A truly immersive experience: in praise of False Lankum – in conversation with Ian Lynch and Radie Peat

Posted on April 26, 2023 by writewyattuk
Radical Folk: Lankum’s fourth album builds on what’s come before, and is rather special. Photo: Ellius Grace

Technology, eh. It’s lovely to conduct video interviews these days, but if the connection goes a bit awry, you struggle a bit.

It’s not like it was down to mere distance, either. Ian Lynch and Radie Peat, from the Dublin band Lankum, were just across town from each other, Ian coming through loud and clear while a time delay and dodgy sound made it a struggle for Radie.

That’s me over-explaining why Ian does much of the talking here, but it’s the music that speaks volumes, and on that front Lankum are true artisans in communication, having just delivered a wonderful fourth LP, False Lankum, a third for Rough Trade Records and for my ears their best yet, carrying on where they left off with 2019’s wondrous The Livelong Day.

And that’s where I came in with Radie, while Ian was wrapping up another interview, the gap between my gushing praise and her modest response a few seconds as we tried to get into the swing of things.

“Thanks. It feels nice to get it out.”

The new record started coming together in early 2021, the band – Radie and Ian joined by Ian’s brother, Daragh Lynch, and Cormac MacDiarmada – overlooking Dublin Bay from a Martello tower close to one housing James Joyce’s museum, only realising later that almost every song had some sort of reference to the sea.

Then they began recording, overlooking the city at Hellfire Studio, sleeping each night back at that 19th century defensive fort. The result? A somewhat startling record, soon drawing you in, lead single/opener ‘Go Dig My Grave’ (from Robert Johnson’s ‘A Forlorn Lover’s Complaint’, c.1611) seeing Radie ‘showing us Hell before they show us Heaven.’

As their press people put it, this is a band – ‘folk radicals’ is the term I’m tending to see, and that sounds about right – that plays together ‘as though they are a single lung, with sounds expanding and collapsing from indistinguishable mouths, bellies, fingers, keys and feet, creating not so much a wall but an orb of sound.’

That was evident before this LP, not least on the song that first snared me, ‘The Wild Rover’, from 2019’s The Livelong Day, that album seen as one breaking Lankum out of the mould of ‘Irish traditional’ or ‘folk’ music, paving the way to critical and commercial success, earning them that year’s RTE Choice Music Prize and resulting in Vicar Street shows in Dublin selling out in 20 minutes.

And there are so many highlights this time, not least Cormac’s first time singing a full song on a Lankum LP, ‘Lord Abore and Mary Flynn’, and second single ‘Newcastle’, an achingly heartbreaking tale of pain, of longing for love and for home, again with a timeless melody.

Then there are the 12-track album’s originals, ‘Netta Perseus’ and ‘The Turn’, both penned by Daragh. And as I put it to Radie, it sounds like they truly immersed themselves in order to bring this record about.

“Yeah, that was while we were writing it, and that’s where we were living while we were recording. The whole experience of the album is very much that we were all together in that place. And immersion is the right term, because usually we would be, you know, getting on with our normal lives then kind of meeting up to write or record, but because of the circumstances with Covid, it was just like, go and be all together in one place through the whole thing, which is a lot more intense and makes it a different way of working as well.”

Is that right that it took a while to realise there was a link among the themes of the songs, with regard to the sea playing a huge part in it all?

“Yeah, we’re not very prescriptive, if that’s the word. We don’t decide before we go in what we’re aiming for in terms of over-arching themes. Usually, it’s just subconscious, and comes to light after.”

Is Hellfire Studio on the other side of town from where you were based?

“Hellfire is kind of more up the mountains, closer to the tower than where I am now, but out of the city and up in the mountains, quite rural, with an amazing view from there. And it’s a studio, but there’s cattle as well, so we’d be recording tracks then go out, and there’s lots of cows.”

Livelong Quartet: Lankum, back with another winning album. Photo by Sorcha Frances Ryder

By now, Ian has joined us as I confess to both of my interviewees that I was somewhat late to the Lankum party, only on board since The Livelong Day landed on my desk, courtesy of Ben Ayres at Rough Trade. It stood out amid several records put my way pre-lockdown, and I felt I had to know more. And when I conveyed that sense of wonder to Ben, he clearly wasn’t surprised that it appealed to me. I’ve certainly made up for lost time anyway, receiving an introductory ‘cool’ from Ian for my admission.

How would you say you’ve changed in getting on for a decade now as Lankum? You were never mainstream Irish folk, clearly, but you’ve clearly gone down your own road from more rootsy beginnings. And how much of that resultant journey was down to your ‘fifth member’, producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (credited on the previous LP for his ‘metaphysical counselling’)? Was it largely down to his studio techniques, or just a natural progression?

Ian stepped up this time.

“Erm, I would say it’s a bit of both, you know. I think there were elements of our sound that, if I look back on the last four albums, I can see there’s a thread we’ve been following. I think there’s elements of that even on the first album {Cold Old Fire, 2015}. There’s more drone-heavy tracks, like ‘The Tri-Coloured House’ with that extended drone piece in the middle, and ‘Lullaby’, and I think that was the stuff we were most excited about.

“But I think in a way, we had to kind of like misrepresent ourselves, because anytime we were doing anything for the radio, they all wanted three or three and a half minute songs. If you’re going on to a TV show, it’s like, ‘Oh, will you do ‘Salonika’ and ‘Cold Old Fire?’ or whatever. So, I don’t think that side of the band was really coming out.

“I think then, going on to Between the Earth and Sky {2017}, we wanted to kind of develop that side of things more. But we didn’t really know what we were doing. It was just that we had this idea, the four of us, going, ‘We want to get these bigger sounds and more drone-heavy sounds out of the instruments that we have.’

“And it wasn’t until Spud came down that he could get some really heavy ‘low-end’ out of those instruments. Since then we’ve been kind of ramping it up the whole time, seeing how far we can take it.”

I gather the linking pieces – fugues – on this new LP started life as one track, ‘Sheep Stealer’, spliced up. And that’s something not enough musicians do, I suggested. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Paul Weller’s 22 Dreams as an example. It’s something I really like though, and works so well. It’s certainly not just a case of ‘have drone, will travel’. There’s a lot more to it than that.

“Ha! Yeah, I think it’s something we had been interested in doing, and we’ve discussed for a number of years. It was in our gigs, just having one extended piece of music, whereby one track would lead into another, and maybe some segments in the middle that would join up certain pieces of music, which we never got around to doing.

“It was only really during lockdown that we kind of put a bit more work into that. We did a live-stream thing from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, ‘A National Disgrace’, where we were able to work those elements. We played the entire thing in two different segments, 45 minutes each. And within that we were kind of experimenting, linking up songs with separate drone pieces, using samples and stuff like that. That was really exciting, and I think that led on to us wanting to do something similar with the album.”

The day ‘Go Dig My Grave’ was released online, I saw a tongue-in-cheek online comment regarding an imaginary conversation between you and a record company executive, them telling you that you were on the cusp of crossover success, suggesting, ‘maybe lean into the accessible acoustic folk numbers and we can hit the mainstream’, your response being to release a ‘nine-minute funeral dirge from hell.’ Not far off the mark, I’d say. But I love that you don’t seem overly concerned about chart or commercial success.

“No, I don’t think that kind of thing has ever motivated us. We just want to make the music that we like making, really.”

When I shared that first single online, one friend said it was well timed, the latest record from your One Leg One Eye side-project, Ian, having arrived in the post that day, so he was looking forward to going off and listening to that. And you’re clearly not a band to stand still. Is that right that you’re not long back from a lecture tour of America?

“That was last October.”

I get the impression you don’t live in each other’s pockets.

“Yeah, we’ve all got our different projects going on, you know, and all like to stay busy, doing different things. And you have to these days. It’s not like you can just be in a band, and that can be the one thing. You need to have a load of different side-hustles on the go!”

Track two, the exquisitely gorgeous ‘Clear Away in the Morning’, for me is perhaps more akin to Richard and Linda Thompson, those folk elements in there somewhere. But again, you take it somewhere else altogether.

“Yeah, I think the way we understand it, or the way we see it, is that we wouldn’t really call the music we make folk. The term isn’t used as much in Ireland anyway, but even traditional … we all know what traditional music is, and all know that what we make is not traditional music.

“It’s obviously one strong element of what we do, but amongst many other things. But maybe it’s easier to let other people define and analyse to what degree those things are there. We just like making the music, we don’t try and pass all that down, you know.”

I read how all the band members bring in songs in to potentially cover. What was it, Radie, you heard on Jean Ritchie’s 1963 take on ‘Go Dig My Grave’ that made you think it could work for Lankum?

“I just loved that song. I didn’t think it was going to work as a Lankum song for years, but I was tinkering with it, thought it would probably go on a solo album, then it just kind of floated up into my memory or my head or whatever, when we were getting together the material for this album.

“Hearing the kind of stuff we were writing, I thought it would bring another element to it. It was very obvious it would fit, and it was really easy that day, trying to figure out what to do with it. It came together really fast. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s really obvious which songs are the right ones, and sometimes it’s not. You just have to work them all, see what jumps out.”

There are two originals on this album, but to me it has the feel of being a whole album of originals, just because of the way you operate as a band.

Ian: “Well, yeah, maybe!”

‘The New York Trader’ is outwardly more traditional sea shanty fare. But I like the idea of, for example, an American tourist stumbling upon you playing that in a pub on a remote part of the coast or down on a slipway, in a Fisherman’s Friends style, then getting drawn in by its majestic beauty, ultimately being dashed on the rocks by its sheer power. And this is what you do, going somewhere with a song, drawing us in, then taking us on that wild ride. And it works so well.

Ian: “Ah, thank you!”

But then, on this album, you go straight into the sweet folk melody of the gorgeous ‘Lord Abore and Mary Flynn’. A genius move. I gather Cormac’s been playing that a while. Had you considered recording it before this album, or is it just something that felt right this time?

Ian: “I think he’d been planning it for a while, but I don’t know … maybe you were, Ray, when we were recording The Livelong Day?”

Radie: “I’d been at him to bring it forward for a couple of years. He’s been playing that for years and years. And he’s been playing it in that arrangement for about eight years. And I just love it. It’s brilliant, and that coming after ‘The New York Trader’, I think a lot of the balance on the album is about contrast, you know, and some things only work because of where they come in the series of the album.

“It’s kind of tension and release, and the fugues are kind of like clearing your memory or cleaning your musical palate. Yeah, I love that contrast, and how full and heavy ‘The New York Trader’ becomes, and then you’ve got this lovely … wispy thing then.”

It’s a record that stays its considerable distance too, and somehow you’re left wanting more as ‘The Turn’ – like a dramatic reworking of prime Simon & Garfunkel, although perhaps less ‘I Am a Rock’ and more ‘I Struck a Rock’ – reaches its dramatic conclusion (arguably entombed again, where we started out), not something you might expect from a 13-minute finale. Glorious.

Anyway, talking of impressive reinterpretations of the nine concentric circles of torment, I gather, Radie, you’re something of a scholar of Dante’s Inferno in Italian.

“Yeah, I studied The Divine Comedy. I started reading it when I was 19, in university. And yeah, it’s still probably the most amazing work of literature I’ve ever read. It’s wild stuff! I’m really glad that some of the imagery made its way onto the cover, and Ian also loves that artist.

Dig Deep: Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh and Ian Lynch. Photo: Sorcha Frances Ryder 

“I don’t know if he came at it through The Divine Comedy angle, but he had discovered Gustave Dore, I think, through his other work. So that was like a point that we really had in common, that we loved all that. But you can’t get any more ‘high drama’ than The Divine Comedy!”

There’s kind of a parallel here for me – and you can shoot me down on this one – with the imagery arguably a 2023 take on The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and The Lash using The Raft of the Medusa on its cover 38 years before.

Radie: “Yeah, one of the Dore images is from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the guy on the prow of the ship being swept by the wave. It definitely looks like it fulfils that album cover by The Pogues. I liked that crossover. Very subtle!”

Forthcoming live highlights include a sell-out at London’s Barbican on Thursday, May 4th, with their biggest headline gig to date following across the city at The Roundhouse in December, their upcoming tour almost completely sold out already, the band also set for key European dates. How easy will it be to translate all of this on the record to the live Lankum experience for these forthcoming shows? Because for a four-piece you certainly carry a bit of a punch.

Ian: “Yeah, that’s something we’re still working on now, to be honest. We’ve got about another month until our first gig. So yeah, it’s just another part of the whole process for us, trying to figure out how we’re going to arrange the songs live, because doing what we do in the studio is one thing, but quite often we end up playing different instruments or having to figure out new bits completely.

“But that’s fun as well. It just has to be done, and that’s where we’re at now.”

And to bring it full circle, I’ll say the same to Ian – congratulations on another wonderful record. It’s really something special.

Ian: “Ah, thanks very much.”

True Lankum: Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada, Ian Lynch. Photo: Steve Gullick

For more information about Lankum, new album, False Lankum, its predecessors, and the band’s forthcoming live dates, head to their www.lankumdublin.com website. You can also follow them via www.facebook.com/dublinfolkmiscreants, www.instagram.com/lankumdublin/ and www.twitter.com/lankumdublin/.

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Getting the run down on The Higsons, four decades on – the Terry Edwards interview

Posted on April 22, 2023 by writewyattuk

Among this weekend’s 2023 Record Store Day releases, I was intrigued to hear word of the vinyl release of a mini-album featuring two cult early ‘80s 12” singles by post-punk/funk pioneers The Higsons, celebrating their brief liaison with 2 Tone Records.

Run Me Down – The Complete 2 Tone Recordings is a 500-copy limited-edition black vinyl LP from Sartorial Records, its tracks originally released by Jerry Dammers’ label in 1982 and 1983, out of print for more than 30 years.

The Higsons fitted in with the label’s political nature and were integral to The Specials’ mastermind’s vision of having something other than ‘new wave of ska’ acts on the roster, this reissue arriving 40 years after the initial release of the ‘Run Me Down’ single.

What’s more, Higsons frontman/vocalist turned comedy writer/author Charlie Higson has designed a new cover under sleeve art pseudonym, René Parapap, having been responsible for all the band’s cover art bar the ‘Run Me Down’ sleeve, designed by Chrysalis Records’ art department.

The Higsons came together at the University of East Anglia, Norwich in 1980, releasing several singles before joining 2 Tone, their sole studio LP, The Curse of The Higsons, following in ‘84, the group disbanding two years later.

While Charlie Higson, aka Switch, went on to fame alongside Paul Whitehouse and co. in The Fast Show, my interviewee, brass player/guitarist/vocalist Terry Edwards became a much sought-after session musician, his many engagements these days including shows with Higsons drummer/vocalist Simon Charterton and Madness bass player Mark Bedford in The Near Jazz Experience. Did Terry ever think he’d see these early ‘80s 2 Tone releases reissued on vinyl?

“Ha! Well, everything seems to come around eventually!”

How did that Jerry Dammers link come about, something we perhaps wouldn’t associate with the label’s previous championing of ska.

“Well, he was aware of the band, and it came out around the time they did the More Specials album, I think. Lots of people just loved ‘I Don’t Want to Live with Monkeys’, our first single. It was one of those things that was a bit of a touchstone to a lot of people.

“Bizarrely, my connection with the Tindersticks is slightly through that. The singer {Stuart Staples}, five or six years younger, would have been mid-teens when he heard that, and absolutely loved it. And in later years he got in touch, wanting me to do something because of that record.”

Pawn Stars: The Higsons, back in the day, and remembered with much punk/funk fondness

That involved a one-off show at London’s Barbican Centre in 2006, the Nottingham indie outfit, formed in the early ‘90s, performing their second album in full, with a nine-strong string section and two brass players, including Terry on trumpet. And more recently, Terry teamed up with Tindersticks guitarist Neil Fraser for another project. But, back to Jerry and 2 Tone …

“The Specials were also aware of that first single, and on one of those Smash Hits things of what you were listening to, Terry Hall named it as one of his records, saying, ‘It makes me laugh.’ And with the band a bit hot at that moment, Jerry and a couple of guys from the band – not including me – were at some party in Bristol, started chatting … I believe alcohol was involved … and it came from there really – a face-to-face meeting and a chat over a few drinks.”

Was it just a single deal initially?

“Two singles and an album was the deal mooted, our manager holding out for more money for the album, so we made it a two-single deal, which in retrospect … maybe we should have done the album, but you know, hindsight, 20/20 …”

‘Tear the Whole Thing Down’ was the first 2 Tone release, in October ’82, their fifth single – after one on the Romans in Britain label and three on Waap! Records – followed by ‘Run Me Down’ in February ’83. And although I put the band’s take on ‘Music to Watch Girls By’ on more compilations back in the day, ‘Run Me Down’ was my favourite Higsons-penned song, although follow-up, ‘Push out the Boat’, back on Waap! that November, also made an impression on a lad just turned 16. More to the point, ‘Run Me Down’ was playing in my head when I woke up on the morning of this interview.

“It was rather annoying that it didn’t make the Radio One playlist. With Chrysalis and 2 Tone behind it, we thought, ‘Yeah, this is the one that’s gonna break us.’ It didn’t … but it did extremely well on import in New York. Ha! It was on New York University radio all the time, and a lot of college radio stations, and so forth. So it has a bit of a life in the American underground, in a way.

“We went to America three times in ’82, ’83, ’84, on an absolute shoestring, not having the money to do anything other than get from gig to gig, but we sort of had a bash at it. And that song was big for them.”

Was that on both coasts?

“The third visit went to the West coast, but the first two were just on the East coast, and we got to Minneapolis and Chicago. We didn’t do anything in the middle.”

Taking of New York, listening back to ‘Ylang Ylang’ on this LP, I hear a David Byrne / Talking Heads influence.

“Ah, yeah, well, Charlie’s on record saying we always strenuously denied we sounded anything like the Talking Heads … but always wanted to sound like the Talking Heads!”

Above all else though, I just remember what a great live band they were. I only got to see them once though, and not until 26th January 1986, on my old Guilford patch at the University of Surrey, age 18.

“That was our penultimate gig!”

I didn’t realise that, although I did wonder, seeing as you parted ways that March. So where was the finale?

“The University of Nottingham, although we got back together for one thing, the bass player’s birthday. Colin {Williams} was a mature student, six years older than me, and that was for his 50th in 2004. We got together for a party. He very smartly asked me last, so as everybody else said yes, I had to! I’d just come back from America, having done a few weeks in the theatre, for Tom Waits’ The Black Rider, so my head was very much somewhere else.”

Looking back to early ’86, I don’t recall any rock star petulance or dramatic walks off stage. Was it all pretty amicable when it ended, a natural ending?

“Erm … our popularity had waned. We were together five years, and it hadn’t happened for us, in all honesty. We’d done reasonably well as an independent band, but never broke through that glass ceiling. We still meet now and again, and I play with Simon in the Near Jazz Experience, so we see each other a hell of a lot. We all get on, but I certainly don’t want to do the band particularly, not through anything other than I’ve just got lots of other things on!”

He’s not wrong. There’s not enough space on the internet to walk you through his amazing CV, but I remember talking to his former Essex associate, David Callahan, of The Wolfhounds fame, about something he contributed to one of this records, as if surprised, David responding with a suggestion that there aren’t many records out there that Terry’s not featured on.

“Haha!”

Am I right in recalling you go way back?

“We’re from the same neck of the woods. He’s from Romford, I’m from Hornchurch, spitting distance between the two towns. We’ve been aware of each other for some time. Different schools, but we were in various sort of school bands around the same time, knowing each other quite a while.”

In another parallel, I was talking to Martin Ling, from another early ‘80s Norwich scene outfit, Serious Drinking, and he also has Romford roots. And I believe you have mutual friends in Madness’ bass player Mark Bedford, also part of the Near Jazz Experience?

“Yes, in fact Mark was my best man last year. Ha!”

Mention of Serious Drinking (okay, I brought them up, but …) reminds me that both bands released their debut LPs on Upright Records. Mind you, I’m still miffed that I missed out on a triple-CD Cherry Red reissue of The Curse of The Higsons, having to make do with a 1999 CD version that replaced my original 1984 vinyl, one of many downsizing despatches after redundancy a decade or so ago. But that’s another story.

How important was legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel to the cause (he asks, knowing full well the answer)? I’ve heard from some quarters there wasn’t really a Norwich scene until he mentioned there was.

“Well, Colin heard him on the radio saying he lived in East Anglia and there didn’t seem to be any bands around there doing anything. So he wrote in and said, ‘We’re The Higsons, we’re supporting The Fall next week, if you want to come.’ Which was true. We’d just done our very first demo. He said he couldn’t come to that but he’d come to whatever the next one was, and we gave him a cassette of the five tracks we’d done to eight-track, one of which was ‘I Don’t Want to Live with Monkeys’. He gave us a session on the back of that, out just before two of its tracks came out on a local compilation album.”

That was Norwich: A Fine City. And what was your link to Norwich’s Backs Records and Waap! Records (which accounted for their other early singles)?

“Waap! was our imprint, but two older guys at the university decided to start a label called Romans in Britain. At the time, there was a big hoo-hah about full frontal nudity on stage in a play of that name. There was also a band called Screen Three involved. The label founders wanted the first release to be Nero 1, so that was the catalogue number for Norwich: A Fine City, with our first single Hig 2 … so I think people were looking around for Hig 1, and there never was one! Then they wanted Screen 3 for the third release. Yes, people with too much time on their hands who should have been studying at university!”

On The Curse of The Higsons’ credits, there’s also a mention for Pete Saunders, ex-Dexy’s Midnight Runners and at the time with Serious Drinking, someone else Terry’s worked with since, not least at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Talking of keyboard supremos, there’s also a mention of Frog from The Farmer’s Boys, which brings me on to a certain René Parapap, whose early sleeve artwork also included their first three singles. It never struck me back then that might be a pen name for Charlie ‘Switch’ Higson.

“Well, I think that was the point, wasn’t it, that you wouldn’t guess! Ha!”

Waap! Wonders: The Farmer’s Boys also engaged a certain Rene Parapap on the record sleeve front

Good point, well made. I love the cover he’s done for the re-release. And his artwork is very distinctive, something I also recall from early Farmer’s Boys singles ‘I Think I Need Help’, ‘Whatever Is He Like’, and ‘More Than a Dream’. Like my interviewee, it seems there’s no end to his talent, I suggested.

“Ha! We’ve obviously gone on slightly different career paths, but we’re grafters, really, and care a lot about what we do, we like doing it, we do it well. So we worked at it, and you don’t turn out a piece of artwork like that without throwing a few bits of paper away in the first place.

“Charlie’s always sort of been a doodler and a drawer … and a writer – that was his thing at university. His degree was in English, with a minor in film studies, I think, while mine happened to be in music. And I think we both really toiled at what we do, neither of us wanting to do anything else.”

Did you bond straight away at UEA?

“There were two years between us at university, so he was in his third year when I came in for my first, along with Simon and Colin. Charlie was that cool, slightly older bloke, far as I was concerned. In fact, everybody was cooler and older! Simon had just come off touring with Alex Harvey, at the age of 18. That’s what he’d done in his year between school and university. So I was slightly awed with him. Having been a professional drummer, he was much better than the drummers I’d ever played with.

“And Charlie was one of those people who … I always thought he knew what he wanted. He’d say, ‘I was really insecure at the time,’ but he had a good image and we met in the rehearsal studio, via Simon and possibly Colin, and just started playing together. It was the band that connected us.”

There’s a live photo of Terry on sax alongside Charlie on trumpet among the press information that came my way for this release. But don’t be fooled …

“He learned literally two notes to play along with songs! I showed him what fingers to put down. He was never a trumpet player, but we managed to get enough notes out of it to make a section when we were a five-piece.”

Brass Monkeys: Charlie Higson and Terry Edwards in live action, way back then

Did the others move on to day jobs after the band split?

“Yes and no. Colin’s background was that he played with an early incarnation of Wah! Heat. He’s from Liverpool, and we supported Wah! on two or three occasions through Colin.

“Stuart {McGeachin, guitar, vocals} was from Bristol and was playing there, and after The Higsons he started working in airline entertainment, putting together all the music and film stuff you would get when you’re sat in your airline seat.

“And Colin became a speech therapist, then helped children with severe autism. He’s retired now.”

How did scriptwriter and Charlie Higson associate Dave Cummings fit into all this?

“He was in the original band. We did three or four gigs before he left – again in his last year while we were in our first. He then moved to London to make fame and fortune with his band, Bonsai Forest, who had Paul Whitehouse playing guitar with them. He was in Charlie’s year, after which Charlie got Stuart involved in the band.”

Dave Cummings left in Summer 1980, his CV also including six years on guitar with Del Amitri (from 1989) and co-writing credits with Paul Whitehouse for early 2000s BBC sitcom Happiness and 2015’s Nurse, 2000 feature film, Kevin and Perry Go Large, and playing the role of the bass player in prog rock band Thotch in 2014’s The Life of Rock with Brian Pern.  

Dave’s place in the band was filled by Stuart that October, when the demo was recorded which found its way to John Peel in January 1981, including two Dave Cummings songs collectively written.

Of the many names Terry’s worked with, it’s a somewhat eclectic mix, including The Blockheads, The Creatures, Department S, Faust, Hot Chip, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Lydia Lunch, Madness, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Robyn Hitchcock, Snuff, and Spiritualised. I half-heartedly ask for his personal highlights, but he wriggles off the hook.

“You take different stuff from experiences, and as a session musician you have to be fairly pliable. What I like about what I do is that people get in touch now because they want Terry Edwards. They don’t want a trumpet or sax player. If you want somebody who’s plays real high Cuban trumpet, you don’t phone me. Robyn Hitchcock was asked by someone, ‘Why did you think you needed a trumpet on such and such a song?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t think I needed a trumpet. I thought I wanted some Terry on it!’ I thought that was really nice.

“So I’m kind of avoiding your question, but I think you learn a lot from playing with other people, because no two people write songs the same way. When you go in and think you understand how something’s going to go, you learn from that, then take that away. Thankfully, I’ve never really had to do something I absolutely detested. But even if it’s music I wouldn’t necessarily listen to, you learn from that experience, how people write those songs. You go against your better judgement.

“Sometimes a song needs that specific style of sax playing, so you do it, then you go, ‘Oh, I understand that now.’ On the same subject, I’ve played with {US pianist and long-time David Bowie collaborator} Mike Garson a few times, via this producer, Tom Wilcox, who gets very interesting things together.

“He was doing one of those Bowie alumni things, I said, ‘I’m gonna come and see you in Manchester,’ and he said, ‘Oh, bring your saxophones.’ He sent me the set-list and said, ‘Why don’t you play on ‘Young Americans’, which I’d never learned to play. You think you know a song because you’ve heard it a million times, then actually having to learn it, you realise how it’s put together, and in fact, it’s got quite a limited number of notes on it.

“You think it’s David Sanborn and he’s all over the saxophone, but he’s really strictly in a six or seven note scale, with no notes outside that. And it’s a discipline that really makes you think about your instrument.

“That was early 2020, just before the shutters came down. So we’re talking quite late in my life to have discovered something. And the absolute beauty of it is that you don’t know everything!”

That was for the Holy Holy project, yes?

“Yeah, there were some shows on a tour that Steve Norman couldn’t do. And funnily enough, Steve and I come from similar backgrounds in the way that we were originally guitarists. There wasn’t really a place for a second guitarist in Spandau Ballet after the initial singles, so he learned the saxophone.”

You mentioned Robyn Hitchcock, and I believe there’s a tribute song of sorts, ‘Listening to the Higsons’.

“Yes, that was my introduction to Robin. I’d never heard The Soft Boys. Somebody said, ‘You know someone’s written a song about you?’ Then I got to know him. We were introduced – Simon and I – backstage at the Town and Country Club in London (now The Forum) by our soundman, who was the house soundman there. And I played with him just a few weeks ago at Alexandra Palace.”

Meanwhile, mght there be a live launch for this Higsons re-release?

“Erm … we’re just hoping that the good people of the world will just buy the 500 that we’ve pressed. Ha!”

Do you think there will ever be a moment when you all step back onto a stage at the same time?

“And for the same reason? Ha! Erm, there are no plans. Things certainly have their time. I didn’t get a ticket to go and see Led Zeppelin when they did their one reformed gig at the O2, but I’d love to see them. But by the same token, I wouldn’t want to do that with my own band … although that’s a bit two-faced.

“I think Charlie feels the same way. I remember him saying, ‘I want to grow old with a bit of dignity.’ I was a bit affronted by that, thinking, ‘Well, actually, I’m still doing this,’ and this was the same week he was on The Chase Celebrity Special. He’s standing there, next to Basil fucking Brush, and there’s a man who wants some dignity! Ha! I have pulled his leg about that!”

I like to think that – like The Beatles in Help! – The Higsons, The Farmer’s Boys and Serious Drinking went through separate front doors of band abodes in a terrace of houses in Norwich back in the day, yet it would all be one room on the inside, maybe with Popular Voice (and possibly Screen Three) coming round for a cuppa now and again. Tell me that’s actually true.

“I don’t think the house would have remained standing for very long with all those bands in!”

Did you live with any other Higsons at the time?

“Stuart and Charlie for a short time.”

Were they good housemates?

“It was just the way the university turned people out, really. You had to find somewhere to live, Charlie had a place, Stuart was already in, and a room came up for me. I took that for the best part of a year, I suppose.”

In the Discogs’ listing for The Higsons’ early 1982 Live at the Jacquard Club performance – included on the Cherry Red reissue of The Curse of The Higsons – one comment reads, ‘The energy in this life performance could be distilled and replicated to replace fossil fuels and address the climate crisis. Waap!” That seems a perfect tribute for the band I recall four years later.

“I think that’s actually one of the things we could never really get on record – what the live band was like. I think the same’s true of Gallon Drunk. What a phenomenal band. I thought Gallon Drunk was gonna be absolutely huge. I don’t think the records ever really … but can you actually do that?”

Terry joined Gallon Drunk in 1993, staying onboard for three albums. Had he completed his degree at UEA?

“I did get a degree in music, yes! I think only Stuart didn’t.”

Going right back, were there musicians in the Edwards family?

“Certainly on my mum’s side. She was an infants’ schoolteacher, the one playing the piano at assemblies. Her sister was a piano teacher and taught me piano, and their mum played piano and their dad played violin.”

That was in Hornchurch, with Terry’s maternal grandfather from Ipswich and maternal grandmother from Hammersmith, with links to Romford and East Ham on the Edwards side, and a Welsh link way back. Was there always a love of brass for you?

“Chronologically, saxophone is very late in the instruments I played. I started off on piano at the age of five, purely because I broke my leg and couldn’t go out running after a ball, and mum’s piano was there in the house.

“Then at senior school, a trumpet was available. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it wasn’t the violin, which my brother played, and a boy who sat next to me in class played trumpet, so I kind of fell into that. I really just wanted to be a pop star. I got a guitar when I was 13, wanting to play pop and then Beatles songs, then discovering Jimi Hendrix, and so on and so forth.

“I just kept plugging away at that, then I got a sax for my 18th birthday, because I really liked The Blockheads, and Davey Payne’s playing, and an amazing R&B saxophone, Earl Bostic. But I don’t come from a jazz background at all – hence the Near Jazz Experience, playing rock music but on jazz instruments.”

There can be a bit of snobbery in that world.

“Oh, not ‘alf, yeah! And because of it you get a bit frightened … until you actually listen to things. The best thing you can do is follow your ears, rather than a trend or your eyes. Follow your ears … although it gets you in a very funny place! Ha!”

There’s no denying you’ve worked hard at this, a love of music the common thread.

“Yeah, and it is largely for the love of it, you know, rather than a way to make money. Ha! I think you have to love doing these things, first and foremost, because you don’t become an overnight sensation overnight!”

As for the Record Store Day release, I look forward to physically seeing this new release.

“Yeah, it’s nice to have those songs all in one place, and it makes sense to have them on two sides. It sounds a bit funny when you hear all six without turning a record over. It makes sense, because the A-side is the A and B of ‘Tear the Whole Thing Down’, followed by the full {12” of) ‘Run Me Down’, then you turn the record over and get the A and B of the second single, then the instrumental. A lot of thought went into that. Ha!”

Maybe I should press pause and step out of the room between them when listening to the digital version.

“Yeah, go and have a cup of tea in between. It’ll make more sense!”

The Higsons’ Run Me Down – The Complete 2 Tone Recordings is out today (Saturday, April 22nd) on Sartorial Records as a limited-edition LP, to mark Record Store Day. For more details, head to The Higsons’ Facebook page. You can also check out a Rough Trade Records link here, and The Higsons’ Bandcamp page.

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Let me tell you about Sweden (and Denmark, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester …) – catching up with Hugh Cornwell

Posted on March 31, 2023 by writewyattuk
Doorstepping Out: Hugh Cornwell, back on the road soon. Photo: Bernard Fevre

Early May sees the return of former Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell to the road for three more UK headline dates, celebrating last October’s acclaimed Moments of Madness LP.

Following a 23-date nationwide tour late last year, he has shows in Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield along with bandmates Pat Hughes (bass) and Windsor McGilvray (drums), playing two live sets – one of solo years’ material, the other comprising classic Stranglers songs.

As the punk icons’ lead singer and guitarist from 1974 to 1990, Hugh was the main songwriter across 10 Stranglers albums, overseeing 21 top-40 hits and 14 top-20 LPs in the UK alone, before going it alone, having delivered 10 more LPs since.

And Moments of Madness, is considered a high watermark, one of his most significant, attracting praise from the likes of Mojo (‘Cornwell’s still doing things his way and often with striking results.’), Uncut (‘Thunderously tribal garage-rock… the ex-Strangler not yet gone soft.”), Classic Rock (‘the one constant with Hugh Cornwell albums is that they’re never dull’), Record Collector (‘creates a universe where hardcore and newcomer Stranglers fans alike can revel.’) and Louder Than War(‘a call back to his rock roots … a late flowering classic from a man who has always known how to write a damn good tune.’).

Self-produced, and playing all the instruments himself, Moments of Madness finds Hugh flexing his musical muscles with a stripped-down, offbeat, reverberating ‘60s vibe across its 10 tracks, indelibly stamped with Hugh’s trademark imagination and storytelling, the latest long player landing four years after previous high calibre solo offering, Monster.

As the 73-year-old suggests on opening track and first single, ‘Coming Out of the Wilderness’, there are elements here of a hardy veteran tackling the art of survival amid challenging and turbulent times.

This time, his subject matter includes the ‘bewildering trend for tattoos’ (‘Red Rose’), environmental concerns and threats to our ecology (‘Too Much Trash’), and his Mexico-based Italian friends who make the best pasta he’s ever tasted (’Lasagna’), amid more reflective, very personal insights (‘When I Was a Young Man’ and LP closer ‘Heartbreak at Seven’, the first song recorded for the album).

It’s been a tough few years for many of us, and Hugh’s lost some old friends, including former bandmates and co-conspirators Dave Greenfield in May 2020 (‘He was the difference between The Stranglers and every other punk band. His musical skill and gentle nature gave an interesting twist to the band.’), fellow ‘Tele brother’ Wilko Johnson just after the latest LP landed (‘No one could play like Wilko. We’ll all miss him.’), and Jet Black in December (‘We shared a special period of our lives when we strived to become professional musicians. We were immediately drawn to one another, he had a singular sense of purpose that I identified with. He threw everything in his previous life out, to dedicate himself to our common goal. The Stranglers success was founded on his determination and drive. His timing was faultless. All power to him and his legacy.’).

As for the sound, he says, “It’s like I’ve got a stew-pot of sounds where I’ve put in a bit of Joe Meek, a bit of Lou Reed, a flavour of The Doors, a bit of this, a bit of that, and I mix it all up and it tastes good. I’m like a cook when I make records in that I don’t follow any recipe.”

Born and raised in North London, where he played in a band at school with fellow future star, Richard Thompson, Hugh’s degree in biochemistry from university in Bristol led to a postgraduate research role in Sweden in the early ‘70s, where he spent part of his spare time busking in nearby Copenhagen (a cross-border hydrofoil ride away from nearest town, Malmo), ultimately leading to his role in the band Johnny Sox. And when that outfit decamped to England, Jet Black joined and the band got back to basics in Guildford, Surrey, where The Stranglers story proper started in 1974.

While Hugh stuck around for another 16 years, he made an album with Captain Beefheart drummer Robert Williams in 1979, Nosferatu followed nine years later by hisfirst solo offering, Wolf, two years before he called time on The Stranglers.

And since 2012’s rightly acclaimed eighth solo outing, Totem and Taboo, recorded in Chicago and engineered by Steve Albini, we’ve had 2016’s This Time It’s Personal alongside fellow poet laureate of punk contender John Cooper Clarke, giving their own inimitable takes on songs that shaped their youth, and then Monster in 2018, writing about the idols that shaped and influenced his life. And on the evidence of Moments of Madness, he’s clearly still on a creative roll.

Hugh was in West London when I caught up with him, taking a breather amid rehearsals with his bandmates.

“We’ve found a good place here, in Shepherd’s Bush. The boys, Windsor and Pat, both live in Guildford, but we’ve got a system now where they come up to town, which is good.”

The three dates coming up include a Manchester show rescheduled from late November, when a show at Gorilla was cancelled due to an ‘insurmountable technical problem on the part of the venue’, Hugh and his band feeling they ‘did everything they could to try to make the show happen’, apologising on behalf of the venue to ‘everyone who made the effort to get to the show on an evening of travel difficulties and poor weather.’

That date has now switched down the Oxford Road to the Academy 3 on Saturday, May 6th, with all tickets from the Gorilla concert remaining valid.

“It was impossible to play there under the circumstances. You have to put a standard on what you expect people to accept, and what we could have done wouldn’t have been acceptable. I think it would have been substandard. If people are paying the money for the ticket, they deserve a good show, so it’s been rescheduled.”

I see you’ve also got a trip back to Scandinavia lined up, supporting The Undertones again. Are you doing a few dates with them?

“Yeah, we’re also up in Copenhagen. We’ve got about a week of shows.”

It’s been half a century or so since Hugh was living in Sweden, working on a PHD at university in Lund while living the life nearby and building up that live acumen across the water in the Danish capital.

“This is my first trip for a long time. I’m looking forward to it. It should be interesting. I’ll have to brush up my Swedish!”

Funny you should say that. A friend was telling me how he was in Stockholm around 2003 with a friend from London, married to a Swede and fluent in the local lingo. They went into a record shop, finding and buying a copy of ‘Sverige’ (the Swedish language version of Sweden (All Quiet on the Eastern Front)’, released as a single solely in Scandinavia in 1978). He told me the guys in the record shop insisted on playing it before they let him leave, critiquing the quality of your Swedish in a long, long debate in their mother tongue, in what proved to be a listening party with a difference.

“What, saying it wasn’t a good translation?”

I think it was more about your accent and pronunciation in places.

“Ah, well, you can’t win over accents! Ha, how funny.”

I’ll have to find out the address for you.

“Absolutely. I’ll have to go in there. Did he purchase it or not?”

I believe so. I think he was hoping to just buy it, then leave the shop.

“Oh, I see … like a museum exhibit!”

I think so … which – no offence – I suppose you’ve become, in a way.

“Yeah, I have, in a way. Ha!”

I love that track, both versions, and picking up on the English language version and the line, ‘Too much time to think, too little to do,’ how is your boredom threshold these days, would you say?

“Well, I mean, I still have a lower boredom threshold. It doesn’t take much to get me bored. But I manage to fill in with different interests. So I avoid boredom as much as possible. Because boredom is the end of life, really. I mean, you’ve got to avoid getting bored, basically.”

And the music’s keeping you young, I’m thinking. You’re certainly out of the stalls at pace right away on the latest album with ‘Coming out of the Wilderness’, your ‘60s roots to the fore but sounding as current as you ever have.

“Well, thank you. I hope members of the public think that too, so they’ll come along to the shows, because the new stuff sounds good live. It works well. I mean, Pat and Windsor have done very well in interpreting it their own way. And it’s great, I’m really looking forward to playing them again.”

There’s even a little heavy dub on the title track. It sounds like you’re having fun playing bass there.

“Oh, yeah, it was the first time I’ve let myself play bass for many years, and I really enjoyed it. And some of the songs started out from the bass riff, which was interesting. ‘Too Much Trash’ started out from a bass riff, which is a nice way to start songs.”

‘Coming out of the Wilderness’ was already out last time I saw you live, supporting The Undertones at Lytham’s Lowther Pavilion on Lancashire’s Fylde coast, on what proved a great night (with a review here). And that song for me is somewhere between the Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and a few ‘60s UK R&B influences, but there’s also something deeper in there, perhaps a bit of some of those acts that influenced all those outfits, like Howling Wolf or John Lee Hooker.

“Well, great! I mean, why not? I’d be happy for all those to be cited as influences. It’s just, does anyone know what those names mean anymore? That’s the thing.”

Well, they should do. Then again, America was partly oblivious to their own influential acts in those days when the so-called British Invasion came about, not realising where they’d nicked those songs from in the first place, so who knows.

Three’s Company: From left – Hugh, Windsor and Pat, Clitheroe, The Grand, 2018 (Photo: Peter Gresty)

“That’s right. Well, maybe that will happen with me. Maybe they’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and not know where I’ve nicked it from!”

And is there a subtle nod to your early solo outing, Wolf, as well on that song and its accompanying promo video? Only somehow that’s 35 years old now.

“Wow! Yeah, and we’ve revisited Wolf. I got the guys to gen up on ‘Another Kind of Love’, which I’ve always been fond of. And it’s worked really well live. Also, we’ve been looking at resurrecting some of the old Nosferatu songs, and they’re working quite well too. So everything and anything’s possible, you know. If you go back into your back catalogue, you can find ways of playing almost anything.”

I’d say, having caught you live a few times in recent years, you’ve proved that time and again.

“I hope so.”

Will it just be that core trio of yourself, Pat and Windsor on these forthcoming dates?

“That’s right.”

You’ve clearly found a formula there, and you seem so tight as a unit. It works well.

“Yeah, they’re very gifted, and between us we’ve managed to cover the keyboards option, because I don’t want to take keyboards with me on the road. What I’ve discovered is that because they’ve got such great voices, you can actually summon up a lot of the extra instruments from that, which is really nice. And on some of the old Stranglers songs – we can recreate them using the voices to supplement the guitars and bass, so there’s not so much missing as people would imagine.”

Agreed, with a case in point for me – among the tracks that really stood out last time I saw you – alongside several solo era songs, ‘London Lady’, which sounded so fresh at Lytham. And while I never feel comfortable with ‘Five Minutes’, because of the real-life horror story behind it, it’s such a great song live, all these years on.

“Yeah, my manager said, ‘Are you sure you should be playing ‘Five Minutes’ at a festival?’ Because it’s not really family material. But it works so well and it’s so exciting that I think it kind of transcends any of those misgivings. And yeah, I mean, ‘London Lady’, that’s one of the really early Stranglers songs, and in those days we were just a power trio. That was really before Dave Greenfield had stamped his keyboard mark. It’s a song that lends itself to a power trio, so I’m really happy the way that’s worked out.”

Seeing as Moments of Madness is your 10th solo album, were you at all tempted for history to repeat and to call this one 10?

“Ha ha! Well, no, not at all … although there are 10 songs on it!”

Well, there is that as well. And among some extremely positive reviews for this LP, someone in Uncut mentioned your ‘thunderously tribal garage-rock’. That’s not as bad description, really, that nod to garage rock. A couple of songs here wouldn’t have been out of place on the classic Nuggets compilation.

“Great! Well, that’s very good feedback. It’s nice to know it’s working, you know. And I mean, it was actually recorded in a garage … or a building that used to be a garage, so there you go!”

Was it a bit of a lockdown project in that respect?

“It was indeed, yeah.”

Have you now got a taste for self-production, then? Or would you be happy to record with someone else twiddling the knobs next time?

“Well, it’s working. We did Monster there too, and the album with John Cooper Clarke. The last album I actually went somewhere else to record was Totem and Taboo with Steve Albini. Since then, everything’s been working very well. There’s an old maxim which says, ‘If it works, don’t fix it,’ so I see no reason not to continue that. And there’s a progression as well. I mean, I think Moments of Madness sounds better than Monster did. So hopefully, maybe the next one will sound even better. So we’re getting there now!”

And this one’s rather a personal album. A few tracks have that vibe to them.

“Yeah, they are very personal. I mean, it’s a lot of my actual life, and what goes through your mind and stuff, all put down there. So yeah, I’ll plead guilty to that!”

However, despite the content of ‘When I Was a Young Man’ and a couple of other tracks of that lyrical bent, you’re not po-faced. Songs like ‘Lasagna’ suggest the Cornwell humour’s still there.

“Well, ‘Lasagna’ is based on a real experience, you know, and it’s all real stuff. I don’t really have to make anything up. I write about things that happen to me, about real things. There’s not much fantasy in there.”

Were you always happy to be the showman, do you feel?

“Well, when I was in the band that The Stranglers became, in Sweden, Johnny Sox, I was the second guitarist, the sideman who played rhythm guitar and sang backing vocals most of the time. So I started out there, then as time went on, I ended up centre-stage. So it wasn’t always a given. I didn’t always think I was going to be where I ended up.”

That said, one of my abiding memories of the first time I saw The Stranglers, at Guildford Civic Hall in 1982 when I was barely 14, was you telling jokes to the audience while all manner of technological problems were going on with Dave Greenfield’s keyboard. And you still had that warm rapport in the support slot at Lytham four decades later. You’ve always came over as a natural frontman to me.

“Oh, well, why not? If you’ve got people listening to every word, it’s the perfect time to tell a story or a funny happening or something, and just basically make them laugh, you know, and realise that life isn’t that serious and you’ve got to try and enjoy it as you can.”

Good point, well made. And talking of bands who always bring a smile to the face, you’ve played a lot of gigs with The Undertones now. They’re celebrating the 45th anniversary this year of much loved debut single ‘Teenage Kicks’, and this May also marks 45 years since The Stranglers released third studio album, Black and White.

“Oh, well, it makes sense then, and we will be playing the Swedish version of Sweden in Sweden! So that sort of goes along with that thinking, right? And it gives me a good introduction to that song.”

The university town of Lund isn’t so far from Malmo, where one of the dates takes place. Was that where you would get along for a night out back in those days?

“Well, there wasn’t much going on in Malmo in those days! It might have changed now. I shall find out. But you’d go to Malmo to get the ferry across to Copenhagen, and that’s where everything was going on. I could be in Copenhagen in an hour, via Malmo. It was so quick to get over there, and I used to go over there and play in the bars, busking in the bars. I used to do that a lot.”

And as you say, Copenhagen’s also on this itinerary. And you’ve clearly got something of a rapport with The Undertones. You’ve played with them a few times now. It seems to work, the two acts on the same bill.

“Oh definitely, they’re a great bunch of guys. It’s nice. We have good fun.”

As long as he steers clear of trouble this time. According to Hugh’s ex-bandmate JJ Burnel, talking to Dave Simpson for The Guardian in 2014 about the band twice being escorted out of Sweden by armed police, ‘200 members of this teddy boy gang who hated punk drove up in their big 1950s American cars, beat up our road crew and smashed our equipment. We were locked in our dressing room but managed to escape by throwing a few Molotovs before the police arrived.’

On the other occasion, Jet Black (in his own words) ‘kicked up a fracas because I couldn’t get served any food and the hotel threatened to call the police, who turned up with machine guns again to escort us on to the next plane.’ 

I put this to Hugh, telling him I’m hoping for his sake those notorious Swedish greasers they’d had a few past run-ins with in The Stranglers’ years wouldn’t be out to confront him this time.

“Ha ha! Yeah, I think they were called the raggare. I don’t know if they exist anymore.”

Well, perhaps you’ll find out.

“We’ll find out, yeah!”

Let’s just hope for his sake, any surviving gang members will be on Zimmer frames these days.

For this website’s November 2019 feature/interview with Hugh Cornwell, head here, and for our October 2018 chat, head here. For our November 2015 feature/interview with Hugh, head here,  and for our July 2013 feature/interview, head here. You can also check out a July 2014 interview with Jean-Jacques Burnel here, and a March 2015 interview with Baz Warne, fronting the band since 2006, here.

Hugh Cornwell’s forthcoming UK, Irish and Scandinavian dates (*acoustic **supporting The Undertones, who are doing five extra dates in Holland and Germany around their four shows in Sweden and one in Denmark): Belfast Black Box* (Wednesday, April 12th), Dublin Pepper Canister* (Thursday, April 13th), Galway Roisin Dubh* (Friday, April 14th), Cork St Luke’s* (Saturday, April 15th), Uppsala Katalin** (Tuesday, April 25th), Stockholm Slaktkyrkan** (Wednesday, April 26th), Goteborg Pustervik** (Friday, April 28th), Malmo Plan B** (Saturday, April 29th), Copenhagen** (Pumpehuset, Sunday, April 30th), Birmingham O2 Institute 2 (Friday, May 5th); Manchester Academy 3 (Saturday, May 6th); Sheffield O2 Academy 2 (Sunday, May 7th). Hugh and his band will also be appearing at the Mama’s Pride Festival in Geleen, Holland, the second of nine dates in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria that month, leading up to his Melkweg show in Amsterdam on Sunday, May 21st. For details and tickets on all those and more shows in October and next January, head to www.hughcornwell.com and www.thegigcartel.com. You can also keep in touch via Facebook and Twitter.

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Fill in the pages of tomorrows yet to be – talking Dodgy with Nigel Clark

Posted on March 18, 2023 by writewyattuk
Cool Place: Dodgy foursome (from left) Nigel Clark, Andy Miller, Mathew Priest, and Stuart Thoy

What is it about dogs that they get vocal the moment interviews start? It’s normally my rescue lab-cross, Millie, but in this case Dodgy frontman Nigel Clark’s Bedlington whippet-cross is doing all the barking.

“As soon as I say hello to anybody … hang on … Indie, there’s no one coming! It’s a phone!”

Soon enough, Indie is settled – on Nigel, it turns out – and we can commence, first comparing notes on our four-legged housemates, in his case with a tale of the cat that comes into his garden and causes ructions.

It will be eight years this summer since I last met Nigel, after a storming couple of sets with Dodgy – the band he co-founded with previous WriteWyattUK interviewee Mathew Priest (drums), Andy Miller (guitar, on board since just after the band relocated to London and took their name) and Stuart Thoy (bass, who joined just in time for their most recent LP in 2017) – in the unlikely setting of Ribchester Village Hall, a rural Lancashire setting 10 miles north-east of Preston, one glorious summer’s evening, a Hollow Horse production that formed part of local promoter Carl Barrow’s visionary drive to put under-used community buildings to good use.

It was my eldest daughter’s first live show … and what a great one to open with. And among the many highlights (with my review here) were hits from their biggest-selling LPs, 1994’s Homegrown and 1996 follow-up Free Peace Sweet, plus inspired takes on the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ and Frank Wilson’s Northern Soul classic ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)’, the latter including wondrous forays into The Velvet Underground’s’Waiting for my Man’ and ‘Run Run Run’ and Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner. Does he remember that night?

“Yes! I do remember that! Wow! How many years ago? Eight? Isn’t it mad, eh. Time goes so quickly.”

It’s odd to think that’s a longer period than Dodgy were together first time around. But in seven years they sold more than a million records worldwide, releasing three albums and enjoying 12 top-40 singles, including ‘90s classics ‘Staying Out for the Summer’and ‘Good Enough’, the latter officially one of the most played tracks on UK radio in the last 25 years.

They reformed in 2012, comeback album Stand Upright In A Cool Place landing16 years after their double-platinum bestseller, to rave reviews, The Word magazine suggesting, ‘They’ve just made the record of their career by a country mile,’ The Guardian describing it a ‘revelation’, and the record also receiving four stars in Mojo, Uncut, Q, and various national newspapers.

Then there was 2017’s What Are We Fighting For, again well received. And now, 27 years after Free Peace Sweet (‘rather beautiful and serendipitous as the average age of the band was 27 when we made it’), from which ‘Good Enough’ was drawn, there are five celebratory shows, carrying on where they left off in 25th anniversary live celebrations of Homegrown, a tour that ended witha big night at O2 Shepherds Bush Empire.

Ahead of this interview, I revisited Free Peace Sweet, and it’s lost none of its impact. Such a great LP. I have all their albums on the shelf, but that remains my favourite.

“I don’t know if it’s my favourite. I think it was the most eclectic of the three albums we did to then. I think Homegrown was the most concise, from song to song. It sounded like the same band, while Free Peace Sweet, in that period of the ‘90s there were so many different musical styles going around, it was the start of the future, if you know what I mean, with so many influences – from the technology of drum and bass onwards.

“I was really into all that, and still am. I love technology, but I love nylon string folk guitars and fingerpicking. So it goes from the birth of music to where we are now, really. And I’m still the same – the eclecticism lives on.”

I get that, but also recognise that wouldn’t work if there wasn’t a great collection of songs beneath it. The quality of the songwriting is there. You talked about the birth of music, and for me there are nods to Ray Davies’ songcraft on that LP. And of course, The Who, something that comes across in so much that Mathew plays.

“Yeah! Well, it used to. He’s calmed down a bit now! He doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve as much these days … that was 27 years ago. But those 27 years don’t seem like real years. It doesn’t seem that long a distance. In fact, since ‘97, what seems to have happened since the internet {took off}, time has taken a different tangent, I think.

“I was talking to my wife the other day, saying, ‘God, we’re middle-aged’ and she said, ‘There’s no such thing as middle-aged anymore.’ If you think back to when people were in their 50s years ago, they’d all be getting their clothes from that certain shop, the blokes would be wearing caps … Know what I mean? It’s not like that anymore. The gap has shrunk.

“I don’t know if I’m reliving my past, but my kids have grown up now, they’ve all moved out, so I feel like I can get along with my life again, going back into the things me and my wife like doing.”

Nigel, originally from Redditch, and Mathew, from Bromsgrove, moved to the capital from their Midlands roots to get Dodgy off the ground. But these days, Nigel’s in West Wales while Mathew’s in Wiltshire.

My interviewee tells me he’s coming up to 29 years of marriage, aged 27 at the time (yep, that number again). I told him I tend to find it’s those who married far earlier who have the midlife crises, perhaps building up this idea of what they felt they missed out on while bringing up children.

“And they’re normally not married now! You have to make a mistake. When I went down to London, I jacked in my job, my girlfriend, my house, then moved down to London to do music. Everything had to go. But I’ve done that in my life. I know what I want … and what I don’t want!”

Back on the subject of Free Peace Sweet, I’m struggling to think off the top of my head of another LP carrying the title track of the previous album. And that makes me smile.

“I don’t know why that happened! We always had a song that should have gone on the album before, and it never made it. And with ‘Homegrown’, it was destined to be on an EP that got shelved, as we didn’t like the other side. It was kind of Dodgy trying to do something different. It sounded like Stereo MCs, it was called ‘Don’t Go Back’ or something like that. We went, ‘This isn’t what we want to do.’ So we shelved it, and when we got to Free Peace Sweet we went, ‘What about ‘Homegrown’?’ And I liked the idea of putting it on and nodding to the previous album. Like ‘Grassman’ was supposed to be on the first album.”

I’m still struggling to think of a previous case where someone’s done that.

“I seem to think something’s gone on with Led Zeppelin. Somewhere along the line, they had a song that was supposed to be on another album, or whatever. But maybe it is unique. And I like that. One of the reasons for me to get into music in the first place was because … I got a job and bought a house in the mid- to late-‘80s, and started to live this life. So I wanted my next career to not be anything to do with business, and we made a point of trying to avoid all the business rubbish that goes on in the music industry.

“Like, when we first signed our publishing deal, we got two publishing companies to play video football against each other for us. To do different things, turn it a little bit crazy. I’d been in business. I didn’t want to be in business. I wanted to be in music, and the music would carry us. And it did, you know. We had that focus, we were very focused.”

That sounds like my own experience. Being in fairly well-paid jobs, but quitting to get on the path to doing what I really wanted to do, foregoing a comfortable wage to do it. But real life experiences teach you so much, and in my case, being in business at least convinced me what I didn’t want to do for a career.

“Yeah, I think that’s how we work it out really. It is what you don’t want, and sometimes I dip into this parallel world where there’s the Nigel that didn’t leave that job. And it’s quite useful to remember those things. Sometimes I write lyrics that are about not conforming to the life that society has. Even your parents told you, ‘You need to get a job, you need to do this.’ I look at this person I once was, the conforming one. I can bounce things off him sometimes.”

I mentioned Ray Davies before, and he shone a light on those situations at times, something The Jam echoed with songs like ’Smithers-Jones’.

“Yeah, and that line, ‘I’ve some news to tell you, there’s no longer a position for you’, for me personally, I wanted to be in control of all that. I didn’t want that to be my life. I could see how easy it is to do it. People get trapped.

“When I worked at Rover on the shop floor, I was only young, 18 or 19, but a lot of people started there at my age, then had kids and couldn’t leave, because they had children to look after. I was lucky in one way that my circumstance of not having children that young, not having much responsibility then, enabled me to be able to follow my dreams.”

Remind me how you met Mathew and how the Dodgy adventure came about.

“I answered an advert in a local paper, looking for a singer. I was just starting out, musically. I’d been doing it quite a few years, recording demos, and thought it was about time I got a band. I met Mathew that way, he was the drummer in the band, and we decided after about a year that we were really serious about it.

“I went to America, travelling, came back and decided I was either going to live in New York or London. And he said, ‘I’ll come.’ So we did it together, which was brilliant. It would have been difficult on my own. I tried to always be Mister Overconfident, saying, ‘I’m going’ but it was a lot better and easier that I had someone with me.”

You were based in Hounslow, West London. Was that purely a case of somewhere you could afford to live, close enough for the circuit?

“When we first moved down in 1988, we lived in Battersea, and as someone into punk, the soundtrack to our first year in London was The Story of The Clash. Mathew knew The Jam more, so I kind of influenced him there. Then his mum and dad went travelling and we sort of inherited their records, which is when I got into Sly and the Family Stone, in a big way. I still think they’re probably the greatest band ever.

“We were DJs as well. We bought a set-up and would go around colleges and places like that. So we knew what we liked, were vivacious in the music we wanted to listen to, and took on everything. There were things going on – techno, baggy, all that, but we were consuming Simon and Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, then The Beastie Boys, then Neil Young. And when we first heard Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, that was it. I love harmony. I don’t think anything’s complete if you can’t sing a harmony. I listen to a lot of Townes Van Zandt these days, and always sing harmony to him, thinking, ‘If I knew him …’

That makes sense. It’s threaded through your music. Take for example, Free Peace Sweet’s ‘You’ve Gotta Look Up’, with its Beach Boys sunshine vibe.

“I’m listening to an album at the moment, which I really recommend, a feelgood album that’s just come out by Panda Bear from Animal Collective and Sonic Boom from Spaceman Three, who sent him all these intros from ‘60s songs. They both live in Portugal. Some you may know, some you’ll definitely know, such as ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. Panda Bear put them into his sampler and started singing these new melodies and songs over them, and it’s joyous. It’s just sunshine. It’s amazing. It’s my album for the summer.”

An artist who has also released two solo LPs, 2006’s 21st Century Man and 2020’s Make Believe Love, clearly still has his ears open. We’re not going to find him solely on the Rewind ‘90s circuit, are we?

“Well, you might do! I’ve got three or four things on. The Dodgy thing at this moment in time, there’s no record label, there’s no finance for it. So we just do gigs, including these five for the first part of the tour, and hopefully we’ll carry on if we can. Then we’ve got about 25 festivals this year, so that’s great. So this is my income really. Dodgy is still earning my income, then I’m doing stuff with Chris Helme, from The Seahorses …”

Chris supports you on these dates, I see.

“Yeah, he’s great, and he’s coming down to mine, having recently moved by the sea, which is amazing.”

Nigel has his own studio at his new base in Ceredigion.

“I do a lot of electronic music as well. My plan is to start doing online gigs, at least video gigs from my studio. I’m aware that a lot of people aren’t going out nowadays. It’s very difficult to sell live tickets at the moment.”

It’s noticeable that these five Dodgy dates are all weekend shows.

“It’s ridiculous. Someone booked me the other day for a Monday. I said, ‘Monday? Are you sure about this?’ But two weeks before, he said, ‘No one’s coming.’ So I know that now. Society has changed so much, and the money flowing around isn’t fairly distributed in this country. Which is unfortunate, because we need people to have money for society to be able to grow. This is why we’re stagnating as a country right now.”

I was going to ask, 27 years on from Free Peace Sweet’s ‘U.K.R.I.P.’, where do you feel we’re at now? Slowly decomposing?

“Well, the system is broken, and we’re looking at a situation where, hopefully, although I don’t want it to get better at the moment – because I want it to get so bad that we never have these people back in power – I think we need a year zero in this country. We need to get rid of the rotten establishment causing this country so much pain. It’s so blatant, and it’s disaster politics. As soon as we get ready to go out on the streets, another disaster happens.

“They’re a horrible bunch. I’m talking about the Tories, definitely, but I’m also saying that politics in general is out of touch with people. We need to move on, to stop thinking people are stupid. We’re not stupid. We don’t even need politics. We’re a global world. The internet enables us to think globally. And what do we do? We shut it all down. It’s the end, and they know it. They just want to try and squeeze the last juice out of their control.

“It’s a sorry state of affairs. And you have Rishi Sunak getting really excited about the prospects for Northern Ireland, and you think, ‘Fucking idiot! We had that!’ I think we need that year zero, need to go back. I don’t know how it’s going to happen and what it’s going to look like, but I keep coming back to – and I did keep saying this when lots of people were going to vote for Brexit – that the European Union was a peacetime union. And look what’s happened since 2016 – the war in Ukraine escalated because of the weakness of Europe that we caused. I’m outraged about that, the Russia papers, Brexit … I’m angry. These people should be in prison. I think a lot of us think that.”

On a far happier note, back to Free Peace Sweet, and ‘Good Enough’. A modern classic. You found a formula for radio airplay longevity there, it seems. Not many acts manage that.

“We did, didn’t we! And it still earns more money than any of our other songs combined. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? If we didn’t have ‘Good Enough’, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.

“My wife was pregnant with our first son, Marley. We were living in London, and I remember accidentally writing it on the sampler. I got the beat and all that, originally from Lee Dorsey & the Meters. I was learning about samplers. We were making a nest for our newborn son to come into the world, and it was inspired by Bob Marley and George Harrison, really – ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and most of Bob Marley’s back catalogue, because of the positivity.

“It’s so easy to write in a negative sort of way. To write a positive song is so difficult, and yet it came together, When we were in the studio, we felt, ‘This is really good, this is gonna be a hit!’ Then the chorus came. It was a bit cheap, but I liked the harmonies and we managed to get a good hook. It’s one of those things, and it is a radio song. I used to write letters to the radio, going, ‘Why you putting techno on the radio in the daytime?’ People just want to be cheered up on the radio!”

“One of Those Rivers’ also has that feelgood vibe. Another for held-up lighters and swaying arms at festivals. And you’ve written some great festival songs.

“I’m really looking forward to playing that this year We played it at the time, but in the ‘90s we were all a lot younger, and just wanted to bounce around! We didn’t want to be introspective. This will be the first time doing the album in its entirety. It’s a fun thing. We’ve a lot of things to do, a lot of rehearsals in London in April. I’m really looking forward to seeing the guys. It’s been months!”

You clearly don’t live in each other’s pockets.

“We really don’t. Mathew lives in Salisbury, Andy and Stuart in London … and I couldn’t live any further away! We’ve got a keyboardist as well, Graham. Yeah, it’s all good.”

Regarding ‘One of Those Rivers’, that ‘From the rooftops’ line reminds me of classic children’s TV show Rainbow … prompting a chorus of that theme tune from Nigel.

“’Up above the streets and houses!’ It’s a really simple chorus actually. It’s that simplicity of two chords, the melody rising over it. I’ve always liked that. I like starting low then seeing where you can go, the chords staying the same. Those things just happen, but these days it’s really hard to finish music, I find. Doing an album in the ‘90s, we’d collectively finish. It’s very difficult to finish something on your own.

“That’s sort of why I’m more aiming towards the live thing from my house now. I’ve got a performance studio, with visuals, projectors, stuff like that, so this is what I’m hopefully doing very soon. But I feel I’m going to be playing songs that aren’t finished, but are atmospheric, with electronics, and could go on for 10 minutes. They’ll be jams, you know. I want to do something new, as I think the world has moved on in some way.”

You always did mix things up. I mention various classic influences, but on a song like ‘Ain’t No Longer Asking’ I not only hear The Kinks but late ‘90s bands like Gomez who followed in your wake, another more experimental band.

“Yeah, Gomez was about ‘98/’99, and we’d gone by then! One of my absolute favourite modern contemporary artists is Beck, and I think I took an influence from Mellow Gold for ‘Ain’t No Longer Asking’. Again, it was me using samplers, which to me are like guitars now – as much an instrument. Pressing a button to me is the same as holding a chord down, and twisting a knob is the same as strumming. It’s a new way of looking, and it’s fun.

“And I love taking all my stuff out in my campervan. A lot of them run on batteries, so you can do a jam in your van.”

On the subject of which, what became of the van featured on the cover of Homegrown?

“That was the band’s. We rented it at first, for the original Homegrown. Then 25 years later we re-did it and used my silver van, my Crafter.”

What happened to the original van?

“One of our fans bought it. It’s in a garage. He’s been doing it up for years. It’s still being looked after.”

Incidentally, Homegrown’s opener, ‘Staying out for the Summer’, their other big hit, was also written about Nigel’s days at Rover in Longbridge, south-west Birmingham, not far from his Redditch roots.

“It was like, you’re only young once, am I going to just stay in this place and rot away, or just get all those commitments then not be able to leave. I didn’t do very well at school. I went to a rubbish school, but then I realised I was in the summer part of my life. When you’re born, it’s spring, then summer is your 20s, and so on. That was the thinking behind that song, and I love that song. That’s probably my favourite of those I wrote for Dodgy.

“But I still feel a sense of guilt when I talk about my life, because I did it, working at Longbridge and all that, then I got away from it, and now I feel guilty that not everyone did. ‘You can’t go around saying that!’ That’s what my mum used to say. ‘It’s not for everybody, you know.’

Anyway, we went off the subject. You were telling me about the band’s roots in the capital.

“Yeah, we started off as The Dodgy Club in Kingston-upon-Thames in the late ‘80s. We started there just because we couldn’t afford to play gigs in London. When you’d play the Sir George Robey or the Lady Owen Arms, they’d charge £30, you’d be on the graveyard shift, and no one would be there because they’d got the bus home. Everyone was on that circuit, and I was like, ‘We need to find our own venue.’

“We had an eclectic music collection, from the Dead Kennedys to Deee-Lite and NWA to Neil Young. We had that on a poster. We crossed this generational thing. We found a venue that was a restaurant, and said, ‘You’ve got a basement without tables. Can we do it in two weeks and have this as a club on Tuesday nights? You keep the bar, and we’ll keep the door.’ And it’s been a venue since that day we started it. Beggars Banquet use it, there’s drum and bass clubs, and it’s open every night of the week as a small club for students.

“I’m so proud that the legacy of Dodgy is that we started a venue, now part of a recognised cultural centre, also associated with David Bowie, who did a lot of gigs in Kingston. And they’ve invited Dodgy back there in May or June. I’m very proud of that legacy.”

Of course, while you’re out celebrating your majorly successful third LP soon, it’s actually 30 years this spring since your debut, The Dodgy Album, was released.

“Yeah, and they’re all being re-released in June, on vinyl, which is great.”

Did you learn a lot from Ian Broudie (who produced that first record)?

“Yeah. He’s a great teacher. He won’t always give you the answer, but will point you in the right direction. I remember saying to him, and I didn’t know much about music, ‘I find this one really hard to sing, Ian,’ and he’d say, ‘Why don’t you change the key?’ I’d be like, ‘How? I don’t know how to!’ So you’d get the chance to revisit your songs. He’s always been brilliant like that. Such a good teacher, and so knowledgeable. We’ve done a bit of writing together. He’s a great guitar player, although he’s not so confident about his voice. And he’s a music lover.”

Talking of music lovers, you love to drop in those cover versions here and there.

“My wife said this morning, I’ve found a cover version for you,’ and it was Kurt Vile singing ‘Speed of Loneliness’ by John Prine. I said, ‘I already do it, love!’ She put it on, and I sang all the verses!

“I’ve a gig tomorrow in Doncaster and I’ll pick a few Northern Soul songs, like ‘Do I Love You’ by Frank Wilson …”

Ah, one of the highlights at Ribchester.  

“Yes, we did a band version, but I changed it during lockdown, made it more like Jackson C. Frank or Paul Simon, a finger-picking version. I’m going to release that, because someone came up to me the other day and was like, ‘That’s amazing! I love that song, and you’ve just done your own version of it.’ I like doing that, especially with soul songs. I love Northern Soul, and I’m perfectly matched for punk rock and technology too.”

Nigel was born in 1966, so like me came from an era where there were so many tribes to fit into when it came to music, kids often feeling they had to choose between Northern soul, punk, hard rock, and so on.

“Well, when I was into punk, you weren’t really supposed to like any other songs. You’d go to a school or youth club disco and there’d be a Northern Soul section, where older guys with their flares and talcum powder would get out there, do half an hour, then there’d be the punk bit, and the Angelic Upstarts would come on, ‘Teenage Warning’ or something. Then it’d be the rockers’ section with Deep Purple … But I liked it all!

“I was really into rock, and really into Led Zeppelin, because John Bonham was from Redditch and went to my school – he was born in the same area, Headless Cross, where I was born. So I’ve always liked John Bonham and Led Zeppelin … and I loved reggae!”

Again, the Midlands was at the epicentre of all that, with Steel Pulse’s Handsworth Revolution, UB40, and so on. 

“Exactly! UB40 in King’s Heath, 2 Tone in Coventry, all that. And I’ve got into more African music recently, probably through listening to a lot of Talking Heads, listening to Fela Kuti, for me one of the greatest. I’m such a fan, and I got my son to buy me a couple of albums last year on vinyl. I think they’re fantastic.

“And there you go, that whole idea of where the song’s not really finished, but just let it evolve live, rather than verse and chorus. I’m interested in pop melodies, but also in creating something that people can step into, and I think that’s what Fela Kuti did – 18-minute tracks with the bassline the groove and the girls singing. It’s amazing.”

As for home life, you’re clearly enjoying life in West Wales.

“We love it here. What I can’t get my head around is, the whole of Ceredigion from where we live all the way down to Cardigan, there’s only 73,000 people …”

And probably a lot less in winter, with so many second homes, sadly.

“Yeah, and where I’m from in Redditch, it’s 125,000 people. So to move here … you know, I’m feeling very Welsh at the moment.”

That area, particularly Aberystwyth, is where Brummies went for holidays, traditionally, wasn’t it?

“It was, and you hear loads of Brummie accents here, but also accents from Geordies, from Yorkshire, Manchester, and then you’ve got your Welsh-speaking people … and it’s just so friendly. You don’t feel like you’re being ripped off. And you know what, none of the people around here voted for Brexit. I feel safe, I feel amongst friends!”

Dodgy’s Free Peace Sweet anniversary shows take place at Bristol’s O2 Academy (May 20th), Edinburgh’s O2 Academy (May 26th), Manchester’s O2 Ritz (May 27th), Birmingham’s O2 Institute (June 3rd), and London’s O2 Forum in Kentish Town (June 10th), with support from The Supernaturals, back for some rare appearances after five top-40 hits in the late ‘90s, and Chris Helme, lead singer/songwriter of The Seahorses (formed with John Squire after he left The Stone Roses), their UK No 2 LP ‘Do It Yourself’ spawning three top-20 singles, Chris performing Seahorses tracks alongside solo material.

For tickets, head to www.ticketmaster.co.uk. For all the latest from Dodgy, visit www.dodgyology.com. And for more on the support acts, try https://bit.ly/TheSupernaturalsFB and www.chrishelme.co.uk.

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Going back to my roots – talking an crann and more with The Undertones’ Damian O’Neill

Posted on January 13, 2023 by writewyattuk

Getting on for 45 years since The Undertones recorded debut single ‘Teenage Kicks’ at Belfast’s Wizard Studios, there’s still plenty of love out there for the band and its members, as seen in recent acclaim from critics and fans alike for the third solo LP from guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Damian O’Neill.

While it was older brother John O’Neill who penned that influential first hit – legendary DJ John Peel’s subsequent adoration truly kick-starting this Derry outfit’s international rise – Damian was a key component from the day he joined as a teenager after brother Vinny called time on the band to concentrate on his O-levels, his subsequent writing credits including first two LP openers ‘Family Entertainment’ and ‘More Songs About Chocolate and Girls’, and (with Mickey Bradley) singles ‘My Perfect Cousin’, ‘It’s Going to Happen’ and ‘The Love Parade’ before the original split in 1983.

And in a career that continued apace with London-based That Petrol Emotion and in more recent times The Everlasting Yeah, and of course that Undertones reboot with Paul McLoone out front in Feargal Sharkey’s absence since 1999, plus cameos with the likes of Ash – last guesting with them live in Belfast in December – Damian and the band continue to thrive, and he’s kept himself busy of late between live jaunts, much of his spare time spent on that new record, an crann – Irish for ‘the tree’, the title seen as ‘a symbol of growth and inspiration’ – an inventive collection of largely instrumental tracks, mixed by producer Paul Tipler (Stereolab, Placebo, Julian Cope, House Of Love).

I was lucky enough to buy a signed copy from the merch stand when The Undertones played Lytham’s Lowther Pavilion in the autumn (review here), and was soon beguiled. And as Damian put it, “If someone listened to this record without knowing anything about me, they’d probably never guess I started life in a punk band. I unashamedly wanted to present instrumental pieces that are emotional, evocative and personal and offer to the listener textures and layers of music that can be melodic, childlike and even melancholic at times.

“There’s obviously Irish folk traditional influences, as well as French, Japanese, American and British. And I’m playing virtually all the instruments myself, with added percussion on a couple of songs.”

The LP was recorded mainly on a laptop in the loft of Damian’s family home in South-East London, using an array of instruments, from electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, bass, organ, vibraphone, toy marimba and glockenspiel to melodica, mouth organ, squeezebox, kalimba, bells and percussion.

And after a busy 2022 with The Undertones – on fine form live and bringing out reformation years compilation LP, Dig What you Need, like his solo LP out on his Dimple Discs label – Damian was pleased to see the reaction to an crann, which follows earlier solo offerings A Quiet Revolution (Poptones, 2001) and Refit Revise Reprise (Dimple Discs, 2018). Does he see parallels between all three of those long players?

“There are similarities, I suppose, the first one in the fact that it’s all instrumentals, but that’s where it ends! On the Poptones one, most of it is samples. I played guitar and maybe bass on a couple of tracks, but it was all samples. But this time virtually everything is organically done by me. There’s not much machinery going on, or technology.”

Derry One: The Undertones’ Damian O’Neill, back with a third solo LP. Photo: Rosa O’Neill

It’s getting great reviews.

“Yeah, I’m really overawed with those. So happy. Especially in Ireland. I’m really happy about the Irish press, because I wasn’t sure how it would go down. There were some good spreads.”

While opening track, ‘Mas o Menos’, is markedly different from a lot of his previous material, I hear something of that underpinning keyboard from Undertones single ‘The Love Parade’, 40 years ago.

“Yeah, there’s a very ‘60 feel to it, and I thought that was a good opener. It’s catchy, and there’s that ‘60s organ – in fact, it’s the same one I played on ‘The Love Parade’, so you spotted that well!”

That’s a Korg CXD-3, incidentally, an electronic clonewheel organ simulating the revered Hammond organ and Leslie speaker, first marketed in 1979, a digital version following in 2001.  

“It’s very hard to find these days. They don’t make them anymore. I think Nick Cave was using one for years, if you’d see him live in the 2000s. But I’d say that {opening} track’s more influenced by The Limiñanas, a French band. I love them, especially their more ‘60s stuff. I wanted to do a Limiñanas-type song, and that’s what came out.”

As for that bassline, I think Booker T and the MG’s’ Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn would love that.

“I know, that bassline is the best thing about it. I came up with that first, then built around it really, the same with ‘La Tengo’. That’s one of my favourites, a great bassline, more like a Massive Attack bassline, and again I built around it. That’s how I come up with things, like a nice guitar riff, which you just enhance.”

As on the splendid ‘Sweet ‘n’ Sour’ on the last record, Dave Hattee features on drums on that opening song. And what with your friendship with sometimes-Undertones deputy Kevin Sharkey and of course Billy Doherty, you seem to have amassed a few drumming mates down the years.

Dee Light: Damian O’Neill gets down to it in the studio for Eileen Gogan’s LP, Under Moving Skies

“Yeah, and what’s really good about an crann, there’s another drummer, a percussionist called Liam Bradley, renowned in Derry and Ireland. He used to drum for Van Morrison for years, that’s how good he is, and Sinead O’Connor, and The Chieftains … and Ronan Keating, All the greats! Haha!

“I won’t bore you on this, but I didn’t even want to use him, or didn’t think about using him. That was down to Kevin {Sharkey}. He lives in the Lake District now but he’s a really good friend and a big supporter of my stuff. I sent him a couple of tracks {‘Malin Head Imminent’ and ‘Manannan mac Lir’} and wanted Kevin to put percussion on, but he sent it to Liam in Derry without me knowing, and Liam loved the tracks.

“Liam’s got his own studio in Donegal and came up with his amazing, like 20 tracks of percussion and drums on each song, and ‘woah!’ It just brought it up a different level. So, so good. I was overjoyed.”

It seems as if you had a trip to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the special effects on the opening song as well.

“Ha! It wasn’t too much, but when we were in the studio, mixing it, we added a few things.”

On the sleeve notes for ‘Mas o Menos’, you say, ‘More or less (but less is more)’ so I’ll understand if you don’t want to over-explain anything, but I’m intrigued by the subtle colour, such as your mention for ‘Malin Head Imminent’ and ‘happy childhood holiday memories at Slievebawn, Co. Donegal.’

“Yeah, most of the album is very introspective, looking back, and the music suits the mood, I think, especially on that – that’s one of the standout tracks. It builds and builds and has this lovely feel about it, this nostalgic look back to when we were kids, staying in this little green hut. Lovely memories.”

I’m reminded of Erland Cooper’s Orcadian trilogy, and his collaborations with Hannah Peel – who has her own Donegal links – and Simon Tong in The Magnetic North that turned me on to his work.

“I’ll have to check him out. I like Hannah Peel. She’s great.”

Some Product: Damian’s solo LPs, flanked by The Undertones’ first and most recent (Photo: Malcolm Wyatt)

What strikes me that his records and your latest solo work have in common is that use of nostalgia and imagination through music to take you back to treasured places. Like him, you’re London-based but seemingly dreaming of your formative years and roots, in your case in Derry, Belfast, and thereabouts.

“Exactly. That’s the beauty of home recording technology. And a lot of it was done during lockdown. I had some of the tracks already, but because I had so much time on my hands, I thought I might as well get cracking, do something creative while I’m here.”

That lockdown period has a lot to answer for, creatively, and I get the impression from online pieces I’ve seen that that the likes of Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney/The High Llamas) was doing his thing in his loft elsewhere in London while you were doing your thing in yours.

“Yeah, sure. I saw Sean last night actually, at a friend’s party. He’s working on his new solo LP. The man never stops composing. He’s so prolific. I get so jealous. He can come up with things so quickly. Where it takes me years, it takes him months!”

I hate to bring this up, but on ‘Malin Head Imminent’ there’s a ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ type Pink Floyd feel. Has this punk rock kid from the north of Ireland gone over to the dark side … of the moon?

“Ha! In the past with that year zero thing, we all hated Pink Floyd, like on that Johnny Rotten t-shirt, and that was the case for us for years. But we’d say, ‘Well, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd were okay!’ But two years or so ago I heard something from Dark Side of the Moon and thought, ‘You know what, this isn’t bad!’ I think you do mellow with old age. Even with a wee bit of Tubular Bells you think, ‘Well, y’know, it’s not that bad!’

You heard it here first, discerning punk pop kids. And in far more hip territory, on ‘Tune for the Derry Ones’, there’s something of Paul Giovanni and Magnet’s The Wicker Man soundtrack for me.

“Ah, right, that’s great. Maybe unconsciously, because I love that soundtrack. So good. That’s more of a mandolin piece really, and I got Viv, my wife, to do the choral voices. She’s such a great singer. She got it so quickly, four takes and that was it. She has virtually perfect pitch.

“I didn’t know how good she was, I’d never really recorded her live, but I was like, ‘My God! Do it again.’ And she virtually repeated it exactly, without any sharps or flats. She’s got a great ear … much better than I ever have. When someone’s on the radio, singing, she goes, ‘Oh! Turn that off,’ because they’re flat. I won’t notice, but she does.”

The Loft: Where the magic happens for Damian O’Neill, high up in South-East London

The track that took me the longest to get, if you like, is ‘A Quare Visitation (Belfast ’65)’, with its kind of wonky chord structure and everything, partially reminiscent of Neil Hannon’s theme tune for Father Ted. But it builds and grabs you.

“There’s a good story to that. Me and the family were living in Belfast in 1965. I was born there. I was four years old, sharing the top attic bedroom with my brother, Vincent, who was five and a half, and we were woken up in the middle of night by this sound of marching men, people shouting, and stuff.

“We looked across and could see silhouettes of this tribe, marching across the wall, disappearing again, then reappearing, going on for three minutes or so. You could hear them – swords, shields, marching boots. We froze. We were so scared. Once it disappeared properly, we ran downstairs, told my mum and dad. They were saying, ‘Ah, you’re having a bad dream,’ and we ended up sleeping in their bed that night.

“That was that, but me and Vincent talked about it for years, the rest of the family like, ‘Ah, your head’s cut!’ But fast forward about 20 years, I was talking to my mum, saying, ‘Do you remember that time we thought we’d seen …?’ And she said, ‘Actually, I didn’t want to tell you then or even later, but I’d seen it as well. I was cleaning your room two weeks later – and this was during the day – and heard this noise and could see these shields, and I freaked out. I told your dad when he came home from work.’

“She had the same reaction – ‘Your head’s cut, you totally imagined it!’ But she said she’s seen it, and that confirmed basically what we’d seen. And we moved shortly after, coincidentally, going back to Derry, because my dad got offered a job.

“I like to think maybe something happened on the location where the house was built – it was a battleground, and there were warring trades, way back. Who knows? It could have been Vikings, because they were in Ireland and Antrim especially, and it kind of looked like Vikings, the way the helmets were shaped. Some sort of outer world ghostly thing going on there.”

It is said that children and females are more receptive to picking up those things.

“I think so. And animals. You see cats and dogs staring at the corner, and you’re thinking, ‘What the hell are they staring at!’”

Tell me more about ‘Lament for Loughinisland’, the sleeve notes for which add a Martin Luther King quote, ‘Justice too long delayed is justice denied.’

“That’s an old outtake, from back in A Quiet Revolution days. So that actually is samples. I lost the original track with that mix, the bulk of it, then enhanced it, putting in melodica, harmonica as well, to make it a wee bit more eerie, you know, textured. It’s got a sweet thing going on, but there’s something sinister.

“It was called ‘Bells and Trombones’. But I’d seen a documentary on Loughinisland, this horrible thing that happened in 1994 in this tiny village, a Loyalist attack on this pub {where the locals were} watching a {World Cup} football match, Ireland in Italy, with six people killed, this horrible case of state collusion, people never brought to justice. It made me really angry, and I just wanted to say something about it.”

Regarding ‘La Tengo’, we’ve already mentioned that soulful bass, and in this case it’s fair to say Damian’s wigging out somewhat on guitar too.

“You know what, I’ve never done a solo over 15 seconds … but now was my chance! And hey, it’s my record, I can do what I want! It lasts nearly two minutes or something, which … if you told me that back in the punk rock days …”

First, Pink Floyd, now this.

“Ha! I love that solo. It was done live up here, in the loft. No overdubs. Technically, it’s not very good, but it’s the feel of it. I was listening to a lot of Gabor Szabo, the Hungarian jazz guitarist, and wanted something that sounded a bit like that kind of reverb thing he has. I’m not comparing myself to him – he’s a magnificent guitarist – but I wanted to get that feel of what he might do.”

How about – with apologies for my pronunciation – ‘Manannan mac Lir’?

“Actually, my niece, who speaks fluent Irish, corrected me {on that} the other day!”

 Well, it’s a gorgeous track.

“Thanks! A lot of people tell me – a real compliment – it sounds like Ronnie Lane or early Faces, or something you might find on Rod Stewart’s first solo album. There’s a nice Celtic kind of feel. That’s the most Irish song, I suppose.”

Taking Steps: The Undertones, hopefully bringing us some fresh product in 2023

The chord structure reminds me of ‘Demon Days’, arguably the last Grant McLennan-penned classic, recorded by fellow Go-Betweens legend Robert Forster for The Evangelist. And there are echoes of The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ and even That Petrol Emotion’s ‘Cellophane’ for me.

“Oh, I see what you mean by ‘Cellophane’. I wouldn’t compare it with that though – that’s such an underrated song. it’s beautiful. But some people were saying, ‘You should make that into a proper song rather than an instrumental … I nearly held it back because of that, but then thought …”

You can do both, surely.

“You could do both! In fact, I might give it to somebody to come up with lyrics. I tried originally to make it into a song, but couldn’t come up with anything decent … so yeah, maybe somebody will come in and make it a No.1 song!”

I’m guessing ‘New Loft Trio’ was a product of lockdown days, starring yourself, Viv, and daughter Rosa. And despite the fear of what might happen next back then, there was that feeling for those of us who were lucky enough to experience it of a chance to properly bond with loved ones, reminding ourselves of what was most important in our lives.

“Well, we were just messing about when Rosa was about 11, and she came up with this wee riff, we enhanced it, and I taped it. I always thought, ‘Someday I’m gonna do something with this. And there’s a lovely innocence about that track and Rosa’s flute playing. She’s 11, it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t matter. There’s just a lovely vibe. It’s got a real child-like quality.”

And you managed to capture it.

“Yes, it’s great.”

I was however surprised, having mentioned Sean O’Hagan earlier, not to find him on the credits for that. It has the feel of something he would do.

“Well, Sean was a big supporter, and heard these tracks before they were mixed, giving me a wee bit of advice. But he didn’t play on it this time, like he did on the last record.”

Third Offering: Positive Touch was the third album Roger Bechirian produced for The Undertones, from 1981

Similarly, the afore-mentioned Hannah Peel loves creating music box collages, and there’s a feel of her vibe there too.

“Yeah, and I love music boxes as well.”

As for ‘We Want The Wesleys’, is this your response to Paul McLoone and Billy Doherty going off to resurrect The Carrellines – a call for you and Mickey Bradley to get back out there on the live circuit as your ‘60s-flavoured side-project?

“Ha! Ah, you know about that! That’s kind of the odd track, very short, kind of more like something inspired by that band Bert Jansch was in, Pentangle.”

I see it as something you could play over the PA as you clamber on to stage, as the lights go down.  Before an Undertones show maybe. Either way, I’d like to see The Wesleys come out of retirement.

And then the record ends with ‘Round and Round’, which seems – as the title suggests – to bring everything together. I see that with my cinematic head, the camera fading back down the stairs from your loft, out onto a suburban street in South-East London, a Routemaster bus stopping outside, taking us away.

“Right, you’ll have to do the video for ‘Round and Round’, Malcolm!”

However, that’s not strictly the end, an crann instead concluding with a snatch of Damian’s original ‘Sign and Explode’ demo of a great song that ended up on The Undertones’ Positive Touch in 1981. And that mirrors, neatly, a similar touch on the vinyl edition of previous LP, Refit Revise Reprise, which carried a demo version of ‘It’s Going to Happen’.

As it turns out, Damian has also been involved alongside That Petrol Emotion bandmate Raymond Gorman in that mightily influential outfit’s new Demon/Edsel box set, Every Beginning Has a Future, comprising 121 tracks across seven CDs, featuring all five studio LPs, their live album, non-album B-sides, bonus tracks, remixes, other live recordings and fan club only releases, along with rare images and memorabilia and a 52-page colour book with sleeve notes from music writer John Harris.

Personally, finances rule out a copy for me right now, but it certainly looks a really lovely package.

“It is, it’s a lovely thing. Me and Raymond put it together with designer Tony Lyons. It’s a labour of love, in a way. I haven’t heard all the CDs myself, because of all the extras – there’s loads of remixes and stuff. But I’m so happy there’s finally a decent anthology of That Petrol Emotion. It’s been long overdue.”

Is that everything out there by the Petrols now?

“Well, the John Peel sessions aren’t on it, unfortunately. It wasn’t easy to get them, so we didn’t bother. But that’s it as far as I know, that and a couple of live sessions we did in France which aren’t on either, which is a shame. They’re absolutely wonderful, 1993, I think, or ‘94. But you can’t have everything!”

As for The Undertones, will things carry on as in 2022 this year, out on the road a fair bit?

“Yeah, God willing.”

To put that into context, that remark followed the sad news before Christmas of Terry Hall’s passing, and similarly Iain Templeton and Martin Duffy around the same time, all three departures reason enough to remind us that nothing can ever be taken for granted.

“If we’re all still in good health, I think we start in April, we’re going to be doing a Scandinavian tour which we postponed last time because of Covid. Then we’re doing UK shows, and Germany again. I don’t think we’re going to be as busy as we were in 2022, when we were catching up with Covid cancellations from the previous two years.

“But I’d love to get something new out there – a single or something. It’s been a long time, and the Dig What You Need best of album really invigorated us. We keep selling loads of them at concerts. It’s been great, with a really good reaction.”

Left Leaning: The Undertones, back in 2016. From the left – Damian, John, Billy, Mickey, Paul.

For more on an crann, visit https://www.damian-oneill.com/. For the latest from The Undertones, including 2023 live dates, try https://www.theundertones.com/. And for more about That Petrol Emotion’s Every Beginning Has a Future, try here.

And for this website’s May 2019 feature/interview with Damian O’Neill, and further links to othet Undertones-related copy, head here. You can also find a live Q&A with Damian from late last year via the excellent Retro Man Blog site here.

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WriteWyattUK’s quotes review of 2022, part two – July to December

Posted on December 31, 2022 by writewyattuk

July

Hippie Daze: Festivalgoers in Bickershaw as a rag’n’bone man does his round in ’72. Photo: Frank Orrell

Chris Hewitt on Jeremy Beadle involving him in 1972’s Bickershaw Festival, ultimately setting him on his career path:“Jeremy was targeting all the colleges and universities, contacting social secretaries, saying you can have free admission if you help work on it, entice students to come. That’s when I got the phone call at the SU office at Rochdale College, asking if I could come and work on tickets and flyers, and travelled down to Bickershaw to meet him. Discussing the festival with Jeremy in 2007 he told me he had wanted to create what he envisaged as an English Woodstock, and although he was managing to achieve many of his objectives, he was forever chasing cheques for everything, including his own wages. To think Jeremy had a gargantuan commitment to pay artists and site contractors and was faced with his main financier/businessman going to jail with three weeks to go, it’s testimony to Jeremy’s amazing ability and self-belief that the event was such an artistic success, given the weather and underlying financial problems. He later told me he always, because of his fight to overcome his disability earlier in life and go into showbusiness, had a firm belief in backing the maverick outsiders of life, supporting crazy ideas. It was this self-belief – to recreate Woodstock with West Coast American bands in a field halfway between Manchester and Liverpool – that saw the festival succeed artistically.”

Katy J. Pearson on her folk roots:“For ages I was kind of jumping around about what I would define my genre as. But if I really think about what I was listening to growing up, it was very folk-orientated. And I kind of forget to kind of mention that and every time I see the word folk. I get a bit annoyed, thinking of Three Daft Monkeys playing at Wychwood Folk Festival, kind of gypsy folk and party folk. When, actually, folk is such a broad term that I can accept I’m in that realm. Growing up, I was into a lot of James Taylor and a lot of Crosby, Stills and Nash era Americana folk-rock. And recently, I’ve listened to a lot of Vashti Bunyan. I’ve just read her memoir, she says she doesn’t like to be referred to as folk … but there’s a side of her that is. In that kind of realm, I’m happy to be defined as that.”

Barn Stormers: From left – Rob Parry, Helen Stickland, Simon Barnber, Andy Strickland, Sherborne 2022

The Chesterfields’ Simon Barber on ‘Our Songbird Has Gone’, a tribute to former co-frontman Davey Goldsworthy: “When Davey died, his ex-girlfriend, Catherine said, ‘I think you should have this.’ I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a little black book, A6, he’s written on the side of the pages, ‘The Slits’, and what really touched me was that it has all the words from the Kettle period to all our songs – he’d written all my lyrics in there as well. I was always in awe of him and his words, and think I became a better wordsmith as a result of being in the band with him. So to see that was quite a thing really. I wrote that song on my birthday, in lockdown, May 2020, the first time I’d walked out to meet my daughter, who lives eight miles away. We both walked four miles, she brought the kids, we had a picnic, it was a gorgeous day, and on the way out, that rhythm got into my head and the words started landing. I’d been thinking about Davey, and sang it into my phone a few times. When I got there my granddaughter, Lexi, nine at the time, pulled a ukulele out, she’d been learning ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and they all sang that to me before the picnic. If I hadn’t sung the song into my phone I might have lost it … another tune in my head. And pretty much, a couple of days later, it was done.”

Music book author/editorand Manchester City fan Richard Houghton on the continuing allure of the Rolling Stones, having publishing two books on the band in 2022:“Quite simply, I’m a fan. I’m not embarrassed to admit I’ve collected over 200 different books about the Stones over the years, and whilst I haven’t quite gone to the lengths of some of the uber-fans out there who’ve got every album, DVD and t-shirt ever produced, I’ve seen them over 30 times and my travels have taken me to the States, Brazil and Europe … and Anfield, which shows just how dedicated I am!”

August

Super Troupers: ABBA’s legacy lives on, five decades beyond their first assault on the charts

Stockholm-based ABBA biographer Carl Magnus Palm contemplating how love for the band shows no sign of waning: “I remember 30 years ago people said to me, when I was working on my first book, ‘You better hurry up, before the ABBA revival dies down.’ Ha! They’re like The Beatles now, in the sense that they’re part of the culture … it’s a reference point, it’s everything else, you know. You don’t have to compare it on any other level, but in that sense, people are always interested.”

Phil Barton on his working relationship with former Beautiful South/Housemartins singer Dave Hemingway in Sunbirds and previously The South: “I’ve got to know Hammy well, being on tour and everything, you end up spending a lot of time together. Our life experiences have been extremely similar. And there really is a bond there that isn’t just a kind of professional collaboration. It’s deeper than that. When I send him a load of songs, I don’t give him any clues as to who wrote them. I like to get a genuine reaction, without it being prejudiced. I send him stuff I’ve done and that means a lot to me, and I might send something that’s quite pretty that I co-wrote, more written to order for what we’re doing. That sounds terribly cynical, but there’s a real art in that as well. And the ones he picks out are always the ones he has a connection with. There’s a wavelength thing going on.”

Guitar virtuoso Elliott Morris on ‘Tonnau’ (Welsh for ‘waves’) on 2022 LP, Something Worth Fighting For: “It’s about those things I was missing in lockdown, being in those places where you feel that sort of grounding. Not to say I don’t feel at home in London – it’s my home and I love it to bits, I’m very lucky in the part of London I am to have that green space and can’t imagine what it would be like living in a tower block in the centre of town. And London did become very peaceful – you’d go out into parks, and it would be so quiet, and you’d be like, ‘Oh, wait, I remember why it’s this quiet, and why there are no planes going over.’ It was weird. But I grew up in Carmarthenshire, lived there 10 years, and didn’t go back as much as I wanted to. Then, around 10 years ago, I got an email from a guy who runs a pub called the Pentre Arms in Llangrannog, and remember getting there, thinking, ‘I’ve been here before.’ It was deja vu but more certain than that. I spoke to my Mum and Dad, and they said I went there on school trips. It was just very circular to end up back there, gigging, and that’s one of those I look forward to in the diary every year I play there.”

City Slickers: L to R – John, Ronnie, James, Keith and Chris step out in Glasgow. Photo: Stuart Borland

John Scally on The Orchids’ early days alongside fellow co-founders Chris Quinn and James Hackett, aka the Penilee Three: “We grew up together, lived in the same street, went to the same school, going all the way through to secondary school, and at 14 and 15 – getting into music – it kind of transcended from there. Obviously, there was Postcard Records, stuff like that. But I’d always been a huge Beatles fan, and from 13 or 14 was into early Simple Minds, back to things like ‘Empires and Dance’. James was into things like Steel Pulse, Chris was into New Order, Joy Division … a whole load of things. We were really lucky, because in the early ‘80s the Barrowlands reopened, and there would be something every week to go and see, like Aztec Camera, Echo & the Bunnymen … and at that time the Splash One happening in Glasgow.”

September

Queen of Country Noir, Gretchen Peters, on how the pandemic underlined her decision to quit the road:“I had plenty of time and did a lot of thinking about it. And there’s a certain thing I figured out, a few years ago. When you’re touring, there are nights you’re really tired, or nights when you have something going on, personally, or whatever it might be. And I learned at some point that you bring whatever you have to the stage, and try to channel that into your performance, rather than tamping it down, pretending it’s not there. I don’t know what’s going to happen on this tour, or what’s going to happen tonight, but I have a feeling it’s going to be quite emotional, and I’m welcoming that with open arms, because I know I’m going to feel that way after all this time, seeing those people and hearing them. And if there was one thing that really came home to me during the period when we weren’t able to tour, it was how important being in the same room with people is. Online concerts are great in lieu of nothing, but they’re not the same at all.”

Guitar Buddy: Evan Dando, back across the pond with The Lemonheads in 2022. Photo: Barry Brecheisen

Evan Dando reflects on The Lemonheads’ path to success:“It’s one of those things where we weren’t fully formed when we were making records. We made records just to get gigs, paying for it with our high school graduation money. We came at it backwards, whereas a lot of bands are at their peak when they make their first record, and it’s really hard to beat that. Luckily, we kind of stumbled into it, so we’ve still got room to get better. We ought to make a real mind-blowing one this time. The stakes are high! And it’s so much fun.”

Manchester-born, Derry based singer-songwriter Adam Leonard on music punctuating his leisure time:“I love it. As people like doing sports, it’s a really keen interest. I find it really satisfying. Even last night, I spent about three hours dealing with a track until it was all finished. Every spare moment I’ve got, outside wanting to spend time with family, my wife and kids. It doesn’t pay the bills. I do get some money from it, but not enough to live off. It would change it if I had to do it for money. I’ve spoken to a number of people like that, painters especially, doing commissions, suddenly losing interest in what they were once passionate about. There’s a massive danger of that.”

Neil Arthur on why he’ll never be content just churning out past hits with Blancmange: “A lot of people are frightened of the future and are quite happy to have a repeat of something that was done before. But it’s just not for me. Looking forward you’ve got a hell of a world to try and navigate through at the moment. We’re all moving forward – so we’ve got to try and find some answers.”

Private View: Blancmange’s Chris Pemberton, Neil Arthur and Liam Hutton, Lancaster’s Kanteena. Photo: Malcolm Wyatt

Paul McLoone on The Undertones’ post-reformation compilation, Dig What You Need, and the prospect of a new record:“I would absolutely love that. I didn’t really know about the compilation when it was first mooted. But I’m really glad we did it. It makes a lot of sense, displaying the songs in a possibly better context. I don’t want to speak for the others, but with me it’s reignited the idea of maybe doing another. John’s been busy with side stuff, Damian’s got an instrumental album coming in a week or two, which is brilliant, also on Dimple Discs. But maybe next year, the smoke will clear a wee bit. I don’t want to put all the pressure on John, but he’s the instigator.”

October

Cass Browne on Senseless Things’ remastering landmark second LP, The First of Too Many LP: “We found a lot of conflicting frequencies, like with the acoustic guitar. We were still really young and didn’t really know everything. We were still finding our feet. A lot of the frequencies for Mark’s original chord guitar was really piercing, and drenched everything, and we’ve spent a lot more time with this version of the record than we did originally.”

Lightning Return: Ian Broudie was back with the Lightning Seeds in 2022. Photograph: Tom Oxley

Lightning Seeds creator Ian Broudie on working with Terry Hall again, speaking just weeks before The Specials’ legend’s passing: “Terry’s one of the greatest talents I’ve had the pleasure of working with. We started working together when I produced a couple of things for him …I think the first thing we worked on was The Colour Field, and we struck up a friendship, really … I’d say a bond. And it’s been lovely seeing his career re-blossom with The Specials. Then there was The Fun Boy Three, and … he’s done so many things that have been great. I think he’s brilliant.”

Syd Minsky-Sargeant on Working Men’s Club’s second LP, Fear Fear: “One of the talking points within the tunes is the shift in the way that society had to operate, being a young person within that. I think that was quite a big topic within the record, but it was tied up within an emotive side of that as well. So yeah, I was just trying to make it slightly conceptual, in a way, but also try and keep it personal in another sense.”

November

Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg pays tribute to Sandy Denny, now 44 years gone:“It is bizarre, but she’s always kind of represented with Fairport when we do gigs. We could never replace Sandy Denny, that’s why we never got a girl singer again. Like you could never replace Richard Thompson, which is why we never got another guitar player. But Sandy’s still there, because we play some of her wonderful songs, like ‘Fotheringay’, and of course, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’”

California-based ex-Mighty Lemon Drops guitarist David Newton on how his Black Country roots proved perfect for an eclectic taste:“One of the great things about growing up in the UK at that time, another thing you can’t convey here in America, is that you were into everything. I used to buy Northern Soul records and the first records I bought were by Slade, Sweet and Mud. And soul was big, and reggae too. It was great, this mixture of all these kinds of things. The other thing in the States is that radio’s kind of formatted here. You get a rock station, a soul station, a pop/top-40 station … With the BBC, you got a real cross-section.”

Kate Rusby on duetting with fellow Yorkshire leading light Richard Hawley on ‘No Names @30’: “I think he’d been there five minutes when there was this power cut, so we all sat around in the studio, around a candle, singing through the song, him learning it, getting used to it, then the lights came on and he was like, ‘Right, come on, let’s go and do this.’ He started singing, and we were just in bits – he just hit the nail on the head. Asking me about it, we had this lovely chat, him saying, ‘When I sing somebody else’s song, I like to get right inside somebody’s head, and it’s like going through the front door and having a walk around the house.’ What a lovely day we had. It was brilliant.”

December

Ska veteran Buster Bloodvessel on the bonus of reaching the big time with Bad Manners: “When we actually started to hit the charts, we couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable that they would take us seriously, that they’d allow things like ‘Ne-Ne Na-Na Na-Na Nu-Nu’ into the charts … It then became the longest-lasting single that year, to come in and out of the charts. I was so knocked out.”

London Lad: Buster Bloodvessel, still loving the stage life in his 60s, giving it large with Bad Manners

The Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound co-driver Rob Pursey recalls rock’n’roll excess alongside partner and long-time musical collaborator Amelia Fletcher with indie darlings Heavenly: “I guess my most vivid memory is of the Sarah Records Christmas Party, where Heavenly played. Hair grips were tossed to one side, spectacles were dropped and trodden on, cardigans and anoraks were ripped. It was wild.”

Haircut One Hundred lead guitarist Graham Jones on recording debut LP Pelican West using revolutionary digital techniques at Roundhouse Studios, Chalk Farm, with Bob Sargeant: “There were lots of problems and there was an in-house engineer there to fix the thing, with all these funny little digital blips and hops going on. There was always someone there with a screwdriver. ‘Hang on, we’ll just have to wait for an hour while what’s-his-face gets his head in amongst the wires.’”

Legendary drummer Don Powell recalls frontman Noddy Holder’s 1966 audition for the band that became Slade: “The first song we played was something we knew and Nod was playing with his band, ‘Mr Pitiful’ by Otis Redding. And it worked straight away. We just looked at each other, started laughing, and just went into other things the four of us knew. It worked so well, and we thought, ‘This is it, this is the one!’”

Bangin’ Man: Slade legend Don Powell proudly displays The Adventures of Bibble Brick

For WriteWyattUK’s quotes review of 2022, part one – January to June, head here.

That’s it for the year, and thanks for reading, folks. It’s fair to say you can expect a change of pace on the feature/interview front in 2023. Stay tuned for that, the next interview already set up and not so far off publication, and several more lined up. Until then though, Happy New Year one and all, stay safe, keep the faith, and cheers again for your support.

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WriteWyattUK’s quotes review of 2022, part one – January to June

Posted on December 30, 2022 by writewyattuk

January

Shocking Content: Alan Wilkes, aka Vinny Peculiar, with Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New

Vinny Peculiar celebrating his 14th solo LP Artists Only, and a magpie’s approach to songwriting: “Those chords have been used by everyone. But you get to a certain point in life when you think, well, everyone’s used them, so I’ll use them as well. That really is the story of songwriting. There’s only so far you can take it, unless you want to get into the world of augmented fourths and triads and strange jazz tempos, and then it becomes almost impossible to relate to.”

John Power reflecting on Cast’s classic 1995 debut LP, All Change:“We weren’t looking for riffs. We weren’t writing in the studio. We had it all, every song was ready – waterproof and bullet-proof! It had all the riffs, all the drums, and we were tight as anything. So it went down like that – probably a big reason why it sounds so fresh and why all the parts work on it.”

Rising indie star Dana Gavanski revealing her musical roots:“I did listen to a lot of radio, you know, like R&B and pop, then I heard Joni Mitchell for the first time and her album, Blue, and then only listened to ‘60s and ‘70s music, mostly folk, until I was about 25. I didn’t listen to any contemporary music and didn’t know anything about anyone until when I was about 27 or 28. I was like, ‘Ooh, who are these people? What’s indie rock? I don’t know what that is.’ Then I listened to a lot of the weirdo soundscape stuff Brian Eno did, then cell music. And I love Meredith Monk. I just think I’m such a slow learner and late bloomer. It takes me a long time to sit with something and realise where I need to go next.”

Green Credentials: Dana Gavanski released When It Comes in 2022. Photo: Clementine Schneidermann

February

Joe Mount on the pandemic informing Metronomy’s seventh album, Small World:“I wasn’t really wanting to make a record about Covid. But I ended up finding quite a lot of inspiration in all the things that were happening around me and my family, finding out things about myself. Then, towards the end of making the record, I felt it would be unfair to sort of mine the last two years for good inspiration and ignore the reality of it. It’s a bit exposing and embarrassing trying to write something about the experience of it all, but I also feel you shouldn’t shy away from things because they’re embarrassing. So in a way, it’s an attempt at acknowledging all the bad stuff.”

Brick Briscoe on the September 11th, 2021 album launch show in Indiana that almost became his last ever gig: “We were playing our release show on a rooftop – a Beatles thing – in Evansville, Indiana. A city of 140,000 people probably. We were surrounded by these amazing big buildings, playing with 100 or so of our local followers. We were playing the last song. I remember looking up thinking, ‘Gosh, what a great night! This is just the best. We’re having so much fun’. Next thing I know, I hear a clang and I’d fallen face-first on my guitar. Next thing I know people are trying to revive me. Luckily, two EMTs (emergency medical technicians) happened to be in the audience and they tried to get me to settle down. Very soon I was in an ambulance. I had a 230 beats-per-minute heart rate. I was in distress, but I got it. I knew what was happening. You think you’re having a heart attack or something. That wasn’t the case, but they stopped and started my heart, got it to go back into a rhythm. Next thing I know, I’m in hospital for six or seven days, and don’t make it back home for 11 days, because I’m in a safe house near the hospital for a short period of time.”

Three’s Company: Brick Briscoe, left, and bandmates The Skinny, aka Allen Clark III and Cory Folz (right)

(Martin) Noble reflects on Sea Power, the band previously known as British Sea Power, in their breakthrough period, around the time of 2005’s Open Season:“That was a good period, taking us a few places. We went to Cornwall, did an event, made this giant human fruit machine – your arm in Bacofoil, and you had to pull that. Three of us were inside and had loads of bananas and apples to put up randomly. Martin Clunes was walking through the car park. ‘Martin! Come and have a go!’. It was 1p a go. He gave us a pound. He tried to get away after three goes, but we were like, ‘You’ve got another 97 goes!’ The horror on his face!”

Clare Grogan recalls the Glasgow punk scene and how it inspired the formation of Altered Images:“There really was a kind of group of what I describe as baby punks, and we all gravitated towards each other. Although none of us were at the same school, we became a little tribe of people that went to see all those acts, which we loved. Originally, when we heard Siouxsie and the Banshees were doing a Scottish tour, we got in touch with the fan club and asked if we could open for Siouxsie, support her on tour, and they said yes! And I’ll never quite understand why … but they did!”

Planet Clare: Clare Grogan was out on tour with a new-look Altered Images, showcasing Mascara Streakz

March

Mickey Bradley on The Undertones being out on the road with ex- Stranglers singer Hugh Cornwell in 2022, and past dates with the band that made his name:“I’m a bit nervous, I think he’s gonna be brilliant. We need to up our game … or else maybe nobble him, de-tune his guitar, nip all his strings! The Stranglers were great. We supported them in 1978 in Ireland, before ‘Teenage Kicks’ came out. They were very considerate, made sure we got a soundcheck, made sure doors were kept closed till we had our soundcheck. Really encouraging. And they had Jean-Jacques (Burnel) jumping into the crowd to beat up somebody who was spitting all night! I still remember that. He jumped off, ‘boom!’, then jumped back up on stage, carried on.”

Bob Hardy on leaving West Yorkshire for Glasgow, paving the way for the birth of Franz Ferdinand: “I moved here ostensibly to study at the art school, because the painting department was really good and I wanted to paint. I was either going to London or Glasgow, but didn’t really fancy London. Glasgow was more appealing. We always came to Scotland on holiday when I was a kid. And the music scene was a big draw. As a teenager in Bradford, I was an obsessive music fan, a huge fan of Glasgow bands like Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, The Arab Strap, The Delgados … that whole Chemikal Underground scene. And it seemed very manageable, because of the size of the city. I had friends that came the year before, I came to visit, the energy was great and you’d see people from bands I’d been a fan of since I was 15 … in the pub! I felt, ‘This is amazing!’”

Left Right: Franz Ferdinand didn’t know where to look as their Best Of came our way. Photo: David Edwards

Jaz Coleman contemplating what makes Killing Joke tick, all these years on:“It’s one almighty clash of wills and personalities. But when it locks in, it’s monstrous! Everybody, I can guarantee everyone … probably except Youth … is going through massive stress at the moment. Because it is stressful before we all get together, every time. I don’t know why, but it just is for everybody. But one thing you can be certain of is that however bad you feel, it’s worse for the other person. Haha!”

Sleeper’s Louise Wener on her family decision to leave the capital for the south coast:“I was pregnant with my second child, we needed more space, and it was like, ‘Bring up our kids by the seaside, that’d be a really cool thing to do’. And Brighton’s a great city … a little town really – quite compact, easy, very relaxed. It took a while to settle. I’d say, ‘I miss London!’. Now, when I go there to work, I relax on the train going back. The air’s different, and I love living by the sea.”

Sleeper Cell: Jon, Andy, Louise and Kieron, collectively Sleeper, 21st century style. Photo: Rob Blackham

April

Mark Kingston on the difference between writing songs for The Farmer’s Boys and their modern incarnation The McGuilty Brothers:“I come up with ideas, play them to Barry (McGuilty), because he’s got to sing them, make sure he’s happy with the words I’ve written, then we go to the band, say, ‘This is the key’. And because they’re so good, they pick it up straight away. Back in the day, we’d sit in a room for hours, noodling until something came up, and that was probably the wrong way to do it. The songwriting bit was quite hard, trying to come up with something in a democratic way.”

Neil Sheasby contemplates the thinking behind Stone Foundation’s Outside Looking In LP:“When creating music, the goal is to recreate the sound you’re imagining in your head. Sometimes it’s achievable, sometimes you fall short. With this record I believe it’s the closest we’ve come to realising what we set out to achieve. It was important to push ourselves, not get caught up in a musical cul-de-sac of complacency. It had to sound fresh, a leap forward into uncharted territory. I think the songs reflect that.”

Looking Up: Stone Foundation put the pandemic behind them and returned to the live circuit

Simon Fowler, asked for his thoughts on Ocean Colour Scene’s Brit Pop heydays and how he views them now: “Oh, with great fondness. And quite a bit of pride, to be honest. It was as good as you can imagine, really. Did I get to enjoy the experience? Oh God, yeah … far too much! Haha! I’m glad we did. We did the whole rock’n’roll show. We were just about young enough. I was in my early 30s. Me and Oscar are four years older than Steve (Cradock) and Damon (Minchella). But the idea of that lifestyle now fills me with utter horror! Ha! The idea of going to a nightclub fills me with dread!”

Phil Odgers on coming to terms with losing The Men They Couldn’t Hang co-frontman Stefan Cush in early 2021:“As life gets closer to ‘normal’, you’re constantly reminded of places you’ve been, things you’ve done. Because we were going to do a new album and were talking about an acoustic album, we had a Zoom get-together, our first, and it was four days after that I got the call. We couldn’t believe it. Because of lockdown it was as if someone in Australia had gone. If that had been the case before, we’d have gone round, seen everyone … but you just couldn’t do it.”

Double Act: Swill and Cush fronted The Men They Couldn’t Hang for nearly 40 years (Photo: Peter Stevens)

May

Simon Wells on how meeting fellow songwriter Boo Hewerdine led to the creation of Simon and the Astronauts: “I met Boo in a pub, and we just talked about music and songwriting. He said, ‘I’ve got a weekend of songwriting, come along’. For me, he’s one of the best singer-songwriters in the country. And over the years, I’ve got to know him, being on residential weeks with him and people like Darden Smith. And through all that, I met Ben one weekend. Boo said, ‘Let’s try and do one song together, see if it works out’. We met Chris Pepper, this recording engineer in Cambridge, Boo suggesting we just do one song at a time, as live as possible. We’d literally write something in the morning, then record it in the afternoon. We didn’t really know if it would work out as a project. And Boo can do that, drive that along. Originally, that project was going to be called Jason and the Argonauts, but I thought I could put a spin on that. When they said, ‘Your name’s got to be on it,’ we became Simon and the Astronauts, because of my love for sci-fi and cartoons and comic books, taking that imagery. And the first album has a booklet where everyone’s got a job title, and what they do on the spaceship.”

James Douglas Clarke explaining how The Goa Express’ mutual love of The Brian Jonestown Massacre informed and inspired the band’s direction: “We all went and saw them when we were like … I don’t even know, we were definitely way under-age for going out in Manchester, going to parties all night! We were probably 16. We got the bus up, and it was just one of them coincidental moments where every single one of us had a ticket. We were already all into music, but after seeing them we were like, ‘This is what we should do!’. And to this day we still love that band. I think they’re on tour soon, and when they play in Manchester, I assume we’re all gonna be there again.”

Hillside Assignation: The Goa Express, coming to a town near you. Photo: Louis Butler

The driving force behind The Crazy World of Arthur Brown on the Long, Long Road album marking his 80th birthday and how he planned to tour it:“The Human Perspective concept is the exploration of our inner selves while trying to navigate the external world. The God of Hellfire meets The God of Purefire, if you will. This is the live show I always wanted to perform with Kingdom Come in the 1970s, but technology at the time meant it wasn’t possible. But now I’m able to fully realise my vision. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.”

Rising indie pop star Alfie Templeman on how the pandemic inspired his Mellow Moon album:“I think people assume I’m this easy, outgoing person, but there’s actually a lot more layers to me, and this record shows that. Writing songs like ‘Broken’, ‘Take Some Time Away’ and ‘Mellow Moon’ were like therapy. It was me asking ‘What’s wrong with me?’ and ‘How am I going to get better?’ and just figuring things out in real time. I had therapy but there were still things unresolved in my mind. So I turned to music for the answers.”

June

International Tresor: Gwenno Saunders released her third solo LP in 2022. Photo: Claire Marie Bailey

Mercury Prize nominee Gwenno explaining the rationale behind Cornish language LP, Tresor:“We live in a chaotic world and what impacts on our ability to make positive decisions is largely circumstantial. The song is about trying to connect with our ability to do the right thing at a point where everything is in flux, in crisis, and the foundation of our society is changing. How do we connect with our responsibilities and instinct to commit to the collective in a largely individualistic society? ‘Tresor’ is an homage to an older, analogue world, the soundtracks to European cinema, and a final fair farewell to the 20th Century.”

Miles Hunt on The Wonder Stuff’s golden days:“Eight years, in each other’s pockets. I don’t care what walk of life you’re in – whether it’s friends you went to university with, got your first job with, first signed on the dole with, whatever – almost every day for eight years … and we were a strange bunch.”

Miles Travelled: Miles Hunt with the 2022 take on The Wonder Stuff

Mick Shepherd on The Amber List co-headlining with West on Colfax and Red Moon Joe at early July’s Ukraine relief fundraiser at The Continental, Preston, Lancashire:“Seeing all the suffering and pain this invasion is causing prompted us to act. We can barely imagine what the Ukrainian people are going through, and putting on this benefit not only shows our solidarity and support, but hopefully will raise money to help those most in need of assistance.”

Broadcaster/ex-music promoter Tony Michaelides on artistic development and a certain Dublin outfit he chanced upon in their early days: “Take as an example when me and Mark Radcliffe went to see U2, 31st May 1980 – I’ll never forget the day. They weren’t that good, they were third on the bill to Wah! Heat and Pink Military at Manchester Polytechnic, most people talking at the bar. You probably had about 20 people watching them. But you were gonna know what that band was called and remember that singer, and were going to be reminded of it over and over again. When U2 played in front of a small crowd, they played to them like it was a stadium. And when they play to a stadium now, they remember what it’s like to play to a small crowd. You bring those people in, so there’s a connection, and great frontmen grab your attention. U2 came out after that gig to meet every single person. We’re only talking a few people, but me and Radcliffe were so impressed. I brought the local radio DJ, playing their type of music on his show, and they were starstruck.”

Special Guests: U2 came calling at the house in Cheadle Hulme that Tony renamed The Edge

Part two of the WriteWyattUK annual quotes review – covering July to December 2022 – will follow very soon.

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Waiting for the family to arrive – back in touch with Don Powell

Posted on December 23, 2022 by writewyattuk
Bangin’ Man: Slade legend Don Powell proudly displays his children’s book

If it’s Christmas, it must be time for another chat with a member of glam-rock legends Slade. And it seems that drumming colossus Don Powell has had another happening year.

While the credits on 1973 classic ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ read Noddy Holder/Jim Lea, it’s fair to say that record, as the band tend to address it, shaped the lives of Don and guitarist Dave Hill too.

A long-time resident of Denmark, having clocked up 76 years on the planet, it’s fair to say Don’s as fired up about music today as in Slade’s 1970s heydays. But a little housekeeping first, your scribe telling his distinguished interviewee he hopes he can hear him properly. I still had a croaky voice, a few days after succumbing to the latest flu-like cold virus doing the rounds.

“I can hear you fine, Malc. Are you getting better, mate? Or is it one of those things that’s gonna be there forever?”

Well, you never know, do you. And that’s a rather typical start to a conversation with Donald George Powell. He’s been through no end of life-challenging health episodes down the years, yet wants to ensure I’m getting over my cold.

“I tell you what, it’s been like that over here as well, Malcolm. I’m not feeling ill, but just drained, if you know what I mean.”

I tell him that getting up at stupid o’clock in my mid-50s to change nappies doesn’t always help.

“Yeah, the usual! Been there with grandkids, mate. They always want to get into our bed about five o’clock.”

It’s been another busy year for you.

“It’s been fantastic, and I love it with things on the go all the time. I really get off on that.”

Old Pals: Don Powell and Jim Lea at Wolverhampton Art Gallery back in the summer

And all these years on it appears there are still festive chart battles going on. But it’s not Slade vs Wizzard or Elton John like in ‘73. It’s Don up against former bandmate Jim Lea in the UK Heritage Chart – Don Powell’s Occasional Flames (also featuring old pals Paul Cookson and Les Glover) following success with ‘Just My Cup of Tea’ and ‘I Won’t Be Playing Wonderwall Tonight’ with a festive resurgence of ‘It Isn’t Really Christmas Until Noddy Starts to Sing’ while Jim follows a run with ‘The Smile of Elvis’ with ‘Am I the Greatest Now’.

“I tell you what, some few weeks ago I was in the UK, Jim was doing some solo things, and he asked me to do some drums for him. That was really nice, the first time we’d worked together in that sense for many, many years. And it was great fun, exchanging lots and lots of memories. Everybody else in the studio looked totally blank, not knowing what the bloody hell we were talking about!

“And it was a nice place, near where he lives, part of a farm, pretty well isolated, so there’s no problems with noise, if you know what I mean!”

Ah, you boys and your noize. And Jim seems to be doing quite well with his health at present. It’s a similar tale with you, I guess, after all those recent scares.

“Yeah, Jim seems okay. And I’m fine, since the doctor kicked me out of hospital, saying, ‘You ain’t normal, get out!’ It’s weird. I mean, with the stroke, it was like in in my drinking days. But luckily, our daughter’s a doctor, and said to my wife – her mum – ‘If he was my husband, I would send him to the hospital.’ I couldn’t hold a cup or a glass, things like that. I was sitting upstairs watching TV, and wanted to change the channel, but couldn’t hold the remote. My wife straightaway talked to her, and sent for an ambulance, and they did some testing inside. It’s incredible, all this equipment they’ve got now. And yeah, everything there’s okay now.”

Then there was a cancer scare …

“That was weird. I had a real pain on the right-hand side of my stomach. My wife said, ‘Go and see our doctor. She was a bit concerned and sent us to this specialist hospital about an hour’s drive away, and they put me on one of those beds to the X-Ray department. They said everthing’s all right on the right side, but bad news – we’ve found a tiny cancer, the size of a pea, on the left colon. This was on the Tuesday, and I asked, ‘What shall I do now?’ And they said, ‘Well, you’re booked in for Thursday to have it removed. Be here for six in the morning.’

“They did the operation and kicked me out on the Saturday, bringing it out through my stomach – and it was the size of a golf ball from the size of a pea in less than two days.”

Someone was clearly looking after you, not least with that mystery ailment that flagged it up.

Compact Discs: The WriteWyattUK Slade CD Collection (Photo: Malcolm Wyatt)

“I know, mate. Like my wife said, ‘You’ve used your nine lives, mate. Be careful.”

I was looking this week at the UK’s Christmas chart from 50 years ago, featuring so many records I recall first time around (I’d just turned five) – Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’ topping the pile, followed by Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding-a-Ling’, T-Rex’s ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’, John & Yoko’s ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over), The Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’, and Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’. And what do you reckon was at No.6?

“Err … was it us?”

It was indeed. ‘Gudbuy t’Jane’. Its sixth week in the top 10, having peaked at No.2.

“Wow! That’s it. You just reminded me. I think it was ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ that kept us off the top.”

You got it.

“I must tell you, we were on the same show that Chuck Berry recorded that. In Coventry. He was top of the bill, and there was also the Roy Young Band. Do you remember them? They were actually his backing band. He’d turn up about 10 minutes before and say, ‘When I want you to start, I’ll raise my arm, and when I want you to stop, I’ll stamp my foot.’ Everybody knew his songs anyway. We opened the show, and if I remember right, we were all still skinheads then. Then came Roy Young, then Chuck Berry, and he hardly sang, he just let the audience sing. And when that show finished, they cleared the stage, and an hour or so later Pink Floyd were on, doing Dark Side of the Moon. And I’d never seen anything like that. What a bill that was, eh!”

Promoters wouldn’t dream of putting those acts together today, surely. But bearing in mind Chuck’s novelty hit recorded that night, in retrospect maybe if you’d gone backstage and tweaked with the electrics, it might never have happened, and Slade could have had another No.1 that year.

“Yeah, and of all those incredible songs he’s written, and everybody’s recorded, he gets to No.1 with bloody ‘Ding-a-Ling’!”

As it was, a truly momentous year followed, Slade doubling their tally of UK No.1s, the sixth being the festive classic Don prefers to refer to as that record. And in a way it was very much a golden year for the band.

“Yeah, it was that year that we were on a world tour, and had just finished a big American tour. We had a week off before we went on to Australia. And Chas Chandler, our manager and producer, said, ‘Do you have anything? If you have, we can go in the studio, do something.’ I remember Nod and Jim saying, ‘We’ve got this Christmas song.’ They played it to us, and Chas said, ‘We’ve got to do this!’ So we booked the Record Plant in New York City, the Summer of ’73, 100 degrees outside, and there we were, singing that record. And would you believe now that when we finished it, we didn’t want to release it? Chas thankfully said, ‘I don’t care what you lot say, this is coming out!’

I don’t reckon it’s been out of the top 100 at this time of year since.

“Oh, it’s phenomenal! Everybody must have this bloody record, but it keeps on selling. The funniest thing is, when I’m in a supermarket when it’s playing and I’m getting my groceries, all the attendants are singing it at the top of their voices.”

Fast forward to December 1982, 40 years ago, following the release of the Slade on Stage LP, and I finally got to see you live for the first time, Slade headlining one of two memorable nights at Hammersmith Odeon in December 1982. That was such a key show for me, the atmosphere so special, even across the road at the Britannia pub before. I was barely 15 then, yet loving every moment … and pint.

“I think we had three nights. And that was a great gig. I loved that gig. Lovely memories, eh.”

By this time in 1992 it was all over though, Noddy Holder officially quitting, and Jim Lea following. Yet if I recall right, there may still have been live shows for Dave Hill’s Slade II outfit come December. Were you on board with him again by then?

“Well, it wasn’t Christmas, but he did come round. My then-wife ran hotels and I was just helping out, you know, when he came down and said there’s an opportunity for us to get back on the road. I said yes straight away, and that was it. We started touring. And what was nice about that particular line-up, we managed to get to places like Russia, which we could never get to in the ‘70s. That was a great experience. We did a lot of the old Eastern Bloc, and that was really interesting.”

And this year Don was back in tow with Jim, sharing a stage and a few old stories for a sold-out, live-streamed Q&A at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, forming part of the Black Country Beats exhibition.

Dun Deal: Don Powell’ splendid autobiography, written with the help of Lise Lyng Falkenberg

“That was great. We could laugh amongst the two of us, only things us know. It was nice to reminisce about lots of stuff in the early days that nobody else would know about … and maybe we could do a tour of the country of those shows.”

That would be brilliant. I’ll wait by my phone for confirmation.

“I tell you what, Malc, I’ll keep you in touch about that.”

I really enjoyed the in-conversation tour show Noddy Holder did with Mark Radcliffe, so that would make for a perfect follow-up.

“I never saw that show with Nod. But I heard it was a good one.”

One story I recall was them talking about you and Dave recruiting a singer one day, Nod contemplating coming along in disguise and auditioning. And that prompted another memory from Don, in pre-classic four-piece days with The Vendors.

“Dave and I were with this particular line-up, and he was with the Memphis Cut-Outs, who became Steve Brett and the Mavericks. Even then, Nod reminded me of a John Lennon type. I remember saying to Dave, ‘I tell you who’d be good …’ But Dave didn’t rate him at the time. It was just a pure coincidence that Dave and myself were in Wolverhampton and bumped into Nod, went and had a coffee in the local department store, and mentioned all that. We’d already recruited Jim Lea by then, but had this rehearsal in this pub opposite where Nod lived with his mum and dad, the Three Men and a Boat. They used to have gigs there. We played there a few times before we met him.

“The first song we played was something we knew and that Nod was playing with his band, ‘Mr Pitiful’ by Otis Redding. And it worked straight away. We just looked at each other, started laughing, and just went into other things the four of us knew. It worked so well, and we thought, ‘This is it, this is the one!’”

Speaking of which, at this time in December ’62, six decades ago, you were in an early line-up of The Vendors with frontman Johnny Howells (who also met Don and Jim at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in early August) and Mick Marston (guitar), before Dave Hill joined you.

“That’s right, just playing weddings and youth clubs. I remember one time when they had Saturday morning matinees at the cinema for kids, and there was one around the corner from where Johnny lived with his Dad, where we were just miming along to three or four songs. Then John came to us and said, ‘I’ve got us a gig, we’re playing this wedding reception … and we’re gonna get paid!’ I looked at him, said, ‘We’re gonna get paid for this?’ We were getting £6 – £2 each. That was incredible. We could have a bag of chips each!”

Were you working then?

“Yes, in the laboratory of this foundry. Then we were just sort of gigging, local pubs and clubs. In fact, I kept in touch with my boss – another Don – until a few years ago. He was really helpful to me. He found out I was in a band – I kept it quiet – but I managed to keep my job. One of the kids in another part of the factory saw us the night before in a local battle of the bands, telling my boss. But he just said, ‘You never told me you were in a band.’ He was great and if need be, he’d let me finish early, the van picking me up outside the factory. Lovely memories.”

As for Wolverhampton in December 1952, what would a Powell family Christmas have involved for six-year-old Donald George and his family, while Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’ was topping the very first official UK festive chart?

“Well, music was far from my mind then. It was basically me, my brother and two sisters, Christmas Day a big family thing in our house. Me and my brother were sleeping in the same room, in a council house, trying to keep awake to catch Father Christmas. We never did though – we never caught him!

“There’d be Christmas wrapping paper all over the house from unwrapping our presents, Dad would go over the pub about lunchtime for a couple of pints, while my mum and eldest sister got the Christmas lunch together. And it’d be all around the table with crackers and party hats then, watching whatever film was on that afternoon. Lovely memories.

“I never knew my grandfathers, but I knew my two grannies, mum’s mum only living a couple of hundred yards away. I remember Gran with a glass of stout and Vimto.”

And will you be in Denmark this Christmas?

“Oh yeah. This is my home now. Nearly 20 years now. And we’ve got six grandchildren. Everybody will be here for Christmas Day lunch, and (Don’s wife) Hanne’s mum and dad, all around the table, then the kids go to their fathers the day after or the day before. It’ll be a lovely Christmas Day and we’ll all be doing the tree in a few days. And over here there’s a special song on Christmas Day where we hold hands and dance around the tree. It’s a Danish tradition. I don’t know the song, but I’ll dance around the tree with all the kids and all the family.”

Occasional Flames: Paul Cookson, Don Powell, and Les Glover

Chewing gum as you go, yeah?

“No, that’s another story! I don’t do that anymore. It started fetching my fillings out! My dentist kept saying, ‘I can’t keep rebuilding your teeth!’ But he built a gum-shield for me, which is fantastic. And it really works. And when we’re doing a show, you see all the kids down the front looking, pointing at this brilliant white gum shield. I wanted the dentist to black one out, but he wouldn’t do it!”

And will you be reading your younger grandchildren your children’s book, The Adventures of Bibble Brick, written with your biographer and friend, Danish writer Lise Lyng Falkenberg?

“Actually, I never thought of that. They don’t really understand so much English, so I’d have to get one of the parents to read it for them. But I actually wrote that book in the late ‘60s, it got shelved and I never thought anything of it. But I just mentioned it to Lise, in conversation, and she said, ‘Let me read it.’ I got the manuscript, she dotted a few i’s and crossed a few t’s for me, it was taken on, and it’s doing alright. I’ve noticed on my bank statement I’ve had some royalties from Amazon, so yeah – it seems like it’s cleared its costs.”

As for his next studio projects, don tells me he’s recording with some Danish musicians at present.

“We’ve released a version of ‘Far, Far Away’, the Slade classic, calling the band Don and the Dreamers.”

Brilliant. And sometimes it’s hard to keep up with, what with Don Powell’s Occasional Flames, and The Don Powell Band too.

“I know. I’ve got different hats for different things. But I’ll keep you in the loop, and have a great Christmas. I really enjoyed that. Thanks, Malc!”

And with that he was gone, no doubt to practise his moves around the Christmas tree. And if he’s not decked out in one of his one-piece outfits with the cutaway sleeves on the big day, I’ll be very disappointed.

Did you ever get to see Slade, the Black Country legends that claimed the world, live? Do you go back as far as The ‘N Betweens, or even The Vendors or Steve Brett and the Mavericks? Were you around when they made the classic film, Flame? Did you get along to its premiere in Sheffield? Ever catch them on the set of Top of the Pops? Were you there to see them at London’s Command Theatre Studio in 1971, Earl’s Court in 1973, or Reading Festival in 1980? Did you attend any of their memorable mainland European, North American or Australian shows? Have you an entertaining tale or two of bumping into Nod, Jim, Dave or Don down the years that you want to share in print? Or did you just want to tell us about your love for Slade and how important a band they were (and remain so) to you, and the joy of buying that treasured copy of ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ or Old, New, Borrowed and Blue? And have you any good quality photos of those meetings that you have copyright to use? If so, we’d love to hear from you via thedayiwasthere@gmail.com, ahead of a new publication lined up for early 2023, those memories sharing the pages with a history of the band and their key releases, plus interviews with band members, the latest in Spenwood Books’ A People’s History series, following titles covering Cream, Fairport Convention, Queen, the Rolling Stones, and Thin Lizzy.

For December 2020’s WriteWyattUK feature/interview with Don Powell, and links to past Slade-related interviews and features, head here.

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Taking the Westway to the sea with Graham Jones – talking Haircut One Hundred, Boys Wonder, and more

Posted on December 22, 2022 by writewyattuk
Pelican Reunion: Graham Jones and Nick Heyward, back together again on stage next year

Haircut One Hundred are back, celebrating their 40th anniversary with a live show and special edition of Pelican West, the debut LP that saw them on their way all those years ago.

And that was all I needed by way of an excuse to get back in touch with guitarist Graham Jones, who left London for Cornwall in 1990 but is very excited about a 2023 Shepherd’s Bush Empire show that sold out in a matter of days.

But before we get on to that, let’s go right back, Nick Heyward (guitar, vocals) and Les Nemes (bass) setting the ball rolling as early as 1977, although it was only after they relocated from Beckenham, Kent, to central London that Graham (guitar) came on board, the band soon adopting its distinctive name.

“The old story we keep trawling out is that our girlfriends, who were best mates, were the connection. Nick and Les were already doing this band, Moving England, and making demos. I was doing my own punky stuff, not too far away from where they were. Our girlfriends went to the same school.”

I’m guessing you’d been playing guitar for a while.

“Yeah, I was in a band called Strobe Effects, with mates from Forest Hill School, Dacres Road {South-East London}. My mate used to live three or four doors away from the school and we’d rehearse in his converted garage.”

A proper garage band. And as you were born in 1961 and on the doorstep for London, I see you as being right time, right place for punk rock. Were you into prog before getting bitten by that particular bug?

“Not prog. I was always a Sweet, Slade and T-Rex fan, the rockier side of pop, I suppose. And there is there is a little Slade story linked to Haircut One Hundred, because when we recorded Pelican West at the Roundhouse, in the next studio was Girlschool, the heavy metal band. And who was producing them? Jim Lea and Noddy Holder!”

That was Girlschool’s fourth LP, released in 1983, a couple of years after their winning Headgirl collaboration with Motorhead on the St Valentine’s Day Massacre EP.

Meanwhile, it all seemed to come together really quickly with Haircut One Hundred, taking off after recording debut single, ‘Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)’ at that same Roundhouse studio in Chalk Farm.  

“I think the reason Roundhouse was chosen was because it was one of the first digital studios, using the 3M digital {multitrack} recording device. Before that, everything was done on analogue 24-track. The Beat had just done their first album there {I Just Can’t Stop It}, produced by Bob Sargeant. And that’s why we ended up there, because we were using Bob Sargeant, in the early days of when digital was just being trialled.

“There were lots of problems and there was an in-house engineer there to fix the thing, with all these funny little digital blips and hops going on. There was always someone there with a screwdriver. “Hang on, we’ll just have to wait for an hour while what’s-his-face gets his head in amongst the wires.”

And were you soaking this all up? You have your own home studio now, and I imagine Nick and yourself in particular watching very carefully, taking it all in. Did you all have an interest in that process, or were you just about making the music?

“I think some of us took more interest in the engineering side. I definitely did. I didn’t understand what I was looking at, but I kind of picked up the basics, which I’ve carried with me to this day, which I still deal with, recording here at home. And ever since going to the professional studios I’ve always had some kind of recording machine. I’ve always had a four-track machine. And it must have been in the late ‘90s, when recording software became available on computers.”

Have you still got copies of those early demos you made when it was the three of you (Graham, Nick and Les) plus Patrick Hunt on drums?

“Well, I wasn’t using a four-track machine then, not until towards the end of the Haircuts.”

Do any of those early demos appear on this new Pelican West expanded reissue?

“No, but there’s another album if people wanted to hear any of those. But in those days, we went to a normal eight-track studio and you handed over your money, recorded three tracks and went home again. And people recorded over those master tracks. They didn’t always put these things on the shelf, because they’re so expensive. They’d probably sit there a couple of months, then another band would come in and they’d wipe it and record over.”

Did you stay in touch with Patrick?

“I haven’t seen Patrick for a while. He did appear in Cornwall a few years ago, but I don’t know where he is. He went on to work with Sade, I think.”

Was it all a bit of a blur? Because it all seemed to happen so quick, from the first single and album onwards, not least when the teen pop mags took an interest. Did you have time to enjoy it?

“I think with anything in the music industry, you’re either on or off. You’re either a struggling musician, or it’s all full-bore. And once people recognise you’re on the upward trajectory, everything gets chucked at you. Whether you want to do these things or not, a lot of them are part of raising your profile. There’s a lot of things we did which we really loved and a lot of things we did, which we retrospectively look back and think, ‘Oh, no!’”

But you were all so young. You were barely 20 when Pelican West came out.

“Yeah, I remember my 21st birthday, we were off to New York for a gig at the New Music Seminar, I think, right in the middle of Manhattan. Those days, because you’re full of enthusiasm, that’s what drives the band, the enthusiasm for the music.”

I don’t want to muddy any waters, go into any perceived negatives, but for North of a Miracle, Nick was barely 21. I loved that album from the start, and have since gone back to your post-Nick follow-up Haircuts LP, Paint and Paint, and there’s some good stuff on there as well. You were a talented bunch. But part of me wonders if you were listening to Nick’s debut solo LP, thinking, ‘That should have been ours’?

“Unfortunately, when things did fall apart, we already had a body of material ready for a second album, which forms part of this re-release. We’ve got the missing tracks that were unfinished, and some still are unfinished, but it’s impractical – the studio costs for getting it back completely are not really viable.

“Going back and putting stuff on it now would sound a bit weird. And that’s exactly what everyone else thinks. I don’t think Nick would like to sing over a backing track from the ‘80s. But on North of a Miracle there are a couple of tracks which were originally done by the Haircuts, and they’re featured on Pelican West 40.”

Those tracks were Nick’s first solo hit, ‘Whistle Down the Wind’, and ‘Club Boy at Sea’.

“We had Paul Buckmaster in to do the string arrangements. I think some of the parts were replaced by other musicians for Nick’s version. But the original version is on Pelican West 40.”

Those both involve rather sweeping orchestral arrangements on Nick’s debut LP. I kind of assumed that wasn’t the case with the originals.

“We decided there were two tracks we were going to use the orchestra for – those tracks – but it’s an expensive thing to do, to hire a string arranger and an orchestra. You’ll hear these tracks and hear how the band was developing. But we were getting pulled in 50 different directions at once.”

That seems to have been the tipping point for Nick. And I’m guessing it all got a bit too much for everyone.

“Nick would say exactly the same thing, due to those demands for producing a second album, being asked to tour. You know, do you record, do you tour? And being the youngsters we were, we were trying to please everybody, instead of saying, ‘Sod you lot, we’ve got to finish this. Forget about the touring, or do the touring and forget about the album. And in the end, I think if it was too much for Nick.”

When you first heard North of a Miracle, was it a case of, ‘Bastard!’, all a bit raw, or were you ready to face it by then?

“We were kind of under the impression that, you know, there was interference happening, with outside sources. And it’s a really difficult thing to know who’s telling the truth within the industry. It’s a difficult one to answer.”

I guess it was mostly down to the corporate machine and big, bad music industry. You were close friends before and remain so now, right?

“Absolutely. We were always friends. It’s only the industry really, and the things done within the industry are always the downfall of any band.”

Was it a one-album deal with Arista? Only your second record came out via Polydor, I see.

“I think we had a bigger initial deal with Arista. So there was more work that could have been done, but I think we had to change our dealings and record companies after Nick had gone. We had to extract ourselves from Arista just to see what we could do as a second incarnation, if you like. But that wasn’t what we necessarily chose to do. It’s where we ended up.”

Was Marc (Fox) nailed on to be frontman of the reconvened band, post-Nick? Only that was a bit of a surprise that he stepped forward.

“We actually auditioned people, and we had the singer from Secret Affair come along, and interviewed a few other people, putting an ad out. We auditioned a few people around at Phil’s house, but it just wasn’t working. So we thought, why should we bring in someone outside when we could pull someone in-house?”

And there are some lovely moments on that record. It’s just a shame it got lost, really.

“It’s one of those albums … it has got some great moments on it. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s what kept us busy until we all decided this is obviously not the master plan really. We’re just kind of making the best of what we’ve got.”

Was there a big gap between that and where you went next? Was it just the fact that it wasn’t a commercial success that made you think to knock it on my head?

“Like I was alluding to, it wasn’t the thing we’d planned to do. Because we weren’t doing it with Nick, it wasn’t like the authentic article, really. While we were in this kind of situation, I think the band members were probably looking at their futures and whether it was fulfilling their artistic needs or not.”

You clearly made some good mates along the way. For instance, you had that link with Glen Matlock.

“That came later, after Boys Wonder.”

I was coming on to those years, that band having released one album, 1989’s Radio Wonder, and five singles between 1987 and 1990. How did that project come to pass?

“We knew Ben and Scott {Addison} from Boys Wonder back in my punk days, before I joined the Haircuts. We crossed paths in those days, going to a few local punk gigs in London. And we actually asked them to come and do some backing vocals in the Haircuts, part two. They came on tour and did some vocals with us. I think at that point we said, ‘Do you want to join us, do something?’ And they said, ‘Actually, we’ve got our own thing, Boys Wonder, maybe you want to come with us. So I did a bit of an audition with them, ending up going that way instead.”

Do you think you deserved a bit more success there?

“Well, they were kind of the complete opposite of what I’d just come out of.”

Which is what you needed, in a way?

“It fitted my guitar style a lot better. I was kind of going back to my roots, regarding musical influences.”

Our mutual friend, Pete, saw you play a charity show in Cornwall told me when he heard you play it was unmistakably you, despite the passage of time. And you do have that very distinctive style.

“Well, I don’t think so. All I’m doing is chucking my own influences in there. My musical influences were Steve Jones of the Pistols, Mick Jones from The Clash …”

Neither related to Graham, despite their respective London roots … far as I know. Sorry, carry on …

“… Stuart Adamson from the Skids, 100,000 other punk bands, Derwood {Bob Andrews} from Generation X was a huge influence on my playing …”

“I alluded to it earlier that you got the chance to see a lot of those bands in their pomp.

“Yeah, I did, because I used to work in the West End, in ‘77. I was a little too young and just missed on seeing the Pistols, but that’s when I picked up the punk thing at school, but around ‘77 I was buying and going to see The Clash all over the place, Generation X, the original {Adam and the} Ants, the Ramones, The Rezillos …”

Fantastic days, so to speak. The latter two alone, I love their live LPs, really felt like I was there. And you probably were.

“I was at the New Year’s Eve concert …

“At The Rainbow?

 “Ramones, Generation X and The Rezillos, I think, were on the bill.”

Marvellous.

“Yeah, I’ve been to some great gigs and picked up some amazing influences, which is what I put into Boys Wonder and the Haircuts as well – it’s a completely different thing that I bring to Haircut One Hundred. I kind of bring … I don’t know, you’d have to tell me what I bring to them!”

I was going to say – same as I put to Nick a few years ago – you never had the kudos of the Postcard bands, for example. A lot of contemporaries were seen as a lot cooler. But maybe it was the fact that the teen mags and young kids latched on to you more, screaming at Nick and so on. Yet there were so many great influences at play there, and what you were doing wasn’t so far off what Edwyn Collins was doing with Orange Juice, alongside Zeke Manyika and co., a real mix of influences involved. And it worked so well.

“Well, you hit the nail on the head there. We were a lot edgier when we started out and we were cooler in many respects than we might have been perceived to be later. A lot of our early influences were Orange Juice’s, and we had a connection later on, Nick’s girlfriend and my girlfriend both from Glasgow, and they used to love us up in Scotland, along with Aztec Camera and Orange Juice.”

I believe you got to know Jimmy Pursey and Edward Tudor-Pole from your working days in London’s West End too.

“I think that’s when Nick and Les came to see me play. I used to work in a photo lab and one of my friends who worked with me, Phil Payne, was in a band called The Low Numbers, kind of a post-punk /early Mod kind of band. His drummer was a really keen football fan, and I could play drums – I learned drums at school – so whenever their drummer disappeared off to see Arsenal, it was, ‘Derek’s gone off to the football, can you come up and drum for us?’ So I’d jump on the train and go up to the youth club in Great Portland Street.

“Around that time, I was also learning to play guitar and played with The Low Numbers with Jimmy Pursey and Chris Foreman from Madness. And Eddie Tenpole as well. We did a fundraiser for that youth club, where we were rehearsing, a place for the kids on the local estate to hang out. I think it was a Christian club. The bloke who ran it was a really good bloke, always out for the youngsters, this youth club he used to run so passionately in this basement.”

Returning to Boys Wonder, how long did that continue? I see you moved down to Cornwall in 1990. Was it still happening around then?

“With Boys Wonder, it was a real comet. You always hear that analogy about things burning fast and bright, and we were on a really high and fast trajectory, with a following on the fashion scene, our girlfriends and friends all connected with fashion or music, the girls making our clothes for us – Ben drawing the designs and the girls making them, adding their influences. Then we had our musical influences, which was a lot of the punk stuff, a lot of T Rex, while Ben and Scott were interested in jazz, and musicals – there was a lot of Oliver in there – and Anthony Newley, all this stuff being rolled up in Boys Wonder, the creative process.

“The press didn’t get it, there was a very strong underground movement, but we couldn’t get out of that and convince anyone the songwriting was far more superior than what they were perceiving at the time. We were signed by Sire in America, but weren’t really backed to any extent that would enable us to spend more time and more money on it.”

Were you working by day again at that point?

That wasn’t the case with the Haircuts.

“We were all working, trying to get by.”

“No, we were all professional musicians. With Boys Wonder it was completely different, almost going back to square one again, proving ourselves as a band, which we kind of did to some extent. But we ended up as a bit of a cult band as opposed to other bands alongside us, good friends at the time like {Doctor and} the Medics, who got to No.1. But good for them.”

There were so many great bands from that era who missed out on the big time, but were later cited by those who broke through with Brit Pop and so on as big influences. In that case, perhaps the right place but the wrong time.

“Yeah. And we were most definitely pioneers, and we do get quoted by other bands. But that’s the luck of the draw in the music industry. You do your damnedest and then nothing happens.”

As long as you’re having fun doing it though, and have stories to tell your kids about, that’s great, surely.

“Yeah.”

And you did get to play in Glen Matlock’s band and support Iggy Pop in Europe in your next venture.

“Yeah. Well, at the time there was another band called Lightning Strike, and Crazy Pink Revolvers, with Theatre of Hate, CSM 101 … There was a group of bands doing various things at the time. And the singer of Lightning Strike, Dave Earl, writing something for his girlfriend, who wanted to be a singer, and they asked me and another Boys Wonder member to do a bit of backing to record something to see if we could get her a deal. We did that and asked Glenn to play bass on it. I said, ‘You can’t ask Glen!’ But this manager of ours said, ‘If you don’t ask …’ So I asked, and he said yeah.

“He did it, and liked what I was doing, so asked me to join his band. I think at that point Boys Wonder had gone as far as it could go. We kind of hit that rock brick wall again, nobody taking us seriously, kind of going round in circles. So I joined Glenn’s band for a short while and did this tour around Europe, which was good fun. And I was in the band with Steve New {later Stella Nova}, also from the Rick Kids, Glen on bass, Dave on drums, me on guitar, and Justin Halliwell, currently playing with Glen again. We supported Iggy for a bit, but I think at that point Steve was going downhill with his addictions, and I liked being in the band but didn’t really want to go round the whole thing again.”

And you were already heading down to Cornwall a lot in your spare time by then, right?

“I was, I was visiting here since the mid-‘80s, a seasoned traveller to Cornwall and already going surfing, coming back to visit friends here for Christmas and Easter. My life has already taken a turn.”

On Spec: Haircut 100, the full complement, back in the day

The heart was clearly pulling you towards Porthtowan.

“Yeah, I think I said to Glen in 1990, ‘Once I’ve done this tour, I’m going to move to Cornwall,’ which I did, and then I kind of stopped music as a profession, just to do something different for a bit.”

You always kept your hand in though, from teaching guitar and everything else, setting up the studio and all that.

“And there’s nothing to prove anymore, is there. It doesn’t really matter. Music should be a creative process and shouldn’t be there for any other reason. It’s an art, and it’s the reason why we started in the punk days, in the early Haircuts days, because we were all enthused and all creating something. We didn’t want a record deal at that time. I mean, everybody dreams about being on Top of the Pops, but you don’t do it for that reason.”

With quite a few of the musicians I speak to, the ambition was just to get a John Peel radio session or make one single, even those who ended up doing far more.

“Well, nobody plans for anything bigger than that, because it doesn’t happen to most people.”

You clearly have that parallel love for Cornwall, something we share, you’re a keen supporter and fundraiser for Surfers Against Sewage {SAS}, and aways had that love of surfing and surf music. It was all meant to be, it seems.

“Yeah, Jan and Dean, Hot Rod music, ‘50s rockabilly, it goes partly hand in hand with the surf culture … not really in the middle of winter though!”

Are you out and about on a board still?

“No, I go in bodyboarding in the summer sometimes, but I decided I was a better guitarist than a surfer, so I let the surfers carry on and get the waves while I’ll go in and enjoy myself if I feel like it. I’ve had some great times surfing, but most of my surfing took place in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.”

“And as you know, the SAS is still going, and I helped set up first surfers’ ball down here.”

It’s a proper community where he is too, and the day we spoke Graham was getting ready for that evening’s Porthtowan Surf Lifesaving Club Christmas Awards at the village hall, along with his wife, Bertha, the pair having met not long after he moved to Cornwall, recently organising a fundraising campaign for a rescue long board made by former British longboard and shortboard surf champion turned ‘shaper’, Ben Skinner, in memory of local former lifeguard and keen surfer, Neil Walters.

“There’s a real connection there, with the surf club, and our daughter’s a lifeguard as well.”

Graham has two sons too, the older lad also a guitarist, working for the RouteNote music company in Truro, the other based in Wales. And while a Londoner through and through, Graham was born in Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast, his Dad serving in the RAF at the time. But perhaps the call of the sea was always there.

“Maybe.”

And are you looking forward to or secretly dreading that Shepherd’s Bush Empire date with Haircut One Hundred?

“Not dreading it at all. It’s going to bring a lot of people together, a lot of friends who haven’t seen us for a while, and a lot of people looking forward to the release of the unheard material. And we were quite surprised it sold out so quickly.”

Is there a likelihood of a second night being added?

“Erm, I can’t really say. I expect something will follow on from it, and because things sold so quickly, that’s going to prick up the years of other promoters.”

Well, maybe the surfers’ ball next year will feature the Haircuts down at Porthtowan.

“You never know.”

Any details on who’s going to feature in that Shepherd’s Bush show?

“No, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

Fair enough. At that point, Graham reminded me of his involvement with another band in more recent times, The Continental Lovers.

“I met the singer when he was on holiday in Porthtowan, we got chatting and I ended up being invited to play on a few tracks just to see how it would go. Joe, the singer, was really pleased with it and I really enjoyed playing on it, because it was kind of down the Boys Wonder route as opposed to down the Haircuts route.

“They’re based in Gloucester, so it’s not really practical for me to get involved, and they’ve got another guitarist playing my parts now, more their age group, someone who fits in and has got all the tattoos and everything! But playing the music came quite naturally, and they’re definitely a bunch worth looking out for.”

And if you could just pick a highlight of your days with the Haircuts, in the studio or on stage …

“I think for all of us, probably, going to the States was a massive bonus. For me personally, it definitely was.”

Do you still pick up the phone and talk to each other now and again?

“Yeah, we do.”

And is that easy conversation, old blokes being nostalgic?

“There’s always nostalgia, and you go over old ground and remind each other of the stupid things you did and who we met. That’s all part of it. But we kind of look to the future with a positive and a new vision. There’s no guarantees there for anything.”

That’s one thing with the pandemic and so on. That taught us a few things about the fact that you can’t take anything for granted. I wonder if that formed part of your resolve for getting this together – the whole reunion, reissue and live project.

“Yeah, the reissue was bound to happen because of the 40-year anniversary. But the company that decided to take it on have really done a good job, they’ve been really supportive, and they wanted the band to be completely included. They haven’t done anything that we’ve disagreed with. They haven’t just bulldozed in, licenced the tracks and released any old crap. They’ve really tried to include the band, and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire show is part of promotion for that release.”

The super-deluxe edition of Haircut One Hundred’s debut LP Pelican West – originally released in February 1982 and spending three months in the UK top-10 album chart, 10 weeks of which were it was in the top five – includes non-album single ‘Nobody’s Fool’, added to the CD and 4-LP set, the new version of the LP featuring a remaster of Pelican West, all the 12” mixes and B-sides, a live set from Hammersmith Odeon, and for the first time, demos for their unfinished second album, given the provisional title, Blue Hat For A Blue Day.

Over four CDs, there are 54 tracks, of which 24 are unreleased, including nascent versions of later Nick Heyward solo hits ‘Whistle Down The Wind’, ‘Blue Hat For A Blue Day’, and the ‘lost single’ ‘Sunny Boy, Sunny Girl’.

The 4-CD set features a 44-page booklet with 10,000-word sleevenotes featuring an oral history of the time with all six members, interviewed by the set’s curator, author and DJ Daryl Easlea. The booklet also includes memorabilia and exclusive photographs from the personal collection of Haircuts guitarist Graham Jones and bassist Les Nemes. Pelican West 40 is also available as a half-speed master vinyl LP as well as a 38-track 4-LP edition containing the new half-speed cut of the album along with the unreleased second album tracks and a collection of 12” mixes. For a track listing and details of how to pre-order, with the new package set to be released on February 24th, head here.

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Missing You – a tribute to Terry Hall and Iain ‘Tempo’ Templeton

Posted on December 21, 2022 by writewyattuk
Live Presence: Iain Templeton collage by WriteWyattUK from his Paris 2018 guest slot with Silvain Vanot on Michael Head’s ‘Queen Matilda’, (Video copyright: Arnaud Bringer-Casanova / Les Champs Magnétiques)

“Love, there was so much love, enough to last a hundred years.

Laughs, we had so many laughs, how come they turned into tears?”

I wasn’t sure it was common knowledge when I got the sad message from Iain ‘Tempo’ Templeton’s sister Claire on Monday evening that we’d lost him, a day which ended with equally awful but more widely received news regarding the wonderful Terry Hall. And then came more grim news yesterday concerning Martin Duffy, of Felt, Primal Scream and Charlatans fame, barely a few months my senior. All that on the back of losing – over the last couple of months alone – his namesake, Brian Duffy, aka Stranglers legend Jet Black, and the hugely inspirational Wilko Johnson, rock’n’roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis, and evergreen singer-songwriter Christine McVie.

Regarding Terry. so many truly lovely words have already been posted about him by so many of you on that front, and for me he was an integral part of my musical journey, key to so many winning combinations around my formative years, an early love for The Specials’ debut LP (one that never waned) leading to having my eyes opened by what he did with Lynval Golding and Neville Staple in Fun Boy Three while Jerry Dammers continued to carve out his own direction with the original concept, neither option any less enlightening. Then there was a further step forward with The Colourfield, followed by Terry, Blair & Anouchka … and I’ve barely touched the first decade there. Often hard-hitting, but with plenty of moments of pop mastery en route.

In fact, talking of great songwriters, he came up in my most recent Ian Broudie interview a few weeks ago, the pair having co-written the Lightning Seeds’ return to form, ‘Emily Smiles’, 28 years after bringing us the wondrous ‘Lucky You’. Ian said at the time, ‘Terry’s just one of the greatest talents I’ve had the pleasure of working with. We started working together when I produced a couple of things for him. It’s been lovely seeing his career re-blossom with The Specials. Then there was The Fun Boy Three, and … he’s done so many things that have been great. I think he’s brilliant.”

No arguments there. Sadly, I never got to chat to Terry, but I at least got to share some priceless stories with many of his old tourmates, not least former bandmates Neville Staple and Roddy Radiation, expressing my love for all they brought us.

As for Tempo, I studied for my Master’s with his older sister, just over a decade ago, yet somehow – not being the mouthy kind – she never mentioned him. I knew her by her married name, and it just never came up – his amazing, rich history in the fledgling La’s, and of course Shack, as well as Michael Head and the Strands. But it certainly wasn’t from any sense on her part of anything less that pride in his amazing talent. And when she finally introduced me to him a few years down the line, there was an instant bond, from a truly loveable guy as well as a great musical talent. He was fragile, I could tell, but also so funny, so passionate, and so talented, as the many unpublished songs he put my way confirmed. Lockdown projects, really, from this true one-off.

I’ve double-checked with Claire that it’s okay to share her initial message to me, one simply reading, ‘I wanted to let you know that my lovely brother died today. He succumbed to the alcoholism that dominated his life since lockdown. I’m so grateful for the interview you did with him and how you made him feel. That was wonderful. He was a complex human being but a brilliant drummer. I’m so very sad but also feeling a sense of relief that he’s no longer plagued by those demons.’

Looking Up: Iain ‘Tempo’ Templeton says grace (Photo copyright: Claire Melhado)

I’d been so absorbed elsewhere that I hadn’t realised I’d not ‘seen him’ online for a fair while. And I should have thought more of him lately … not least in a year when Shack lynchpin Michael Head was (quite rightly) getting so much positive traction for his latest LP. I so loved the music Tempo sent me … even if the accompanying video was a bit in the face. But I guess that was him … at least the public persona. Hopefully, someone will now step up in the right circles and give the recordings I heard (and I gather many more have followed, his positivity shining on through) the true acclaim and wider reception they require.

Until then, Terry, Iain, Martin, I salute you with this Blair Bronwen Booth/Terry Hall classic single from 1990, one that resonates to this day …

“The rain is falling, and I’ve tried calling,

But I just can’t get through to say I’m missing … missing you.”

Doorstep Troubadour: Iain ‘Tempo’ Templeton in his Solian guise in his adopted Liverpool (a WriteWyattUK photo collage sourced from The Pool Underground)

And for my feature/interview with Ian ‘Tempo’ Templeton, from February 2021, head here.

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