norman lamont

I’m doing a headline set at the Listening Room in the Blue Blazer, Spittal Street this Sunday.

The evening starts at 8 with some open mic slots then I’ll do a solo acoustic set, with stuff you know and stuff you don’t.

Now of course it …

They say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  It appears to be true of writers, even aspirant, spasmodic, lazy and confidence-lacking ones like your correspondent.  I may have made myself ready by sitting down a couple of weeks ago with a notepad to write 20 verses to a new song-in-potential and completing the exercise. This morning a prompting made me get up in time to pick up the notebook and write another page or two for a different song-in-potential, of a different calibre altogether, one where I feel for once I have something to say.

From a songwriting point of view I find the most powerful injunction, the one that makes the difference between writing that is fluent and free and the normal experience of sweat-and-struggle is Forget about rhyme.  Rhyme can become, if you like, part of the post-production or editing.

In my earlier days however it was a driver and, more than that, a source of creativity. It would juxtapose elements my logical mind would never have juxtaposed. I occasionally – only occasionally – came clean about it, as when a friend asked about an image he found striking but unpleasant in the little-heard song Portobello Slam: ‘Why did you say the shot missed and killed a swan? It’s a great image – red blood on pure white and all that, but why a swan?.’  Me, in a rare fit of honesty: ‘It rhymed with  gone.’

OK since you asked, here’s the whole song:

Rosie Bell has kindly written a review of Fiction 2.

Last night’s Springsteen night was a great success – a good variety of songs and performers with a full and enthusiastic audience. If the earlier part of the show over-emphasised the serious singer/songwriter aspect …