The Incident: The Interview
Why is the new album called The Incident?
The starting point was an experience I had driving home one night. There’d been a really bad, presumably fatal accident on the motorway. When things like that happen, the police put up this sign saying ‘Incident’, and it struck me that was a very detached mechanical word for something that was traumatic and dramatic for the people involved. I had this kind of poetic moment where I felt the presence of people who’d died in the accident in the car with me. I almost felt if I looked in the mirror I’d see them in the back seat.
The word ‘incident’ stuck in my mind – it seemed like a very iconic word. We become immune to these incredible traumatic, dramatic, tragic things reported in the media. So the fact ‘incident’ is quite a cold, mechanical and detached word seemed somehow appropriate to me.
Did you approach the writing process any differently from the last album?
I started to write as soon as I finished my last solo record. I came out of that pretty tired. The idea of going back to the drawing board was daunting in a way. On top of that it’s always been very important to me to feel like every album has a reason to exist - I’m not interested in just making the same record over and over again.
So I set myself the task of doing something quite different this time. I decided to write a long-scale piece from beginning to end, rather than write a set of songs and find the right way to sequence them. Each part of The Incident grew out of the preceding part in the sense that a rhythm, or a chord sequence or a melody would suggest how the next section would develop. So what you get is that very natural, organic sense of flow across the whole piece.
People can look at it as 14 separate songs but they do have this seamless sense of flow. I’m pretty pleased that we managed to pull it off.
The Incident is a double CD. Why did you feel it was important to separate the title track from the rest of the album?
I grew up at the end of the great era for vinyl where you had two sides of an album. You could actually take advantage of the division and create two very distinct listening experiences.
We lost that with CD. Vinyl had something about it. If you think of all the classic albums, most of them come from the vinyl era and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think its something about the fact that albums were limited to around about 45 minutes – they had this division so you almost had this pause for breath. Now you get death metal bands making 80-minute albums of this relentless pummelling death metal. I’m not picking on death metal, but I find it very hard to listen to any samey music for more than 20 minutes. Maybe that’s just me!
The Incident itself, the main song, is supposed to be experienced as a singular listening experience, not to finish and then ten seconds later say, “Oh, here’s some other stuff we wrote!” It may seem like a a functional thing, even the fact that that you have to take one disc out and put another one in makes it make more sense.
Part 2 / Part 3
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