Diary entry #2 - 'F--k You' a.k.a. 'the middle finger salute'!

Hello and welcome to the end of April/mid-May blog/diary/drivel DAA! I know
I'm a bit late, but hey, it's not like I'm having a baby or something.
April's a busy time for me as I have about half a dozen birthdays in the
family so my time was predominantly spent at home up north.

HammersoundWhile back home I went out in Manchester and Liverpool and 'round
my old haunts in Deeside and Chester. Chester's the same as always except for
loads of new flats being built everywhere and old places being done up, even
my old local The Falcon is being refurbished. In Manchester the pace of
change is even faster, I can't believe they knocked down the Hacienda! One of
my earliest memories of going out in Manchester is sneaking in there when I
was about 16. In Liverpool the old haunts around Cream were dead, but I
fancied this Russian restaurant round the corner which I've wanted to go to
for ages and had a great night out, always a great atmosphere in town on a
Saturday night - loads of busies around though these days and even more
building than Manchester - is this a renaissance for the North?!! In Deeside
where I grew up, in North Wales, the town looks great these days, thriving
even. I called into the guitar shop Hammersound where I bough my first ever
guitar aged 10, nothing much has changed in there, its even the same bloke
behind the counter, nice guy, but he wouldn't really recognize me from when I
was 10 and used to hassle him to let me play his Fender Telecasters.

KT Tunstall's 'Eye To The Telescope'On the way back 'darn sarf' I had a
listen to that KT Tunstall album and I really love her version of
'Wonderwall', great song! She was great at the Brit Awards ('f--kin' square'
I hear you all yelp, but like I give a shit!), so I whacked on 'Mexicola' by
the Queens on repeat and got home a lot quicker.

Having been away since Christmas, something struck me that 200 miles north of
London I'm suddenly not known as 'the Drapes', 'Draper', 'you bender', or
whatever the Southerners call me, but I actually already have a name for my
new project! 'R Paul', just like R Kelly - every time I go away I forget
about this appendage I've had for years! However, I'll leave the videoing of
groupies in hotel rooms to other less celebrated members of the music
industry. The reason I'm sharing this useless piece of information with you
is because I keep getting asked what I'm going to be called. The Six Million
Dollar Man'This has led me to think about the name for this whole
thing/project (I'm not really professional enough to call this a project), am
I going to call myself me, as in Paul Draper, I always thought my name was
shit and for a few years of my life I insisted everybody call me Steve -
strange but true - which was because I loved Steve Austin, the bionic man, my
mum didn't mind calling me Steve but she always made me wear a T-shirt under
my tracksuit which pissed me off - the real Steve Austin had a bare chest
under his tracksuit, but never mind... 'Steve Draper' sounds like an ITN
reporter and I was only 6 at the time, if you get my drift? So back to names,
if I had a name as cool as Trent Reznor, why would you call yourself Nine
Inch Nails? Arctic Monkeys's 'Whatever People Say I AM, That's What I'm Not'I
provisionally called these demos 'Monkeys On A Rock' for some weird reason
(after watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001 stoned), but then Arctic Monkeys came
along and that was out of the window... incidentally their album is the best
debut I've heard for a very long time. My favourite band name of all time is
a Japanese band called 'The Pete Best' - genius! I'll call myself 'The Paul
Draper' - cool, contemporary, it's got a 'The' in it. Other names being
bandied around to much hilarity in the studio are 'The Internet Stalkers' or
'The Internet Stalker', 'The Paranoid Schizophrenics' - cool, but a bit long
in the tooth now, so I guess I'll just have to settle for Paul Draper for
now. I'm sort of comfortable with it, let's just hope Xfm don't play my
record when it comes out as I'll die of shame when they read out my name -
it's not exactly 'Ian Brown' is it, or maybe Ian Brown thinks 'shit, I'm not
Trent Reznor' and Trent Reznor's sitting there thinking 'wow,'The Paul
Draper', what a great name for a band!'...

Anyway back to this month's sessions... 'Feel Like I Wanna Stay, Feel Like I
Wanna Go' is the first track I've attempted with any other musicians playing
on it. Jack Nicholson in 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'I first recorded a
version of this late last year, it's in 3/4 timing and I had some programmed
drums on it, so it sounded a bit Goldfrapp-y in the rhythm track but with a
more feminine falsetto added by myself (it's the 80's fan in me!), which
sounded kind of cool but sort of static as well with the guitars on it. In
fact one of my golden rules in making this album is to stop singing like a
girl, it was never intentional, it's just I always write in the key of A (out
of laziness), which makes me sound like Jimmy Somerville (no offence Jimmy -
I think that song about running away was genius!). So I wanted to see what it
would sound like as a band playing it, so I called for the cavalry! Wayne
Riches (Skin's drummer) played drums, and Chad and I split bass and guitar
duties between us and off we went, jamming all day interrupted by the odd big
spliff. 'Drugs!', I hear you say! Oh no, smoking that shit gives you paranoid
schizophrenia, that's where the silly band name came from! Great! I'm happy
with that one, as I say a bit old hat, but hey, its better than everyone
going round saying you're a square, and always good fun when you meet someone
new, just have that 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' look in your eye!

Rickenbacker 330 guitarWe recorded numerous takes of the backing track during
one day's recording, not really with any decent vocals on it, just me
shouting away in the background, and as with most recordings of backing
tracks, the only really important thing is to get a great feel and energy
into the playing. As my plan is to try and cover as many of the instruments
as I can manage myself, Chad's involvement was to just make it sound like a
band really while getting a great drum take, and I'll re-do his parts
properly at a later stage - but still a big thanks for him for getting the
track working. This is where things gelled for the first time in the project.
For the guitar-freaks, we had a Rickenbacker 330 for lead, thru my Fender
Deluxe combo amp ('Revolver'-era Beatles stylee), a Rickenbacker 4001 bass
(bought in New York and shipped back here) through a Syd Barrett-era Selmer
amp that I bought in Doncaster and had refurbished (as it's 40-odd years
old), but sounds great - it's all live going straight to tape.

So my obsession with loops is over - I gave up trying to combine grooves and
rock - that great Kasabian album put my efforts at that sort of thing to
shame - so it's back to basics for me, either full electronic, or just a band
(but never say never!), which is so difficult when trying to emulate my all
time most respected musician - Prince (and Bowie, obviously) and trying to
play everything yourself, as I'm a control freak, as anyone who has worked
with me will attest to, but unfortunately to make music you have to have some
sort of vision and aim for it. Always hopelessly falling short and sounding
half-baked, but that's the only way I can do it. Anyway, I first had a stab
at writing this song a while ago and then took it with me on a minidisc to
America. While I was in Nashville I felt like I had no real understanding of
the music scene there and was in two minds as to weather I should stay a few
more days or just leave, and then I remembered I had this unfinished idea
called 'Feels Like I Wanna Stay', which I dug out and finished there before
leaving. So there's no nano-technology going on here, it's simply one of
those stay/go songs - we've all heard 'em! Anyway it really rocks (rawks -
this is the noughties!) without the electronic drums, and a big thanks to
Wayne for bringing this track to life! I can cover the other instruments,
although it's been a bit of struggle as my guitar playing has been very poor
for a while now.

We also had a crack at a piano stylee song called 'Annie' - a song I've
struggled with for ages, but that's been shelved to be re-recorded again next
week, as I need to change the lyrics and chorus (basically everything) 'cos
I'm not happy with it, so there's not much to report on that one yet.

However, what really did work out was a new song called 'Grey House'. It's a
song pretty much about my house, which I'd painted grey - walls, skirting
boards, grey carpets; the lot - but that was back in my Prince-obsessed days
when I thought if I wrote about a colour it would make me look more
interesting than I actually am (Prince and Hendrix had purple, but grey was
mine... ALL MINE!). 'The Laughing Gnome' by David BowieI developed a bit of
an OCD obsession with everything grey, so this is my 'ode to my sadly deluded
past'. I love this track! Again Wayne covered drums, Chad played bass for
purposes of putting the backing track in, and I played very bad guitar!
Although as before, I'm gonna cover all instruments except drums (I've got
CDS - crap drummer syndrome, although my finest drumming moment was on 'You,
Who Do You Hate?' where I managed to stay in time, in-between big breaks).
The instruments were the same as the recording of 'Feels Like I Wanna...',
and it took us an afternoon to nail a great 'vibe', as industry pros say.
It's an upbeat-y rock track with a nod to Bowie in there for sure, but then
pretty much everything I ever did had some sort of Bowie-nod - even the
vary-speed vocals I've done sound like sodding 'The Laughing Gnome'.

Now I've been in two minds for a long time now as to whether I should mention
this, but what the f--k, the sympathy vote'll do nicely! I had a bit of a
problem with my 'f--k you' finger (that's the middle finger on my left hand
to the uninitiated) - it all started at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth when we
were recording 'Getting Your Way', an old Mansun track, and I was really
getting into playing the bass, but this sort of blister appeared on my left
hand middle finger and the more I played the more it kept bleeding... Anyway,
to cut a long story short, I went to the hospital near the studio and they
cut out a piece of my finger just above the nail, oh joy! The session sort of
petered out, and a few days later the doctor called me to inform me the piece
of me in a test tube had been analysed and it was unfortunately malignant -
f--kin' great! To cut an even longer story short, I saw a specialist who
informed me it was called a Bowenoid Malignancy, and he said it was really
unusual for someone my age to have it, and that the usual course of action
would be to lob off my finger just below the knuckle. Just perfect... here I
am trying to write an album and if I was going to get the 'c' word anywhere;
I certainly didn't want this almost farcical version of it on one of the most
important parts of a guitarist/songwriter's body. Anyway, the specialist said
that due to me trying to make this record ('Kleptomania') and being a
songwriter, he'd recommend I go for chemotherapy, which I did. I had five
goes in this big machine, strapped up in lead in a sealed room and guess
what... it did the trick! All I've got now is a manky finger with a bit cut
out of it. So to everybody who keeps asking me, 'what's up with your hand?',
well, it wasn't the 'caught me finger in a broken guitar string that went
septic' excuse - now you know. After the treatment my finger swelled up like
a golf ball for months, and I couldn't really play or write for a very long
time, and even now it's still a bit painful to play, but doesn't really
bother me.

Spinal Tap liveSo to anyone who's taken the piss out of my guitar playing,
f--k you with bells on (nothing like a bit of Northern vitriol!). It takes
all my effort to make the string touch the f--king fret without wincing in
pain, and that last Mansun tour was f--king agony with bloody puss spouting
everywhere, so I hope it explains why the set was short on that tour and the
songs on the album were written in weird tunings, or on the piano with my
right hand. Belated apologies, but I'm sure you understand, I was just trying
to keep on going and work 'round my comical finger, but ultimately it
defeated me. The specialist told me not to be in any stressful situations or
it might spread, and as I've said before, the recording sessions of the
'Kleptomania' album were just too stressful for me. Anyway I've never
professed to be a great player, it was only ever a tool to write with -
Spinal Tap solos were never for me - but each to their own; if you can do
'em, good luck to ya.

Being deflated about the whole 'c' thing, I set off to the States on my
writing trip. I took a mini guitar to write on, a 'Baby Taylor', which was
easier to play that a normal-sized guitar. I used alternative tuning and sort
of wrote around the finger, and didn't really use it at all - I just sunned
it a lot! Anyway, I put on 3 stone on that sodding trip, a third of my body
weight! That's right, I only weighed 10 stone before and I went up to 13, but
my Fat Elvis period wasn't the ubiquitous spiral into a drink and drug hell -
I'd done that already - boring, got the T-shirt etc. (anyway, the best drug
is Cortisone [the best gig I ever did, I kept triple jumping the monitors!]
and Spanish sleeping tablets [on my writing trip to Puerto Banus]).

So my Vegas Elvis period really did come from Vegas! It was actually a very
un-rock'n'roll burger comparison test. I wanted to see who made the best
burger in the whole of the U.S. I tried 'em all - In-N-Out Burger, Jack In
The Box... but the clear winner was Denny's! Anyway I'm back to just over 10
stone now - Mick Jagger: eat your waist out! And I'm about as healthy as I
can expect to be after pummelling my body for the past decade - it's not in
exactly what you'd call great shape, but it's good enough to make a record,
except for that one bit. I knew it would happen at some point anyway - I
predicted it in my song about the subject.

The whole US road trip was great though, but I'm not going to tell you too
much about that, as I do want to get back into the States at some time!
Needless to say I ended up in some sticky situations, like driving 'round
Dallas with some bloke in this massive Caddy, toting this silver gun - there
is photographic evidence somewhere, but I haven't got it, so I'm sure someone
somewhere will try to blackmail me with it at some point down the line...
join the queue buddy - people love blackmailing rock'n'rollers! I want to
find the blackmailer who secretly filmed us all doing drugs in the band -
well that's what you anonymous letter-writers keep telling me... big f--kin'
deal, 'rock star does drugs'... wow, I could be a cross between Pete Doherty
and David Gray - oh well, it's either that or back to the biscuit factory, as
a mate of John Lydon used to tell me!

Cheshire cheeseSorry if you're not enjoying this, but these are the first
essays I've had to write since school and I just don't really know what to
talk about - I just can't talk shit or lie thru my teeth to sell records, I
really don't care that much, I'm sick of telling people what my favourite
cheese is (Cheshire, obviously... I mean Wensleydale's OK, but it doesn't
have the crumbly texture, and my home county cheese of Lancashire is similar
in texture but not quite as dry... bollocks, right, back into rock star
bullshit mode! Next thing I'll be telling you is what my favourite colour
is... BLUE!).

I mean, it's not exactly NME interview material, but what can you do! As this
is all stream-of-consciousness writing, and I've just mentioned the NME...
New Musical ExpressI should go into some detail about NME, because over the
years that's the biggest thing mentioned in all the letters I've got - why
NME never liked the band. To put the record straight about NME, when I grew
up in Deeside in North Wales, NME was the highlight of the week for me - it's
hard to envisage in the age of the Internet, but I relied on NME and Melody
Maker to tell me what music to get into, it really was the only source of
information on new guitar music. When I went to college in Eltham, south east
London, it was a revelation to me that you could buy the music press on a
Tuesday and not have to wait until Wednesday like back home, so I'd go on the
train every Tuesday to the west end and buy NME and Melody Maker, and find
all the best gigs for the coming week in and around London, and thought I had
a real scoop over my mates back home.

Anyway it was me who shafted the band's relationship with NME by refusing to
do an interview about 'Little Kix', although to be fair, most music critics
thought the band was shite anyway! But as I say, I just couldn't do the rock
star bullshit thing, my interviews sounded self-obsessed (true!) and
miserable (also true!), so I just didn't want to talk about it. I'd already
gone along with the whole fiasco for too long and certainly wasn't going to
try and big it up or diss it to the NME! But at least I've dipped my toe back
into the world of interviews and I've finally done my first post-Mansun
interview with thedownloader.co.uk which you can check out here. I've also
done a Q and A for the pauldraper-music.co.uk fansite which you can check out
here, and some questions for the forthcoming pauldraper.net site here. It's
great that there are fans putting up fansites already, before I've even got
music to play you, and thanks so much for the faith - I just hope my music
doesn't let you all down. If you want to join in the fun, check out those
sites and their forums, where you can meet some other fans of my music that
doesn't even exist yet (a bit like being religious, believing in something
that doesn't actually exist - you just have faith in it!) - there's also
draperview.com, and I'll keep you posted if any others come online. I know an
equipment site is coming, so you'll get an insight into what guitars and amps
I'm currently using, if you are that way inclined! There's also an official
MySpace page that Dave's set up for me - again, you'll have to have some
faith here as there's no music up yet. Next month, hopefully, but please go
ahead and join up and spread the word as such (now this f--king blog thing
has gone to my head, I really do sound like Ron Hubbard!). It's at
http://www.myspace.com/pauldraperofficial, and is not the other comical one
that someone set up, and just for the record once again: f--k right off you
Internet stalkers!

Duncan FergusonI'd also like to mention the passing of a bit of a hero of
mine - the great Duncan Ferguson. The only disappointment of my career so far
is not to get a mention on Toffeeweb for giving the blues their only Number
1-connected record. I got a load of blue noses in Parr Street Studios in
Liverpool, and I subliminally chanted 'Duncan, Duncan, Duncan Ferguson' at
the end of the first Mansun album. As for the campaign for keeping Parr
Street open, I'm right behind it. Liverpool shouldn't lose this place - it's
great for the city's music scene and just a great studio in general.

I hope this month's blog has been a decent read (if not, unsubscribe yourself
from the mailing list and f--k off!), and I hope I can add something a little
different over the months... some video footage and music, so you don't just
have to read my drivel. I might even post an entry when you're least
expecting it, to be really rock'n'roll, like guerrilla journalism - it's all
me arse isn't it really?! Next time hopefully I'll have some music to play
you, so it's going to be a challenging month! F--k... what have I let myself
in for, there's no going back now, boy?!

Paul