4 January 2005

Beads Without a Chain'

Trevor Jones: It's a new year and I'm back from the sanctuary of Corsica to the shock of the M25. I've written 3 new songs during the break: 'Beads Without a Chain', 'An Average Sadness' and 'Paper Planes and Pony Tails'. I spent much of the break trying to put my lyric book in order. It's a log of thoughts/lines/wishes and memories...a bit like a 7 year old's diary really. This housekeeping got me thinking about memory, how we receive, store, review and edit experience, then represent our edited histories as fact, convenient to the way we wish to be received and perceived by the world. I have a bad memory, so writing songs is a helpful way of placing myself in the world; we are what our past makes us, we are witnessed by bearing witness, and we live where compromise leave us. In trying to organise my memories, draw them together, join the dots, it struck me that it was like threading beads, bits and bobs, to make something substantial. Though the metaphor is a little laboured, I liked the idea of my mess of memories as 'beads without a chain', the thread, or chain being the songwriting process. With that as a starting point I was off. I started listing visual images that I could recall from childhood. I have a picture of my sister Kerry, as a young girl, playing naked in a field of corn or barley. Shades of the Sting song 'Fields of Gold' I know, and although the image predated that song by many years, it's an irony that, as one of Kerry's favorite songs, it was played at her recent funeral. The song goes on to question the process of memory, and presents the idea of a 'Memory Palace', a building in which we store our memories and place them in order, in particular rooms, so that we might access them more easily, (the idea, not mine, is attributed to Cicero and endorsed by Thomas Aquinas) I've tried it and it is useless to me; I made my Palace into a labrynth! It does seem to work for others though. I showed Marcus the song, and he played along with an upright piano which I think sounds like Tom Waits, though Marcus hears Mrs Mills! Vocal and listen back. We think that it may work with woodwind, in much the same way that 'Five Points of Light' did on 'Alaska'. Decide to ask Simon Currie to do an arrangement. We have just received the first promos for the single 'Mystery to Me'. Marcus took the cover shot (which looks great) and we're both very happy with the presentation. Let's hope it does the job.

Marcus Cliffe: First day back after the Christmas break,I’d spent a couple of days previously installing NUENDO 3 and new LYNX drivers.I wanted to test everything out first to iron out any problems if there were any, fortunately everything worked perfectly so it’s just a case of getting

into the new features. The cover shot in question was taken last year in Japan when I had a

day off and an old friend of mine who’s been living in Tokyo for 15 years took me out fro the day. Unfortunately there was torrential rain all day so even with an umbrella I was soaked constantly from 1: the incredible humidity and 2: the rain bouncing up from the ground! The actual picture was taken at the Yasukuni shrine and is a picture of an girl scurrying to get inside from the rain.

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