ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

“They’ll be in tune.”

The orchestra chatter. “Are you marked ‘forte’?” one asks his neighbour.

Chris picks up a copy of Private Eye that is lying on the mixing desk and starts reading it.

“Discipline, discipline,” mutters one of the musicians.

Trevor queries one of the percussion sounds. “Frank, is there any way you can get any more tone out of the spanner?” he asks. He suggests that the orchestra now start playing along with the Pet Shop Boys’ recorded track.

“Bit of track coming, folks,” Nick Ingman tells the musicians, as though it is some kind of gentle warning. They play along. “Could we have another five per cent of the vocals?”

In the control room, Neil picks up an aviation magazine called Pilot and starts browsing through it. “I thought it was a yachting magazine,” he says, as though this would somehow explain his interest. Soon he puts it down and shows Literally the brochure for a new play, Telstar: The Joe Meek Story, which he is planning to see as soon as it opens. It’s about a legendary eccentric record producer who made a series of remarkable, sonically innovative records then met a sorry end. “Don’t you like ‘

Telstar’?” he asks. “Don’t you like ‘Have I The Right?’ by The Honeycombs?”

The musicians do a full run-through. Neil and Chris laugh, amused at the most over-thetop moments. “We might not use it all, you know,” Neil says. Trevor says that they need to split the musicians up into smaller groups. “There’s a lot of racket,” he says. “Exciting, I thought.”

“That timpani roll,” laughs Chris.

“Hilarious,” says Neil. “From their new album, Hilarious.”

They listen back to the recording of the orchestra. Chris raises his fist.

“Very Wagnerian,” nods Neil.

“It sounds like the overture to a show” says Chris.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Neil agrees.

Gavin, who leads the strings, comes into the control room to have a listen. Trevor tries to introduce him to Neil and Chris but they point out that they have known him for years — since the recording of ‘Left to my own devices

“‘Left to my own devices’ was the first string session we ever did,” Neil points out.

“Twenty years ago?” suggests Gavin.

“No” corrects Neil. “Seventeen years ago, to be precise. Studio One, Abbey Road.”

Neil picks up Pilot once more and Trevor explains that the best bits in the magazine are the details about safety matters and recent crashes.

“Trevor has an unhealthy interest in plane crashes,” Neil observes.

Nick Ingman gives the string section new instructions. “Instead of what you have please play your lowest D.”

“D? Or B?” queries one of the players.

“D,”says Ingman. “For ‘disaster’. And as big and loud and juicy as possible.” The instructions continue: “… Pete, you know that quaver thing?” “It’sforte from bar nine, the m.f has gone…” and so on. He chats with Trevor about the fact that the harp player hasn’t turned up yet.

The song’s relentless chorus hammers out:

“If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear. If you’ve something to hide you shouldn’t even be here.”

Nick Ingman asks them to stop because the cellos are lagging behind. “It’s not getting to 4 when I expect it to,” he frets.

“A different world,” observes Trevor, quietly. “The skill it takes to do this…”

Chris reads about Camilla Parker Bowles in the newspaper. He doesn’t appear to be paying much attention, though occasionally, without looking up, he’ll say something like, “We’ll have to have a proscenium arch for the next show.”

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Trevor points out that you can’t get strings recorded for pop records to sound like this in

America. (He lives and works in Los Angeles some of the time.) “They’re working in a factory — they don’t dig it,” he explains. “These guys sort of understand what you want.” And in America it’s hard to get the A-list players anyway for a pop music session — they’re always working on a Stephen Spielberg movie soundtrack or something like that.

They play along to the track again.

“I wonder when the kitchen sink is coming,” sniggers Chris.

“With the harp,” says Neil.

“Fireworks…” Chris says.

“We recorded fireworks once,” Neil recalls.

“Did we?” says Chris.

“Julian recorded them at J.J.’s party for the ‘Always on my mind’ twelve-inch,” Neil says. “They weren’t that good though — they didn’t explode in time.”

“The harp’s arrived,” Trevor announces.

“Someone wearing a top hat…” predicts Neil.

… some jugglers coming,” adds Chris.

Neil continues the fantasy: “We’re recording some mime artists this afternoon…”

After a while, Trevor says that he’s happy with what they have. “You can always fix the timing,” he says. “It’s hard to fix the pitch.” He has two suggestions. One is to the orchestra. “Why don’t we move on and do ‘Luna Park’ now?” The other is to Neil. “Shall we put the kettle on?”

At a later date, Neil and Chris explain to Literally the background to today’s session.

“Originally on this album we weren’t going to do strings…” Neil explains.

“Or guitars,” laughs Chris.

“Our original idea in writing the album was to do minimalist electric-pop,” says Neil. “Consequently as a result we’ve made an album of sweeping epics, one after another really. I don’t know how we’ve managed that.”

Trevor suggested that they used Nick Ingman for the arrangements. This is the first time they have been in the studio with him, though he arranged the strings on “Numb” which will also be on this album but which was recorded in 2003.

“With the style of these string arrangements, they’re not incredibly intrusive strings,” Neil notes. “They’re used as a rich texture.” As he pointed out in the studio, the first time they ever used live strings was on the first song they recorded with Trevor Horn, back in 1988, “Left to my own devices “It was the first time we worked with Richard Niles who did the arrangements, and he did a massive arrangement and we edited some of it out. It’s exciting doing strings, because it makes the harmony sound much richer, which I really like. I always like hearing the strings playing by themselves as well — it gives you a completely different idea of what the music could be.”

They point out that sometimes orchestrations don’t work. “In this case not at all — I’ve liked everything — but we have had situations before,” says Chris. “But the great thing is that you don’t have to use everything. We’ve had occasions before where we’ve cherry-picked the bits we liked and not used the other bits.”

They talk through these three songs. First, the anthemic “Integral”.

“One of the ideas for the album is that we took the themes of the songs from contemporary events,” says Neil. “‘Integral’ was inspired by the issue of ID cards in Britain, whereby everyone in Britain is issued with an ID card which has a smart strip on it which collates all of your social security information, any criminal convictions, and other stuff, which also is going to be shared with the United States of America. And it seems to us to go against all British traditions of liberty and freedom. Continue »

So we wrote this song which is a kind of satire, sung from the point of view of the people who are issuing the ID cards, and sums it up by saying ‘your lives exist as information’ which is kind of how things are going in a way… ‘Integral’ because you’re integral to the government’s concept; it’s what everyone says: ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’; the point being that if you have got something to hide you’re not integral to the concept of modern Britain. But we only really like people who’ve got something to hide.”

“They’re certainly more interesting,” says Chris. (He adds one more practical objection to ID cards: “It’d be a nightmare for Batman and all those superheroes.”)

They wrote the music in their London studio.

“You started writing the music,” Neil reminds Chris. “You didn’t like it to begin with.”

“It’s alright,” says Chris. “It’s the sort of thing you might get annoyed with after a few plays. It was just trying to be uplifting really. It’s not easy. People think it’s easy doing uplifting four-on-the-floor stompers but actually it’s quite difficult, particularly when you’re not in the mood. When you’re feeling like Chris Martin on a good day, it’s not easy to do. But we try. We owe it to the fans.”

“I think it sounds threatening more than uplifting,” says Neil.

“Musically it’s a bit triumphalist, don’t you think?” says Chris.

“Yes,” Neil agrees. “Threateningly triumphalist.”

“Yes,” says Chris. “It’s the state — it’s an overpowering state.”

“It actually has an influence from Rammstein as well,” says Neil. “It reminds me a bit of Rammstein’s song, ‘Amerika’.” He starts singing: “We’re all living in Amerika… wunderbar …” “Intregal” also reminds them of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “Trevor thinks a lot of things on this album sound like Pink Floyd,” says Neil. “I, of course, have never really listened to Pink Floyd so it’s very difficult for me to judge this. I was never a fan.”

The second of these three songs is called “Luna Park”.

“It was written about two years ago,” says Neil, “in the north of England…”

“I think it was done in London,” says Chris.

“You might be right,” says Neil.

“They come from the heavens anyway,” notes Chris. “We’re just a vessel through which they pass. If anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus.” (Literally readers may like to consider at their leisure whether this represents Chris’s true opinion or is a savage parody of pompous pop star interviews.)

“I’ve always like the phrase ‘Luna Park’,” says Neil.

“You don’t get them in England,” says Chris. “We have Blackpool Pleasure Beach.”

“In Nice there’s a Luna Park,” says Neil.

“All across Germany,” notes Chris.

“Luna Park is their name for a permanent funfair,” says Neil, “and obviously it means something to do with the moon, that you go there at night, lit by the moon. I’ve always thought there were a lot of connotations… …lunatic, for instance. So there is that notion that it’s madness, and that’s specifically what I liked about it — the mixture of fun, fear and madness. It struck me as a good metaphor for America. So in the song Luna Park is America. It’s basically a war on terror song.

There’s another song on the album called ‘Psychological’ which has a similar theme. It’s basically about how you imagine things, of how being afraid of a directionless terrorism in a way is like being afraid of the dark. In the dark you don’t know what’s happening, and with terrorism you feel where information is concemed you’re in the dark so you’re irrationally scared.”

The third song is called “Casanova in Hell”.

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“We wrote that in the north of England,” says Neil. “Chris started writing a song on the grand piano which I’ve got in my house, and I’d had the idea of writing a song called ‘Casanova in Hell’ from reading a book about him… It’s a short novel, Casanova Homecoming, by Arthur Schnitzler who was the Viennese writer at the tum of the twentieth century and it sort of draws upon the idea that Casanova is getting older, and so the song is about Casanova. A woman laughs at him because she thinks he’s too old to have sex with her, and he confronts that realisation and gets his revenge by writing his memoirs.

And it was his memoirs that made him into a historical figure as well as a literary figure — he recorded all of his sexual conquests as well as other things in these books. It’s got this very pretty melody that has these sort of dissonant notes in it. When the conductor was introducing it to the orchestra he said something about the words… One word has been changed, though. The word ‘masturbate’ has been changed to ‘contemplate’. It was just too icky.”

“We didn’t want a parental guidance sticker on the album sleeve,” deadpans Chris. “We’re not that type of band.”

Once the kettle has boiled at the back of the control room, Trevor Horn makes his own cup of tea and stares at the jar of chocolate biscuits. “Biscuits around the place, it’s deadly.”

“Don’t go there, Trevor,” counsels Neil.

He has one biscuit anyway while the strings run through “Luna Park”. Chris points out a bit of the arrangement that he doesn’t like.

“We should have Axl Rose singing on this, really,” says Neil. “He’d sing it really well.”

“This has got more rock, hasn’t it?” Chris observes. “I don’t mean in a bad way.” He shares his reservations with Nick Ingman about the opening passages.

“We can schmoot them up a bit,” Ingman suggests.

“I think they’ve got to do it aggressively,” Neil agrees. “I think it needs to sound rushed. It’s got to match the piano.”

“Which is obviously being played percussively,” states Nick Ingman. He talks the strings through the song. “There’s the famous semi-quaver passage at 65…” he says at one point.

“Famous,” says Neil, who is enjoying tea and a banana. “People talk of nothing else.” He says that he sat next to the notorious art critic Brian Sewell at a dinner the other night when he was presenting the BP National Portrait Gallery portrait prize. (Neil took the opportunity to note how old-fashioned portrait painting was and reasoned that it must, consequently, have something going for it.)

“This is about Casanova in hell,” Nick Ingman tells the string section. “Listen to the words. They’re very good.”

Neil chats with Chris about Sondre Lerche. Chris laughs when the already-recorded Neil sings the word “erection” in the background.

“That sounded a bit better than I thought,” says Trevor.

Neil worries that some of the string parts sound a bit inconsequential, and says that he doesn’t understand the discordant part at the end.

“You asked that the strings sort of comment at the end,” Trevor reminds him.

“Did I?” says Neil.

“We can cut it,” says Trevor.

“No, no, what did I mean?” Neil says, wondering. “It might have been a good idea.”

Nick Ingman talks to one of the viola players. “You’re a tiny bit flowery for me,” he says. “Because you’re the bottom viola, if you’ll excuse the expression…” They do another runthrough and he praises them. “Lovely,” he says. “Very limp. Beautifully limp.”

They consider the problematic end passage. “This ascending chromatic thing which may get cut,” as Nick Ingman describes it to the players. Continue »