In 1988 I wrote a song called ‘Model Son’. This song appeared eventually on an album for RCA Records – Swimming against the Stream by Latin Quarter (a group of which I was a non-playing member) released in the spring of 1989. By that point it was my one hundred and forty-seventh song and would make my fortieth recording. Oddly, no one save myself heard my version of ‘Model Son’. Instead I did with it what I did with all the songs I wrote in the years I spent as a full-time songwriter: I completed it on paper as a lyric where the melody and arrangement existed only in my imagination and in snatches of singing on a cassette recorder. I then posted the lyric (set out, conventionally, as verses, chorus, and ‘bridge’) together with several others, to my then songwriting partner, Steve Skaith (he lived in London, I in Liverpool). His contribution to the songwriting process was to set my words to music.

In recounting this brief outline of songwriting practice, one that identifies me as a lyricist rather than songwriter as such, I am aware of how unusual and far-removed from the conventional portrayal of pop songwriting my experience might seem – at least since the rise of ‘rock’ music and the emergence of the writer-performer. Rather than argue for the contemporary re-emergence of the non-performing songwriter in the now narrower sub-genres of ‘pop’ and ‘R&B’, for the purposes of this discussion I intend to emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between my experience and the writer-performer rock ‘norm’. My reason for so choosing is because the contribution I wish to make to a symposium which reflects on the relationships between words and music is one that emphasizes, and explores the implications of, the work involved in bringing them together.

I use the term ‘work’ advisedly because I mean it in the prosaic sense of paid employment, of effort for reward under prevailing economic conditions. My writing ‘Model Son’ is evidence of my being a worker in the popular music industry.