'writes every damn note' would not seem to be true in the case of, say, Babies or Bad Cover Version.

Stephen wrote:

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'writes every damn note' would not seem to be true in the case of, say, Babies or Bad Cover Version.

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 Those two weren't on DC or TIH though so it might have been a different writing process. I do remember Nick saying The Fear was Mark's work as he was really into drones at that point.

How disrespectful towards the rest of the band. Even if he does write the basic idea, surely that involves once the others join in.

yeah he probably means the tune, then the others would bring in their parts, which, to producer, are arrangements, it's not technically writing. Most bands have one songwriter credited coz it's the melody and chords that counts, no the guitar solo or the drum roll here and there.

Blur had a good way of really describing who did what: they had "song: albarn", and "music: albarn, coxon, rowentree, james"

I find it hard to believe that Jarvis would come up with a full melody in the rehearsal room. Maybe he would come up with bits of melody then built this up at home.

-- Edited by andy on Thursday 31st of January 2013 09:10:23 AM

rawrsomesauce wrote:

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Didn't Russell say that Jarvis came in with Help The Aged fully written?

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 ... with the sense that that was unusual amd therefore worthy of comment. I seem to remember somewhere reading an interview where Jarvis talked about the difference between his solo albums, where he still has a band working with him, and Pulp being that in the solo environment he turns up with fully formed songs and more or less tells the band what to do, which is not the case in Pulp. As Andy says, maybe some people don't call that "writing". I also have a vague memory of Richard Hawley explaining that they split up into threes (depends a bit on how many of them there were at the time presumably) and work bits out like that. As a non-musician I remain fascinated by how this sort of thing all comes together.

I have posted this link before, it is a BBC article about wrangles over song-writing credit. I suppose people see music in so many different ways, the legalities probably arose in an era where you had professional song-writers, either words/music duos (Rogers and Hammerstein type thing) or individuals who wrote songs and touted them round record companies who matched them up to singers, who record them with a producer who arranges it all. So the various parts of the process were completely separate in everyone's mind. They probably still think in terms of words and melody as being the song and some great guitar solo or whatever, organ part on Whiter Shade of Pale in the case of this article, is just a bit of a frill that embellishes the basic song. But in the mind of a band like Pulp all working the song up together, it is all of their contributions that matter and make the song what it is, hence their attitude to song-writing credits that is also mentioned here down the bottom somewhere.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6146618.stm

The most notorious example of band credits for me is what happend with Joyce & Rourke in The Smiths.

I thought it was well documented that Jarvis wrote pretty much all of the melodies for mid period Pulp stuff? Such as him writing the guitar solo for Pencil Skirt, and that video of him teaching Candida the synth line in the chorus of Lipgloss? I think that by TIH and WWL the process had changed somewhat (lots of talk in Sturdy's book of improvisational soundscape stuff in rehearsals), but the whole thing with Nick writing part of Babies was purely to do with him playing that chord, or that two note riff, and it inspiring Jarvis to write a song around it, so nothing really to do with the final song at all?