Ahead of my catch-up with The Beat co-founder Dave Wakeling, I dug out an interview he did with Adrian Thrills for the NME, alongside the sorely missed Ranking Roger when the pair were at the helm of The General Public, supporting Queen on The Works tour in Dublin in late August 1984.
“Oh, my heavens! We were thinking it was the Queen that had just done the song with David Bowie, kind of hip and dancy, so thought, ‘It’s a stretch but should be alright.’ But for the live show it was very much the heavy metal fans’ ‘let’s pretend he’s not gay’ show, which always stunned me. So we didn’t really go down that well. I think we went down a bit better in Dublin than other places, but even Birmingham was tough work.
“And at the end of the English run, I said, ‘We really can’t do any more, we’re going down terrible, they’re shouting at us, we’re not even doing our job warming the crowd up, because we’re not their flavour. I said I didn’t want to do the European part of the tour… and we didn’t – we got fired by the agency instead, U2’s agents too. I think it had been done as a favour, some bloke at Virgin was the brother-in-law of the drummer of Queen, although it didn’t really fit together and everybody knew that. But when the obvious became obvious and people were waving ‘fuck off’ fingers at us, I did what I thought was the decent thing, and I’m afraid we got punished for the favour.
“But Adrian Thrills was a lovely chap. We had great conversations over the years, great interviews, and I was always particularly pleased when he got to review the albums, because he’d got a deft touch of picking out the lyrics that were meant to be the most important ones. I was always proud of him for that. Anybody who compliments you in the right way, that’s alright by me!”
A couple of quotes from that interview stand out, including one where Roger said, ‘One of the reasons The Beat split up was that we weren’t hungry anymore. I’m always hungry.’ With the benefit of 40 years’ hindsight, that was a big move to make, The Beat splitting at that point (1983), restarting with a fresh venture after three great albums in as many years.
“At the time, there wasn’t much of an alternative. It wasn’t such great bravery. A couple of the other lads wanted two years off, and were quite adamant about it, and we were trying to do a record deal with Virgin, who became aware of this. And they {bass player David Steele and guitarist Andy Cox} had good reason, they said it was ‘more planes than buses’ and just wanted to go shopping, not be recognised, buy some food, cook it and go back to bed, live a real life. They were worried we’d start writing songs about being on Rock ‘n’ Roll Boulevard, believing the lifestyle to the point it would become our reality and we’d be singing songs about it.
“But me and Roger had just started having babies and the money up to that point had been split equally amongst the band, so everybody had done okay but nobody had really got enough to not do anything for a couple of years… so we didn’t really have much option.
“It had been dying on the vine. You couldn’t get anything done. What had been spontaneous and enthusiastic was now torturous and hard to do. Now the only thing I’ve learned in the last 40 years is that maybe I just badgered them to death, and they were just sick of it. Ha! So you do learn some things in retrospect.
“I was called down to Virgin Records – just me – and the bloke said, ‘The Beat don’t want to do a record deal. We know, we’ve been trying, and every time we get close you think of something else. Now we hear the group wants two years off. You’re pissing us about.’ I said, ‘There’s differences of opinion and we’re trying to work out the best way to go forward.’ And he said, ‘The Beat’s over, finished. Do you want a record deal with Virgin?’ I said, ‘I could do with one. I just got a kid.’
“He said, ‘Is there anybody you’d bring with you?’ I said, ‘Well, David Steele’s the genius, but it’s him who wants two years off.’ He said, ‘What about Roger?’ I said, ‘Me and Roger still get on great. We’re still roommates.’ He said, ‘Well, Virgin think you and Roger have still got some juice in you, and we’d be willing to give it a go.’
“I went down in history as the executioner of The Beat – I gave birth to it and killed it. But it wasn’t really that simple. I was more like the undertaker who had to come in and clean up the mess! The Beat had been dead on its feet for a while. We weren’t going anywhere, we weren’t doing anything. We thought it was just to do with exhaustion and musical issues, but looking back over the decades, parts of each of us got tired of parts of the others.”
I guess that was the case with your General Public bandmates too, Horace {Panter} from The Specials, and Stoker {Andrew Growcott} and Mickey {Billingham} from Dexy’s.
“Well, we found ourselves in this situation, and thought, ‘What should we do? We should get a group,’ then all of a sudden we were in a different position, and our friend from The Specials who played the bass was looking for a gig, and our friend who played the drums in Dexy’s was looking for a gig, as was his mate, the piano player. It went from, ‘Let’s look around locally for musicians,’ to creating a new wave Humble Pie, a sort of blue ribbon, transatlantic rock, the Blind Faith of the ‘80s.”
At that point, Dave is side-tracked, turning back the clock to the Summer of ’69 and London’s 1968/71 series of free concerts in Hyde Park.
“I hitchhiked from Birmingham to Hyde Park to watch that first Blind Faith show {June 7th, 1969}. Stevie Winwood was a Brummie, so we went down to support him, see how well Eric Clapton could do with one of our heroes. Ha! It wasn’t the greatest show I ever hitchhiked to Hyde Park for, but it was alright…”
There were some memorable shows there around then, not least what served as the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones memorial show, four weeks later.
“That was the best one, but hitchhiking as a young teenager was the bit that was most exciting to me. You could pretend you were in an American film, barrelling to places with very exotic names. When I look back, it’s remarkable that we did have a society where 14/15-year-olds could hitchhike… and probably most of them got there and back!”
After that time-travelling segue, we’re back on track, with our first proper mention of Dave’s 2023 take on The Beat (stylised The English Beat across the Atlantic) and their 20-date UK tour, Annabella Lwin’s latest line-up of Bow Wow Wow supporting, as was the case with The General Public 40 years ago this very month.
I should have had this interview online a while ago, but life took over and they’re already some way into the itinerary. However, there are still plenty of chances to catch them, a schedule starting on May 26th at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill including Monday night’s hometown show for Dave at the Town Hall in Birmingham (June 12th), a visit to Chalk Farm’s iconic Roundhouse four days later, and concluding at Cardiff’s Great Hall on June 30th.
This latest tour follows last year’s sold-out run for The Beat, Dave’s overriding message of ‘two tone love and unity’ clearly bringing in the numbers amid ‘testing times’ where ‘connection and community are a great comfort.’
When we spoke, he was still at his adopted base in the San Fernando Valley in California, looking forward to his latest trip over.
“I’m coming back to England in a couple of days, and it’s always exciting. I get trepidatious, build up my expectations beyond reason, but it usually works out fine. I’m at that phase in my life though, where if things have changed in Birmingham and I frankly don’t know where I am, it reminds me of my dad. When I got to be a pop star, I bought him a car. Not a brand new one, because he’d not driven, but a Cortina because he was a Ford bloke. I thought he’d enjoy tootling around town. But I noticed when I went to visit, the car didn’t look like it had moved. I asked if it was running alright, and he said, ‘Oh, ah, I turned it over yesterday.’ I said, ‘You’re not using it much then?’ ‘Nah, not so much.’ I said, ‘I thought you’d be enjoying it.’ His voice cracked a bit and he said, ‘Dave, last time I couldn’t find me bleeding way ‘ome! It’s all changed. I don’t recognise the roads.’ He’d gone uptown, and there was a new set of islands and ring roads.”
I know the feeling. An M6 closure on my way back from Surrey to Lancashire recently saw me exit at Sutton Coldfield, trying to skirt the city to get back on at Walsall. I failed and ended up re-joining the motorway after experiencing Sunday afternoon queues near Aston. All that spaghetti, a bit confusing for mere mortals from out of town.
“In some cities they do that on purpose. Boston, for example, was designed convolutedly so only the natives would know their way round, and directions are more a suggestion! There’s any number of poor ways you can get from one place to another, but that means any invading army would have just as much difficulty getting to the centre.”
We last spoke in April 2018, and it’s fair to say a lot’s happened since, whether we’re talking the UK, your adopted homeland, or wherever.
“A lot of things, almost as if the pandemic was a full stop, a turning point or something. It made all the things that were great about our society better, people helping each other, and everything that’s bad about our society way worse, with anybody who wasn’t in on the team getting as greedy as they could, stripping the assets while everybody was struggling. It brought out the best and the worst, didn’t it.”
There was certainly polarisation, whether we’re talking Brexit Britain or Trump’s America.
“Very similar. It’s interesting. When things get scary, people who in the past screamed about the importance of their independence start gravitating towards authoritarian figures. ‘We need you to tell us how to be free!’ Whilst that’s a contradiction and it would be easy to ridicule, you have to understand that the working class particularly do this out of fear. When things get bad, we start to look around for a strong man.
“It’s happened endless times, it never works, they never get what they want from this, but it gives them an outlet for their anger. They’re angry at the world they’re in, and you’ll do! It’s like the drunk in the pub. ‘I’ve no problem with you, but you’ll do.’ And it starts to spread hate amongst anybody that’s different from them, as if somehow they’ve decided they’re the norm – what everyone else has to be judged against. There’s your first problem, innit, mate!”
What does Dave miss most about Birmingham, as a long-time US citizen? A pie and a pint perhaps?
“Sadly, not the pint. I’ve missed them a bit too much in my past, so have to keep away, and I’ve put on a lot of weight. Fish and chips are quite important, although I’ve become like my mum – I don’t need many chips. It’s awful when you hear your mum and dad’s sayings coming back! Pies and Jamaican patties are quite important.
“I like the clouds, puffy white cotton wool clouds, which you don’t see much here in California, so that seems very English to me. And all those 50 shades of grey clouds, making you think the world had already ended and you didn’t have to worry about that – it had already happened.
“Irony. I miss irony. We don’t have as much here. I do enjoy it when English people say the exact opposite of what they mean, pull a certain face, and you know exactly that they mean the opposite of what they’ve just said. Sadly, if you do that over here, people tend to take it literally. ‘That’s a nice shirt on you, did you buy it yourself?’ ‘Oh, wow, you like it? That’s cool.’ I found that particularly difficult when I was a youth soccer coach. Irony, I thought would be very useful with younger players who sometimes got confused about what colour shirt your team was wearing and played a beautiful pass to one of the others. But if you tried to use irony there, it completely missed.
“I do follow British politics… from an amused difference. I feel I did my bit. I sang ‘Stand Down Margaret’ and wrote down exactly what was going to happen if they went down that path. Now, 40 very odd years later, you’ve got Brexit, shit in the rivers, and yes, we have no tomatoes. Billionaires are picking the carcass. It’s exactly what you could see was going to happen if we followed trickle-down.
“It’s post-capitalist now. They know very little is going to happen to them if they get caught. It’ll get bound up in some inquiry. It’s become brazen, but just because somebody gets away with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t break the fragile sacred bonds of society.”
We could have carried on down that road, Broken Brexit Britain Avenue, but it was time to return to the main gist, and I brought up how his latest publicity material suggests the band formed in 1979, the first single – a memorable take on Motown classic ‘Tears of a Clown’ – having hit the charts that December, the first of five UK top-10 hits over the next three and a half years. Surely it all came together the previous year though, 45 years ago.
“That’s right. In fact, we started meeting up in the summer of ‘77. That’s when we met David Steele. And in 1978, we moved back to Birmingham. Me and Andy thought we’d escaped Birmingham, but David Steele insisted we had to go back to Birmingham to form the band because there wasn’t enough of a pool of musicians nor gigs to play on the Isle of Wight.”
I should break in and explain that David Steele hailed from Cowes on the Isle of Wight, his namesake working on the island when they met, making solar panels in Blackgang (where the ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ was written, I believe). Back to the two Davids’ tale though…
“Being of punk purity, David Steele said one gig is worth 1,000 rehearsals, because you’ve got to be real in front of people. You can’t practise pretence. So we went back to Birmingham in ’78, started practising – Tuesday nights, once a week – and got jobs that kind of supported it so we could buy gear, and we found Everett {Morton}, our drummer. By the end of ‘78, we were ready, according to David Steele, because we’d got eight songs – that’s all you needed. If you needed more, you were lying!
“We started up there at the end of March ’79, the same weekend as the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown incident in Pennsylvania. At the time, nobody was quite sure how it was going to end up. It was ongoing, they’d never put one out like this before and wondered, would it burn a hole all the way through to the centre of the Earth? Accordingly, we were introduced as the hottest thing since the Pennsylvania meltdown. So it was a case of, ‘This lot are going to be political.’ Born on an auspicious day.”
There’s another parallel with The Clash, Joe Strummer moved to write ‘London Calling’ as a result of that incident, The Beat having toured with them too, and Mick Jones having featured extensively on The General Public’s All the Rage.
“I was a huge fan of The Clash. I knew it wasn’t pure punk, but I enjoyed the rock ‘n’ roll cartoon of it, and I thought they did the American rock ‘n’ roll, ‘Oh, look, my shirt’s not done up’ fantastically. Ha! I really liked it – the songs and the lyrics. Then, as if in a dream, The Beat were opening for The Clash for a week in Paris, in a theatre closing down that week – the crowd allowed to destroy the theatre.
“So then they were my mates, and then we were on tour in America, and we played the Us Festival together, where I stood at the side of the stage next to Digby, their famous guitar roadie, watching Mick Jones from a few feet away, one of my guitar heroes – who eventually played lead guitar on many General Public songs – not knowing I was watching the very last Clash show. And I don’t think any of us knew!
“Very odd – from just being in the crowd, thinking they were fantastic, and I’d never be good enough to be in a group, I then became their mate. Not as much as Roger. They liked having their picture taken with him… and he liked it, too. But I did manage to creep into a few photos, and it always looked like – in a photograph with The Clash – you were discussing how to solve the last few remaining problems in the world! It was that serious, and weighted – spokespeople for a generation. Although all you were doing was having a cup of tea and a cigarette! But when it’s a black and white photograph by Pennie Smith, it’s, ‘Ooh, I bet they’re talking about something serious!’”
Conversely, when The Undertones look back on their live travels with The Clash, they say they felt more like giggling, star-struck fan kids in their company.
“Yeah! ‘Look, we’re in a group!’ We took a lot of that attitude from The Undertones and Buzzcocks though, like Slade before them, they didn’t forget where they came from, wore the same clothes as the fans, which you could buy in shops (they weren’t designed especially), and you could find them at the bar, having a fag and a pint with the fans after the show. We appreciated that, and they were two of the best examples of perfect two-minute punk singles. They could be that sharp and adroit, but they could still hang with people from where they came from. We liked that and often used it as an example of how we tried to be, always making ourselves accessible to fans, never charging for meet and greets, for example. But if you want a fag out the back, we’ll be there in about 20 minutes!”
At this point we’re off on another meander off the subject – my fault for mentioning how when it came to editing a book on Bruce Springsteen, I loved the early tales of Asbury Park, the Stone Pony, and his New Jersey roots, but couldn’t get excited by the 21st century tales of corporate sponsorship meet and greet situations with The Boss in record stores and large stadia.
“Oh, I adore that place! I go there a lot. We use Asbury Park as our East Coast base when playing around New York, because – especially off-season – you can still get hotels for $140 a night, and it’s quite deserted, although it’s picking up now it’s become a gay centre, with a lot more restaurants. It’s starting to pick up, but in winter it’s still quite desolate and deserted.
“I like Southside Johnny better. I saw the first Bruce Springsteen tour when he came. We’d heard a live tape from the Bottom Line in New York, 1974, and it was like, ‘Let’s see if he can do it in Birmingham, at the Odeon, and the opening band came on with a big brass section, and I was like, this is going to take some following. Then Bruce came on, and was okay, but wasn’t quite as on fire as the cassette we’d been listening to. It didn’t resonate. It didn’t seem as real to me as Southside Johnny. It seemed a pretence. It was good, but I felt this bloke’s pretending that he’s barrelling down Misfortune Boulevard, whereas Southside Johnny sang like he’d been through a rough period! And I loved the brass. I did go on to like Springsteen, but when I walk the boardwalk I’m more likely to reach for the Asbury Dukes than the E-Street Band on iTunes.”
And back to those meet and greets…
“It might be akin to the same feelings we’ve expressed about the political situation, when something becomes overtly corrupt or overtly maximising the profit potential of this experience, you walk in there more as a target than a human being. You’ve been marketed to that point. I’ve done a few meets and greets, because sadly, sometimes concerts insist on it – they’ve already sold the tickets. But I feel embarrassed, so try and do them as differently as possible.
“I won’t sit behind the table, I’ll walk round the crowd, let them take their own photographs, not in front of the corporate logos. They say thank you, but I can see they’re seething at me and I end up with most of the ‘meeters’ and ‘greeters’ talking their heads off with me because I’m just being real, as if I was having a fag round the back, whereas those that have been sold a meet and greet, the people who sold them that ticket do not care whether they get meeted or greeted. All that matters is they get a photograph that makes it look like they have. Sometimes they never get to speak to the person they paid to meet and greet. They just get shoved, photographed, then moved along. I rail against it like a socialist in the 1940s! And when I leave, they all go, ‘Bloody prima donna!’
I like to think that’s your punk DIY spirit coming through after all these years.
“I do have some of that still, and it fits sometimes even less into this co-opted corporate society. And the price of some tickets now is even worse with some sites over here – you can buy a ticket and put it straight on the auction block. People are using concert tickets as short-term investments, turning over a ticket. ‘I bought two at $100. I got $500 for one, $700 for the other.’”
In the early days of their success, The Beat formed toured alongside The Specials, Madness and The Selecter, going on to release three hit albums.
They went on to tour the world with The Clash, The Police, The Specials, The Pretenders, REM, Talking Heads, and David Bowie, that initial hit with ‘Tears of a Clown’ their first of eight top-40 UK singles, including fellow top-10s ‘Mirror In The Bathroom’, ‘Can’t Get Used To Losing You’, ‘Hands Off… She’s Mine’ and ‘Too Nice To Talk To’, while the band defined an era with ‘Stand Down Margaret’.
As for sublime debut LP, I Just Can’t Stop It, released in late May 1980 (the first of two that reached No.3 in the UK), they seemed so tight even then, I suggested, despite having not spent a lot of time together in relative terms. But I suppose there was an array of ages and levels of experience within the ranks, older hands Everett Morton (drums) and Saxa (sax) aged 29 and 50 respectively (the latter with added pedigree from playing with Prince Buster, Laurel Aitken and Desmond Dekker), Roger barely 17, David Steele 19, and my interviewee and Andy both 24. Perhaps a fair bit of credit for that early polish needs to go to producer Bob Sargeant (who was involved with all three LPs), but they already seemed fully formed.
“We’d done a lot of shows, but we’d only got what was on the album. We hadn’t any other songs. We had over a year just playing them, then got to open for The Selecter and started to do bigger shows. The songs were clearly going down very well, and ‘Tears of a Clown’ being a hit made us think we knew it all. Luckily, Everett had been playing in groups for 12 years, he could keep his head, and he managed to put down not just a steady beat, but a steady and enthusiastic beat. For him, it was like, ‘I never thought I’d get a bloody chance to do this. I thought that bus had gone.’ He’d played in soul bands, but he’d spun kettles at the Swan factory for 12 years, so it was a dream come true.
“For Roger, he just thought that’s what life was like. ‘I just have to think I’m going to be in a pop group, and I will!’ As for David Steele, he believed he was ordained as the Mozart of the ‘80s… and he was right. I still haven’t heard a bassline like ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’. Nobody else has given us a bassline in 2-2 timing, and danced to it. And me and Andy were already kind of disillusioned hippies, clinging on to the beginning of punk at the last moment.
“It did seem very vibrant times for music and more excitingly, because of punk, you could have social commentary in songs, it didn’t have to be about broken hearts or chasing skirt. The record companies were so numb from what had just happened with punk, much of which they missed until afterwards, that they were terribly eager to have whatever it looked like the kids were into. If you could fill a concert hall, the record companies wanted you, and didn’t ask about lyrics or politics, they just didn’t want to miss the next punk train.”
How did Saxa fit into that?
“He was a very experienced musician, playing 30-plus years by then, and had developed this gentle grandfatherly, sozzled – embalmed in vodka and over-proof rum over the years – vibe, and would say very wise things in an odd way. It was like the Oracle at Delphi. He’d say things that would just sound daft, then you’d realise the utter wisdom. If there was friction in the band, you’d hear him go, ‘One hand wash the other’ – unless we pull together, we’re all fucked!
“On our first Top of the Pops, he’d got this really psychedelic, yellow lady’s beach hat, which he insisted on wearing, pulled down so far over his face that you could kind of see his glasses, beard and saxophone under the hat. All the way through the filming, I was like, ‘Saxa, pull your hat back!’ But he was like, ‘No, man, good gimmick!’ We were then driving back in the blue van to Birmingham afterwards, and he said, ‘Yes, David, me think this band will do it.’ I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, I’ll sign off the dole next Thursday.’ ‘Is that why you had your hat pulled over your face?’ ‘Yes, me wasn’t sure, but now me am!’ He was hedging his bets, but he wasn’t going to wait until it was shown on the TV. He was now convinced that The Beat was a good enough bet that he’d come off the dole. Ha!”
I don’t want to be maudlin, but while Saxa was a grand age (87). we lost him in 2017, Roger in 2019 (just 56), and Everett in 2021 (70)…
“Black lives matter, eh? I know it’s different countries, but I’m sure there are similarities – a disproportion in the availability of healthcare and the availability of healthcare that’s delivered to you that appears culturally appropriate. Blokes don’t like going to the doctor too much, and if they’re not made welcome, they’ll find a way to not go. But Saxa liked it, he was up the doctor’s all the time, and beat prostate cancer into remission in his late 80s. That’s very rare, isn’t it? He was so full of life and spirit. His daughter told me {regarding} the outpatients’ oncology department, ‘It’s ever so sad in that room, nobody’s looking that thrilled, but he’d start doing soft shoe shuffles along the line of chairs. ‘Come on now, cheer up!’ and start singing and dancing.’
“But he actually beat it, I went around his house. congratulating him, and he said, ‘One thing, David, you have to see…’ He opened his shirt and he’d got breasts, from the hormones and chemo, and said, ‘I think me must have liked them too much in the past, me grown my own now!’ Ha! That was something I didn’t need to see. But he had that amazing spirit about him that helped when you were young and depressed and confused.”
Balancing out what I said before, it’s great to see the likes of Pauline Black and Gaps Hendrickson still out there with The Selecter, touring and recording, as is the case with Rhoda Dakar, and Buster Bloodvessel with Bad Manners, and the Madness boys, and Roddy Byers with his band, all still carrying the 2 Tone torch. And I could say the same about you.
“Yes, that’s right. But it was such a shame about Terry Hall. I liked Terry, very much. He was always incredibly kind to me. He seemed to go out of his way to be kind to me. I always appreciated that, tried to return the favour. I took his lead. And it wasn’t really until he died that I found out the whole story of his tortured youth, being molested or worse, being put on tablets because of it – then, all of a sudden, his stage persona made perfect sense. You knew it was an affectation, but I didn’t know what the source was. I thought Morrissey got it from him a bit – this notion that you could be the loneliest person in the world whilst everybody in the room is riveted, looking at you. Quite a trick to pull off.
“I was talking to Jerry Dammers about this, wondering what was it that made us at certain points in our teenage years decide we wanted to take a step back and start writing bloody poetry about it! For me, I think about the struggles I went through as a teenager, then how those struggles developed into my adult years, and it’s the same kind of drive. Always looking, always searching for paradise, not being able to realise it’s always right here, right now if you just stop and look properly.
“But I’m learning. I compartmentalise now. We lost one of our dogs on Thursday. Kidneys. On Friday we had to say goodbye in the garden, then I had to go and do two festival concerts. ‘Hey everybody, how you doing?’ Thousands of people, happy, and it’s not their fault I lost my dog, so you have to compartmentalise – try not to think, else you’ll cry. And that’s what life’s always like.
“I’ve been looking forward to coming to England for about nine months, but this is the wrong week. I need to be here with the other two dogs, because we’re going through something at the minute. If I sod off now, they’re gonna think I’ve gone as well.”
Sorry to hear that, Dave. What sort of dog?
“An Alsatian, mixed with Chow. They’re all Chow mixes. A particular challenge. The others are a Boxer-Chow and a Retriever-Chow. I can’t really walk those two. With the other one, I managed, she was a little smaller. With the others, if they decide they’ve seen something across the road, you find yourself walking sideways. There’s no point saying anything. It’s like walking a carthorse!”
I can sense my reactive rescue Labrador-cross getting anxious just hearing that. She barks at the mere sight of an Alsatian on the other side of the road.
“Well, Chows has been born to bark for 4,000 years and they’re really proud of how well they bark for you. ‘Did a good job, eh?’ ‘Oh, thanks a lot. That really helped!’ But nobody’s got in the house yet! Most people don’t come within 5ft of the front door, because it’s vibrating from the barking that’s going on. It’s like a Tibetan temple!”
As for California, you’ve been there a while now, haven’t you?
“That’s correct. Coming on five/six years, two different spots after living the life – Malibu, Palisades, Dana Point, and adjacent to Oceanview. At least there’s a breeze there though, which we don’t get here, it goes up to 120 degrees. You can’t think straight, it’s a bit much. But they have a lovely joke in LA – ‘How do you get to the Valley? Marry a musician.’ And the musicians say, ‘Marry an actor.’ But I have a swimming pool in the backyard and wouldn’t be able to even afford a garden closer to town. And I don’t need to commute anywhere. I’ve sometimes thought of moving out entirely, but I’ve a set of friends and family, and wouldn’t see them as often. There are other places that are prettier and cheaper, and because most of my business is on the road, I could live anywhere, but I’m sort of settled and know how the lifestyle works.
“This part of California is probably one of the politest places you could ever want to be. Everybody says sir or ma’am, ‘Have a nice day’ or ‘Have a good one.’ It’s always very smooth, calm, rarely any hostility. And everybody knows if something does crack off, there’s a good chance that half the people in the room have a gun, and whoever starts it won’t be the one who gets to finish it.
“I actually feel safer than I do walking around Birmingham. There’s less chance of violence here. You can go and find it, of course, but you could go to certain areas of Birmingham and find it. I’m not pro-gun at all, I’m pro-civic behaviour! We’ve already got enough differences, we don’t need to rub each other’s noses in it. I like the idea that people from all sorts of different cultures should be able to get along together, determined by their basic humanity.
“And today, Los Angeles City Council has made it English Beat Day! They gave me a proclamation thanking us for various work we’ve done – about racial inclusion, against nuclear waste, and various things we’ve championed over the years. I couldn’t really be prouder. When I moved here in the late ‘80s, Los Angeles was the city with the most languages spoken and most religions practised ever, in the history of the world. The Super League of diversity!
“I was really excited to be a part of that, and still am, even though, under the road tunnels, the homeless tents break your heart, and we’re failing in that, although they’ve just put one and a half billion dollars towards it that might make a dent.
“In terms of diversity, if Iran and Iraq go to war with each other, for example, there’s probably close on half a million of both sides here. But they never start anything over it, because they’ve got more important things to do. It’s like, ‘Are you kidding? I’m in a BMW, getting my kid to school, who’s going to college. I’ve no time for throwing hand grenades.’
“They say the roads are a nightmare or the traffic’s terrible, but then you realise some of them barely speak English, there’s 14 million cars on the road, but most of them get there and back every day. It’s not a nightmare. It’s a miracle!”
You mentioned David and Andy going off to do their own thing – and that led to major success with Fine Young Cannibals. I got a feeling there might have been a little frostiness, or did you just accept it was time to go your own ways?
“I don’t think they were happy, but they got to do exactly what they wanted, including Two Men, a Drum Machine and a Trumpet. And oddly enough, it was almost exactly two years when Fine Young Cannibals were announced. There was some frostiness, but that seems to have dissipated over the years. In fact, we’ve had a few lively email chats over a new potential record deal.
“And as you get older, different things start to become important, and we’ve managed to discuss some of the past and some of the present – where we are in life now and what our priorities are.”
Well, we mentioned all those people we lost from that initial scene – that must have an impact, giving you a more positive focus, perhaps. None of us are here forever.
“I think so. You could say, it’s a bit too late for that, isn’t it? And with this drive for a new record deal, there seems to be a sense of pride in the legacy of the music, and that’s helped us forgive or at least tape over some of the past and see the good in it more than the bad. And I’ve had to accept my role in it – a livewire! Unbearable! It happened after The Beat too, and in personal relationships. I can be too much – too much enthusiasm, and then the moment it goes wrong, I’ll just fuck off.
“Fight or flight. I wasn’t even aware of it until quite recently, but it’s a genetic thing that’s gone on for a few generations. And it turns out that we have quite a lot of Neanderthal alleles – hence my wide hands or hobbit feet, as my sister called them! The big, broad chest, short in height, and all that. They’re four times stronger than homosapiens, but also have a very highly-tuned fight or flight response, and it turns out my grandad, my father and me, displayed that kind of behaviour endless times during our lives. It’s not through any ill will, we just misperceive things and see things much more acutely than perhaps they actually are.
“I think that helped me greatly in the songwriting, because it allowed me to see things deeply. I could sit there for 18 hours thinking about one line in a song till there it was, so in some ways that kind of intensity can be very helpful. It’s just not always that helpful when you’re dealing with other human beings, it turns out!
“I think it’s even a Wakeling thing, because I met somebody associated with another ‘80s group who had been married to a distant cousin, and she couldn’t help but come and meet up and tell me the story and go, ‘Er, you’re a bunch of livewires, aren’t you.’ I thought it was just me! Sadly, in essence, I’d always dreamed of being Thor, and it turned out I was Stig of the Dump!”
I mentioned Pauline Black and Rhoda Dakar, and talking of strong, creative female survivors in the business, you have Annabella Lwin’s 2023 line-up of Bow Wow Wow on this tour, a band created by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in 1980, members of Adam & the Ants backing Annabella, then in her teens, their cherished hits including ‘C-30, C60, C-90, Go’ and top-10s, ‘Go Wild in the Country’ and ‘I Want Candy’. Did they know each other back in the day?
“Even weirder than that, we did some shows last year, it went well, so I said, ‘Would you like to do a tour in England?’ So we arranged it, and once the dates were set, she got in touch and said, ‘Do you realise it’s exactly the 40th anniversary of the tour we did in California?’ They opened for us then, 40 years ago to the month – May/June 1983. So that was a good accident, I thought that was auspicious.”
They made some cracking records.
“Fantastic, with a gentle, optimistic revolutionary zeal about them. There was a happiness involved in their revolution – the world wasn’t worth saving unless everybody could be happy. No point getting everybody to march in time in sombre uniforms – it was more apocalypso!”
More a case of Go Wild in the Country with Livewires this time, then?
“Yes, while you can! We thought we were changing the world. Now. It turns out 40 years later, it’s like, ‘Oh, dear!’ The idea at the time was that they’d hear ‘Stand Down Margaret’ and change government policy. ‘There’s some young lads in Birmingham, ma’am, they’ve made a very good point.’ Of course, social change doesn’t work like that. But now, I think it will, because the degradation, the horrors … it started with the miners’ strike, blokes on horses cracking heads, and it’s ending with members of the Royal Family visiting food banks to encourage the great work going on. I don’t need to be ironic!”
Perhaps we’re in a post-ironic phase of society.
“Yes! Luckily, I’m out of here soon. I used to be anti-war, my whole life. But now I’m thinking, compared to spending four months in an American hospital slowly dying with loads of drips in me, not knowing what’s going on, I wouldn’t mind a nuclear war! At least it gets you out in the open air, and it’ll all be over pretty quick!”
And with that and a quick chorus of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ with accompanying whistle, he’s off out to seize the day, California style, adding, ‘That’s cheered me up about the dog, thanks!’
For WriteWyattUK‘s April 2018 feature/interview with Dave Wakeling, head here.
The Beat Skavival Tour 2023, also featuring special guests Bow Wow Wow, continues this week, with the remaining dates (all June) listed here:: Mon 12th – Town Hall, Birmingham; Wed 14th – O2 Academy, Bournemouth; Fri 16th – Roundhouse, London; Mon 19th – Roadmender, Northampton; Wed 21st – Junction, Cambridge; Thu 22nd – HMV Empire, Coventry; Fri 23rd – Rock City, Nottingham; Wed 28th – G Live, Guildford; Thu 29th – The Forum, Bath; Fri 30 – The Great Hall, Cardiff. For full details, head to https://www.seetickets.com/tour/the-beat-bow-wow-wow. And for more information about Annabella Lwin and Bow Wow Wow, head here.
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