INSOLO - Track by Track
INSOLO - Gary Kemp - Track by Track
In Solo
In Solo was the first song I wrote for the album. The paintings of Edward Hopper had been on my mind. This one especially - Room in New York, 1932. Here her finger rests upon the key, not daring to break the silence by pressing it. Both figures are present but an ocean apart. We stare through their window, unobserved.
I wanted to write about that feeling of being alone in a city. Even while being in a relationship. I imagined the arrangement visually and set the story out in three main parts: She, He and We. The focus moves from one character to the next and finally to a wide shot. I added the ‘Greek Chorus’ middle section at a later date as we expanded the song musically in the studio, out from the guitar solo.
At this point I imagined the camera flying high into the surrounding buildings, taking an objective view of the people below. Everything had to feel organic and analogue until after this moment, where suddenly it’s all swept away and the big synth pad takes over from the orchestra. To me this is the point the camera goes down into the streets and into the characters’ heads before the story ends by seeing that they are in fact partners, struggling to communicate with each other.
Vocals, All Guitars, & Programming – Gary Kemp
Keyboards, Programming, Piano and Organ - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Drums & Percussion - Ged Lynch
French Horn: Matt Clifford
Strings arranged by Toby Chapman, Gary Kemp and Rob Taggart
A Rumour of You
I wrote this while on tour in the US with Nick Mason. It came lyrics first. I get obsessed by scansion and internal rhymes when working this way, making sure every verse runs the same, and once I have it fixed I won’t break out of it. I like that discipline - I find it helps me to focus on the storytelling more and not be pulled by phonetic sounds I might make up when writing a lyric after the music.
At first, I couldn’t decide which way to take the song musically and wrote three different melodies. One was much more up-tempo and almost a country rocker, but it felt wrong in the end as it took the menace out of the lyrics. It’s a tale of obsession and hopefully ambiguous as to whether the protagonist actually did once have a relationship with the woman that he’s looking for, or if in fact they’d never met. Either way, he certainly hasn’t met the woman she is now.
I nearly titled it Desire is a Hitchhiker but I thought the line would be better delivered as a surprise, a new part of the tale arriving like a new acquaintance on the road. My brief to Toby was to have a pre-chorus of that line, starting quietly and small in the distance and getting nearer and clearer before the drop. In my mind, this was the aural version of seeing someone up ahead on the roadside and driving towards them.
Musically it needed that greasy slouch of a suburban landscape to reflect the protagonists mind set, and the dirty guitar licks and lap steel growling underneath seemed to help create it.
Vocals & All Guitars – Gary Kemp
Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Lap Steel - Lee Harris
Waiting for the Band
Thoughts on my past and how it encroaches on my day to day became another theme in the writing of the album. In this song I wanted to capture those teenage feelings That I had as a fan of music, of artists and bands, and of those blistering emotions that surround the anticipation of seeing them dressing up, claiming the present as your own, being part of a tribe. All these things were tied up with my growing sexuality and desire to be different.
I tried to capture that heady feeling in the opening verses, the thrill of being a disciple in the hunt for a hero. In the middle section of the song the protagonist - me - walks into the venue, heads into the pool of light in front of the stage and feels that sense of rising euphoria. In my head it was Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 and I was about to watch Bowie come on, but it could be any artist that ever turned you on, striding out onto the stage.
And then they’re gone… and the music floats back into the reverie that it started with. During the saxophone solo we worked in some archive audio of fans, like ghosts floating in and out of the music; voices from another time.
And I’m still waiting for that feeling to happen again… waiting for that band, for him, her or them to come into my view and thrill me to the core - it’s never left me. It almost gets me through the day, the thought that those thrills might still lie ahead. Is that a feeling of nostalgia for music? For lost friends? Or just for lost youth? Whatever it is, I’m still deeply aware of it and wanted to tell it in song.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp
Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Martin Kemp
Sax - Theo Travis
Strings arranged by Toby Chapman, Gary Kemp and Rob Taggart
Archive clips from ‘The London Weekend Show’ interviews with Bowie fans outside Earl’s Court, 30th June 1978. Courtesy of ITV Archive
Ahead of the Game
Ash Soan was a drummer I wanted to use for the album. He’s so tight and funky but has a sparse sound that doesn’t interfere with the overdubs. After programming this song, I sent it out to him to work on at his Windmill Studio and during the pandemic we collaborated on various tracks at a distance. Surprisingly it was not much different to having the control room/studio screen and talkback, but it was something I needed to get use to during this period of lockdowns.
Richard Jones added the bass guitar. Apart from being a friend Richard’s an amazing player and I’ve worked with him before in the supergroup at Carfest Festival with his band the Feeling, so we had an easy language. He loves late 70s’ pop and I felt some of that influence in this tune. In building backing vocals with Toby on this album my references were always 70s - Wings, 10cc, Supertramp etc. Surprisingly given the amount of guitar on the track, like most of the album I wrote it on piano.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp
Keyboards and Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Richard Jones
Drums - Ash Soan
I Remember You
There’s no third person here. The object of memory is me; the young man or boy I once was. We are a series of different people throughout our lives and I was trying to look back on some of those incarnations of myself, now gone. It’s a reverie and Lily Carassik’s dreamy trumpet alongside my floating guitar-sound hopefully help to create that atmosphere.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming - Gary Kemp
All Pianos & Programming- Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt,
Drums & Percussion - Ged Lynch
Trumpet - Lily Carassik
Too Much
This song came out of a feeling of being overpowered by the global bad news that constantly seems to beat us down. That feeling of helplessness and exhaustion that it sometimes creates in us. That sense that there’s too much going on to ever be able to change anything can make you retreat into the shell of your family. I was hit by it one day and sat at the piano - my usual solace along with the guitar - and this tune and lyric came out in one sitting. It felt like a comfort to declaim it and not write a song about what we should all be doing.
During recording I sent a couple of songs over to my friend Roger Taylor from Queen, wondering if he fancied playing drums on anything. He chose this and I’m so glad he did. The power in his playing seems to help the lyric and lift the song just at the right moment.
Matt Clifford who plays keyboards for the Rolling Stones played French Horn on the track. He also played on In Solo and I am the Past.
Vocals & All Guitars – Gary Kemp
Toby Chapman - All Keyboards & Programming
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Richard Jones
Drums – Roger Taylor
French Horn - Matt Clifford
Strings arranged by Toby Chapman, Gary Kemp and Rob Taggart
The Fastest Man in the World
‘Yeah, it’s me’, I admit in the middle 8 of the song, ‘Once young, bright and highly attuned’. Until then I’m telling the story of some guy who can’t commit to a relationship and is therefore always on the run. It’s a story I knew well for a while. Sometimes it can take you years to finally write about who you once were or what you once did.
I like the ‘Hot-Dog’ 50s guitar solo section in what I visualised as the ‘chase scene’. It’s a little comic and tongue-in-cheek which hopefully balances the ‘admission’ of the middle 8 and outro section. 10cc were definitely influential here in their ability to hop from comedy to heartfelt, irony to accuracy, objective to subjective, within the same song.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp,
Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Drums - Ash Soan
Strings arranged by Toby Chapman, Gary Kemp and Rob Taggart
I am the Past
I started this song by writing the lyrics while I was traveling in the US. When I came to write the music, I wanted some of that 50s-style Americana to be within it, and the male backing-vocal chorus was something that I thought I’d heard on some distant old cowboy record. I wanted those blocked unison voices to make the solo voice seem even more alone when it came in, giving the effect of pulling from a wide shot to a close up.
In my mind I am the Past is part of a trilogy on the album, along with Waiting for the Band and I Remember You, that deal with my feelings of loss and time lost and the personal sadness that is often within those thoughts. I was trying to capture it over and over again I think, trying to look at it in different ways. Whatever it was, it kept creeping into my songwriting. This one deals with how those issues feel while also loving someone who seems stronger, more vital than you, someone who never knew you as your younger self. In retrospect it might be an apology.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp,
Keyboards, Piano & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Drums - Ash Soan
French Horn - Matt Clifford
The Feet of Mercury
Although In Solo was the first song that I wrote with this album in mind, The Feet of Mercury is the earliest. It’s been hanging around for a while, but I didn’t want to lose it. Ironically it was the last song to be recorded. Mercury had wings on his feet that got him away fast, so it’s a kind of more poetic companion piece to The Fastest Man.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp,
Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
The Haunted
This begins with the instrumental motif from In Solo played on guitar. In my mind it’s the same characters that appear in In Solo but further on in their story. It has the same She/He structure that was in the opening song. In many ways it’s the bookend to the album, with the final song, Our Light, being a kind of postscript. Again, this is a song where all the lyrics were written first and then propped up on my piano where I attempt to capture the mood musically. I then take it into my studio and begin the programming, finding sounds, messing with guitars, before taking it to Toby and turning my plastic pianos and organs into real ones. Toby and I have played together off and on for nearly 40 years - no other player understands what I want and like as much as he does, and it was a joy to work with him throughout the album.
I always imagine arrangements and musical moods visually, and again Edward Hopper came to mind with his Automat, 1927 painting.
And ‘He walks slowly through the darkened night’ was always, in my head, a scene from a Carol Reed movie.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp,
Piano, Organ, Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Drums - Ash Soan
Percussion – Ged Lynch
Our Light
I wanted to leave the album on a more positive note. Our Light is a straight up love song and the power of it. Their love begins in King’s Collage Cambridge during Evensong and it’s here a ‘boy as pale as milk sings out towards the stone’. I’m an atheist but it seemed the right setting for the spirituality of love.
Vocals, All Guitars & Programming – Gary Kemp
Keyboards & Programming - Toby Chapman
Backing Vocals - Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Bass - Guy Pratt
Drums - Ash Soan
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Album produced by Gary Kemp & Toby Chapman
Mixed by Gary Kemp and Toby Chapman except Ahead Of The Game mixed by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, assisted by Matt Wolach
Mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road
Strings for In Solo, Waiting for the Band, Too Much and The Fastest Man in the World arranged by Toby Chapman, Gary Kemp and Rob Taggart, conducted by Rob Taggart and Recorded at RAK Studios, London
Cellos - Bryony James, Chris Worsey. Violas - Emma Owens, Polly Wiltshire. Violins - Emma Parker (Leader), Glesni Roberts, Jackie Hartley, Laura Melhuish, Richard George, Cat Parker. Copyist - Phil Knights