9. Tom WaitsMule Variations
I started making music when I was studying for my Masters. I did it all alone in my room and never told anyone anything about it. I got a scholarship and for the first time, I suddenly had time to make music alongside my studies because I didn’t need a job to support myself. I started putting things down. I was entirely self-taught and my confidence wasn’t great about any of it. It didn’t help that so many people just laughed at me in my early stages of making music – and when I say laughed at me, they ripped the piss out of me or were quite emotionally abusive – when I dared tell them that I was doing this.
In that period, it was just largely blokes in bands and female musicians were still very much the exception to the rule. A guy I met called Matt, who started to play guitar and bass for me, eventually heard me sing when I plucked up the courage to share my songs with someone. He told me I was really good and that gave me confidence and, crucially, some much needed encouragement. He was the first and only person who told me that at this point in my career. He was a great bass player and guitarist and it gave me hope. I guess I needed some – any – validation.
We listened to this album together. I first found it as this dusty and discarded CD in an old room at university in their television studio where previously I’d done some work experience to help fund my undergraduate studies. Goodness knows how it ended up there, it had been there for years but I’m glad it did. I’d not heard of Tom before this, but I decided to take the record home, put it on and when I heard ‘Big In Japan’, my world changed. I was like ‘Fucking hell!’ It was simple, I thought: ‘I can play this!’ and realised this is a version of the blues that PJ Harvey was kind of taking and making her own. Anyone could sing this and that is the point of it: it’s really accessible when you’re not a trained musician and you think you’re not good enough – it showed you, much like PJ Harvey did, that it can be done.
It also had ‘Take It With Me’ on, that peaceful, mournful piano and I realised you shapeshift from this kind of like evil, dirty blues sound to this almost Disney-like song that’s a bit like a fairytale. I went to Fopp days later and bought his back catalogue. I guess I should say thank you to whoever left that CD rotting in those studios for like five years!
