Happy Birthday to "The Grown Ups": Hoxton Song

As a way of celebrating the first birthday of my debut album, The Grown Ups, I thought I would write a little "behind the scenes" feature about each of the songs on the LP. You can listen, download or buy the album over at www.mickterry.co.uk

HOXTON SONG

Sometime in late 2008, on a whim, I bought a piano . I hadn't really written anything substantial in over five years, other than the beginnings of a song that would eventually become "Ringing Like a Bell" , and I had begun to wonder if my writer's block had applied for permanent residence. Not being a piano player by any stretch of the imagination, I found that just by changing the bass notes over a floating chord immediately freed me from the tired guitar chord progressions I would normally veer towards. Sometimes you just need to hear the same notes in a different order. Who knew?

Around the same time I had started to use Facebook and hooked up with a few old friends I grew up with in Hoxton. On one of the groups, somebody had posted a copy of the photo which would become the front cover for The Grown Ups. Whilst discussing this with one of my old school pals, he said that he still remembered me being drunk on top of the postbox after my sister's wedding and trying to convince the police that I was merely overcome with emotion, rather than a heavily intoxicated 14 year old. That afternoon, returning to the piano, I sang the line "That's me drunk on top of the postbox. " over a descending bass line and Hoxton Song tumbled out in about 20 minutes flat. In little more than the time that it takes to cook a Vesta meal, I had finally emerged from the songwriting wilderness.

A few years previously, whilst driving through North Carolina, I spotted a Grizzly Adams type character emerging from the woods, carrying four rusty car exhaust tail pipes on his shoulder. To this day, it still puzzles me as to exactly how the donor cars ended up in the middle of a forest. In my head, I see myself with a full-on trapper's beard, emerging from the woods and dragging an old piano behind me.

Songwriting is like that....

"You're gonna die up there."

What is it about the moon that is so inspiring? Is it the fact that it seems so big that you could almost touch it, or that, unless you happen to drive around in an Apollo landing craft, you will never set foot on it. Either way, that gravitational pull has us all, at one time or another, reaching for something completely beyond our grasp.

Romantic notions aside, it is a cold, dark place where no known life form can exist. After all, "There is no Dark Side Of The Moon, it's all dark". So, why on earth would you want to visit such a god forsaken place? I think that because it is such a permanent fixture in our lives from the very beginning, it has an almost siren-like quality. On a clear night it can always be found smiling down on you, trying to tempt you with it's other worldly charms. When I was a kid, I used to picture the man in the moon as a kind of spiv-like character, opening his coat to reveal stars and moonbeams for sale, each one of them hanging perfectly from the inner lining.

Perhaps, it's a symbol of a time when we believed anything was possible, when TV fed that dream and promised us that a brave new world was just around the corner. We watched, in our millions, as man set foot on the moon and believed that we'd all be whizzing towards the thin blue line within the next 5 years.

Fast forward to 2011 and we seem to be looking back with an almost, whimsical longing to a planet inhabited by Martin Landau and his band of brothers. Perhaps, the reason we send robots deep into the far corners of the galaxy is that we now know, without uncertainty, that the Solar System is a very, very lonely place. Careful what you wish for Space Cadets....

Kontiki - Cotton Mather

The world of popular music is littered with great, lost albums, terrific records which somehow dipped beneath the public radar, only to be unearthed years later when the band members were either too old to rock out or had actually rocked completetly off of this mortal coil. Maybe the lost album is, in itself, a lost art. With the way music is now released in the digital domain and stored for perpetuity, no recording should ever be deleted and, therefore, lost? Think of Big Star and their first two records; two of the most glorious slices of Power Pop heaven you are ever likely to taste (I'm still not convinced about the "Third"). Out of step with the music of the early '70's, their hooks, melodies and achingly, beautiful harmonies languished in record collections of only the very knowing, until a fan chanced his arm and wrote a letter asking them to reform. The subsequent reformation unfortunately came to late for founding member Chris Bell who was killed in a motor accident in 198. Even if you were lucky enough to catch the new line up, Alex Chilton could never understand how these early and, to him at least, embarrassing songs were held in such high esteem.

Back in the late '90's(1997 to be exact)I got my hands on a copy of Cotton Mather's Kontiki CD and I was hooked from the very first listen. What the f*ck was going on in these songs? A vocalist (Robert Harrison) from Austin, Texas who sounded more like Lennon than Lennon, but also sounded like Sir Robert of Dylan in equal measures. Operatic interludes (I can dig that), audio bleed (lots of it), tape hiss (yum yum) and chock full of Power Pop hooks you'd sell your kids for. King Mono-Brow, Noel Gallagher liked it so much, he got Cotton Mather to support Oasis on tour! I saw the band in London about 4 times and even managed to have a great little chat with Robert Harrison about the recording of the record. Many years later I discovered him alive and well on MySpace and emailed him, mentioning our little chat. Gracious as ever, he even said he remembered it.

So, coming full circle and, even though he has been busy with his new band, Future Clouds and Radar, we find that Robert has decided to fund the re-release of Kontiki as a Kickstarter project. This basically enables fans to pledge money to the project in order to reach an agreed funding target. As long as you hit the target, the funds are released. The good news is that the target has already been met and the re-release is set for January 2012, thus ensuring that this great, lost album never goes M.I.A again.