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The Boys do too:
Neil: "Johnny Marr came up with the idea for the backing vocals at the end: 'coming up against it now, really coming up against it oooh whooo whooo'. He said, 'If you were being Quincy Jones you'd do something like this.' I said, 'Let's do that, then,' and we sang them together."
Chris: "We were still doing Sharon Redd breakdowns. No handclaps though."
Neil: "It's got a very good end."
Chris: "Well done, Chris Porter. That's the sort of thing only a proper producer would do."
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 17 March 2016 20:43 (eight years ago) link
On "Before":
Chris: "I love this. There's nothing extraneous on it. There's no unnecessary musical things happening."
Neil: "We set out to make it for America. This is the song described by Atlantic records, our American label at the time, as a 'straight out of the box smash'. It wasn't a hit there."
Chris: "I love Neil's vocal style on this."
Neil: "It's very smooth. I sing like a girl."
Chris: "Maybe you should sing like a girl more often."
Neil: "It sounds like no other record we've made. It's a very gorgeous, loving record. We wanted to work with Danny Tenaglia whom Tom Stephan had recommended to us. We didn't really know Danny's work. We were going to work with David Morales in New York, and David Morales's agent cancelled two days before we were going. The studio was booked. And Tom said, 'You should be working with Danny Tenaglia anyway', so we phoned him up and he, now to my astonishment, just dropped everything. Danny was a hip in-crowd thing at that point, but he wasn't the world's most famous DJ. Now, of course, it would be a big event."
Chris: "And we discovered that Danny, unlike most DJs, can bloody play the keyboards. Imagine our surprise. He did a great production job on this. When he put the bassline on I thought 'wow', because he didn't make the bassline follow the root note of the chords."
Neil: "We did it there in the studio."
Chris: "We deliberately didn't arrive with anything."
Neil: "It was based on two bits of songs Chris had written on his Ian Wright tape that he put together, very reluctantly."
Chris: "I'm always reluctant. It's two different songs being shoved into one. It's a waste."
Neil: "Danny had programmed some drums, and we put these bits in, and then in the studio I started singing the 'before' thing and Chris said, 'Go and sing that immediately', because it's good to sing immediately because you get the nuances. I forget nuances terribly easily. I went back to the hotel and wrote all the words, and I sang it the next day. The vocal sounded great and then the engineer wiped the third verse by mistake. I think the three girls' vocals on it are lovely. At first Danny didn't like it where they go 'before...before...before', but we realised it was the hook of the record. It's the same message as 'Love comes quickly', really, but from a slightly different point of view. When you're feeling down about love, when you're in a difficult situation, suddenly things can straighten out. Suddenly the right person comes into your life. The middle bits - 'there's a story of a man who loved too much' - are slightly different. I think they're about O. J. Simpson because that was on the telly the whole time then."
Chris: "This was just one of those things that sounded good from day one."
Neil: "I don't know why it wasn't a bigger hit. It was a hit in England but it did nothing in Europe. It's great when someone who you expect to do some big white record does some gorgeous smooth black record. I think it may be too linear. Quite quickly, you've heard everything. My ear expects, on the second verse, something else to happen. We tried to remix it in London but it didn't sound right - what we added sounded too different from what we'd recorded in New York - so we didn't use it."
Chris: "I have to say that people are wrong sometimes. The trouble is, we've set ourselves up as releasing big records, so if we do something different people are always going to be disappointed."
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 17 March 2016 20:45 (eight years ago) link
'Can You Forgive Her?' has a really distinct shift from the verse to the chorus, though, whereas with 'Before' it's a little more difficult to pinpoint which part is meant to be the chorus, as the "you find your love before" part sounds as if it could be part of the verse, and the "before, before, before" part, while definitely a hook (as Neil explains above) doesn't really feel like a chorus either.
― // 166,000 W A N K E R S // LOVE (Turrican), Thursday, 17 March 2016 22:35 (eight years ago) link
one year passes...
one year passes...