by Peter Moore

Number Two – Brendan Benson: Tiny Spark

In around November of 2002, I was living in the north east of England being chilled to the bone in a tumbledown student house that didn’t possess any effective type of heating, and which rattled to the foundations when anyone slammed the front door.

Ostensibly I was spending my time doing a history degree, but in reality I was busying myself with the more familiar trappings of student life: drinking beer from a vase, incinerating the occasional pizza and waking up long after it had gone dark. Still, I was being productive in the occasional fit of creativity– writing up gig reviews for the student newspaper and magazines in London; one of which called our house telephone one afternoon, and asked whether I could do an interview with an American singer songwriter who was playing in the area. He was called Brendan Benson.

The venue wasn’t glamorous, it was a half forgotten town hall in a smoky northern town named Middlesbrough; a place where the locals ordered themselves a pint of lager, drank the drink, then ate the glass. But, for me, Middlesborough town hall was to become a significant milestone in my musical education.

Benson was a wiry thirty-year old, something of a genetic mish-mash between James Dean and Brains from Thunderbirds. He had just returned to music after three year hiatus, triggered by a dispute with his record label in the late ‘90s, who’d ungratefully dumped him months after claiming that he was ‘The New Beck.’

He was candid, wistful and funny, if not a touch timorous. I’d gone along that evening with my girlfriend, and Benson responded to our ironic gifts of a jar of Marmite and a Chocolate Orange with an almost childish fascination for obscure detail.

‘My grandmother used to give me these for Christmas,’ he exclaimed, as his face lit up like a firework.

Anyway, kicking around a box in my bedroom somewhere is an hour long recording of an interview with the man who would go on to form The Raconteurs, would work as a producer for the White Stripes and would act as a mentor for the majority of the good bands to roll out of Detroit.

Maybe, I’ll write that up one day again. But, here for the moment, is the lead single for the album that he was touring that evening in Middlesborough. The album was called Lapalco and this song is titled Tiny Spark. It was later voted by Q Magazine as one of the top 500 singles of all time.