Michael Head: 'I've never been happier in my life'

The singer and musician explains that he’d begun memorialising his early years in the Liverpool districts of Everton and Kensington and his time in the bands The Pale Fountains, The Strands and Shack long before a book deal was offered. But the process has been painstaking as he works in a “quite unorthodox” way, writing chapters and short stories by hand.

The deeper he got into it, he discovered he had ideas to spare. “I said to (the publisher) early doors I’m going to write it the way I talk. When I’d got my format I wasn’t picking the guitar up at all, I just got right into the writing, enjoying it, but when I was taking a break I was so absorbed with the content of what I’d been writing, being a songwriter and the way I’ve found as I’m getting older, these songs were just pouring out,” he says.

Ciao Ciao Bambino on the new album, for instance, was inspired by recollections of his mother singing the Connie Francis song of the same name to him, setting in train memories of childhood holidays on the coast. “As a songwriter I thought you don’t need much, you’re done,” he says.

Ambrosia, meanwhile, came to him while reminiscing about Shack. “I’m writing Shack chapters and we are in Switzerland with Dr Phibes and a band called Eat My Dog, we do get stopped in the Alps. As I’m writing Ambrosia unfortunately Tempo (the Shack drummer Iain Templeton) passed away, which made it more poignant finishing it off.”

The older he gets, Head says, “the more I get older I’m believing and understanding art. Dreams have always tapped into the way I write songs and the subconscious.”

He cites another chapter about the time in 1982 when The Pale Fountains were touring with Aztec Camera which in turn inspired him to write a song. “Me and Biffa (The Pale Fountains’ late bassist Chris McCaffery) were in awe of Roddy Frame, he recalls. “I was still learning my craft as guitarist and a songwriter but this kid was onstage and he was blowing me away with his proficiency on the guitar, his jazz chords. We went into the dressing room after the soundcheck and told Roddy, so he showed me a few chords and the Paleys songs changed after that because there were a few game-changing chords that he showed me and I thought this is the future, but there were one or two that I couldn’t play and my brain was saying to my fingers ‘you’re not going there’. That was 1982. So, 40 years later, when I writing these chapters I’m reminiscing about the time with Roddy Frame and I’m thinking what was that chord? I’m playing all these diminished suspended jazz chords and wrote You Smiled At Me and incorporated these chords within the song.

“So they bounced off each other, the book and some of the songs on the album.”

Loophole may have a wistful tone but there is plenty of joy within its grooves. Head agrees that it reflects where he is in his own life after his recovery from addiction to drink and drugs.

“For me personally I’ve never been happier in my life,” he says. “We had big moments with our kids obviously, having said that, but in sobriety you’ve got a chance to focus, to have a bit of clarity in what you’re doing. I’ve reconnected with the love of my life, we got married, I reconnected with my kids.

“When you’re a drunk you obviously don’t go with anybody. But I’m also focused with songwriting, so I’m in a good place in a just going forward level at my age.”

Where in the past Head’s albums have been punctuated by significant gaps, Loophole was completed at career record-breaking pace with his band. It arrives just two years after his previous album, Dear Scott. “I feel like the mindset of writing the songs of Dear Scott and then going into Loophole it was just a flow of a mindset, of an environment, of a collective of the Red Elastic Band, and my son Arlo, who’s done the artwork.

“I only realised as I’m getting older that when (Shack) were doing albums like Waterpistol and HMS Fable I’d be writing songs for the next album before the album was even finished. People would say ‘what’s that?’ You’d go, it’s just an idea. They say, ‘it’s too late to go on the album’ and I’d say, I know. It would invariably go on the next album.

“But this time, because of the environment and the mindset and the group of people – ​​​​what you get with Bill (Ryder-Jones, who produced the album) is incredible – and with the band, they’re beautiful young men who you could go and have a pint with individually and collectively, and they go inot a room and play some beautiful music with me, playing to the highest level, and when the girls are there as well singing, it’s great.”

Loophole is out on Friday May 3. Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band play at Leeds City Varieties on Saturday May 4.