‘I wrote it in a bedsit on Nick Drake’s guitar’: how Dream Academy made Life in a Northern Town

‘When I played it to Paul Simon, he suggested changing the title – saying, “No one’s going to know how to ask for A Hey Ah Ma Ma Ma in a record store”’

I was a part-time presenter on the first series of The Tube, with Jools Holland and Paula Yates. That was filmed in Newcastle, but they didn’t keep me on, so I went back down to London. It was so depressing. I’d been in a band called the Act with Gilbert Gabriel, our keyboards player – one day we sat strumming guitars in his bedsit and decided to come up with “a big, African-style chant chorus”.

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