Stand!
So, Mike, tell me, what is the the music that made you?
I was a child in the Sixties.
I was lucky enough to grow up during that amazing decade
where it was incredible innovation and amazing music all the time.
I remember when I was about
five or six hearing soul music on the radio.
Otis Redding and the Four Tops and the Temptations.
And getting turned on to emotion in music.
Those voices were full of emotion.
I didn't think about it.
I didn't think, "Oh, my goodness, song is an expression for emotion."
I didn't think anything theoretical.
I just responded to the emotion in the songs and loved it.
And when I look back now, I see that it was a kind of awakening.
When you started writing, did you then think,
I've got to get those emotions in there?
I've got to make sure I give people that experience.
Never consciously,
but it must have, because emotion was something that was very important to me
in music from an early age, perhaps that's fed through into
the way that I sing and the way that I write.
The second song
I picked is Kites by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound.
It's a forgotten track from the psychedelic heyday of about 1967.
But it what it taught me and what I always remember
about the song is the melody, the quality of melody.
It's got a very unusual, almost Eastern, maybe Chinese melody to it,
and great flights of melody.
The vocal sounds like it's on a magic carpet or something.
And that opened me to the possibilities of melody.
My mum and I used to go on holiday to London every summer.
And one day we were in a shop
on Piccadilly Circus called I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet.
It was a kind of hippie clothing chain, but this was the flagship store
and they'd a record department at the back.
And the guy at the record department was playing Stand by Sly and the Family Stone.
And it was a very, very loud sound system.
It was the first time I'd ever heard music properly on that kind of sound system.
I'll never forget the power of that song, with the way it goes...
Stand! Stand!
All these powerful voices arrayed together.
And that showed me the power of a recording...
the power of sound.
When I was about 12 or 13,
I had an older friend who played me Dylan's records
and he played me the album Blonde on Blonde,
and that turned me on to lyric. The power of lyric.
And there was one particular song
called Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again.
It's maybe not one of Dylan's greatest songs, but at the age of 13,
it was the one that amused me and entertained me
and opened me up to the possibility of what mischief
you could have with lyrics,
because Bob's rhyming and his lyrics in that song are really quite outrageous.
And also it's got a large number of verses.
It just goes on and on and on and on and on.
I can almost hear the band think it's going to be the last verse,
but then Bob starts singing again and they have to pick it up again.
It's quite funny.
Have you ever met Dylan?
Did you ever get to be in the same room as him?
I've met him twice, actually,
in the 1980s, when the Waterboys were first emerging
and someone had played him my song, The Whole of the Moon.
And he liked it.
And he was in London and so was I.
And through a mutual acquaintance, he invited me down to the studio.
So I went down with a couple of my band mates...
He was working in
the Eurythmics' studio in London.
And Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics was producing the session.
We turned up and there was Bob.
In fact, we saw him.
He was sitting behind one of those studio screens – those baffles –
and all we could see was his curly hair sticking up on top of the baffle.
But we knew it was him. And he was playing an electric guitar
and he was very, very friendly, very nice. Very pleased to see us.
I think he's super, super shy.
And of course, he's carrying the weight
of being Bob Dylan and everybody knowing that about him.
I'm proud to say I've smoked a reefer that Bob Dylan has rolled
and I'm even prouder to say Bob Dylan has smoked a reefer that I've rolled.
I first got turned on to the Velvets by hearing David Bowie doing their songs.
He used to do Waiting for the Man and White Light, White Heat in his live sets.
And so that alerted me to the songwriting of Lou Reed.
It's a hackneyed phrase, but honestly, it blew my mind
the way that they deconstructed music.
Everything was sonic.
Actually, the great lesson of the Velvet Underground was that
technical proficiency is less important than creative inspiration.
I spent my teenage years in Ayr. The only gigs
we could blag really were in local hotels. Like rock nights
in front of 25 people, and we'd be up there playing Heroin
and Waiting for the Man and Sex Pistols numbers.
And people would just be looking at us as if we had grown two heads.
Holes came out in
1998 on an album called Deserter's Songs.
And at the time, I was very jaded with music.
I had almost stopped listening to rock'n'roll. I'd spent years in Ireland
and got very deep into Celtic music.
And I hadn't listened to new rock records for maybe a decade.
And I was in a record store.
I remember it was the old Virgin Megastore at Piccadilly Circus
And this amazing music was playing, and it had this high voice
and a strange languid band.
And of course, as I always do when I hear something great
in a record shop, I go up to the counter and say, "What's that?"
And it was Mercury Rev. So I bought the record.
And it turned me on again to rock music.
It was the beginning of me beginning
to keep up with all the new records again for the first time in a decade.
And I'm very grateful for that reminder that there was magic out there.
I think she's the best songwriter active in the world
right now, at least in Western culture that I know about.
I think she's the number one.
I remember Damon Albarn quite recently.
I'm sure you remember too. He dissed her and said she didn't write her own songs.
I thought, "You silly twit...
"You should be apologising to her. She's light years ahead of you."
I picked a song called Marjorie from her Evermore album.
I bought the album for my daughter because she likes Taylor,
I was blown away and every time Marjorie came on...
it's about her grandmother who died...
and she's singing about how she can still feel her grandmother's presence
and what died didn't stay dead.
I found it so moving.
And I was sitting there, tears rolling down my cheeks
listening to this.
Trying not to let my daughter see it.
I don't mind her seeing me crying.
She's seen me cry before,
but it was her record and her moment and I didn't want to steal it.
Oh, boy, what a song.
And for me, Taylor's work is a reminder that people are still writing great songs.