Fascinating read, thank you! Reposting some of my favourite bits below for posterity's sake (in case
The Quietus ever goes down).
On making
Dance Hall at Louse Point:
Quote:
I was working as a lecturer on a performing arts course and the theatre director had done a college touring production of Hamlet. It was a very abrasive production, quite confrontational, and he wanted some music for various parts of the performance and asked me to write whatever I wanted and put together a band of students to play it. It was very liberating, because up until then I'd always written songs, which in my mind tended to need to be three and half minutes long, and probably have a chorus. This was the first time I'd tried writing something that a) wasn't going to have any words and b) could 30 seconds long or seven minutes long. It was very liberating for me as a writer, so I wrote some pieces I thought were good, and which I didn’t think sounded like anything else I was listening to or had heard.
Polly was probably making Rid Of Me around this time, or had just recorded it, so she was back around and we used to hang out, so she came and helped me record and engineer a couple of pieces, and she was really enthusiastic about it. She came to see the show, loved all the music and I think she was at a stage where she didn’t want to have the trio anymore – she's a restless creative spirit she didn’t want to keep doing the same thing, she wanted a challenge. So I went away and wrote a whole bunch of music for her, which pretty much were the actual recordings for a lot of the stuff we used on the record. Then during the To Bring You My Love tour we obviously spent a lot of time on planes and in hotel rooms, and she had a lot of time to listen to demos and come up with words. Over the course of the tour Polly would drop round cassettes of her singing over my demos to my hotel room. They were always exciting and surprising, none more so than ‘Taut', which sounded utterly unhinged, and completely original. It's 25 years since we did it, and it still holds up pretty well.
On making
Is This Desire:
Quote:
On my version of Is This Desire, ['Nina in Ecstasy'] is track one side one. An absolutely beautiful song. … It ended up not even on the record which I think was a great shame, but to me, that is probably the most compromised album that Polly's made, largely to do with the time over which it was made. … There were two long recordings sessions and almost a year's gap between them. It’s very difficult to sustain the identity of a record like that. It was also the only record where the record company came in and had a degree of creative input, which had never been sanctioned on any of the other records, certainly none of the other records I was involved with. The record company often never heard anything until they got the mastered album!
I’m not saying it's always good to keep everything out of their hands, but on this album there were a couple of people who I felt took advantage of the fact Polly wasn't very well at that time. Normally she's so decisive and strong about what she feels, about what's going to happen, but on that record she wavered in the middle. I still think it's a really good record, the songs were great, but I felt some of them weren't as great as they could have been.
A couple of things didn’t make it onto the record that should have done, in my opinion. Most importantly, 'Nina In Ecstasy’, which I think is one of Polly's best songs – another one where the recording is the demo. It would have been bold to put it as the first song on the record but I think Polly's career generally was made up of bold moves, that was one time when it didn’t happen, and in my opinion it should have happened.
…
Is This Desire was made over two lengthy sessions, with almost a years’ gap between them, which I think led to a kind of disjointed album with some of the songs being unnecessarily reworked.
The bulk of the first session took place in a small studio in Yeovil, so it was much more Heath Robinson setup, and the second session, most or all of it took place in a huge expensive London studio, so there were differences in the technical capabilities of the studio, but the same musicians basically in both sessions and same producers and engineers.
…
The thing that made the most difference was that Polly probably changed during the making of it, as I said, she wasn't very well for a long time in the middle. I think it was hard for her over that huge amount of time to maintain focus.
On making
White Chalk:
Quote:
We recorded it in Flood's own studio, which was basically like a garage somewhere in Kilburn. Kind of scuzzy, the wi-fi didn’t work very well, and it was cold. We were there for ages making that record.
On making
Let England Shake:
Quote:
When I heard the ['Written on the Forehead'] demo I loved it – she used a lot of samples when she was putting [Let England Shake] together, only one or two of which we ended up using. Sometimes we would recreate things, for instance ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’, where we played a bastardised version of ‘Summertime Blues’ when she had recorded a demo to it. In some places, using the actual sample would have held the song back, as loops and samples often do. The Niney sample was so great there was never a question about using it. There is something brilliant about Flood's engineering of it. The sample doesn’t actually work over the last third of the song – on the demo it sounded really cranky, which I never noticed until we started rehearsing it. We had to take it out for live shows, but on record Flood did something with the frequencies to make it fit, which was a genius piece of engineering.