, he reflected on the 30th anniversary of, an album that proved to be a milestone for the group. He surprised himself in how much enjoyed looking back.
in 2010 was the first time I’d listened to the album since we’d made it. At that point I thought, “Yeah, I get now why people were drawn into it.” It’s a really nice balance of big and small in a funny way. It manages to hang together in a way that on paper it really shouldn’t. And when we played it through earlier this year, when we were rehearsing it, I kind of felt that again. I sort of remembered. I thought, “Yeah, it’s actually really cleverly put together.
Although I’ve always said I wrote it as a wedding present for Mary, it’s a bit of a steal really, since Simon wrote the bass line. That’s one of the two songs on thealbum that, musically, Simon [Gallup, bass] wrote. It was one of his demos that I adapted. He had a middle-8 section that I took out and I kind of simplified the song and wrote the words to it and played it back to him, and he was like, “Whoa.
It was also just nice. I suppose we’re also reaching the point where I look forward to experiences. It was something very different doing five nights at the Sydney Opera House. Playingto just a small room of people had an intensity about it. I’d forgotten that some of the songs actually have a … [] “Prayers for Rain” in particular, there’s something incredibly bleak and disturbing about it as a song. And it worked really well in that venue.Not a lot, but enough.
lesleyh17 I can remember friends encouraging me to buy the album when it first came out and I thought to myself at the time... hell, this isn’t a happy album