21 Mar, 2009 Mafia and The Lost Boys
I really enjoyed this last week as I toured around some of the European capitals promoting our soonish to be released new album. The journalists made good company and long days passed in a flash before me as I engaged in countless interviews. As you would imagine many of the same questions needed to be answered time and time again but that is the nature of the game and I am fine with it.
For your information the general mix of question were separated into three different categories:
1) Questions about our musical past.
2) Questions regarding the new recordings.
3) Questions regarding my personal life.
I was happy enough to try and deal with all of them although I did notice with some fascination a slight obsession with regards to my years spent in Sicily and the desire to know what my experiences had been to date with the Mafia. Seems that many journalists are keen to know about that and become a tad disillusioned when I tell them that in general my personal experiences amount to the same as my experiences of dealing with the Loch Ness monster while growing up in Scotland. Of course that is not to say that neither Nessie nor Il Padrino exist when evidently they both do.
Thankfully for the most part the questions centred around the new songs that they had just heard and the reasons behind our decision to record some extra material that is also set for release. Let me explain to you as I did to them how that came a bout and the impetus behind it.
People who know better than me say that when we fool around childishly, as we all do to at some stage, it means that some hangover from childhood lingers. Perhaps we were not allowed enough freedom in childhood to play more, not able to be the kids we wanted to be because something put a stop to it.
Maybe the pressures to be grown up took over too early and with it the force to be more serious and more mature.
If so that is a pity but inevitably repression tries to resolve itself, tries to find an outlet, tries to break free even as dear Freddie Mercury once sang.
As necessary as it is common these days, our new album ‘Graffiti Soul’ will come in more than one format. The deluxe version will contain a separate disc titled ‘In Search Of The Lost Boys’ comprising nine tracks recorded simultaneously during our sessions for ‘Graffiti’. All songs are covers and it is impossible for me to convey the amount of fun involved in creating them. But hold on a sec! Did I just say fun? Is fun really something that gents our age should be indulging in, are we not after all meant to have grown out of having fun along time ago while taking ourselves so serious. Further than that when was the last time you heard a rock band say “Oh we did it for the fun!”
While discussing our playful adventures with a colleague in the music industry he happened to say without hearing the recordings “I am not sure it is such a good idea to release the tracks, there is a kind of stigma related to doing cover versions after all.” His thinking puzzled me greatly. What in hell was he talking about I thought, especially as I had just spent the previous days listening to some of the greatest songwriters doing covers of other people’s songs. I refer to artists like Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Bowie, U2, Patti Smith, Bryan Ferry, Morrissey, Beatles, Clash, Pretenders and even Springsteen, the list goes on endlessly in fact, I mean what stigma was attached to those artist’s as a result of their remarkable interpretations of other people’s tunes? The answer is zero!
However on thinking about it all some more I came to reflect that perhaps what he meant was that there was a stigma against an overwhelming abundance of piss poor cover versions that amounted to little less than over produced karaoke. If that was what he meant then I am with him and can understand his sentiment perfectly.
So why do we do covers and what happens when we go down musical roads mapped out by previous pioneers? The answer is as I already said; it is a fun thing to do for musicians and can be for the listener also. It is playful. And it is as it should be in my opinion particularly as I believe that the combination of wonderful melodies and glorious words should be allowed to resonate as many times as possible regardless of who created them originally.
Great songs demand to be passed on through the years and invariably that is what occurs. The new context of a classic song when it is picked up and delivered in the most unlikely places can be startling. Incidentally if I were to choose my own favourite example of that it would be Tom Waits spectacularly orchestrated version of ‘Somewhere’. You may have heard it come over the speakers immediately as Simple Minds left the stage during the recent tour. If not you can hear it at our future shows as it fits the mood perfectly. Stage intros are important, but equally so the final exit.
Returning to our own collection of covers and the presumed question of what is the title all about. In that I go back to the earlier paragraph about the childish need to play and try to explain that when Simple Minds are in the act of delivering someone else’s classic, it can be as though the years melt away for us, and among the adrenalin surge we find ourselves once again connected to the young bucks that we once where. Recognising the brave abandon of the lost boy that wanders through all of us still and hopefully always will!
Jim Kerr