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Saturday 22 November 2008

Hooked on Beethoven

Alex James leads a Slow Life

Stephen Lipson, a record producer, lives in the village up the road. Well, he was very pleased with himself, glowing with satisfaction like someone who’d just finished a particularly abstruse crossword. Back in the parish after a couple of weeks in Los Angeles, where he’d been making the new American Idol record. He didn’t even bore me with playing the record itself like musicians always do, but he told me how he’d played everything on it because American session players are all muppets, and then four hours after he’d finished it, it was number one on iTunes. ‘And it still is!’ said Penny, his wife. ‘And top of the Billboard 100.’ For any record-maker, that’s a bull’s-eye.

I like that guy, Stephen Lipson. He’s had more number ones than just about anybody, and he’ll have plenty more, and still his name will remain obscure and that’s the way he likes it. On the whole, I find record producers more interesting than recording artists for that reason. They’ll have music on their tombstones whereas everyone else will merely have their name. Producers just get on with making records with the intensity and glee of children doing jigsaw puzzles.

I’m so over having famous friends, as I said to Robin Gibb on Wednesday. It’s worse than Christmas at the moment with all these summer parties. If I see Tracey Emin eating another canapé, I’ll scream. Anyway, I hadn’t realised Robin and his brothers wrote and produced ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘Night Fever’ in the same afternoon, a strong contender for the best day’s work ever, especially as they probably didn’t get up until lunchtime. Even then, the record company came and listened to the songs, said hmmm it wasn’t sure and suggested changing the words to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ to ‘Saturday Night’.

I guess it’s easy to miss music. I heard the birds singing in the garden today and had to ask myself whether they’d been doing it the whole time, which they had, of course. The Gibbs themselves didn’t realise what they’d done when they wrote those songs.

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