s the kind of soul riff that indie bands play, rather than anything a soul band would do. I remember that I wrote the song on Christmas morning in about five minutes, but then spent Christmas afternoon fiddling around with just the middle section for about three hours. It was five minutes for everything else, then three hours on the four line middle section. Like most people, I find Christmas a very sad time of the year. I wish it didn’t exist.
3. We Come Alive
Simon Trought, the producer man, came round to out flat once and we listened to African pop together, things like the Bhundu Boys and the Four Brothers, with their gorgeous chiming guitars. He thought this sounded like them. We never thought about it, but I liked the comparison very much. It’s a sort of Jonathan Richman, Violent Femmes style doo-woppy thing. The story in the lyrics is completely made up, and I even sing that in the song, so no one can accuse me of not being honest. 4. Kiss Me This is us live with me playing the ukulele instead of the guitar. It’s in F sharp minor, which is almost as good as E minor. It’s a true story more or less: a girl that I liked at school wrote me a letter on pink paper, but all about her love for John Lennon and not me. It pissed me off a bit at the time. I don’t still hold it against John Lennon. It’s fun to sing songs you wrote when you were 17 and stupid, though. I put some lyrics in from blues songs that I liked, ‘Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor’ by Mississippi John Hurt are in there. I think I thought this would give strength to the idea that there is life outside the Beatles. It’s hard to say what I thought. It’s very old. This song has become more of an excuse to do solos and rock out than anything else. Also, it only has three chords, so it’s hard for us to make a mistake. Most bands have a song of this nature in their repertoire.
5. Instant Coffee Baby
This is our ‘Born To Run’! It has the epic quality of Bruce Springsteen, but it’s set in the tiny humdrum world of the Midlands village. It’s probably my favourite thing on the album. It’s got one of the best guitar solos on the record and some good handclaps and I’m not embarrassed by too many of the words. Lyrically, it’s a sort of collage of different memories and different people, but it’s all bolted together in such a way as to sound like one story about one guy and one girl. It’s funny how that happens. It’s similar to the way that your sleeping brain will bolt together different things from your day to make one story in a dream, but it’s a story that has no beginning and no end and doesn’t really make sense all the way through. It can never be fully understood and it isn’t even worth trying.
6. Avocado Baby
I thought that everyone knew about the Avocado Baby. It’s a story my parents read to me as a child. It’s a sort of proto Home Alone. The baby is fed avocados and becomes very strong, so he is able to defeat some burglars when his parents are out of the house. It turns out that no one knows that story, but it doesn’t seem to stop people liking this song. It has two cowbells on it, which is always a good sign. One of the pleasures of recording a band live is that accidental surprises can occur. On this, Franic goes for a bass guitar solo at the same moment that I go for a guitar solo. We both go for the same notes too. It sounds very practised, but it has never happened before or since. It sounds good to me anyway, a glorious mistake. This also has a good jumpy quality because a couple of bars are missing from an otherwise standard chord sequence during the verses. Also, I love avocados.
7. Friday Night In Loughborough
Loughborough is looking up a bit these days. They’ve spruced up the town centre and all that. But when I was growing up it was a complete dump. It was also the nearest town to Wymeswold, the village that Franic and I grew up in. It was where we used to get drunk when we were teenagers. I used to buy all my records in the now sadly closed Left Legged Pineapple. I first went to the cinema there: the Curzon, as in the song, which has changed its name now. It was the first place I was allowed to go without my parents, the first place I kissed a girl, the first place I had a job etc etc. It isn’t worth anything, it’s a complete nothing place, it just happens to be that place in the fairly dull story of my life. I actually hate it there, like the song suggests, and am glad I never have to go there anymore. I really did get in a fight with a marine, and everybody I know from back home has puked up in various bits of Loughborough at various times. All the place names are true. This song was written in less time than it takes to play. It’s all very very simple. It’s quite a popular one, which is always hard to understand because it came so easily compared with lots of songs that I wrote that nobody likes. I find it funny anyway.
8. Red Wine Teeth
A straight-forward break-up/alcoholism/blow job story in waltz time. I play piano on this, which was fun. The first chord sequence I had for these lyrics was actually laughed at by Franic and Jonny, so I had to go away and find a different one. It’s a good example of the band saving the day. I would be totally rubbish without the two of them. Still, I was very indignant and pissed off at the time. I enjoy singing the names of all the games. Everybody knows sardines and charades, but I should explain that sleeping bag is a game I used to play as a child. It was like blind man’s bluff, except instead of just wearing a blindfold you had to climb head first into a sleeping bag and then stumble around in that trying to grab your friends. Unsurprisingly, it really stinks of feet in the feet end of a sleeping bag. This is The Wave Pictures attempt at a country song in the style of Townes Van Zandt, but Jonny’s high harmony vocal makes the whole thing sound rather more like ‘Back for Good’ by Take That.
9. Strange Fruit For David
This is very popular and always fun to play. The lyrics are complete nonsense to me but the funny thing is that of all the songs I’ve written this seems to be the one that people think about the most. I’ve heard so many different explanations of what I might be on about. I always tell people they are right. Either all of the explanations are right or none of them are. My favourite thing about this particular recording is the violin playing of Dan Mayfield. He did it in one take having never heard the song before in his life. He really is a special musician.
10. Just Like A Drummer
Drummers always seem to sleep very well. I think they have less on their minds. I wanted to introduce the expression ‘’to sleep like a drummer’’ into the English language. It’s much more accurate than ‘’to sleep like a baby’’. Everyone knows that babies wake up all the time crying, but drummers sleep soundly through the night. They can fall asleep instantly on public transport or in noisy bars. Jonny Helm can even sleep standing up. I saw him do it once in an airport.
11. I Remembered
I just wanted that rhythm on a song on the album. Lyrically it’s the story of a moment of drunken madness that finds the narrator writing a person’s name down over and over again, frantically, for absolutely no reason. It never happened to me, I’m not really a doodler or a scribbler. I like the bongos and the ukulele and all the singing on this one. It’s very much in the style of Herman Dune, probably the most important band to me that I have ever worked with.
12. January And December
This is a duet with Lisa Li Lund. She thinks the lyrics are very filthy but I plead innocence. Her singing is great on this. Like most of the best recordings we have ever made, this take was spontaneous, recorded whilst we were warming up. It was just lucky Simon had the tape rolling. Lisa came in later and did her vocal part beautifully.
13. Cassius Clay
Some more nonsense, this one co-written with Toby Goodshank and David-Ivar Herman Dune. It’s a drunk party song, and we were drunk and having a party in the studio when we recorded it. We badgered Simon into playing guitar with us. I’m playing the ukulele. It’s a really nice way to leave the album. It’s nice to say goodbye smiling for once. I stole the line ‘’fantastic to feel beautiful again’’ from Tracy Emin. She has a piece that is just that sentence as a neon sign. It was lovely to me when I saw it. I hope she takes it as a compliment. I wish that everyone could have seen Jonny dancing around the studio to this when we were listening back. He’s one of the world’s greatest dancers.
