WEST PIER
SERENADE

West Pier Serenade

The album takes its title from what was the very first of my songs to gain any significant attention.

West Pier Serenade was written while I was a student at Sussex University in — probably — 1977, completely ignoring the punk zeitgeist, and was later published in 1979 in Southern Rag, the forerunner of fRoots, no less.

To be honest, I soon stopped playing it because I thought the last verse collapsed into an unsuccessful mix of unconvincing imagery and forced rhyme.

Plus, when I started playing in double-dropped D tuning in 1987, it became too much of an effort to work out and play the diminished chords the original song relied on.

So I was less than happy when this was the first song both my mum and dad suggested I put on the album.

I was busy explaining all about the dodgy third verse and the change in tuning when my mum simply said that one of the reasons they liked it was because it reminded them of Irene, my dad's dad's second wife.

My mum said Irene had lost a lad in the trenches and had therefore never married until she married my grandad in the 1970s.

I hadn't known that. I had always loved Rene.

I relearned the song.

Noni and the Golden Serenaders

Noni and the Golden Serenaders (1997) is from the Gentle Men song suite about my grandfathers and the First World War.

Apparently The Golden Serenaders were featured in a 1931 film called Comets, but no-one — not even the BFI — seems to have a copy of it.

However, you can see Noni performing one of his clown routines in the British Pathé archive.

VIEW THE BRITISH PATHÉ FILM →

J Johnnie

J Johnnie (2000) was written when my dad wrote his memoir of his experiences in the RAF during the Second World War, A Navigator's Tale.

J Johnnie was the name of the Liberator bomber he was flying in when he was shot down in February 1945.

At the time these notes were written, the song had never previously been recorded.

Gliders for Tim

Gliders for Tim (1991) I found in a churchyard in Devon one February Sunday morning.

We were away on a band mini-tour. I went for a walk in the churchyard and found a headstone with two gliders carved on either side of the epitaph:

The song originally appeared on Heart's Desire, and later versions of it appeared on YouTube, performed by different people.

The German Exchange

The German Exchange (1997) was written for Gentle Men, one of several songs trying to find a way to end the song-cycle.

In 1997, who would have thought that Britain would soon be sending bombers and soldiers to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Although I still like this little personal story of reconciliation, I felt that the course of events required a different ending for the next recording of Gentle Men.

Down the Town and Over the Moon

Down the Town and Over the Moon first appeared on the 1995 Brentford FC benefit CD EP, Saturday Afternoon Red Army.

Cauliflower Curry

Cauliflower Curry (2011) is probably the most polemical song on the album, although some people think it's just about cooking.

In 2011, when significant numbers of disaffected people rioted in Britain, tabloids carried headlines about “Anarchy in the UK”.

I have always thought that anarchism was rather more than the post-Sex Pistols definition of it as a public nuisance.

So in a culture where everything is presented in terms of competition — from education to entertainment to even cooking pies and cakes — a song favouring non-hierarchical, non-violent, self-organised co-operation is pretty subversive stuff.

And the meal was vegan.

Sunday Morning St Denis

Sunday Morning St Denis (1989) was the first song my dad said should be on the album.

Thinking about it, he probably saw me play it for the first time in public at Brentford Waterman's Arts Centre in 1989.

I don't play it that often because it has that tricky introduction — clearly written by a much younger and more ambitious guitar player — and it is difficult for me to catch the right performance of it without diminishing it either by artifice or repetition.

It's also probably the song I am proudest of.

It appeared on UK Talking, then Ma Thatch Downfall 1, and Barb Jungr has also recorded a splendid version of it.

When's It Gonna Snow?

When's It Gonna Snow? (2011) is me trying to write the type of song I possibly would have tried to make a career out of writing if Thatcher hadn't got elected.

Here Comes That Miracle Again

Here Comes That Miracle Again (2005) first appeared with the lovely Russell Churney playing miraculous piano on Metro.

The inspiration for the song was finding a golden crocus defiantly sticking its foolhardy head out of the frozen mud that constituted much of the Green Dragon Nursery garden in Brentford, and watching the hard-bitten urchins gather round and marvel at its beauty.

The song then seemed to turn into a song in praise of spring, replete with old Wordsworth's bloody daffodils, no less.

But actually, it's also a song about my relationship with my dad.

Whitton High Street

The studio was booked for 10.30 and Saskia would be arriving a little later.

I was just putting my guitar into its case when it struck me that, actually, the album wasn't complete.

Unless I told you that Miracle was also really about me and my dad, you wouldn't know.

So I took the guitar out of its case and wrote Whitton High Street.

That's where I have, I think, my earliest and most enduring memory of me and my dad — walking hand in hand down a windswept autumn Whitton High Street.

Ben, who mastered the album, said it reminded him of his dad.

I hope it works some magic for anybody who hears it.