It’s nearly six years ago now, though it hardly seems it, and more or less when I came back in after nineteen years away.
I was reading back through the Sproutnet archives and remembered this interview, from the period leading up to the release of “Let’s Change the World With Music”, and then discovered it had somehow drifted offline.
There’s this curious thing when there’s been a gap between releases – though the 2000s weren’t bad for activity in retrospect: Tour in 2000, Gunman 2001, Megahertz 2003, Acoustic Steve McQueen 2007 – which is that the myth of the hermit sort of takes hold a bit, and you remember the wild-eyed mad-bearded photographs of Paddy in peculiar pyjama bottoms and red hat, and you wonder whether this time he’ll come out with his brains fried. At least that’s how I think.
So the first radio interview is a sort of nerve settler. And this was a particularly good one. At that time the McGurk tapes had just turned up, and they get a mention, and there’s the now familiar story of the Sony playback of the demo tapes and how that led to an insane couple of years writing “Earth the Story So Far”.
I just wish Maconie would do the decent thing and write a biography.