Ever met a Psychic Cat?

I have. . . . .

On 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica. Nostradamus is a big white cat with huge green eyes, that wears jewelry and shimmering silky robes. He'll tell your fortune for a dollar bill and if you're lucky, he'll stay in your thoughts and inspire your dreams the way he did mine.

It was November 2001 and I was in Santa Monica finishing my Tiger mouth album. I was walking with my friend Kirstin, down 3rd St Promenade which is a very long street that runs through the beach district of Santa Monica. In the day time 3rd St Promenade is full of cashed up shoppers, bible bashers, buddhists and kids.

As twilight falls and the evening gets ready to make its entrance, the atmosphere of 3rd St. Promenade goes through a metamorphosis, as the homeless kids, junkies and street entertainers start to appear and take up their mark, bench or corner.

Kirstin and me had some time to kill and decided to walk down 3rd St. Promenade, I had been staying there for about a month and had never before seen the strange sight that awaited us that evening. We noticed a small crowd of people standing around two cats dressed in glamorous antiquated robes that they might have stolen from a shrunken movie star's wardrobe circa 1930's.

Around their necks they wore chains and jewels and standing next to the table on which they sat, was their master, a dusty looking fellow wearing a hat that looked even more ancient than the cat's robes. They were a bizarre looking trio but you could tell they were family.

I handed a dollar bill to the man with the hat and he asked me which cat I would like to choose my fortune scroll. One cat was called Houdini, he had a certain charm but ever since finding this motley crew, I had not been able to take my eyes off the lovely white cat called Nostradamus.

The man with the hat gave Nostradamus some peanut butter and in return Nostradamus chose a fortune scroll from a strange homemade device that they'd made, in which were, hundreds maybe even thousands of fortunes inside. Then he handed it to me with his pretty white paws and my heart melted at his gentile and delicate touch. I thanked him and read my fortune, it was sweet and what it says will remain between me and Nostradamus, however there were seven words written at the end of the prediction on the card, they read, " Have Joy. I Love You. Psychic Cat." I put the scroll in my purse, it has a picture of Nostradamus on one side and I keep it with me at all times.

As we walked away, (Kirstin was a bit freaked by the whole thing , so neglected to get her fortune told) I looked back over my shoulder and it may have been a trick of the light or something but, I was sure that The Psychic Cat smiled at me and those words, 'Have Joy. I Love you. psychic Cat' slipped through my mind in a feline purr all night.

We looked for the Psychic Cat a few days later, we'd told our friend about it and she wanted to see him but we couldn't find him, no matter where we looked or who we asked and I went back most nights, looking for the trippy trio, as my hotel was at the end of 3rd St. Promenade but I never saw him again. Except in my dreams.

I returned to London in December 2001.

On the eve of 2002 we celebrated love, freedom and friendship. The frost on the ground sparkled like diamonds as we kissed.

It was refreshing to be back in London and wonderful to be home at last. The English winter reminded me of how far away I was from L.A. and I felt relieved to be able to gather my thoughts and look around and have some fun with my people. Usually, after I finish an album, I have a few months of head space time. It's like my mind becomes focused to a pin point whilst I'm making a record and when I finish, I have to open it up again and let the world back in, so I can start all over again.

One night, I had a dream about the Psychic Cat. I saw him with a suitcase, and an overcoat and hat and he looked as though he was running away. He looked lost but excited and I could feel his heart racing as he walked past the peddlers and cafes and bars and street kids, everything he had was in the little suitcase which he held in his pretty white paw. This image stayed with me and I began to think more and more about the Psychic Cat and his adventures, if he was really free.

Lost on 3rd St. Promenade. I also wondered if he might actually be on his way to see me in London!

I decided to write a song all about the Psychic Cat and so it began. Psychic Cat, the album inspired by a real life psychic cat.

Metso and I sometimes write songs together. (We also spent a lot of sleepless nights putting this site together : )) Every now and then we have a little party, just the two of us. we often end up writing a song or coming up with some crazy story ideas. We were taking a break from dancing and we were watching the moon through an antique nautical telescope that belonged to Metso's dad. That telescope is amazing, when you look at the moon through it, on a clear night, you can see the craters so clearly and mountains and all that beautiful detail. It never fails to inspire awe and hope.

Metso had been playing around with this song idea on a synth in Reason (music programme) and I started hearing this one line, see the moon in my eye, so you think I'm a spy. But I'm just a voyeur, you wanna fly? We stayed up all night thinking of lyrics to capture the moment and playing around with synths and wrote a demo track called Voyeur. We were really tripping off that one line and this very hypnotic pulse on the verse.

I put a demo together with Metso's help, at home on Pro Tools and Reason (music programme), working every day and night on Hot Lips and Graffiti Boy and Psychic Cat of course. I played Psychic Cat to Chris Chris Coffey my friend and drummer, he'd just got Reason (music programme) and I was encouraging him to play around with beats as he was mainly a live drummer and we had very little money to spend on the demos and certainly not enough to go into a studio to record live drums. I love programming beats myself but I had written Psychic cat on an acoustic guitar and was having difficulty finding a rhythm to drive the song. He made a drum pattern that made me rethink the pace of the song and gave me a new direction for the verses. I added a conga vibe and replayed the guitars which gave me the vibe for the ooh la la la harmonies on the chorus and made Psychic Cat come alive.

When Break-dancing and all the wonderful 80's Hip Hop came to England, I was a little girl but I loved that whole vibe and I would spend hours practicing the robot dance and spinning on my back like some of the older kids were doing at the local disco every weekend. I loved that music and still do, it has a super cool energy and I wanted to capture that energy in the song 'Graffiti Boy'. I wrote 'Graffiti Boy' about Metso who was well into his Graffiti art as a kid and getting harassed by police for practicing it in Essex, whilst I was still practicing spinning on my back and doing the robot dance a hundred miles away!

I used a lot of synth sounds and wanted to create an electro sounds-cape that would capture the graffiti tapestry of that time, in all its fluorescent optimism and cool.

Tony O' Neil was the keyboard player in my band at the time. I played him the chorus and Middle 8 of Graffiti Boy and asked him to write a verse part, he's wicked with electro lines and he didn't disappoint me with the verse line he came up with. After that, it was easy to write the words of the verse. 'Tony also had a part in writing 'Home Honey I'm High'. He was telling me about his friend who was a big drug user, the guy would come home and say to his girlfriend, ' Home Honey I'm High !' That story cracked me up and I thought it would be a great lyric. So we started playing around with ideas. Tony's a wicked pianist and we wrote this song idea on the piano. Eventually, It changed almost beyond recognition from the original idea but songs do that sometimes, as you continue to work with them, they can take on a new life and a meaning quite different from that of it's starting point.

The song, 'Groupie' started it's life as a tender word on Metso's (Hot) lips : ) He said, 'I'm your groupie. I wanna be your groupie' and we smiled and kissed. We made those beautiful words into a song, our very own love song to last always and forever.

The song 'Speakers', is an expression of my displeasure at the corruption and greed that have grown to gigantic proportions in this amazing age in which we're living.

We visited Cambodia once on our travels. I was shocked at the disgraceful corruption of the government that was allowing American and Vietnamese companies to build huge hotels and casinos right on the border, whilst Cambodian children begged on the streets, like pretty sad little dolls who had already been thrown away by the unjust ways of this world. The power of the Corporate dollar was evident everywhere we turned and whilst the children of Cambodia dream of owning a c.d. walkman, the Casinos and hotels spring up relentlessly all around them and the rich Asians and Americans and Europeans who are too scared to cross the border without a guide, fund these hellish establishments, just as the corrupt criminal politicians fund the destruction of rain forests and villages world wide in order to 'develop' the unspeakable ugliness of excessive luxury and inexcusable debauchery, in places where their people struggle just to eat. They build pleasure complexes and fun fairs that glare a neon grimace at the poverty and struggle of the people who can only sit and watch in awe and fear and eventually succumb to the machine, become part of its despicable 'progress'.

It's happening every day, every second people and for the first time in my life, I felt shamed at my ignorance. Whilst M.T.V. and the modern media herald the values of a lost generation, fancy cars, loads of cash, cribs and excess on all levels, eternally youthful bottox injected butts wriggle and squirm to the beat of a thoughtless chant about guns and diamonds and Cartier, Gucci, Versace, it neglects to inform the kids of the truth. It keeps them buying, consuming and dancing into the ideals of a joyless, meaningless existence. Greed and ignorance is what they want to feed us, need to feed, us so that in our comfortable lethargy, as we dream of one day being rich and famous and perfect instead of lost and bored and confused, the fat cats can sneak out into the big old mother world and rape her for all she's worth. They treat nature like a whore and make justice and liberty a joke.

In August, that year, I received a call from Dave McCracken. He said that he was interested in working with me on my new album and I was glad he'd got in touch because I'd met him briefly when I was looking for people to work with on Tigermouth and we'd hit it off immediately but he'd been asked to tour the album that he'd made with Ian Brown, so we hadn't had the chance back then to work together.

We arranged a day to meet up and the first idea that I played Dave was Voyeur, the song that Metso and I had started writing. Dave played an electric guitar and came up with these ace chords for the chorus that gave a really rockin' feel to the track.

We started working on my Psychic Cat album in early September. Dave is a whizz with synths, and also a lover of strong melody and message in a song. It was great working with Dave, he is open and passionate about his work and has a great ability to refrain from using formulas. So many people get stuck in a way of thinking that they must stick to verse, chorus structures at all times when writing a song, then making a song becomes designed around one template which is dull and confining for the artist and listener. (Modern radio stations, with their two and a half to three minute song play restrictions, have contributed a great deal towards the dumbing down of many young modern music listeners and helped create a platform for laziness and predictability in the creative sensibilities of many music producers and writers.)

I believe in structure and I think that it's essential for a musician to understand the structure of a song so that they may understand why they want to stray from it when they do. If I write a song with no chorus, I need to know why I've done so, otherwise I'm just winging it and not really understanding the emotive purposes of the song. Unless of course that in itself is the purpose.

When I begin writing a song, it's a spark in the ether, a glimpse of an idea which needs to be free to roll this way or that and in the early life of a song, the last thing on my mind is how the verse will move with the chorus. That comes later on to me, as the music grows and the rythmn evolves. First thing is the melody and the emotion. The melody being the prime catalyst of the emotion or vice versa.

Whilst making my album, Tiger Mouth, I had learned a lot about feeling my way with lengths of intros and verses and choruses and breaks etc. in order to keep a song moving and fresh, not too repetetive. I had had a lot of time in the interim between finishing Tiger Mouth and starting Psychic Cat, to reflect on what I had learned and when I started writing the songs for Psychic Cat I felt much more confident to experiment with these principles. I wanted the Psychic Cat album to have more of a plaful vibe, I wanted it to be more 'from the hip' and as Dave likes to say about cool stuff.

Andrew Innes' tongue wagging guitar and pumping beats were behind the song 'Ideal'. We had been working on this idea and he'd played this amazing guitar over a drone and reverse tablas and cool beat. I ended up taking just the guitar part and the beat and writing a song to that. It's an interesting way to make a song, just taking a couple of wonderful elements from an idea and re-writing a song to fit with what's been played because what had been played had over taken and sounded stronger than the original idea. So I hade a new starting point of inspiration which I loved but I didn't want to change any of the guitar and so I wrote a melody that fitted with the whole guitar part that Andrew had played from start to finish to a different idea.

We did our own thing and had a very cool time. I often pictured the Psychic Cat, when I'd be singing or we'd be recording guitars. I envisioned him singing the songs with me and getting down to the tracks and smoking and writing lyrics and stuff. His little white paws drumming a beat on the mixing desk as we recorded vocals or a guitar in Dave's Home studio.