The CD Home in 3 Bits is a collaboration between poet Paul Summers and a musician, Lindisfarne guitarist Dave Hull-Denholm. Paul tells LNE about the project and what it’s like to work with a collaborator from an entirely different medium.

Where did the original idea for Home come from?
The collaboration was borne out of a Hydrogen Jukebox commission in May 2004. Originally it was just three small sections representing disparate landscapes: town, sea and country, with Dave switching between an acoustic guitar and a 12-string electric and then onto the piano. The essence of those three original bits is still just about present in the pieces Sniffa, Beach and Quarry Moor on the finished CD.

When we first performed it, the whole thing only lasted about eight minutes but we had really enjoyed the act of collaborating. We get on really well; we share a similar sort of aesthetic and the creative relationship was free of the usual egotism. And as someone who absolutely loves music but can’t play a note, it was great fun for me to be around someone so multi-talented. The potential for doing something bigger was staring us both in the face.

How did you expand the work?
As they were, the original three pieces were just vignettes, impressionist landscapes, and we both thought it would be good to create a loose filmic narrative to guide the listener through the locations.

I’d had this slightly obsessive idea about doing a secular Requiem for a while – since my mate’s little girl died. So, someone making a pilgrimage home for a little girl’s funeral became the story to inhabit the landscapes, the landscapes themselves began to mirror the effects of her death on the protagonist and question his entire relationship with his ‘home’. That combination of sadness, grief, love and muted celebration that you associate with traditional requiem pieces became the core of our rational. It’s a very loose narrative but it is there.

Dave and I had a shared interest in notions of place, heritage and identity both musically and in literary terms. He had a headful of ideas and I had bits and bobs of stuff floating about. I quite like the idea of sampling from my own work too. If you get the new book (Big Bella’s Dirty Cafe, Dogeater) you’ll see that lots of the libretto for Home is an amalgamation of fragmented lines and phrases from other poems and that new poems grew out of pieces of the libretto.

How did the collaborative process work?
Well, I went away and did most of the writing but we spent lots of time talking about the narrative. While I had a lot of writing that I wanted to use, Dave also had bits of tunes that had never been used. The first version that we did had almost entirely different music on it but it evolved quite a lot. It had started off being quite simple and quite acoustic and a bit more folky and then we realised that that wasn’t necessarily what represented us any more either. It’s almost method acting.

We spent a lot of time together. It was nice to sit there watch the music evolve. It was a very organic process – I’d take some words over to Dave’s and he might have the backbone of something and then over the course of the next couple of days we’d knock up demos on Pro Tools of how we thought that bit of the scape should sound. We were probably both a bit pernickety and spent more time than we needed to trying to reinvent things but it made it feel like it belonged to both of us. It felt like the whole thing was evolving all the way through with both of us having an input, which is quite rare in my experience.

I’ve work on quite a lot of collaborative projects and very often it’s two people working separately and then delivering something together at the end, but with this we both had a share of it. And we both ended up dabbling in each other’s worlds – we both had filmic images in our heads and we ended up feeding them back to each other so that by the end of it we were both watching the same film. The process was really enjoyable and I think there’ll be more collaboration.

What’s interesting is that although the piece itself is 35 minutes long, there actually aren’t that many words in it. It’s actually quite sparse and if you added up the spoken word bits you’re probably only talking about eight or nine minutes – there’s quite a lot of space. Which is nice, because it means you have to make your head work a bit.

Where did you record it?
Partly at home and partly in the studio. We bought Pro Tools with some of the money we’d been given for the commission and most of the CD was either recorded at my home or at Dave’s. There were lots of stolen moments, as Dave’s got two kids and was working and so was I, so it was a morning here and a late night session there and we’d get the skeleton of it sorted together and then Dave could go away and spend the next few nights ironing out what we had. But for the cellos and some of the piano, we went to a studio in Durham. It sounds like it cost more than it actually did!

The production value and the quality feel of it were very important to us – there’s too much tat being produced and we wanted a high spec on the packaging, which I think we just about pulled off.

There’s a 24 page libretto in the package. Most of the words have grown into poems or were sampled from poems that were going to be in the next book, so I suppose the companion to Home in 3 Bits is Big Bella’s Dirty Café. Some of the sections in Home in 3 Bits might be sampled from four or five poems, but they’re quite little snippets and it’s nice to see the more expansive versions standing alone as well.

What’s the next step?
The next big thing is going to be to get it heard. We only printed a thousand but there’s a loyal Lindisfarne fanbase, so hopefully we’ll pick up a few sales there. At the moment it’s too short to tour, but there are vague plans to extend it and take it out on the road with a proper band.

The other idea is to explore the character who’s in Home. You get a little insight into this poetic reporter and it would be interesting to extend the short film into something more of a multi-layered narrative and bring in some of the peripheral characters that are only really hinted at at the moment, and try to do something musically that’s kind of a musical equivalent of Short Cuts.

Home (in 3 bits) is available to mail order.

Price: £10 (including p+p) UK & Europe; £12 (incl. p+p) Rest of the world

Please make cheques payable to Paul Summers

For further information, contact:

Email: paul.liarincltd@blueyonder.co.uk
Tel/fax: +44 (0)191 296 6787
homein3bits.co.uk

93 Park Crescent
North Shields
Tyne & Wear
NE30 2HL