cover design by E Buchanan

WOODSTOCK SAYS:

Musically, this is as nude as it gets. It is, after all, a draft, rather than a final outcome. But if visual artists can sell sketches, why not musicians?

Glasshouse was the last song I wrote at the last Ray Davies workshop I attended. I was not in a good frame of mind for two reasons - firstly we'd finished recording Road Movie and I was afraid I might never write anything again. Secondly I had all but signed a deal on the album and something just didn't feel right about it. I ended up going with my gut, but that was later, and not necessarily the right decision. Ray suggested I think about writing songs with a more limited vocal range and challenged me to write a song about him, within an octave. He said he didn't want me to write about him being a rock star. I said I'd never met him as a rock star, so I wouldn't be able to anyway. I think the song is probably about me. He never heard it because he left before I'd finished it, so I never found out what he thought. I sometimes cheat about the octave when I sing it (I do here), but it doesn't mean anyone else singing it has to.

Faded Picture is a time song. On the noticeboard in my kitchen is a postcard I was sent after I reviewed Deacon Blue at some festival in the late 1980s. It says "Have you no soul, or just little knowledge?" and is signed "Deacon Blue Fan." It's hard to read now because most of the ink has faded away. One day in 1997 I was in the gym and a Deacon Blue record was playing. Not only did I realise that the fan was almost certainly right, but I also became engulfed in a worrying realisation that I'd probably lived my life all wrong. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Watch The War was written in early 1999 on what would have been my parents' golden wedding anniversary if they'd been around to celebrate it. They married at Westminster Registry Office and then went for a drink with my aunt and three friends at the National Union of Students' bar in Endsleigh Street. Fifty years later I traipsed around Bloomsbury in unsuitable shoes and an airhostess costume (don't ask) looking for it for hours, thinking about war and television. Eventually I found a hotel on the corner, just about as far away from late 1940s communist idealism as you could get. I had a drink there and wrote down this song. Pity it's more relevant now than it was then.

I wrote Circus at the end of the 1998 Edinburgh Festival. I think most people know the feeling.