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Tanita Tikaram, singer-songwriter
I wrote the lyrics on the floor of my bedroom in Basingstoke when I was 16 or 17, as a way of decompressing from studying for my A-levels. I had the idea for “Twist in my …” something, but didn’t know what else to put in there. I tried “Twist in my gravity” before ending up with “sobriety”, but it’s not a song about alcohol. It’s about feeling that things aren’t right in the world, and that adults can do terrible or immoral things – but none of it will change you. Fundamentally, it’s a song by an alienated teenager who feels there’s a lot of injustice. There’s something lovely about how intensely you feel things as a teenager.
The opening line, “All God’s children need travelling shoes,” is the title of a book by Maya Angelou. Then “All good people read good books” is the language of a kid who reads a lot. It’s a little road song: you’re on a journey, kind of travelling, but really looking for something. Once I had the groovy little guitar riff, the song just fell together.
I’d only previously sung in a school play, but some guys from a local band helped me record my songs in a nearby studio, so suddenly I had a tape. I sent it to the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, London, and they gave me a spot at their open mic night. I played there to just three people, but one of them was the venue-owner, Vince Power, who told an agent: “You’ve got to see this girl!” Soon enough, I’d signed to a record label and they suggested Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke as co-producers. Like me, Rod had been very young when he had his first hit in the Zombies, so there was empathy there.
Peter would pick me up at the train station and we’d drive to Rod’s home studio in St Albans, where we recorded Twist in My Sobriety. Rod wanted the right sound for the melody line and went through the whole woodwind section of samples. In those days, samples were all on floppy discs so you’d sit there for ages waiting for them to load, but then suddenly he tried a synthetic oboe and said: “My God, that works!”
I never had an inkling that the song was going to be a hit, but it took off in continental Europe and everywhere else followed. I’m very proud of it. Recently, a young woman came up to me and said: “That song takes me to my happy place.” It’s a dark song to do that for someone. In the US, people tell me it helped them with their sobriety or rehab. I have to explain: “Sorry, it’s not about alcohol. I was just a kid.”
Rod Argent, co-producer
When Peter and I first met Tanita, she’d only ever played her own guitar. We thought she was really talented: we wanted to match the strength and direction of her composition with a really colourful, inventive backing. My studio was in a wonderful Georgian house called Red House, where we had two rooms: a control room and a recording room with a piano in it. Everything was done in there – and in those day we recorded on to tape.
Pete came up with the brilliant idea of recording a master vocal with Tanita playing guitar to a guide rhythm track we’d then dispense with, because that was the way she was used to playing. That gave us a really confident vocal – Tanita sounded really in command. But it meant we could be really inventive around it, conjuring up a scenario with strings and such. We built up every track on her Ancient Heart album like that.
For Twist in My Sobriety, Pete created a definitive drum part and I had a ball coming up with the instrumental sections. The booming synth sounds at the beginning have a lot of attack, then I came up with a part for – unusually – oboe, which Pete was very unsure about at first as he wanted a more folky thing. But there was something classical about it that sounded really lovely. We did it using the oboe sound on the synth first, then a professional player called Malcolm Messiter came in and played an actual oboe.
I thought the finished song had a fantastic feel: there was something very unusual about it. I played it this morning for the first time in a long time – and it sounded absolutely brilliant.
English (US) ·