Social media has repopularised your song Headlock, but how did it feel 20 years ago when you had to create, advertise and market the Speak For Yourself album almost entirely solo? Samgams
Back then if you were lucky you got into NME or i-D magazine. The only real coverage I got was in the techie music mags, but then Hide and Seek was in The OC, Headlock got on the radio and I started getting recognition. If only we could have had TikTok and all this free promotion 20 years ago … but if I’d received then the kind of attention I get now, I might have made different life choices, so I wouldn’t have changed anything.
Did you really remortgage your flat to finance Speak For Yourself? AD2023
I spent four years making an album in [the electronic duo] Frou Frou on Island Records, but it never recouped so I never saw a penny. Making another album with that label would have felt like taking your best dress back to the dry cleaners after they burned it. After I got out of that deal, no bank would lend me any money. Then I realised that my two-bedroom flat in Waterloo I’d bought for £120,000 was worth a hundred grand more a year later. I remortgaged it to make the album and never looked back. Funnily enough, after all the attention on TikTok recently I’ve just received my first royalties from Frou Frou after 25 years.
More than 20 years ago, you recorded and toured with Jeff Beck. How did the collaboration come about? Ben1976
I met Jeff when I was 19 at a songwriting camp in [the Police manager] Miles Copeland’s castle in the Dordogne. I was much younger than everybody else and socially awkward so I got pretty drunk. I was sitting outside playing guitar very badly to myself and Jeff said: “Let me show you some shapes.” I said: “Wow, you’re good!” Later that night I ended up drunkenly driving a golf caddy around the estate and crashing into Miles’s mum’s prized terracotta pots. A week later I got a message from my manager asking: “Did you meet Jeff Beck?” He told me he was this really famous, legendary guitarist – I had no idea! – who wanted me to sing on his record. I sang his gorgeous Nadia as best I could and did some shows with him. He was a sweet man and I loved him so much. A lot of people from that generation are just so grateful to have been able to do what they loved all those years, and their egos are very small in comparison to the amount of fame they had.
The Listening Chair is a unique, autobiographical song, intended to update [with an added minute] every seven years. How hard was it to distill a seven-year period into one minute? Coopertapes
I don’t know if I did it very effectively, but I sat in a physical listening chair and asked audiences: “What’s the song that you feel still needs to be written?” There were hundreds and hundreds of different…
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