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  • 2 days ago
Richard Ashcroft talks through the rest of the tracks on his new album 'United Nations Of Sound', and discusses his wife, his creative process and his low loints.
Transcript
00:00She brings me the music and I am slowly...
00:04My wife is everything to me, you know, she's everything.
00:10I think she is in a way that you could say muse or what I have you,
00:16but she truly does, she brings me the music.
00:19And there's also written a period where,
00:21although I haven't been away that long,
00:23when you've been with someone in such close proximity for so long,
00:27a good few days away, you really do start questioning a lot of things
00:31and what's important to you and what's not.
00:34And, yeah, I really wanted to...
00:36I had written that song before, but I really felt like,
00:41because the recording process was a little mad at times,
00:48I think the energy and the feeling in the song is so much more pronounced,
00:52especially at the end, there's the screaming within it,
00:55there's this big crescendo of calling.
00:57And the funny thing is, we used to laugh about it,
01:00because wherever we were, we could never get...
01:03we could never phone, we could never call anyone,
01:06we're in the middle of these studios,
01:07we literally couldn't get any signals.
01:09So no, whoever was married, whoever was trying to...
01:12we could never get through.
01:13And it became like a mantra, and you'd see people calling,
01:17calling constantly trying to get through,
01:19and we never could get through.
01:25The Royal Highness, to me, is like, lyrically it's like a celebration
01:30of the act of being in a studio when most of the city is asleep,
01:34and you perhaps creating something that in six months' time,
01:37or a few months' time, people are going to hear.
01:40There's a magic to that.
01:42There's a magic to be making music, creating anything,
01:45in the dead of night, in your own little universe.
01:49So the busy doing it, making, shaping it, creating it,
01:52it's all about that.
01:53It's about when you're on that crest of a wave of creativity,
01:56and you wish it could last forever, unfortunately it can't.
02:01There will be a crash, there will be a down point,
02:03there will be a point where the stuff stops flowing for a while,
02:07but when it's flowing, and everything's coming together,
02:09there's no other feeling like it.
02:11So, in a sense, the beat that No ID put on was just perfect for it.
02:17It was like something straight, you know,
02:19it took me straight back to like Salt and Pepper or something,
02:21it took me straight back to back in the day from DMC.
02:26But the Beatitudes I constructed and put some beats on myself
02:30before No ID came in, and then he just took it on to another level.
02:36Again, because I wanted to get physical on this record,
02:38I wanted there to be opportunities for me to perform this record,
02:42not be tied exclusively to a guitar for 80% of the show.
02:51Well, in a sense, I'd been hammering out that song on the piano for four or five years,
02:58and I'd never actually got to a point where I could record it, I tried recording it.
03:04I could never seem to get anywhere near what I was hearing in my head,
03:10and the vision of these incredible almost day-in-a-life crescendos and then down again.
03:17And by recording it in a very stripped-down way with just a big beat behind
03:22and leaving that space, it sounded possible to do.
03:28It sounded like, yeah, this could be achievable.
03:30And I think No ID at the time was saying, you know, that's my favourite song out of everything we'd
03:34done that week.
03:35So I started re-looking at it, and we put some more guitars.
03:40I actually, I think I recorded nine different pianos on that song, trying to get the sound.
03:48I don't think I ever actually achieved it, but for all over the world, Italian pianos, Japanese pianos.
03:54I don't like Japanese pianos, so nearly every studio does have a Japanese piano.
04:00German pianos, you know, it got a bit crazy.
04:04As a finisher of a record, it's about letting go after all that emotion.
04:10It's about, you know, maybe it's time to let it go.
04:16Let a lot of the past go, let a lot of the pain go, and move on, you know.
04:22Find some kind of redemption through music.
04:24Find something that gives you the energy and whatever to carry on.
04:30I'll see you in a bit of a little bit.
04:34It's about 3.0 to any other people, and you can find something that's going on.
04:35Yeah, and as you can see, people write to me in the background.
04:36Have a great question.
04:36Have a great question.
04:36We can learn how to learn what's going on.
04:36I think that it's about it.
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