It can be annoying when something you treasure becomes public property. Although I'm firm in my belief that good music deserves to be heard by everyone, I must admit I felt a little strange when 'You're Gorgeous' (an obvious hit in anyone's world) became the current favourite of sales reps in the office I worked in at the time - people who only a few months earlier were obsessed by 'Macarena'! It even made me question my feelings for Baby Bird, but it only took a trip home and a few minutes of 'I Was Born a Man' (the 4-track debut) to reassure me that everything was OK.
Of course the success of 'Ugly Beautiful' led to confusion. Why was it the fifth album under that name in two years? Was this a solo act with a bunch of hired session musicians, or was it a genuine band? Recent developments have puzzled us even more. We've had a few very grumpy live dates with Stephen's broken foot in tow, and a final, mostly instrumental, collection of 4-track stuff - appropriately entitled 'Dying Happy'. I was lucky enough to catch up with John, the bass player with the group, to straighten out a few things. First of all, how did they all link up with Stephen, were they already aware of his work?
"I was aware of it for about a year and a half before we met up. He had a friend in Sheffield where I lived and he used to give him tapes and I used to listen to them. It wasn't until they decided that they were going to try and get a release out of it, or a deal, that they realised they were going to have to get a band together. So Stephen moved to Sheffield cos it had a live scene and he was introduced to me cos I was a promoter and I knew the live scene! I put a band of local musicians around him and we're lucky that that's still the line-up now.
What was your selection procedure - did you stick with people you knew at first?
"Kind of. I was brought in first to actually put the band together. We didn't advertise, we didn't audition. Rob the drummer is an old friend of mine who I'd played with a long time before and I had to persuade him to come back from Stoke, where he'd moved to. The keyboard player is Hugh who was a friend of Stephen's from his theatre days (from the experimental comedy theatre troupe Dogs in Honey) and Luke came along and actually auditioned as a bass player as I was playing guitar at that time. He'd worked out an arrangement of 'Man's Tight Vest' and as soon as we heard him play that we swapped instruments that very day. That's how it started."
So does the band have an input on all the arrangements?
"Yes. One of the things about the 4-track material is that there's a kind of arrangement to them, they just flow and in some respects that's a good thing and it gets left as it is, and in other respects you have to control it a bit!"
You have done some songs in radically different ways - 'Too Handsome to be Homeless' is a good example.
"With that song one of the reasons the version on 'Ugly Beautiful' is different from the one on 'Bad Shave' is that usually there's two or three versions of each song and the one that I took as the basis for our version had more of a hip-hop beat to it so it wasn't such a leap for us really. Other songs like 'I Don't Want To Wake You Up' - everyone knew the songs, we just didn't know the chord changes but we just forgot about the 4-tracks and went in and re-ordered it. It was the only way of doing it, rather than trot out a straight 'cover version' if you like."
Who picked the songs from the first four albums to make up the running order of 'Ugly Beautiful'?
"They sort of picked themselves. The basis of the album is built around our live set and our favourites, and the funny thing about is that when we got our polling cards in from the first four albums, it kind of mirrored what we had chosen anyway. We've tried half a dozen times to do 'Hong Kong Blues' (from 'I Was Born A Man') and it just doesn't come off live. If you put a big band around it, it just sounds like crap 12-bar blues, instead of the tacky keyboard based tongue-in-cheek 12-bar arrangement on the 4-track. The band have had a bit of flak for daring to expand on these little gems that people have taken to their hearts, but what they've forgotten is that we're probably the biggest fans of Baby Bird anyway, so the songs are safer in our hands than in anyone else's."
When you first linked up, even prior to the release of the first four-track album 'I Was Born A Man', did you think that you would be this successful?
"Knowing what I know now I would say no, but at the time I was naive enough to think that it was fairly plain sailing. It has been a lot of hard work, and it was me who said in an interview a year before 'You're Gorgeous' was released, in fact before we'd even recorded it, that we would have a top 5 hit with it. But that was just band bravado really, it wasn't a genuine prediction, and when someone told us that it was number 3 mid-week it was just mind-boggling to even contemplate. I always thought that it could go big because Stephen's got a great voice, they're great songs and we're hoping that we did a good job on them. A lot of people who say there's been a sell-out - that's just rubbish. I think a song has to be taken to as many people as possible. The beautiful thing about it is that for me it isn't lowest common denominator music and yet it's had widespread success."
Did you consider your lo-fi material to be more accessible than the usual lo-fi stuff!?
"I've always thought of lo-fi being about pop songs and I always think that lo-fi is an attitude rather than a collection of musical instruments. The funny thing about it is that I would always class myself as a lo-fi exponent because the kind of music I like is largely within that kind of field. The fact that I get accused of being a session musician is hilarious because as far as I'm concerned session musicians are the anti-Christ. It's one of the worst things anyone's ever said about me! I'm trying my hardest to play the bass parts without making a mistake, ad I get accused of that!"
With the fifth album of four-track recordings 'Dying Happy' now on release ("introverted soundtrack stuff, a good listen" says John), are you going to be starting a new 'band' album from scratch?
"'Ugly Beautiful' was an experiment - it wasn't a covers album, but it obviously wasn't built from scratch. Stephen has decided that the second album has got to be an album of new songs, so I think it's going to be exciting because it's really our first 'all-new' album in a way, even though it'll be the seventh to bear the name Baby Bird!"
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