|
|
TIM BOOTH INTERVIEW PART THREE One thing some people have commented on is that your lyrics have become a lot less personal, or at least come across that way. On this record? Going back to the last couple of James albums as well. God, I don’t think that’s true. I’d have to get out Pleased To Meet You to look at it. Let’s talk about this record because it’s in my head. When I go for radio interviews, it’s the opposite, they think the lyrics are so personal and everyone assumes I’m writing in the first person. What happens is that I’ll get inspired by something that’s happening to me for a lyric or by something that’s bugging me. The lyric might then drift into another character but the initial inspiration always comes from something that’s going on for me. Wave Hello is a song about fear of commitment which definitely has resonance for me. But when the character says “things never turn out my way”, it’s no longer me at that point, because I’m lucky, I’m really blessed. I get to do my passion and make money out of it. How many people get that one? So I don’t consider “things don’t turn out my way” as being the reality for me, so the character had slightly shifted to a bit more of a loser-ish character half way through, but it definitely started from my own fears. But songs like In The Darkness and Eh Mamma? In The Darkness? A song about obsessions and sexual fantasies? Sorry, that one definitely comes from me. I have a lot of sexual fantasies and obsessions. Me and my partner, we laugh and talk about it and that’s part of a great relationship. You’re with somebody who you know is your life partner, but you still get crushes and fancy other people and it’s up to you where you make choices on that, where you draw the line. Eh Mamma. I think, and I slightly changed the lyric because I didn’t understand what I was writing, is a lyric about my baby. And it was initially written, it was a weird song, almost a sex song written from a baby’s point of view. The lyric was originally “heaven is a breast, it’s the one on the left yeah yeah” And that was the punchline. “I’ve been working out all day but I’m skin and bone man, I’ve been trying to pump it up with testosterone” then it used to go “I can’t really work my body and I can’t really work my mind.” It was almost this frustration of a baby trying to get its body going and not being able to. And “heaven knows there is no god above like mamma, there never was a girl who’s good enough like mamma, when I’m older mamma marries me”, that was all about the baby coming. But I didn’t even know what I was writing about. And the “spit or swallow” lyric was a bit about drinking milk and then I realized it sounded like a really filthy sexual pun. I literally changed about five words and the whole song became a sex song. So I think that was quite an intimate song presaging my baby coming. It’s a bit difficult to get that out of the lyrics Of course it is. But isn’t that bizarre. “I’m sending her an apple to tempt her” that bit I wasn’t so sure about. That was a bit I added later when I realized that it wasn’t going to work. Does that happen a lot where you don’t understand what you’re writing? Quite a bit. Discover was a really tricky one for me. I nearly didn’t want it on the record because I knew people would go “this is just about me” and the lyric is so raw that I was a bit uncomfortable with some of it. And Lee was going “this is one of the best songs on the album, it’s going on”. And so I had to leave it on the album and I would have left it on there but part of me was worrying that people would think I’d really cracked on this one. There’s a line on there that’s taken from the original version you were doing of “The Shining”, the line about the Nazis and the Jews. Yes, well spotted. Do you do that a lot? Use ideas from other songs. No, that’s the only line. Ever. That I couldn’t find a home for. Even you don’t know this, I wrote that line about three years into James in a song about the horror of experiments, what they put animals through reminds me of how clinically they massacred the Jews, and it was a line in a song that James never released. The Holocaust devastated me when I was told about this when I was about 13. As a teenager, it was like discovering there was a Satan in the world. It was so shocking and devastating to me. The first time I shaved my head was after watching a programme on the Holocaust, I was just so upset and remember just going upstairs, cutting my hair in a mirror and it got lower and lower until I’d shaved my head. And now I’m with a Jew and when she went to Poland and went to Ausschwitz, she took months to recover. It still has such a power for me. Couple that with my past life stuff makes me think I have some resonance to that place. And I’m not sure where I’d be, whether I’d be the Nazi or the Jew. That’s the truth of it for me. There’s a line about Palestine. Is that coming from the same angle? You see what’s going on there. Well, in what sense, what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians. Yeah, it’s terrible to witness what they’re doing to the Palestinians and America supporting it and Britain supporting America. And then not understanding why the Arab world hates us. That stuff really upsets me. Going back the Nazi and Jew line, it was fascinating when I went to Germany every interview would bring that up and they were “what is this? You can’t use the word Nazi, why are you using this?” I’d explain that from my philosophy, from my life, is that you’re born at the wrong time, into the wrong family, in the wrong culture, you could be the Nazi or you could be the Jew. The past life guy that I worked with wouldn’t train anybody until they’ve gone into past lifes where they have been the person committing the atrocities, the murderer, the rapist, when they’ve been the general doing the massacres in the concentration camp. People find they’ve had these awful things happen to them, traumatic events that are spinning into their present life and causing neurosis or phobias in certain ways, throat problems because they were strangled, things like that. Everyone in this culture almost wants to be a victim, the lyric “everyone’s a victim”. The victim archetype is huge in this culture and it’s deeply supported by the media. The media love stories about victims. And it’s also a huge blaming culture that goes with it. Where there’s a victim, there has to be someone to blame. The line about “when I point the finger, I’ve got three pointing back” is the thing where to point one finger, you have the other three back towards you and you’re seeing something in them that you’re denying in yourself, you have the potential to do it. When I slag someone off for fucking around, I know it means a lot to me because I could fuck around and I’m terrified of it somewhere so it’s a big deal to me. It’s a heinous crime in that person because I’m terrified of it happening to me. It usually has a resonance to me. Did you ever not put songs out in James because your views on such things were different to that of the rest of the band? In James, if I started talking about this, Jimmy would give me a kick under the table and warn me and they didn’t want any of that stuff because they thought it would make James look eccentric in a way they didn’t want and that was fair enough. There was a big deal on the Laid album. Me and Brian wanted The Lake on the album and the band didn’t and they told me because they thought the lyrics were too poetic and that was partially the reason I went off to work with Angelo. I felt like I had to find somewhere else for that kind of stuff and I was really upset by that. There have been times where I’ve written a lyric and they’ve come in and expressed really not liking a lyric but usually I stood by my guns. The first song Saul and I really wrote together was Destiny Calling and he hated the lyric as it stands. He came in, tried to get me to change it and everything. And the weirdest thing was about three months later he loved the lyric and couldn’t remember that he’d hated it and come at me quite fiercely to change it. That happened quite a lot. Lost A Friend To The Sea, they asked me to change that one, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t change it. I’d learnt from What For. When we first wrote What For and I sang the lyric “Bouncy bouncy bonjour” as a joke in rehearsals. And when I changed it, Gavan was like “you have to sing bouncy bouncy bonjour” and I got to the point where someone was backing him up so I said “if I have to sing this, I have to leave the band. You can have that lyric if you want, but I’m going.” And he backed down at that point. I realized what happens is people get attached to lyrics and “bouncy bouncy bonjour” in nobody’s book is an OK lyric. No way. So then I learnt I had to be the person who was satisfied with my lyrics and there were times when they didn’t like some of my lyrics or I’d had a bit of a fight around it but I always had to go with my lyric in the end. I had no choice because I had to sing them. Are there any lyrics you regret? Give me a clue. A particular line, a particular song. There’s a few lines that are loose where I think I could have come up with something better than that. I remember “the rain floods gutters and makes a great sound on concrete”. Somebody said “a great sound on concrete – couldn’t you have been a bit more specific?” And no, I couldn’t. I don’t think so. Sometimes I’ve been a little bit stuck and feel I haven’t finished a lyric. A little bit like that. I didn’t quite match an opening verse. Low Low Low had the most great opening line “I’m a member of an ape-like race at the arsehole end of the twentieth century” I never matched it in the song, I couldn’t find anything as good as that. I wanted that off the record and The Lake on there. Yeah, it’s an odd song It is an odd song. The song it could have related to possibly was Laid. You know, a slightly wacky song. And then you did the football version? The football version, which is probably deeply embarrassing. I hardly ever go back though. I’m embarrassed by half of the first album because I sung it out of tune a lot on it. What happened was I’d done vocals supporting the other guys doing their takes for weeks and then they said “it’s your turn” and I’d completely fucked my voice and the sound is well out of tune on that record. I’m embarrassed by that record a bit. That still sounds really fresh though after 18 years. Does it, great I can’t hear that you see. I go to Lenny (Kaye of the Patti Smith band who produced Stutter) and say how great Horses is and he tells me they were never satisfied with that record. |