One of my favourite albums of 2024 was Please Go Wild by Polite Company – the new project from London-based songwriter, Alan Gregg.
Released in May this year, it was a lovingly and brilliantly crafted record of melodic, wry and observational power-pop songs with a melancholy undercurrent.
Reminiscent of Fountains of Wayne and Squeeze at times, Gregg has a knack of composing a killer tune, as well as penning clever and amusing lyrical couplets – more on that later…
On Please Go Wild, he tackles topical subjects including super yachts and the oligarchs who buy them (New Yacht), the rise and fall of charismatic tech entrepreneur, Adam Neumann, (Barefoot Billionaire: ‘He’s the star of the new tech boom/You can find him in the meditation room.’ ) and press intrusion and PR manipulation on Perfectly Good Explanation, which is flavoured with Mariachi brass.
“Some of these songs kind of wrote themselves after reading newspaper articles about people in high places doing dodgy things,” says Gregg. “Rock stars are generally pretty well behaved these days. If you really want to see bad behaviour, read the business pages.”
First single and album opener, Circulation, could be the happiest song about depression you’ll ever hear, while Second Chance Charity Store is a delightful, piano-led, country-tinged tune inspired by a second-hand shop, which looks at the staff who work there and the hipsters who hunt for bargains amongst the bric-a-brac.
‘Please Go Wild is a lovingly and brilliantly crafted record of melodic, wry and observational power-pop songs with a melancholy undercurrent’
Previously a member of New Zealand band, The Mutton Birds, who were signed to Virgin Records in the late ’90s, Gregg, who has recorded with Neil Finn and had a song covered by Ron Sexsmith, also released a self-titled, bubblegum pop album under the name Marshmallow in 2003.
That record included the wonderful Casting Couch – a song written about the darker and seedier side of Hollywood that has become even more relevant in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement.
Please Go Wild was recorded mostly in Gregg’s home studio in North London, but additional recording was done by Sean Read (Dexys, The Hanging Stars, Soulsavers) at his Famous Times Studio in Clapton, East London – Read also plays brass and percussion on the album, and Paul Lush (Danny & the Champions of the World) guests on guitar on Perfectly Good Explanation.
As well as Fountains of Wayne, Gregg’s music has also attracted comparisons to The Go-Betweens.
“At the time of recording this album I was listening a lot to ’70s songwriters like Mike Nesmith and Gilbert O’Sullivan,” he says. “In fact, for a while the working title for the album was The Gilbertweens.”
In an exclusive interview carried out over coffee in his North London home, Gregg tells Say It With Garage Flowers how the self-released Please Go Wild came about, reflects on the craft of good, old-fashioned songwriting and reveals some of his influences and inspirations.
On releasing the album, he says: “If you sat down and looked at the pros and cons of doing it, it might seem like a crazy thing to do, but a good song is a good song, and I just wanted to get it out there in some way and let it do what it does.”
Q&A
I love your new album. It’s a collection of wonderfully crafted, observational and old-fashioned guitar pop songs that are full of clever lyrical couplets, but with an edge and a melancholy to them…
Alan Gregg: Yes… A friend of mine, who was quoting somebody that I can’t remember, used the phrase, ‘a pleasing sense of melancholy’, which I quite like.
You mentioned couplets… I’m actually a bass player. I sang on the Marshmallow album, but usually I’m a backing vocalist… I thought that if I was going to be singing, I needed to give people a reason to listen because I don’t feel like a confident singer. I love couplets and I don’t mind how corny they are… I like corny rhymes.
Some of your lyrics remind me of Chris Difford from Squeeze, and, like Squeeze, you combine them with a strong pop sensibility…
Alan Gregg: Yes… Some of those early Squeeze songs had great rhyming couplets.
I think Up The Junction has one of the greatest opening lines ever: ‘I never thought it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham….’
Alan Gregg: That’s genius – it’s a great opening line.
There are some great rhymes in some of your songs – I like the line in Barefoot Billionaire: ‘He’s a force of nature, a wheeler dealer, with a taste for weed and tequila…’
Alan Gregg: Anyone can come up with a couplet, but to build up some good ones that can surprise you, make sense or make you laugh is hard to do – Leonard Cohen was the master of good couplets. Everyone thinks he’s miserable, but some of his couplets are very funny.
‘I love couplets and I don’t mind how corny they are…’
If you have a good couplet, it’s like having a really well-made guitar… you know it’s good, and it’s got quality and substance. It’s really satisfying. I also like a lot of impressionistic writers, like Neil Finn – he’s got the voice to carry it off. When he sings anything, you think, ‘That’s beautiful…’ but I never had the voice to fall back on.
Do you think that way of writing pop songs with clever couplets is now seen as being old-fashioned?
Alan Gregg: I think it is, but the craft of writing songs, where couplets and melodies hang it all together has changed. I’m not comparing myself to Ray Davies, but his songwriting is an amazing thing to be able to do or to aspire to. It’s probably not something that a lot of people care about now…
Your new album hangs together as a solid piece of work. Were all the songs written with the intention of making a record, or do some come from a while back?
Alan Gregg: Two of the songs are from poems that a friend of mine from New Zealand wrote: Peculiar Julia and Shrinking Violet. His name is James Brown – he’s quite a well-known poet in New Zealand – and he put a book out [Floods Another Chamber, 2017].
Those two poems were on facing pages. I did those two songs first – I said they sounded like song lyrics and he said, ‘Give it a go…’ I wasn’t really thinking about making an album but then a whole bunch of songs just emerged, like Circulation, Barefoot Millionaire and Perfectly Good Explanation – I just sort of vomited them out!
So, when was that?
Alan Gregg: Just after Covid… As I wasn’t thinking about putting an album out, I actually talked to a couple of people, one of whom was Tom Collinson [Danny and the Champions of the World], about finding singers – he knows everybody and he loves Gerry Rafferty, Crowded House and Supertramp. I thought he would know a singer, so I sent some songs to him, but he said the person singing the songs should be the person who did the demo, because the songs had an everyman quality. I agreed with him.
‘I wasn’t really thinking about making an album but then a whole bunch of songs just emerged, like Circulation, Barefoot Millionaire and Perfectly Good Explanation – I just sort of vomited them out!’
So, you recorded the album and put it out yourself rather than working with a label…
Alan Gregg: With Marshmallow, I worked with two labels that ceased to exist – it was hard and I didn’t need to do that again. I wasn’t thinking I would put an album out for all the reasons we just talked about – my music is unfashionable – and I’m a bald man in his mid-fifties… But the songs appeared, and I recorded them. The music industry has changed so much, and it felt like an uphill slog, but something happened… I had a moment and I decided I wasn’t going to be overwhelmed by it.
People have been putting out music long before Spotify existed, and they will after it stops… I thought it was worth doing it for the sake of doing it, and there are a few Marshmallow, Mutton Birds and power-pop fans around the world. The album has been selling on Bandcamp and it’s getting played on Spotify.
I think it’s going to be a word-of-mouth record…
Alan Gregg: Yeah – so, if you approach it from that point of view, without any expectations and without thinking you’re competing with anybody else…. If you sat down and looked at the pros and cons of doing it, it might seem like a crazy thing to do, but a good song is a good song, and I just wanted to get it out there in some way and let it do what it does.
You were listening to songwriters like Mike Nesmith and Gilbert O’Sullivan while you were writing the songs, weren’t you?
Alan Gregg: I like those sort of slightly goofy guys – there’s a humour in their music and they come across as not taking themselves too seriously. I felt like that was a good area to be in – music with a good sense of humour and good tunes.
When Mike Nesmith died, everybody claimed to love him and professed what great fans of his they were, although they never mentioned him when he was alive… Gilbert O’Sullivan isn’t a fashionable name to drop, but I like the fact that him and Nesmith were a bit out of the mainstream…
D0 you like Randy Newman too?
Alan Gregg: I love Randy Newman – he has some great couplets too.
What’s your songwriting method? What comes first – the music or the lyrics?
Alan Gregg: I do tend to write the words first. For example, I had the words for Circulation… the chorus was spinning around in my head for months and months, and one day I read an interview with Joe Strummer, and he said that The Clash always operated on instinct rather than intellect, which is quite an obvious thing to say, but I thought, ‘wow – that’s really good,’ and the next day I said, ‘I’ve got to finish the Circulation song’ and I thought about instinct not intellect… I wrote the lyric in five or ten minutes, didn’t change it and I never looked back.
Circulation feels like the right song to open the album with – it’s about getting back on your feet again after being depressed and out of the loop. You haven’t made a record for a long time and now you’re back with a new album. The song, which was also the first single from the record, is very apt…
Alan Gregg: That was the idea – it came along after a few of the other songs, but when I realised I was making an album a certain amount of fear crept in… I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ and I think Circulation came from around that time.
The song Perfectly Good Explanation is a topical one – it deals with privacy issues and the media, and it mentions a love rat… a man who cheats on his wife…
Alan Gregg: It is a topical song – the love rat came from when Matt Hancock was photographed cheating on his wife and I also read the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [by Shoshana Zuboff], which is great… One of the verses was inspired by that.
New Yacht is another great social commentary song – it mentions oligarchs and weapons – and it also has some lovely lyrical couplets, rhymes and half-rhymes in it..
Alan Gregg: Mojitos and torpedoes…
One of my favourite songs on the album is Second Chance Charity Store – it’s up there with Bennett Wilson Poole’s Wilson General Store when it comes to great, jangly guitar pop songs about shops… Funnily enough, Wilson General Store was written about band member Danny Wilson’s family shop, and there’s also a Danny mentioned in your song…
Alan Gregg: I saw a sign that read ‘Second Chance Charity Store’ – I think it was when I was in the States years ago. I always remembered the name of the shop. I played bass with Danny Wilson [Bennett Wilson Poole and Danny & the Champions of the World] for a few shows when he did his solo album. We played at a festival and he left his sleeping bag in my car. He came back to my house in London to get it, and I was working on the song Second Chance Charity Store at the time… He called me from the Tube station and said he was going to go to the Oxfam shop opposite, so it’s that Danny! I needed a name for the song… Hipsters go to charity shops because they find cool stuff.
It’s an old-fashioned way of writing a song – it started with the idea of the shop, the lyrics came reasonably quickly, and it was based on a real situation.
Talking of real life… Barefoot Billionaire was inspired by the disgraced, WeWork tech billionaire Adam Neumann…
Alan Gregg: I read an article – the first line of it was, ‘He’s the star of the new tech boom,’ and then it mentioned a meditation room… There’s a book about him called Billion Dollar Loser [by Reeves Wiedeman], which is fantastic – it reads like a thriller.
People used to say that Adam Neumann was incredibly charismatic – one person said he imagined it was like meeting Julius Caesar… He could stand up at ridiculous tech events and win over a whole room. A guy from SoftBank who invested four billion dollars in Adam Neumann’s company did it based on a 15-minute meeting with him…
That song has a lot of couplets that I love – when they come along, it’s a nice feeling. Some people don’t like the quirkiness or the corniness, but I don’t care about that.
Please Go Wild by Polite Company is out now.
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