When it came time to record Alison, was there a specific approach that you wanted to take?

You know, we had such modest resources.

This sounds like name-dropping, but the very first occasion I met Bruce Springsteen in Nashville in the middle of 1978- We said hello's, and then we were both of us, I think, actually weirdly shy, and we're looking at our shoes, and suddenly Bruce said, "How did you get the sound on I Am...

Is True?" And I said to him, "No money" [laughs] Because that's the actual truth.

You know, the reason why the record sounds immediate is because we didn't have either the means in terms of studio hours or even the format to over-elaborate the arrangements.

This record, Awesome, was recorded in Pathway Studios in Highbury and Islington, which was an eight-track studio, tiny room.

And by the time we put the full band in there, there wasn't a lot of space for air, let alone anything else.

If there were a photograph of the scene where the song is taking place, what would it look like? What's the setting?

broken toys and faded colors

This is the other good thing you get here.

You get these esoteric things.

I'd spent a lot of time watching anime with one of my 19-year-olds who's really into it.

His brother is a scholar of horror.

It's good.

It opens my mind to the art inside horror and in manga and in anime.

This

It's one of those things where it upends any kind of preconceptions of where you were as an artist at that point, and it, it points to how important it was to sort of curate and shape and decide which of the many things you were doing was the thing you were doing.

A number of the songs which have been heard before from that pre-profe- you know, pre-My Name Is True period do paint a very-- If you just take one group of songs, which is those recorded with my first band in London, Flip City, we weren't very-- We didn't have a, you know, we didn't ha- We weren't really technically that good, but we were very willing, and we really loved music, and we tried to play the best we could.

And I was learning to write songs, not, not just to be heard in public, but also to be played with other people, 'cause prior to that, I'd had one singing partner in Liverpool or played on my own.

And I began when I first came to London in 1973, went back to live in London, '73, trying to get booked, and I think I got one or two kind of solo bookings, but they were very modest.

And then tried it in a band for a year or so, and then realized I was, you know, even including the recordings.

And then I wrote the group of songs that opens The Blueprint, which you can hear have echoes of the first Bruce Springsteen album.

I think you can hear that in "Losing You." [singing] Now you're here.

To jump back, I think the ragtimey stuff like Mercury Wings What intentions do you think you had for that material?

Where do you think the Red Shoes image specifically came from?

I have no clue.

I just figured they were something that didn't feature in my wardrobe and those angels would definitely want them.

Whoever these people were, maybe they were fallen angels, maybe they were malevolent, I don't know.

The rest of the song is really a dance hall tragedy, isn't it? You know, I said, I'm so happy I could die.

She said, drop dead and left with another guy.

This stuff could be found in another song.

But are you writing, is what I'm wondering.

Yeah.

And that's where we rehearsed.

And I would go on a day off down to...

And now I was, I d- I was using my holidays, my holiday allowance from my day job, and I would go down and rehearse all afternoon into the evening, sleep on the couch in the, in, in the rec room, uh, where th- they were set up, and, uh, then go up to London and record.

And we would, we did, I think, I can't remember whether it was four six-hour sessions or six four-hour sessions.

I know there was some arithmetic like that.

I think it was only four sessions that did the rest of the record.

Right

Mm.

And I had met Nick when Brinsley's came to, um, The Cavern.

I'd met him in the pub opposite The Cavern.

I got talking with him, and then I turned, then I became the guy that would turn up at their gigs and ask him questions.

You know, I was trying to find my way.

I wasn't asking for favors.

I was just asking advice about things, about songwriting and that.

Do you remember when she first listened to this record, what she thought?

And now it's just a series of jokes about private parts.

Well, that's what you know by now from reading this book, that that is really my entire aim has been this.

I think, no, I appreciate what you're saying.

I, of course, the David Lee Roth, we've managed to mention David's name more often than mine.

It's amazing.

He's getting a lot of free publicity.

Maybe he's got a book out as well.

When you're writing a song for somebody whose style, whose instrument is as distinctive as somebody like Solomon Burke or Johnny Cash, are you thinking of it the way, say, a comedy writer might think about, you know, writing a joke for David Letterman or Roseanne Barr, thinking about trying to capture something about their particular voice?

that's

amazing.

If they'd come a year or two earlier, it would have worked, because they would have been the kings of the scene that went before.

But they turned up, and they were staying in...

Headley Grange, which is quite a famous location.

It's where Led Zeppelin did some of their work, preparing for records.

They didn't record there.

I

The fact that I could be in this room with a thousand people and we're all together singing that

song.

It felt, when it actually happened, it was worthwhile.

But my trepidation was just that it seemed like a little too easy.

The thing with that hearing something, which is somewhere between the expressive nature and singing and the actual sound production with the mechanics, Of singing, it's something I've necessarily come to consider more as you get older.

You have to make more provision for setting yourself up to have the same freedom as you may have had when you were younger.

just instinctively, because you can become inhibited by different factors, either being self-conscious, which I'm not tremendously, or overthinking it, or just simply being aware that there are frequencies that you don't need in order to create the vocal sound that's in your mind.

They sound fantastic.

Yeah, were you surprised that you were there, a pop star, suddenly?

Yes, very much.

I had thought myself to be a songwriter and I had actually gone around trying to... get my songs listened to by publishers as much as record companies, because I looked in the mirror and thought I don't look much like Roger Daltrey in his, you know, Greek, Greek God sort of period, you know, with the ringlets.

I didn't look like that.

And of course, once my first managers and the head of the record company had the had the crazy idea of giving me this name, or at least the first name.

The second name was my great-grandmother's name, so Elizabeth Koslow.

So, I mean, and the glasses.

Was that important to you to be there?