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BiTS: Let's get back to Catfish. You played all over the world with Catfish. Has there been an
occasion when you've been standing on the stage playing or perhaps singing when you thought,
what on earth am I doing here? This is wonderful.
ML: [Chuckles]Every time we go somewhere new, really, it's a whole new experience still, even
though I travel around and do it all the time. Going to new places and meeting new people is always
really humbling and I really enjoy it, to the point where we were playing in Spain one time and it
was a tiny little village, and we didn't think anyone was going to be there. We didn't think there
was anyone in the village. It looked deserted. But then we went to the venue and it was like okay,
well maybe it might be a bit of fun. It might be a paid rehearsal or something like that, thinking
there was not going to be anyone there. It was absolutely flooded. The whole place was rammed.
The whole village had shown up essentially, and it was amazing and one of the things that really
got me was we went into a song called ‘Broken Man’, and when I got to the chorus, I saw a lot of
people in the audience, who didn't speak any English, who had only met us that afternoon, singing
along to the song and I was like this is amazing. We're in a whole new country that we've never
even been to before, playing to a room full of people who don't speak English, or at least the
majority of them don't speak English and we don't speak very good Spanish, but they're singing
along to one of our songs and it's just incredible to
Paul Long think that a small village in the middle of Spain
knows the lyrics to one of my songs. Just things
like that make me really realise that wow, this is
really cool.
BiTS: That's an absolutely terrific story. I like that
very much indeed. When you're writing music—
you write a lot of stuff, I think with your dad, but
you clearly write alone as well—how do you write
a song? Do you get an idea for the lyrics or the
melody, or does it come in different ways?
ML: It comes in different ways, really. A lot of
times, I'll have a guitar riff come to mind or
something like that on the guitar and then I'll fit some lyrics around it, or sometimes it's the other
way around. Sometimes an idea for a subject for a song or a lyric idea comes into my head and then
I write down a vague chorus and then kind of add rhythm and melody to it. It can change depending
on the mood. I never like to sit down and purposefully write a song. I always like it to kind of
spring to mind naturally, which can sometimes be annoying because it could be 4 am, and you're
trying to get to sleep, but then you suddenly get an idea for a song and you have to do it then
because otherwise you're going to forget it and it can also be annoying because sometimes you
don't really write anything for a while. Sometimes it just doesn't strike until a later date. I know a
lot of musician friends of mine have the ability to sit down and just write songs, whenever they
want and I'm always quite jealous of that, but yeah, I always think you find your own way of doing
things and I think this is my way of doing it.
BiTS: If you have an idea in the middle of the night, how do you keep it? How do you keep the idea
alive?
ML: Well, you've just got to keep working at it, really. Sometimes you use stuff that you haven't
heard in years. I record every idea that I have on my phone and I never delete any ideas, so I could