Akira The Don takes us track-by-track through his debut album When We Were Young.
Last updated: 27 November 2008
Liverpool
"My most personal song, my mam's least favourite, 91Èȱ¬ Radio Wales DJ Adam Walton's track of the year in his 2005 Christmas chart, Keith Tenniswood's favourite remix of the same year, and the perfect, bittersweet setup for the LP."
Clones
"Increasingly huge, the Alice Cooper-sampling club SMASH continues to tear its ugly way across the globe, recently popping up quite graphically, and prominently, in a strip club scene in "the biggest TV show since Baywatch", CSI.
"Originally I wasn't going to have any other emcees on the LP, striving as I was for purity of expression, but I had to make an exception for North West London's prodigiously talented Bashy."
Oh! What A Glorious Thing
"A perfectly realised exercise in writing The Perfect Pop Song, according to KLF's The Manual, "Oh!..." has already been featured in a Hollywood blockbuster (Ivan Reichman's My Super Ex Girlfriend, during a scene when Uma Thurman and Eddie Izzard get it on, weirdly) and got me a load of free dentistry. It is also the new single out 11 September. Fittingly enough."
Love
This track was recorded with a 12-piece orchestra, which filled me with joy and tears at the time.
Akira The Don
"This track was recorded with a 12-piece orchestra, which filled me with joy and tears at the time. It's about being little, in love, and how, much as you think age will bring you wisdom with regards to matters of the heart, it actually doesn't at all.
"Annoyingly, things remain as confusing as they did the first time you ever touched the warm hand of a pretty other. So it goes. The song itself, whist being the most distinctly un-gangsta rap song EVER is notably the only one on the LP I did beat boxing on."
Bankers
"In Welsh primary schools in the late eighties, children used to encourage each other to put their fingers in the corners of their mouths, yank them open, and recite, "my dad's a banker and he banks all day." Which was hilarious then, and remains so now. As a grown up, discovering the true nature of those that run our world, I have found the statement to be entirely factual."
Thanks For All The Aids
"After the grotesque, self-congratulatory, bugger-all-accomplishing festival of Western decadence that was last year's Live 8, Jarvis Cocker wrote "C***s are still running the world." Which is true. I wrote Thanks For All The Aids, a heartfelt, if entirely sarcastic, God-sized pop song dedicated to the entirely lunatic population reducing achievements of Henry Kissinger, the World Bank, the Catholic church etc.
"This is the song that set the alarm bells ringing at Interscope, $200,000 into their budget. "What the f**k are you saying?" demanded one possibly hearing impaired marketing person, as I recall."
London
"Like all the other autobiographical songs on my album, this is a factual story about moving to London aged 19. It was also the first full song - music and words - I wrote, using a £15 midi keyboard, Acid (which is computer software, not drugs), and a pen. The hook is sung by Lois Winstone, daughter of Ray, and the entirely massive sound can be credited to the dream-realising genius of Danny Saber."
Back In The Day
"Co-produced with Emile (Ghostface, Eminem, Obie Trice, MOP) and recorded at New York's legendary Cutting Room - birthplace of such masterpieces as Cuban Linx and Capital Punishment - with Kay Slay and Papoose in the next studio, this is the second least gangsta rap record ever.
"It's about growing up in a valley in North Wales, and the spirit-crushing nature of our dear school system. It also features a choir of excitable English pre-pubescents."
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I am told this song is controversial to some people, but then ankles are controversial to some people.
Akira The Don
"As an ex-Roman Catholic, I am constantly being told I am going to hell, so I don't see anything wrong in me saying I am going nowhere of the sort. And neither are you. Well, not nowhere.
"I suspect when I die I shall re-enter the cosmos from which I came, and mingle with everything and eternity for ever more, but I might not. I am told this song is controversial to some people, but then ankles are controversial to some people."
Dead Babies
"This is a sad song, but beautiful, and epic, on a Jim Steinman level. It's about being young and getting pregnant, or getting people pregnant, and the resulting loss of life, and of love.
"In America, there are really pissed off people who murder those who practice abortion, whist simultaneously supporting a war that has cost the lives of untold thousands of BORN babies. It is all very sad."
Hypocrite
"Danny Saber and I co-wrote this. It channels the spirit of Black Grape (RIP) via the glacial beauty of Howard Jones, and the gutter funk of the Wu.
"Lyrically it concerns my entirely human habit of being a bit crap at all manner of things I really know better than to be crap about. My guitarist Jeres says it is a cop out. I say it is the TRUTH."