Last night I played in ‘Songs In The Key Of London’ at the Barbican: a night of London-inspired songs performed by lots of different artists. I got to do the guitar solo in ‘Our House’ by Madness, which is something I used to sing along to even before I played the guitar. Elvis Costello turned up during the interval so there was an impromptu rehearsal of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in his dressing room, with Squeeze, Green Gartside, Robyn Hitchcock, Madness, The Blockheads and Andy Serkis (Gollum) all crammed in. Totally bizarre. When we played it onstage (for the first time), picking out that beautiful melody to a packed house was just a tingly experience.

There have been a couple of other multi-artist shows I’ve been involved with recently. In January there was a tribute to Nick Drake, which is going to be on the BBC soon. With all these things there is a 2-day rehearsal (for around 26 songs), and there’s always a few moments during the concert when you turn a page and see a chart that you’ve forgotten to make notes on, and have no idea what to do. On this occasion the calm precision of the music itself seemed to diffuse a lot of the potential tension and, with the exception of the night that was filmed, it was pretty relaxing.

We went straight from the last Drake show to Heathrow airport and headed to Sydney, to do Hal Wilner’s Rogues Gallery – a collection of sea shanties – in front of the Opera House. We arrived at the first all-day rehearsal almost insane with tiredness, and by the end of the second day everyone was pretty destroyed. Rehearsals continued through the soundcheck, with Tim Robbins, Peaches, Todd Rundgren, Pere Ubu and many others working through their piratical renditions. 30 minutes before the show, the sky heavy with rain and caffeine in my bloodstream battling with the galss of wine I’d tried to calm mu nerves with (bad idea), I went onstage to check my stuff, and realised I couldn’t see. So I went and had a lie down and was quickly surrounded by worried-looking faces, and a paramedic, and then it all got a bit needlessly dramatic. In the end Dr Adrenalin did the trick and, like hearty sailors, we all pulled together and guided the ship through the storm.

After that, it was off on tour round Australia with Marianne Faithfull. To stave off the madness that I feel descending every time I have to spend days waiting around in airports, I got to work editing the huge amounts of material amassed for Brett Anderson’s next album. I whittled 12 of the 30-minute improvised jams down into songs, and the result is, I think, one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with. There is a tangible excitement to using completely improvised performances in structured music. The only time those riffs have ever been played, at the ‘moment of conception’ as it were, become the final document. This process was so intense and satisfying that I got to really enjoy the release of doing a gig in the evenings. During the encore at the Opera House, when it’s just Marianne and I onstage, I remember she looked at me with the strangest expression – sort of triumphant and defiant and kind at the same time. We don’t talk about a great deal offstage, but at that moment I really understood what she was trying to tell me – that she may be a bit eccentric and have a gravelly voice (up to that point the Australian press had been vicious), but look at her now: playing to a packed Sydney Opera house, completely in her element, with the crowd eating out of her hand.

When I got back from Australia I was persuaded to go on tour again! This time round the UK for a week with Kathryn Williams. We recorded her album live last year and she wanted to take the same band out on the road. It was a really wonderful experience, being with lovely friends and playing music with extreme delicacy and awareness, which is demanded wordlessly by Kathryn’s own performance. So minimal, but so rich. Kathryn is extremely pregnant at the moment so it was rather gutsy of her to take on the strain of a tour. She even insisted on staying up with me til 1:30am doing backing vocals for the Chris Difford album.

That project is nearly finished now – just vocals to do. We had anoterh few days tracking instruments at Jools Holland’s extraordinary private studio in Greenwich. It’s like a miniature village from the 1930s, and features two hyperactive cats who are very friendly and like to destroy the soundproofing when you’re not looking. I did some strings with a wonderful violinist called Emma Smith and tried a new approach – instead of arranging like I usually do, I kept an idea in my mind of what it should be, and then worked with Emma to get close to it. In other words, lessening the amount of control. I found the results were a lot more interesting and unexpected – stuff you would never think of writing down. Plus it got me out of copying parts.

2010 has started with a really productive period of work. I always enjoy this time of year because it’s traditionally a fairly quiet time with most people still away on holiday – which provides an opportunity to get a lot done. Last week Brett Anderson and I started work on a new album. I proposed that we draw all the musical material from improvisations. He had never worked in this way before, and I was really delighted that he was willing to try it, and touched that he trusted me enough to go along with it. Along with two of my favourite musicians, Seb Rochford on drums and Leo Ross on guitar, we came up with 26 pieces in 3 days. It is now down to me to edit these into song structures for Brett to write over. This large-scale editing is something I love to do, and the improvisatory way of working allowed me to play guitar much more freely than I usually do as a producer, when I have so much else to think about. At this stage of the record, I feel like a sculptor about to start chiselling away at an extremely high-quality piece of stone.

The following week I stayed in to same studio, with Seb, to start producing the Chris Difford album that we’ve been writing for the last few months. It felt great to be working with someone who has made so many timeless records, and who is still open to trying new directions. One fantastic moment came when Chris brought in his earliest demos, on reel-to-reel tapes that had not been played since 1973. We all looked on in respectful silence as the engineer lined them up on the tape machine (a rare sight nowadays), and when the first song came through I realised it was in the same key as the one we were working on that day, which was about that period in Chris’s life. I sampled the tape and played it backwards through our track, creating a psychedelically nostalgic background. Being in that beautiful studio, 12 hours a day for 10 days, working on 41 different pieces of music with my friends, I really felt like producing is what I love doing the most. Some parts of it are quite geeky, for instance just having loads of guitars and amps and beautiful set out and ready to go; some parts of it are much deeper, as the best kind of focus comes when you are so deeply into the essence of the music that it hardly feels like work – until the end of the day when exhaustion comes crashing down.

Much of December was spent in solitary confinement in my studio, tweaking and refining mixes and edits of Brian Eno’s Pure Scenius project, and continuing to work on Iarla O’Lionaird’s album. There was also a session for a film score which demanded classical guitar only, which always freaks me out a bit as I’m not really trained on it, and my classical guitar isa 3/4 scale one intended for children. But I managed to get through, aided by the extra time afforded to me by various technical difficulties!

This December saw the second outing of Twisted Christmas at the Barbican, which gave me the rare opportunity to jam with a bagpiper, accompany Eliza Carthy singing a Chris De Burgh song, and play rhythm guitar to Richard Hawley’s lead. I made the most out of my new toy – a set of ‘blossum bells’, made by some eccentric guy in San Fransisco. They are 6 large metal cones on a stick, and you don’t know which notes they’ll be until they arrive. being restricted to 6 notes makes you come up with more interesting parts; I was reminded of it last week when I had to play a part on Farfisa in C, when none of the C’s worked.

I used the lull before Christmas to finish off a few of the things I’d promised to do for friends, but which I hadn’t yet found time for. I also did another session for Trevor Horn, for a South African tenor singer. I really enjoy working for Trevor because of the precision that’s required, combined with a very English sense of both humour and professionalism. He even took time to play me the original multi-tracks of ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, which was fascinating to dismantle and strip back to an absolutely killer 4-piece band live performance.

Finally, I went through quite a strange period with a project I was working on before Christmas, which dented my confidence. The immediately positive outcome of it was that I realised that for me, it’s important never to take confidence for granted, and often it’s helpful to deliberately undermine it. Feeling like there’s a long way to go, or being aware of a multitude of deficiencies can seem daunting or depressing, but it’s also a great catalyst to progress and improvement. That’s not to say it’s good to be insecure – that’s an impediment too. I just think it’s best to be as ‘transparent’ as possible, and never let a preconceived idea of right and wrong stifle creativity. I think it’s the musical equivalent of the scientific ‘double-blind’ test.

Hello, friends, I just found out that Bingo Gazingo (born Murray Wachs) died on New Years Day. He was struck by a cab on his way to perform his weekly show at the Bowery Poetry Club about a month ago.

If you love Bingo as a person and an artist as much as I do, I encourage you to spread the word about his music to people and let them know how awesome he was. He’s got a myspace page where people can appreciate his music and comment:

http://www.myspace.com/bingogazingo

BINGO GAZINGO

The first time I saw Bingo was in a UK documentary about outsider artists in America. I watched his segment over and over again, and resolved to try and work with him. Within 20 minutes of emailing the show’s producer I was on the phone with Bingo and he had launched into spirited transatlantic renditions of his soon-to-be worldwide hits, “J-Lo” and “I Love You so Fucking Much I Can’t Shit”. His raging ambition to be famous worthy of a man a quarter of his age, his joyously demented inhibition, and what I suspected to be a hidden awareness that he was destined to remain an outsider – all of these endeared him to me immediately.

I got to know Bingo (he was always Bingo, never Murray) a little better over the next few years. He made a guest appearance on my album “The Unrest Cure”, with “2000 Years From Now” – an impassioned rant against all the people who had held him back in life (‘I knew I was better than all those jerks put together’). Although I was sorry never to be able to give him the news of a hit that he demanded in a subsequent series of letters written in his trademark capitalised spidery scrawl, I think he was pleased that on his song, at least he had Brian Eno singing backup.

Bingo visited my East London studio in 2006 while he was in town with My Robot Friend. He started performing the moment he got in the door, reciting poem after poem grabbed at random from plastic bags, coat pockets, and often from the murky recesses of his memory. He wanted to concentrate on what he saw as ‘the hits’ – mostly highly libellous celebrity-themed pieces. But I was intrigued by some of the other material that slipped through, that seemed to offer tantalising insights into his past, and that blurred the line between Bingo and Murray. Many of them were about his late wife. Frequently he would veer from tender to scatological in the space of a couplet, snapping out of beauty and back into a sneer.

On the car journey back across town that night, my friend spontaneously ordered me to stop the car outside The Foundry, a squat and a popular venue for art, poetry and music. She led Bingo inside and he walked straight onto the stage and took the assembled crowd of young trendies by storm. A large group of them followed him out to the car afterwards, huddling around him and asking who he was. The look of quiet satisfaction on his face was one I’ll never forget. I saw it a few more times, and that look remains one of my favourite memories of Bingo.

Later that year I filmed the video of “2000 Years” with Bingo in Central Park. After telling off the cameraman and I for taking a taxi instead of the subway from Queens, he zipped around the park on a sweltering summer’s day with abandon, dancing with a salsa band and defiling a playground with cries of ‘I want to put my iTube in your YouTube’. He was willing to do anything in the name of promotion, but after several hours even he got tired, and abruptly said ‘ok, that’s enough’, before shuffling off.

Nobody did more for Bingo than My Robot Friend, Howard. He gave Bingo an outlet, and brought his voice to many more people than would otherwise have heard it. Both Howard and I will keep endeavoring to bring all Bingo’s recorded work to the attention of the public, but no longer – in the words of the great man himself – to that of the ‘fucking record companies’.

In one of my favourite songs of Bingo’s entitled “What A Life Some Shit”, he makes some very fair observations: ‘Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God bust our balls? Even if you have the talent, you have to be gallant’. Bingo definitely had the talent, and despite his propensity for bellowing profane poetry at startled strangers in the street, I found him to be nothing less than a perfect gentleman. He had a fiery but generous spirit, and despite his uncompromising nature he didn’t take himself too seriously. The mainstream may not have taken him to its heart, but that’s because the machine that drives it doesn’t have one.

In “The More I Love You More”, he writes ‘You are the last page of my life, you are the last poem I’ll ever write. Here’s to you with love, and here’s to love with you’. Quoting that is the best memorial I can offer. I feel extremely lucky to have known him, I smile at the memory of such an inspiring person, and I miss him. Please spread the word!

Last month I spent a week producing Carl Barat. We’d never met before, and as I lugged all my equipment into a studio on Hoxton square on day one, I was rather nervous. Usually there’s at least a meeting beforehand. But within an hour of his arriving, we had written a new song and had a bit of a laugh, and we managed to record 4 tracks in a massive hurry. The imposition of time limits really is condusive to getting the best performances. Carl took this idea one further, by finishing lyrics only moments before going into the vocal booth. After one such last-minute addition, he observed “putting a new verse in a song is a bit like putting a new kidney in a person – you never know if it’s going to be rejected”. Findlay Brown, who co-wrote one of the songs, came down to help out and Carl kept a fairly constant supply of interesting people coming through the studio. Some artists like a ‘closed set’, and others like it to be more social. Generally I’m in the former camp, but this time it was fun. He and his manager thanked everyone on the last day by bringing in bottles of fine whiskey.

I’ve also been working on Chris Difford’s record, continuing to write songs with him and beginning to plan the recording sessions in January, and Iarla O’Lionaird’s album too. I had a couple of days with Jon Hopkins, putting puano on Iarla’s stuff. We’ve known each other since we were 15 and we know each others musical personalities so well, and yet it is a continuing joy to keep developing and surprising each other. He has a touch and approach to the piano that is mesmerising and unique.

One of the things we worked on together last year was the score to The Lovely Bones, which we co-wrote with Brian Eno. Last week was the world premiere, held at Leicester Square. We were sat 3 rows behind Charles and Camilla, whose otherwise-standard issue cinema seats had been specially draped in ermine. Once seated in the cinema, we were able to watch the arrival of various stars and dignitaries on the big screen, before seeing them enter the auditorium in reality. The sheer oddness of the occasion made it even more difficult for me to assess the film, and how the music had been used. I just remember being really pleased at how much of our stuff was intact, and generally overwhelmed at hearing stuff I’d written blaring out of a Peter Jackson movie. Also odd was the fact that I had to go straight to the premiere from a session with Trevor Horn. This involved getting changed into my tuxedo in a vocal booth, and bidding farewell to the most famous producer in the land whilst wearing it.

I have been trying to turn Brian’s Pure Scenius project from June this year into an album; coming to terms with the sheer amount of material, and figuring out how best to present it, have been the main challenges but it seems that Brian, Karl Hyde and I are gradually circling in on the right approach. It’s interesting to edit and mix 20-minute long pieces of music, because to get a true picture of what is right, you have to listen through from the top every time. But as ever, it’s about paying attention to detail without losing sight of the overall feeling.

Work continued with David Holmes on the Russian film ‘Gustav’. There was a bit of a scramble on the first day when the producer announced that he wanted to hear 5 major themes by the end of the night; but we got through that one and I think it’s going to be one of the best scores David has done. One night he took me to the club he’s just opened, got behind the bar, and destroyed me with whiskey. The following day was spent trying to do intricate string arrangements through a noxious fog.

A short tour with Marianne Faithfull was like a mini-holiday, albeit a sleep-deprived one. The main thing I learned from it is that Luxembourg town is absolutely lovely. Funny how tempting it can be to generalise about a whole town, or even country, based on one’s pathetically limited experience of playing there. Hence the group resolution that Amsterdam rocks whereas Zurich sucks. All very scientific of course.

There were a few sessions for other film things, one involving lots of small instruments that are very hard to tune and all in different keys, which was like some kind of living anxiety dream; and I’ve been working a bit with Duffy who is a bundle of manic benevolent energy. And lastly my new solo record has been mixed, and will hopefully be released in the first half of next year. It’s called ‘Zero Sum’.

Last week I took part in ‘Carousel’, a tribute to Jacques Brel at the Barbican. I’d been fairly familiar with his work, but having worked on it closely I now want to learn some proper French so that I can fully appreciate his incredible lyrics. The concert mixed French, English and Belgian singers – from Mark Almond and Momus to Arthur H and Arno – and as part of the house band I could more or less just sit back and enjoy. A non-musical highlight was hearing Arthur H translate the lyrics to ‘Madeleine’ for the audience: “She is all my life, we will eat goooood French fries…”, which made everyone in the room fall in love with him immediately. I got to use my favourite guitar – a 60s Italian thing made of sparkly plastic, with an enormous unforgiving neck, that sounds like it’s being played straight out of an old valve record player. It doesn’t get out much, but it made it onto the next Paloma Faith single too.

The week before, I was in with a new artist called Delta Maid. The producer was Craig Leon, a man of bafflingly and humblingly diverse talents, who has worked with everyone from Bob Marley and Blondie to Suicide and Pavarotti! It was fantastic to see a true master of arranging and producing at work (when we weren’t too busy getting him to tell us stories from his past). The music, which was steeped in traditions that I am by no means an expert on, was beautiful. Unbelievably it was Delta’s first experience playing with other musicians, but it didn’t show; a couple of times I sensed that I wasn’t quite getting the authentic feel she wanted, so I just got Craig to play those bits! After all, he was actually there for the ‘real thing’. The combination ended up working really well.

I went to Belfast with Jon Hopkins, for some sessions with David Holmes on a new film he’s scoring called ‘Gustav’. It is Russian, and as beautiful as it is grim. Jon and I basically spent 3 days improvising under David’s direction, and generated a load of material for David to sort through and tailor. I ended up playing a lot of guitaret (the rare thumb piano-like instrument that Eno gave me), and a £50 ukelele that David had bought recently. It was just a toy really, but played into his £3000 microphone, all the little imperfections and finger noises sounded very intense and atmospheric. When we got back, I played at one of Jon’s shows. Even in the thundering maelstrom of his live set, what he wants from his musicians is incredibly specific, and I felt slightly as though I was walking on eggshells; but I think it worked just having other people on stage (he usually plays alone), and the quiet bits took me back 15 years to when we used to play together at school concerts.

The Josephine Oniyama record got finished a few weeks ago. The last 4 or 5 days were spent mixing, and once again Josephine was extraordinarily patient during the boring bits (actually it’s all quite boring by then), inspired and passionate when called on to sing, supportive when I wobbled, and generally lovely to be around. The head of the record company came down and made some very useful suggestions – usually that is a moment to be dreaded but he comes from a musical background and was very helpful. The record deserves to do well. I also kept up the work on Iarla O’Lionaird’s album – adding a variety of strange and outsized bass instruments courtesy of Simon Edwards. I still feel this huge responsibility because of how much I love what Iarla does, but every time I hear his voice coming back through the speakers it inspires me.

I did a session for Skye Edwards (from Morcheeba), for a John Martyn tribute record – I had a bit of a hangover and hopefully it didn’t show too much. I hardly ever have them on sessions because it’s a bit miserable and scary, but luckily it was Skye’s honeyed voice coming through the speakers rather than something abrasive. There was also a day with film composer Alex Heffes, and Seb Rochford came to my studio with an artist he’s producing called Jay Brown (sister of VV). We managed to get 2 full tracks done in a day, and I just had to engineer – doing that alone is quite rare for me but I really enjoyed it, because I got to concentrate purely on mic positions and sounds, without the distraction of also having to play and produce. Seb played some absolutely incredible percussion, glass marimba and bass in addition to the drums, and we even got Jay’s managers to add handclaps at the end of the day.

And in between, I wrote a few songs with Chris Difford (of Squeeze); although not technically ‘with’, as he wasn’t there. But he sent me lyrics and asked me to come up with some music. I’d never worked that way before but found it incredibly inspiring. His words are like fully fleshed-out stories, and music just seems to rise out of them like a lovely aroma. I did 6 or 7 in a couple of days, and hopefully a few of them will go the distance.