Say goodbye again....
There you go.
If I asked you
straight off the bat,
what is the music that made you...
what immediately comes to mind?
The Jungle Book.
When I was little,
literally my first memory is
sitting in our drawing room
(we're the sort of family
that had a drawing room) and
we had the sort of the family
record player,
this big old sort of 60s thing.
And I think the only record
that I was interested
in, certainly, was Walt
Disney's Jungle Book.
I just remember being tiny
and kind of playing it
over and over again,
the Bare Necessities and
Trust in Me and all of those songs.
Do you think they came out
in The Divine Comedy's music?
Can we hear those in there, do you think?
Absolutely.
I think there's a lot of
sort of Disney soundtrack
vibe in my songs
because
I think people of my age,
when we think of sort of
those magical feelings,
those butterflies in the stomach,
we think Disney really.
I have two elder brothers.
They'd have new bands that they loved,
you know, and I would naturally kind of
listen to them.
The first big thing was the Electric
Light Orchestra.
I remember,
quite vividly,
Des listening
to the whole of Out of the Blue
with the lights off in the playroom.
We had a playroom,
we were that family and
I was there listening to it all with him,
and I think that comes out
in my music as well.
I mean, I do still love ELO, and Jeff
Lynne is one of the best song writers
I can think of.
Well, the first time I
sort of saw any music
on the telly, on mainstream
telly that
seemed to be overtly
from my neck of the woods
was The Undertones.
And to be specific, My Perfect Cousin
on Top of the Pops.
And that was a weird thing to
suddenly see people on Top of the Pops
that could have, you know,
been at the shop down the road.
And I guess that might have
pressed a little button
in my head going...
You could do that too. You know,
it looks like fun.
I would pinpoint
my dad playing the piano.
Usually on a Sunday morning,
you'd hear him in the drawing room,
playing usually
something like Khachaturian
or Rachmaninoff, something uber romantic.
We still have the same piano up in my
mum's house,
and every time I play, it's like
takes me right back.
Not least
because I wrote a lot of my
early songs on that as well.
My dad always sort of drew the
the similarity between,
you know, me on the stage
and he in the pulpit preaching.
They're not a million miles
away from each other.
And
I certainly have to stop myself
moralising in songs and preaching
at audiences.
Buying No Regrets,
the Best of Scott Walker
and the Walker Brothers
in 1992 on cassette
is like an absolutely formative
moment for me.
So take me back.
Where did you buy the cassette?
I think I was living
on my brother's sofa
in Ealing at the time,
and yes,
I think I'd bought it
in Woolworths,
ah, Woolworths
because I'd sort of seen his name
written in lots of music press.
You know, people name checking him.
Even down to
John O'Neill from The Undertones,
who produced our first record
said, "You sound a bit like
Scott Walker." I went, huh?
It was
actually when I saw
the advert for it on the TV
that just this amazing
sound came out of this man's mouth
like I'd never heard anybody make.
And I bought the record
and I instantly was just intoxicated.
I don't think, you know, I'm
a carbon copy of Scott, but - I wish -
but I do notice sort of vocal inflections
that I just learned from him
and I can't get rid of now.
I had heard a rumor
that you used to send him your records.
Is that true?
Yeah, it's true.
Him and Michael Nyman were
the recipients of many posted CDs.
I don't know why I did that.
It was like, I think I owed them a debt.
And then I read an article...
it was for Les Inrockuptibles
the French magazine
and they
said, "Do you know of The Divine Comedy?"
And he said, "Oh,
is that that little Irish guy
who keeps sending me his records?
Yeah, I
think he
likes my 60s work more than
what I do now." And he was right.
In the mid-80s, I became an indie kid.
It seemed the thing to do when you're 15.
My gateway drug into indie-dom was U2.
A bunch of us from school like scraped
and scrimped
to have enough money
to buy these magical golden tickets
to see
U2 in Croke Park on the Joshua Tree
tour in 1987.
And it's just like,
really pivotal kind of moment for me
to be in that space
with this band who were literally
suddenly the biggest thing on the planet
and oh, it sends
shivers down my spine,
just thinking about it.
It really does.
A very important
musical moment for me was
seeing the film A Room With a View,
the Merchant Ivory film.
It was the sort of combination of
the beautiful,
clever E.M.
Forster story,
perfect casting, perfect acting,
beautiful scenarios
and this like amazing music.
Mostly Puccini.
When she
has the kiss in the poppy field,
it's like the most romantic thing
I've ever seen and heard.
And you know, it'll never get
better than that for me, really.
I'm just trying to reinvent that
all the time.
There are sort of artists
that maybe were contemporaries of mine
that were very important,
like Jarvis Cocker and Pulp.
In fact,
formative moment was I was recording
Casanova in a studio in Bath
called Moles.
And they had a nightclub down below,
and after a long day's recording,
me and
Darren, the engineer, went downstairs
for a drink.
There was nobody in there,
but the DJ put on the new Pulp single
Common People.
And by the
end of it, I was
just had my head in my hands thinking,
how on earth is one meant to sort of,
you know, live up to this?
This is so incredible.
You know, it's definitely
in the top five songs of the 90s for me
and, yeah,
I was immensely jealous.