The Sunny One

I think this is my favourite of the many songs I’ve written with Brian Chin Smithers. For years Brian and I got together once a week to write songs and we must have written, though a lot were never finished, a couple of hundred.

My recollection is that it was usually a Wednesday but it happened whenever we got together with a guitar or keyboard up until the time he moved to Brighton. In the years since, on the all too few rare occasions we meet up, we still write songs and he’s the only person I’ve ever successfully, consistently written with. I have demos of many of them recorded on to a wonderful 8 track Tascam 688 for which I have Dominic Walker to thank.

The song, though it doesn’t sound like it was, in my mind at least, inspired by Bob Marley’s High Tide or Low Tide and I remember we rediscovered our idea for it after not coming up with something we liked and so went back to sketches recorded on cassette at some earlier time. We finished it pretty quickly once we had found it. The lyrics are about Mother Nature the closest thing I have to a religion.

Brian was in Brighton by the time I recorded it but I had a midi file of his keyboard parts and lovely Mike Hunter sampled Mansun’s mellotron for me. Love the sound of it.

I recorded my vocal at 10 in the morning at Andy Wilson‘s Hype studio and it was my attempt to sound like Smokey Robinson! Doesn’t quite get there… Martyn Campbell was boss with his ideas for the song, Lizzie Nunnery popped in to sing some bvs and Tony McGuigan played them drums.

Get me out of here I need to feel the wind blow
And change this atmosphere and make my blood flow
Walk out to nature
Feel the rain that’s why she made it.

Chorus
She was wired to the sun
She lit up everyone
When she called a king would run
Coz she’s the sunny one

The past grows longer still the future shortens so
We find that time can kill but also helps us grow
Dive in to nature
Smell the flowers that’s why she made them

Chorus

So get me out of here I need to feel the wind blow
And change this atmosphere and make my blood flow
Step out to nature
Be the world that’s how she made it
That’s why she made it.

Chorus