Mark Nevin rose to fame as songwriter and guitarist with Fairground Attraction best known for the number one single ‘Perfect’ and Brit Award winning album ‘The First of a Million Kisses’. After Fairground Attraction, Mark formed Sweetmouth with Brian Kennedy on vocals, forged a song writing partnership with Morrissey before embarking on a successful solo career.
In his fourth interview with Jason Barnard, Mark explains what inspired him to write his latest album ‘Strike Up The Sally Ann’.
When we spoke two years ago about your last album ‘My Unfashionable Opinion’ you said that those songs came quickly because of David Bowie – it created an urgency that you were running out of time. Did the material come quickly for ‘Strike Up The Sally Ann’?
Yes, when he died it did create an urgency in me, and it is still with me. As we are all aware, these last couple of years have been extraordinary politically and I have been reading so much, trying to get my head around what is going on. The songs have evolved out of my broadening understanding and have helped me to formulate my position on certain things. Like a lot of people,I am so concerned about what is going on around us. Dangerous ideas have been re-branded and are invading our lives through so called politically correctness. This is what ‘The Clever People’ is about, ‘The clever people want to change the laws of nature, they just ain’t good enough’. I think that the biggest problem we face is well-meaning ignorance, perfectly decent people who haven’t really thought through the implications of their reasoning.
‘Somewhere In My Dreams’ is a very evocative opener. Is it based on your memories of childhood and the bonds we share with people, or more recent experiences?
I co-wrote ‘Somewhere In My Dreams’ in June two years ago with the singer/songwriter Callaghan at Pennard House, a beautiful old country mansion located beside the Glastonbury Festival site. It was a perfect summer’s afternoon on the last day of Chris Difford’s songwriting retreat and the words and melody seemed to fall into our hands as though they had always existed. Callaghan is a very English young woman who spends a lot of time touring around America, I said it must be a big contrast, all that driving between American cities and then coming back and forth to the UK. So that is how it came about, but like a lot of songs, it seems to have a meaning above and beyond the ones the writers intended. It evokes the England of my childhood, the summer fairs, village greens and Salvation Army bands. It is precious and I don’t want to see it turned into a series of generic shopping malls that look like any other place in the world.
Am I right that ‘A Fish Needs A Bike’ was inspired by the feminist slogan ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’? Is this track a challenge to this concept?
Indeed. Our culture wants to feminise boys and make girls masculine, it is a terrible terrible mistake, the consequences will be catastrophic. Men and women need each other, the lie that they don’t is pure evil. We are committing suicide in the deluded belief that what is happening is some kind of progress. The mass neutering of the masculine will create monsters, male and female.
‘A Cathedral Collapsed’ is one of my favourite tracks from the album. Is it about having a powerful self-realisation?
I was in a swanky cocktail bar waiting for what seemed like an hour for the bartender to create a couple of absurd drinks and it struck me that this was the modern equivalent of a religious ritual. Everywhere I look I see the soul and meaning sucked out of life, in art, music, people. There are those who consider what is happening as a triumph of secular humanism. It isn’t, it is nihilism. The collapsing cathedral is that awful realisation. I absolutely love Paul Cuddeford’s brilliant guitar on this track, he is all over the album, a thrilling musician.
‘Silver Arrow’ seems to resonate some of the themes we’ve previously discussed about you finding your voice and increasing your self-confidence. Is that something you recognise?
I was at the William Morris Museum in Walthamstow and saw a lithograph of King Arthur, he was the one who could pull the sword from the stone because he looked the angel in the eye, he could do this because he had a pure heart. The song is about that, that if our hearts are pure we can do extraordinary things, miracles really do happen.
The video for ‘Dolly Said No To Elvis’ has racked up hundreds of thousands of views. How did you get to collaborate with Heather Colbert?
I was at the after show party of a Sparks gig in London (yes, I got to talk with Ron Mael!) and I met Joseph Wallace who directed the incredible stop-motion video for their single ‘Edif Piaf Said It Better Than Me’. Joseph also teaches animation and I asked him if he knew of any up and coming animators who might like to get involved with the Dolly song. He put me in touch with Heather, she loved the story and was keen to get involved. I told her to do whatever she wanted and she did. I was blown away by the final result and it quickly went viral on the internet. I only got to meet Heather for the first time a few weeks ago, we were invited to a screening of the video at the British Film Institute. She is wonderful and I am lucky to have found her.
And ‘Graceland Horses’ is another Elvis reference?
This is another co-write from Chris Difford’s writing week. This time with a young singer called Honey Mooncie and the country star Jim Lauderdale. I went to Graceland about 30 years ago and I remember seeing the horses there, I thought The Graceland Horses would be a great title but I didn’t know what it could be about. We wrote this song outside in the garden of Pennard House and it was really meant for Honey to sing. She is only 16 and is just about to ‘leave the garden’ of her childhood and set out on her journey in music and life. I imagined her dreaming of riding with Elvis on the Graceland horses as a metaphor for the realisation of her ambitions. Elvis was ‘The King’ of course but it is more about The King as an archetype, the perfected man.
Was it the death of Jimmy Scott that inspired you tell his story through ‘Little Jimmy Pain’?
It was his life. I saw him singing at The Jazz Cafe in Camden back in the nineties. He was extraordinary. I was watching some videos of him recently on YouTube and wondered about his story. I was delighted to see that there was a book about him, which I ordered and enjoyed immensely. What a life! He was 4 foot 11 inches until he was 35 when he grew 6 inches in height. It was a tragic life but he finally triumphed when he was very old.
‘Standing on the corner of Misery and Hope, with his hand on his gun, he’s trying to score some dope’
And to close ‘Oh No, Another Song’ – is that laying down a marker to say you’ll continue playing live and releasing albums?
No, this is another song from one of Chris’s writing week. I wrote it with Nashville artist James House and Garry Tallent from The E Street Band. What a thrill to meet Garry and I was blown away when he told me that he loved Fairground Attraction and had bought both the single of Perfect and our album. I was saying that there are so many songs out there now that it is almost as if even one more would be too many, it’s like ‘groan, oh no, another song’ we all thought that was funny and out came this song.
Taking ‘Strike Up The Sally Ann’ as a whole, what would you say are its linking lyrical messages?
My whole life has been a quest for truth and I love the way that our truth is revealed to us through the process of songwriting. I often write a song and six months later I go, ‘oh, so that is what this is about!’ In the second song ‘The Man Who Sends The Spam’ I imagine finding the guy who sends out all those hideous emails that we all get every day and making him ‘eat the lot’. I hate lies, I love truth. We live in a time where we are constantly being drip fed terrible lies and propaganda via every laptop, TV, iPad and smart phone. We have to seek truth or we are doomed. The ‘clever people’ aren’t as clever as they would like to think they are, a pure heart is more important than anything, look the angel in the eye, be a silver arrow, ride with the power of the Graceland horses, it’s the summer fair on the village green, I was always there, somewhere in my dreams!
‘Strike Up the Sally Ann’ can be purchased as a signed CD or digital download from Mark Nevin’s website.
