Blog
Mah Knees: Background to the Lyrics
Written by Jimmy
This is really Martyn’s song. Jimmy had to fill out all the bits around the following phrase: ‘Mah knees, they go up, Mah knees they go down, Big Big Big, 1 2’.
So, first, let’s try to go into Martyn’s mind. He didn’t actually have a song. He was joking to the band that he had a song called My Niece. We thought that was somewhat inappropriate, especially the going up and down bit. So we asked him to change it to Mah Knees. Then, we discovered he didn’t actually have a song at all. He had a cool riff. And he had the line about his knees going up and down.
Second, let’s try to figure out then how to fill out the rest of a Martyn song. Jimmy asked him what it was about. He didn’t know. Jimmy asked Martyn what was going on in his mind when we sang about ‘Mah Knees.’ He said, ‘nothing, I just have this image of some big knees going up and down.’ And then he added, ‘oh, and i also have this image of someone that looks like me saying 1,2.’ Cheers Martyn. So with an image of Martyn walking around the streets of some sea side resort, the words came together rather quickly. Martyn wakes up with his knees clanking, he walks down the board walk with his knees clinking and clanking, and then he dances in the moon light with his knees clonking, clinking and clanking. And bish bash bosh, we have the lyrics.
Then we did a draft of the song in Spain. With Ed on vox. Then we did a draft of the song in London with Martyn on vox. Then we discovered Gus and got him to sing it on a day when he was really hung-over. Gus could not sing the middle 8. Not one bit. We told him to sing like a drill sergant. Not very helpful instructions. And his head hurt. So the whole band did the middle 8. And then we had to do the ‘big big big’ bit at the end. there were 8 bigs. The band can’t count past 6. So it took 743 takes for the band to stop at the final 8. Hmmm.
Musically, Martyn had a 16 note riff. Two rounds of 8. And 1-2. He added the Shssh during a live performance. But that was it. 16 notes. Cheers. But the band piled in and sorted it. The final bit of icing was putting on Ed’s trumpets… which required us putting song at half speed and then recording Ed normally. It resulted in a lot of band laughter which we left on the final.
so please don’t think about Martyn’s nieces when you hear this, in the same way you shouldn’t think about Constipation with Immovable Thing. Otherwise you might not like us very much. Or to be clear, Martyn.