Session work:
The Man Upstairs
(Francis/Dade)
From the Small World Incident album 'End'
Steven Francis of Small World Incident writes...
"Mike decided it would be nice to do something orchestral with a harp. Mike's good at saying things like that… "let's do a song with a harp", or "let's do a jungle-break-beat rhythm with ukelele and kazoo". So it was that we started playing around with strings, clarinets and of course a harp.
We wrote the music together, just playing off each other, although I think the song was originally in 4/4 and I had the idea of turning it into 3/4 to give it a different mood, and besides we have no other 3/4 tracks on the album.
Lyrically the surburbs crop up again, and I do feel bad that both Max's songs are about suburban mundaneity, because he's not a mundane person at all. Max learnt this song by listening to Mike's guide-vocal, and when Max came to sing it we were both blown away, not only by his amazing voice, but because some of the notes he sang weren't what we expected. We congratulated him on interpreting the melody differently to us, although it turned out that Max thought he was singing Mike's notes… it's just that Mike's note were a little flat in places!"
