By May 1995, I had begun to realise that songwriting was a numbers game. We had 48 songs over four albums at this stage and I liked precisely 7 of them. A hit rate of 14.5% (1 in 7).
There were no 'ideas' or 'demos' recorded and stored to go back to later. Each thing I started writing was developed into a song regardless - and then stuck on a tape, no particular order and called 'an album'. Whilst I could sequence up to eight songs in the PSS-790's memory (there were eight slots, each with five tracks), I could only realistically sequence two full songs before the memory filled up. These had to be bounced to tape and the memory of the keyboard wiped so I could start writing the next song. The knock-on effect of this was a swelling catalogue of songs (we wrote 70 songs (8 albums) in 1995 alone) but a very low number of decent tracks resulted!
If I wanted to write another song I thought was half-decent, it would take another seven attempts. And so it happened - out of the next seven, 'With only you', 'Love Love', 'Honest Man', 'Silent', 'Take the Chance', 'I Can Wait' and 'Whatever it Takes', I liked precisely one of them. Make that, loved one of them. In fact, to this day it remains one of the best things we ever wrote.
Doug gave me the lyrics for 'Whatever it Takes' when he stopped by for a song writing session in April '95. On those lyrics, Doug takes up the tale :
"Whatever it takes was written as I was leaving for Ilkley and it owes a lot to Roxette. "In this Crazy world", is a phrase the mighty Per Gessle uses in "Almost Unreal", a cracking song from a poor film (Super Mario Bros.)!
My GCSE and A level art was fuelled by the Look Sharp! album, capturing Edward Hopper style paintings. Incidentally, it was Ian who told me I paint like Hopper, it was never intentional!
It was kind of an odd time for me personally. I was with Michelle and she was worried about me moving away. I was worried about her too and rather selfishly, kept my fledgling karate club going; I was also getting quite a bit of success on the karate scene. I didn't get into art school, I didn't get into community work school (Durham university - of course I didn't get in!) so I just had to make things work! I had to do 'whatever it takes' on all these fronts.
Of course it's a love song to Michelle but that was my mindset at the time. It was a time of change and I guess I was doing whatever it took to make the best of the change. The song came to me on the last bus to Kibblesworth on the roundabout at Gateshead one night. I was drifting with the idea of the song in my head and it clicked at a particular moment. The streetlights lined up on the overpass and it was then the words came flooding to me. I wrote them when I got home and then painted a picture of the inside of a nightclub called "The Taste" with a short haired, badass looking blond woman."
Musically, 'Whatever it takes' started life as a slow reggae song built around the 'If my heart breaks, I'll give the pieces to you' line repeated; but I soon gave up when it wasn't working. Bereft of musical inspiration, I started messing around with 'Bedrock' and then 'Skillet' by The Time and in particular, the guitar riff in the bridge of the latter:
Once the musical seed was planted, 'Whatever it Takes' became a vibe. An evolution that propelled us into November's 'Intermezzo'. A pulsing funky danceable mix of syncopated rhythms and counter melodies. The opening synth piano cadenza was improvised; a one shot thing that thankfully, I recorded. The drum groove, the fat bass sound, the pseudo-stereo effect created by a slightly wonky tape-deck, the melody that wrote itself - everything seemed to happen organically. The only thing that was missing was the guitar in my head which I wanted to wail throughout the last 20 or so bars.
Just over a year later, in 1996, I acquired a guitar effects rack and borrowed a friend's guitar. The result was a slightly augmented version (see audio tracks above) with wah-wah guitar in the verses, reverb on the vocals and a badly played solo at the end. Fast forward to 2002 and the introduction of a 12-track digital mixing desk which resulted in the final audio file above where the guitar is slightly more palatable and the piano much more crisp (played on a Roland E-500). The awful wah-wah guitar is still there however and the solo is a tiny bit better, but not much.
It was almost twenty years before we went DAW and got the song to sound exactly the way it was meant to (see the first audio file above, the 2015 version)
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