Early days | Spearmint? | A Week Away | A Different Lifetime | My Missing Days |
Paris In A Bottle | Songs For The Colour Yellow | Oklahoma! | A Leopard And Other Stories |
The Boy And The Girl That Got Away | The Future...

Paris In A Bottle

Having made a relatively straight forward album with "My Missing Days", I was in the mood for something more ambitious next. I felt it was better to have a glorious failure than a tame success. So I set off writing a grand story album about my sister.

One thing I have learned about writing is that you set off down one path, and then you end up somewhere else. I am like that anyway: as soon as I have a plan, I want to do something different; as soon as I set a rule, it feels restrictive and I want to break it. Somewhere along the way, actually after band rehearsals had begun, the story about my sister got dropped, and a new idea emerged. This new idea involved harking back to an incident from my past when my friend Graham and I went (disastrously) busking one summer in Paris. We spent one of the evenings with two French girls, and I began wondering whatever happened to them. The key thing for me was that nothing dramatic happened to any of us - we had probably all just lived our lives since then and ended up in different places and most of us would not have fulfilled the ambitions and dreams we had then. So the album would provide snapshots of these four lives from each person's viewpoint.

I also wanted it to be very Pop, almost as a contrast to its over-ambitious narrative idea, and I liked the idea of it having some decent singles on it.

The project evolved, and progressed more like a stage musical than an album. I wanted to get guest singers in to sing some of the parts, though, confusingly, it didn't bother me if they were not directly singing the part of the character they were representing. The album was to begin and end with two long spoken pieces - the first with me telling the story of that night in Paris; the second with one of the girls reminiscing in French about that night and life since. These were originally twice as long as they ended up - Rhodri encouraged
edits as he felt it was getting out of hand. I remember I had a line about hearing a noise from the next bed like "a dog licking an ice-cream cone", which he found hilariously bad. I liked it - it was the sound of Graham kissing the girl, but Rhodri felt it was a contender for the "worst erotic writing of they year" award.

It seems now like I was trying to absense myself from the finished album - there is a large chunk where my voice does not appear at all. It does not feel like a band album - we all play on it, but because it was put together at different times in different places and it took months, I don't think they felt part of the project at all. In fact, I don't think they knew what was going on half the time! Rhodri often jokes that is was his first solo album, because he was left to sort out lots of bits on his own - again I was happy to be distanced.

We ended up making sure that the album was relatively short, to counter-act the pomposity of its lyrical content. Like "A Different Lifetime" it would probably have made more sense if it had been longer and included missing narrative.

We went for a digipack again and I love the ambitions of the placing the tracks on the back according to place and year within the story. The front is probably my least favourite Spearmint sleeve - it seems a bit too literal, without evoking a memorable image, which the rest do for me. We are very lucky having Jim do all the art from within the band; it really lifts each project for me!

Having said all of that, I still rate the album - I love the ambition of it, love the spoken pieces, and think that "Psycho Magnet", "The Competition", "What's Wrong With Breaking Up" and "My Girlfriend Is A Killer" are some of the best Pop songs we have done. I very much like "Wednesday Night", which really should be in a stage musical. Most of all, I adore "The Space" - definitely a contender for my favourite Spearmint song.