This week marks the release of the second Shirley Lee long player, Winter Autumn Summer Spring, and I managed to hog a few minutes of Shirley's time to ask some questions about the album...
ES: I've just been watching the video for "An Old Cricketer" – are those all your own records?
SHIRLEY: Yes, they are all mine. I noticed that my aging digital camera has a video function, so I wondered whether it would film for three minutes in one go, as if so, I could make a video for a song on it and not even need to edit anything. I was then thinking about "An Old Cricketer" and looking at my records and it just seemed an easy, appropriate idea for a video. So I just pulled out a big pile of albums, some because they are favourites, and some because they have great sleeves. Bridie held the camera and I just chucked each record in front of her until three minutes was up. It literally just took that long to make the video. She then figured out how to put it to the track. We didn't spend any time worrying about it or refining it, just kept it instant.
The song is about our great radio DJ John Peel, who died a few years ago. In many ways his passing coincided with an ending for rock music, I think. He was just so open-minded and enthusiastic, and he was always there, a guiding father figure for us all. He got us into so many different kinds of music, and now there is a huge gap, there is no other DJ like him. I didn't choose the albums in the video to relate specifically to Peel, but I definitely came to a lot of them via him.
ES: I think I picked out something like a third of those that I have myself, amongst many I'd still like to get, but the main reason I wanted to chat with you was about a record of yours I'll soon be adding to my collection, Winter Autumn Summer Spring. What lead you to do another solo album instead of a new Spearmint record?
SHIRLEY: The first Shirley Lee album in 2009 was a little strange in that it was very much made by Spearmint. After Paris In A Bottle, I started writing and it became apparent that the album would largely be a collection of personal love songs. So it seemed like a good idea to do it as a solo Shirley Lee record. I had always had it in the back of my mind that I would like to make solo records at some point as well as doing the band stuff, so this seemed like a good time. Also, we didn't want to flood the world with Spearmint albums - it can get a little hard to keep up if one of your favourite band does an album every single year. It felt appropriate to try something different.
In complete contradiction to this, we were all happy with the way the band was playing together and wanted to get in a studio again. We made the last couple of Spearmint albums on computers at home and in different locations, and I was pining to go into a studio again, as we had for the early recordings. So the album was made by the band in a real studio. It was a Shirley Lee album, made by Spearmint really, and is more of a band album than much of our actual band output.
I was left with the nagging idea that I hadn't really made a solo album at all, and I started to wonder what would happen if I tried to do the whole thing myself: write, play and produce something all on my own. We went on to do a batch of Spearmint songs for the A Week Away re-issue, and then I decided to have a crack at a proper solo album.
ES: Apart from the lack of actual other participants, how was working on your different from recording with the rest of the band?
SHIRLEY: Well, once I got started, I realised that I had complete freedom, especially to do the things that might normally get filtered out in a band situation. So I decided to let things like instrumentals and the little songs to come through. By the little songs I mean those simple one minute long pieces that sometimes turn up on b-sides or at the end of albums. These are often my favourites. Usually I can only get one of those away on a band album, but I was able to include quite a few of them here.
Once I started to develop a variety of ideas, it seemed natural to go the whole way and make it a double-album so that there was room for them to all co-exist.
The next album will be a Spearmint record and I am sure will be a more band-orientated single album - after doing something this ambitious I suspect I will want it to be quite concise!
ES: As with many of your Spearmint albums, Winter Autumn Summer Springfollows a story – can you talk about the development of the concept for the album?
SHIRLEY: I watched a documentary called The Bridge a few years ago and aspects of it stayed with me. The film covers the number of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge and its lure as a destination for "jumpers." It is also a very beautiful ode to the bridge itself. I re-watched the film and read the piece in The New Yorker which inspired it. I discovered that it's the number one suicide location in the world, but that Beachy Head, which is a harshly beautiful cliff with a lighthouse a few miles away from me as I write this, is not far behind. There is also a forrest in Japan which is very popular with lovers who wish to commit suicide together.
The idea that people would travel long distances to end their lives in a specific place fascinated me. It seemed a way of joining other like-minded people, even though you were planning something completely lonely and isolated.
In the film, they interview people who survived the jump, which is quite a small percentage. They seemed to be saying that they changed their minds on the way down, and then were so glad to survive. I wondered whether most people in fact change their minds on the way down, but then don't survive. This then seemed a powerful argument for dissuading people from jumping.
The images in the film of the bridge itself also stayed with me. There is something about the scope of it and its "unchangingness" while the world around goes about its business that has an almost spiritual power to it – the story of how Joseph Strauss built it in the '30s is such a tale of scale and determination.
ES: That all sounds quite dark, but the album itself is actually very uplifting and features a fair number of love songs...
SHIRLEY: When I start writing an album I usually go off in one direction, knowing full well that I will end up somewhere else, and that is part of the appeal for me. I started writing about Strauss and the bridge. These songs didn't make it through to the final album, though I do think it is a fine topic for a film, or an opera maybe? I moved onto writing about the calling to travel to a place to end your life, the journey, and the final indecision when you get there. That indecision at the end is another thing that comes through in the film: people pacing up and down the bridge waiting for the impetus to finally jump.
I knew that as people changed their minds on the way down, this would ultimately be a hopeful message, that there were better alternatives to ending it all.
At the same time, I was writing love songs to Bridie and also various other songs based on reminiscences from my youth, as well as having some fun trying out different approaches to writing. One of the love songs is a the idea of just running away in secret to San Francisco and getting married, finding a stranger to be a witness and to take the photos.
And there it came together: Somebody is travelling to San Francisco with the intention of jumping from the bridge. We are travelling to the same place at the same time with the intention of getting married. We walk to the middle of the bridge to find a random stranger to be our witness. It turns out to be the would-be suicide. We persuade him to come with us. Later that day, we all talk about the past and how we came to this point in our lives.
I can imagine that story as a film (an art film!). So that is the arc of the album and it does end with a message of hope.
Having said all that, I don't want the concept to be restrictive. The idea of the characters talking and reminiscing meant that all kinds of other songs could be included. In fact, you can ignore the concept completely if you want, and that's fine. After all, most concept albums are actually quite loose: How many songs onZiggy Stardust or Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band are genuinely about the concept? Maybe three or four on each?
I do like an album to have some kind of theme, though, both as a writer and a listener. It just gives you a bit more to get your teeth into...
ES: Well, one of the things that's always appealed to me about your songs is the narrative quality of so many of them. Whether taken as part of an overall concept or on they're own, so many of them are these fully formed little stories. With that in mind, what did you make of our graphic novel anthology This Is a Souvenir, and how your lyrics were adapted for that?
SHIRLEY: We LOVED This Is A Souvenir! I mean, can you imagine the thrill and honour of somebody putting together a book interpreting your work? So, thank you, it is one of the nicest things that has happened to the band.
The day a copy of the book arrived, Simon was round at mine rehearsing harmonies with me, and we sat on the sofa in the fading summer evening light and read through all the stories. It was great, and really funny for us, too, to see how certain characters in the songs had been drawn, when we know how they look in real life.
Some songs are spot-on to the meaning we originally intended, and some go off in their own direction. Of course, interpretation is what it says, and I am always comfortable when people get the wrong end of the stick listening to our songs and put their own meaning onto them – that's part of the fun with songs, isn't it? – and I often prefer the words I come up with when I mis-hear other people's songs; words that suit my own meanings.
Of course, I prefer some of the graphics in the stories to others – that's just taste. I won't say which are my favourites and which aren't!
The main thing I got from the book is the huge range of possibilities around mixing graphics with songs. I would love to do an album where the graphics are created in tandem with recording and are then built into the album artwork and a live show. I would also like to do a live version of the book, where we would play the songs and the illustrations would be projected.
All in all for me, as the band's lyricist, it was a very happy project.
