Signal To Noise

Last update: 12th September 2005

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Notes

This track was first performed live with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the VH1 Honors Awards on 28th April 1996. Unfortunately, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died before his could record his vocals in the studio. It is thought that his vocals on this track on 'Up' are taken from this 1996 performance.

This track has been performed live at the 1998 Paris Amnesty International concert with Youssou N'Dour and again at 2001 Seattle Womad with Iarla O'Lionaird.

The Virgin press release says that the "signal referred to is a sense of personal morality and compassion."

Richard Chappell on the production, "The Oxford backward samples on this... Peter likes to have treatments come back again through the Oxford and use the EQs on the console, which are pretty dynamic. So he'll take his keyboard track and a drum track through the EQ and do some passes of the whole song running an EQ filter across it."

Peter's Comments

"I've worked a little bit with strings before, but this is the first time I've taken some two and a half weeks on one string part. It was very exciting to then go into the studio and hear them played, even though many thousands of people have done it before me. So I guess that was one way in which Western or European music came back into this record."

On having Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing on the track, "It means a lot to me because he's like a Pavarotti figure - one of the great singers of our time."

"One of the new songs on the album is Signal To Noise and I think its quite a big, cinemascope journey, which not all the album is. I was very lucky to work with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who I think was one of the greatest singers of our time. This was a piece we managed to record with Nusrat and I think Signal To Noise, in part, is a cry for activism - in the sense that there's a lot of noise out there and the signal would be a sort of goal at the end."