Artist News Releases

Middleton and Shrigley make sweet Words And Music

By Aly Barchi | Published on Monday 20 October 2014

Mssrs Malcolm Middleton (of songwriting fame) and David Shrigley (of wry and whimsical illustrations-with-captions fame) have conspired to make a collaborative LP titled ‘Music And Words’. It’s taken the pair seven years to start and finish, and will finally be released on 15 Dec in time to make an ideal anti-Xmas gift for an ‘alternative’ relative.

It worked like this. Shrigley did all the ‘words’ and gave them to Middleton, who built the ‘music’ on top, apparently as a means of paying Shrigley back for drawing the artwork on his 2007 longplayer ‘A Brighter Beat’. Still, as Middleton has admitted, in spire of their long-time artistic kinship, the pair’s ideas weren’t always in total sync with eachother.

“I misinterpreted the meaning of David’s words so created a certain style of music to accompany the wrong themes”, he explains, adding: “I took one song ‘Sunday Morning’ to be a scathing attack on the pomp and arrogance of religion, only to be informed that it’s just about willies and was recorded on a Sunday morning. It makes for an interesting record though”.

Making his own mini speech, Shrigley says: “We have similar sensibilities; we’re both into darkness, pathos, despair; existential things. It was just what I wanted, even though I didn’t really know what I wanted”.

‘Music And Words’ features a ‘poster single’ in ‘Story Time’, which is, says Middleton, “the song that started it all. Funny, disturbing, and then a bit more disturbing. It’s a beautiful song, not just a cheap shock”.

And now here is a stream of the track, and the tracklisting it appears on:

A Toast
Houseguest
Monkeys
Walker
Dear Brain
Caveman
Sunday Morning
Story Time
Help
Touch My Face
The Tree
A Computer