Go West, Young Lady

Adventures in music ongoing

Hello Dear Reader

Those of you who look forward to these dispatches will have noticed that I left you alone last week. I have accidentally fallen into a cadence - a cadence, would you believe! - something I have never done before but it’s suiting me to bring a modicum of routine to my otherwise haphazard existence and I’ve rather taken to what I call Bankers’ Hours. Not since 2014 and that ridiculous Year of EPs undertaking have I risen each morning and, after performing my ablutions (the first fifteen minutes of which involve moaning loudly about some new ache somewhere), padded straight to my cosy home studio for another diligent day at the coal face of popular song.

I took a week off for half term - which was probably six days more than necessary because my son is very much a teenager now and only requires my presence as a taxi driver, chef, laundress and human ATM. He deigned to spend one day with his parents, who, like grateful lovesick puppies, considered it the best day they have had all year. I need to be needed, friends. For those of you in the middle of parenting toddlers, this will fall on deaf ears, but trust me - before you know it, you will find yourself exploding with joy when your child finally texts you back, even if it is just a thumbs up emoji. It’s like being eternally friend zoned, except you pay all their bills.

I needed that week off though. I was working on a few of these covers and beginning to hate songs I thought I had loved my whole life. Nothing was working. I was getting quite down about it - wondering if I no longer knew what was a good song or not; wondering why certain towns in the UK and Ireland have produced hardly any songwriters or musicians and while Glasgow - where I’m not playing, of course - has produced a disproportionate amount of musical genius.

‘There’s a Weeknight Special Deal at the Côte in Wokingham’ my husband said to me the other evening, sensing my malaise, ‘come on. My treat.’ I could say that my ensuing excitement was indicative of middle age, but let me be honest here - I was born middle aged. Few things hit the spot for me of an evening in the quite the same way that doing the ironing while watching a Midsomer Murders I haven’t seen does.

Unless it’s a meal deal in a reputable chain restaurant in a leafy Berkshire backwater. Years ago, when Q magazine released a stocking filler book of musicians’ tour riders and I was in there, my rider had knitting needles and a jar of Nutella on it.

On the way to our meal deal - which was great by the way, I can heartily recommend the set menu soup starter, I didn’t know you could do that with sweetcorn and a mushroom - my husband suggested we listen to Smooth FM and whatever song it was playing would have to be the song I covered next as long as it was British. (Not in a Brexity way, you understand; more to fulfil the tour brief.)

It’s very rare that the husband allows the dial to wander from Talk Sport but this was his idea of a romantic night out. The song that was playing? We Close Our Eyes by Go West.

Which is a banger. Not only is it a banger, but it’s a scarily brilliant production, reminiscent of Trevor Horn at the height of his powers and I just could not figure out how to wrangle it to the ground. I was afraid of it, to be honest. And I’m not alone - there are hardly any covers of it that I could find. Some songs are just perfect, and meant to be left alone and enjoyed in their original form.

Still, I was always planning a Go West cover, for various reasons, not least because Peter Cox (born just round the corner from Twickenham) has been so supportive of my music and it has meant so much to me that someone of whom I am enormous fan enjoys my own music. But it goes deeper than that.

Back in the early nineties when I was at school and studying music A Level, my teacher - a former Cambridge organ scholar and all round musical savant genius - decided that his little coterie of students needed a change of scene. Or maybe he needed a change of scene. He walked into class, and surveying the ramshackle group of misfits - only the weirdos were doing music A Level, nobody took us seriously - told us to gather our things and follow him to his flat on the school campus.

His flat was stuffed to the gills with CDs and books and art and it was thrilling to be allowed an insight into his actual life. Remember seeing a teacher from school out in the wild? Doing their shopping, or in a restaurant? It was well weird, right? Anyway, here we were, five students and one teacher, behaving like grown-ups. He put the kettle on, offered us biscuits, proceeded to loosen his tie and lit a cigarette. (He didn’t offer us one, before anyone is scandalised.)

‘Today’, he said ‘I’m going to play you what I consider to be a perfect pop song, absolutely perfect.’

He slipped the CD into the player and pressed play. And my heart skipped a beat when I heard the opening bars and recognised it as a song I already loved and worshipped.

That day, we spent a good few hours taking apart King of Wishful Thinking by Go West, and it was the first time I’d not been embarrassed by how passionate I was about pop music. This was my jam, my area of expertise, and maybe my teacher was doing me a kindness because I had been struggling in the calculated and rarefied world of classical music study and finally I could shine. He was the first person to say to me, yes, pop music is a serious business and there’s no shame in it, and there’s nothing wrong with you because you find it as special and moving as a Mozart symphony. You can love both. You can analyse a four minute pop song with as much forensic focus as you might a Bach cantata; in fact, you really, really should because if you want to write them this is how you learn.

I think of that day often, even more often at the moment as I dismantle all these incredible songs from the history of pop music. How a simple chord choice - minor in the verse, major in the chorus - makes a lyric shine, gives it extra heft. How important the song title is, how you can sum up everything in just a few words. Breakdowns, middle eights, repetition - these are the tools at the songwriter’s disposal and we learn from the craftsmen who have gone before us.

It’s been a thrill to cover this song this week. And weirdly emotional too. It’s the song that gave me permission to do this thing I love more than anything else, and it’s my way of saying thank you to two men - my music teacher Stefan who changed my life, and to Peter Cox for writing this little nugget of gold* that has brought me so much happiness for most of my adult life.

I hope you like it.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx

*along with Richard Drummie and Martin Page