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Catchy tune, bad grammar and a falsetto bit: how hard can it be to write a great pop song?

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(You is) Cold, Cold, Cold
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PATRICK FREYNE talks to some of the industry’s most successful hit-makers about the essential ingredients of a pop song – and then, taking their advice, gets down to recording one of his own
WHILE ROCK songwriting has always been about authenticity, pop songwriting has always been more about artifice. From the churn of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building to Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s Hit Factory in the 1980s, to small studios from Dublin to Stockholm, behind every fresh-faced starlet there is a businesslike production line churning out hits as though they were widgets. On BBC2 at present, Secrets of the Pop Song , Guy Chambers, who cowrote Robbie Williams’s biggest hits, is giving some new insights into the hit-making process. Last weekend in Dublin a songwriting workshop was held at Windmill Lane, featuring Tim Hawes and Obi Mhondera.
“What makes a hit song?” asks Hawes, cowriter of Hear’Say’s Pure and Simple , among many other hits. There’s a pause before he answers his own question: “Well, you need something that appeals to everyone, that’s poppy and cool and comes in at around three minutes.”
That sounds easy.
“No, it’s not easy,” says Hawes. “It’s not easy at all.”
That said, the basic rules of hit-making don’t change much. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, a middle eight or breakdown section if you need one, and maybe a bridge section between verse and chorus,” says Chris O’Brien, who, along with his songwriting partner, Graham Murphy, has written for Westlife among other pop acts. “If it’s a boy-band song and a ballad, you probably need a key change for the end, for the bit when the fireworks go off and they get off the stools . . . Whatever you do, it has to pass the whistle test. If you have a great pair of legs and are wearing a funny suit you might be able to bypass some of this, but even Lady Gaga follows it for the most part.”
But how does one go about filling a chosen structure with music? In their 1988 book The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way , Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, from The KLF, recommend pilfering from other successful songs. Ray Harman, composer for hire and former member of Something Happens, says that, consciously or unconsciously, this happens all the time.
“If you take something like the Bruno Mars tune Grenade , it’s a very modern tune and in many ways couldn’t be from any time other than now, but there are elements there that are vaguely familiar from old Motown records. You have to be able to appeal to so many people at the same time. I think it was the Edge who said that most pop songs sound very familiar, with a 2 per cent X factor that gives them that little bit of magic, the bit that’s odd or interesting.”
The industry itself, of course, prefers to focus on the bits that are safe and familiar. “What the record companies want is always fed by things that are currently happening in the charts,” says Tim Hawes. “Every record company person wants the last big hit. Often by the time you write that for them, things have already moved on. It’s quite bizarre really.”
O’Brien elaborates on this dubious system: “Say Amy Winehouse has the cool song of the month. Well, you’ll get a call from the record label saying: ‘Forget that **** you were doing last week, we want the Amy Winehouse style now!’
“As writers for hire in the pop world, we’d get these call sheets each week which would say something like: ‘Pixie Lott is looking for songs in the style of Amy Winehouse – must be catchy and cerebral but pop.’ Basically, translated, this means: ‘Must be exactly the same as Amy Winehouse but because she’s younger and hasn’t done drugs, soften it up for children’s television.’
“Another one we got was a call to write ‘Massive Attack light’. Basically you’d take the essence of a Massive Attack track and put a bit of Dido on it.”
So the main thing for budding hit-makers to take from this is to listen to the charts and borrow ideas. And they should be heartened by the fact that, thanks to the democratising effects of technology, this Frankenpop process is increasingly accessible to all.
“In the Brill Building days the writers all knew their chops. They wrote proper chord sequences and arrangements and modulations between the keys,” says O’Brien, who has in recent times moved towards the world of rock production. “There was a lot more musicality going on.
“The fact that that’s changed opens things up. Nowadays your tone-deaf granny could pull out a laptop, get a bit of a beat going, put a song over the top, and who knows where it could end up.”
'Cold, Cold, Cold' Four hours to create, two minutes to listen to
I went to Arad Studios, owned by my friend Les Keye, the songwriter and producer, and we attempted to write a hit song. Tim Hawes said that “the most successful of my songs have come from very quick, spontaneous sessions”, so our first rule was that we would write and record our masterpiece in a single four-hour session.
Pop is all about simplicity, so we played two chords over and over again. In The Manual , The KLF insist that pop is all about the bass, so I told Les to write a “really good” bass line (which in a way means that I wrote the bass line). This, coupled with a bridge (the bit that energises the chorus) and a sampled drumbeat, meant we had the rhythm track for the song.
After a week listening to chart music, I had come to the conclusion that 90 per cent of contemporary pop songs were about either love or partying. I improvised lyrics about both. The best pop songs are slightly bittersweet, and this was turning into a track about someone who has been prevented from first loving and then partying by a mean person.
As some of the best chorus hooks of recent years have involved repetition of the same word three times (as in Jessie J’s Price Tag : “It’s not about the money, money, money”), I decided to do the same for the chorus. Because bad grammar is also cool, I made sure that my pronouns didn’t match my verbs.
Les came up with the melody for the bridge on the way back from a trip to the shops, to which I librettoed the self-assertion: “The one thing you got to know about me, I can’t distinguish between fact or fantasy!” (Pop music nowadays is filled with people asserting facts about themselves.) After this we borrowed an R&B brass idea and Les sang a load of soulful falsetto. “What do you know about it?” he inquires, to which I respond: “Ah, you is cold cold cold!”
Fake strings, Auto-Tune and vocoder were used to add more “pop sheen”, then our four hours were up. By the time this article is published Les and I should be on a tropical island somewhere, contemplating our success.
(You is) Cold, Cold, Cold
By Patrick Freyne (The F Bomb, pictured) and Les Keye (The L Word)
I came around to make love
To hear you talkin’ bout breakin’ up Don’t be talking bout breakin’ up
That stuff is messed up
One thing you gotta know
about me
I can’t distinguish between fact
or fantasy
(What do you know about it?)
Ah you is cold, cold, cold
(Shee! What do you know
about it?)
That you is cold, cold, cold.
I came around to party hard
Only to find I’d been barred
Why you talkin’ bout me
being barred?
is it because i party too hard?