‘Ed Sheeran asked us for work experience then drank all our beer’: Nizlopi on making JCB Song
‘We’d get big, rugby-playing men coming up to us in tears and saying “I miss my dad” – or “I love my dad and I’ve never told him”’
Luke Concannon, singer
John and I started writing songs together when we were 13. After we finished at university, we both moved back in with our parents in the Midlands and started writing an album. One day I went downstairs and my dad was cooking. I said: “What should I write a song about?” And he was like: “I don’t know. Diggers.” He drove a Massey Ferguson digger in his own father’s groundworks company and would pick me up from school in it straight from a job. One kid a couple of years older than me at school would often pummel me, and my dad always felt so warm, loving and safe by contrast. The two worlds were a massive juxtaposition. I went upstairs and 90 minutes later more or less had the song exactly as it was recorded.
This months blog is an excerpt from the intro section of the forthcoming book ‘A Hero’s Journey Through the Music Industry’. Stay safe people!
Diva
The legendary R’nB diva Mary J Blige is standing in front of me, beautiful and statue-like. She’s stood, stock-still wearing only a large brilliant-white dressing gown, a white towel wrapped-royally around her head accompanied by huge dark sunglasses atop a sphinx-like expression on her inscrutable and motionless face. She displaces air in the way that only a true diva can! But its obvious she doesn’t want to be standing in front of me right now, – or more accurately – she doesn’t want to be standing in front of anybody right now! But she has to.
To my right, the Kaiser Chiefs (the band, not the football team) are leaving the stage. Charlotte Church is to my left with her band and Richard Ashcroft is in the corner looking pale and interesting.
The hosts for the show, Rufus Hound and Fern Cotton, look like they just been dragged out of bed and had cups of coffee and scripts thrust into their hands – my guess is, they’ve just been dragged out of bed and had cups of coffee and scripts thrust into their hands – and pushed into a TV studio (elementary my dear Watson).
