Do all songwriting roads lead back to The Beatles?
Anyone who’s been listening to the radio lately must by now, surely, have the makings of a master songwriter. There have been so many programmes recently about how to write a song that none of us has any excuse for not writing the next Christmas number one. You get the guitar, I’ll bring the tambourine.
The Radio 2 Celebrates Songwriting season has been a whole series on the theme of the craft of the songwriter, and it’s not over yet: instalments are set to continue up to Christmas. The best so far has been music journalist Pete Paphides’s
How to Write a Perfect… series (Radio 2, Saturday and Sunday), in which he speaks to songwriters and performers about how their hits came to be, and the impact on audiences when they’re played live.
In the episode on break-up songs, we heard from All Saints’s Shaznay Lewis about how she wrote the lyrics to the soulful and heartrending 1990s pop classic, Never Ever, alone in her bedroom, over the chords of
Amazing Grace. Paphides studded his programme with gleaming gobbets of pop trivia, such as the fact that Rachel Stevens’s 2003 breakout solo single,
Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, was originally written for Britney Spears as an answer song to Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River, but Spears turned it down.
Even better was Paphides’s programme on the perfect power ballad, the kind of song that’s ideal to sing loudly en masse with clenched fists, contorted brows and closed eyes all round. There was an interview with Susanna Hoffs, of the Bangles, on writing Eternal Flame. Hoffs said that the song’s mood was influenced by The Beatles’s Here, There and Everywhere,
but, weirdly, it was also partly inspired by the bit in This is Spinal Tap where the band improvises a hilariously terrible harmonised version of Heartbreak Hotel while standing over the grave of Elvis Presley.
There’s a corniness to power ballads, which is partly what makes them such fun to sing with friends in the early hours of the morning. But the emotions behind them are real. Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol talked about writing his band’s biggest hit, Run,
which is about the fear of letting down his family. He said that he didn’t see himself as having written a power ballad. But maybe nobody ever sets out to write a power ballad, and it just comes out in a fit of passion.
Some of the other programmes in the season so far have been less inspiring; It’s a Kind of Magic – The Queen Story (Radio 2, Sunday), for example, in which Gary Davies presented a concert celebrating Queen songs with the 60-piece BBC Concert Orchestra, was an extravaganza that was really an elaborate festival of self-indulgence. Even hardcore Queen fans may have been disappointed by the distance between these heavily garnished imitation performances and the original alchemy of the band’s finest works.
True genius was more accurately recorded in Paul Mccartney: Inside the Songs (BBC Sounds for Radio 4). In 10-minute instalments, Mccartney read extracts from The Lyrics, his new book detailing his life in songwriting, giving the stories of how he wrote and performed specific songs. He recalled writing All My Loving while far from home on an early tour, the sound of screams “still ringing in my ears” from the audience at The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and related with warm nostalgia writing Got to Get You into My Life after first trying marijuana with Bob Dylan.
Away from pop, Shaking up the Shanty (Radio 4, Tuesday) was a programme by Sheffield folk family duo The Rheingans Sisters, who were writing a modern sea shanty in response to the contemporary international shipping industry, and in particular to honour a sustainable shipping vessel, the wind-powered Gallant cargo schooner, the design of which – all creaking sails and scrubbed wooden decks – harks back to an age before diesel or steam power.
The boat moves olive oil and wine between France, Portugal and England, and also transports coffee and rum across the Atlantic in winter. The Rheingans Sisters, Rowan and Anna, decided that they didn’t want to write a traditional shanty, despite the Tiktok-fuelled resurgence in interest in the form during 2020 (they said it was “not quite our style”), and so decided to break all the rules of the shanty. They ended up with something more contemplative and emotional, and special in a different way. Which perhaps goes to show that, even with all the instruction and songwriting recipes in the world, there are no rules for writing a perfect song. It’s much more magical than that.