Annie Lennox is in there  Surely the biggest female omission is Polly Harvey.

-- Edited by saw119 on Saturday 14th of September 2013 06:06:42 PM

Can you bring yourself to save a fiver and order it from the Daily Mail? Probably not. I saw this article before, but didn't read it hard enough to realise they were plugging a book.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2400126/Secrets-hitmakers-Lily-Allens-1-haunted-ghost-TV-inspired-Oasiss-Champagne-Supernova.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

There's a plug for the book right at the bottom, that's the bit I didn't get to the first time, but looked familiar in saw's link. I just took it for some random article, but I suppose that doesn't doesn't happen these days does it, they need a press release to cut and paste into an article.

What? You don't think "Fuck you very much" is brilliant songwriting???

Wow I'm shocked PJ Harvey isn't in there. But surely Kate Bush?

I had a quick scan through this today "in a shop on the King's Road" (Waterstones, actually).

There is proper, in-depth research done on the questions to the singers/songwriters involved and I was definitely impressed enough to earmark it as a future purchase so when I looked at the Jarvis interview I didn't want to spoil it too much for myself.

But there are some very interesting quotes from him - the author mentions Chris Thomas saying how Jarvis writes everything in Pulp - which Cocker kind of bashfully says not really but that he's forever over-dubbing stuff on different instruments himself (whenever they were in a studio with a capacity of 48 tracks, he felt a tendency to use them all so as to hide any inadequacies as much as anything, apparently. I know their grounded, inferiority complex is genuine, but sometimes I wish Pulp talked like arrogant cocks). Jarvis also says that he has about 500 cassettes of recordings which he (and presumably, Pulp) made over the years but that he's not got round to listening to them properly or throwing them out.

Also, apparently the whole "Simulate a scene in a forest where you're the trees and he's the bear etc.'' wasn't exactly a common songwriting exercise - not as much as swapping each other's instruments, anyway.

I'm sure there's a lot more of interest (his chapter is about 25 pages long) in the interview, some stuff we've probably read before but it's possibly the most comprehensive interview on his songwriting that's yet been done. Until Sturdy sits him down some day.

And the other interviews look really interesting too.
Only thing, for such a cast of heavy-hitting British musical talent, the quality of the paper in the book is quite flimsy and amateur - that rough, cheap paper. No gloss. And the pictures are all b/w, I think. Not sure how these things work and if the artists get paid after the interviews have been commissioned but you imagine the publishers would have prettified the book a bit. Anyway, definitely looks like sticking on Christmas/Birthday lists. And re the relative lack of female artists - the author has said he wanted more in the book but they turned him down

Eamonn wrote:

 Jarvis also says that he has about 500 cassettes of recordings which he (and presumably, Pulp) made over the years but that he's not got round to listening to them properly or throwing them out.

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 If you cant find the time jarv i'll happilly go through them all for you.