‘I was too busy to sleep with millions of people': ex-boybander Eg White on penning bangers for Adele, Duffy
Troop into Eg White's living room, past the bright, spacious kitchen and the yapping terriers ('Meet the unwelcoming committee!'), then descend into the snug basement studio with its underfloor heating and you will have reached the place where pop bangers are born: hits for Adele (Chasing Pavements), Will Young (Leave Right Now), Duffy (Warwick Avenue) and countless others. The Ivor Novello award-winning songwriter, born Francis White, sits in front of a desk cluttered with screens and consoles and thingamajigs. In T-shirt, jeans and trainers, he looks as lean as the neck of a Stratocaster. When he is in quizzical mode, as he very often is, four deep grooves appear on his forehead like the strings on a bass guitar.
White's newest project is the music for a stage version of Midnight Cowboy, the Oscar-winning 1969 buddy movie with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as deluded outsiders adrift in New York, adapted now by Bryony Lavery. Most of its 15 songs – from sanguine ballads to Latin-tinged stompers – were composed not here in White's west London home but on a family holiday to Colombia. For two hours each morning, while his wife and children were still in bed, he wrote on a cheap baritone ukulele, which he plucks off the wall from between rows of guitars to show me. 'You can take it in the hand luggage,' he says cheerfully. 'If your kid sits on it, which happened a few times, it lives.' Presumably he means the ukulele, not the kid.
I had arrived expecting to hear tales of adolescent identification with Voight's naive gigolo, or Hoffman's grungy conman, but White turns out to have no affection for the film whatsoever. 'Too depressing. Couldn't bear it.' Many of his compositions for the show temper the dourness that put him off the film. New York Bus, a hymn to the Big Apple that features the line 'I hear they've got a weakness for a refugee', suggests Simon & Garfunkel at their antsiest.
'Interesting,' he says, in a way that suggests he disagrees entirely. 'If there's a smell to the thing, Brown Eyed Girl is where I was heading. The cast did it in rehearsal and I suddenly thought, 'Christ, if we're not careful, this is going to turn into Hair!' So I'm going, 'No, no – you need to be bad-tempered.' Think Van Morrison. Think grumpy old cunt.'
The commission came to White, somewhat implausibly, via his wife's sister's husband's cousin's builder, who decided after 50 years in construction that he wanted to produce a musical and ended up with the rights to Midnight Cowboy. Soon, White was sitting by the pool in Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, trying to evoke life in the gutters of late-1960s Manhattan. He arrived home with a suntan and a completed score. It all sounds remarkably … 'Easy? We can go with easy. Absolutely free of trauma. Because you have the structure already. You're moving the story forward.'
Writing in character, too. That must be close to impossible when working with a pop star who has a persona to maintain: listeners might get the singer muddled up with the song? 'Oh yeah. You'll write some horrible, ugly character stuff and they'll go, 'I can't sing this. I'm just not that much of a …''
Older musicians like character songs, he says, 'whereas I work with young people.' Adele was 17 when White first wrote with her. 'I met her before she was the queen of the world. Before anyone. Her demo was touched by God. You don't hear that every day: the playfulness, the accuracy, the language.'
He plays down his own contribution. 'If I'm feeling too full of myself, then I've probably stolen from the other person. Ultimately, they're the one who'll be sitting on top of the missile. All I know with Adele is it didn't feel like being in the room with a 17-year-old. I'd try something and she'd say, 'You might want to reconsider that.' And she'd be right.' Chasing Pavements came about after White strummed 'some very boring chords' while Adele sang over them. 'Once she lit the fuse, it got explosive. Then it got good.'
White had his own short-lived ride on the missile in the late 1980s, when he and his brother David were in the boyband Brother Beyond, fronted by heart-throb Nathan Moore. 'Brother Beyond was good until it wasn't,' he says. 'Without being rude – no, I have to be rude – Nathan was a brilliant pop star but a terrible singer. Stock, Aitken and Waterman were famously brutal with him. I'd written a song called Here Come the Rockets, which I gave Nathan to sing. It was clear it wasn't going to work. That's when I went, 'I'm out.''
He recorded the song himself in the early 1990s with Alice Temple, as the duo Eg and Alice. Around the same time, he began his producing career with two albums for indie rockers Kinky Machine. He was working so hard he neglected to have a debauched rock'n'roll lifestyle. 'I'm old now,' he says. In fact, he is 58, but you take the point. 'I write songs about having a spankingly amazing night out that ends in near-death by the side of the M25 at six in the morning. Things I never did and would love to have done. I was too busy making a living to sleep with millions of people.'
He grew up in London, the son of classical musicians. 'BBC orchestras were being made redundant in the early 1980s. My dad was like, 'Kids, this is dying. Run for the hills.'' A childhood pianist, violinist, flautist and double bass player, White had always been averse to pop music. But hearing Queen's Don't Stop Me Now at the age of 11 was life-changing. Is it possible to say what struck him about it?
'It's more than possible,' he says, springing to his feet and cueing up the track. All at once, a cobwebbed anthem is re-invigorated by his running commentary. 'The second chord's unusual … This is a bit of timing fuckery here … Then a flat seven … His melody is great … Oh, statistically this never happens … Double-fast … Wait … Wait … There's no chorus on this song.' His jaw drops. The bass strings reappear on his forehead. 'It's got no chorus! It's just three verses one after another!'
That sort of commercial perversity is his sweet spot. It's what he strives for. 'You need it, otherwise you die creatively,' he says once the song ends. What's perverse about Chasing Pavements? 'Normally, when you've got a good chorus melody, you repeat it. And Adele changes the melody. Big fail.' What was his reaction when she did it? ''Nooo!'' he shrieks, hands outstretched as if he is the passenger in a crashing car. 'And the timings are all over the place. It goes three bars, not four. None of it is even slightly geometrical.' He gives a rueful sigh. 'I should be doing more of that kind of thing. Less safer work. I could use more bravery.'
Like his father, he is prone to talk as if he should run for the hills. 'There was a five-year period from 2003 where I was writing what people wanted to release: slower songs which take longer to unfold and have more real instruments and aren't about tightly controlled phrases and beautifully clean productions. There was a brief moment when that shit was flying, and thank God I made some money then. With the financial crash in 2008 came a fear about radio advertising. Tempos go up because you don't want to lose workplace listenership. The sort of stuff I write is in abeyance now. What was once a four-minute song has to fly as a seven-second clip on TikTok.'
I have the sensation of eavesdropping on an argument that has been raging in White's head since long before I rang his doorbell today. 'I think I'm blaming external stuff,' he decides finally. 'When in fact I would do well to have more nerve, 'Where are your guts, boy?''
AI is nipping at his heels, and it may be this that forces him to take the risks to which he is alluding. 'AI is built on human output, and most human output in this area is not perverse. So I'm determined to head to the edges because that will be less vulnerable to attack.'
Riding the missile, lighting the fuse, vulnerable to attack: White makes pop music sound like a health and safety nightmare. He makes it sound like war.
Midnight Cowboy is at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, from 4 April to 17 May
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