ISLE OF NOISES - Conversations with Great British Songwriters (w/ Jimmy Page)

[sam_webmaster]

ISLE OF NOISES
Conversations with Great British Songwriters
Daniel Rachel

RAY DAVIES, ROBIN GIBB, JIMMY PAGE, BRYAN FERRY, JOAN ARMATRADING, CHAS JANKEL, JOHN LYDON, MICK JONES, PAUL WELLER, STING, ANDY PARTRIDGE, DIFFORD AND TILBROOK, MADNESS, JOHNNY MARR, BILLY BRAGG, CHRIS LOWE AND NEIL TENNANT, LEE MAVERS, DAMON ALBARN, NOEL GALLAGHER, LILY ALLEN, LAURA MARLING

More than twenty of the UK’s finest musicians discuss the magic and reveal the secrets behind their art in a rare collection of interviews about fifty years of classic British songwriting.

Isle of Noises features brand new, exclusive, in-depth interviews with many of the UK’s greatest living musicians.

The heart of the book is to understand songwriting and the creative process behind the craft. Each interviewee discusses the inspiration and working practice behind their most successful songs, often disclosing lyrical and melodic secrets along the way.

‘It’s a really interesting project. I bet no one says the same thing.’ DAMON ALBARN

‘I was astounded by Daniel’s knowledge and even after all these years to be asked original questions that surprise you was very impressive.’ ROBIN GIBB

Published by Picador in hardback on 12 September 2013; £25.00

The combination of each artist’s unique personal insights and the breadth of knowledge represented in their collected experience makes this the definitive word on classic British songwriting – as told by the songwriters themselves.

http://www.isleofnoises.co.uk/

[kenog]

Thanks Sam for this. I for one didn't know this was due for publication. A definite must-buy for me as there is a wealth of experience and talent in there.

ISLE OF NOISES
Conversations with Great British Songwriters
Daniel Rachel

RAY DAVIES, ROBIN GIBB, JIMMY PAGE, BRYAN FERRY, JOAN ARMATRADING, CHAS JANKEL, JOHN LYDON, MICK JONES, PAUL WELLER, STING, ANDY PARTRIDGE, DIFFORD AND TILBROOK, MADNESS, JOHNNY MARR, BILLY BRAGG, CHRIS LOWE AND NEIL TENNANT, LEE MAVERS, DAMON ALBARN, NOEL GALLAGHER, LILY ALLEN, LAURA MARLING

More than twenty of the UK’s finest musicians discuss the magic and reveal the secrets behind their art in a rare collection of interviews about fifty years of classic British songwriting.

Isle of Noises features brand new, exclusive, in-depth interviews with many of the UK’s greatest living musicians.

[aen27]

I didn't know this was coming either. Thanks so much, Sam.

[Walter]

Thank you, Sam, for bringing this to our attention. That is quite a group of musicians. Looking forward to it!

[Bayougal65]

I think this is something we all have been begging for, more insight into the creative process!

Should be fascinating reading!

I hope Jimmy's contribution to the book is lengthy!

Thanks Sam, for the heads-up!

PS: I notice it is also available on Amazon for Kindle for those so inclined.

[DropDown]

Thanks for the heads up Sam & Bayougal...I just downloaded it on Kindle as I wait for the print copy.

[FireOpal]

I'll be very interested to read Jimmy's thoughts on this topic. Hopefully, he will be more elucidating than Robert, who when asked about his writing process once replied, "Well, you either write songs or you don't."

[truth and beauty]

This sounds fascinating.

In the UK, the book is priced at £25 - but Amazon are selling for £16 ..

[Disco Duck]

Thanks Sam for this. I for one didn't know this was due for publication. A definite must-buy for me as there is a wealth of experience and talent in there.

Some obvious names are missing: Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Jagger & Richards, Elton John.

[Otto Masson]

Thanks for pointing this out, Sam.

I will use this opportunity to also point out another book that came out last year which I don't think too many people are aware of: My First Guitar, which is a collection of interviews by Julia Crowe. There are many interesting interviews there, with guitarists ranging from Les Paul to Satriani, or from Dick Dale to Santana ... Scotty Moore, Alex Lifeson, Steve Vai, Vernon Reid and many others ... and two concluding chapters devoted to conversations with Jimmy Page. I thought they were fun to read.

[kenog]

Maybe that was intentional.

Some obvious names are missing: Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Jagger & Richards, Elton John.

[Disco Duck]

Maybe that was intentional.

Perhaps the author thinks enough information is already out there about McCartney et al.'s songwriting processes.

[kenog]

Thanks Otto. I wasn't aware of this publication either. It might be worth mentioning it in the 'Musician's Corner' thread.

Thanks for pointing this out, Sam.

I will use this opportunity to also point out another book that came out last year which I don't think too many people are aware of: My First Guitar, which is a collection of interviews by Julia Crowe. There are many interesting interviews there, with guitarists ranging from Les Paul to Satriani, or from Dick Dale to Santana ... Scotty Moore, Alex Lifeson, Steve Vai, Vernon Reid and many others ... and two concluding chapters devoted to conversations with Jimmy Page. I thought they were fun to read.

[Bayougal65]

Thanks for the heads up Sam & Bayougal...I just downloaded it on Kindle as I wait for the print copy.

DD,

How are you liking it so far?

I hope it is well written.

I will probably get it on Kindle this weekend.

[aen27]

My hard copy came yesterday and it is beautiful. I only had a chance to look through Jimmy's interview quickly, but I loved it so far. I want to read more slowley soon. He also refers to probobly Charlotte as his wife which is very confusing as it has been mentioned before about them not marrying many times. He also lets slip that "Who's to Blame" is about his own 'divorce.' Those were a couple of things that caught my attenton right away. It looks very well written and impressive. It looks like it will be fun. Not only Jimmy's.

[Disco Duck]

My hard copy came yesterday and it is beautiful. I only had a chance to look through Jimmy's interview quickly, but I loved it so far. I want to read more slowley soon. He also refers to probobly Charlotte as his wife which is very confusing as it has been mentioned before about them not marrying many times. He also lets slip that "Who's to Blame" is about his own 'divorce.' Those were a couple of things that caught my attenton right away. It looks very well written and impressive. It looks like it will be fun. Not only Jimmy's.

From what I've read, they were never legally married. However, Page may have considered Charlotte his common-law wife. When he refers to "my family" when discussing the 1970's, you can tell from the context that he is referring to she and their daughter. That is an interesting factoid about Who's To Blame?

[kenog]

Here's an extract from Jimmy's contribution. (Sourced from DangerousMinds.net).

"...The following is an exclusive extract from Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, a superb new book by Daniel Rachel published this month by Picador. Inspired by Paul Zollo’s seminal Songwriters on Songwriting, Rachel has managed to bring together a truly impressive ensemble of British tunesmiths, including Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, Mick Jones, Robin Gibb (why the hell not!) and Johnny Marr, among others. The results are hugely enjoyable, and the mind veritably boggles imagining the kind of cajoling and legwork Rachel must have put in to coax this rich and eclectic ensemble out of their country piles—not least the notoriously taciturn, the notoriously notorious Jimmy Page…"

Daniel Rachel: Do you have any introductory thoughts about songwriting?

Jimmy Page: I know what my contribution is and I know how that kicks off in the early stages. Coming from the guitarist’s point of view, I’ll start with the music first. That’s the essence of the key ideas and then I’ll work on those. Sometimes I’ve written the lyrics myself. For example, on the first Led Zeppelin album I had a number of things where I had the chorus, like ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ . . . well, that line gets repeated a number of times so there’s not a lot of lyrics in that (laughs). ‘Good Times Bad Times’ I wrote the chorus. I had the music for it and I was writing for this thing that was going to be put together for the band. The whole thing on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ is recognized by John Bonham’s bass drum, isn’t it? Initially I had a sketch for it and then Robert supplied lyrics to the verses. I was very keen on concentrating on the music, and whoever I was going to be working with, for them to be coming up with lyrics. I didn’t think that my lyrics were necessarily good enough. Maybe they were in certain cases, but I preferred that very close working relationship with whoever was singing, whether it be Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers or David Coverdale. The starting point would always be coming from the music, whether I had written that acoustically or electrically.

Daniel Rachel: It’s very noticeable in your music how song structures seem far more classical than pop in their construction.

Jimmy Page: Well, very much so, because I had very much the view that the music could set the scene. One of the things that you’ll see in the Led Zeppelin music is that every song is different to the others. Each one has its own character; musically as much as lyrically. For example, ‘Ten Years Gone’ or ‘The Rain Song’, which has got a whole orchestral piece before the vocal even comes in. So yes, it was crafted in such a way that the music was really of paramount importance to setting the scene and most probably inspired the singer, in this case Robert, to get set into the overall emotion, the ambience of the track of what was being presented, and then hopefully inspire him to the lyrics.

Often we just had working titles. A good example of this and how it would change and mutate was ‘The Song Remains The Same’ leading into ‘The Rain Song’. The original idea I had for that was an overture—as ‘Song Remains The Same’ is—leading into an orchestral part for ‘The Rain Song’. I had a mellotron and I’d worked out an idea—John Paul Jones did it much better than me—coming into the very first verse. If it’d worked that way there wouldn’t have been any vocal until the first verse, you would have had this whole overture of guitars and then into the orchestral thing that opened up into the first verse. But as it was, when we were rehearsing it then it actually became a song; the structure changed, there was another bit put in and then Robert started singing.That wasn’t a bad idea to have an overture, a whole musical segment that took you into ‘The Rain Song’, but it worked out really well as it was (laughs). Whatever it was you were constantly thinking all the time about it.

Daniel Rachel: Writing in movements was a very unusual step to take as a songwriter, considering Led Zeppelin was preceded by predominantly verse, chorus structures to suit the three-minute single format.

Jimmy Page: Although I’ve already said on the first album there were some choruses there, it got to the point where some of the things didn’t have what you’d call the hook. The reason was we weren’t actually writing music that was designed to go on the AM stations in the States at the time. You had FM, that were called the underground stations, and they would be playing whole sides of albums. Well, that’s a dream, isn’t it?—because people are going to get to hear—it’s not necessarily a concept album—the whole body of work that you’re doing on one side of an album and on the other. That was really a nice way to be able to craft the music into that. It was going to go like that anyway, but it was just really useful. The essence of the contents of these albums was going contraflow to everything else that was going on, and again this was intentional. Whereas on Zeppelin II you’ve got ‘Whole Lotta Love’, on Zeppelin III . . . with other bands it’d be something very close or reflective of if they’d got some sort of hit, and we just weren’t doing that. We were summing up the overall mood and where we were on that musical journey at each point in time.

Daniel Rachel: Did you write songs in sections and then join together collated ideas?

I worked very much in that way. I’d be working at home on various ideas and when we were working on something in a group situation I’d think, ‘Oh, I know what I’m going to put in this,’ if you hadn’t already put it together. Some things, I had them really mapped out, and other things—this is as the group goes on—would be on the spot. ‘Ramble On’ and‘What Is And What Should Never Be’: I had those structures complete.

Daniel Rachel: Can you explain how a riff comes to you?

Jimmy Page: A riff will come out of . . . this whole thing of do you practise at home and all that. Well, I play at home and before I knew where I was things would be coming out and that’s those little sections or riffs or whatever. At that stage it’s selection and rejection. It’s whether you continue with something or you go, ‘No that’s too much like something else,’ and then you move into something else. If you’ve got an idea and you think that’s quite interesting then I’d work and build on it at home. ‘Rock And Roll’ was something that came purely out of the ether. We were working on something else and John Bonham happened to play—just as you do sometimes, because we were recording—this intro from ‘Keep A-Knockin’’ from Little Richard and I went, ‘Oh, that’s it!’—I did this chord and half a riff that was in my head – ‘Let’s do this.’ It was really quick to do and we could write like that.

[aen27]

From what I've read, they were never legally married. However, Page may have considered Charlotte his common-law wife. When he refers to "my family" when discussing the 1970's, you can tell from the context that he is referring to she and their daughter. That is an interesting factoid about Who's To Blame?

I think that may be too, as it is not the only time he has referred to her as his wife, though in the Classic Rock articale on Lucifer Rising, he referred to her as his 'partner.' It's in the context that at the beginning of the interview, he notices that (the author) Daniel Rachel has one of the bootlegs on cassette that was stolen from him called Rehersal 1970-71. He calls them his 'notebook.' He than tells the story how these 'notebooks' were stolen from him. There are no recent pictures of Jimmy, though I love that he is described at the beginning as 'elegant and dapper in a long black coat with silver hair combed back.' I love when he talks about his lyrics and let that slip about "Who's to Blame.

Thanks kenog for that excerpt.

[truth and beauty]

I bought the book and it arrived today: I'm looking forward so much to reading Jimmy's chapter but I'm intrigued equally by the ambition of this project: I'm hoping it offers a mix of great insights into the songwriting process from all the contributors. Fingers crossed ..

[DropDown]

DD,How are you liking it so far?I hope it is well written.I will probably get it on Kindle this weekend.

DD,How are you liking it so far?I hope it is well written.I will probably get it on Kindle this weekend.

Hi Bayougal, I'm going to start reading it tonight, I've had no time in the last few days...it looks good from what I browsed through!

[DropDown]

The Kindle version states JP's birthday as January 8, 1944. Is there the same error in the print version?

[truth and beauty]

Hi DropDown - I have my print copy, and haven't had time to read it yet, except to observe that the interview with Jimmy is quite long and promising : the extract which Kenog supplied is great but it obviously goes further .. so looking forward to that.

The birthday is indeed wrong, and as I understand it Joan Baez does share a birthday on 9th January - but she was born in 1941, so at least in astrological terms, no massive comparison there.

From the little I've seen, not much else is wrong: Daniel Rachel's questions to Jimmy and to others appear to be thoughtful and well informed.

[DropDown]

Hi T&B,

Another slight - but maybe I'm just nitpicking - is when the author writes that Jimmy was given a discarded guitar. I'm pretty sure that JP once said in an interview (I can't remember which) that he happened upon the guitar when it was left behind in the new home his family had moved into, but I might be wrong.

[truth and beauty]

Hi DropDown

I noticed that one too! Also, the paragraph implies Jimmy might have begun playing at around the age of eight:

"When the boy was eight, the Page family moved... Soon afterwards, Jimmy was given a discarded guitar. He discovered an immediate and natural bond with the instrument ... "

I don't think he's ever been specific about the age he began playing, but in other interviews he's suggested it was at a much later age, around 12.

He talks about the guitar in the Epsom house in his BBC interview Jimmy Page in Conversation. He says the guitar was already in the house: "an intervention". But then he talks about, later on, watching a boy play guitar at school, and arranging to bring the guitar from home so the other boy could show him how to tune it. His age isn't mentioned, but certainly the impression is that, while the guitar was there from age 8, the impetus to begin playing was triggered by other events.

There is probably a whole other thread about this topic !

However I do think we're being a little nitpicky ... the chapter on Jimmy is great ( still reading the others). I love the idea of persistent questioning, all on the theme of songwriting, and I think it pays off. So I wouldn't want to put anyone off.

[aen27]

^ He also mentions finding the guitar in the house in It Might Get Loud.