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the making of Six O'clock
What makes a truly great driving song? A killer hook; a thumping,
hot-hatch-shaking bassline; Bruce Springsteen? Last week The Sunday Times
set out to record a new type of motoring anthem, with a little help from
Mike Rutherford, the guitarist in Genesis, and Kenney Jones, a former
drummer for the Who. And to capture the essence of the driving experience
fully, these rock heavyweights would be playing instruments made entirely
out of car components.
You can see the fruits of our labours above. Hopefully, you’ll agree that it’s
not bad, for music played on the remains of a dismantled hatchback.
“It’s a great driving tune,” said Rutherford, who played the guitar parts on a
weird-looking instrument made from a clutch plate.
“It’s a cracking number and dead catchy. You’ll find yourself humming it in
the car, even if it’s not playing,” said Jones, who laid down the beat on
wheels fashioned into drums.
Before going any further we should add, in the best Smashie and Nicey
tradition, the exercise was all for charidee. The Teenage Cancer Trust will
get all the proceeds, so if you listen to the song and like it enough to
download it, please make a 79p donation (the price of one track on iTunes).
Rutherford, the mainstay of our improvised band, called Carparts, has sold
more than 150m records as part of Genesis, as well as fronting Mike and the
Mechanics. Jones was a founding member of Small Faces and Faces. When the
Who’s original drummer, Keith Moon, was found dead, Jones took over. He also
recently topped the American charts with a single from his new band, the
Jones Gang.
We also recruited some of the country’s leading classical musicians, members
of the National Symphony Orchestra, to play other carparts instruments
including the rear-suspension spike fiddle, the fender bass and a flute made
from part of a strut and some air-conditioning tubing.
All the instruments have appeared in a recent television advertisement for
Ford, which features an entire orchestra playing instruments assembled from
the components and body panels of a Ford Focus. They were designed by Bill
Milbrodt, an American musician who began making music from bits of cars in
the 1990s. He formed a New Jersey band called the Car Music Project in 2005,
who were spotted by Ford’s UK advertising agency.
With his colleague Ray Faunce III, a luthier (a maker and repairer of stringed
instruments), Milbrodt had just over a month to transform two brand-new
Focuses into a 20-piece orchestra for the ad. “These are so much more
advanced than my first attempt at carparts instruments,” he said. “And they
look much better too. They’re painted with proper car paint, which costs
$400-$550 a gallon.”
The vocalist for the Sunday Times’s recording was Richard Watson, who co-wrote
the song. In the best tradition of talented hopefuls, he’s never had a hit
or a record deal and composes in snatched moments between office meetings at
a busy London recruitment agency.
InGear’s mighty supergroup assembled for the first time last Monday morning at
the Farm, the Surrey recording studio set up by Rutherford in 1980. It’s
where Invisible Touch, Genesis’s bestselling album, released in 1986, was
recorded, as well as some of Phil Collins’s solo projects, and commemorative
discs line the walls.
The first step was to get to grips with the instruments. Rutherford, a pioneer
of the double-neck guitar and various Moog synthesisers, was wrestling with
all four stone of the clutch-plate guitar. “This is without doubt the
weirdest thing I have ever played,” he said, inspecting the welds holding
the thing together. “But I guess after playing the double-neck for most of
my career this is the next step. And there has always been that link between
music and cars.
“I’ve actually got an eight-year-old Ford Focus at my house in Spain – I’ll
never look at it in quite the same way again.”
There is no prog-rocking-out with this instrument strapped over your shoulder,
however. Rutherford had to spend most of the recording session sitting on a
stool with the guitar resting on a piece of sponge in his lap to stop the
metal edge digging into his legs.
Jones rolled up shortly after 11am in his Jaguar XK, wearing a modish black
donkey jacket and with the same fuzz of suspiciously brown hair he’s had
since the 1960s. Rutherford made him a mug of instant coffee (“We’re out of
the proper stuff – sorry. This is rock’n’roll”) and he began experimenting
with the 16in wheel-rim drums while creating strange sounds with the
assorted carparts percussion, including cogs, springs and a mixture of gears
for tapping, jangling and scraping. He looked slightly bemused (although
that could just be an unavoidable side effect of four decades of rock
stardom).
“I saw these instruments in the ad but to be honest I presumed they were
miming. I didn’t think they would actually play in tune,” he said. “I
remember drumming on a guitar case for a track with Andy Fairweather Low,
but that’s nothing compared with this. This is fantastic.”
The last time Jones remembers paying as much attention to the insides of a car
was in one classic rock’n’roll escapade when he and the rest of the Faces
were being driven down to a gig in New Orleans by a fan in a ropey old hire
car. “We got really bored, so we started taking the car apart bit by bit,”
he remembers. “We were stripping it out and throwing bits out of the window
– the window winders, door panels, seats. By the time we’d finished there
was only the steering wheel left. It was pretty early in the morning so I
imagine we were hung over . . . or maybe still pissed.”
Jones and Rutherford are neighbours in Surrey’s rock-star belt, which is also
home to Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Brian May, the Queen guitarist. They
have played together before at local charity bashes but this is the first
time they have released a track together.
Watson began loosening up his vocal cords and sucking throat lozenges to
soothe the after-effects of a bout of tonsillitis. “I know it’s unusual for
the singer to be asking for autographs from other members of the band but
Rutherford and Jones are two of the people I’ve admired most on the music
scene,” he said. “I love Ooh La La by the Faces, I used to listen to Foxtrot
and Invisible Touch [by Genesis] when I was a kid and my mum was a big fan
of Small Faces in the Sixties, so this is all quite surreal.”
Watson’s song, entitled Six O’Clock in the Morning, was inspired by an
obsessive ex-girlfriend who kept phoning him and, like all great road songs,
looks for hope amid everyday drudgery. It was selected from a number of
entries submitted to The Sunday Times and arranged for car parts by Tim
Woods, a composer and music student at Anglia Ruskin University in
Cambridge.
In the sound studio, Justin Pearson, principal cellist and co-artistic
director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was trying to tame the rear
suspension spike fiddle, made from a shock absorber. He was using trial and
error to figure out where to put his fingers and how much pressure to apply
with the bow to create the right notes. Phil Todd, our flautist, had an
equally difficult task to keep his instrument – essentially a piece of
piping with holes in it – in tune.
The recording session was proceeding – slowly. Pearson had cracked the spike
fiddle, with a little help from Rutherford in the recording studio. Although
his demand to “make me sound a bit more sexy” was beyond even the several
thousand knobs and buttons on the mixing desk. “You could do all this on a
laptop these days,” Rutherford noted. “Although a lot of new acts are
getting back into recording together as a band.”
But what really has changed is the amount of time that groups – even super
ones – can spare for the recording process. “We used to come down for three
months and record a record, maaan,” Rutherford said in his best mock-rock
voice. “Those days are gone, which is a shame, because they were a lot of
fun.”
We had just a couple of hours to complete the track. Watson was fine-tuning
his “woo hoo”s and “dobedo”s and a handful of students from the Academy of
Contemporary Music, in nearby Guildford, were going to help to boost the
guitar and percussion sounds. By 8pm it was a wrap. We had recorded the
first Sunday Times single. Just don’t expect a world tour any time soon.
There are plans for some of the instruments from the session to be auctioned
off in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, plus Jones may be otherwise engaged
– a source close to the band tells us there is a strong likelihood of a
Faces reunion.
Additional reporting: Emma Smith
Kenney Jones, drummer with Small Faces, Faces and the Who: “I think the
best driving song would have to be No Particular Place to Go by Chuck Berry.
It’s a fantastic song and it starts with the line ‘Riding along in my
automobile’, which is pretty ideal. It’s all about him trying to pull this
bird and not being able to undo her safety belt, so to speak. I also like
listening to the Eagles while I’m driving.”
Mike Rutherford, guitarist with Genesis and founder of Mike and the
Mechanics: “I think it would have to be a Steely Dan track called Reelin’ in
the Years. I associate it with one of the long tours we did with Genesis in
the 1970s and this song was just always in the air. We used to tour in two
cars, a Merc and a four-door sedan, which was quite cool at the time. I
hated tour buses. I think a good driving song has to give you a bit of a
lift, a bit of energy.”
Pedal to the metal: the best music for driving
Best driving songs as decided by Rolling Stone 1. Immigrant Song, Led
Zeppelin (1970) 2. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (1975) 3. Highway to Hell,
AC/DC (1979) 4. Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tom Petty (1989) 5. Truckin’, Grateful
Dead (1970) 6. Ol’ 55, Tom Waits (1973) 7. Radar Love, Golden Earring (1973)
8. Tush, ZZ Top (1975) 9. The Passenger, Iggy Pop (1977) 10. Wanted Dead or
Alive, Bon Jovi (1986)
And the ones they missed 1. The Boys of Summer, Don Henley (1984) 2.
Ace of Spades, Motörhead (1980) 3. Route 66, the Rolling Stones (1964) 4.
Silver Machine, Hawkwind (1972) 5. Drift Away, Dobie Gray (1973)
To download the track click
here. You will not be charged but you can follow the link to the
Teenage Cancer Trust website (www.teenagecancertrust.org
), where your donations will be gratefully received. Please make a
minimum donation of 79p per download
Caring for teenage cancer sufferers
All proceeds from downloads of Six O’Clock in the Morning will go to the
Teenage Cancer Trust. More than 2,000 teenagers are diagnosed with cancer in
the UK every year, making it the most common cause of nonaccidental death in
teens and young adults. More information about the trust’s work is available
at www.teenagecancertrust.org, where you can also buy tickets for a series
of concerts headlined by Paul Weller, the Fratellis, Muse and our very own
Carparts at the Albert Hall in April.
