“Yeah, I particularly chose that take for that reason.” There had been five takes in all, and the session only lasted an hour. Self narrates this autobiographical piece with suitably grim relish. Simenon’s dark- hearted dub-industrial backing track is the perfect sound environment for the novelist’s ravaged but lugubrious voice.I mentioned to Simenon that I thought his collaborator seemed constantly on the verge of cracking up as he dolefully intoned the refrain: “Sometimes I wonder / if I might be losing / my incident room” Simenon beamed with pleasure. Self turned up looking and feeling more than usually cadaverous; he had “the most appalling hangover”.
All good rock ‘n’ roll stuff, as is the script. The one they chose after a quick look through four alternatives wickedly describes shooting up with the scum from a morphine-kaolin precipitate.Among its more gruesome moments are a description of using the monster- sized 5ml hypodermic in order to hit an artery “in the groin”.

The recording of 5ml Barrel was, they both agree, a “surreal” experience. It took place at the Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham late last year. They don’t deal with normality.” Self in turn reports that he is “extremely flattered to have been part of such a good record”. The novelist Will Self and Bomb the Bass whizz-kid Tim Simenon have just recorded a track together, and are full of wonder at the experience. “We couldn’t be more different,” Simenon observes, “but I like that I was attracted to the mad humour of Will’s books. Don’t think country, don’t think rock ‘n’ roll, don’t think pop, don’t think nothing. Just think music.”Recording was over in four days, and the magnificent result is proof that marketable country doesn’t have to be sung by overproduced young guns Some songs were caught in one take, most others in two “If we’d have done ‘em again we would have slicked it But it’s raw, it’s like really raw and it’s ragged And that’s what I am: I look that way and I am that way.”.

I’ll sing and play my guitar and you follow me, but you play what you’ve always thought you wanted to hear. If you want to try something you’ve always wanted to try, now’s your chance. He hired Don Was, who helped revive Nelson’s career, as producer; but it was Was’s pedigree as a bass player that recommended him. “He and Buddy are the two guys I’ve met in my life that live in the pocket. Buddy was a rhythm man: once he got in that thing, you were locked in. Don Was, too.”For Waymore’s Blues (Part II), Jennings assembled a set of his own wise, witty songs and briefed his session musicians: “You’ve heard my records Try to forget all of that.

“My last day,” he says, “I’ll have to cause them some kind of problem.”After they lovingly produced a boxed set of his best work, Jennings agreed to re-join RCA to record his latest album, on condition that they let him do things his way. The Highwaymen, the splendid troubadour supergroup also starring Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, and whose third album is released next month, pitch themselves as the bad ole boys in an industry interested only in printing money. In 1974 he founded the Outlaw movement with fellow square peg Willie Nelson and entered his most fruitful period. Nelson moved back to Texas, but believing that “it weren’t no way to win if you move away”, Jennings “stayed right in their face until they gave up”.Even today, he’s a thorn in the side of executive Nashville. You had to use their producer, musicians they picked, the songs they picked, and they expected you to dress like they wanted.” This might explain the searing turquoise shirt he’s wearing now: it’s probably a protest garment.The hits – including daring covers of the Beatles, Jimmy Webb and Dylan – accumulated, but the rage remained.

He moved to Nashville in the mid-Sixties and “walked right into a wasps’ nest. They had such a nice system that worked for everybody, but it didn’t work for me You’d take four songs and do ‘em in three hours. It seems like a business that’s supposed to be so happy, and bring so much joy to people, can draw more bad people than anything I ever saw.”Jennings lay low in Arizona for two years, then started performing again At one show, Herb Alpert saw him and signed him to A&M Then Chet Atkins took him to RCA. I took my guitar over to my mother’s house and just dropped it It’s like snakes in the grass. They promised to fly them back to the funeral, but didn’t – “I thought if I ever get off of this I’ll never mess with music again. It is an anger that 20 years on drugs, detoxification, seven packs a day, cardiac surgery, marriage and seven children have done nothing to alleviate.
After the crash, the promoters running the tour implored Jennings and others to carry on performing. In 1979 his Greatest Hits was the first country album to go quadruple platinum.