James Hannah

You were won­der­ing about the song that won the car­a­van com­pe­ti­tion. The his­tory is this. Back in June 2008 I was rework­ing a novel; it was a very intense period. You know bet­ter than most that, faced with an intense period of work, I will apply myself doggedly to doing absolutely any­thing else.

After spend­ing a leisurely Sat­ur­day morn­ing with Jols seek­ing out all the theme tunes to kids’ TV shows from the 1970s and 80s on YouTube, I set about cre­at­ing an elec­tro pop opera in Garage­band. I’d been lis­ten­ing to how Tim De Laugh­ter of the Poly­phonic Spree put his oper­atic pop together, and so I used that as a ful­crum to cre­ate The Adven­tures of Snof­fler and the Wob­ble­dog: a popera last­ing about six minutes.

Jols locked this piece of infor­ma­tion away in her lit­tle stove of ideas.

When White Stuff launched a com­pe­ti­tion to win a car­a­van by writ­ing a lim­er­ick (‘or a rap or something’), Jols leapt on the oppor­tu­nity. She spent the next sev­eral weeks remind­ing me that we ‘needed’ to get right on down to rewrit­ing the lyrics of ‘Are You The Wob­ble­dog’ – a Tribe Called Quest–tinged rap from my popera.

I kept for­get­ting, for some reason.

So, cut­ting to the chase, we spent two ses­sions of sev­eral hours each writ­ing new lyrics. Unlike myself, Jols is a stick­ler for stan­dards – she really is excel­lent at this. I, faced with an intense period of work, will apply myself doggedly to doing absolutely any­thing else.

It was at this stage that I got my novel rewrites done.

So any­way, I sped the exist­ing music up; cut it down to around a minute or so; and we rewrote and rewrote and rewrote the lyrics until Jols deemed every word a win­ner. I can’t remem­ber who wrote what, but ‘ladythrone’ and ‘sassy lit­tle chas­sis’ are def­i­nite Jol­lisms, whereas ‘big end’ and ‘vehic­u­lar’ and gen­eral rhyth­mic choices tended to be mine.

Then I spent an hour or so record­ing the vocals, with old George Mar­tin bury­ing her head in a pil­low for every take to stop her­self gig­gling at my mock­ney accent.

Take after take after take was required to make the ‘car’ char­ac­ter ‘sound grate­ful enough’ at the end of the song. But we got there in the end, and popped an email off to White Stuff.

The rest, as they say, is a mystery.

your pal

jx

PS: I’ve also just made a video for the song. This wasn’t used to try and twist White Stuff’s arm, but if I’d known I could have sub­mit­ted this, I would have done! Click here.