It’s A Beautiful world
OK pop pickers, Number 7 in my Top Ten most popular songs streaming on Spotify is Beautiful Girl.
I’m aware of the recent outrage about Spotify and I sympathise with it, but I don’t want to get into it here. I often think I’ve wasted too much of my life angry at something or other. The opening Lyric, for example: ‘All my life I’ve waged war at this world’ and though it’s an exaggeration, it is to a degree, true. I’ve always had a frustrated pent up fury about me, and I’ve never enjoyed being that way. Becoming a dad helped a bit, I think.
I never thought I wanted children, I was too selfish, too self absorbed, to self righteous and of course that didn’t completely change. But! Suddenly, something else was more important than anything else. We have 2 kids now, so twice as important.
I’m not the first, and in all certainty will not be the last parent to write a song about or for their kids.
At the time this was written, I was running The Acoustic Engine Songwriter club and each week, it ran for about 7 years I think, I opened proceedings with 3 or 4 songs. I get bored playing the same stuff all the time, so I was always writing, and I had hundreds of the buggers, most played only once or twice before being forgotten about or discarded until needed.
Lots of the Acoustic Engine songwriters were great acoustic guitarists and could pick away like John Martyn or Nick Drake – take a bow Nick Saunders, Howie Payne, Dan Sumner and many others. This was my attempt and it’s a pretty simple riff rather than finger – picking.
It too was recorded at Hype Studio, although of the 2 guitars, one was from the demo recorded at home and you can hear where I go out of time with myself. After I’d recorded my guitar and vocals we overdubbed. I can’t remember if it was me or Martyn Campbell who did the foot stamp/ hand clap part, but the mouth organ was played by Martyn, beautifully so. Angie does a lovely backing vocal part. Angie was fantastic. At the time she was in The Lightning Seeds and came up to Liverpool because Martyn asked her to. Just wonderfully generous of her.
The violins were overdubbed by Steve Rothwell and Roger Llewellyn and cello was played either by Alistair Ligertwood or a guy named Louis, whose cello only had 3 strings to its bow, so to speak. I can’t find the original CD pressing which gives all the credits!
The baby laughing at the end is of course our daughter.
If you’d like to listen to Beautiful Girl, you can find a link to the streaming service of your choice here –
allpowertothebookshop.com 