Chapter One, in which Ben gets a new job
In October 2004, Matt spent a week in Toronto in a sort of songwriting sweatshop where Professional Songwriters from around the world had been gathered together to write Awesome Hits. This sort of thing is very useful for creating Professional songs which you can sell to whoever likes them, but by the last day Matt had had enough of latin disco and FM power ballads and decided to write something for himself. The song was called Capsize and it was the first new Aqualungy song he'd produced since finishing Still Life. It was a languid 6/8 seaside song with bulging passionate bits. We performed it at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that December. Our version was quite reminiscent of 'Sailing By', which is a languid 6/8 seaside song they play EVERY FUCKING NIGHTOn Sundays they also play 'Bells on Sunday' - recordings of bell ringing from various churches. Radio 4 is a national institution and you should check it out, but its music selection is wretched. on Radio 4 at 12.45am before the Shipping Forecast.
After that, every so often Matt would play me bits and pieces of new things and it was clear that an embryonic album was forming in the back of his mind. Meanwhile things were taking their course in America, and Strange and Beautiful came out in March 2005. Since Aqualung had left Warner Records after Still Life, it had never been certain what the future would hold, but the deal with Columbia finally guaranteed that there would definitely be at least one more album. Naturally this was very inspiring for Matt, and he began to start making demos of new tracks, many of them featuring a characteristic 'woo-woo' vocal which means 'this is how the song goes and this is the tune, and these are some of the shapes the words will be but I haven't got round to them yet and perhaps never will'. It sounds a bit like the Cocteau Twins.
As time has gone on, this has become the standard Aqualung writing process. When we were younger Matt was always the King of Music and I was the King of Words, and that's how we wrote songs for a long time. Then I got interested in writing the music too and both elements began to even out. Then we both got more interested in writing our own songs and barely ever wrote together and instead acted as sounding boards/vicious critics, which is how it was by the end of The 45s, especially the vicious critic part.
The key tracks of the first Aqualung album were written by Matt and Kim [Oliver], who is a fine musician and lyricist in her own right, which immediately defined the project as something new and different. The rest of the album was quickly pulled together from pre-existing songs. My contributions to that album Can't Get You Out of My Mind and Halfway to the Bottom had been written years before, but had never worked in the context of the band at that time.
It was only when it was time to make the second album that we had to work out how to Make Aqualung Songs. Firstly, all the music comes from Matt. It's not the kind of project where you turn up and go 'listen to my brilliant riff'. You can try, but he won't be interested. When it's Aqualung, it's his music, which of course is the reason it sounds like Aqualung. At this stage he'll probably only play ideas to Kim and I and collect comments. Sometimes Matt and I will play through things on piano and guitar to see if we can develop the basic idea a bit and see if it feels good. This may or may not have an effect on how the song turns out, which is more often than not predicated on the demoPatronising Glossary, which is the next thing that happens.
Like all keyboard-players, Matt has accrued a massive selection of tools to replicate all other instruments, and in recent years these tools have become frighteningly realistic. It's very easy for him to create a huge symphonic arrangement in his computer which might as well be the finished product. This is effectively what the first album was. The making of demos has become an integral part of the writing process, to the extent that there is an almost seamless continuum from the birth of the chord structure and tune to a fully conceived arrangement. I think songwriters from every era have had the concept of what the finished song should sound like from very early on in its creation, but now it is possible to execute the concept at an extremely high level on your own in an afternoon. And this in turn blurs the line between the demo and the master recording. (This prompts some philosophical questions for Co-producers such as myself that I'm sure I'll ponder at great length for you later.)
Aaaaaanyway, after his afternoon's work you can hear an intricately wrought song idea with a vocal that goes 'woo-woo'. Matt has written a lot of excellent words for his songs over the years, but I don't know of any song of his that started with lyrics. Melody is his primary interest as a songwriter. Sometimes words come along with the tune, but if they don't, most of the time he'll sing a woo-woo version and ask me or Kim to turn the woos into words.
