I STILL LOVE YOU
(Spedding/Gordon) Chris Spedding: Guitars, Bass, Organ. Steve Wrigley: Backing Vocals. Andy Newmark: Drums. Vocal: ROBERT GORDON That’s lovely. I’m not familiar with Robert Gordon’s work. He’s got a fantastic voice. You’ve known him a long time haven’t you? Yes. When I first left England to go to New York in 1978, I played with him and we did our first recording together - the ‘Rock Billy Boogie’ album for RCA - back in ’79. Robert came up in the punk era. He first started singing with his group Tuff Darts who used to hang out at CBGB’s which was the place to go. When I first came to New York, the one guy I did know was John Cale – I’d done two albums and two tours with him in the UK - and he took me round all these places and introduced me to the doormen so that I wouldn’t have to pay (laughing). When I was with him I met Jody, who was to become my wife, who was in a band. You’ve recently toured with Robert Gordon in Finland. Finland is like a hold-out for the old Rockabilly crowd. We played for American vintage car clubs. The guys show up with 1950 Cadillac’s and so on. They are really into it, in fact, most Scandinavia is a bit like that. We have a following there. The notes mention The Gang They Couldn’t Hang. That was the two of you with Glen Matlock and Slim Jim Phantom, the Stray Cats drummer who famously married Britt Ekland. It ended up being The Band They Couldn’t Book! (laughing). We were a band of four headliners so it became expensive because we didn’t want to work for sideman fees.
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Easy to find, hard to lose They can never go home. You can never go home. Lyrics from the Joyland title track.
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Chambers: Drums When we listen to this we’re listening to King Mob with your added vocal track. It’s a big sound. We had these two King Mob tracks [Also ‘Message For Stella’] which we’d recorded a couple of years ago, which ended up on this album. Instead of wasting them we decided to use them. It’s Steve’s song. There’s three guitars on there: Steve on rhythm, Sixteen on some lead, with me playing the deep whining solo. Sixteen is an English rockabilly player. He’s not sixteen, he’s older than that, but I think he got called Sixteen by all his neighbours because he lived in an apartment block at number 16.
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SHOCK TREATMENT
(Spedding/Parsons) Chris Spedding: Guitars, keyboards and vocal. Andy Newmark: Drums. Bass: ANDY FRASER Being a great fan of Free, it’s so great to hear the distinctive bass of Andy Fraser. He was in the Sharks with you but there was a car crash and Andy damaged his hand. Yes he injured his left hand, I don’t thing we ever forgave him for that (laughing) because he couldn’t play the bass properly. He’s alright now. There’d been a long gap since you met him again? Yes. From time to time I would
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PIED PIPER
(Duboff/Kornfeld) Chris Spedding: Guitars, Bass, Vocal. Charlotte Glasson: Piccolo. Andy Newmark: Drums Oboe & Sax: ANDY MACKAY That’s a really odd one in the sense that you’ve taken what was a light fluffy pop song – a big hit for Crispian St. Peters in 1966 – and made it dark. I usually like to do at least one cover and I’d always liked this one. I thought it was a good tune but I always thought it was creepy, even more so now with this Jimmy Saville stuff. In the original it was treated like “Come on let’s have some fun!” I accentuated the dark side by slowing the tempo down a bit and singing it myself. I don’t have a friendly pop voice. Andy Mackay, who I’ve played with in Roxy Music and also on his 2004 solo album ‘Music for the Senses’, is a great player who opened up the song for me. He is the Pied Piper.
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Steve (left) and Chris at Lewes’ Foundry Studios. Photo John May
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GO DOWN SOUTH
(Parsons) Chris Spedding: Lead vocal. Sixteen, Chris Spedding, Steve Parsons: Guitars. Steve Parsons & Chris Spedding: Backing vocals. Toshi: Bass. Martin
Steve “Snips” Parsons
“Steve has been my writing collaborator on many of my albums and we’ve been in several bands together including Sharks, King Mob, the Presence LDN and currently The Power Shakes. He is the writer or co-writer with me, of seven of the tracks on the ‘Joyland’ album, as well as co-producing it with me. So I owe a big thanks to Steve – it’s his album as much as mine.”
try and find him and when I moved to California I realized that he was also living there and I tracked him down. I was so into what he was doing musically on the bass that I couldn’t believe that he didn’t recognise that and want to use that. I sort of felt that he was the left hand and I was the right hand. I know you think of him very highly. What would you say are his great qualities as a bass player? He’s incredibly musical. He always thinks of the groove and the song and what the song’s doing. A lot of bass players just find out what chords the guitar player is playing and they play the bottom string. He lets you get on with it and he’ll come up with something else no other bass player would ever have thought of. It’s still pure rhythm and blues. It’s not clever, it’s very smart. So he’s got all these things that musicians can dig. I thought “right this guy’s for me” but it’s only recently that I think we’ve got more of a rapport. I was able to ask him to do this and he said yes and I knew exactly what he would do. Then he sent me something of his and I played on it and he loved it. The deal was if you play on my record I’ll play on yours. We have more of a thing going now. His contribution on this track is just perfecto.”
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I’M YOUR SIN
(Parsons/Spedding) Chris Spedding: Guitars, bass. Andy Newmark: Drums. Lisa Abbott: Backing vocals. Vocals: LANE & CHRIS SPEDDING Lane has got a helluva precocious voice, like the young Helen Shapiro. It sounds like the characters are plotting a crime. This is really dark. This woman is trying to steer this guy wrong to do something really bad. He sums it up with this line: “I’ve got that bad, bad feeling again” and she says:
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11 Brighton & hove Musical Times
”I’ll bring the van and you bring the gun” (laughing). Lane is 16 and is from Southern California, where she is still in school. These are her first recordings. If she’s got the ambition to do something, we’re here and we’ll work with her. Her mother also has to approve of what’s she’s doing.
MESSAGE FOR STELLA
(Parsons) Chris Spedding and Sixteen: Guitars. Toshi, Bass. Martin Chambers: Drums. Vocals: STEVE PARSONS Steve’s got a good vocal on him too and he’s not a big guy. Do you remember when you first met him? Yes, he came to a Sharks rehearsal. He was recommended. We auditioned him. We liked him and we liked his songs. I don’t think Andy Fraser was prepared for the fact that he wrote songs, I think he wanted to be the main writer or maybe he just didn’t take to him. We had also asked some other singers to join including Leo Sayer before he had done anything and two friends of Steve’s from Hull – Mick Ronson and Robert Palmer.
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BOOM SHAKKA BOOM
(Parsons) Chris Spedding: Guitars, Bass, Vocals, Keyboards. Jody Spedding: Backing vocals. Andy Newmark: Drums. When I first read the title Boom Shakka Boom it struck a chord. Was it with something in the past? Well, Sly and the Family Stone have it in Dance to the Music. It’s one of those soul things from the ‘70s like “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me”. The last lyric, in case you didn’t get it is: ‘Bad bird flying on a plasma screen/Say Howdy Yourself/ Here’s your American dream’ CF
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