Skye

Mind How You Go

Private about her personal life and modest about her achievements, she never really played the pop star game. We knew her voice, but despite her success, we did not really know much about Skye. Until now…

Skye’s debut solo album, MIND HOW YOU GO, is not so much a leap into the dark as a step into the light. Yet it was also a journey into the unknown. She did not know where it would take her and her record company did not know what to expect.

MIND HOW YOU GO is her emphatic answer, a sublime album of vivid songs that present Skye in an entirely new light. Of course, there is much that is familiar – the beguiling quality of her voice, the potent melodies that bury themselves deep inside your brain, the cool elegance of her delivery.

But this is also Skye as you have never heard her before. With Morcheeba, she was usually singing someone else’s lyrics. MIND HOW YOU GO finds Skye singing her songs, telling her stories and finding her own way on an album that is both personal credo and a realization of her inner strength.

That she has emerged as such a powerful solo artist should perhaps not come as a total surprise. She was writing her own songs on guitar long before joining Morcheeba and around the time of the band’s last album, Charango, she performed several of her own songs with a string quartet as part of a play starring Vanessa Redgrave at London’s Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn.

"I never had any aspiration to be a solo artist", she says. "We recorded the 4th album Charango and other members of the band started talking about taking a long sabbatical. I thought – what am I going to do? Morcheeba was a huge part of my life. Parts Of The Process, ‘The Best Of’ was released 2003, we finished the tour and the others were doing their own projects, then decided they wanted to split-up the band and work with someone else. It wasn’t planned on my part and I don’t want anyone thinking I abandoned the band, because I didn’t. But we all realized it was time for a change and an opportunity to move in new directions."

Once the decision had been taken, Skye’s determination to make a solo record dictated a steep learning curve because for the first time she was faced with the responsibility of coming up with the songs. "In Morcheeba, I had an input. But Paul was the lyricist and it was always understood that my role was to join up Paul’s words with Ross’s tunes. I’d never even been in a studio with anyone else and suddenly it was all down to me," she says.

She set about the challenge of finding fresh collaborators to help realize her ambition with relish. Not unreasonably, the first was husband Steve Gordon, who plays bass and has several co-writing credits on the album. "I hate talking about personal stuff, but in this instance there’s no getting away from it because we wrote the first song on our honeymoon", Skye says. "We went to Antigua and took a guitar and the result was ‘Calling,’ although we added a new chorus later."

It was the start of a prolific burst of songwriting, not only with Steve but a wide variety of other writer-producers. With more than 30 songs written by Spring 2004, the search was on for a producer and Skye found herself in Los Angeles with Pat Leonard (Pink Floyd/Madonna/Bryan Adams). "My married name is Gordon and his studio is on Sunset and Gordon, so I thought ‘he must be the one," she jokes. "But the real reason was that he was so enthusiastic about writing and working with me and rather than just doing one or two tracks, he was keen to do an entire album."

Despite the folio of songs she already had, she promptly set about writing a dozen more with Leonard. Somewhere in the process, a writing/recording session with Daniel Lanois (U2/Bob Dylan/Emmylou Harris) at his home studio, produced three more gems, so that there was an assortment of riches when it came to the final song selection.

Many of the earlier songs were eventually dropped, simply as a reflection of how fast Skye was developing as a songwriter. The turning point, she recalls, was the writing of ‘Tell Me.’ "I told Pat I didn’t think I could write another song. Then I was telling him a story about when I was in New Orleans on St Patrick’s Day and everybody’s faces were painted green. He suggested I went away and wrote about it as if it was a letter to my daughter, just describing where I was and what I was doing. So I did and I wasn’t happy at all because it didn’t rhyme and wasn’t structured like a conventional song. To me it seemed all disjointed."

Leonard, however, was blown away and answered Skye’s objections by giving her copies of Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Hejira by Joni Mitchell. "He didn’t say anything. He just told me to go away and listen to them. It was a revelation because all the songs were like stories and didn’t have trite rhymes. I didn’t know you could write like that," she says. ‘What’s Wrong With Me’ is another track written in similar style. "I was saying ‘where’s the chorus?’" Skye recalls. Pat Leonard simply told her it did not need one. "It was strange but enlightening. It was a whole change of style for me."

"Working with Daniel Lanois was also an amazing experience. We were chatting and I told him that I was from Jamaica and I’d just met my grandma for the first time when she came over from Kingston and she’s seen my mum for the first time in 50 years. Daniel stated scribbling and came up with this song about my mum and my grandma. Every time I tried to sing it, I cried. We eventually got a rough version down, just with acoustic guitars. We called it ‘Jamaica Days.’

The album title also has a family connection. MIND HOW YOU GO is something my foster mum’s, been saying to me since I was a little girl. She still says it to this day. I knew the album was going to be called that before I even had the songs," Skye says.

"I’m proud of what I did with Morcheeba and I never felt fake singing someone else’s words. But this record is the real me. I haven’t had to learn the emotion behind the songs because it was already there. It’s my personal journey. People ask what this record means to me, but that’s an alien question because I’ve been living and breathing it. It’s not a question of what it means to me. This record is me."