M&SR: When you go to write, do you sit down at the piano and figure out a melody, or do the words come first? Do you find a sound you like and write a song around it?
Heap: Usually they don’t come all at once. At the moment, I’ve got lots of tiny, little 10-second ideas that, say in a sound check I was just messing around and then a melody comes into my head while I’m playing the mbira or while I’m just singing into my vocal sampler. Then an idea will pop out while I’m playing something on the piano and I’ll play a loop on that. On my laptop, I use GarageBand to just quickly record an idea. So there are tons of things in there. Most of it’s crap but every now and then, if I have to write a song…like “Speeding Cars,” I had this one line that I loved so much. I had no idea what it was about. But then it was sitting in my head for quite a while and it just became apparent when I had four days to do a b-side.
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M&SR: Is it true you had to re-mortgage your home in order to get your latest CD out there?
Heap: I did…well I didn’t have to but I chose to. Actually, no, I did have to [laughs]. The reason why I had to was because I’d just finished with the Frou Frou album and I was going to do another solo record. I’d been offered deals by the people I was signed to at the time and, to be honest, I just felt I’d had enough of this. I really felt like they’d messed up Frou Frou big time, and I just wasn’t prepared to spend another four years making a record and then for them to tell me, “Oh sorry, I don’t really think it’s working. We’re not going to release a single.” I just wasn’t prepared to do that. That’s happened to me twice, on the last two albums that I’ve done. But this one, I just wanted to make my own luck, basically. I believed that it can’t be that difficult. How difficult could it be? If you write what I think is great music, how could it be so difficult to get people to buy it, if it is good? And I believed that it was, because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. So yeah, I didn’t want to sign another deal with them so we just agreed to let me go, which was good because they could’ve been bastards about it. And then I went to try and get some money and realized that side of it wasn’t so easy, being an unpaid musician who doesn’t have a job anymore. I’ve never actually had a job. So when I tried to get a loan, they’re like, “But you’ve never had an income. You have certain amounts here and there, but we can’t give you a loan with that.” So now I couldn’t get any money to do the record. When I came back, kind of feeling a bit rubbish about it all, I saw a “for sale” sign at the bottom of my flat. It was for a two-bedroom apartment, which was the same size as mine. I asked them how much it was going for and they said it was 230,000, which is twice the amount I bought mine for. So then I re-mortgaged it, got the cash out for the profit that I made, and I made the record with that cash, basically. So I have a larger mortgage, but that’s how I did it.
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