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A good Eg
Pop quiz time. What do these two songs have in common? The melodic similarities may provide a clue…
On the whole I can take or leave both Will Young and Adele, but I like these songs, because they were written by Eg White.
A long long time ago, Eg was almost a pop star. Here he is, way back in 1987, with cheesetastic 1980s band Brother Beyond. Eg is the skinny guitarist singing backing vocals.
For reasons I can’t remember, but which I plan to ask Eg about when I interview him for the Scotsman in the next couple of weeks, he left Brother Beyond just before they started working with Stock, Aitken and Waterman and became properly (if only briefly) successful. As an adolescent pop fan who hated SAW for what I saw as their Thatcherite, money-grubbing cynicism, this made Eg a sort of rebel hero to me. While I’d quite liked the sunny, summery songs Brother Beyond wrote for themselves, like How Many Times and Be My Twin (still a fantastic pop single, however unfashionable it may be to say so), I despised everything SAW wrote for them. I loathed the lazy, dreary Motown pastiche of The Harder I Try as soon as I heard it. I felt the same about He Ain’t No Competition, their second single with SAW - which, in typical, shameless SAW style, was exactly the same song, again (a strategy that had previously worked with Kylie‘s Got To Be Certain, which is more or less I Should Be So Lucky, again, and Rick Astley‘s Together For Ever, which is essentially Never Gonna Give You Up, again).
What it came down to, ultimately, was that I thought Brother Beyond had sold out by working with The Hit Factory. And yes, I know how that sounds. The briefest of glances at the video above will demonstrate what a curious view of ‘selling out’ the young me must have had - the early Brother Beyond weren’t exactly the Jesus and Mary Chain, were they? The point was, I suppose, they wrote perfectly good pop songs by themselves - and to this day, it feels to me that Eg’s subsequent songwriting success vindicates that view.
Anyway, for whatever reason Eg walked way, but he hadn’t given up on being a pop star quite yet. Here he is four years later with his friend Alice Temple, as the duo Eg and Alice, on the bit of ITV’s The Chart Show that showcased new bands about to hit the charts.
Eg and Alice didn’t hit the charts - I don’t think they charted at all, in fact - but they did make an absolutely gorgeous album together, 24 Years Of Hunger, that’s about as far removed from Brother Beyond’s likeable but slightly naff music as it’s possible to get. In my view - and I’m not alone in this - the album is one of the great lost pop classics of the last couple of decades. I still have it on vinyl, and play it often.
Eg had one more go at being a pop star in 1996, with a lovely album called Turn Me On I’m A Rocket Man, a solo voyage through a musical landscape somewhere between Prefab Sprout and Al Green, and a short walk from Elvis Costello’s work with Burt Bacharach. It reminds me, in particular, of Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen, in that it’s full of exquisitely arranged songs with beautiful chord changes but barbed, jagged lyrics full of unexpected turns of phrase that at first seem to jar with the smoothness of the arrangements. He paints a pretty unflattering picture of himself, all in all, as an unfaithful, dishonest loser. ‘I really love it when you’re naked,’ he sings on one song. ‘I’m not fussy I just wanna shoot my gun. A suffragette is not a bad thing but I don’t think I’ve ever had one.’ You wouldn’t find that sort of thing on a Natalie Imbruglia song.
Turn Me On was no more of a success than 24 Years of Hunger, alas, and after that Eg disappeared into the background, gradually re-emerging as a name on the credits of other people’s albums. I have a vivid memory of listening to Emiliana Torrini‘s first album, Love In the Time Of Science, back in 1999, and suddenly thinking some of the melodies and chord changes sounded a bit Eggy, particularly on this song…
... and then scouring through the sleeve notes and feeling quite pleased with myself when I realised I was right. Since then his clients have been gradually more famous - Will Young, Natalie Imbruglia, James Morrison, James Blunt, Take That, Joss Stone, Pink, Kylie Minogue, Beverly Knight etc. He won an Ivor Novello songwriting award for Leave Right Now. I still frequently find myself playing ‘spot the Eg White song’ while listening to the radio. It generally involves me realising I quite like a song by a singer I’m otherwise completely indifferent to, such as this one…
Despite all this, to this day no one outside the music industry seems to have heard of Eg. This might just be about to change though, a little bit at least. I’m writing all this because Eg is about to release another solo album, Adventure Man - the first thing he’s released under his own name since 1996. Despite his status as hitmaker to the stars, very little fuss is being made about it, it seems. The album’s supposed to be out on 18 May on Parlophone, but at time of writing there is no website or MySpace page. When I emailed Parlophone to ask for a copy, explaining what a big fan I was and how I wanted to write a big feature about him, they first failed to reply for ages, then sent me Pete Doherty’s album by accident - as if they couldn’t quite believe it was really the Eg White album that I wanted.
Several more emails later, I finally have Adventure Man in my eager hands, and am not disappointed. Eg’s voice is more cracked and croaky than it used to be (he sounds like he’s been doing some hard-living in the interim years), but the music is still lovely. Listening to it is a fascinating lesson in the differences between what a songwriter-for-hire does for other people, and what they do for themselves. Like Eg’s earlier solo stuff, these songs sound almost like daytime radio hits, but there’s always something slightly off - a chorus that doesn’t go where you expect, a reference to ‘junkies in the lavatory’, a singalong lyric that appears to be a tribute to sex dolls. Musically, it sounds as if he’s making a point of throwing quirks and curveballs that he couldn’t if he was doing his day job - I love the way the lyric for the opening song barely scans, as if he’d thought ‘these are the words I want to use, I don’t care if it doesn’t fit the song.’ It sounds like he had a lot of fun making it.
That said, he doesn’t make it sound like he’s found much love or happiness over the years. There’s a noticeable Morrissey-like streak throughout - a song called My People that pays tribute to other disappointed folk like Eg, ‘full of sadness and despair, beautiful like rain filling up the swimming pool on a winter afternoon’, and another called Weird Friendless Kid, which seems to be about Eg as a child, a misfit with a purple lunchbox. Anyone who has been missing the Prefab Sprout of Steve McQueen and From Langley Park To Memphis will surely love it.
The press release, I notice, makes no mention of anything Eg did before he wrote Leave Right Now. There’s a brief mention of Alice Temple, but only because she sings on one of the songs (which long-time fans will be very happy about; I’m glad to see they’re still friends). That’s to be expected, I suppose - none of that music was commercially successful, so to Parlophone’s PR team it’s not interesting or important. Eg is, in this version of events, simply ‘the man behind the hits’. But he’s far more interesting than that, and his own songs are far more interesting than any of the ones he’s written for other people.
And here’s what Eg has to say about Adventure Man.
“I don’t write many hits, that’s the truth. There are lots of songs I am proud of, but I know there’s no money in them. Sometimes they are subtle, interesting songs, a little bit more desperate, more ironic, funnier, darker, better observed. This album has a spread of different energies, it’s not stuck in one place. I think if you can let it in quietly, it’s a little bit nourishing.
“I think everyone would have been happy with an album of almost-hits, songs that I liked but that weren’t quite good enough to pass the drive-by test. But that’s not what it became. As the record was made, those songs fell by the wayside, and the album started to become more ironic, sophisticated, interesting and plausible
“I’m afraid Adventure Man is me. The album is going to have a cover like a Tin Tin graphic, where I am jumping over a fence with my guitar and it’s a beautiful day and its all fantastic. And on the back sleeve will be a photo of me trying to get over the same wall, but it’s a crappy day, I have very little hair, and my old dog Gnipper and I can’t get over the wall, I am thoroughly beached. And that is a metaphor for what I do. For me, songwriting is about trying to know myself, and just momentarily, for three minutes, I imagine myself more extreme. Not necessarily better, sometimes worse, sometimes happier, sometimes sadder, but a more extreme, richer and fuller person. Everything boring and frustrating I consign to my real life. Then I have a fantasy where I really do get the girl, or go down the toilet, or fly over the wall. All those things which are just frankly unwise in real life can happen in songs. I really run, really get free. And that’s why I suddenly find I love to be singing. I can sing and I am not myself and yet I am more myself than I will ever be. And that’s good enough for me. Then I’m delighted. That will do.”
Well said, Mr White. I look forward to talking to you.
Andrew
