How do you go about writing a song?
First you have to work out what you are hoping to achieve, who you are aiming it at and why. I rarely just sit at a piano or get out my guitar and see what comes out. Before I do that, I have already thought out what I’m going to do.
Take Kylie Minogue. The first thing I thought when I saw her was she’s got this great career as an actress, she looks great, she sounds great, and now she wants to be a pop star. But I also wondered if maybe she didn’t have love in her life. The first song we wrote for her, I Should Be So Lucky, is about that. She’s singing I’m lucky at other things, I wish I were lucky in love. It’s a sad little song but setting it against a background of bright cheeriness gives it a built-in paradox and tension.
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Where do you go from there?
In 90 per cent of songs I start with the title, which sums up the idea behind the song. This might be a phrase you’ve heard before, it might be catchy or have a ring to it. Sometimes it even suggests a rhythm by itself. It would be difficult to do I Should Be So Lucky as a waltz.
Then you have to work within the framework of a standard 3-minute pop song. Is this restricting?
When Shakespeare wrote sonnets he immediately set himself a framework of 14 lines. When he wrote in pentameters his framework was 10 beats to the line: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” With me, it’s a 3-minute pop song, because I love that format. And in my songs I’m not trying to say things like “ban the bomb” or “shoot Tony Blair”. I want to say: I love you or I miss you or I want you. For me, there have only ever been two songs: either you’re happy or you’re sad. So the restrictions are there right away. It’s about rehashing familiarity, and that framework makes me more creative.
If you were a painter and you were undisciplined and had no structure and no preconceptions, where would your picture begin and end? Painters start with a piece of paper or a canvas. It all happens within that frame. You have to tie yourself down and then get yourself out of it. That’s what Houdini did, it’s what David Blaine does. It creates tension; people know you’re restricted.
People accused you of having a formula.
I don’t have a formula. And I am always looking for inspiration, looking for the thing that makes the difference. There is nothing as difficult as coming up with the words and music for another 3-minute pop song that says “I love you” in a way you haven’t heard. Yet I believe there are a million songs still to be written in this format. I’m still looking for the perfect pop song, one that does all the things you want it to all the way through. I haven’t written it yet.
You can have the framework, and you can have all the musical tools of the professional songwriter, but that doesn’t necessarily give you a song. Where does the creative spark come from?
It normally starts with a need. Someone might need a song by tomorrow, because I have agreed to write for them and I always leave it until the day before, or even the hour before. When I was with Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the late 1980s I would be working on at least four songs with four different artists at a time.
My creative writing was done either in the bath or while driving to the studio. I’d go to bed the night before with a puzzle – having to write a song for Donna Summer who would be in at 11 o’clock the following morning. I’d wake up and my brain would have been working on it all night. By the time I was in the bath, I would be developing an idea. And then I’d sing it to myself in the car. I don’t read or write music and I never had any musical training. I always hear it in my head. Then I have to get it out, put it to music or translate it onto tape. The danger is that you lose sight of the original idea, add too much to it. Every artist has to know when to stop because if you don’t you end up with a black canvas.
What does it feel like when you’re creating in this spontaneous way?
Something goes on at a fundamental level in the mind when this happens. Maybe it’s something primeval or evolutionary. Or maybe it’s tapping into some great universal field that we all have access to. That would explain an awful lot to me. Matt Aitken and I used to have these white-hot moments of creativity, and you just don’t know where it comes from. When you’re sparked, because the singer is going to be here in 10 minutes and you’ve got to get something done, something clicks. When the circumstances are right – and without me analysing it – the channel opens, the flashing lights go off and the whole system resonates. I cannot explain it.
How do you know when you’ve got a hit song?
You know when it gets you. If I hear a hit song on television or radio for the first time, I am spotting patterns before I have even registered what the lyrics are or how the tune really goes. I’m spotting patterns of notes and word rhythms. It sets my hairs on end. I didn’t even register what the song was about but it set me off. It’s almost subliminal.
With me, I know when I’ve got something. I’m dealing with the same old restrictions in my world of pop songs. I go to the piano, run something over a million times, try it this way, try it that way, and apply all my experience to the problem of coming up with something that works. I can spend an hour, two hours, three hours looking for it and then all of a sudden something will happen and you realise you’ve got something you didn’t have before. It’s as if I asked my brain to hunt around, and while I was sitting there doing something else it just popped in.
What musical devices do you use to get the ideas across?
There’s a chord sequence I’ve used a lot in my big hits. If you are in the key of C, you actually start on the F major, then later resolve to C. After playing the F, you move up a tone to G, but at the same time you linger with the bass on F. That creates tension – it’s already tugging at you. Then you drop to E minor and then across to A minor. And eventually you resolve to C. So you’re setting the tension and then releasing it, paying people off, as it were, with the resolve. I use these chords a lot, and the key is how to be creative within the framework they give me.
Another device is to keep the crescendo and power in a song by going up in tone or key as it develops. For example, if I write a song all in one key then realise that the tune is great but it doesn’t really develop, I might put in key changes. Sometimes the key changes happen as part of the song. In I Should Be So Lucky, for example, the verse starts off in A, then goes up a tone, then moves to E minor, and then we’re in C for the chorus. So the pitch keeps on rising, but it’s the melody that takes us there.
What about tempo?
Right back to Kylie in the 1980s, I have always looked at beats per minute as fundamental to a song. Anything too slow and you get a lethargic reaction. With Stock, Aitken and Waterman we were trying to make people feel uplifted and get their heartbeat moving. There is definitely a point somewhere around 120 bpm when it starts to get excited.
What does it feel like to write a hit song?
It’s a funny feeling. Take Never Gonna Give You Up, which I wrote for Rick Astley some day in November 1986. The day before I wrote it, it didn’t exist. Now that song is out there. Everybody seems to know it. That’s the way I look at it: it changes you because now it’s there and it wasn’t before. And when everybody tells me they know it or fell in love to it or danced to it, then you feel you’ve changed the world.
How do you explain how popular music evolves and how musical styles can become dated?
Sometimes it’s due to changes in technology – the use of sequencer keyboards, for example. Sometimes it’s because of cultural shifts. For example, the fact that the standard tempo of pop songs went up from 120 bpm in the 1980s to 136 today is down to people taking Ecstasy in the clubs. In the 1990s something changed and we started to make records for people who weren’t all there. They had become fixed on a sound. It would be repetitive and very fast, as their heartbeat went faster and faster. I don’t like that beat, but you’re stuck with it. It comes down to the framework again. You cannot put a record out at 130 bpm if everyone else’s is at 136, because yours will feel slow.
Can you imagine writing in any other genre? Your brother, I believe, is a classical musician…
My brother is leader of the viola section of the German National Opera Orchestra. He writes in a modernist style with 12-note sequences – it’s like a crossword puzzle, it doesn’t have any joy. When he comes over he’ll play me a piece he’s written, but it’s just noise to me. I tell him that. I’ll say, “For Christ’s sake, John, why can’t you write a decent tune that we can all enjoy and love and that’ll move us or make us happy?”
Do you ever write songs just for yourself?
Yes, of course, but I’m not going to play them to you. I don’t think anyone else would be interested in them. I see myself as serving the public, rather than imposing my ideas on them. With Blur or Oasis you buy into their world. In my world, which is pure pop, your song is going out to people. That is what it feels like. Professionally I’m not really trying to write songs that suit me, I’m trying to write songs that suit the singers and their audience. I’m thinking all the time, how will I grab people, how will I please them or excite them or move them? To that extent sometimes even the singer or the band is irrelevant.
Is there anything science and technology can do for you as a songwriter?
I’m not certain if technology is a useful tool to songwriters, although as a record producer it has been highly influential. Recording studios have become very different places over the past 10 years. This has opened the door for millions of “bedroom” record-producers, though I don’t think the product has improved artistically. There’s a distinction to be made between good records and good songs. I still believe a good song exists outside of the technology, and I continue to sit at a piano or guitar to actually “write” a song. Any future improvements should be in the software department.
