Playlouder - Music is the Network

We took future poet laureate Derek Meins to task about his new mini-album ‘The Famous Poet’ and this is what he had to say about this rather wonderful collection of rockabilly indie tunes and surreal spoken-word pieces.  ‘The Famous Poet’ is out now on 1965 Records, and also includes Mumford and Sons on the record as Derek’s backing band plus original artwork by Orlando Weeks, the singer in The Maccabees. 

Over to Derek:

“All of the little ditties in between the songs on the album are taken from about two hours worth of recording I did in the studio. I basically stood for a couple of hours one night during the session with my little book that I write ideas down in and ranted. Iain, the producer just left it recording and let me get on with it. When we were mixing I listened back through it and chose the best bits, the "popular culture" ditty at the start came from this.

"The Freud Song" was written a couple of years ago when I still lived up north. I wrote it and recorded a rough demo of it and then never really thought about it much more after that. One day about a year ago when playing a gig in London I decided to play it and it went down a storm so, I continued playing it. Recording it was great fun, we did it completely live, as we did most of the album. Some of the band insisted on removing parts of their clothes for some reason, quite fitting I think!

"The Gin Song" was written about a year ago when I lived on the sea front in Brighton. One rainy day I was sat alone in my flat and drinking a half bottle of Gin and listening to the Carter Family. I basically wrote the song as an answer to their song "Working on a building". It has lines it such as, "if I was a drinking man I tell you what I would do, I would quit my drinking and work on a building too". So, being an "unbeliever" and fond of snifter, I thought I should offer people an alternative!

"Oh! You Pretty Woman" is a re-arrangement of an old traditional song. The author is unknown but the first time I heard it was a version by Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies. I just love the energy and lyrics of the song, although I slightly adapted some of them. Again, this was great fun to record and is my favourite song to perform live with the bad. Everyone seems to love singing along and it has a real he-down kind of vibe.

"Richard" was one of the first pieces I wrote to be performed as a poem rather than a song. The idea had been kicking around for a while but I could never quite work out how to make it into a song. I wrote it about the first time I ever took mushrooms. I was visiting a friend in his halls of residence, we took loads of mushrooms and every now and then this guy would wander into my friend’s room. To start with he seemed amiable but continued to become more and more agitated. This did not mix well with what was going on in my head, I asked my friend who this guy was and what he was doing. "Oh, that's just Richard," came the reply, "He goes through phases."

"A City Called Hell" was something I'd had waiting in my little book for years, unable to decide what to do with it. When mixing the album we found this track of left-over drums we'd recorded. I shouted what I had written over the top and then banged loads of pots and pans along to it. Simple!

"End of Man" is based on certain parts of "The Life and Death of Mr Badman" by John Bunyan. It’s a lot more of a band based song than the others, it was the last to written. I think this may give an idea of what things will be sounding like from me in the future, but who knows?

"Modernity" was the last poem I wrote on the album. It was basically made up in the studio. We tried a few different versions of the female voice. It was quite funny, we tried typing the words into computers and getting them to read it out but what we settled on is, Iain speaking in a funny voice and then putting it through some weird program. If you saw him, (he's 6 foot 3 and has a large Salvador Dali-esque tash!) you would never imagine that voice could come from him!  

"Ex-Her-Size" is my favourite poem to perform live. I made it up late one night at Iain's house when we were doing pre-production. I scribbled it down in one go with some little doodles, he found it lying around and really liked it so I performed it at my next gig and it worked really well, the rest, as they say, is history!

"Over Yonder" was myself and Winston, one of the band members mucking around in the studio. Iain came in and said, "let's record that", so, we did.

Be sure to come and see Derek’s captivating live show on the following dates over summer:

28th August 2008 Soapbox night @ The New Evaristo, Soho with Beans on Toast and Jay Jay Pistolet

www.myspace.com/derekmeins
www.new.facebook.com/pages/The-Famous-Poet-Derek-Meins/10604558893