When I told Eric Goulden, the artist best known as Wreckless Eric, where I was calling from, he pondered over the geography until I mentioned it was a few miles south of Preston, Lancashire.

“Oh, I know Preston. I’ve had the windscreen wipers torn off my van in Preston. I have a friend who always puts, whenever I announce any dates, ‘But you’re not playing in Preston.’”

Maybe it’s too late to add a date this time, but if you squeezed one in, I could aways bring some windscreen wipers along, just in case.

“What, you’d tear off your own windscreen wipers? Y’now, ‘For a bit extra I’ll rip your car aerial off and replace it with a coat-hanger.”

Ah, those were the days. Not so common with these new-fangled motors, of course.

“No, you don’t see that thing with the coat-hanger anymore.”

I had an elderly neighbour a few doors down who fashioned something similar at his place, so he could watch telly upstairs in bed. I felt that was a bit of a throwback.

“Marvellous! And when you get to a certain age, you can really freak people out if they give you a ride anywhere. As you get out the car, you say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. That will soon dry off.’ Ha! Or as you get in the car, look at the seat, put a newspaper down, and say, ‘I see you’ve had that Mr. Braithwaite in the car again.’”

Fantastic. And where do I find this much-loved musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer today?

“Oh, I’m in Cromer, in Norfolk.”

In your head or in real life?

“No, I mean in real life… really!”

The reason I ask is that in the press for his new LP, the rather splendid Leisureland, he suggests there’s a bit of Cromer in there.

Explaining the idea behind the LP’s theme, he says, ‘Standing Water is a British seaside town – amusement arcades, crazy golf, stagnant boating lake, unemployment… People flock in, spend money, but the locals don’t get rich, they get pushed out. They end up on the Brownfield Estate, tucked away behind the out-of-town supermarket, where local children play on grassed-over landfills that seep methane gas.

‘The derelict interior of the Majestic cinema: broken seats, rotting red velvet, fallen, gilt-covered plaster mouldings… the screen, ripped and lurching. It could be the theme for a budget TV soap. The music plays, the credits roll, mugshots of the cast of everyday characters loom and disappear – Mr Braithwaite played by a well-loved British character actor in his 80s with disquietingly perfect teeth; a genial young policeman, all sticky-out ears and Brillianteened quiff; an old sea salt; an antique dealer; a brace of lady dog breeders… Normal folk just like you and me.’

That sets the scene perfectly. With Cromer just one real-life example.

“There is a bit of Cromer in there. But there’s a bit of every seaside town I’ve ever investigated in any way. It’s not all about seaside towns, though, and I don’t know if ‘about’ is the right word, anyway, but there’s a lot of seasideness about it, and a lot of Englishness about it.”

He’s certainly nailed that. Is this his dog-eared love letter to the old Blighty he left behind?

“Well… yeah, my last three records were written and conceived, if you like, in America, and were pretty American. Not me. I’m still very English, but they dealt with much more American matters, so I really did have a conscious thing in my head that I’d do something that was more about England.

“I never want to lose that. I say England because I’m much more English, I think, than British. I think Scotland’s the best part of the British Isles in so many ways, but I’m not Scottish, and neither am I Irish. I’m probably one of the only people in America who doesn’t think they’re Irish!

“We’re actually working on moving back to England now, to live.”

When he says ‘we’, that’s him and long-time partner, Amy Rigby, an acclaimed singer-songwriter in her own right. And where might they settle?

“Well, you know… Norfolk… Cromer. We love the area. There are places that will be more convenient, in a way, ‘cos it’s a bit cut off, but we don’t like ‘em as much.”

Those most recent LPs mentioned were 2015’s amERICa, 2018’s Construction Time and Demolition, and 2019’s Transience, widely praised as his best, from an artist looking to encapsulate ‘pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia – lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots.’ And then came covid, with Eric left at death’s door, his ultimate recovery leading to a whole load of introspection.

“Before the pandemic I used to tour all the time. It was almost as though I was addicted to it – new places, new people. During the lockdown I couldn’t go anywhere. I think that’s why I started to invent a place.

“Covid hit me hard, damaged my lungs, gave me a heart attack – I almost died in the emergency room. I began to feel extremely… mortal. I began to look at where I’ve been and where I come from. Maybe to get my mind off the ultimate destination.”

Accordingly, Leisureland sees him return to a more ramshackle world of recording – ‘guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beatboxes and loops,’ in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who he met in a coffee shop in Catskill, New York, delighted to find he lived around the corner and could easily drop by to put drums on newly-recorded tracks. And while the recording methodology may be contemporary American, the subject matter is almost entirely from his home nation. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.

He’s certainly captured the seaside feel he was after on this record, and that sense of Englishness. For me, there are elements of everything from The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Who – which I guess are all deeply woven into his musical DNA, not least those McCartney and Entwistle-esque bass guitar flourishes – through to Mott the Hoople and onwards. I’m even getting a bit of Tommy… or even David Essex in That’ll be the Day. Eric’s inner Tommy Walker… or perhaps his Jim MacLaine.

“Oh, that’s a very underrated film {That’ll be the Day}, an incredible document from that time. You know, you can’t find it anywhere anymore. I thought that was a great film. That was the generation just before mine, but there are so many overlaps. I could relate to it – that post-war austerity was still lingering when I was growing up. But I didn’t want {this album} to be nostalgic. It is contemporary, I think.

“My viewpoint is contemporary. I mean, the seaside is a fantastic thing. You have these places, and they have a grimy, darker side which is like, what you see is people enjoying themselves, middle-aged men taking their shirts off, their wives thinking, ‘You can carry this off, Mick!’ and they’re going, ‘Yeah, I can. I’ve taken my shirt off. Deal with it!’ I miss that kind of belligerence of the British holidaymaker. Ha!

“But most people are really nice, and there’s something really sweet about people being on holiday and having a great time. You see all that, but behind there’s a whole world of everyday life. There’s seasonal employment, there’s minimum wage employment, there’s a lack of decent places for people to live because everywhere’s rented out for holiday accommodation and the odious AirBnB. And what you get with that is drug problems, and you get a town like Great Yarmouth.

“Y’know, when everyone was going abroad for their holidays, those towns got incredibly run down, so you get asylum seekers there. ‘We’ll put them where nobody else wants to go.’ And it builds this hell on earth sometimes. It’s a strange dichotomy – on one hand you’ve got this jollity and joyful seaside experience, then you’ve got this awful, dark, other side to it. And to me, the thing that would really sum it up is the stagnant boating lake.”

One of so many poignant themes explored.

“They’ve actually filled in the stagnant boating lake in Cromer, made it into a crazy golf {course}.”

That will lead to an inevitable backlash, cries of, ‘That’s health and safety gone mad. If we choose to drown in these places, that’s our prerogative!’

 “Mmm, I nearly drowned in Torquay when I was a child. I was about three and managed to fall into the boating lake. They spent all week keeping me out of that, and on the last night I managed to fall in! But my grandfather fished me out, saved my life.”

There’s almost a parallel there with your old friend, Ian Dury. In his case though, there was no such saviour, polio contracted from a holiday swimming pool leading to a life of disability.

“It’s not really that much of a parallel. All I did was nearly drown in a boating like. He got polio from a swimming pool in Southend. I don’t know. I never quite got the story straight as to what happened with him.”

So sad, but something that defined him, I guess. But back to this wonderful new Wreckless Eric album, one I’ve been playing back-to-back since my first preview…

“You like it? Wow!”

I certainly do. And I think you may be teasing. I can’t imagine anyone of taste hearing a preview and not loving it.

“No, everyone seems to. I was thinking, ‘I hope people find a place for this.’ I’m never sure. I never know what to make of the work that I do. I just hope for the best.”

You’re too close to it, maybe.

“Well, you are really, when you do it. And I never really want to assume everything’s gonna be just great and it’s a God-given thing, because it never really is.”

Those neat segues between songs remind me of Paul Weller’s 22 Dreams in a sense, in this case breathing space between evocative sonic postcards from the old homeland. Did you go into the studio with that in mind, or was that something that happened along the way?

“I didn’t think, ‘I’ve written all the songs, now I need to book some studio time.’ I record all the time – we have a studio in the house. I’m a pioneer of home recording, I suppose. I spend a lot of time recording and sometimes, you know, I do it for a purpose. Sometimes I’ll think, ‘I’ve got this track, I’m gonna record it,’ and sometimes I’ve got bits of songs and record those. I never really make demos. I don’t like to think in terms of, ‘I’ll make a demo, then I’ll make the real version.’ I just start doing it and things get patched up and cut together. I’m more of a collage-ist than a songwriter. I kind of make it all up as I go along, see what happens.”

I like the way you come back to recurring themes, such as mentions of your John, Paul, George and Alan characters. I don’t like to suggest it’s a concept album, but there’s a bit of that.

“Sort of, yeah. I did think of making a concept album and was going to call it Standing Water. It was going to be 12 tawdry tales or something, but honestly, I couldn’t do it and then I had all these other bits of songs like ‘Radium Girls’. That’s actually American. It doesn’t fit, but it kind of fits… and I don’t know how. It may be just that I made it fit by saying, ‘Yeah, l made it fit. I’ve taken my shirt off too’!”

He’s off again.

“I don’t think men should be allowed to take their shirts off in public after a certain age. But anyway, ‘Radium Girls’ fits because I say that it fits, you know. Ha ha!”

It’s not all been a smooth ride, Eric previously putting on record he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he ‘crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground’. He went on to release ‘20-something albums in 40-something years’ under various names – The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with that original stage name.

When we spoke, he was still a couple of weeks off his LP launch at London’s Rough Trade West (Friday, August 25^th), ‘playing for 30 minutes or whatever it is.’ He also let on that he’d been asked to headline across town at Clerkenwell Festival (Sunday, August 27^th), after Chris Difford pulled out through illness, ‘which is a shame – he’s a lovely man.’

I told him I felt he and Chris had a bit in common, but maybe I was back to musical DNA – the pair the products of everything they’d come from and listened to in their formative years.

“Well, yeah, we grew up at the same time. I don’t know if he’s a bit older than me. I can’t figure it out.”

Actually, they were born the same year – 1954 – albeit 55 miles apart, with Eric in Newhaven on the south coast, a few months older, Greenwich-born Chris yet to hit his 69^th birthday.

Eric talked a little about his own beginnings in the press release with the album, dwelling on his East Sussex seaside roots.

“I thought of my birthplace. My parents hated it – they couldn’t wait to leave. They’d moved there because of my dad’s job. I was born there and even though it might be a dump, it was where I came from, and for a young boy it was paradise – docks, cranes, cargo ships, fishing boats, a Victorian swing bridge, a steam locomotive rolling through the town centre… And the ferry service to France. I could see it, from the cliffs alongside the dull bungalow suburb where we moved when advancement made home ownership possible – the old Versailles steaming out of the harbour mouth, disappearing over the horizon to a distant somewhere else.

“Growing up in South-East England I didn’t know how the world was laid out, though I had a pretty good idea that it was fucked-up. But my parameters were narrow – I lived an enclosed life. A walk to the end of the road, a bus ride, a train, a short walk to the school gates at the other end. Always the same bus, the same train, and the same walk. I got a bicycle and the possibilities widened – ride away from home for half a day, spend the other half riding back. Then I learned to hitchhike, I hitched rides to Brighton to see rock bands who sometimes came from America.

“I understood that the world was bigger than I first thought, but still hadn’t been much further than the end of the road. I was dumb, but in my defence the information that might help me to become less dumb was not readily available – Peacehaven Public Library didn’t carry books by Jack Kerouac, and it never occurred to me to look at a map or seek out a forward-facing independent book shop because, as I said, I was dumb. I was also stoned, detached, confused, and waging a battle with the ancient neolithic settlement that lived under our house and threatened to climb on top of me most nights and crush the life out of me. I was a weird kid. We slept with our heads facing north.

“When I was 17, I gave up on trying to tunnel my way out. I learned to drive – it was easy, I was a natural. Since then, I’ve driven all over the place and driven the length and breadth of the United States numerous times. I’ve been everywhere, man. I can tell you exactly how fucked-up it is. “

Talking of travel, Eric has a handful of dates back in the States (The Depot, Cambridge, New York, September 22^nd;The Avalon Lounge, Catskill, New York, September 28^th;Elkton Music Hall, Elkton, Maryland, September 29^th; Moorestown Music Collective, Moorestown, New Jersey, September 30^th) before a UK return, his main tour opening – after his latest BBC 6 Music radio session, for Marc Riley and Gideon Coe (Wednesday, October 11^th) – at Gravesend’s LV 21 (Saturday, October 14^th), including some interesting stop-offs. And as someone with a passion for Cornwall, I had to ask how come he’s included The Bush Inn at Morwenstow (Sunday, October 29^th). Not a venue you tend to see on the circuit.

“I think I’ve played there three times. I was doing a few gigs down that way, and this guy got in touch, said, ‘I’d love you to come and play the back room of my pub. We do put things on. I could get an audience.’ I was a bit worried about this, but had a day I couldn’t fill, so said okay, and when I got there he’d printed out song lyrics from all different parts of … I thought, ‘Take the Cash’ or ‘Whole Wide World’, fair enough, but he had song lyrics from all over. He said, ‘You know that song you did on this album…?’ I realised, ‘Oh, he’s actually a real fan.’

“He owns this pub, run with his son or daughter and son-in-law. He’s really good, and I’ve got a soft spot for it. And there’s an intelligence kind of thing, like Jodrell Bank, nearby.”

That’ll be GCHQ Bude, at Cleave Camp, a couple of miles away.

“Yeah, a very, very strange area in some way.”

Also on the list is Hull (The Wrecking Ball, Friday, November 3^rd), an important location for Eric over the years. Back to his art school days, but also with his beloved, Amy.

“Yes, I went to art college in Hull and wrote ‘(I’d Go the) Whole Wide World’ when I was there, and first played it there. Years and years later, I was going to play Hull and the promoter said, ‘Can you come up a day early? I’d like you to be the guest DJ at this gig by Amy Rigby. You’ll like her. She does ‘Whole Wide World’.” I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of her.’ And she played the place where I first played ‘Whole Wide World’, having just written it. That’s where we first met. It’s funny. I could have stayed in the pub! I wrote this song saying, ‘I’ll go the whole wide world just to find you,’ and could have just stayed where I was, really, couldn’t I!

”I remember watching her playing, thinking, ‘She’s great, a bit like Chrissie Hynde. Really good at this, but she’s out of my league… and probably neurotic anyway. I had all these kinds of ideas. I would never have thought we’d be married, you know.”

He’s packed a fair bit in down the years, and in 1998 wrote his autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success – The Wreckless Eric Manual, covering his life in England in the punk rock years and the music industry, ending at his departure for France in 1989, having remained across the Continent for that previous decade.

As for his relationship with Amy, the pair having moved to upstate New York in late 2011, they’ve been an item for a fair few years now, releasing the first of their three LPs together in 2008, their liaison perfectly documented in the song, ‘Do You Remember That?’

“Yes, and it’s true, that – everything in that song. The one-way street mentioned was in Edinburgh. I did drive the wrong way down a one-way street. I can remember that. She’s going, ‘Do you always drive like this?’ There was a quick U-turn, all these people going, ‘What did you just do?’”

Going right back, is that right that while based in Hull you took a trip over to Oldham to see Kilburn and the High Roads, in what turned out to be a big turning point, shaping your own journey?

“No, some of my family come from Oldham, but I never went there to see Kilburn and the High Roads.”

Oh dear, seems I may have fallen foul of the rule concerning using unverified Wikipedia trivia.

“Oh, fucking hell! I don’t know how to start with Wikipedia. You know, a few years ago me and my daughter used to get on the Elvis Costello Wikipedia page and change things… because we could! It was a despicable thing to do.”

Maybe Costello was doing it to you too.

“No, I think he’s got better things to do. I hope he has. I feel it was awful to do that, but we wanted to see if we could. Anyone can write any crap. It’s the most spurious… I tried to change some of mine, but it wouldn’t let me because it wouldn’t believe I was me. I had no authority!”

All the same, I’m guessing there was a sea change when you saw a band of that ilk.

“No… actually, I saw The Pink Floyd when they were still cosmic and weird. I saw bands like Procol Harum. I used to go and see them a lot, because they had a Hammond organ, and found that so emotional. I saw a band called Stone the Crows, with Les Harvey – Alex Harvey’s brother – the guitar player, and that was an epiphany in a way. But every band I ever saw was like an epiphany… the Pretty Things… Kevin Ayers… a band called Patto with a guitar player called Ollie Halsall… you know, ‘How are these people doing this? How does this work?’ Kilburn and the High Roads were just another one of those, really.”

I didn’t realise, until I looked him up, Ollie Halsall’s link to The Rutles, having played many of the instruments and provided lead and backing vocals on their 1978 self-titled album. But Eric Idle was cast in his place in the film, Ollie – who died in 1992 – instead in a minor cameo role as Leppo, the legendary fifth Rutle who got lost in Hamburg.

Incidentally, John ‘Barry Wom’ Halsey wrote of him, ‘Ollie may not have been the world’s best guitarist, but he was certainly among the top two,’ while XTC’s Andy Partridge cited him as one of his top three influences, with Bill Nelson (Be-Bop Deluxe) and Alvin Lee (Ten Years After) also fans. But let’s get back to the other Eric and those formative Stiff Records days with Ian Dury and co.

“What I did like about Ian {Dury}, was that he was very, very English about it. At a time when it was assumed that we would sing with cod American accents. I was always questioning that. Ray Davies sang more with an English accent, and Kevin Ayers did, but it wasn’t the general thing.

“You definitely didn’t want to sound English. But I always wanted it to be truthful. I always wanted to have some kind of honesty. I never wrote about Mississippi, being out on the West Coast, or driving down I-95 or something, until I actually knew about those places and had been there.”

I’d say ‘Semaphore Signals’, not least with its ‘Messages of love to the green belt, from a semaphore lover on the hill’ is just one such very English line from your back catalogue. But there are of course many who would rather just keep asking about another song from that era (‘the first song I wrote that was any good’), and I get the impression – although it was Eric who brought it up in this conversation – he gets a bit tired of that.

“Well, it’s always difficult. ‘Whole Wide World’ is an enduring hit, and when you’re a kid you might dream of that. It’s a great thing, but then you get it, and … so often, people have that and the next thing, they go, ‘Well, I’m not all about that, y’know, I’ve got all this other stuff. Why do you have to always bring that up?’ And it’s like, ‘Because it’s a fucking hit! Didn’t you want one of those?’ So I prefer to be grateful. But yes, carry on.”

Among those who have since recorded ‘Whole Wide World’ are The Monkees and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. Meanwhile, Eric’s version featured in a 2022 travel ad, while a Cage the Elephant version is the new theme tune for the Smartless podcast. It sure has a long shelf life. Quite right too.

Anyway, I was going to ask where he reckons his new converts from that world should head. Do they start with Leisureland and work their way back through his impressive body of work? Or start at the beginning with the self-titled debut LP and work forward?

“Oh, it’d take years to start from the beginning. I always thought when they teach history in school, they’ll start with the Etruscans or something, but you think, ‘Who the bloody hell are they? I don’t know any Etruscans.’ But if they started off from now and took you back, that would give you a true sense of history. You know, ‘We live in the 21st century and we have this, this and this, but there was a time when they didn’t have the internet. And apparently, before that they didn’t have cars, and they didn’t have electricity…’ Work your way back, and maybe, if you’re extremely unlucky, you’ll get right back to the Etruscans and really understand history.

“So I’d say, start with the here and now and if you’re really interested, go back. Some of the super-fans will say, and they’re very kind, ‘Whole Wide World’ isn’t my best song. I really like that, and I’ll say, ‘Thank you,’ as it’s a kind gesture. But I don’t know if it is or how you measure that. It must be pretty good, because it seems to speak to a lot of people.”

Well, he should be extremely proud of that, and we could leave it at that, not go in too deep as to why that’s resonated so widely. As it is, I was only born in 1967 so I’m a bit younger than his original core fanbase, but my older brother had good taste and through him I got to hear ‘Reconnez Cherie’ and ‘Semaphore Signals’ on a cassette version of Live Stiffs (that I have to this day), so was always aware that he had more than one great song.

And back then, you had a hell of a band, Eric, joined as you were by Denise Roudette, Davey Payne, and a drummer by the name of Dury.

“Erm… that was a strange band. I mean, it was my band, but Ian was in charge.”

I can’t imagine a scenario when he wasn’t in charge.

“He was extremely bossy in those days. But while he knew about rhythm, he didn’t know about the rest of music, really. He didn’t know about melody lines or chords or anything. I remember an excruciating moment, playing a demo for somebody we were trying to screw some money out of. I said to Ian, ‘What do we do with this instrument?’ because he was producing the demo. He said, ‘What key is it in?’ I said, ‘It’s in E.’ He said, ‘Well, just play E for 32 bars and we’ll put something in there.’ It was a version of ‘Reconnez Cherie’ with 32 bars of ‘jing, jing, jing.’ We’re all playing the E chord and nothing’s happening. We sat in this meeting, trying to get some development money out of Dave Robinson at Stiff Records, and these 32 bars of E just went on for a year. It was excruciating!

“Davey was a freeform sax player, really – he was awesome – and knew when to start and stop. But he was also somewhat psychotic, inclined to violent outbursts. And then Ian stole him for The Blockheads. I told Ian, years later, ‘I could thank you for that. You saved me years of grief.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I know I fucking did!’

“Even on his deathbed, although Ian was smiling when he told me, he said, ‘You sacked me, you fucking cunt!’ He’d always say that. ‘You sacked me, I’ll never forgive you for that!’ He’d say, ‘We had a real good Bohemian thing going on before you fucked it up!’ But I’d say, ‘No, you fucked it up – you got the gold record.’ I was trying to do my thing, but everyone was looking past me, trying to get a glimpse of the drummer hiding behind five great big cymbals, because he’s got a gold record. It’s not a good look!

“But yeah, it was a good band for a while. Denise was fantastic. I mean, she always wore like a party frock, and we thought that was really funny. You’ve got to make an effort.”

Have you still got that badge with ‘I’m a mess’ on it, as worn on the sleeve of the debut LP? And are you still?

“No, not really… well, everyone is, in some way. You’ve got too many photos on your phone, or you don’t know where the important documents are, or whatever it is.”

How does he see himself? Artist, musician, or both? Well, he suggests on his website, “I was an art student – four years in British art colleges in Bristol and Hull. I became a momentary pop star, though I thought of myself as an artist, and became a musician by virtue of standing behind a guitar and playing it for years and years. If you do something often enough, you’ll probably get good at it. The other option is to stop, but I’m not a quitter.

“I also play the bass guitar. I think I’m a good bass player, but I can’t be sure because people rarely say what they really think. Unless it gets to crisis point, and then it all comes out. It hasn’t reached crisis point with regard to my bass playing as yet, so I think I must be quite good.

“I play the piano too, but my piano playing is rudimentary to a point that stops just short of embarrassingly bad. I could describe myself as a multi-instrumentalist, because I also play the harmonica quite well, but I’m not so sure. Multi-instrumentalist is a fashionable term these days, I think it actually means the person in question owns a bass guitar.

“I’m known as a songwriter, though I’ve never really felt that I was born to it. I wrote songs because I was in a band in the early ‘70s that played covers – everyone played cover versions in those days unless they were either famous or pretentious. I didn’t want to be pretentious, but I thought the band needed a cohesive identity, and as no one else thought they could write songs I had no choice. 

“And okay, I was a pretentious fucker too.” 

But what would 1977’s Wreckless Eric make of 2023’s Eric Goulden, do you think?

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine that. God, wouldn’t it be weird if you could meet yourself? I think if I met him, I’d have a fucking good talking to him, and he’d go, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever…’

I’m thinking he probably wouldn’t listen too hard.

“No, and I’d probably give him a clip round the ear. Ha ha!”

If you were to stumble upon Addis and the Flip Flops playing live today, what would you make of them?

“The Flip Tops! Not the Flip Flops. We weren’t a beach band! Addis and the Flip Tops were thoroughly appalling, but we must have had something, because we had our following at the time. People used to stand in front of us, and once I threw a box of ball bearings onto the dance floor. Whoops! There was always something that got us banned from somewhere else.”

Can you remember where the ball bearing incident was?

“I can’t, actually. Some Hull venue, with unpleasantness in car parks. There were people who hated us, but there always were people who hated you. There was this kid I went to school with – unfortunately, he died – and he was a guitar player and used to slag me off in his blogs and stuff. But I thought, actually, it’s okay. I wish we could get together and talk about stuff, because we actually agreed on so much… but he didn’t know that.”

Do you remember much about those late ’77 John Peel sessions you recorded? Was that a key experience? You said you don’t tend to think in terms of ‘this is the demo version’ or ‘this is the real thing.’ So that must have been a good way to try out songs.

“I remember on the first Peel session we played, I wanted to do the vocals live and do it all live, while a lot of people did it like they were making an album. They did it on an eight-track. We tried the whole thing live, but had to put the vocals on afterwards, because to do a live vocal for something that’s going to be listened to more than once, you’ve got to be really good… and in those days I wasn’t good enough to do that, really. Who knows if I am now.

“I had to replace the vocals afterwards, but I remember being adamant that we did it as live as possible. Years later, I would go into the studio and do it straight to two-track, and the engineers love that purity.

“I’ve done loads of {BBC 6 Music} sessions for Mark Riley, and when they were first doing those sessions, it was really gung ho. I remember doing one with two microphones in front of me, sitting on my amplifier. Those are really live, and I think there’s a purity to those. I’m always scared to listen back to them!”

Well, I’m pleased you’re still making fantastic music, and I better let you go now, but it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you.

“Thank you, and yeah, come to the gig in Manchester, at Gullivers. You’re probably having some rain up there now, yeah?”

I’m actually looking at clear blue sky from my window.

“No! That’s ungodly. Lancashire doesn’t have blue skies. Surely not! You best put your sunblock on. See you later!”

Leisureland by Wreckless Eric is out now on CD, LP and as a digital download, via Tapete Records from this link https://shop.tapeterecords.com/en/wreckless-eric-leisureland-3901.

Wreckless Eric’s Autumn 2023 UK live dates: ​LV21, Gravesend, October 14^th (tickets); Holy Trinity Church, Folkestone; Rock ‘n’ Roll Brewhouse, Birmingham, October 19^th (tickets); The Prince Albert, Brighton, October 26^th (tickets); ​The Lexington, Islington, London, October 27th (tickets); ​The Moon, Cardiff, October 28th (tickets); The Bush Inn, Morwenstow, October 29th (tickets); Hen & Chicken, Bristol, October 30th (tickets); Gullivers, Manchester, November 2nd (tickets); The Wrecking Ball, Hull, November 3rd (tickets); Music & Arts Centre, Barnoldswick, November 5^th (tickets); Swiss Cottage, Winchester, November 10th (two shows, later performance sold out, tickets); Voewood, Holt, November 11^th; 50rpm, Coatbridge, November 12th; Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, November 13th (tickets); Rum Shack, Glasgow, November 14th (tickets); Claypath Delicatessen, Durham, November 16^th (tickets); Brudenell, Leeds, November 17th (tickets); Guildhall, Gloucester, November 18th (tickets); Just Dropped In, Coventry, November 19^th (tickets). And those dates are followed by half a dozen more in Germany and Austria before November is out. For full details and all the latest from Wreckless Eric, head to https://www.wrecklesseric.com/.