\u2018People tell me it helped them with their rehab. I have to explain: Sorry, it\u2019s not about alcohol \u2013 I was just a kid singing about injustice\u2019<\/p>\n
I wrote the lyrics on the floor of my bedroom in Basingstoke when I was 16 or 17, as a way of decompressing from studying for my A-levels. I had the idea for \u201cTwist in my \u2026\u201d something, but didn\u2019t know what else to put in there. I tried \u201cTwist in my gravity\u201d before ending up with \u201csobriety\u201d, but it\u2019s not a song about alcohol. It\u2019s about feeling that things aren\u2019t right in the world, and that adults can do terrible or immoral things \u2013 but none of it will change you. Fundamentally, it\u2019s a song by an alienated teenager who feels there\u2019s a lot of injustice. There\u2019s something lovely about how intensely you feel things as a teenager.<\/p>\n
The opening line, \u201cAll God\u2019s children need travelling shoes,\u201d is the title of a book by Maya Angelou. Then \u201cAll good people read good books\u201d is the language of a kid who reads a lot. It\u2019s a little road song: you\u2019re on a journey, kind of travelling, but really looking for something. Once I had the groovy little guitar riff, the song just fell together.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d only previously sung in a school play, but some guys from a local band helped me record my songs in a nearby studio, so suddenly I had a tape. I sent it to the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, London, and they gave me a spot at their open mic night. I played there to just three people, but one of them was the venue-owner, Vince Power, who told an agent: \u201cYou\u2019ve got to see this girl!\u201d Soon enough, I\u2019d signed to a record label and they suggested Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke as co-producers. Like me, Rod had been very young when he had his first hit in the Zombies, so there was empathy there.<\/p>\n
Peter would pick me up at the train station and we\u2019d drive to Rod\u2019s home studio in St Albans, where we recorded Twist in My Sobriety. Rod wanted the right sound for the melody line and went through the whole woodwind section of samples. In those days, samples were all on floppy discs so you\u2019d sit there for ages waiting for them to load, but then suddenly he tried a synthetic oboe and said: \u201cMy God, that works!\u201d<\/p>\n
I never had an inkling that the song was going to be a hit, but it took off in continental Europe and everywhere else followed. I\u2019m very proud of it. Recently, a young woman came up to me and said: \u201cThat song takes me to my happy place.\u201d It\u2019s a dark song to do that for someone. In the US, people tell me it helped them with their sobriety or rehab. I have to explain: \u201cSorry, it\u2019s not about alcohol. I was just a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Peter and I first met Tanita, she\u2019d only ever played her own guitar. We thought she was really talented: we wanted to match the strength and direction of her composition with a really colourful, inventive backing. My studio was in a wonderful Georgian house called Red House, where we had two rooms: a control room and a recording room with a piano in it. Everything was done in there \u2013 and in those days we recorded on to tape.<\/p>\n
Pete came up with the brilliant idea of recording a master vocal with Tanita playing guitar to a guide rhythm track we\u2019d then dispense with, because that was the way she was used to playing. That gave us a really confident vocal \u2013 Tanita sounded really in command. But it meant we could be really inventive around it, conjuring up a scenario with strings and such. We built up every track on her Ancient Heart album like that.<\/p>\n
For Twist in My Sobriety, Pete created a definitive drum part and I had a ball coming up with the instrumental sections. The booming synth sounds at the beginning have a lot of attack, then I came up with a part for \u2013 unusually \u2013 oboe, which Pete was very unsure about at first as he wanted a more folky thing. But there was something classical about it that sounded really lovely. We did it using the oboe sound on the synth first, then a professional player called Malcolm Messiter came in and played an actual oboe.<\/p>\n
I thought the finished song had a fantastic feel: there was something very unusual about it. I played it this morning for the first time in a long time \u2013 and it sounded absolutely brilliant.<\/p>\n
Tanita Tikaram plays Beautiful Days, Escot Park, Devon, 20-23 August.<\/p>\n