Q – I was wondering if following release of Cleaning Out The Ashtrays you would be performing any of the songs you normally do not perform live in your set eg Wild Orphan, Everyone’s Complaining?
Also a while ago you made available a MP3 file Family Man which if I remember correctly was from the Love Story recordings. Did you consider including this on the Ashtray Recordings or is it earmarked for a future album?
A – I did work on a few Cleaning out the ashtrays songs for the January tour, and I’ll certainly be bringing those songs with me next week when I head for Germany. I was thinking of learning a few more but I think, instead, I’m going to work on new material and try to audition as many new tunes as I can, as that is the best test of their worth, I think.
Family Man was never finished, mixed or mastered for release, so it didn’t fit the Cleaning out the ashtrays algorithm. The verse chords actually became I’m Gone a year or so later. It will be on the Demos, Unfinished and Rejected songs box, which I imagine we’ll get to in 2013 if the Commotions box is 2011. Work has already begun on it, though – Nicky Holland found a demo of Nobody’s Girl that I ‘produced’ along with a song we co-wrote which never surfaced. I think I have finally located a DAT of my 1991 demo of Nick Cave’s The Ship Song and Lee Hazlewood’s Pour Man – in the Universal vaults – their records show it, we’ll see if they can actually find the tape, and if it can still be played…