CB: "And they toured with us in America for quite a long time. And he's an amazing writer – he had an amazing pedigree. He was in Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation Of Christ, he was an apostle in that – Martin Scorsese directed the videos, his backing band was The Band – I mean, that's not bad. And he was just an amazing writer."

JK: "Years later – so many years later – in fact last year, we got the chance to go back and tour in America and in that time, sadly Michael - fairly recently, had passed away, very sad. But we'd have loved the chance to hook up with him again or the chance to play with him again – but it wasn't to be. So on the last tour of the States indeed we played Let The Day Begin. It went down an absolute storm and sounded better than we ever imagined that it would. Pretty much within about twenty-four hours since coming back to these shores and landing at Heathrow we booked the studio in London and tried to capture it."

JK: "It's great to have it in the set, and great to have it on the album, and hopefully it's a great homage to Michael as well."

Band Interviews
Big Music Deluxe DVD

Martin Hanlin
The Real McCoy
KX 93.5

JK: It's a tremendous coincidence - if you look at my Facebook page today, I've posted a thing about Michael Been. And the reason I posted it today, is I'm in New York and I have good memories of being with Michael in New York.

JK: How did we get to know him? Well, we toured together two or three times. Although The Call were opening for Simple Minds, in our eyes Michael was like a mentor. He became a kind of mentor to us, not only because of his art and his music, but because he was older than us and he knew more about stuff and certainly America was still new to us. And to travel through America, to have him as a kind of guide, was really quite something. But I thought he was one of the great underrated songwriters. They were a great live band, too, and they just missed the kind of commercial success which I think they merited.

JK:: 'Let The Day Begin' is like a gospel for the working man. It's a song we played live a few times. I have to tell you, we've got a song called Waterfront, and Michael always loved that song. He'd say, 'Man, I love that.' The song itself is about the rebirth of our city in Glasgow. It talks about the water, and anyone listening might think it's Biblical. A baptism or something. Michael loved that song, and about a year later he came back and he said, 'I'm going to play you a few songs.' He played me 'Let The Day Begin,' but before I had the chance to say anything - because I wouldn't have said it, but I was thinking it - he said, 'It's not a million miles from Waterfront, is it?" And I said, 'No, it's not.'

JK:: It's got the same rhythm, but his song is much better. And we feel really proud to play it, especially to people that don't know it, therefore it's a kind of lost treasure. He sings on a song called Sanctify Yourself on Once Upon A Time. You can hear him bellowing in the background, doing his gospel thing.

Songfacts Interview
March 2018