Blue Sky Diaries - Part 4

January 25, 2001

Today was a very, very fine days work. The World Has More Than Seven Wonders is nine years old. It might have been Phil that noticed it as he was flicking through Her Beauty, My Mystery and His Holy Ghost. If ever words were transformed by taking them off a page and setting them alight with music then this is the poem. For me it’s an almost surreal experience as I never ever conjured these kind of incarnations for my rhymes though I did always say that they were lyrics to unwritten tunes.

The tune, arrangement and Edwardsian quirk and drive give this piece of work a sound that takes the psychedelic sounds of 67 Beatles and marries it with the exuberant crescendos of Twist and Shout. Mark dipped into his box of vinyl oddities and pulled The White Haired Girl (A Ballet In Eight Scenes) performed by the The Shanghai Dance School (where does he find them!!!), sampled it and sent the track going beautifully raving barmy. The vibe has me imagining my students going daft to this at some Derryvolgie party. The idea makes me giggle inside because one of my fears was that they would see this as some middle aged project.

As the day and the week begins to run away from us I am aware that Sprinkle, the melody of which Sam lost sometime yesterday is looking decidedly precarious in the grand scheme of things. It seems crucial to me in the overall balance of the poem/song cycle and the content just beefs the whole thing up. I believe we need it. As they come near the end of work on Seven Wonders I am told that in twenty minutes we need to start work on the next song. If we don’t catch that melody, Sprinkle is lost forever.

At the eleventh and a half hour Hill discovers the song. As we play it to the guys I am a tad nervous as it is literally just formed. It passes the audition and before we were finished Mark was away off on all kinds of sampled directions. Where he ended was where David Gray and Blue Nile might meet up with the children’s programme Chigley’s theme tune which he indeed sampled onto the track. Take this and put it behind the Cockburnesque nature of the spoken word parts and it all adds up to the most beautiful of things.

There is a realisation within me that this album is suddenly becoming a life’s work. For some years I have been obsessed by grace and how it works it way into the very tiniest nooks and crannies of our lives. We even called our second daughter Jasmine Grace. So this album takes my sermons and my thoughts and weaves them into a fascinating piece of art.

I think my thirty years listening to music and thinking and debating it’s strengths and foibles is very much in evidence here. My difference between the difference between inspirational art that communicates about God as well as reflecting His creativity as opposed to the seamless propaganda and clichés of doctrinal couplets that are a blasphemy against such an artistic God. As I told Queen’s University students just last week, we evangelical Protestants have been robbed of our art. We robbed ourselves. This album is my little contribution to redressing some of that. It is an album where we are not at all in your face about being in your face. It is out there a little, nesting on the hedgerows of left field but it is not a hedge that is so far across that bridge that people cannot be encouraged across to pick it’s berries.

As we leave the studio tonight I am aware that there is much still to do and the standard is set. I imagine that less will mean more on the songs that are left but that less still needs to be quality.

Back at the Travel Inn we had a very wonderful last supper. It has been a huge bonus of the week, getting to know Mark and Dave under the watchful eye of our intrepid waitress, Patience. Tonight we heard about Dave’s bum chord in Japan in front of Eric Clapton - ouch!!!!! Mark regaled us with his legendary session with one Julio Sinatra. It certainly tickled Sam. Dave apparently has a tape of the entire session, chat and all. Mark also told us about the bass player in his jazz band who told a guy called Paul McCartney, back in 1962, that he’s never make it if he didn’t learn to read music. Pity he didn’t. I wonder what he would have written. Paul McCartney eh - I wonder what he did instead!

A day in the studio ending with rock star small chat. I could quite handle this.

Back