Last update : 22 July 2008
Coffee and Stars
New album released 15th September 2008
‘Coffee and Stars’ seems an appropriate title, as caffeine and wonderment have been our prime stimulants for the past decade, during which these songs were written and recorded.
Choosing the tracks for this collection was challenging. Marcus and I had different favorites and, like children I guess, we seemed to favour the slightly wonky, cross-eyed ones. We’ve included a couple of those here (can you see them?) alongside the more obvious favourites that aunty always kisses first.
So, this is like a family photo, with most of the family still locked in the attic. Let’s hope that ‘Coffee and Stars’ compels you to visit those neglected children in situ, on their original albums. We hope, like us, that you’ll come to love them all.
Yuri's Dream (Limbo 2007)
This was written quickly. I'd read an article about Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He rose from humble beginnings to become the first man in space. An uncomfortable celebrity, he had trouble readjusting to the earthbound life. He'd only been weightless for a short while (the flight lasted 108 minutes) but returned a changed man. He hit the bottle. Just before he was about to make his second trip into space (8 years after the first), he was killed in a routine training flight. I tried to place myself into his dreams, just before that fatal flight. What were his hopes on being heaven-bound again?
Wilful (Alaska 2002)
I think it was ‘Uncut’ magazine who described this as a cross between Fleetwood Mac and Bread, which in turn makes me think of that classic Val Doonigan album title, ‘Val Rocks, but Gently’. Life on the edge!
Lights of Home (Limbo 2007)
This one seemed to find its target, with The Sunday Times nominating it one of their songs of the year (“you may cryâ€!) We had intended it to reach a musical climax for the end section; instead Marcus dropped the arse out of the song which adds to the vulnerability of the sentiment. Lucinda Drayton provides beautific backing to my beastly bawling!
Weatherwise (Alaska 2002)
Marcus presented me with a guitar arrangement that we developed into this, a typical MM paean that longs for better days. Melvin Duffy (who also plays with The Lilac Time) made his MM debut to great effect, as did Marcus’s daughter Rebecca who provided “hope floats†in one nonchalant take.
Heels for Dust (Glow 2005)
A playground moment that we’ve all suffered I’m sure.
Sunburst Finish (Limbo 2007)
“There’s not a chord I wouldn’t diminish, to capture your heartâ€.
Alaska (Alaska 2002)
My girlfriend Di came home one day with a story of an odd couple she’d encountered on an empty late night train. They were disheveled and seemingly dysfunctional but were engrossed in the care of a baby that the hair-lipped mother was clutching to her anoraked breast. As Di left the carriage she saw the baby revealed as a doll! These characters became central to ‘Alaska’ and ‘Malkovich’ from the same album. I’ll often leave a song with Marcus, as a small performance, maybe just acoustic and voice. When I return to the studio weeks later, he’ll pull the ‘comfy chair’ up between the big speakers and, with a twinkle, press ‘play’. The icy grandeur of this arrangement was a shock; the back of my neck confirmed its potency.
Walking John Wayne (Bicycle Thieves 1997)
If memory serves, this is the first Miracle Mile song with my vocals that was deemed worthy of public consumption. It first appeared on the promo album ‘Bluer Skies Than This’ that went on to form much of ‘Bicycle Thieves’. Steve Davis had a guitar figure that we shaped into a song. The lyrical conceit celebrating the lonesome strut that leads to “the next best thing that gets us over and out of thisâ€.
Five Points of Light (Alaska 2002)
I’ve heard this song described as being “like Tom Waits tidied up by an overbearing Auntâ€. I love it for its inclusive sentiment and for Marcus’s prodding piano, more Mrs. Mills than Tom Waits.
Milk Moustache (Stories We Could Tell 2004)
Don’t call me sentimental but if a life does indeed flash before our eyes at the moment of death, accompanied by the smell of baking bread (apparently, but unconfirmed) I hope to catch more than a glimpse of “the dancer in the purple dressâ€.
Blue Sea White Dog (Slow Fade 2001)
This was probably the first MM band song that truly reflected the direction I wanted to take; less of a ‘live’ vibe that had dominated ‘BT’ and ‘Candids’. Those albums were recorded as a gigging band and reflected that dynamic. For ‘Slow Fade’ I wanted something more subdued, even somber, that seemed appropriate to the more introspective nature of the songs. This didn’t suit everyone and was probably the undoing of that MM incarnation. It was Steve’s last involvement and, for me, his finest moment as MM co-producer. Ironically it was also the first song that Marcus played on, guesting on Double Bass with that other MM debutante BJ Cole. Those two have since been ever present, Marcus as my musical partner and BJ as a sonic staple of whatever is ‘the MM sound’. When I was about 10 I spent glory days with my uncle Mike at Cleveleys near Blackpool. He let me do all of things that were forbidden at home: I could make tea, cook curry and drink sterilised milk. With no siblings to compete with I was stage centre, totally indulged; we would “stand atop the tower to see where we could beâ€, the start of a life time of gazing at horizons. I always had scuffed knees (a good thing) that were remedied with ‘Red Magic’ an iodine salve. Whenever I smell it I crave sterilised milk.
Papillon (Limbo 2007)
This one sits pretty; it went from an acoustic lament to a twitchy pop song. We then removed all of the percussion, leaving the ambience and Lanois like atmosphere.
Love Letters and Long Goodbyes (Limbo 2007)
A sad song about injury and recovery.
Paper Planes and Ponytails (Glow 2004)
Radio friendly nostalgia, they say. Also Rebecca’s favourite as it gave her permission to sing the word ‘shite’…
Guggenheim (Slow Fade 2001)
Written in New York in the time it took me to walk from The Dakota Building (the scene of John Lennon’s murder) through Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum. It’s pretty simplistic lyrically; a recognition of a moment of grace and, yes, a love song. It was the first song that Marcus co-produced; I couldn’t afford the rates at Jacobs studio where we’d started ‘Slow Fade’ so, as with other fractured recordings from those early sessions, he took snippets of performance from the master 24 track tape and pieced the samples together on his home computer, easily done these days, not so then.
Starwatching(Slow Fade 2001)
Written after a magical fire lit Norfolk evening, sharing beer with friends and snails, wishing (as ever) on stars and satellites.
The Dust Will Shape Your Sins(Stories We Could Tell 2004)
I’m sure that this has a strange potency for Marcus; he wrote the guitar arrangement for a newish girlfriend, I applied lyrics that related to the breakdown of his previous long-term relationship, only for his current (and beloved) lady Lucinda to cover the song beautifully for her album ‘Both Sides’.
Glow(Glow 2005)
This song, about the comfort and refuge to be found in alcohol, produced another of Marcus’s ‘comfy chair’ moments; the pianos on the original “hold your horses†section giving my hair a permanent middle parting and the climax providing a fitting finale to the collection. Now where’s that bottle?
by Johnny Black
Despite being based in a home studio in a rural backwater on the outskirts of North London, Miracle Mile chose to name themselves after a fictional gold rush main street half a world away where, according to adventure yarn spinner Jack London, ragged 49ers would blow their hard-won nuggets on booze and broads.
They apply a similarly unorthodox approach to their career in general. The band’s core duo of singer/guitarist Trevor Jones and multi-instrumentalist/arranger Marcus Cliffe have, for the past eight years, been relentless in their pursuit of the perfect song. Not the fastest, the gnarliest or the loudest, not even the most instantly commercial, but the song whose melody, lyrics, arrangement, performance and spirit might stand the test of time, giving pleasure to listeners not just for years but centuries.
They’d be the first to admit they haven’t yet found that perfect song and maybe never will, but I’d argue that their albums — the documentary evidence of that search — deserve a place alongside the best work of time-tested tunesmiths as elevated as Randy Newman, Elvis Costello or Tom Waits.
Marcus Cliffe wasn’t yet on board when the first album, Bicycle Thieves, arrived in 1997 but already it was evident that frontman Jones didn’t fit in with the prevailing mode. There was no rage, bitterness or self-loathing in his songs and nothing at all turned up to eleven. Instead, he offered meticulously orchestrated slices of ordinary human life, transforming the mundane into the marvellous with carefully crafted lyrics sincerely delivered. Even here, though, the hypnotic sample-based "Recycletwo" revealed a willingness to experiment that marked Jones out as more than just a pop craftsman in the vein of Crowded House or Aztec Camera.
What had started essentially as a recording project had become a five-piece live band by the time the follow-up, Candids, was released in 1998. Loaded with nagging guitar hooks and dynamic vocal interplay, it included one particularly affecting piece, "Small Ad," which featured just one line of lyric, the heart-rending couplet, "Baby’s shoes, never used." With those four words, Jones conjured up a yawning abyss of grief that other writers might struggle to evoke in an entire album.
Jones quickly realised that live performance was not his forte and retired to the womb of the studio for 1999’s third album, Slow Fade, which also saw the birth of the partnership that would lift Miracle Mile higher still above the norm. Marcus Cliffe, in demand as a player for Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois, Mark Knopfler and others, was drafted in on upright bass.
Immediately the music took a more intimate turn, with Jones exploring the little things that illuminate the big things. Almost every song offers up at least one unforgettable line, like "I'd rather be ashes than dust" in "Everybody Loved You," or the concept of filling the void left by his loss of faith "with despair and metalware" in "Starwatching."
Slow Fade was further enhanced by the delicately filigreed swirls and swoops of England’s finest steel guitar maestro, B.J. Cole, whose style sat so well with Jones and Cliffe that he has become virtually a full-time member of the band.
And then, out of nowhere, catastrophe struck. Trevor Jones’ beloved sister died in tragic circumstances. It’s typical of the man that, rather than wallowing in his grief as he had every right to do, he dealt with his loss in the quiet, honest dignity of "Sister Song," the achingly lovely tribute that concludes the fourth album, Alaska. It can’t have been coincidence that the album, despite its meltingly beautiful musical landscape, was named for one of the coldest places on earth.
By the time of Stories We Could Tell in 2004, Miracle Mile were drawing critical plaudits in every significant British magazine and newspaper, along with comparisons to such pop pluperfectionists as Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile. Critics were noting that Miracle Mile was fast becoming a repository of timelessly romantic music fueled by the same shamelessly emotional human concerns that inspired the great standards. More than this, it was being noticed that while most bands go into decline after two or three albums, Miracle Mile were getting better, perhaps because they’d avoided the trap of trying to be contemporary, and had no need to be more outrageous than the competition, largely because they didn’t see music as a competitor sport.
The sixth album, Glow, showed up in 2005 and found Jones and Cliffe further expanding their musical palette mixing Celtic folksiness with slow, semi-industrial percussion on the inspirational "An Average Sadness," blending Badalamenti guitars with Bacharach horns on "What Kate Did Next," and opening "Strange Sympathy" with a beautifully synthesised string orchestration before letting the song melt seamlessly into a laid-back country-rock rumination on the gap between aspiration and acquisition. Glow was also their most lavishly packaged disc, gorgeously presented at no small cost to themselves.
Album No. 7, Limbo, is fresh off the block as of this writing and, yet again, here are fifteen songs overflowing with sensitively wrought melodies and heart-fluttering lyricism. If it’s not a contradiction in terms, Limbo is even more quietly passionate than usual, deliciously understated and, at times, devastatingly tear-jerking.
Miracle Mile may just be too concerned with timeless quality for their own short-term commercial good. They’ll never sink a fang into the jugular when they can plant a whisper of a kiss on that sensitive spot at the nape of the neck and set off a tiny ripple that will, in the fullness of time, explode in the heart. I, for one, wouldn’t want it any other way.
Five star review for Miracle Mile's 'Limbo' in Hi-Fi News!
Johnny Black Hi-Fi News August 2007
Four tracks from new album 'Limbo' Now Playing