I think I know enough to do that well now. So, when I do it, it has to be appropriate and really capture a feeling. But at the time, that was part of my agenda-taking guitars out, seeing what filters did, things like that.īut honestly, I don’t really like a lot of music that blends electronic music and guitars. Like with Electronic’s second album, I was trying to make my guitar sound like a synth. One way I’ve done it wrong in the past is by not putting enough guitar on. Was the decision to background guitars in some cases on this album also a response to that record? Deciding where guitars should sit in more electronic music is a balancing act. Lots of stuff still comes via the way people probably expect I write songs, too, which is to just sit down with a guitar. Musically, you can still tell that it’s coming from an indie rocker from Manchester, but the whole idea started from just that title. The same thing happened with “Lightning People.” I had that title, which to me sounded like a Staple Singers song or something, so it ended up with a sort of choir/gospel feel. Sometimes you mix and match images or sometimes a concept comes first. So that song is about transmitting and receiving erotic signals. There’s a lot of downtime in that kind of situation, so I started working on the song “Receiver.” And as you said, it sounded to me like the atmosphere of being in a nightclub-like those I used to go to in Euston at the end of the ’80s-finding myself, you know, still there at 5:40 in the morning. I started writing the album and just a few weeks into it, got the call to work on the Bond film. Was that a conscious thing? Well, it’s funny how some things turn out. The rhythmic drive and dance feel of many of the tunes also struck me as nocturnal. So, I didn’t have a concept, but I did have a sort of nagging agenda-that the album would be expansive and that I would tackle feelings about the psychology and predicaments of being a modern person. I made the assumption that the part of my audience that listens most closely and that I’ve built up over the last 40 years or whatever, that they are living similar lives to what I was talking about. So, a lot of the songs reference those feelings-like “Lightning People:” “I can’t sleep/static sheets/cries that put me on my knees”-that idea of a storm coming. I think a lot of people were lying awake wondering if they still had a job and worrying about their businesses. There were also these nocturnal themes that emerged. I took all the equipment in the space out for that shoot to signify the way I was feeling about all that. So, I ended up very aware of all this idea of space, which is even why the sky is so blue on the cover. But, of course, with the way things turned out, I ended up-and I must confess, illegally-going alone into my studio space, which is the top floor of an old factory, staring out at my Mini, which was the only car in this vast parking lot, and working like that for weeks. I just had this idea that (the double LP format) would give me a lot of space. I say subconscious because I started writing it before Covid and had this idea that I wanted to do a double LP, and because it was going to be a double, I thought it could be expansive. Even the picture of you on the cover-you next to the Fender Showman-seemed like a totemic suggestion of longing for big sounds. I pictured you making this record, amid lockdown, making music for the clubs we hoped to return to again. I was really struck by the bigness of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. Johnny Marr with his closest comrade, the Fender Jaguar, at L.A.’s Teragram Ballroom.
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