It’s quite subtle, you know. Nobody ever believed me when I told them there is an actual story there. And a subject – other than myself. It’s quite hopeless. Everybody always thinks everything I write is about me.
Of course there are some parallels or I wouldn’t be interested in the story in the first place. I’ve got to feel some empathy with this girl. But at the same time when I write a song or perform any of the songs, they’re stories. ‘Broken English’ was about Ulrika Meinhof. It wasn’t till years later that I understood that it could be about me, too.
‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ is a Roger Waters song. But how perfect a lyric is that! It had so many reverberations about the sixties, the end of the sixties and the consequences. It’s possibly about Syd Barrett, the founder and original lead singer of Pink Floyd, who became deranged as a result of obsessive drug-taking in 1967 and spent most of his life in institutions – a legendary loon. He died in July 2006. But songs are composites, they’re about many different things, not just the ostensible subject. Roger wrote ‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ in 1968 but he never gave it to Pink Floyd.
Speaking of the past, ‘File it Under Fun’ is my way of dealing with my history. It’s about anybody I’d ever really loved. The title may sound a bit flip, but it’s not intended to be that ironic; it’s more true to my life, true to my feelings than sardonic. It’s got a kind of it’s-all-right-now feel, we’ll file it under fun, don’t worry about it. It’s true there’s a certain world weariness to it, but that’s probably because I’m always being asked about my past and it does get wearying. That was my reply at the time I wrote it anyway. I may have changed; Vagabond Ways is a long time ago.
The title, ‘Wilder Shores of Love’, is taken from Lesley Blanch’s book of the same name, about the exotic and possessed lives of four wild women who lived as they wished: Isabelle Eberhardt, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby and Isabel Burton. But wilder shores of love has a bit more personal reference than just the book. It came from a line of Anita’s. She said she’d been to the wilder shores of love. Not sure I have! Love to me is much more practical. Maybe she had just had some great sex. I have, too, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as the wilder shores of love. ‘For Wanting You’ comes from my asking Elton and Bernie Taupin to write a song for me – and that’s what they came up with. It was a wonderful moment when I received that in the post. Of course, as per usual, I did not do it in the most commercial way you can imagine. I’m sure it could’ve been a hit, a big hit, but I underplayed it.
‘Great Expectations’, written with Daniel Lanois, is the story of my life. It’s the story in my mind as it goes through my life in pictures. It’s as if you’re sitting outside a tent around a fire and I’m telling the story. As I recount it I can’t remember everything that’s happened and, truth being so subjective, it’sa fable rather than an autobiography. The exclusiveness of memory as it fuses with the mythical life story and with Dickens’s wistful novel. It’s a slightly bitter little song.
To do a song like ‘Tower of Song’ with a light touch is quite hard. The tendency is to be earnest and intense, so it isn’t easy to pull off. But I think I’m getting over that. Still, you have to approach ‘Tower of Song’ like the great monument it is, a Tower of Babel of all songs and all the great singers who’ve gone before you, including the haunting voice of Leonard Cohen himself. The way Leonard does it is dark and broody. I lightened it up a bit. Some people didn’t like that, but there’s no way you can out-gothicise Leonard Cohen.
‘After the Ceasefire’ is a Frank McGuinness bit of magic. It’sa very Irish song, and quite literal in that sense. It’s not about Ireland, it’s about a relationship, but also Frank’s relationship with Ireland. Just a lovely lovely lovely little poem.
It was all the others’ fault, they thought at any rate
After the ceasefire to put an end to hate
She was reaching for her knife, he a fork and spoon
They sat about devouring the poison of the moon
Shared a fatal cigarette neither one would light
Their breath was flame enough, nobody said goodnight
After the ceasefire, after the ceasefire.
FRANK McGUINNESS and DANIEL LANOIS,
‘After the Ceasefire’
Vagabond Ways I recorded with Dan, and Mark Howard, in the Teatro, the recording studio that belongs to Daniel Lanois. Mark produced it. Dan and I wrote some songs together – beautiful stuff. I’m not particularly fond of what he does with U2, but his own records I love. And the ones he does with Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan, of course – Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. That wonderful song ‘She’s gone with the man with the long black coat …’
What was going on in my life when I was making this record? I was emerging from my cocoon. I’m very one-pointed. I’d done 20th Century Blues and then The Seven Deadly Sins. So Vagabond Ways was my first record back in my own genre. I felt I had to make a bit of a statement. A Mariannifesto. To say, ‘Here I am! I’m back!’
In early 1970 I was in bad shape. Not long after I’d left Mick I found myself on a slippery slope – I’d become a heroin addict and spent my days seeking oblivion, sitting on the wall of a demolished building in Soho. As if things weren’t dire enough, I agreed to play Lilith, a cemetery-haunting female demon, in Kenneth Anger’s occult allegory Lucifer Rising. Needless to say, the film didn’t improve my situation, either karmically or financially. And that was that – or so I thought, but karma has an awkward habit of bouncing back at you. It reminded me, yet again, that dabbling in the occult – even if you don’t entirely believe in its coiled powers – has a nasty way of casting its baleful influence long after you have left the scene – and accumulating vengeful force along the way.
Through William Burroughs I’d met the writer and painter Brion Gysin – inventor of the cut-up and Burroughs’s sometime collaborator. Brion was a really kind soul. When I was living on the street in London, I would occasionally go and see him. He was one of those rare people who genuinely did care about you; he was different, especially in those dark troubled times in London, Brion stood out like a beacon when everyone else seemed so self-centred and horrible – there was little sympathy for someone in my state in those days.
One day Brion took me round to where the occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whom I’d met through Robert Fraser, was staying. Kenneth was notorious for his film Scorpio Rising, a montage of Hell’s Angels, Hitler, fellatio, sodomy, Jesus, and assorted satanic imagery. Anger has made some two dozen movies, almost all dealing with satanic subject matter; aside from Scorpio Rising, the best known are Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. I should have run as fast as I could from a self-styled conjurer of dark powers – however silly his dilettantish Satanism seemed to me – but I was very susceptible to the influence of others just then and easily led. As my father would have reminded me, in the words of Virgil, facilis descensus Averno – easy is the descent to Hell.
But love and light to Kenneth – only thing to do with Kenneth – love and light I send. Really. Can’t do anything else. I’ve gone through so much recently. All the anger, bitterness, upsetness, paranoia, grief has gone away.