More on: Songdog

Songdog, fronted by musician and playwright Lyndon Morgans, released their fourth LP on One Little Indian earlier this year.

'A Wretched Sinner's Song' tells the tale of 'Ruben' over an album's worth of powerful imagery. Jon Parry talks to Morgans about this acclaimed album.

The opener 'Ruben's Tattoo' seems very much a microcosm of the album, encapsulating its heart and soul - would you agree?
Yes, it's definitely a keynote track and that's why the sleeve artwork is dedicated to it. It also happened to be the first song I came up with for the record and the first tune the band worked on when it came to organising arrangements for the material, so it always did occupy a prominent place in the architecture of the thing. All the main themes of the album do seem to crop up in that one song - jealousy, destructive obsession, solipsism, love/lust, the suicidal urge, 'madness' (whatever that is).

The second track 'Crown Of Thorns' then begins the first-person story-telling with quotes often leading reviewers to mistake the listening experience as voyeuristic - for me it is akin to eavesdropping. Are you angered by the 'confessional songwriter' tag?
If the term 'confessional songwriter' is intended to 'explain' what I do as an artist in the sense of imposing a limit on me and my work, explaining me/it away, then it's misapplied. There's undoubtedly a very sizeable element of testifying in what I do, the whole body of work, seen from one angle, is one long, ongoing owning-up on my part, but that's not all it is. Still, that reservation duly noted, the notion of the work as confession is OK with me.

Do you ever feel your work is misunderstood? If so, what would you attribute this to?
I've certainly read some wildly misguided responses to some of my stuff but I'd just put that down to the generally poor standard of pop/rock criticism anyway - another day, another album, the journalist's busy schedule/short attention-span, and I suppose, to be fair, the overwhelming majority of the stuff that comes their way merits no better. But I really feel more overlooked than misunderstood. First I need to get noticed, than maybe I can progress to misunderstood! Nick Cave's work seems to share certain thematic concerns with my own, but because of his (well-deserved) prominent place in the pop culture his records get time devoted to them, get pored over, and, as a result, as an artist he'll be indulged for things I'd be hung for. It's just a question of profile. When they get me wrong it isn't personal, it's just that my low profile means I don't, in their eyes, merit the time needed to get me right.

The characters in 'A Wretched Sinner's Song' seem self-destructive and without hope. If we define hope as 'believing things can get better', do you see your work as conveying it?
It depends how you'd define 'better'! In my songs hope does exist, in fact they teem and pulsate with it, but hope in the form of the possibility of some fleeting instant of magic or poetry or clarity or heightened perception or some other such epiphany - even, say, a character remembering one afternoon twenty years ago when two people came together in an act of perfectly blind and guiltless lust. The possibilty that such moments might occur at any time, or even did at least occur if only once in the past, is all the hope my characters ask for, and I think it's the best we'll get, human nature being what it is and the condition of being alive being what it is. The possibilty of those intense moments of revelation or heightened meaning make life worth living/worth having been lived.

Is hope necessary for a work of art to be considered 'great'? Do you think your characters are able to be empathised with? Is empathy important in art?
I don't see hope as an essential component of great art, no. The work of Goya, Beckett, Francis Bacon, Hamsun and those early Pinter plays, aren't traditionally seen as being big on hope, but they are great works of art, surely? The bleakest imaginable viewpoint can qualify as great art if it's charged with enough poetic intensity-of-feeling. But as for the characters in my humble little ditties, yes, I do think they're to be empathised with. I do consciously try to leaven the 'bleakness' - if that's what it is - with humour, I really do, I try never to stint on the gags. Anyway, even if I tried to write a song about a perfect day, it'd still come out tinged with melancholy, just like Lou Reed's does. But what's not to empathise with in Ruben? For a guy, at least? He likes 'titty-bars', painting and old vinyl! Have my critics never ached with lust? Never known an instant of self-loathing? I insist that all my songs are essentially true, even when they involve jealous tattoos or talking crows. And if you can't empathise with the truth... Yes, I do think empathy's a big part of even recognising that something is art in the first place.

I would say you have a peerless gift for subtext in song. As a former playwright, Lyndon, what do you find are the chief differences between the crafts of play and song-writing?
Writing for the stage is a lot easier, you can stretch out more, be more expansive, take your time, labour a point if you have to, whereas writing to a melody demands concision, plus you have the restrictions of the rhyme-scheme - if the tune seems to demand one - to consider. Then there's the question of tone - again, you have a lot more leeway when you're play-writing. My first play, 'Fetishes', had one character talking like someone out of a Henry James novel and another like some nineteenth-century Cockney guttersnipe. Fun to do, but nigh-on impossible to pull off in a 'pop song'. One part of me reveres 'Waiting For Godot', another 'Hallelujah', but my heart lies in songwriting (though more as Jacques Brel would conceive it than Noel Gallagher does).

For the final question, a quote from one of your main influences, Emil Cioran: 'Today, [man] is on his way to his own self-destruction through self-objectification, impeccable production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph.' Do you agree with this statement? Can we have too much self-analysis? Would you say the characters in 'A Wretched Sinner's Song' have this sense of destiny and civilisation?
Yes, Cioran's right, as ever. "Artificial triumph" indeed! But the characters I write about in 'A Wretched Sinner's Song' are creatures of the modern world, with all their modern lusts and appetites and failings. I suppose they do gaze inwards overmuch, half-in-love with what they make out, half-appalled. But that's what being human in the twenty-first century seems to entail, and in the end, my characters are on the very same handcart-ride ride to Hell as the rest of the human race.

Jon Parry

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