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Interviews Daily Telegraph May 2004
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Where
does a song come from? Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and rising star Rufus Wainwright are both brilliant songwriters – and fans of each other's work. They talk to David Cheal about the art of pop David Cheal Could we begin by talking about the mechanics of songwriting – how you actually set about doing it? Meeting of minds: Rufus Wainwright and Neil Tennant discuss songwriting with David Cheal Rufus Wainwright My mother and father are songwriters [his father is Loudon Wainwright III, his mother folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who also knitted his jumper]. When I left university my mum forbade me to work because she felt I should be at home writing songs. She understood the direction I was heading and gave me the opportunity to do that. I don't think a lot of people in the music business have had that. Neil Tennant Do you get up and sit at the piano? RW I get up every morning and play for a good hour. Well, I try to! NT When I was at Smash Hits [Tennant was a journalist on the pop magazine] I wrote a lot of songs while I worked. I remember sitting on a bus going home from work and I wrote the whole rap in my head for what became What Have I Done to Deserve This. I was repeating it, and I got home and I wrote it all down. RW I do think the best songs are usually written like that. For all the sitting naked in front of the piano every morning, probably the best songs I've ever written came when I was sitting in the bathtub... it will pop out whenever. NT The work is finishing it. Because often you get a great idea for a bit of tune, but your heart positively sinks because you know you've got to sit down and work the whole thing out and do the rhyming thing. And I always try to make the lyrics sound easy rather than forced. DC The legend is that Paul McCartney dreamt Yesterday and woke up and it was a fully-formed song. RW John Lennon did that with Across the Universe. NT John Lennon was half asleep and he heard a police siren go past and that gave him the start of the song. Chris [Lowe, Tennant's partner in the Pet Shop Boys] does the same thing, a lot of things half asleep. People are amazed when they're in the studio and they see Chris lying apparently asleep on the sofa; in fact he likes to drift off and then he suddenly has an idea. I once actually had a dream that we were recording a song with David Bowie. And I woke up and I subsequently finished it, it was called Friendly Fire. Every morning I wake up with a tune in my head. Do you get that? Songsmiths: the two musicians are admirers of each other's work RW For me it's very much about walking. I'll walk a lot without eating, get physically exhausted, and then I have a song… and then deserve a meal. I tend to torture myself, essentially, for music. DC Do you ever get a sense that the songs are fully formed, already there to be teased out? RW I don't know where they come from. I think part of it is a blackout as well. I do sometimes think, what are all these things that I've created? Why didn't I go into law or something? NT I think the best things come quite easily and you don't have to force it. RW There are still a couple of songs that have taken five or six years to finish: these epic, monsterpieces. NT I think the ones you have around for six or seven years are also really tricky. I start to think, what's the song about? And the answer is, I don't know. I can't rationalise what the song's about, even if I like the title I've got for it, and so I can never finish it. Do you care if people listen to what your songs are about? RW Do I care? I enjoy it, but I don't think that it matters. NT I tend to listen to songs as pieces of music. You know the famous story of Bob Dylan and John Lennon listening to either Bob's or the Beatles' new record. And Dylan's going, "Yeah man, just listen to the lyrics," and Lennon's going "No, just listen to the sound…" and I'm with John Lennon on that. What I like is the whole thing, the feeling it gives me. When I worked with Dusty Springfield, she said she had no interest in the lyrics, and I was briefly upset, because I thought she was such a good interpretive singer. What she was interested in was melody. But in the course of making melody work, she made the words work. RW But there are certain songs that are so well crafted, like for instance The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Ewan MacColl. You hear it sung in this weird Scottish brogue, and then you hear Roberta Flack's version. I'm interested in the relationship of the words to the melody in that song, the spacing and stuff. NT I remember when I first heard Strawberry Fields Forever, I'd read about it beforehand and John Lennon saying that he'd tried to write this song that was like a conversation between two people and I was fascinated by that. It's is a song where the words are really more sort of sounds. DC Who's the greatest? NT Well, wouldn't you have liked to have written Four Last Songs, by Richard Strauss? But wouldn't you also like to have written practically everything Marvin Gaye ever wrote? RW I've recently discovered Harold Arlen. I think he's the most under-appreciated American songwriter. He wrote Come Rain or Come Shine, Get Happy, Over the Rainbow. I really think he's the greatest songwriter ever. DC Who are you writing for when you write a song? RW I have to say I'm kind of writing for Papa Verdi. I have this odd reverence for dead composers, just in terms of when I write music I lean on their sensibilities and try to think a little bit like them, and therefore kind of write for them. DC And how do you know when you've written a good one? NT I think that's difficult. Sometimes you think you've written a really good one and then you realise you haven't. RW I find sometimes you write and think "this is great" – which usually means it's pretty shit. NT Sometimes you think you're being important. RW Oh, that's the worst NT And everyone's gonna think, "Oh my God, they're such geniuses writing this." Chris now always says, "No, let's write rubbish!" 'Cos it's really difficult to write rubbish – you know: good, catchy, moronic, saying something sort of new, that's kind of funny. When I think of how quickly we wrote, "I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money" [from the 1986 hit Opportunities]. It was just so stupid, but only now do I appreciate it. RW I've been simplifying my style in terms of chord structure and accompaniment on the piano. But I like to keep both. I think there is the simple side which is always great, but I think the complicated, Straussian, hyper, Western chord structures, big weird things, still pull a lot of power if they're executed properly. NT People have got to be able to understand it, to get into the song. It mustn't close the door in their face; they sometimes think you're writing to be clever. RW I walk that line now, but then I wanted to. NT Yes, we do that too much. I think Chris and I undervalue what we do well, which is something simpler – because we get bored with it. RW But I still think that It's a Sin is one of the most dramatic, structurally sophisticated little gems that I've ever heard. NT Written in 15 minutes! What we try to do is intelligent pop, and there used to be a bigger audience for that than there is now. I guess Franz Ferdinand, now, are trying to do intelligent pop. One thing that's changed in Britain is that at one time people used to listen to all sorts of music together. On Radio 1 and, before that, on a thing called the Light Programme, you would listen to Engelbert Humperdinck followed by the Small Faces, followed by Jimi Hendrix, followed by Des O'Connor. On Sunday mornings everyone would listen to Three Way Family Favourites which played requests from British soldiers around the world and again you'd have Vera Lynn played next to the Who. DC It was the same on TV. I remember that famous Jimi Hendrix appearance on the Lulu show. NT Very famous! Mark Bolan on the Cilla Black show… Whereas nowadays we live in a culture – I think in America as well, though not so much – obsessed by cool, and it's a very uncreative thing. Nowadays you'll notice that pop television – Top of the Pops, CD:UK – is not driven by the charts. They've decided that the chart isn't important because the records don't sell that much. They go by what's cool. I think that's a shame. RW I think it's a shame, but it's also where good songwriting comes in to save the day. Because after the storm settles, a good song will last a bit of time. One of the first things that struck me about art was reading Shelley. He said that that which is false will eventually disappear, and that which is true will eventually come to the surface. That's sort of what keeps me going. A great song will stand the test of time. DC So that would be your barometer of a good song – that it endures? RW It's not so much that it endures, but that it has nothing to do with the time. It takes you away from the everyday world, it's a total escape mechanism. That you can live in that song, and be moved. And if it keeps doing that over the years, then it's great. NT It always fascinates me how musical styles can go totally out of fashion. For instance, you like Harold Arlen and what people now call the Great American Songbook, people know what those are now. And it's also quite interesting that there was a great bit of American songwriting that was actually quite clever and acerbic and economical, and those are the songs that survive. "Every time you say goodbye, I cry a little" for instance, which has got an incredibly clever lyric. And then you think of people like Ivor Novello who was astonishingly popular but nowadays the music is too firey. Franz Lehar was massively successful… And all those people from the '50s and '60s. We don't hear songs from people like Johnny Ray any more because it's too sort of harrowing. RW But I do think there are certain songs that are so undeniably sturdy, like some by Burt Bacharach, or Cole Porter or Rolling Stones or Abba. I hope I write at least one like them! DC At some point we got to this situation where it became important that people wrote what they sang. NT Yes, Frank Sinatra I think only wrote one song – he didn't feel that was his job. When we worked with Liza Minnelli, she'd had a meeting with Dave Stewart who suggested to her that she thought about her life and wrote lyrics about it – and she was just appalled! She said, that's not my job! My job is to sing and dance and be Liza Minnelli – it's a big enough job anyway. DC It grew out of that '60s individualism… RW It started with Bob Dylan. NT And the Beatles, their first album is half them and half covers. Then by the third album they proudly say it's all them. And that was the new thing. The Stones started writing because Andrew Loog Oldham realised the financial advantages of it and locked them in a room and told them they had to write a song. They wrote As Tears Go By or something, and got going… I think because of that, music became much simpler, harmonically, and the whole idea of lyrics changed because they became more about expressing yourself. Rufus Wainwright performs Leonard Cohen songs with Laurie Anderson and Nick Cave tonight and tomorrow at the Brighton Dome (01273 709709); he then tours the UK with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, starting Monday at the Festival Hall, London (0870 401 8181). His album 'Want One' is out on May 31 on Dreamworks. |
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