He’d ask me things like,

“What does put your hair down to touch the ground mean?”

I’d squirm and say,

‘Well there was this boy and this girl and they got… intimate.”

Every now and again he’d go outside to bash a student in the stomach with an iron bar or break a stick over someone’s arm then come back and continue with the translation.

“I want to be outside your window, I want to be outside your door?”

“She’s in love. She wants to spend every moment of her life with him.”

After he finished the translation, I recorded him speaking the Chinese, and spent any loose time I had learning the words; on the bus, on the tube. I relished queues because it took away the guilt that really I should be doing other things than learning a song in Chinese.

Each morning,  I’d be kicking a bag and Shifu would wander up to me, pen in mouth, translation in hand. He would change a line here or a word there, perfecting it like a poem. He used the same concentration he used for his kung fu. I guess that’s why his translation is so good. But I was pretty pissed off because just as I’d learnt an impossible to pronounce word , he’d swap it for an equally impossible to pronounce word and I had to start all over again.

My friend, Yonghu ( his name means Brave Tiger) came to the recording studio to make sure I was pronouncing it correctly. It usually takes about two hours for a lead vocal but this took six.

And do Chinese people understand? Chinese people understand about 75 % of what I sing without reading the lyrics, which I think is pretty good innings for my first Chinese song. Even if I was native Chinese,  Chinese people wouldn’t understand some of what I sang because when a person sings there are no tones so the words can mean different things.  For example, my boyfriend’s name is Yan Lei. His name means thunder but it can mean tears depending on the tone.  One day I was listening to a Chinese song and I recognised the word ” Yan Lei” and I said “that’s you” and he said “no it’s not, it’s tears.”

Listen to Everywhere You Go

Listen to The Chinese version

In “Chungking Express”, two people go to a hotel room, the girl sleeps, the guy eats a lot of chips, watches TV then washes the sleeping girl’s shoes. In “In The Mood For Love” the two main characters write kung fu comics, eat noodles and give each other smoldering looks. It’s because the characters never have sex that the viewer’s attention is held.

I wanted to create the same erotic tension in this song. A seductive verse and a chorus which builds but only happens once right at the end of the song before fading out into a change of tempo and sound.  The song watches and wants but its desire is never consummated.

Hotel was nearly scrapped from the album because I couldn’t get it to work. But then Joe Watson came down and played that haunting piano riff,  and Andy added a drum machine, only putting Howard’s drums in the outro where they go mad as if frustrated by the tension of the verses. It was only then that it had the mood and atmosphere I wanted to invoke.

Listen & Download

HOTEL

My body is your hotel, it’s on the 42nd floor
Take the lift, I’m waiting inside for you, I’m hiding in your bedside drawer

And I love the way you do
And I love the way you do

My body is your hotel, I hear you knocking on my door

And I love the way you do
And I love the way you do

Cos I know that I am not beautiful
And all you really want is a friend
But I want to put my arms around you
I want to touch my fingers to you
I want to rest my head on your shoulders
Cos you are my weakness
My worst habit is you
I want to put my arms around you, touch my fingers, rest my head, my worst habit is you.

My body is your hotel, I feel you walking through my door

And I love the way you do
And I love the way you do

Doing a self-release I’ve had to embrace snatching time whenever I can and having zero budget for videos and pictures. I’ve put my money into what I think is the most important thing: the music. I hope you enjoy the result.

For my first video for Kata, I wandered into the woods behind my mum’s house with a bendy tripod, digital camera, couple of memory cards, and my iPhone. The video was shot to the sound of woodpeckers drilling into trees. My mum’s dog kept getting into shot so I lost valuable shooting time putting my wellingtons back on, sprinting him across the burn (or stream as it’s called in the south), over the fields and back to the house. Roddy – who kindly edited my amateur footage – complained that I kept stopping in the middle of my performance and fiddling around with my phone (it’s true I did). “The show must go on,” he reminded me.

I don’t know why I chose to make a video for this song. Maybe it’s because my album moves in quick time through each stage of a love affair. Count 2 Three is my favourite stage. The heady desire of I want to be with you every minute of the day. I want to see you when you sleep. When you wake up. I want to witness every moment of your life.

But then there’s the chorus.

My dad used to quote to me a famous Jewish proverb: “Life is exactly like Motke Chabat’s blanket. Motke Chabat’s blanket was too short, draw it up to his neck his feet are cold, draw it to his feet, his chest gets it, that’s human beings for you, the blanket’s always too short.”

It’s similar to the Buddha saying there’s always a hair in the butter. Nothing outside ourselves can make us truly happy. Nothing is ever enough. There’s always that desire to have just a little more.

To shoot the video I got up at 5.30 am, three mornings in a row, hoping for golden hour. I wanted the video to be bathed in light so I could do lots of flaring and back lighting. But the sun never came. Eventually I had to accept that I had no control over the weather so I pretended it was summer to stop me shivering in my dress and looking cold on camera.

Count to Three

I’m creeping through your house but you don’t know, you don’t know

I’m opening your door but you don’t know, you don’t know

I’m crawling in your bed but you don’t know, you don’t know

I’m disturbing everything but you don’t know

It’s a wonderful night

It’s a wonderful day

It’s a wonderful life

But this won’t go away

I’m colouring the sky but you don’t know, you don’t know

I’m casting my net wide but you don’t know, you don’t know

I’m hurling into you, but you don’t know, you don’t know

I love everything you do, but you don’t know

And if you all I want

I would ask you to hold my hand

And count to three again

It’s a wonderful night

It’s a wonderful day

It’s a wonderful life

But this won’t go away

This song is from my album: Breaking Up With You Is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me. Release date: 9th May 2011.

The sheep’s head  I bought for my boyfriend has now been boiled with herbs for two hours. Yan Lei holds one of its eyeballs between his chopsticks. ‘You want?’ He pops it in his mouth, chews on it for awhile  then we have an argument about me doing music again.

It goes like this:

Yan Lei: Doing music is like going to the bookies and betting on a horse.

Me: You can’t compare music to gambling.

Yan Lei:  You gamble your life and hope something happen. You don’t know if you win or lose.

Me: I’m not doing it for a result. I like music. It’s what I used to do… it’s just you’ve never known me as anything else but someone who runs your fucking martial art’s business.

His mouth is full of sheep’s brain when I accuse him of having a farmer’s mind. In the West, I tell him, we make money from ideas, not work.

After the argument, we have a kung fu fight.

In 1996 Sony gave me 90k to record an album and another 90k to be me. My manager and I had a thing about multiple of nines. That’s why we went for 180k rather than 200k. We made a similar deal with the publisher. Nine is still my favourite number. I hate even numbers. Four being the worst of a bad bunch.

Sony gave me a house and bought me a recording studio. In my bedroom was a 24 track recording studio. I fed the wires down the chimney to the living room below, and covered the walls in thick curtains to keep the noise form spilling out onto the street. At night I sang my lead vocals with the company of the red flashing record light and the green lights of the compressors. I needed the confidence to be vulnerable, and I only had that kind of confidence when I was alone.

I called my microphones ears and had a lot of them. Each vocal was sung into a different one. I was obsessed with getting a warm full fat sound for the acoustic guitars.  The album was recorded in 8 weeks, mixed at Olympic Studios -  by Jeremy Wheatley who’d been trained under one of my favourite mixers, Mark Spike Spent -  then released a few months later.

It was unusual for a company as big as Sony to give an artist so much artistic freedom. At the time I was told that I had more artistic freedom than Michael Jackson. This was told to me in a “it shouldn’t really happen kind of way, don’t quite know how you slipped under the radar.” kind of way.

Then the predictable story began. Mike Sault, the man who had signed me, left to work for a publishing company. No one knew what to do with me. I was taken out for lunches in Soho with potential new A&R men. The one I liked was Rob Stringer. But he was too busy running his label and looking after the Manics. Also, I don’t think that girl’s music interested him. My art director, who had become my good friend, said, “Let’s face it, they’re all a bunch of idiots,” He was referring to the marketing woman who stroked the cardboard cover of my single and said it reminded her of pubic hair, and when she asked me what I was going to wear for my video, and I replied “Jeans,” looked horrified and said, “Pop stars don’t wear jeans.”

I wanted to be free and creative and I thought that’s what music was and when I realised it wasn’t I felt as if I’d walked into the wrong room. I realised the music business wasn’t so much about making music but about being strategic and clever. And I wasn’t clever. I was embarrassingly naive. I’d expected the Sony  offices to be a creative space with pianos and paintings. I couldn’t understand why it looked like an insurance office.  I think it was only when I was standing in amongst the grey drabness that I understood why the most successful artists are the ones who can’t really sing.

My body has an over active immune system that attacks it’s own organs. This has resulted in my thyroid no longer working. For the last five years I’ve passed myself like a parcel from one endocrinologist to another hoping that one of them will prescribe me a natural thyroid medicine made from dessicated pig thyroid that could make me feel better. The Levothyroxine they have prescribed me hasn’t stopped my hair from falling out, my weight from increasing or the feeling of perpetual jetlag. To do things takes the energy of an aeroplane but I have the energy of a paper plane.

This is the conversation I have every three months with my endocrinologist.

“You feeling better?” asks the latest one (or the one before that or the one before the one before that.)

“Still feel like shit.” ( sometimes I’m more polite and explanatory in my response.)

“The dosage is correct now so we don’t understand why you’re still not feeling well… Maybe it’s something else… Maybe it’s not your thyroid. Maybe it’s your lifestyle.”

“Lifestyle?”

Ever since the disease developed I’ve lived the life of a librarian.

Today I was told I have a heart murmur and high liver enzymes which need to be investigated so I have more letters and appointments and hospitals to go and see. I don’t know what any of this means but as I sit in Starbucks sipping  my latte and shivering in my coat – even though it’s the height of summer -  I feel as if my life is nearly over. Not in a oh my God,  I’m about to die way. But in a I’m too young to spend so much time in hospitals kind of way. My illness has reduced me to a passenger. I can’t  follow the Nike ad and Just Do It.

Each endocrinologist has frustrated me by never saying no and never saying yes when I ask to be prescribed the natural thyroid therefore giving me a hope that maybe they will. But now that I’ve jumped through the hoop of a stronger and stronger dose of Levothyroxine, I realise it’s futile. I didn’t even bother asking this time.

There’s a three-month waiting list to see the private doctor that’s been recommended to me by a friend. His consulting room is in Brussels, which means I have to FedEx my blood and urine to Brussels, and then a month later I’m travelling on the rickety tram further and further into the suburbs of Brussels. I get lost. My friend – who can speak French – had assured me that everyone can speak English in Brussels but this clearly isn’t true. As I raid my brain for a remnant of school French, what comes out of my mouth is the Saturday morning Chinese I’m studying. Finally I find an estate agent who speaks English and she directs me to the surgery.

The blood test in the UK is three lines long where as the one in Brussels is two A4 pages. In preparation for being poked and prodded I’m wearing the correct underwear (not too sexy, not to shabby) . It’s a double appointment and I get sleepy. The doctor prescribes me the natural thyroid I’ve wanted for five years, together with some hormones and minerals that my blood is deficient in. I feel like a drug’s mule as I move through the Eurostar customs. I’m worried that the drugs won’t work. Maybe the London endocrinologists are right.

It takes three months for me to switch over completely and for those three months I do a Qigong that Yan Lei teaches me, then as my energy increases I start to exercise, something I could never do on Levothyroxine. If I ran for twenty minutes, my body would feel like lead and I’d have to sleep for an hour after. But by the end of the three months I can run up and down Parliament Hill and do 45 minute kung fu circuit training with Yan Lei.

And I still have energy.

And my hair has stopped falling out.

And I no longer need to sleep nine hours at night and two hours in the day.

The jet lag I’ve had for more than five years has gone.

I don’t know what to do with all this time.

All this energy.

All this hair.

It sounds funny to say this…. but my life has been given back to me by a bunch of pigs.

And I’m so grateful to them.

The songs we’re recording are: Things That We Repeat.  Animals. Hotel. But I Feel Alright… It’s not just lack of money that’s making us record as quickly as possible, it’s also because I don’t want to have time to think and allow the itch of dissatisfaction to enter. If I scratch the itch then I self-destruct.

The backing tracks are done in a day (Howard Monk on drums and Jonny Bridgwood on double bass), guitars in a day, vocals & backing vocals in a day. Sean comes down to add some guitars and Pete plays everything else, effortlessly swapping from mandolin to acoustic to electric  to banjo to vibes. Andy, the engineer, gets confused with what he calls my random references and says he’s recording blind. He complains that I sing too much and Pete plays too much guitar.  But whatever he says, the music is taking shape.

In the evenings the street fills up with a heavy narcotic incense that spills out of the Nigerian Church Of Freedom. A choir of voices and the rhythm of African drums pour through the open windows of the industrial unit. Andy’s pissed off that the place he decided to build his recording studio in has turned into a ghetto for God but I like it.

As I wait for him to tune his synth, put the rubbish in the chute then give me a lift to Canada Water , church goers spill onto the street, some of them dressed in billowing white gowns. I’m the only white person and the only non-believer in this sea of black and they walk past me as if I’m a ghost. They come here to sing to God and I come here to sing into my beat up old East German Neumann. They sing for salvation and I sing for what? I sing because I can. I’m elated. The world is not crashing. The drugs. Are. Finally. Working.

“…every endeavor pursued with passion produces a successful outcome regardless of the result. For it is not about winning or losing – rather, the effort put forward in producing the outcome.”

It’s weird that the very second I’m about to start writing with Sean, Pete emails me some chords. For months I’ve been badgering him to send me chords, “You’re a really good guitarist….why can’t you write songs?”

I even went round to his house and we sat for three glum hours trying to come up with something. Then we gave up and he made me a fish finger sandwich.

While I wait for his ideas to import into Garageband, I remember the last time I wrote songs and took them to my publisher to see what he thought.

“It sounds like you’re not enjoying it anymore,” said the A&R guy.

He was right. I’d allowed myself to get sucked into the music industry and I was no longer making music for myself. This had never happened to me before. People used to ask me, so how did you get a record deal with Sony as if I’d landed some dream job. But I never had any ambition to get a record deal, I just wanted to record some songs and at the time the only way to do that was to get a record deal.

Back then I was insecure &

young &

surrounded by strange people.

That didn’t help.

No one gave me any words of advice.

They watched me step myself off a tall building and fall very slowly through the air.

It was what was expected of me.

It’s just I didn’t realise at the time.

The adverts for a songwriter haven’t worked so I phone and email everyone I know asking them if they know any songwriters. In Hobgoblins, I stare at an Appalachian dulcimer and wonder if I could learn how to play it therefore eradicating the need for a co-writer. I write a song with the 50 cent backing track of Window Shopping that I download from iTunes. I even go to see my acupuncturist at her traditional Chinese music lesson in the Chinese Community Centre in Gerard Street to see if I can work with a musician from there. She gives me a hug and a biscuit and afterwards we go for Dim Sum.  She says I should sing because it’s good for my Lung Qi.  I tell her it was okay before when I was doing it for a laugh. I learned If I Were A Boy in Chinese and sang it at some Chinese New Year Parties & was given the nickname The Beijing Beyonce. But now I want to do it for real.

Then someone gives me a number for a songwriter called Sean Redmond. We meet in a pub, talk for a bit then go to his flat which is just round the corner, next to the wig shop and opposite Paris Fashions. By the sickly green flashing sauna sign, Sean searches for his keys then using the light of our cell phones to guide us, we stumble down the stairs and into his basement bedsit. The bed part is divided by a clothing rail with predominately leopard skin dresses that I presume are not his. A kebab shop’s ventilator blows cooking fat through his one window. Even though it’s only 4pm I can hear a couple fucking in the room above.

Placing my blue carrier bag on the floor, I hope the blood from the sheep’s head I’ve just bought for Yan Lei won’t leak onto his carpet. Sean clears some clutter from the sofa then sits on a chair opposite. It’s a large black office chair with a wheel missing. As he starts tuning his guitar he tells me he found it on the street. I shiver and button my coat and think maybe it’s too late for me to get back into music.

I run a business now and it has definitely changed my mind. I never used to think about money but now I’m always thinking: but how can this make money? And this isn’t the way to think about music. You have to do what you love and if it makes money then it makes money and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. You have to be Naïve and Hopeful and Childish and Insanely Stupid. And this is why I’m not sure if I can do it any more. My mind is weighed down by lists and the hundred emails clogging my inbox and Joe the forwarder from Chicago who left a message for me to call him. There’s a problem with the import to the States.  Crate loads of Yan Lei’s Qigong books are sitting in a warehouse and they need to be moved quickly or I’ll have to pay a fine.

Sean starts to play me stuff, idea after idea, and it all goes away; the fucking upstairs, the cold, the bloody sheep’s head, the problems in Chicago. And I begin to understand why he can bare to live here. Music: it’s the Ultimate Drug.

He glances up from his guitar. “Which ones do you like then?”

I dive into my coat pocket, retrieve my iPhone and balance it on my knee. “Let me record them all and see what I can come up with.”