My mate Jamie Morgan and I did an embarrassing single as Morgan McVey, called Looking Good Diving. The music press saw them as the enemy but they were more punk than the punks. All the PWL artists were nice, but none of them were really musicians – unlike Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who really knew their shit. We’d play Trivial Pursuit with Kylie and people like that. I’d come up through punk but ended up working with Stock, Aitken and Waterman at the PWL label. And Jean-Baptiste was like: “That’s it! That’s the video.” Then I answered the door with a towel on my head and a baby under my arm. My other neighbour was hanging out the laundry. Before we talked about ideas for the video, the director Jean-Baptiste Mondino sat outside our house in our little Fiat Panda listening to Manchild while watching my fabulous Jamaican neighbour sweeping the front of the house wearing gold chains. The way we worked was very domestic: a lot of work at home, kids in the studio, a baby under my arm. When we’d finished recording it at Eastcote Studios, Tim Simenon from Bomb the Bass did the scratching and came up with a really great electronic hook. I liked the simplicity of a raw hip-hop beat with orchestrations. Manchild was a very important song for me: it was where I found my style.
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