About fifteen years ago, a new song popped into my head. It had a title, a melody, and a handful of lyrics. It had a faintly Brazilian feel to the rhythm and the harmonies. The title was Simone. It seemed to be about a woman who left her partner and escaped to some exotic location.

But the chorus was lacking a punchline. If I was going to sing her name several times, I needed to tell Simone something. There was no message to give her. The atmosphere was certainly there; yet to keep it from lapsing into it ‘lounge’ territory, it needed an ironic twist. And every time I tried to sit at the piano and play it, I got lost in the chord sequence. It seemed that every few bars there were several different ways for the chords to modulate. I would pick a given key to start in, but when I got back to the next verse I’d be in a completely different key. It was a musical Rubik’s Cube, and it was frustrating me. So over the years, I never made progress with the song.

This happens from time to time. There are remnants of unfinished songs in my closet. Not many, maybe a dozen over the 35 years I’ve been a songwriter. Usually if they never get finished, it’s because there wasn’t enough substance to begin with. But in the case of Simone, it bothered me. A lot. There was something fantastic about the song, and it kept nagging me. It would come back to haunt me every couple of years; I’d sit at the piano and try to play it, but I’d end up just as confused.

This is not like me! I usually have a very good sense of orientation with melodies and chord sequences. I can bend music and lyrics until they make sense. But with this piece of fiction, it took a slice of real life to bring me to a place where I could complete the song. Someone I’m close to told me they have gender dysphoria. (S)he felt a transition was taking place. This news was astonishing, and more than a little frightening. I found it hard to process. Looking back, I realised I could have seen this coming.

But it brought me back to my song. What if Simone was previously Simon? She was running away from her former, male self? Suddenly I had unlocked the riddle, I’d found the ironic twist I was looking for. I went for a long walk across the marshes, which is where I usually come up with my best lyrics, and I found the punchline I was lacking for the chorus.

‘You’re like a timebomb in his blood.’

With its new ambiguity, the plot line opened up many possibilities for a backstory with lots of tasty lyrical details. The next missing piece was the chord sequence. I thought hard about why I was unable to get my head around it. I decided it was the malleable and jazzy nature of Brazillian chords that was throwing me. So finally I tried something I’ve never done before: I sang the melody unaccompanied, and added the chords afterwards, as if I was voicing someone’s instrumental solo. What I ended up with was very curious: each of the three verses, and each double part of the song’s three choruses, is in a different key. I wrote down a chart for the chords, but I still can’t play them straight through without referring to it. How am I ever going to do this song live?

Happily the musicians I worked with are able to read pretty fluently, so armed with the chord chart (and with editing help from my friend Chucho Merchan) I put down a version with acoustic guitar, drums, percussion and upright bass. They did a grand job of negotiating their way around the tricky chords. It took me a few weeks to sift through the performances, but last night I finished a version (still absent a lead vocal) that I can finally call a complete song. As I often do, I emailed myself an MP3 from the lifeboat studio, so I could listen to it on my laptop speakers this morning.

I woke up today, did some chores, returned a few emails, played a little online Scrabble with my friend Rachel, and gave the song a listen. It’s damn good! How satisfying to have finally brought it to life after all these years.

And as a final ironic twist, I turned on the TV as I ate my breakfast, and what did I find? a 2002 movie starring Al Pacino as a Hollywood mogul who invents a computer-generated female movie star called…. ? S1m()ne.

When I occasionally need to record a group of musicians I don’t have room to do it in my lifeboat studio, the Nutmeg. I have to go and rent a studio elsewhere. Trouble is, I’m very hard to please in that department. When I lived in LA, Bill Bottrell introduced me to the delights of vintage Neve mixing consoles, and I was hooked. The mixer is the heart of a studio and directly affects the sound of a record, and these just have a great sound that’s all their own. Twiddling their knobs is like tuning a beautiful guitar. There are a handful of enthusiasts in California that own and maintain these old lovelies that had their heyday in the 1970s—the era of Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Nile Rogers—but most commercial studios have long since replaced them with newer, more powerful, but much less delightful Neves or Solid State Logic mixers. Bill single handedly changed the face of American music production when he recorded Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club on his old Neve in a vacant shop (!) in Pasadena in the early 90s. This album was raw and gritty and the arrangements stood up for themselves. It won several Grammys and signalled the end to 80s production excess (you know, ultra-compressed tracks running through giant automated SLL desks with big snares and tones of digital reverb, kinda like my productions for Prefab Sprout!)

But I’m very pleased to have found a little recording studio in East London (the right end for me) called The Way that owns one of only two left in Great Britain. It’s a custom 8078, 40-input board that lived at Sony’s studios in Tokyo for many years. It’s manned by an enthusiastic young staff who have inherited the passion for this board.

I just spent 20 hours recording a small Latin ensemble there, consisting of upright bass (Chucho Merchan), drums (Nic France), percussion (Bosco De Oliveira) and acoustic guitar (John Paricelli). I’ve had this strange song in my head for about ten years now, and in my imagination it was always played by a Latin quartet. It’s called ‘Simone’. It’s a dreamy slow groove that belongs in the ‘Oceanea’ section of my album. It has a simple melody but an odd Brazilian chord sequence, which is not my forte at all. Over the years I would sing it occasionally to myself in the shower, walking on the beach, or falling asleep; but on the occasions I’ve tried to work it out on the piano it’s always perplexed me. It modulates every few bars. Not only that, there are different options for each modulation. Each section is in a completely different key, so every time I would arrive back at the verse, I had to relearn the complicated chords. And I’d usually just say, fuck it I’ll go and make a cup of tea.

Well, I decided ten years was long enough for this puzzle to remain uncracked so I took the plunge and booked these musicians into The Way, giving myself two weeks to unravel the mysteries of the song. In the end I decided to run a click and just sing the melody, then work out the chords to go along with it. It was like solving a Rubik’s Cube–no, a Rubik’s Polyhedron. I finally managed this in the nick of time, and sent Chucho a demo so he could chart it out for the other guys, not being a reader myself. We came together in the studio for the first time and recorded the song, finishing up about 4.30am this morning. I think it sounds fantastic, and they gave me something I could never program in a million years. We also did a second song, ‘A Jealous Thing Called Love’ which I played on my last tour.

On aspect of modern recording versus the ‘old days’ is that you can do unlimited takes and record endless tracks. Before, you had to make decisions and choices as you went along: let’s say you had a near-perfect conga take with a couple of stray hits out of place, you would painstakingly go through and identify the bad bits, then ‘punch in’ ie get the conga player to repair the bad hits on the fly. Now you just let them slip by, knowing you can later do a composite of several takes, cut and paste a good section from elsewhere, or even physically move each hit forward or back a few milliseconds in time until it sits right in the song. While this is great because the real premium is the musicians’ time, plus the hours spent in a for-rent studio, the downside is that for every hour I spent at The Way I will probably spend half a day in the Nutmeg editing what I recorded! So I won’t know the true value of what I captured for another two or three weeks. It’s all very well to just let the musicians go wild while trying out different tones and EQs, but in the back of my mind I cold see myself sitting there in the Nutmeg for hours on end, looking out over the sea, playing god while I move huge chunks of multirack audio around in time, making it all groove perfectly. Still this is infinitely preferable to me than twiddling knobs on a synth or tweaking MIDI notes in Logic.

Anyway, here’s a cameraphone snap of me with the venerable 8078. I’m sure to most of you it looks just like any other mixing board. But to those in the know, this is like a vintage Bentley.

Some pics from TEDGlobal in Oxford last week, copyright TED/ James Duncan Davidson.

Imogen Heap turns the audience into a human looping machine while jamming on the Hang drum.

Matthew White, euphonium impresario

Sophie Hunger, Swiss singer-songriter

The Radio Science Orchestra. Centre is Lydia Kavina, niece of Leon Theremin. To right is Bruce Woolley. I later joined them for my song Puls Kosmosa.

It’s been an intimate meeting here in Oxford, a bit like a return to the pre-Long Beach days in Monterey, when the audience was small enough that you made new friends early on and bumped into them repeatedly over the next few days. Yet the range of speakers has been fantastically diverse, and the music program at TEDGlobal 2009 has been one of the most eclectic ever. I don’t have many photos yet but

We kicked off with Matthew White, an amazing young euphonium player called Matthew White. He was trained in classical and the Northern brass band tradition, but he’s reinventing the instrument and evolving new techniques such as the ability to play intervals by blowing and singing at the same time. He’s also impressively fast and accurate with his streams of staccato notes. He was a big hit in the opening session, so we asked him back for a quick reprise on Day 2. I asked him on the mic what popped into his mind when he heard he would be going on right after Stephen Fry, and before Gordon Brown. He thought about it and then said: ‘I’ve peaked!’

The second morning featured a great performance by Imogen Heap. She’s performed at TED before, but that was 4 years ago with Frou Frou and her former partner Guy Sigsworth before she was doing all the technology herself. In the interim she’s become a phenomenon of the Internet music era. She’s never cracked the Billboard charts, or been on the cover of Rolling Stone; yet she’s spent over 18 months at #1 in the iTunes electronica downloads, and she has over 3/4 million followers on Twitter. When she wants to do a public appearance she just calls for a flash mob, and an hour later there’s a line around the block. She’s just completed her new album Ellipse, which I think is her best yet. This was her first live perfomance since finishing the album, and she hasn’t yet figured out how to perform the songs live: so she played one new song on the piano (‘Wait It Out’) and treated us to a couple of her best-known songs that she created entirely from scratch. One was ‘Just For Now’ which she builds up and down using a looper. Then she gave us the iconic ‘Hide And Seek’ with its lush vocals and memories of a troubled childhood. This made my wife Kathleen very sad because our daughter Harper sang and played it to us the day before she left home last month. I, of course, was too busy trying to work out the voicings she was using to control her Harmonizer.

Sophie Hunger is an interesting singer-songwriter from Switzerland who gave us a taste of her passionate and rather sombre music, accompanied by two acoustic guitars and a rather amazing trombone player who made great use of an antique Harmon mute as used by the big bands of the 1930s and ’40s.

Emanuel Jal was a warchild in Sudan who spent many of his childhood years toting a machine gun to avenge his village which was ransacked and destroyed. He was determined to kill as many Muslims and Arabs and he could; yet before long he found himself playing music and jamming with his former enemies which brought about his change of heart. He walked hundreds of miles with other refugee kids, most of whom didn’t make it out alive. He was eventually smuggled out of the country with no papers by a benevolent woman who has since died. Having survived the horrors of his childhood, he has now dedicated himself to doing something to help the next generation of kids in his home country, and he is speaking and rapping his way around the world raising money to build a school. His moving story brought many TEDsters to tears, and he has since received pledges of all sorts of help with his project, ranging from cash to designer chairs to free translations.

Eric Lewis returned for another late night piano session. As controversial as ever, he seems to split audience opinion down the middle—some think he’s reinventing jazz piano, while others feel he’s about as relevant to art as Liberace.

Radio Science Orchestra, Bruce Woolley’s unusual ensemble featuring harp, flute, Beamz and electronics, performed an homage to their favourite heroes and recurring themes like Leon Theremin, Sputnik, and Dr Who. The featured soloist was thereminist Lydia Kavina, niece of the great man himself who lives in Oxford. They also reprised my song Puls Kosmosa which I wrote for the Sputnik and Beyond performance at the ICA in 2007, and Bruce and I duetted on the Russian lyrics, co-written and translated for me by Melissa Jordan and now tweaked by Lydia for Communist-era folk authenticity.

Last night’s bonus session which was held not in the Playhouse but in the gorgeous Sheldonian Theatre. To open the proceedings, Felix’ Machines rattled and sang a delightful overture. Felix builds them painstakingly in his bedroom, and programs them from his laptop in Logic Studio. I love the way they make music that a machine would actually make. It would be easy enough to program them to imitate the kind of electronic music you hear everywhere. Instead Felix has created a whole new vocabulary for his machines that is interesting and mesmerising at the same time.

As TED’s music director I have the enviable task of selecting the musicians that appear here, and helping them tune their performances to fit the context. It’s an honour for me and for the musicians that play here to be able to add a little fairy dust that help these amazing ideas grow. TED’s truly making waves around the world now. If you have suggestions for musical acts that we should consider please send them to thomas at ted.com

We’ve got one final surprise in store for this the final morning of TED. I don’t want to be a spoiler so I’ll add a footnote about it later!

FOOTNOTE:

The final musical surprise was a return to the stage by Imogen Heap, who (having sent most of her gear home to Essex) used the audience as a human looping machine and three sections of us vocal lines to loop for her while she improvised over the top with hang drum rhythms and vocalising! Eyes closed, totally in the moment, summing up our feelings about the whole week in a single chant. I was so proud of her!

And just to end on a geeky note: I loved this WW2 German cipher machine that was part of the set!

It looks like EMI Canada is releasing GAOW and TFE Collectors Edition CDs on August 10th. Still no plan for EMI USA to release them physically, but I am actively looking for another US label to license them.

I’m here in Oxford where TEDGlobal 2009 is about to get underway. The stage at the Playhouse looks beautiful. It’s a cosy theatre, more like our old one in Monterey than the new one in Long Beach. Oxford is my old stomping ground—my dad’s old office was at the Ashmolean Museaum across the street, and we had drinks last night overlooking his old college, Lincoln. During the school holidays I used to take the bus in to meet him at the Wimpey Bar round the corner for a cheeseburger: an exciting innovative food import back then in the ’60s and ’70’s, though Americans would probably have choked on the Wimpey version. Last night a friend and I ducked under the Bridge of Sighs and down a dark alleyway to the Turf Tavern, where one almost expects to see Sebastian slumped in a corner with his teddy bear.

I’ll be interested this year to meet the TED Fellows, a group of forward-thinking young people from around the world who are invited to attend TED on a kind of scholarship, and bring their unique talents and ideas into the mix. The quality and diversity is off the charts—here’s an example of one CV that caught my eye!

Rachel Armstrong is a medical doctor with qualifications in general practice, a multi-media producer, a science fiction author and an arts collaborator whose current research explores the possibilities of architectural design and mythologies about new technology. Rachel is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing “metabolic materials” in an experimental setting. These materials possess some of the properties of living systems and couple artificial structures to natural ones in the anticipation that our buildings will undergo an “origins of life”-style transition from inert to living matter and become part of the biosphere. By generating metabolic materials, it is hoped that cities will be able to replace the energy they draw from the environment, respond to the needs of their populations and eventually become regarded as “alive” in the same way that we think about parks or gardens. Since metabolic materials are made from terrestrial chemistry, they are not exclusive to First World countries and have the potential to transform urban environments worldwide.

I’ve been a bad blogger the last couple of weeks. It’s been a busy time: I’m leaving today for Oxford where TEDGlobal 2009 runs July 21st-24th. As TED’s music director (great gig!) I contact, book and organise the musicians who play between speakers over the four days of TED. This year we’ve got some great music, including Sophie Hunger, Radio Science Orchestra, and Imogen Heap; also a teenage euphonium virtuoso, an East African war child-turned-rapper, and Felix’ Machines which are mechanical marvels that play gorgeous sequenced music using found car parts, piano hammers and LEDs. Looking forward to seeing my old friend and former percussionist Clif Brigden will be there DJing the whole event. And Kathleen has a full TED ticket this year, which she says she values more than any vacation anywhere in the world.

My son Graham just made his music festival debut at Latitude with his bin drumming group Bin There Drummed That. Sixteen kids dance around a circle and bang the heck out of plastic wheelie bins. He’s off for his second day there. Last night he witnessed a Patrick Wolf set, much to the annoyance I am sure of his older sibling Harper, now in the US, who is PW’s biggest fan and has photos of him plastered all over her bedroom wall. (Her annoyance will increase Tuesday when Graham and Talia get to see a live talk at TED by her other big hero, Stephen Fry. Thank heavens Eddie Izzard turned TED down–Harper would have committed harikiri.)

I’ve been digging Imogen Heap’s new album ‘Ellipse’ the last few days. It won’t be out for a few weeks but she was good enough to send me one (replete with with one of the infamous seals with my name on!) Some really fantastic tracks on there–my faves so far are Little Bird and Bad Body Double–all recorded by Immi herself in her lovely Georgian oval house, and extensively blogged, vlogged and tweeted about in every detail.

I’m writing this while I wait for my hard drive to back up so I can head off to the railway station. After Oxford I’m heading up to Scotland to do some recording with Eddi Reader, one of my favourite singers on the planet. I don’t know yet what key she’s going to want to sing in, so I have to bring a mini Logic setup, which I was preparing this week. In the midst of all this I had a complete computer meltdown and though my album material is all safely backed up, I lost a couple of applications for which I now can’t find the disks. This could have caused a problem for my Eddi sessions were it not for Eric Persing of Spectrasonics who kindly offered to FedEx me a new set of Omnisphere disks in Oxford, using my old serial number. So kind of him!

After Eddi I’m staying in Scotland for the National Championships of my yacht racing class the Loch Long One Design. I’ll be staying with the class Commodare on the shores of the Clyde, and crewing on #141 Fiona as the seaworthy English take on the fearsome Scots. Then August it’s back to work on my album in the Nutmeg of Consolation, as I try to pass the elusive notional halfway mark.

Yesterday was Lunesse’s birthday, my fabulous web mistress and Forum moderator. Happy Birthday darling!

James Cabooter
on Sunday 5, 2009
Hi James Cabooter here, my ears have been burning. I can happily confirm this is nothing to do with me. First I heard about it was this morning thanks to a barrage of abusive emails.
I’ve been in contact with eBay, Sony and Imogen’s various contacts and rest assured the item is now off eBay.
Unfortunately our post is often intercepted by people and this is not the first time it has happened to a member of our staff.
I’ll be doing my best to find out who stole the disc and looking forward to actually hearing the album myself. I’d appreciate if you could spread the word to salvage my what remains of my reputation.
many thanks
James Cabooter

There’s an interesting scenario unfolding over at eBay. A record seller listed a DJ pre-release copy of Imogen Heap’s forthcoming ‘Ellipse’ album, with an unopened seal. Large record labels often make a few hundred copies of upcoming albums to distrubute to DJs and journalists, giving them time to preview the album and build excitement. It’s often supplied with a ’seal’ with the name of the recipient on it, along with a warning that it is traceable back to him/her, to stop people trying to cash in on it. This album was sent to one James *ooter, a writer for Da**cer (this is all you can see from the photo but the rest is not hard to work out.)

But someone brought this item to Imogen’s attention, and in the early hours of this morning she flagged the violation to eBay, meanwhile creating her own eBay account so she could bid for the album herself. Ironically eBay initially wouldn’t verify Imogen’s credit card! But once they did she placed a maximum bid of £2,000,000. The bidding is at £1,550 right now but It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

For as long as I’ve been in the music business (30+ years) I’ve seen DJ copies of my own music showing up in bargain bins and record collectors’ stalls. I remember around 1980 that Columbia in New York used to have an open drinks party every Friday for DJs where they would play new releases and the DJs could leave with an armful of 12″s. Later on the same day the DJs, all friends, met up again at a record shop on 8th street where they would turn around and sell the 12″s, netting perhaps $200 each. The cost of these pressings, and the party, and the salary of the label’s independent promotions people, are all deducted from the artist’s royalty statement before any royalties are payable. So instead of coming out of the label’s ~80% share of the revenue from record sales, ‘marketing’ expenses like this came out of the artist’s ~12% share. Along with satin tour jackets, bar bills at top night clubs, and in some cases, the marina fees for some radio programmer’s speedboat.

It’s not just the artist that suffers: it’s also the general public, because the Industry has been run so inefficiently that record and CD costs are unnaturally high, while many good artists never get signed or promoted. In a way it was in the Industry’s interest to keep it that way, because it made more manageable and predictable a business that is actually based on the magic of music, and the chaotic nature of the public’s musical tastes.

Personally I dislike many music journalists because they are lazy, ignorant, prejudiced, and elitist; cowards who give the artist no opportunity for recourse, and often not great at spelling and grammar. (There are exceptions of of course!) But whatever you think of the average professional music critic, you can’t condone one who also cynically lines his own pocket at the artist’s expense, not even bothering to break the seal and listen to the album. In so doing he perpetuates the same stagnant and corrupt system that has existed for decades, and which is only finally starting to break down now that the big record companies are not the only game in town.

Members of Parliament are resigning left right and centre because they fiddled a few quid on their expenses. IMO if this journalist James *ooter is selling stolen property on eBay, of via a ‘fence’, he should not be allowed to keep his job, or ever to work again as a professional writer.

Hallelujah. FedEx just brought me a box of the “Golden Age Of Wireless” and “The Flat Earth” (Collectors Editions). They look great! Very pleased with the way the packages turned out. I’ve spotted a couple of typos already, but hey.

That probably means they will start showing up for some of those who ordered them from Amazon etc before the offical release date of July 13th.

I celebrated by going for a swim in the North Sea. Which is actually quite warm now. I feel great. Today is our 21st wedding anniversary and we’re going out to dinner.