You Know I Used To Call My Baby Up...

Happy 35th birthday to EYE

Every new moment in your life finds its place in a museum eventually. What once was fresh and newly minted winds up tarnished and curling at the edges. So it is with my second completely solo record, Eye, released 35 years ago this week. 

On its release in 1990, it seemed vulnerable, stripped of the lacquered production that was increasingly encasing the major label albums I made with the Egyptians. 35 years on, however, this record is another stepping stone into the chasm of history, quaint in a different way from the digital patina that shrouded Queen Elvis and Perspex Island. Regardless, all three albums were recorded on tape, anyway - that was how things were done back then. 

Still, Eye was my attempt to be personal, and vulnerable, inasmuch as my uptight English carapace would allow. I’d had a warm bath from the critics over here in the USA, compared to the ice-cubes down the spine that their British colleagues tended to serve up; nonetheless, some people felt that the emotions in my songs were muffled by the images I used. It’s not for me to analyze or review my own work, but I admit that I did yearn to get through to people more. After all, I had quite a wide audience now, thanks to college radio and the thousands of independent record stores that still existed then. Could I possibly get across to people the way John Lennon did on his Plastic Ono Band album? 

So between November 1988 and October 1989, I recorded Eye completely solo in San Francisco, funding it myself and bypassing both my band and the record label, A&M. I wasn’t sure if it would be released; I just wanted to get it all down on tape. My relative success in the USA - half my life ago now - had put me in turmoil. I was in the throes of breaking up with two people at once, and however much love MTV’s 120 Minutes was pouring on me, I still copped a lot of loathing in my private existence. I probably deserved it, but it triggered some of my best songs. For what it’s worth, playing live, I still perform more songs off Eye than from any of my other records. 

A San Francisco friend recommended Hyde Street Studios, embedded in the Tenderloin, the wasteland right at the heart of the city. As an alumnus of 1966/7, I’d always been drawn to SF, and whilst touring I’d grown some tendrils there. This is history looking back at history; everything becomes an exercise in nostalgia. Human relationships aren’t smooth or kindly - we tend to sugarcoat them if we can, and turn painful memories bittersweet. On Eye I did my best to capture those ugly feelings and bottle them raw, like acid fireflies, forever flaming in my repertoire.

Another feature of my life back then was the lurch between humming California and the relatively empty Isle of Wight, lodged like a diamond against the Southern English coast. On the Island, I stayed in a big, empty holiday home, a legacy of a crumbled relationship. The kitchen was blessed with great natural reverb, and I recorded many demos in it, gazing at the peeling wallpaper and the battered silver kettle. The upstairs of the tiny boathouse in the back garden had an eerie atmosphere, as if an unseen figure lurked there, acting as a prism for my thoughts. A lot of songs crystallized in that wooden hut, erotic and morose all at once. The empty house on a deserted street in the little port of Yarmouth - itself quiet for most of the year - fed me with a desolation that came in useful when I was back in the swarm of SF and LA. 

So Eye was conceived on the Island, and birthed in San Francisco. Wendy Bardsley, the recording engineer, was the only other person present at the sessions, and she added her intense Piscean energy to mine. Neither of us produced the album as such, but she and I brought it into being between us. 

Since then I’ve chased the muse through brambles and briars, up dead-end streets and over clifftops, but nothing I’ve written surpasses the intensity of the songs on that album.

You can listen to EYE here:

Apple

Spotify

Bandcamp