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‘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’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”. After I finished my music degree I was working as a TV researcher when my friend Virginia Astley asked me to join the Ravishing Beauties. When we did Top of the Pops, they gave the audience daffodils to wave Unfortunately, the Ravishing Beauties split up, but I met Nick at a party at the Royal Institute of British Architects, of all places.

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