PJ Moore & Co: 'I wanted to acknowledge what was happening'

A collaboration with fellow Scots Malcolm Lindsay, a composer who has won awards for his music for film and television, and Mike McKenzie, BBC Singer Songwriter of the Year in 2019, their debut album, Until a Good Day Comes, is a quietly affecting collection of songs that burrows deeper under the skin with each listen.

Moore, now 66, first met Lindsay, 56, in 2006 when he was seeking help for 3D visuals to accompany a piece of music he had written on the Scottish mathematician and scientist James Clerk Maxwell. Virtual reality was an area that Lindsay was researching at the time. “He just seemed a remarkable man and open to all avenues and we became friends,” Moore says.

For long-time Blue Nile fan Lindsay, the chance to meet someone whose worked he had admired “for a number of years” appealed. “I have very strong memories of hearing their first album in 1984 and being taken aback by it and loving it,” he says. “There was things coming out of the music that was hard to tie down, it seemed to be communicating in a different way from other music at that time.”

In more recent years they have become neighbours in Glasgow, and would regularly meet up for a coffee, yet Moore was hesitant to ask Lindsay if they might make some music together. “Malcolm was always so busy and I wasn’t formulating anything apart from the Maxwell project which I was intending to be a live event...but eventually we wrote the odd song together. That was when he persuaded me to get some songs off my hard drive. I wouldn’t have done it without him.”

Their first musical project was an operatic soundtrack for the film Dark Water, for which Lindsay asked Moore to write words. “I had this idea for an operatic score which would contribute to the generation of the film, Lindsay says. “I asked PJ to write the libretto and he made a fantastic job, I must say. He produced a flawless libretto at the first attempt, I was completely floored. Then we recorded the album Dark Water with Scottish Opera.”

Writing conventional pop songs, however, was a greater challenge for Moore. “I was never a writer in the band (The Blue Nile),” he says, explaining those duties mainly fell to singer Paul Buchanan and Moore’s fellow synthesiser player Robert Bell. Back in 1983 when the band were making A Walk Across The Rooftops, even a £5,000 drum machine was unaffordable “unless you had Kate Bush’s money”, so Moore, who “knew a little bit about electronics”, found his niche “cobbling things together” in engineer Calum Malcolm’s studio. “At that time there were a bunch of people straining at the leash to think what can you do, if it’s going to be electronic then you’ve got this template available, what kind of pictures can you paint,” he recalls.

What started him writing his own pieces of music was, he says: “I found myself in a draughty old house with a laptop there...Eventually I found I had a tune in my head so I started recording things.”

The kernel for the album came from Moore’s song All That You Wanted, which Lindsay was “so enthusiastic” about when he shared it with him. “I think he could hear that it's got a spring, it's got an engine, despite his deep experience in all types of productions, you can't figure out what makes it tick.”

Lindsay then encouraged Moore to start digging further through his hard drives. “I was curious to hear what he’d done, being a great fan of his music in the past,” he says.

The oldest song on the album, When A Good Day Comes, Moore originally wrote for Celtic Connections in 2011 following a commission from Donald Shaw of Capercaillie, who was then the festival’s artistic director. “They really wanted to do an evening of Celtronica,” he recalls. “I decided to do something that I hadn't done, which was to do a very simple song with electronic pop materials...The drumbeat came from a Stylophone drum box, I just made it an exercise for myself, but lo and behold they liked the song.” The lyrical refrain “I’ll rest and be thankful” refers to “a hill in Scotland which I always call the Rest and Be Thankful, I think it’s from the olden days you had to stop for a rest,” he says. “Maybe that was the start when I thought if I do stuff on the computer I should at least give it a name.”

The record progressed during lockdown when Moore found himself wanting to “acknowledge what was happening, just thinking this is kind of unprecedented”. He and Lindsay would share sound files; during a video call Moore decided to make it about “how basically we're all in this together in a heap with the Tories, it's happening to us all”.

The song Good Until It's Gone recognises the universality of isolation during lockdown. “People had different things they were dealing with: maybe you've got a big family and that's difficult, maybe you've got nobody then that's difficult.”

Moore picks Halfway Crazy as his favourite song on the album. It is, he says, “the only song on the album that didn't originate from me”. “I wrote the piano for that and PJ wrote the lyrics,” Lindsay says. “We originally wrote it for an artist who I produced called Heather Hind.”

“The melody suggested itself and I managed to get away with only 15 words,” Moore says. “It's the simplicity of it. There's a repetitive phrase but it's with a different meaning and shading every time.”

The record was completed as they emerged from lockdown. “I put aside four months from September to December to try to finish the album, it was pretty intense but a very enjoyable and trouble-free experience,” Lindsay recalls. “I worked very smoothly with PJ, we were finished each other’s musical sentences by then. We didn’t have a vocalist but we’d finished the instrumentals and PJ had done a sketch vocal.”

To sing the songs, the pair approached Mike McKenzie, who had a growing reputation after winning the BBC Singer Songwriter of the Year competition in 2019. Finding that "any plans he had were stalled" during the pandemic, McKenzie agreed. "He's so positive and active," Moore says. "He brings a lot of energy. He's (normally) so busy, we were lucky he was able to fit us in."

"He demoed a track to us and there were a couple of bits of that which I thought were stunning in terms of the delivery, the appropriateness to the music he was singing along to,” says Lindsay. “We then tried to tie him down but of course he’s a busy guy so we had to wait two months until he had a free spot. He came to the studio and within four days we had all the vocals finished. From a standing start to the last note in four days was astonishingly quick.”

As for whether the band will ever play live, Lindsay says: “I’m definitely open to offers, it would be great to have the album heard in as many ways as possible. Trying to tour from a standing start is complicated, especially these days, but if somebody came along with a suggestion, I wouldn’t fight against it, certainly.”

Until a Good Day Comes is out on September 22. www.pjmooreandco.com