DO you love those articles explaining how iconic tracks of the past were put together? Here musical artists recall how they made the hits you f**king hate.
I’d Rather Jack, The Reynolds Girls
Pete Waterman: I f**king hate music. Really f**king hate it. It’s nowhere near as good as steam trains. So I decided to make a track about how awful all music is, from jazz to the Rolling Stones. Made the top ten in Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. Paid for me to get my mansion rewired, and that’s what the creative process is all about.
Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran: I was lunching with my accountant and he asked if I’d thought about monetising the working-class wedding market. As a songwriter, those sort of remunerative sales strategies don’t come along every day. I was physically sick while composing it and the middle-eight still makes me nauseous now, but every artist must suffer for his craft.
Bound 4 Da Reload, Oxide & Neutrino
Neutrino: The UK garage scene was always a bit shit, so the question was: ‘Can we make it worse?’ Oxide taped the Casualty theme off the telly with an old cassette recorder, I talked some bollocks over it, and we were pretty much done. Took about 15 minutes.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, The Beatles
Sir Paul McCartney: Me and John were expressing how much we didn’t like each other any more via the medium of music. As we were putting the finishing touches to this turd, George Harrison walked in and said ‘This is awful, can we not do this?’ We refused. He went off in a huff and wrote My Guitar Gently Weeps, so some good came of it.
Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, Baccara
Mayte Mateos (singer): My brain surgeon tells me I now have the mental capacity of a ridge-tailed monitor lizard as a result of repeatedly singing this song. I fail to see the problem, because yes sir, I can boogie!
Doctorin’ the Tardis, The Timelords
Bill Drummond: The KLF were always ironic, so this isn’t shit. I think. I exist in a state of such infinitely-layered irony I can’t work out whether the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu were good or a joke or what. Still it made me some money, which I later burned.
