Eighth Day Magazine Issue Twenty-eight

EIGHTH DAY DAMNED FINE 2021!

Dana Gillespie / Rude GRL & C.C. / Brian Protheroe / Simon Kirke / Blow-Up / The Stan Laurels / Dean Hutchinson / 12 Limbs / The Opening Song / The Priscillas / 2 Lost Souls

ISSUE TWENTY-EIGHT. JANUARY. £5.00

WISHING YOU A

www.eighthdaycommunications.co.uk/magazine / Facebook: eighthdaymagazine /

EDITORIAL

Top: Alice Jones-Rodgers Editor-in-Chief Scott Rodgers Photos and Turkey Sanctuary Manager Bottom, from left to right: Kevin Burke Staff Writer Martin Hutchinson Staff Writer Paul Foden Staff Writer Peter Dennis Staff Writer

EIGHTH DAY Issue Twenty-eight January 2021

Wayne Reid Staff Writer Eoghan Lyng Staff Writer Dan Webster Wasted World German Shepherd Records “Different Noises for Your Ears” Frenchy Rants

Could you be an Eighth Day writer?

Please feel free to email us samples of your work!

Twitter: @EighthDayMag / Instagram: @eighthdaymagazine / eighthdaymagazine@outlook.com

“A wee slice of rock ‘n’ roll history!”

CONTENTS 4. Blow-Up / Wasted World Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

104. The Stan Laurels Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

15 / 23 / 59 / 91. Wasted World Another instalment of Dan Webster’s legendary comic strip.

114. Dean Hutchinson Interview by Paul Foden.

16. Dana Gillespie Interview by Kevin Burke.

28. Rude GRL & C.C. Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

44. German Shepherd Records Presents: 2 Lost Souls Interview by Bob Osborne.

54. The Opening Song Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

125. Rainbow Martin Hutchinson reviews ‘In the Shadow of the Wizard: Rainbow 1975 - 1976’.

126. Frenchy’s Rants This month: Happy New Year!

129. John Hackett Interview and review by Martin Hutchinson.

60. Brian Protheroe Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

130. Paul McCartney Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘McCartney III’.

70. The Damned Interview by Martin Hutchinson.

138. The Blithe Spirit Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

78. Simon Kirke Interview by Kevin Burke.

Happy 2021!

92. 12 Limbs Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

98. The Priscillas Interview by Peter Dennis.

Congratulations to Ligzig and Katie on the arrival of their baby, Amelia, born 26/12/20.

Welcome to 2021, It’s Gonna

BLOW-UP Big Time!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Welcome to 2021! We have absolutely no idea what this year will hold, but surely to goodness it has to be better than 2020 ... hasn’t it?!

Whatever happens, at least one thing is certain: Great music will always somehow find a way to reach us and in the following pages, we introduce you to just some of the bands and artists who, pandemic or not, are about to fill our ears over the next twelve months!

Whilst the world has been in the grips of COVID madness, the bands and artists who would have otherwise been taking to stages all over the world to do what most of them do best (i.e. performing their music for you) and getting together in the studio to record new material, they have been forced into rethinking how to both reach their audiences and how to keep the creative spark going. Some of the results have been quite astounding, with many musicians taking the opportunity to stay connected to their fans with all manner of great online gigs via social media platforms, whilst others have harnessed their inability to function as a recording unit like they did previously by dabbling in a bit of home recording, with some even ending up producing the most interesting works of their entire careers.

Since the start of the first lockdown in March last year, our very own Dan

Webster, the man behind the legendary Wasted World comic, and his wife Natalie have been passing the time that otherwise would probably have been spent recording and performing live as two-fifths of Blackpool’s premier purveyors of acid rock, The Drop Out Wives by putting their brand new project into action, the brilliant lo-fi duo Blow-Up. After entertaining us during the first nine months of the pandemic with three excellent singles, ‘She’s My Witch’, ‘Soul Digger’ and ‘Bodybag’, all of which came with accompanying videos made with a little help from the duo’s friends from the Blackpool music scene, Blow-Up released their self-titled debut five-track EP on Spotify and Bandcamp on Christmas Eve, with a physical version to follow very soon.

This month, Dan is celebrating his first anniversary as an Eighth Day Magazine team member. Over that time, he has brought us an unbelievable 111 Wasted World comic strips, winning fans all across the globe. So passionate are these fans of Sid, Blackout and company and their many adventures in Ugleigh that Dan has recently launched the very first Wasted World T-shirt, which we dare say will be just the first in a very long line of Wasted World merchandise.

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In the following interview, conducted early last month, Dan tells us all about the incredible history of Wasted World and gives us an insight into everything Ugleigh, whilst he and Natalie tell us everything we need to know about what is bound to be one of the greatest new bands that 2021 has to offer, Blow-Up. Firstly, hello Dan and Natalie and thank you for agreeing to our interview. We believe that Blow-Up was born out of the first lockdown.

Would you say it was a case of frustration and boredom and needing to continue making music in spite of the obvious restrictions on the music industry that the pandemic has brought about?

Natalie: Hi Alice! Thanks for having us. Well, actually, just prior to the first lockdown, Dan and I started jamming as a two piece for our friend Catlow [Morris]’s open-mic nights, that were held at Montague’s in South Shore, Blackpool and later at Dirty Blondes, in Blackpool town centre. We started

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out with simple, but obscure covers, and gradually added originals to the catalogue of songs. These would be performed with myself on guitar and Dan on the congas. When the first lockdown happened, yeah, we kept the project going, gave it a name, and Dan gradually moved away from the congas and bought himself a fancy new wave-drum! We couldn’t get together and jam as The Drop Out Wives, so this kept us creating and making music. I think it was no brainer to be honest We started from a two piece jamming at open mic nights playing obscure covers to living in our own little bubble forming Blow-Up. Before we moved back to Blackpool in 2005, me and Dan recorded an EP under the name Twisted Routes and I guess being in other bands over the years meant we were too busy to pick up where we left off as a two piece. Lockdown left us with no choice!

Despite Blow-Up being the two of you, there is a Blackpool music community spirit to the proceedings, with your two singles so far, ‘She’s

My Witch’ (31st October 2020) and ‘Soul Digger’ (13th November 2020) both having been produced by local musicians Shaun ‘Bean’ Reader (Dü Pig) and Kev Atherton at ‘REC’; the video for ‘She’s My Witch’ featuring, amongst others, Zowie from Dischord and Ligzig Liggett (CSOD / The Awkwards / Eye Scream Men) having helped out in the making of the video for ‘Soul Digger’. How important has this idea of a community of like-minded musical friends been during the time you have both been making music and how important have these friendships been during the pandemic and to getting the Blow-Up project off the ground?

Dan: We are most fortunate to be so close to so many people in the Blackpool band scene, and we have a great circle of friends who help each other out how they can with projects like this. As for Shaun and Kev producing our first batch of songs, they are collectively known as ‘REC’, and they produced the last Drop Out Wives

EP, ‘Wurlitzer Sounds’, in 2018. We were so pleased with their work and their ear for alternative music, we were keen to work with them again on the first Blow-Up EP. Our friend Catlow, at the time of ‘She’s My Witch’, wanted to get into filming and editing and so we asked her to take charge of the video. Catlow rallied up the troops by asking many of our female friends to appear as witches in the video, but the COVID-19 rules and regulations were changing quite frequently at this time, and unfortunately a ruling was then made where households could no longer mix. The girls that were asked though still went ahead with their witchy footage and sent the footage to Catlow to edit – so yes, we were definitely blessed to have so many like minded friends! Ligzig was on hand to help Natalie assemble the ‘Soul Digger’, and later, the ‘Body Bag’ video, because he has such a good track record of making music videos for his bands. The videos helped get Blow-Up off the ground massively; we have found that people are much more likely to watch a shared video than just

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listen to a shared track, so to everyone who has helped with these, we are extremely grateful to.

Natalie: Like Dan said, we are so fortunate to have such wonderful people in our lives, who are all talented and gifted in so many ways. Living in Blackpool during the pandemic has brought a lot of people closer together.

For example, live streaming events, arts and crafts, performance art, people sharing their stories online, making short films etc. Obviously it’s been a tough year for everyone but spirits have been high considering, I think people are just trying to crack on and make the most of what we have at the moment, kindness and support goes a long way.

I am very conscious of how mental health has affected a lot of people including myself, and so we should all be there for one another and look out for one another. A simple text to say ‘Are you OK?’ can go a long way. Not to mention the suffering of local businesses ... my heart goes out to business owners and we should try and support as many as we can. I’m not

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going to lie, me and Dan have been lucky in terms of being able to be creative at home and having two dogs to keep us motivated and still working in our day jobs, so I don’t really have the right to moan. Halloween is my favourite time of year and so we thought how special it would be to get everyone involved and spread the love.

Catlow did an absolutely amazing job considering the restrictions we had.

Can’t thank everyone enough for taking part.

‘She’s My Witch’ is a cover of American rock ‘n’ roll band Kip Tyler & The Flips’ 1958 hit, released on Ebb Records. Can you remember how you first came across this song and why did you decide to cover it as our first taste of Blow-Up? Natalie: I heard ‘She’s my Witch’ on a Halloween compilation and recognised it instantly. It’s one of those songs you think you’ve heard someone play before, it’s so bloody catchy and simplistic. Because I’m not proficient in guitar playing, and especially

playing and singing at the same time.

It occurred to me that songs played where the guitar stops and the vocals start could work well for Blow-Up, and so not only did we choose to cover the song, we have adapted this style of writing.

‘Soul Digger’ is an original song and Natalie’s first foray into video making. Could you give us an insight into the writing and recording process of ‘Soul Digger’ and Natalie, has making its video given you the bug for creating more to bring this project’s music to visual life in the future?

Natalie: If you listen to ‘Soul Digger’, you will find very much the same approach was used, where the drums are at the forefront of the song and the Guitar is used as a backdrop. With there just being the two of us, our idea was to bring the drums ‘up front’, and I think we’ve found the Blow-Up sound we were looking for. ‘Soul Digger’ touches on Image over substance - Basically live a little, experiment, move around

scenes and explore the underground.

You only live once. I’m very passionate about this. So much music out there ... go and find it! Making the video, I absolutely loved! I was bored, so made a start, and was hooked instantly.

Thanks to Ligzig! He showed me everything I need to know on Adobe Premiere. The best part was finding free stock footage and incorporating into the lyrics, essentially a visual story of the song. I wasn’t making it for social media, I was making it because I enjoyed it. Bloody chuffed people liked it though. The videos were very much made for fun - I don’t think I’ll be taking it to the next level! [laughs]. I am a huge fan of old hollywood, witches and crazy obscure dance footage. So I’m happy with it! [laughs].

We believe that ‘She’s My Witch’ and ‘Soul Digger’ are precursors to an EP due to be released this year.

Could you tell us anything about what we can expect from the EP? Dan: The self-titled EP will be made up of five songs, two of which are

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are covers ... The aforementioned ‘She’s My Witch’ being one. It’s quite a varied EP! ‘Soul Digger’ is our most alternative and severe track, and we call ‘Bodybag’, which we released online on 19th December our ‘poppy number’. There’s a song which I am on lead vocals for, ‘Waxwork’ which is a straight up rock ‘n’ roll number. I think what was important to us when making the EP was to establish how much sound a two piece can make, and for me on the drums, I wanted to scratch the surface of how varied and wonderful the wave-drum can be.

Combine that with the array of FX pedals Natalie has, and her amazing vocal range, and we soon realised no two songs need sound too alike, and we had lots of fun trying out many different sounds and vibes for each song. Blow-Up ‘Blow-Up’ will be released on digital formats on Christmas Day! We plan to release it physically, and probably as a vinyl, in early 2021.

about what people would think, we just focused on sounds we like.

Natalie: What Dan said. It’s a very diverse EP - we didn’t set out worrying

We take it the name Blow-Up was inspired by Michaelangelo

With the fact that you are releasing an EP in mind, is Blow-Up a project that you would like to continue with after the world has returned to some sort of normality and if so, would you like to see it brought to life in a live setting?

Dan: We have no plans to abandon Blow-Up once the world is back to normal, we are having way too much fun with it to do that! We would definitely love to bring Blow-Up to a live setting eventually. Once we had a set list of songs we are happy with, we did a few ‘live’ gigs that we streamed for different online events. We are now much louder and noisier than the two-piece that appeared at some of Catlow’s open mic nights many moons ago though! As there are only two of us, we think it will be best to just turn our levels up as loud as possible!

Antonioni’s 1966 David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave starring classic ‘Blowup’. Leading on from our previous question, how important is the influence of cinema and the whole visual aspect to the music you make with both this project and The Drop Out Wives?

Natalie: Cinema is everything to me, to both of us, and as music and cinema are two of my favourite mediums, I find it natural to incorporate the two. I am only starting out as a video maker, but I can listen to a song and visualise what would look good on the screen at certain parts. The plan is to make a video for each of the five tracks on the EP …. three down, two to go! And me and Dan being in the videos is honestly really low on my priority list. I like videos to compliment the music, much like I enjoy the right music enhancing video and film. To me, both mediums are important and should go hand in hand. My songwriting style is very much inspired by film initially, I like songs that tell stories. But what is also important to me is taking that story and

using it as a metaphor for whatever I want to write about.

The idea of visuals leads us neatly on to asking about Dan’s legendary Wasted World. This issue marks the first anniversary of Wasted World being an integral part of Eighth Day, but how did it all start, what inspired you and could you give us a bit of a plotted history of the comic strip up until joining forces with Eighth Day? Dan: Wasted World all started, really, when I was in my early twenties, in the early noughties, when I decided I wanted to create my own ‘newspaperstyle’ cartoon strip! I’ve always drawn cartoons, for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always loved that genre of cartoon, Peanuts, Garfield, etc, and so I just decided to base one on what I already knew - the perils and pitfalls of being a rock ‘n’ roller in small-town Britain! The first hundred or so strips I ever drew were a LOT cruder than the ones I submitted to Eighth Day Magazine, just ink on paper cut out and glued onto cardboard! Wasted World

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was picked up, however, by Devolution magazine in 2006, and it ran in that publication for about six months. I then created four of what I called ‘Bagazines’ – booklets of perhaps twenty strips, photocopied, spliced and bundled under a front cover, and sold in a small, brown paper bag. Merchandise too! Pin badges, and what I was really proud of: ‘Wasted World: The Music’, a compilation of local bands who recorded a song for Wasted World, or submitted a track that would fit with Wasted World. In return, I would make the band, or artist, a cartoon poster and promote them as best I could online, or by plastering the posters up in some of our venues in Blackpool at that time. Eventually the CD was released, with postcards of said artwork and I sold every copy I made, which was great. Not long after, I stopped making the cartoon strip and just focused on doing cartoons for other people; be it for gifts, band artwork or album artwork, under the Wasted World name. Sometimes Sid and Blackout appeared, and I did a second ‘Wasted World: The Music’ CD ten years after

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the first in 2018, but by this time I was using a computer to complete the artwork (always hand drawn first, then enhanced on the computer) and I was a lot happier with the finished product.

No, it wasn’t until I met you guys at Eighth Day Magazine, when you interviewed The Drop-Out Wives in December 2019, and I asked if your fine magazine wanted it’s very own ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ cartoon strip, that I officially ‘rebooted’ Wasted World and brought it back, but this time with the digital skills I had picked up over the past few years. Although I said I was happy to think up a brand new cartoon strip, you said you loved Wasted World, and the rest is history! I have always been keen, and proud, to affiliate Wasted World with the local band scene here in Blackpool, and I will continue to do so.

Have any of your own life events been incorporated into Wasted World and were any of the characters that we see in the comic strip based on real people and if so, who and why?

Dan: Ha, most definitely! Although when it happens in Wasted World it is usually a much more exaggerated chain of events. I was 19/20 when I first ever drew Sid, Blackout and company, and that is why they are 19/20 years old.

Growing up as rockers in Blackpool was never plain sailing. Consider the huge chav culture we have here, and the single, and easy to parody, rock club we had at the time [The Tache].

Both are running themes of the strip.

Not every town in England is like London, or Leeds, or Glasgow, for example, so I figured there may be a lot of people out there who could relate!

Sid is the ‘Charlie Brown’, always worrying, always trying to get by, never getting the girl. That could easily have been me. Blackout, his comically hard rocking best friend, could easily have been any of my closest friends (or a combination of them), but initially, Blackout was modelled on my own best mate Rixo growing up too. But of course, exaggerated for comic effect.

‘Ugleigh’, where Wasted World is set, might as well be Blackpool. Simple conversations and occurrences would

later become the crux of a Wasted World gag, I just had to learn how to craft it into a three-box ‘newspaper style’ cartoon strip. Only a few weeks ago, my good friend [and Drop Out Wives bandmate] Giles and I were just chatting - G is a naturally funny guy anyway - and we had a good laugh about something to which I replied, ‘That could be a Wasted World strip!’.

And sure enough, I moulded it into one for the December issue.

Have you been pleased with the reaction from people all over the world to your work?

Dan: Yes, I am always really humbled by anyone who takes the time to pass on a nice comment, and the fact that Eighth Day is sent all over the world still, a year later, continues to blow my mind. I recently created the first ever Wasted World T-shirt. I think there is an advert for it in this month’s issue ... and that’s just the Wasted World logo, but the response from those has been fantastic and shows to me that people get where I’m coming from and enjoy

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the cartoons. And I couldn’t ask for anything more than that. More opportunities have arisen this year too being commissioned for album artwork and a skateboard design in 2020 (big up to my friends at Big Woody’s Skate Shop, Blackpool!) I’m doing exactly what I wanted to be doing when I started out, so yeah, I’m over the moon.

Could you give us and the readers an insight into how Wasted World is crafted each month and how different are your working practices now to the early days of the comic strip?

Dan: I still think it’s important for me to hand draw each box of each cartoon strip, but learning the ropes digitally has enabled me to give each drawing a quick tidy up, add vibrant colour, introduce and reintroduce different backgrounds and scenarios, and the speech bubbles and text have never been so crisp! I’ve also got my own template now too, so each strip feels more like a branded product. I sometimes dig out the old hand drawn, cut out and glued strips from the noughties and cringe massively. But I suppose everyone gets that feeling when you look back.

Finally, other than more from Blow-Up and Wasted World, what else can we expect from you in future and is there any chance of a follow-up to The Drop Out Wives’ quite spectacular 2014 album ‘Voting

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for Gloss’ any time soon?

Dan: The last Drop Out Wives release was ‘Wurlitzer Sounds’ [EP], released in October 2019, and we can’t wait to get back in the jam room to work on some new songs we haven’t really had the chance to jam out yet. But the ‘Wives will be back in the jam room, the studio and on a stage ... and the sooner the better!

Thank you for a wonderful interview.

We wish you all the best for 2021 and for the future.

‘Blow-Up’ is available now via Bandcamp and Spotify with a physical version to follow. blowupsounds.bandcamp.com www.facebook.com/ blowupsound www.facebook.com/ wastedworld

Dana Gillespie Me and Mr. Jones Interview by Kevin Burke.

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“... Bowie and I were suddenly given carte blanche to run amok and have fun!”

Everybody’s life is an adventure, some though live that adventure to a remarkable degree. One such person who has lived and is still living a remarkable life is the singer-songwriter Dana Gillespie.

This is a lady who has lived, loved and carved her own way through the hedonism of rock and roll. She has now put her story down on paper, and released a book called ‘Weren’t Born A Man’ (Hawksmoor Publishing), and it is an exceptional read. For fans of music, and the decades that defined it, the autobiography is essential. The tales of creativity, liaisons, and her journey are all true, and that is the inevitable honesty she illuminates.

Starting her career as a folk singer in the mid-sixties, Dana worked with the greats of the music establishment, from Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, to Elton John and Donovan.

But it was her meeting with one Davy Jones before he morphed into Bowie that brought her into the forefront of rock stardom. Along the way, Dana appeared in musicals such as ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ (Mary Magdalene) and ‘Tommy’ (Acid Queen), fitting in a string of movie roles to broaden her

creative drive, such as the ‘78 Dudley Moore / Peter Cook spoof ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.

Through all of this, a steady pulse of positive energy has become ingrained in her every career move.

Now in 2020, Dana Gillespie remains as essential as ever. With a catalogue of over sixty albums to her name, along with being crowned the finest Blues singer to emerge from the UK, it was only a matter of time before she invested time in telling it like it happened in a printed format.

‘Weren’t Born A Man’ is both the story of, and a connection to, a bygone time. A book that is crammed with humour, and above all else the very human essence, and views of this Blues singer. Dana Gillespie fearlessly lays out her life, in her own words, her gift as a storyteller is exceptional, and speaking to her brings both an era and those legends to life.

When did you decide to write down your story, and was it something that you toyed with for a long time?

Well, I started scribbling up some stories about eight years ago, because

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through all the years of traveling in the group buses and you know, wherever, I’ve always told stories because I’ve been around so long, I’ve got stories about lots of people. Everyone said ‘You must put these down and put them into a book’. I did get it into one format and I called it ‘I Rest My Case’, because that was the title of an album [2011] I just released at that time on Ace Records. I didn’t instantly find a publisher. I went to a couple of people who said ‘Yeah, we really like it, we know you’ll get a deal but this isn’t the right subject for us”. Fair enough, and then I stumbled upon Hawksmoor [Publishing]. So it’s taking a while, and then there was all the practical things like getting the photographs and the right running order and even my stories in the right chronological order. For that I took on a co-author [David Shasha], as he should be called, without whom perhaps I would’ve never finished the book. I mean, I had finished it, but it was a bit all over the place. So he just kind of pulled it together, and this is how he helped me.

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Did it stir emotions for you looking back over your life and putting into a format for the public to read?

No, I’m just aware that my memory is not so brilliant. I don’t mind dragging out any old stories, and a lot of people have said there’s nowhere in the book where I’m nasty about anyone [true].

Well, I’m not nasty about anyone because I’m never nasty about anybody anyway, I’ve got a very sunny attitude to life. So there was no problem going back down memory lane. I miss some people now, but I’m realistic enough to know that nothing lasts forever, and the only thing that’s constant is change.

It was a case of thinking ‘what the hell can I remember? Mercifully, I’ve got a press cutting box from 1964, with lots of these press cutting books. I was able to work out when I was and where, and I was astounded by all the reviewers always used to, in the old days, remark upon my bust size. I mean, you couldn’t get away with stuff like that now but you know the sixties and the seventies were a bit like that. Times have changed.

Your parents did not only bring you into this world, but they gave you space, and I guess allowed you the freedom to grow as an individual?

I didn’t have restrictions, which was fantastic. I was very, very lucky. I sometimes feel that we choose our parents, that sounds a bit bonkers that way round. But I couldn’t have asked for better parents, because when you follow a dream, and for me music was my master, and has always been my master. I knew from maybe eleven, and I started writing my first composition, they never once stopped me from going out and pursuing my passion, even though it might have got sidetracked a bit like landing up in the Marquee Club at fourteen and then of course meeting Bowie. But all of these things were great life experiences. I don’t hold to people that complain that he fiddled about with me when I was 15 and my life has been ruined. That never happened to me. My life has never been ruined by the mad adventures I’ve had because I learnt from them and I had such a great time. My parents were

integral to that plus my father was a very intelligent man and would hand me books that people of thirteen were not normally reading, and my mother was gracious and kind, and loving.

I’ve gotten some wonderful traits - my angelic traits, I get from my Mother and if I’ve gotten any devilish traits, I got them from my Father. I think I got a nice juxtaposition of the two.

You came across David Bowie, in the early sixties, I guess due to a hairbrush?

[Laughs] I don’t think it was due to a hairbrush, but there was a hairbrush in there. I was standing at the back of the Marquee Club, I think it was 1964.

He was the support act to a really great band called Gary Farr and the T-Bones.

I always used to go and watch them and yeah after the gig I was standing at the back of the Marquee brushing my nearly waist length hair, with a few peroxide blonde streaks. He came up behind me, took the hairbrush out of my hand, and said ‘Can I come home with you tonight?’; to which I said

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‘Yes’, as one does.

You developed a lasting friendship with David Bowie. Do you feel you influenced each other musically?

Actually, not musically. His music has never been my type, and my music was never his type. I think what was good was we were friends at the time.

I used to play him my songs, and he played me his songs. But nobody was judging, I think it was just to see how we were getting on. He taught me the first chords on the guitar, and his style of music was never my style, even his style of writing was never my style and it’s always important to have your own style. But apart from when I sang at the John Peel Show with him, when he wrote the ‘Andy Warhol’ [‘Hunky Dory’, 1971] song for me, that was really the only time that I was involved with his music. Although we were both signed, well I was signed to Decca in those days, and he was signed to a subsidiary of Decca called Deram in 1965. But we always just kind of kept it mates all the way through. I mean, we

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were a little bit more than mates occasionally, but through it all we were always friends, best friends. That carried on until he left for America, which was full-time America in ‘75 I think. I’ve never been a big America lover. I don’t even like hamburgers. So I’m quite happy to stay in Europe. I love Europe.

There are similarities to your methods such as you both used twelve-string guitars. I also believe you were the first audience to ‘Space Oddity’ (‘David Bowie’, 1969)?

He was staying round the corner from me in those days, and he rang up and said “I’ve just written this song like right now, I just finished it. I’m coming over right now”. So he came round the corner, and he was there within half an hour of finishing that song. I got to sit and listen to ‘Space Oddity’, which is pretty cool. But of course in those days nobody thought it was going to be kind of iconic [song] which it turned into. It was riding along on the right zeitgeist way, because you know, there had just

been somebody on the moon. Bowie and I used to watch all these kinds of weird things on television whenever there was, I don’t know, a Ken Russell film or something to do with something unusual. He’d run round to my place, and we’d watch it, of course in those days it was all black and white. He just happened to hit on the right timing with that song, but then he was completely not on the right timing before with ‘The Laughing Gnome’ [1967]. What you have to remember is that there were some kind of clangers he made. For everyone, myself included, [we] make some things that are a bit goofy at the time, but that’s how you learn to move onwards and upwards.

electronic arm over the front bits of the audience. When I watched it with Angie [Bowie], when it came to that line ‘Tell my wife I love her very much’, she grabbed my hand. It was really moving stuff actually. He was an unusual writer, a very unusual songwriter, and we were both very keen on being songwriters first, but in order to get your songs across you have to be able to sing them and in order to sing them, you got to be able to turn up at a publishers of ice with an instrument.

So the guitar would be the thing and if you’re not the greatest guitarist in the world, six strings don’t make a big enough sound. So that’s why we both played twelve strings.

Dana continued:

One of the many reasons your book is important, and indeed your story is because of the characters involved, one of whom is Tony DeFries. Do you feel he’s written out of the history of David Bowie to a certain extent?

I used to see him when he finally got the ‘Diamond Dogs’ [1974] shows together, this must have been 1974. So I was there, and he used to do ‘Space Oddity’ and it was lovely when it was in the middle of the ‘Diamond Dogs’ Tour. He would come out in a silver capsule that would go out on an

He was such an important component in making Bowie famous. I’ll never know exactly why Bowie himself

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didn’t want DeFries mentioned, so much so that he was banned. The name DeFries was banned for anyone interviewing him or doing films about him subsequently, especially in that BBC one called ‘Finding Fame’ [2019].

The director had said what Bowie had said, that they were not allowed to put in anything to do with DeFries. I will never understand why. I mean, nobody could have made it without the way that he had pushed Bowie, because he spent thousands and thousands. Bowie was paraded around America as if he was a ‘megastar’ before he was, and this took money. It costs quite a bit of money to make three albums before you even have a hit and in great studios and with great musicians. This is a mega investment and DeFries masterminded everything. He ran this company Mainman, which was very influential in the mid-seventies.

Mainman was in Park Avenue in New York, and these of offices were swanky and plush, and we all had limousines 24/7 and stayed in five star plus hotels for weeks and weeks. All of this cost money and DeFries really did

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maneuver; it’s like an army planned that kind of maneuvering. He planned David’s career, but it worked because David had the talent to go with it as well. Yeah, I think you could try and set up a situation like that, but if the artist themselves aren’t quite right, it’s not going to work.

Your two albums ‘Weren’t Born A Man’ (1973) and ‘Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle’ (1974) are exceptional pieces of work. Overall, did you enjoy the experience of Mainman?

Who wouldn’t? I mean, Bowie and I both were suddenly given carte blanche to run amok and have fun. Choose the musicians that you really wanted to work with. I mean that was a complete joy and having everything taken care of. I’ve always had great high respect for these legal minds that step into your life and go ‘There, there, let me take care of that for you’. I mean, if you’re a musician and you just want to write songs, then that’s music to your ears and DeFries always just wanted us to

create and write songs. I loved making those two albums. I had a great time on both of them.

Your most famous song of that time was ‘Andy Warhol’. What was your view of that song?

I’ve never known why he gave that song to me or why. He has publicly said he wrote it for me. Maybe he did, but I’ve always publicly said that I can’t think of anything worse than having an Andy Warhol can of soup on the wall ... I’d rather look at anything else. But he had a kind of style you know, and Bowie himself was quite impressed with the New York scene, much more than I was, so he was impressed with Andy Warhol. So he said he wrote the song for me, I’ve always thought the words are weird but then he writes very abstract, and I usually write emotional, so we always approached things differently. I’m very honored that he wrote the song for me.

At first, I was in the studio with Rick Wakeman and all the guys that also played on the ‘Hunky Dory’ album for

Bowie and with Mick Ronson. We did the version of ‘Andy Warhol’ and you can hear in the background, Bowie is on the 12-string and singing backing vocals. Then he liked my version so much that he then decided to do his own version, which came out actually before mine on the ‘Hunky Dory’ album. My album took longer to make because I was in the middle of doing ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ every night, so I wasn’t always free to be in the studio.

At one point, you appeared on Mick Ronson’s 1974 single ‘Slaughter on 10th Avenue’, from the album of the same name. Is that an example of Mainman pushing you as an artist?

I think it was probably meant to be a double ‘A’ side. I loved Ronno’s playing, he was a marvellous guitarist and he really was able to take the essence of Bowie songs. Then Bowie had never really worked with electric guitars on these type of songs, and it just by adding this ordinary sound the way Ronno played very, very musical not with lots of distorted guitar and a

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million notes a second. He was tasteful and tuneful in how he played. On ‘Weren’t Born A Man’, it’s the first kind of string arrangement he’d ever done. He always wanted to do it, and although Bowie was meant to produce ‘Weren’t Born A Man’ from the start, suddenly his stardom was starting to take of in America. So he didn’t really have the time to do it, so Ronno took over and he was really pleased because it meant that he could be let loose in Trident Studios, which is where we seem to spend weeks and weeks of hanging out in the studio recording.

A lot of people may or may not know that you appeared on the seminal 1972 album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. Am I correct that you did the backing vocals on ‘It Ain’t Easy’?

Yeah. I can’t remember a single thing about it. But you know, I spent so much of my life in studios it’s very hard for me to remember the sessions I did.

Somebody asked me the other day, because I did all these recordings in the

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mid-sixties with Elton John ... In fact, when he was still Reg Dwight and we did these dreadful top 20 hits that were ‘Top of the Pops’ - nothing to do with the TV show. These top 20 hits would come up on an LP, and we did so many of these I can’t remember all the songs I sang on. Somebody asked me because it was myself, Elton, and another singer called David Byron, who was the lead singer in Uriah Heep. I just spent my whole life in studios. I love being in the studio as I made seventy albums, and this is where I feel completely at home.

“Spending time with Dana was very special. She was magical and helped me overcome my shyness, she knew my story before I did” - Elton John.

That quote appears on your book and shows in some respects the influence you had on not only Elton John, but other artists at the genesis of their career?

I don’t know. I mean, I thought it was a very generous quote, and I haven’t seen Elton for quite a few years, and I never expected him to reply to it within

twelve hours. He had a quote to put in the book, and I thought ‘good on you’, what a cavalier he is. Also there’s the fact the one piano player that he used to admire was the man who then played for a while with The Animals, but then was in my band for years, Dave Rowberry, sadly dead now. But Rowberry used to play in something called The Mike Cotton Sound, and it was his playing that inspired Elton to really move on and make it his instrument. He has said that, and I thank him for being so generous and nice about other musicians, he is kind like that.

As an actress, you appeared in Hammer Films. Were those a sideline to make ends meet?

Well, the old Hammer Films, a lot of it had to do with my shape - not surgically enhanced, I hasten to add.

The fact I was a big girl when I was younger meant I was perfect to play a cave girl falling out of some shammy leather, running round, chasing a pterodactyl, that kind of thing. It was

fun, and if I had no gigs at the time, why not go off and do a film. Because you have to learn about camera angles and discipline. Being up at a certain hour and on set. Not that Hammer Films had much in the way of script to learn, it was glorified grunts in some places. I like any experience as long as it’s interesting.

Is it true that Bob Dylan is an admirer of you and your songwriting?

Well, he said he was, and unless he was lying [laughs]. I knew him in the 1965 and ‘66 and then I saw him in New York in the seventies, but then I hadn’t seen for ages until I got a call from his agent saying he wanted me to be the opening act for his British tour, which I think was ‘97 and it was during this tour, or actually it was three days before the tour started happening for ages and he rang up and said ‘I’m coming over to visit you’, which is quite nice. I said, How on Earth did you choose me to be the opening act after all these years?’ He said he had read a

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review of one of my Blues albums and started to listen. And then he said, ‘I really like your songwriting’, which is a great honour seeing as I consider him one of the best songwriters that we ever had.

Do you feel the ‘What Memories We Make’ collection (Cherry Red Records) kind of paved the way for your book, and reminded people of your accomplishments back then?

I had already written the book when that came out actually, and the man who published the book had no idea about the Cherry Red box set. So I don’t think it has really paved the way.

I think it was just a bit of synchronicity going on which was nice. The reason that the box set came out is because finally DeFries was speaking to people after thirty years of incommunicado as far as I was concerned. He lives now in South Africa. He gave the okay that Cherry Red could put out this box set and then another friend of mine who used to produce Dusty [Springfield] and the Pet Shop Boys, he found the

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different versions of ‘Andy Warhol’ in some obscure tapes in EMI or somewhere sitting around in a small studio. And so that’s why they are the additional tracks. Then on that box set there are additional tracks from ‘Bowpromo’ [1971]. With Bowie on one side, and me on the other and there were only 500 printed up LPs. I’m told each one is worth a small fortune, I’ve got one that lives under my bed. It was very rare, and so the songs on there that we’re kind of demos that never got to be on the album, but somehow Mainman or whoever it was has found all these tapes gave the ‘okay’ and Cherry Red bought them out and packaged them marvellously.

You are obviously proud of ‘Weren’t Born A Man’ and it is a very engaging work. What was your impression when you saw the finished product?

Well, I’m very pleased with how the book looks, and it’s quite heavy in weight. The content is not particularly heavy, I was trying to keep it quite

lighthearted and in some cases funny [as it is], but it’s quite heavy to pick up or to post. I know because I sent a copy last week to Angie Bowie who lives in Tucson, Arizona. - 400 pages, I think, if I’m not mistaken? Yeah, in fact the publisher, who was also the editor, managed to cut out a hundred pages worth of stories, so I was already thinking ‘whoa, I might have to do a volume two’, but let’s see how it goes.

Has it given you the hunger to do it again and write another book?

Not so much to do a book, because I guess as one gets older what else are you going to do other than tell your stories. Given a choice of going into a studio and doing an album or writing a book, I’d choose the albums any day because I do respond better to music.

But if I have some time on my hands ...

I mean the beginning of the lockdown was great for me because I got to finish of all the bits to do with the book. But then that had to go to the publisher come editor, but you know, it’s time consuming, and I’d rather look at the view if I’m sitting somewhere nice. It’s quite hard to be disciplined, but you never know. I was disciplined enough to do this. So yeah who knows? I might do it again and when I get my teeth into an idea, I’m like a terrier - I don’t let go until it’s done.

Well, with over sixty albums released, that projects a dynamic and a near workaholic side to you?

I’ve never seen it as work, I’ve seen it as play. Even some of the more ghastly gigs I’ve had in my life. I think I mentioned I did a panto in the book. I said that was the most awful experience of my life doing panto, Cinderella. I think it was soon after ‘[Jesus Christ] Superstar’, and I remember thinking ‘I have sunk as low as I can ever’, it’s so awful. But, you know, in retrospect, you look back at these low times, or tough times, or difficult times and you think, ‘that’s probably when I learned the most’. So I don’t mind about any weird or wonky things that have gone on in my life.

‘Weren’t Born A Man’ is available worldwide from 18th January, and in a hardcover, signed edition from Hawksmoor Publishing. hawksmoorpublishing.com/ shop/dana-gillespie-book www.dana-gillespie.com www.facebook.com/ DanaGillespieOfficial

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Rude GRL & C.C.

Vive Le Rap! Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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When we connected with Rude GRL and C.C. to conduct the following interview via Zoom, the duo had recently returned from Los Angeles where they were awarded Best Hip-Hop Track for ‘Helen Keller’, taken from the album ‘Anthemic Hip-Hop’, released at the start of 2020. As we head into 2021, the rise and rise of music’s ‘odd couple’, Jenna ‘Rude GRL’ Dickens and Chris ‘C.C.’ Constantinou continues with the release of the hard-hitting EP ‘Like Wow’ on 8th January.

The story of Rude GRL and C.C. is one steeped in musical history and involving the merger of two genres that, whilst at first seemingly have no bearing on each other, have been forever intertwined by their ability to put their point across in a forthright and confrontational manner.

After a spell signed to Ebony Records, C.C.’s early band The Drill (formed in 1977, the year of punk) moved to RCA Records, where they released a string of singles produced by former Animal turned Jimi Hendrix and Slade manager Chas Chandler and supported Slade on a number of occasions. In 1982, C.C. would gain far more notoriety when he was invited to join the newly constructed post-Ants line-up of punk turned pop superstar Adam Ant’s live band as bass guitarist and backing vocalist. He arrived just in time for the tour to accompany that

year’s ‘Friend or Foe’ album and also appeared in the video for its third single, ‘Desperate But Not Serious’.

When Adam parred down his eight-piece touring band to the four-piece which featured in the video for ‘Puss ‘n’ Boots’ (‘Strip’, 1983), C.C., under the pseudonym Chris De Niro, became an integral part of the mid-’80s line-up (alongside guitarist Marco Pirroni and drummer “Count” Bogdan Wiczling) who would go on to record the 1985 Tony Visconti-produced album ‘Vive Le Rock’, featuring the classic lead single ‘Apollo 9’. Of course, this period also included a massive amount of television promotion and saw C.C. performing on ‘Top of the Pops’, ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘American Bandstand’.

However, by far the biggest event that he was involved in was Adam’s performance at Live Aid at Wembley Stadium on 13th July 1985.

After parting with Adam later that year, C.C. formed the Miles Copeland III-managed band SF Go with Tom Robinson Band guitarist Danny Kurstow, whilst in the early to mid-’90s, he formed songwriting partnerships with both Bow Wow Wow’s Annabella Lwin and later Robbie Williams associate Guy Chambers, before giving us the post-punk band Jackie OnAssid, with whom he stepped up to sing lead

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vocals, touring Europe three times and supporting Iggy Pop. In the following decade, he reconvened with Marco to form The Wolfmen, who worked with Lou Reed on the B-side of the 2007 single ‘Cecilie’, a re-imagining of the 1964 pre-Velvet Underground song ‘Do the Ostrich’, originally recorded with The Primitives (nothing to do with the ‘80s band). This era also saw him play bass on The Slits’ 2006 EP ‘Revenge of the Killer Slits’ and co-write two songs on Sinead O’Connor’s 2012 album ‘How About I Be Me (And You Be You)’. In more recent years, he has formed the punk supergroup The Mutants with The Damned’s Rat Scabies and Paul Frazer of Black Futures and Subsource fame and guested with the likes of The Dandy Warhols and Woody Woodmansey’s David Bowie tribute band Holy Holy.

Rude GRL’s story is equally as fascinating. Born in London but raised in a small town in South

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Wales, she was desperate to escape from a dysfunctional upbringing and the racial abuse, trauma and homophobia that came as a result of being a queer woman of colour.

This escape came in the form of music, and in particular, rapping, her considerable skills for which have been winning her awards since the age of 12. She has since worked with a number of musicians on a whole host of projects, including former La Roux member Ben Langmaid and Basement Jaxx. As part of the outfit The Binary Kids, she appeared on the latter act’s 2009 single ‘Twerk’, from the album ‘Scars’.

On ‘Like Wow’, Rude GRL firmly sticks two fingers up to intolerance, prejudice and hate, whilst giving us an insight into her own very personal struggles with addiction, sexual abuse and recovery, turning her anger into endlessly energetic positivity.

Firstly, hello Jenna and Chris and

thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you.

Could we start by asking how, when and where the two of you came together to form Rude GRL and C.C.?

Jenna: So, me and Chris ... I started working with Chris when I was like 17. It was really fun [laughs] and then I kind of went on a little bit of a mad one [both Jenna and Chris laugh]. I was basically just like in addiction, having great fun with that, not! And then yeah, Chris one day just randomly text me at like ... I think it was like 3am and he was like ‘Oh, I’m doing this project with Universal [Music Group], it’s like your sort of music, it’s hip hop. Do you want to do some vocals?’ and I was like ‘Hell, fucking yes!’ So, yeah, I just went down there and we just smashed it! We were doing a track a day and in like three hours a track was done and then so Chris was just like ‘Let’s do a band!’ I was like ‘Hell, yes!’

Chris: Yeah, it was quick, you know.

I remember the first time I met you [Jenna] was when we were both signed to Sony. Were you signed to Sony? I can’t remember, or were you signed to Warners [Warner Music Group]?

Jenna: I was signed to Mercury / Universal and there was an A&R at Sony who loved you and was like ‘You need to meet Chris!’ and I was like ‘Okay!’

Chris: Alright, yeah, that’s how we met and then they put us together and we started writing and I think I met your old manager and then we had a few wild nights, didn’t we? Or days!

And then we just got stuck in really.

Yeah, it was a bit of an odd time really because, I don’t know, we seemed to spend a lot of time in clubs drinking and sort of going out and lounging around on sofas. I remember going out to Soho House, up in Shoreditch ...

Jenna: Yeah, Shoreditch House ...

Chris: I’ve got really vivid memories of that time. I won’t say anything,

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Chris with Marco Pirroni in The Wolfmen

obviously, but anyway, yeah ...

Your debut EP, ‘Like Wow’ is released on 8th January. Could you tell us a bit about the writing and recording process of the three tracks that make up the release?

Jenna: Yeah, so the writing process for ‘Like Wow’ is quite interesting.

The lead single [‘Like Wow’] we wrote in like ten minutes because the train was delayed and Chris was just laying down this awesome riff just for fun. It was just like ‘Oh, ten minutes, let’s just fuck about’ and then, yeah, I just came up with this rap and it was like ‘This is amazing!’ and we just switched it on, recorded it in ten minutes and it was like ‘This is awesome!’ So, that’s how the whole EP started really, from that track and yeah, the other tracks, I’ve always wanted to tell the story of like trauma and addiction and all of that and yeah, we’ve managed to somehow squeeze all of that into the tracks as well. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, I think we got to the

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point where it was starting to develop and Rude GRL was starting to come out with stuff and we got to the point where we could play it safe or we could go all the way there and we just said ‘Let’s just go for it! Let’s just not hold back’. So [laughs] that record’s pretty in your face and we decided to make it a very quick process, so each song would only take three hours to record and write, so instead of messing around, you know, just two guitars, bass guitar, you know, drums, vocals and it goes really quick, one take really and you’ve got it and then we just do the ad-libs and ... it’s really quick. It’s so much more fun that just ages, you know, sitting around and sort of like analysing and going ‘Shall we go for lunch now?’ ... ‘No, go for lunch after, let’s get the songs finished and go out for a drink after!’

In literally everything I have seen, journalists are describing this collaboration as “an unlikely partnership”, but your two musical backgrounds aren’t really that disparate, with the punk era in which

With Rat Scabies in The Mutants

you have often been associated with, Chris (having worked with Adam Ant, The Slits and amongst others, The Damned’s Rat Scabies in The Mutants) and the hip-hop genre that you emerged from Jenna being very much intertwined by the way in which both talk about hard hitting subjects in a confrontational manner. How much admiration did you each have for the genres of music the other is usually associated with prior to working together?

Jenna: That’s a good question! To be honest, like, I love rap and I love like the skill set behind it and I’ve got loads of rappers that I love, but my main passion is like punk and I grew up listening to a lot of punk and post-punk and heavy metal and it’s funny because Adam and the Ants is like one of the bands that I really loved growing up as well. I always loved that type of music and I feel like that’s kind of what I like to do with rapping. I usually like rappers who are like a bit less rap and more punk. I really love that, like grime and stuff like that, and that whole

energy of just do it yourself; like the system’s failed us, fuck it and we’re going to go out there and do what we want and that’s very punk I think.

Chris: Yeah, I think, coming from a bass player background, I’ve always been into sort of roots music, dub music, reggae, ska, you know, more so than rock music. I was not a fan of rock music, so anything that is kind of like ... I don’t know if this makes any sense at all, but ... stuff that has roots music. So, punk, for me, there can be bands that have just got this rootsy-style. Like Rat Scabies, who I play with, from The Damned. When he plays drums, he’s not like a rock drummer, it’s like there’s a roots element, it’s musical. Now, that’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it? But, also the guy in the Sex Pistols, Paul Cook, same thing! When he hits the drums, it’s musical. So, it’s kind of like, for me, the groove side of things is very important and so hip-hop is just sort of a natural extension to me. You know, I guess Public Image [Ltd] started off doing those grooves, but I think it was

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there in the punk days. There were a lot of bands who did have good grooves and stuff like that. But, hip-hop, for me ... I don’t know, when I hear it, if I like it, I like it and it’s the same as what Jenna said, you know, if the attitude’s right and I dig what the person’s saying and it feels real and not pretentious, then I can get into it, you know.

‘Like Wow’ comes on the back of you winning Best Hip-Hop track at the PMA Mark awards 2020 for the track ‘Helen Keller’ (‘Anthemic Hip-Hop’, 2020). Could you tell us a bit about this winning track and did winning the award come as a surprise to you both?

Jenna: Yeah, that track we wrote as part of the album that was the first project that we worked on together again and yeah, that track, we just had a lot of fun really, you know what I mean? It’s about hustling and just doing it for the love and just having a lot of fun with it. And yeah, it definitely came as a surprise to me

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[both Jenna and Chris laugh], which is quite funny because Chris was like, ‘Yeah, I knew we were going to win it!’

He was cool, but the whole time I was just like ‘Wow, we’ve been nominated!

That’s great!’ and I really didn’t expect us to win. So, when we did, I was literally like bouncing around the house for like a whole week! [laughs].

Chris: I think it was like such a wild card, because the other acts were like real hip-hop ... you know ... and the thing we were doing, ‘Anthemic Hip-Hop’ was slightly different in the sense that it wasn’t pure hip hop. I guess it had a little bit of Afro-Cuban and a little bit of a Spanish feel to it and, you know, I have to be truthful and I know it sounds conceited, doesn’t it, but I did think we’d win [Jenna laughs].

But it isn’t because I thought ‘Oh, we’re so great, we’re just so brilliant!’, it was just that I had a feeling that we would win. And I know that you’re not supposed to say that and you’re supposed to go ‘Oh no’, you know.

But, no, I’m happy that we won anyway, so yeah, it was great! [laughs].

Bunni Moretto

It is good that you have that belief in your own music!

Jenna: He’s got enough belief for the both us! [Chris laughs].

We believe that Rude GRL and C.C. also has a third member, Bunni Moretto. Could you introduce us to Bunni and what is her role within the band?

Jenna: Bunni Moretto is a twerk extraordinaire. She does everything ... she does the splits, she twerks, she’s an award-winning burlesque artist, she was the first black finalist of Miss Burlesque UK in 2018 and she’s an actress as well. She’s been in the West End; just last year she was in the West End. Yeah, she’s really cool. She’s like the visual element of the band really.

Our live performances are going to be fucking lit because whenever she performs, the crowd is just like in awe of her and her booty! [laughs]. She does backing vocals for us as well.

Yeah.

Bunni (far right) in the video for ‘Like Wow’

Chris: Is Bunni not around?

Jenna: No, she was living the life of luxury having a sleep and now she’s out getting a massage [laughs].

Chris: No, Bunni’s great, Bunni’s really good. It’s like ... did you ever hear of a band called Hawkwind? [I reply, “Yes, I know Hawkwind”].

Well, do you remember that they had Stacia, who used to dance? And I’ve got to say, I loved it and also, I love it when bands go on stage and something different happens and there’s this guy called Mike Heron [The Incredible String Band]. Well, he had a guy in the band who just used to do ballet and this guy just looked the coolest guy you could ever see and he played a little bit of tambourine every now and then and did some backing vocals, but the rest of the time he was doing this sort of amazing ballet and I was like, ‘This is the weirdest thing I have ever seen!’

Then you’ve got the Happy Mondays, haven’t you? With Bez and that was great, wasn’t it?

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Chris in 1985

I tell Chris that him saying about Mike Heron’s ballet dancer just reminded me of The Fall working with dancer and choreographer Michael Clark on ‘I Am Curious, Orange’ in 1988, which I first saw at university in the late ‘90s / early 2000s. After asking about my university days at Manchester Metropolitan, Chris continues: I didn’t get a chance to go to university, I went to the university of rock instead!

Sleeping in vans and playing at Live Aid! [laughs]. But no, that was my university course! It’s weird because a lot of my friends went to university and I thought, ‘I’d really like to have gone to university and they were going ‘Oh, you’re lucky because you’re out playing bands and stuff’.

Well, yeah, you were already out there doing it, weren’t you?

Jenna: Yeah, I hear that. I’ve just got to uni now! I’m doing music production and sound engineering.

That’s good because it’s helping me with doing what we’re doing now, do

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you know what I mean? I’m not all over the place now, so I can kind of like actually do it [laughs], which is good!

Chris: It’s really handy, isn’t it? It’s great!

Jenna: Yeah!

Chris, under the pseudonym Chris De Niro, you joined Adam Ant’s live band as bass guitarist in 1982, in time for the accompanying tour for that year’s ‘Friend or Foe’ album and appeared in the video for the third single to be lifted from it, ‘Desperate But Not Serious’, before going on to become an integral part of the mid-’80s line-up of the Adam Ant band, most notably being part of the recording of the 1985 Tony Visconti produced album ‘Vive Le Rock’. How did you come to join the band and what are your memories of recording the ‘Vive Le Rock’ album?

Chris: Ooh! Right, I was playing in a band that was signed to RCA Records [The Drill] and we had Chas Chandler

[manager], who managed Jimi Hendrix and he was managing Slade, and basically, we put out loads of singles and we were touring up and down the motorway. You know, we were supporting Slade, and one of the guys in the band joined Dire Straits, the guitarist, Hal Lindes. Yeah, the blonde guy, the surfer dude. He joined Dire Straits and I was sitting in Hendon, where we used to rehearse in this basement, and I thought, ‘oh, I can’t take this anymore!’ I was 23 years old and I was thinking, ‘it’s the end’ and I was thinking, ‘I really am now a failure!’ I was 23 years old and I was signed to this record company and I thought, ‘we’ve just put release after release out and we’re going up and down the motorway, he’s just joined Dire Straits and now look at me! I’m here in Hendon in the basement! My life is over!’ And I thought, ‘right!’

So, next day, there was a copy of the NME and it has ‘Bass player wanted!

Must be able to stand and deliver!’ So, it was obvious who it was, so I phoned up and they said, ‘No, we’re sick of seeing bass players, we’ve auditioned

...’ It was to replace Gary Tibbs. And I said, ‘Okay’, you know. And I have a friend who works at CBS, who Adam was signed to and my friend got me an audition. So, I went there in a pink suit, I wore that and I thought, ‘they’re going to remember me!’ And I went in there and I kind of like had this thing where I thought ‘this job is mine!’ And I remember that I had two weeks to get ready for it and I learned all the back catalogue, I went running every night and I was so determined and I was like banging on the wall going ‘this job’s mine! This job’s mine! This job’s mine!’ like a nutter! So, I went in there and by the time I got in there I was obviously convinced the job was mine, did the audition and Adam was like following me out and I knew he was interested because of the way he was following me out and talking to me and asking me questions and stuff. And then I got a phone call from him and he said, ‘Do you want to go on a world tour? Meet me in Tootsies for breakfast tomorrow in Holland Park’. Met up with him and his manager was there, they gave me a load of cash, and then

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put me on a wage and then we went off on tour and we travelled all over the world. And so then we got to the stage of ‘Vive Le Rock’, making the album with Tony Visconti. It was sort of like a very quick process because Tony Visconti was in ... I think it’s a public thing, I don’t think it’s any secret, but he was in a positive thinking sort of thing. It used to be called ‘S’ and then it became something else. So, the whole studio was like an odd atmosphere. It was sort of like we were robots and we’d sort of go down there and it was between 11[am] and 7[pm] we were working, so you’d start dead on eleven o’clock ... You’d go down there; Tony would be there and then Adam turned up late on the first day and it didn’t go down well! Tony called him into this room, we heard all this shouting going on and Adam came out white-faced and said ‘I’ve never been spoken to like that! I’m only like ten minutes late!’ And then, so yeah, one o’clock was lunchtime, then we finished bang on seven. But it worked great! We recorded the whole album really quickly, then we did ‘B-Side

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Baby’ [B-side of ‘Apollo 9’] and stuff [the B-sides from this era are compiled on the 1994 compilation ‘B-side Babies’]. It was easy and a fun process.

As you were saying, previously, from 1977, you had been in the band The Drill, who were signed to RCA Records and released a number of singles produced by Chas Chandler.

Chas Chandler of course managed Slade, whom we interviewed for our Christmas issue. We believe that The Drill opened for Slade on a number of occasions. What are your memories of being on the road with Slade?

Chris: Ooh! [laughs] It was fun! Well, they were kind of like our big brothers!

Because they had such a good sense of humour and they used to take the piss out of us, you know, because they knew that we were kind of like kids. We’d been doing these really shit gigs and supporting bands not of that stature and so when we went on tour with them, they enjoyed seeing us ... and at the end

Chris performing at Live Aid with Adam Ant

of the gigs there would be all the girls backstage and all the parties, you know, and we’d be just standing there, sort of, you know, in the next dressing room, the support band’s dressing room, and they’d say ‘Come on lads, come and join in the party!’ They were really cool and we had so much fun and yeah, they looked after us. I just remember them always being around when we used to record in that studio, IPC Studios in Portland Place. We recorded there and I think Chas owned it and Slade used to come in and take us to the pub. We’d be all drinking in there and sort of, you know, they’d be just making fun of us and then we went to Dudley and they took us to their pub in Dudley. They were great, they were really good and we played in Hull one night and it was snowing and we sort of finished a gig and we just thought we’d get drunk and, you know, hang out there and we came back and the van doors were open and all our equipment had been stolen [laughs], including the key for the bed and breakfast where we were staying! The night key! So, we had to wake up the landlady and she

let us in and I remember we had one of those electric fires but with just one bar in, so we were all just huddled round it going ‘What are we going to do now?

We’ve got no gear!’ So, anyway, we had a publisher who bought us some new gear. But anyway, it was fun!

Playing with Slade was fun and you know, they’re a really good band.

In 1985, you appeared with Adam at Live Aid, where, reportedly due to The Boomtown Rats’ set running over, you were restricted to playing just one song, ‘Vive Le Rock’. Adam has gone on to describe Live Aid as a “mistake” and “a waste of time”, but what are your memories of appearing at the event and what are your feelings about it all these years later?

Chris: Well, I just had it down as a charity gig. It was just down in my diary as a charity gig, because no one told me what it was really. I think Marco came and told me, ‘Oh, we’ve got a charity gig next week’, so I put it down in my book as a charity gig and

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that was it really, so I kind of like didn’t think anything about it really.

And then we up to Wembley to do the soundcheck and I went up on the back of Danny Kurstow’s motorbike, he was playing in the Tom Robinson Band at the time. He was a mate of mine so he gave me a lift up and we did the soundcheck. I think it was Queen, Status Quo and a few other bands doing the soundcheck and then the next day, we were on quite early I think, so we got up there and everybody was walking backstage, you know, like Elton John and everybody. It just felt like a normal sort of ... because I’d been doing it a long time and I was used to being around people who were well-known. It didn’t feel like anything different, until I went on the stage and the heat of the audience hit me and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m doing something special’ and then it didn’t really occur to me until the next day how big a gig it was. And I think the thing about the one song, I never knew anything about the politics about it, it didn’t make any difference. You know, I was a bass player and I was in the

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band; I wasn’t interested in the politics of this and this and that, I just wanted to have fun. And memories now?

Looking back on it, I just wish I could have appreciated the moment more. I think I was pretty out of touch with myself, you know, my feelings. I was just into having too much of a good time. Maybe that was a good thing, I don’t know, but I didn’t really think ‘oh, this is amazing! This is great!’ I wish I’d kind of savoured the moment more, but that’s easy to say, isn’t it, in retrospect?

Jenna, your background in the music industry is equally as fascinating, but how did you first come to start making music and could you give us an insight into your career so far and some of your proudest achievements?

Jenna: So, I got into music when I was like eleven. Basically, I grew up in a little town in South Wales and it was quite racist and there was a lot of stuff going on at home and so music was a good escape for me to just kind of get out all of that anger and built up

frustration in kind of like a more healthy way. And yeah, I ended up doing like a bunch of gigs and stuff when I was eleven and then randomly, I got put into [BBC] 1Xtra’s Battle of the Nations when I was twelve years old.

So, I was against all these men and then there was just like little twelve-year-old me! I came first in Wales and I came third for our country. So, that was really fun and from there on, I was just doing loads of gigs. I was literally like going from school and doing loads of gigs at night and thinking ‘this is amazing!’ You know, getting like £100 and £150! It was so cool! It was amazing and at like twelve years old, I thought it was like the best thing ever!

And then, basically, I was just touring and then I got signed when I was 17 and I was working with all the grime people, like Wiley and people, and from there on, I ended up working with some cool pop people, like Ben from La Roux and Nick Hodgson from the Kaiser Chiefs. And yeah, I was just like putting some stuff out under [the name] JLD and just kind of having a good time. Worked with some cool

people like Basement Jaxx and stuff like that, but yeah, now I’m working with the coolest person ever which is Chris!

Chris: Aaw, that’s so sweet of you! [both Chris and Jenna laugh]. I don’t know about sweet, but that’s nice of you! [laughs].

Your 2017 single ‘The Way It Is (Survival of the Sickest)’ featured an interpolation of Run-D.M.C.’s 1984 hit ‘It’s Like That’ (‘Run-D.M.C’).

From this, can we gather that this period of hip-hop is the biggest inspiration on your work and which other artists would you consider to have informed your work?

Jenna: Yeah, that song was arranged with Ben from La Roux. I really do like that period of hip hop, like I prefer the older kind of hip hop, the old school kind of rap, but to be honest, my main genre of music that I love is like punk really, post-punk and heavy metal. I’m more into rock than I am rap. I love rap, do you know what I

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The Binary Kids

mean? I love the skill behind it, the lyrics the clothes, but to just listen to music, I just love rock music and that’s pretty much like my biggest inspiration really.

As part of the outfit The Binary Kids, you had substantial backing from Basement Jaxx and appeared on the single ‘Twerk’ from the 2009 album ‘Scars’. How important were Basement Jaxx in getting you known in the music industry and what are your memories of guesting with them?

Jenna: That was so fun! That’s so cool that you know that! [laughs]. Me and KC from Binary Kids, we just met at some really random shit gig that we were both doing in Newport in Wales and it was funny because I’d never come across another girl that rapped in that town [laughs] and she was just doing her thing and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, what?! This is great!’ and I went up after her and she was like ‘Woah, mate, this is great!’ So, we just went into the studio and made all this fun

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stuff. It wasn’t really thinking like ‘this is it, we’re going to be the greatest band in the world’, we were just having a load of fun and thinking ‘this is great, you get free clothes and like you can drink and party all the time and have fun!’ [laughs]. Yeah, with Basement Jaxx, we went in the studio with them and they’re just like actual geniuses, they’re just like on another level. I don’t know how they come up with the stuff that they do, they’re just so cool.

Yeah, that was such a fun session.

They’re brilliant guys, they’re really nice and yeah, I just remember it being really fun. And I was kind of fan-girling because I used to love listening to Basement Jaxx, so I was kind of half working and half being like ‘wow!’

What does 2021 and beyond hold for Rude GRL and C.C., either collectively or separately and can we expect another album from this project any time soon?

Chris: Yeah, we’re recording our second album now and we’re also

Chris and Jenna win at the PMA Mark Awards

doing another project for Universal in January, which Jenna can tell you more about. So, basically, the second album’s underway and then we’ve got a project that we’re doing for Universal and we’ve also had a load of remixes done of some of the tracks, which that guy from Kaiser Chiefs has done and we’ve got some other guys doing remixes of tracks. So, the album will be out, I don’t know, I guess at some point in early New Year. Then some live shows, once it opens up again. I don’t know when it will, but some live shows, we’ve got some fun photograph and video stuff coming up and yeah, just sort of getting out there and doing it. It’s exciting! I mean, it’s really exciting for me because Jenna’s obviously from a different era, but we seem to sort of just click and we’ve got similar backgrounds in some ways and the music just clicks ... it’s easy, it’s fun and for me, it has to be fun or I don’t like doing it and it has to be quick as well! [both Chris and Jenna laugh].

Jenna: The Universal project, I’m really looking forward to doing that.

It’s like a woman empowerment project. Yeah, it’s fun! We’ve already started, we’ve got two songs so far, one of them I’m really excited about.

And we’ve got a track coming out with Cleopatra Records in L.A. in January too, so I’m so excited about next year.

I just can’t wait to get out and perform live!

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you both all the best for 2021 and for the future.

‘Like Wow’ is released on 8th January through Firefly Entertainment. www.facebook.com/ ItsRudeGrl chrisconstantinou.com www.facebook.com/ Chris.Constantinou.Music

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German Shepherd Records Presents:

FINDING

Interview by Bob Osborne.

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AN INTRODUCTION: With three new albums coming out on German Shepherd Records between December and February, it seemed like the right time to explore in detail the work of 2 Lost Souls.

It feels inappropriate to call them a “band” as there are only two of them and they do not make music in a conventional way. So let’s call them a duo: highly appropriate, given their name. 2 Lost Souls are Ian Moss and Paul Rosenfeld.

Ian, who has featured before in the Eighth Day, is the co-owner of German Shepherd Records, writer, raconteur legend on the Manchester music scene, and a member of countless other bands, and indeed duos, including The Parasite, Unseasonable Beasts, Four Candles, The English Disease and his work with his brother Neil, and they are just the current ones. Previous bands have included The Hamsters, The Stepbrothers, Sicknurse, Kill Pretty, and The Dodos. Ian is currently writing a couple of books, one on hit singles of the 1970s and another a volume of his lyrics. He is semi-regularly featured on the podcast ‘Flowing Backwards’ alongside Four Candles drummer Phil Peak.

After a few aborted attempts to learn to play guitar in his teens with bands, Paul Rosenfeld was recruited to play

rhythm guitar in Wythenshawe’s Radioactive Shoulderblades, a band that specialised in recreating mickey take versions of other under performing Manchester bands in order to goad them. Highly unpopular, they managed to be banned from every venue they played becoming adept at filling a tiny car with band and equipment in under a minute, doing a runner efficiently whilst leaving behind the ensuing mayhem. Not being cut out for an early death Paul then decided he wanted a quieter life and began playing in other bands none of which got to the gigging stage but allowed him to improve and work on his songwriting chops. He was then asked to join Manchester stalwarts Dr Filth, who a year or so afterwards recruited Distractions vocalist Mike Finney and renamed as First Circle.

Work then took him abroad and he returned, ending up living in London where he played in several bands, the last of these being alt-country outfit Ultimate Behemoth. The band’s main aim was to finance the singer’s desire to move to Spain with his family. Once that had been achieved, it allowed them to disband, much to the relief of the American roots music community of London. Illness prevents Paul from playing live currently and since being hit by his condition, he has been writing tunes for his own enjoyment.

2 Lost Souls’ music is perhaps a little

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Ian Moss

more rock/pop/blues oriented than Moss’s usual punk/post-punk output with an emphasis on melody and hooks. Each of the three new albums however has a series of surprises which confounds any attempt to pigeon hole the duo’s work. You are just as likely to find a blues tinged rocker as you are a more reflective ballad amongst the three albums.

There are clear political messages in many of the songs as well as Moss’s mini-biographies of famous (and infamous) people.

THE INTERVIEW: I interviewed the pair virtually in November just before the release of the three albums ...

So how did the project start?

Paul: I contacted Ian via email just to introduce myself after hearing Salford City Radio DJ Stephen Doyle play some of his new music. I had seen Ian in his first band, The Hamsters at the Stuff the Superstars gig in Manchester

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Paul Rosenfeld

in 1979 and went to a few more of their gigs as a result.

Ian: Paul’s approach coincided with a ‘Words and Music’ project I was doing [2017] and I invited him to collaborate on a track. From there we continued to work together until the point such was the volume of recorded work it needed its own individual identity which became 2 Lost Souls. The world to me seems to be populated by lost souls and so as there are two of us, it seemed an appropriate title.

How does the writing process work?

Ian: Paul drives the thing sending me tracks electronically, I simply respond with what’s on my mind , some of it written, some of it improvised, but all of it trying to project ideas and opinions, it’s a communique aimed at stimulating thought.

Paul: Due to our locations, we work in isolation of each other, but it doesn’t appear to create any stumbling blocks.

The distance may help as it gives us our

own space to operate in. It makes me very mindful that this is a collaboration and so the end result needs to reflect that. I send Ian rough tracks on the whole, he’ll send me a recorded lyric if the track appeals, the vocal delivery and content will drive the direction I take to complete the track. I’ll then approach one of our tame bass players to see if they have time to put down a track. They’re busy people so there are times I’ll have to put a bass line down myself however I’m no bass player.

I’m not musically literate, so I have no idea about music theory, keys or modes and one of our bass players, Paul, is especially helpful in breaking down the music that way and putting forward ideas so even if he’s not appeared on a track his feedback has probably been invaluable in the process.

Based on the previous track we’ve done, I will try to take a completely different tack with my next idea to avoid repeating ourselves. I can’t translate what’s in my head into my fingertips so I have a process where I’ll sit down with the guitar play a few

chords and get a sound I like and then in a figurative way extend an aerial and try to pick up ideas floating around in the ether, it certainly feels that way.

I’ve also tried to come up with music based on an original written piece Ian has published. He’s also sent me completed vocal tracks for me to then put music to. These latter methods for me are more of a challenge and probably the most rewarding when I can make it work. I’ve discovered that Ian’s got an incredible innate musicality because on those tracks he’s recorded before the music has been done his timing is unerringly accurate, there’s clearly a very natural drummer inside of him to be able to do that.

Although they are a duo there is the occasional guest spot for a couple of bassists, and other collaborators.

Paul: Paul O’Sullivan is one of my oldest friends from my days in Manchester, we met at a pub in the city where everyone went to hear rock music and was underage! We played in bands together in the late ‘70s, early

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‘80s performing our own compositions and played in one of the bands I was in in London. He’s now in demand as a session player in Manchester. Renato is a friend of a friend who I contacted to work on a track on our first album, that started our direct friendship and he’s become a real admirer of Ian’s lyrics and vocals. Another credit should go to Lee Roberts [www.goldmoss.com] who has done some original artwork for us and designed our logo as well as giving feedback for the album artworks.

The three new albums from 2 Lost Souls are being released between December and February. I asked Ian and Paul about them …

There are 38 songs on the new albums, with a variety of subject matters. Where do all the ideas come from, both musically and lyrically and what are your favourite songs from each album?

Ian: My inspirations are myriad and tend to come from whatever I’m reading, films I watch, news reports or

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conversations I’m involved in or overhear. From the first release [‘.....the very last city’], I like the rock ‘n’ roll track ‘Undisputed Mayor of Trumpton’, it’s about a man who lusts after power and believes he is better, in every sense, than the rest of humankind. Think Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Ian Duncan Smith, Rasputin, Ghengis Kahn ... and Morrissey.

The second album [‘Ooby Dooby’] features ‘Slaughterhouse Dan’, which is about people being self-righteous and judgemental in our world of black and white without grey areas. In this story, Dan a man forced into work he doesn’t enjoy to support his family, he is targeted and murdered by a radical vegan faction who’s cause he has much sympathy for, his body is then butchered by his bosses and sold for top dollar as ‘special meat’.

From the third album [‘Another’s Insomniac Dreams’], I particularly like ‘Derangerous’, which is a piece of ‘Phony Punk’ bashing based on an unpleasant conversation I had with a

member of one of the early Mancunian bandwagon jumpers who to put it bluntly hadn’t got a clue. He was odious and as the song states, “the problem and not the solution”.

‘….the very last city’ is more like one of our singles.

Paul: Ian and I are in regular contact either by phone and email and through that, I think we have a good understanding of each other, especially when it comes to political, personal and musical opinions. I’m not confident in my lyrical ability, I don’t have any! I think I’ve only contributed to one set of lyrics, a song called ‘Soulless’, which was an angry reaction to the political situation and that needed Ian to amend and edit.

Ian: I’m currently writing a book in praise of the seven inch singles of the seventies, which necessitates some pleasant research. Today, I’ve listened several times to ‘Motörhead’ by Motörhead [‘Motörhead’, 1977], which is such a bone jarringly liberating piece of music. Lemmy was taking rock ‘n’ roll to an extreme with that one. Also this morning, I listened to Culture’s ‘Two Sevens Clash’ [‘Two Sevens Clash’, 1977]. What an amazing song.

Sweetly delivered but totally apocalyptic, it had such an impact in Jamaica that on the day of prophesied doom, large parts of the community locked themselves indoors, businesses and schools didn’t open and the streets were silent. To give myself a break from the book, I’ve just listened to Miles Davis’ ‘In a Silent Way’ [1969], which I get consumed by and find myself lost to the world whilst in its

When it comes to the music, I have been given a free reign with ideas, Ian therefore has full control over the lyrical content and vocals. I’ve spent too much time with the music, so I analyse the tracks rather than listen to them. Our singles tend to have been created much more spontaneously unlike the album tracks. The track ‘Undisputed Mayor of Trumpton’ on

What music other than your own are you currently listening to?

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grip. It has an almost narcotic hold over me for its duration and I need a period of readjustment after the final notes have sounded.

Paul: I have to do daily exercises for a medical condition. I have headphones to keep out extraneous noise and play music through them. It’ll be a mix of ‘60s Motown and Atlantic soul, ‘80’s indie, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s pop, ‘70s funk, country/Americana and whatever tracks we’re working on. My other half has Radio 2 on all the time at home.

Friends will post music that they think I’d like and there’s also radio shows like Stephen Doyle’s ‘Sonic Diary’ [Salford City Radio] to hear new music.

In respect of 2 Lost Souls music, what would you say inspires the sounds and structures of the songs?

Paul: I probably don’t have an original bone in my musical body. I’m very much the sum of my influences. I think there is a 2 Lost Souls sound, but Ian takes the lion’s share responsibility for

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that because I don’t know anyone else who sounds like him or is prepared to tackle the subject matter he does. When I am working on a vocal from Ian, it’s not unusual for the hairs on the back of my neck to stand to attention, which provides the motivation to do the very best I can do to match that.

A backing track will constantly evolve.

A recent example would be a slow piece of Americana that I sent Ian, who came back with the vocal, which I felt to do justice to needed electronic loops, therefore re-imagining the sonics completely in order to make the song work.

I write pop songs. Neither Ian or I think pop is a dirty word and it does give us unlimited scope to try anything in pursuit of a tune. I’ve no interest in impressing anyone with my virtuosity, I have none and so it’s all about the song.

When we’ve completed a piece and we like it enough to release, we know we have something of worth.

You have been very productive so

far, but I hear there are more albums and songs in the pipeline. What can we expect?

Ian: The well has not yet run dry and since the completion of these albums, several more have been recorded with perhaps more emphasis on melody. I know I’ve found myself almost singing sometimes, although we haven’t entered John Denver territory yet!

Paul: In July / August of last year, Ian casually asked how many tracks we had. It amazed us to see that there were over 40. Some of those needed to be cut as they just weren’t of a good enough standard. COVID has been a factor for us in producing more music. As our movements have been restricted, just as Ian’s live music work has sadly had to be put on hold also, so I’ve spent time everyday trying to come up with ideas for songs as well as learning new ways for me to make sounds and to record it, so we keep evolving. We’ve continued to work whilst getting the album tracks done, so there could be at least a new single ready for release later this year!

There’s no pressure on us to produce, if an idea we have is good enough to work on it and if not it gets discarded.

DISCOGRAPHY: All available from German Shepherd Records: www.germanshepherdrecords. bandcamp.com ‘Cellar Dweller’ (from Ian Moss & Friends - ‘Music & Words’, 2017) ‘Borderline Racist’ (as Mistletoe, 2019) ‘Cords and Digits’ (album, 2019) ‘Coltrane’ (single, 2019) ‘Soho’ (single, 2020) ‘Liquorice Flavour’ (single, 2020) ‘Rules’ (single, 2020) ‘Don’t You Call it Love’ (single, 2020) ‘Dead As A Dodo’ (single, 2020) ‘....the very last City’ (album, 2020) ‘Ooby Dooby’ (album, released 29th January 2021) ‘Another’s Insomniac Dreams’ (album, released 19th February 2021)

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A COMPETITION: To celebrate the release of the three new albums by 2 Lost Souls, Paul has commissioned the creation of bespoke face masks, which represent each of the releases.

The first ten people who email Two_Lost_Souls@outlook.com with their postal address will get an exclusive face mask and free download links to the digital version of the ‘.....the very last city’ album.

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Anyone else who mails after the first ten winners have been picked will get a free download link to the digital versions of the ‘.....the very last city’ album.

The closing date for the competition is 1st February 2021. germanshepherdrecords.com/ artists/two-lost-souls

The Opening Song A Grand Entrance Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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The Opening Song is a new musical project featuring singer Mark Whiteside, who has previously graced these pages (and appeared on the cover of Issue Two way back in November 2018) as the drummer and vocalist of Evil Blizzard and the main man of One Sided Horse, and pianist and producer Stuart Mayor.

With the impending release of Lancashire-based duo’s debut album, ‘Hidden Walls’, we recently caught up with Mark to learn more about The Opening Song and find out what we can expect from their grand entrance.

Firstly, hello Mark and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you again. Could we start by asking how The Opening Song came about?

I have played in various bands since my teens. In fact, I am always looking to do interesting new things. I think I’ve been about fifteen different bands.

After years of playing with friends and gigging all over the UK and abroad, I have met many great people in bands who play many different types of music. One such person I met was Stuart Mayor. He was, well still is, a brilliant Piano player and he joined a band I was with called Treehouse 3.

Stuart is a very tasteful player and often brought his melodic hooks to the songs.

He was easily the best musician in the band.

In 2018, when I was thinking of fulfilling my dream of making a simple piano and vocal album, I immediately thought of him. I knew that he could transform my ideas that I wrote on the guitar. Not only did I know he would give them a beautiful texture, he would also change the songs for the better. He has such an amazing way of playing that gives the music a soundscape below my vocals. After recording the basic tracks, we decided it would be good to add some orchestration to them and this is where Stu really stepped up and took the songs to yet another level. The way Stu layers textures are incredible and really takes you on a journey. I think of this album as music for headphones. In fact, when he said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but this album is a great one for falling asleep to’, I really understood what he meant.

Why the name The Opening Song?

Finding a name is never easy, and we had thought of a few but this name came about after I was thinking of the gigs I have played and just what we should use to open the set with ... a debate probably most bands have had numerous times! So why not use this as the name. I put it to Stu and it was agreed. The Opening Song was born.

Whether this is a band or a working project I am not sure, but to have a name gives it identity and I love this name. Then again I would!

We believe that The Opening Song

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had quite a long gestation period.

In fact, when we spoke to you for Issue Two back in late 2018, you and Stuart were just starting to work together on this project. How did the music develop from there?

me being a drummer, this was a deliberate choice. It’s all based around mood and atmosphere. Stuart would be great as a film score writer and many of the pieces on the album I could hear on a film without any doubt.

Over the last 18 months, I’ve gone to Stu’s home studio working on songs for the album. I would record the vocal in one take live while he played a basic Piano part. I wanted to get an honest take, and I prefer to get it as a whole rather than to comp it if possible. If I didn’t get it then we started again until we were happy with the whole take.

Stu would then develop his piano more around my vocal and create something amazing. One track we recorded early on, I sent through a friend to Gideon Coe [BBC 6 Music]. To our delight, he has played the song on more than one occasion on his night time show.

He said it reminded him of early Tom Waits, so that was good to hear. In total we have recorded about fourteen vocal tracks and he has contributed some beautiful solo soundscape pieces. There are no drums on this album and with

Who or what would you consider to have influenced you for this project?

One of my all time favourite albums is ‘Mid Air’ by Paul Buchanan [2012], he is the singer with The Blue Nile. It is filled with songs of simple beauty. I am hoping our album can come somewhere close to this. I know it’s a big ask, but there’s no harm in trying.

Other artists that give me inspiration are Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits, David Sylvian and I know Stu loves the soundtrack giants that are often unknown, but have played a huge part in scoring films and he also loves ambient music. Someone recently I discovered by chance was Sophie Hutchings. She writes brilliant atmospheric music that played late at night is perfect to chill to. There is so

much music not in the main stream that goes unnoticed by the masses and it’s a shame really. There is some beautiful music out there if you search deep enough.

I really think people love albums that are honest and through time people have been drawn to songs that they can relate to. With The Opening Song we are trying to do the same. Not only through the words, but also with Stuart’s music. I suppose my songs over the last few years have been more on the ‘lost love’ road, but I’m hoping there is enough hope on this album that means something to people who have come through loss of their own. I’m not really a writer of foot tappers, I much prefer sad music to happy music.

I was listening to the album in full the other day and I was thinking I could imagine these songs in a musical theatre setting. I’m not sure why, as I didn’t write them like that but it could be the way Stu has arranged them with his textures and playing. I’m not complaining of course as there are

many great musical type songs.

Hopefully a call from a west end writer who wants some music, or Disney, will come soon!

Finally, what else can we expect from you in the future?

We are looking at a release date [for ‘Hidden Walls’] of maybe February or March and like my One Sided Horse album this will again be on the independent record label Butterfly Effect. They are a great label that let you get on with the music. This will be their 16th release I think to date.

Due to the amount of vocal and instrumental tracks we recorded we have been given the go ahead for this to be a double album and digital download. After this, we will probably take a moment to reflect, then hopefully record some more songs, but I think Stu wants to do one song at a time next time to make it easier and less stressful.

Although I do know he also wants to record an epic soundscape themed track too.

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I expect for myself I’ll be playing more One Sided Horse and Evil Blizzard gigs, COVID-19 allowing, and Stu plays with a jazz trio locally, so I expect he will be doing more of that. I really want to set up a gig in the Harris Museum in Preston as it would be a great building to play and I think suit the musical style.

Thank you for another great interview Mark and all the best for

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2021. Do you have any final words that you would like to leave us with?

Only if anyone plays French horn or violin, we are looking for these for the live show and If anyone plays in a string quartet that’s even better! www.facebook.com/ groups/410360776274626

Brian Protheroe Pinball Wizard Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Brian Protheroe has been making entertainment magic with his distinctive voice since the mid-sixties.

In 2021, his deep tones and RP accent are best-known for narrating Channel 4’s ‘First Dates’ and its spin-offs, ‘First Dates Hotel’ and in the near future, ‘First Dates Teens’, whilst his considerable acting skills have seen him appear in countless theatre productions spanning six decades and several high profile films including a turn as the co-pilot of Air Force One in ‘Superman’ (1978).

Meanwhile, an endless list of television credits have seen him taking on Shakespeare as Edward IV in BBC productions of ‘Henry VI, part 2’, ‘Henry VI, part 3’ and ‘Richard III’ (1982), being seduced

by Dorien in ‘Birds of a Feather’ (‘Food for Thought’, S04, E02, 1992) and being scrutinised by Chandler and Jones in ‘Whitechapel’ (S04, EP01/02, 2013). He was last seen playing Graham Parry in last year’s BBC drama series ‘His Dark Materials’ (‘The Cave’, S02, E02).

Whilst Salisbury-born Protheroe has always maintained that he is an actor who happens to also make music, in recent years, his music career, which since the early ‘70s has run concurrently with his acting career, has been reappraised. In 2015, Noel Gallagher applauded his 1974 debut single for Chrysalis Records, ‘Pinball’ and stated its influence on the track ‘Riverman’ from the album

‘Chasing Yesterday’ after being introduced to the song in an L.A. bar

by Morrissey, leading to a ressurgence of interest in his music.

Seemingly completely out of sync with the music scene of the time, ‘Pinball’, with its several melodically identical verses, lack of chorus and lyrics telling of love gone wrong in a squalid flat with “fleas in the bedroom ... flies in the bathroom” placed against a building, strangely hypnotic backdrop of acoustic guitar riffing and saxophone courtesy of jazz musician Tony Coe, crept into the UK top 40, peaked at number 22 and found Protheroe performing the song on ‘Top of the Pops’.

‘Pinball’ was featured on his debut album of the same name, also released in 1974 and featuring twelve further tracks full of imaginative and complex wordplay with exquisite and in places, quite ahead of its time, production and lush string arrangements by Del Newman, who, at the same time, was also working with Cat Stevens, Elton John, Carly Simon and Rod Stewart. Last year, Cherry Red Records subsidiary 7ts reissued the album along with Protheroe’s following two albums for Chrysalis Records, ‘Pick Up’ (1975) and ‘I/You’ (1976) in a boxset entitled ‘The Albums: 1974-1976’.

If this wonderful piece of work wasn’t enough, last November also

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Brian in 1974

saw Protheroe releasing a brand new album. Entitled ‘Desert Road’, the album brings together a collection of self-released singles made in collaboration with fellow actor and multi-instrumentalist Julian Littman over the last twenty years alongside an unreleased live version of ‘Monkey’ from his debut album and two demos, one being the earliest known version of ‘Pinball’.

Just before Christmas, we rang Protheroe for a chat about his career in both music and acting and of course ‘Pinball’, a song which nearly half a century after its release continues to grow in stature and has become something of a cult classic.

Firstly, hello Brian and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Could we start by asking how you first became interested in music as a listener, how you came to pursue music as a career and a bit about your early career up until signing to Chrysalis Records in 1973?

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Yeah, okay, well, I mean, I loved music when I was a young teenager and even before that. I started listening to my Dad’s old 78s and my uncle’s, particularly my uncle’s 78s because he had a 78 of a man called Lonnie Donegan, who was very big in the ‘50s.

He started the skiffle craze and he used to do American songs with great energy and humour and I loved him. Yeah, then, of course Elvis came along and that was it, we were all in love with Elvis from the mid to late ‘50s. Cliff Richard then came along with an English rock ‘n’ roll record called ‘Move It’ [1959], which I was very into and it was the first record I started miming to in my bedroom in front of the bedroom mirror, as you do. And then The Beatles, and The Beatles wiped everything else away in sort of ‘62, ‘63. My acting career started in the mid-’60s, ‘66 in my hometown and then I went into the repertory theatre system, which was very prevalent then, which meant you could go into a company of actors and stay there, almost like a proper job, for up to two years and it was there in the late ‘60s

Performing ‘Pinball’ on ‘Top of the Pops’, 1974

Starring in the theatre rock musical ‘Leave Him to Heaven’, 1976

‘68 to ‘70, in Lincoln that I really developed my skills and talents as an actor and a musician, because when you were in a company like that, you had to do everything. So, I was writing music for production companies as well as acting. So that was great and then in the early ‘70s, I was in a play called ‘Death on Demand’ [1973] playing a character called Johnny Tomorrow, who was a pop star, I wrote a tune for some lyrics that the author had written for this character, he liked the end product and he sort of took it round to various record companies. Decca and Chrysalis were interested, so I eventually got to sign with Chrysalis.

By that time, I’d already made my own demos. I’d started recording on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder with little demos and they took me on, Chrysalis Records and I did three albums with them. And that’s how it all started. But ‘Pinball’ was my only ... I was a one hit wonder really, although ‘Pinball’ didn’t make much of an impression on the charts in 1974, it got to number 22, but it sort of has grown in stature over the last 46 years and people still like it, so

that’s great.

Of course, by the time you signed to Chrysalis, you were already an established actor, having starred in, amongst other stage and television productions, the TV series ‘Frontier’ (1968) and ‘The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes’ (1968) and in the same year as releasing your debut album ‘Pinball’ in 1974, you appeared in one episode of the BBC television series ‘Masquerade’ (‘Something Down There is Crying’, S01, E04) alongside Elkie Brooks and Stephen MacKenna. At this point in time, did you have preference for either music or acting and how did you come to sign to Chrysalis Records?

‘The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes’ was a small part, but at least I was starting to get parts in television. Acting was the world that I was most comfortable in. I loved being in the studio as a musician.

When I was taken on by Chrysalis, that first album, the ‘Pinball’ album was a real joy to work on in the studio. I couldn’t really believe my luck. And

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so, at that time I suppose, music was slightly dominating the acting career, but overall, acting has predominated because I felt more comfortable in that world than I do, really, in the complete music business. I love being in the studio, but not so much all the other stuff that you have to do, to encompass, to be a successful pop star or musician or whatever. Even when I was very successful as an actor, I’ve always come back to music and I mean, I still play music now. I still play the piano every day, every morning for about an hour and still write songs. I’m still working on songs and decided to put this album [‘Desert Road’, 2020] out of the songs that I’ve been working on for the last twenty years.

The song with which you have become most associated with, ‘Pinball’ (from the album of the same name) was released as a single in 1974. I have seen you describe the song as “a diary entry for a particular weekend in 1973”. What are your memories of writing and recording the song?

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I don’t actually remember recording the song [laughs]. Well ... no, I don’t remember recording the song. I remember the feelings I was going through and the stuff I was going through at the time, because I’d just split up with a girlfriend, I was living in Covent Garden, just behind the Cambridge Theatre in Shelton Street.

And I had no money to speak of, I had no job and I was living with a couple of friends, so that was nice, I had a bit of support, and I used to play the pinball machine in a local pub round the corner from where I was living. And so, yes, I just started writing this song ... a very simple song, almost a folky sort of song about, well, as you mentioned, just like a diary entry of what I was doing at the time. So, that was it and I can’t really remember recording it in the studio, that song specifically. I mean, I loved being in the studio and working with top musicians but I don’t remember that song particularly actually.

‘Pinball’ reached number 22 on the UK singles chart and spent six weeks in the top 40, during which time, you

appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’. I believe there is a story about refusing to wear a velvet suit for the performance. Could you tell us about this?

Well, I went into the Chrysalis record company, the head of Chrysalis Records and he got his cheque book out and said, ‘Right, you’re on ‘Top of the Pops’, you need a suit’ and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to dress up specially, because the song is not glam rock, it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, you know, I didn’t need to present an image, an image that wasn’t me for the song, so obviously, you know, I wasn’t going to wear any sort of flashy suits or anything. I just wanted to wear what I normally wear, just jeans and a jean jacket, as I did on ‘Top of the Pops’.

So, that was why and that was the beginning [laughs] of me feeling slightly uncomfortable with what was required by the record company. So, it was an uneasy relationship for about three years until they finally thought, ‘Right, well, we’re not going to get what we want!’ [laughs].

The track was critically acclaimed upon release but in more recent years, Noel Gallagher, who was apparently introduced to the track

by Morrissey in an L.A. bar, has cited ‘Pinball’ as an influence on the track ‘Riverman’ from the 2015 album ‘Chasing Yesterday’. When did you first become aware of Noel Gallagher and Morrissey’s fondness for ‘Pinball’ and did the resurgence of interest in the song because of it come as a surprise to you?

Well, it didn’t suddenly happen, it’s sort of been around ... I mean, I think that may have given it a little boost, the story about Noel and Morrissey, but I think it had already begun. I mean, it was being played on, for instance, ‘Sounds of the 70s’ [BBC Radio 2], Johnnie Walker and [BBC] Radio London’s Robert Elms played it regularly, you know, and used to invite me on his programme. I can’t remember the year that I was introduced to that story about Noel and Morrissey, but someone sent me a sound file of him being interviewed. [I

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In ‘Whitechapel’, 2013

tell Brian that the ‘Chasing Yesterday’ album was released in 2015]. Yeah, that sounds right, it would have been about five years ago.

Earlier this year, 7ts, a subsidiary label of Cherry Red Records released ‘The Albums: 1974-1976’, a 3CD set featuring your first three albums, ‘Pinball’ (1974), ‘Pick Up’ (1975) and ‘I/You’ (1976). Do you have a favourite album out of the three included and why?

For different reasons, but I suppose ‘Pinball’, the first one, I would pick, really because it’s a lovely mixture, an eclectic mixture of different styles, from the funky ‘Monkey’ track to quite sort of string-laden romantic songs and interesting musical genres. There’s a song called ‘Money Love’, which was the B-side of ‘Pinball’ [single], which was in 7/4 time. I loved jazz at that time. I was listening to Dave Brubeck and I loved the strange time signatures.

So, I think ‘Pinball’, just because it was the first. It was probably the most enjoyable to record because it was the

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first. My only regret with the first album was that I didn’t play the basic track with a rhythm section, with drums and bass. They were added later, so some of the timings are slightly odd.

But the songs are great and I’m very proud of it still.

Your tenth album, ‘Desert Road’ was released in November. Could you tell us a bit about the writing and recording process of the album and have you been pleased with the reaction to it?

Yep, very, very pleased, yes. The reaction is not that important to me really. Well, I suppose it is in the end, but it was something that I thought I needed to do because I hadn’t ... Over the last twenty years, twenty-five years, I’ve been occasionally putting the odd single out. I’m not a prolific songwriter, so the songs come very occasionally, so I hadn’t had enough material to put into an album until now, so I thought I’d collect the songs that I’d been self-releasing digitally over the last twenty-years and put them into

With Jane How in ‘His Dark Materials’, 2020

a collection with one new song, with a remix of a song from the ‘90s and two demos, one of which was the original ‘Pinball’. So, I thought I’d do it properly, so I got a friend of mine ... I commissioned a painting from a friend of mine. I had an idea for an image for the album cover, which was related to an image in the new song, which is called ‘All the Stars’, of a desert road with a car driving away into the sunset. So, that was it. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out, I got a great designer and I did some of the design myself and it was just a pleasure to put together. Yeah, and I’m very proud of it. Yeah.

Of course, your acting and voice-over career continues alongside your music career. You have been the voice of Channel 4’s ‘First Dates’ since 2013, whilst your latest acting role was as Graham Parry in the BBC’s ‘His Dark Materials’ (2020).

Having been appearing on our television and cinema screens for over fifty years, are there any roles that stick out in your mind as

As co-pilot of Air Force One in ‘Superman’, 1978

favourites and why?

On television, waaah, I don’t know.

It’s mainly in the theatre that I’ve had the most satisfying roles. I mean, at the end of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I had a series of television series. There was one called ‘Gentlemen and Players’ [ITV, 1988-1989] in the late ‘80s; there was one called ‘Shrinks’ [BBC, 1991], where I was playing a sex therapist in the early ‘90s; there was a Geoffrey Archer mini-series called ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’ [BBC, 1990], but they weren’t as satisfying as parts that I would normally get in the theatre.

They were great fun, but I have had more satisfying work in the theatre as far as acting is concerned.

One particular acting role that I wanted to ask you about was your appearance as the co-pilot of Air Force One in ‘Superman’ (1978).

What are your memories of being part of the making of this classic film?

Yeah, well, I was cast in that because

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I fitted the costume. The actor who was originally cast couldn’t do it and I was the same size as him and that’s how I got the part. It was filmed in Pinewood Studios, North London, and I was there for about a week, because although it was only one scene, we were what they call ‘weather cover’.

So, we were standing by for a week in case it started to rain and they couldn’t do the outside scenes with Christopher Reeve. I think there were about four of five of us in a little cockpit, which was being shaken up and down, while we were being filmed, by the crew and making a terrible noise, as a result of which, they couldn’t really hear my dialogue, so in the end, I was dubbed. I was dubbed with an American accent, so you hear this almost Mickey Mouse voice saying, ‘Hi, this is Air Force One. Can we have the latest weather report?’

That was what I remember.

musician or vice-versa?

These days, how do the two sides of your career, actor and musician co-exist in comparison to how they did in the mid-’70s? Do you consider yourself as an actor who is also a

Finally, what can we expect from you in 2021 and beyond?

It depends. This year [2020], because of lockdown, I’ve been more of a musician than an actor, apart from the voice-over work that I do. So, music has slightly gone ahead in that respect.

But, generally speaking, I think of myself as an actor who is also a musician. But music is a very strong part of my life. I’ve worked on all the songs on the album with the same producer and multi-instrumentalist as I have for the last twenty years. His name is Julian Littman, he plays with Steeleye Span and we’ve known each other since the early ‘80s and he’s a great friend and a very talented musician. So, I couldn’t have done it without him really and also, he’s been involved in the live performances I’ve done over the last ten, fifteen years or so.

No idea at all. It depends. Who knows what’s going to happen next year? I

mean, presumably, this vaccine will mean that we have some sort of new normality, I don’t know, from Easter or a bit later maybe. I’m not particularly keen on doing anymore live performances. If I did, it would be in a small venue, about a hundred-seater, and with a simple set-up. Maybe like an unplugged set-up in a small venue.

And I hope to continue doing ‘First Dates’, because that’s terrific. I’ve just started a teenage version of ‘First Dates’, ‘First Dates Teens’, which will

be on in the New Year, which is great fun. It’s lovely, yeah.

Thank you for a wonderful interview.

We wish you all the best for 2021 and for the future. brianprotheroe.co.uk www.facebook.com/ protheroespace

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WISHING YOU A

DAMNED FINE 2021!

Interview by Martin Hutchinson Photography by Jill Furmanovsky (unless stated).

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Punk pioneers The Damned’s original line-up has reunited for a UK tour in 2021. The founding members Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible and Brian James will play five shows next July ... assuming this ‘damned’ pandemic has slung its hook.

the Sex Pistols to be an opening act on the ‘Anarchy Tour of the UK’ in 1976. Alongside The Clash and Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers too, the band hit the road, but most of the dates were cancelled by organisers or local authorities, making it one of the most infamous tours in rock ‘n’ roll history.

The greatest surviving British punk band The Damned formed in 1976, releasing the first ever UK punk single ‘New Rose’ on 22nd October of that year. Considered one of the greatest songs from this period, The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ brought focus on the burgeoning punk scene before any other group. On their upcoming tour in 2021 they will celebrate the iconic single’s 45th anniversary, as well as perform tracks from the first two albums, B-sides and covers that the original line-up played.

Shortly after the release of ‘Damned Damned Damned’, The Damned went on to support T.Rex on what would be their final tour before Marc Bolan’s tragic passing later that year. Bolan was famously a big fan of the group and invited them on tour himself. Soon after the T.Rex shows, Dave, Brian, Rat and The Cap became the first UK punk band to tour the United States and play the renowned venue CBGB. Their spectacular performance at CBGB fully inaugurated the punk scene in America, sparking a revolution for many who attended that memorable first show Stateside.

The band has an illustrious and extensive history, beginning in 1976 with the aforementioned ‘New Rose’ and with the release of their debut album ‘Damned Damned Damned’ in February of the following year.

Produced by Nick Lowe (Elvis Costello, Graham Parker), it was the first full-length album released by a British punk band and included their now most-streamed song, ‘Neat Neat Neat’, currently on 18.2 million plays.

After releasing ‘New Rose’ and its B-side, a sped-up cover of The Beatles’ ‘Help!’, The Damned were asked by

Original guitarist and main songwriter Brian James left The Damned at the end of 1977 and the band split for the first time in February 1978. When they reformed (initially as The Doomed) in early 1979, he declined to rejoin his former bandmates. Captain Sensible switched from bass to guitar and keyboards, but also left in 1984, after his solo career took off. He rejoined between 1988 and 1992 and again in 1996, remaining in the line-up to the present day.

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The Damned in 1977. L/R: Brian James; Dave Vanian; Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies

In the eighties, The Damned changed course and their new Goth image spawned a number of hit singles such as ‘Grimly Fiendish’ (‘Phantasmagoria’, 1985) and covers of Barry Ryan’s ‘Eloise’ (1986) and Love’s ‘Alone Again Or’ (‘Anything’, 1986). More recently, they have toured and recorded extensively with the line-up of Dave Vanian on vocals; Captain Sensible on guitar; Pinch on drums, Monty Oxymoron on keyboards and Paul Gray, initially a member of the band between 1980 and 1983, on bass.

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line-ups, multiple albums and nine Top 40 Singles, the original band are back together for one tour only. I recently caught up with Captain Sensible and the returning Brian James to ask them about this much-anticipated tour and how they have been coping with the restrictions due to COVID-19.

Their last studio album, 2018’s ‘Evil Spirits’ was produced by the legendary Tony Visconti (T.Rex, David Bowie) and just last year, they returned to Rockfield Studios in Wales to record a four-track EP. Entitled ‘The Rockfield Files’, it features the track ‘Black is the Night’, which is included on the two-CD anthology of the same name released in 2019.

The Captain, his usual outspoken self, tells me, “I’m just a daft guitarist not a politician. [I] want nothing to do with COVID discussions ... the rights and wrongs of any of it. Since March I’ve been in the same boat as everyone else. Our amazing London Palladium show, over a year ago now, with its extravagant stage design and additional circus of horror characters was the Damned’s last performance; it may have taken a couple of antics, but we could’ve toured that stage set for sure. Sadly the live arts have been destroyed by government restrictions. Do they care? It sure don’t look like it.”

Now, after over four decades of The Damned and after many different

Brian, on the other hand, is a little more reserved and a little more positive:

The sleeve of ‘New Rose’, the first ever UK punk single, released 22nd October 1976

“I’ve had to cancel some gigs, there’s been no live work either with The Damned or my own band, The Brian James Gang, and I was involved with trying to resurrect The Lords of the New Age. Luckily though, I live just outside Brighton, just five minutes from the sea, so can go for walks and have got my family here. I’m doing some writing [more about which later] which is keeping me busy.

Hopefully the vaccines will work and I’ll be able to get back into the studio in the spring. You have to look for the positives.”

The idea of the original line-up of The Damned getting back together is one that the fans have been wishing for for years, so how did this reunion come together? Captain Sensible tells me, and also reminisces: “Well, our jobs have gone so we’re all skint, that was a factor. But Dave pointed out that none of the original line-up are getting any younger and it would be a real shame if we hadn’t done some shows before someone kicks the bucket. They’re great players, and

nobody else sounds like them. Those first two albums [‘Damned Damned Damned’ and ‘Music For Pleasure’, 1977] are the sound of 1976 for me ... the Roxy Club, the Hope and Anchor, the Red Cow, the Fulham Greyhound ... and all the other sweaty dives that punk inhabited back then, most of which have sadly disappeared to become betting shops or student accommodation. That’s progress, I suppose. They were rough old days, but blooming good fun ... sleeping on other people’s floors ... bunking the trains ... every night based around attending some gig or other, usually down the Marquee. In fact, we used to shift some market stalls in Duck Lane to create our own private parking space ... never paid a penny.”

Brian tells me that it’s been a long time coming: “Actually we bandied the idea about four or five years ago originally, but Dave and Cap didn’t want to do it then as they didn’t want to let the other guys in the band down. Back in the day there was

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always friction between Cap and Rat, but it must have been resolved as I got a call from the management earlier this year to say that everyone was keen to do it. And, ad Dave says, there might not be another chance.

It’s gonna make a lot of people happy. We’ll be making a hell of a noise.”

After the breakthrough and success of the first two albums, the band split up then reformed in 1979, but without Brian: “That’s right. In ’77, Rat left the band. Firstly, we were being worked really hard and we brought in a second guitarist in Lu Edwards.

Neither Rat or Cap thought he was necessary. We got Jon Moss in on the drums [pre-Culture Club], but it wasn’t the same, although he was a great drummer. It was the energy of me and Rat that was the backbone, Jon just didn’t have the same energy.

I needed the Keith Moon-like Rat to bring out my inner Pete Townshend.

When the other guys reformed, I was doing other things, from Tanz Der Youth, Brian James and The Brains

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and then Lords of the New Church.”

Coming back to the tour, I wondered whether it was difficult to convince Brian and Rat to take part? Cap laughs and announces, “Wasn’t me that asked them!”

After years of playing guitar with the band, Captain Sensible has, for the upcoming tour, gone back to his original instrument, the bass. And it appears that he is quite happy about this, as he explains: “I was excited [about playing bass again]. [I]went straight out and tried a few basses down at GAK and settled on a violin model by Epiphone as I’d toured these McCartney style basses through most of those ’77 shows.

The thing about a violin bass is they are nearly all medium scale - good for a guitarist who is used to shorter necks. Hofner also do a repro model of their classic McCartney bass but it had less weight than the Epi so didn’t get the nod. Bass is fun ... Paul Gray [who joined The Damned for the first time in 1980 started his fourth stint in the band in 2017] makes his sing,

The newly reformed original line-up of The Damned. Photograph by Paul Harries

it’s very impressive stuff, so I need to have a bit of a twang to refresh myself to get anywhere near stage-worthiness ... but I’m looking forward to playing Brian’s old tunes again ... some of which are a real workout, especially for the wrists.”

He adds with a laugh, “I’m more than happy to play bass, banjo, or bassoon for that matter, if someone pays me to.”

It appears that the rest of the ‘normal’ Damned line-up [Monty Oxymoron and Paul Gray – the band are without a drummer at the moment following the departure of Pinch last year] will have no part of this tour, but once this reunion tour is finished, it looks like it’ll be business as usual, once a new drummer is decided upon. However, Cap has been working with Paul Gray: “That’s right. I work with Paul on the Sensible Gray Cells and we just spent the first half of 2020 making ‘Get Back Into the World’ ... when we were allowed to of course.

[Laughs] He’s probably glad to have a break from my presence for a while

after all that. The lyrics reflect our amazement at what was happening with COVID and all that ... it’s all so difficult to ignore. I’d imagine there’s many bands writing about these matters.” And Brian has seen Monty: “Monty lives in Brighton and I see him from time to time. He’s a mental nurse as well and he tells me that he’s writing songs.”

As it’s a reunion of the original quartet, the band will be performing songs from that part of their career they were all together, as Brian tells me: “I think we’ll be doing the first album in its entirety, plus ‘Help!’, as well as some stuff from the second album, but I’m not sure what yet. We’ll get together when we can and mess around with the songs at rehearsals.”

Cap chips in, “We’ve not rehearsed yet. That’ll be fun. I can recall the sessions for the first album vividly.

Rat and Brian both led the band tempo wise and when things occasionally went awry there was some choice Anglo-Saxon phrases

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Photograph by Paul Harries

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thrown around the room. My job in the band was more to glue the rest of it together. I had a lovely old Selmer valve amp and 18 inch speaker cab back in the day ... so rare I’ve never even seen one since then. Anyone who likes the first two albums is going to be in heaven here ... there’s going to be no ‘Eloise’, that’s for bloody sure!”

get sent back on to complete the alloted time as stated on the sodding contract which a club manager might be waving in the air to make the point”. But he does like some of the ‘slower’ ones though: “‘Feel the Pain’ has a different kind of intensity though ... because although slower, it creates a dark and creepy vibe. I like that one too.”

Looking back at the era, the pair must have some favourite songs. Brian’s answer is short and to the point: “There are some songs that are close to my heart, such as ‘New Rose’, ‘Neat Neat Neat’ and ‘Born to Kill’”.

And Cap also lists the latter: “Oh yeah, ‘Born to Kill’, ‘I Fall’, ‘See Her Tonite’ ... pretty explosive tracks, just a million miles away from the mid-pace of Clash and Pistols material which always used to amuse me, as punk really ought to be blistering adrenaline-fuelled mania.

I remember us playing these songs so fast at gigs, the entire repertoire of material would be exhausted after three quarters of an hour and we’d

Of course, the question arises whether the band will record the shows for a possible live CD or DVD and whether the band will write and record any new music. Brian remains hopeful about the recording, as he tells me: “I think they’ll be recorded, the reunion will be too good not to. But as regards a new album, I doubt it. But we might do some shows in the States and Japan as there’s been some interest.”

And Brian has some interesting plans for the future: “I want to finish my Brian James Gang album and I’m halfway through writing my autobiography. I’m also putting together a ‘Rarities’ album full of unreleased songs. I’d also like to do

more Damned gigs, but resurrecting Lords of the New Age will be a priority.”

The original line-up of The Damned will be touring around the country in July 2021. “As Dave Vanian says, it’s more a string of dates rather than a tour”, adds Brian.

The dates are as follows, with tickets available from all the usual agencies:

09/07/21: Eventim Apollo, London 10/07/21: Eventim Apollo, London 17/07/21: 02 Academy, Glasgow 18/07/21: 02 Academy, Manchester www.officialdamned.com www.facebook.com/ OfficialDamned

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Simon Kirke Free, Bad Company & A Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy Interview by Kevin Burke.

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“Free, when it broke up was traumatic ... It had a history of pain.”

On the 30th of August, 1970, four young men took the stage at the Isle of Wight Festival. In front of an estimated crowd of somewhere between 600,000 to 700,000 people, the four, consisting of Andy Fraser, Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirke and Paul Kossoff dominated the landscape.

This collective known as Free became one of the most enduring acts of the late sixties and early seventies. Formed in 1968, releasing six bombastic albums of blues-rock such as ‘Fire And Water’ (1970), ‘Heartbreaker’ (1973) and the number two smash hit single ‘All Right Now’ (1970), before disbanding unfortunately in 1973, Free came to exist in those realms of rock legends.

From the ashes of Free, two men reconvened to form another supergroup. The two, vocalist Paul Rodgers, and drummer Simon Kirke, linked up with guitarist Mick Ralphs (ex-Mott The Hoople) and bassist Boz Burrell (ex-King Crimson).

Together they formed Bad Company, a band that would again blaze a legendary trail. Signing to Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label and indeed that infamous management

of Peter Grant, Bad Company became a steadfast figure of Stadium Rock, that sound which echoed through the seventies. Punctuated by loud guitars, pounding drums and high-pitched vocal acrobatics, Bad Company filled arenas and became airwave favourites. With albums such as ‘Straight Shooter’ (1975), and ‘Desolation Angels’ (1979), the band created a string of what we now term as classics.

This outfit, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the greats of the day, have recently been celebrated in the book ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy: The Musical Journey of Free and Bad Company’ by David Roberts (This Day in Music Books). Along with fan anecdotes, the book also includes contributions from the two remaining active members of both bands, Paul Rodgers, and this man Simon Kirke. As the horrible year of 2020 ran to an end, I spoke to the gentleman Simon: a man who lived the life, and now speaks of it with an undeniable honesty. He is a pleasure to converse with; a humorous and genuine person who gave an in-depth truth to both bands and the music he helped create. Alongside this

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however, he offered hope for 2021 and a hope that music will survive and always prevail.

The recent release of the book ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy: The Musical Journey of Free and Bad Company’ is quite an in-depth read. On a personal level, did looking back through the book stir emotions for you?

Yeah! I mean the short answer is a lot of emotions were stirred up Kevin.

Because what I liked about the format of the book is that it’s an oral history.

With 90% of it fans writing in and reminiscing you know, with contributions from Paul [Rodgers] and myself. Along with other people that have been involved with us over the years. So yeah, it did, especially the section on Free, that really stirred up some emotions, but stronger than I realized because that was where it all started for me and you know we were just a little gang of kids really.

With some 350 fan anecdotes,

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readers are given the eye witness, audience impressions of both bands at their heights. Do you feel that makes it the best account so far?

Wow, yeah, I mean there are people that have grown up with our music, and in fact, I am doing that show [Stageit. com] in a couple of weeks, and people are sending in requests and they are saying ‘Oh, my grandfather loves the intro to ‘Shooting Star’’. Oh wow, you know there are people now my age, and I’m 71, so there is a whole generation of people who grew up listening to Free, and then a little later with Bad Company, and they’re passing on their musical tastes to their kids and now their grandkids. It really is amazing, it’s wonderful and it is very humbling.

You are a very versatile drummer, and some may not be aware that you appeared on recordings by the American blues and boogie-woogie pianist Champion Jack Dupree (‘68) before Free. How did that come about?

Simon with The Maniacs, 1964

Well I had just joined Black Cat Bones, and it was one of those amazing pieces of faith. I was stuck in my little bedsit in Twickenham, and I heard about this band that was playing in the Nags Head pub across town. I was really intrigued by the name, I mean I knew nothing about them but Black Cat Bones was such a great name. But it was a long way [to travel], and I tossed a coin, I literally tossed a coin, and it came down heads, and heads determined that I was going to see them. Long story short, they were looking for a drummer. Their guy was leaving or getting the sack. But Paul Kossoff, who I’d befriended, you know, praised me during one of the breaks. So he said, ‘You know we’re having auditions tomorrow?’ I got the job and only after perhaps literally two months, we were recording with this guy called Champion Jack Dupree and he was a New Orleans barrelhouse piano player.

And I’d never been in a recording studio before Kevin, so I was really nervous. Especially because this guy was a bit of a legend. But, we just played our little set with him, we did

several shows with him prior to that, I think a couple shows, and he liked me, and he liked my drumming. I had never gotten an endorsement of my proficiency before from anyone, least of all someone who’s a legend, this was a man who can play and I was like ‘Wow’. So then it was into the studio to do ‘When You Feel the Feeling You Was Feeling’ [album, 1968]. I think they were up all night thinking of that title [laughs]. It came out, I don’t think I heard it since the day I played on it, but that’s how it all came about.

Who do you feel was the most influential person or musician on your drumming? Or did you have that jazz influence like that of Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts?

Not really, although the first time I ever saw anyone playing drums was on a big band show called ‘All That Jazz’.

I suppose that swing drumming, that big band drumming, it is not that far removed from rock and roll, and from Jive. But honestly, I am in adoration of those drummers, but it’s not my style.

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Free

I guess the guy that really came out of that whole pack to me was Buddy Rich, and he was staggeringly good. My main influences were black music - Soul, R&B, and my number one influence was Al Jackson, Jr. who played with Booker T and the MGs. He did mostly Otis Redding and he played with the Stax House band in Memphis and his drumming was just excellent. He’s the governor as far as I’m concerned. But I had many other influences that shaped my playing. Ginger [Baker] was great and a wonderful drummer, and Charlie Watts he has one of the great backbeats, he is one of the greatest backbeats in the world, but he’s very much influenced by Jazz. Levon Helm from The Band, and Roger Hawkins who played with the Muscle Shoals band. They were mainly out of Alabama and they were the house band for so many artists, such as Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin. So I guess they were the handful of influences on me, but Al Jackson, Jr. was the number one.

In the space of just four years, Free

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accumulated a legendary status.

Recording six albums in that time (as well as a live album. 1971’s ‘Free Live!’) must have meant it was a complete whirlwind. Did the band take over every aspect of your life?

Yeah, yeah, true. Things were different back then. We were a lot younger back then ... we all kind of rose to the challenge. With a couple of the albums, like on ‘Fire And Water’ and ‘Highway’, some of the songs were recorded between shows. We’d come back to London, or we do a couple shows in London or the home counties, and the next day we’d be in the studio cutting a couple of tracks, then go off and do some shows again. So I guess the bottom line though, Kevin was that it really became too much even for these young lads. You know it really became a workload, a kind of beast that ate itself. I guess that’s how I’d put it [laughs]. We wanted to build a following, we worked all hours God gave us… well, that God and Island Records gave us. We’d travel the length and breadth of the UK building up a

fan base. So when ‘All Right Now’ hit, I mean, we’d had this sort of fan base that we’d been building and it just was like a springboard. Suddenly, we were playing to thousands of people in theatres instead of little clubs, you know. Then of course the pressure was on to release a follow-up to try and capitalize on the commercial success of ‘All Right Now’ and ‘Fire And Water’ and we couldn’t do it. We weren’t the sort of band who could write to order.

We just wanted to play our music and if it was popular then it was popular, if it wasn’t then so be it. So ‘Highway’ [1970], the follow-up to ‘Fire And Water’ was a flop and the single that followed it, ‘The Stealer’ [lead single from ‘Highway’], that didn’t do anything either. We were demoralised and we broke up.

So there was a pressure then from the record company to bring out another hit, another ‘All Right Now’?

Absolutely. It’s funny because Island Records at the time were considered an

artist-friendly record label. I mean Chris Blackwell was a great guy, but once ‘All Right Now’ came out and became this monster hit, they kind of changed their clothes a little bit and they became ‘We need an album to follow up, we need a single to follow up ‘All Right Now’’ and it was impossible. The workload increased, instead of playing a different town every night, suddenly we were playing a different country every night. Being so close to Europe, we all jetted of to Holland, or Belgium or France or Sweden. It really got out of control for us to the point where Paul Rodgers was the first guy to say ‘Fuck this! I want to rest, we want some time off’.

Then breaking up, I mean the first time that we broke up, really hurt Paul Kossoff, he was never the same. He got into drugs, and he went downhill very quickly. So we reunited, I believe about a year later, to try getting him out of the doldrums, when what he really needed was rehab, but we didn’t really know that at the time.

By the time Bad Company came

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together, did you, and Paul in particular have a better plan and idea of how to succeed?

Yeah, I mean, Paul put it the best: ‘We want to be the biggest fucking band in the world’. What we wanted to do was just play music unencumbered by a bunch of monkeys on each other’s backs. Free, when it broke up was traumatic, it was traumatized. It had a history of pain. With Paul Kossoff ‘s demise, he had gotten so hooked on drugs. But, Mick Ralphs came out of Mott the Hoople, he was ready to leave, he wasn’t happy and then we found Boz Burrell he’d been kicked out of King Crimson. So there were four guys from three different bands, who just wanted to play music the way they wanted to play it, and it worked a treat.

We all got on, we all drank a little bit, we all smoked a little bit a dope, but nothing terrible, we were happy.

Meeting Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label and being hooked up with them was a marriage made in heaven ... and we took off like a rocket.

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How influential was Peter Grant on the creativity of Bad Company? Did he let you have an almost free reign in the studio?

Yeah, he just said ‘You make the music and I’ll do the management’. And that’s basically what he had done with Zeppelin. When Zeppelin were formed, you probably know this, it was The New Yardbirds, and they were called The New Yardbirds to honor a contract that had yet to expire. So the first half dozen gigs they did was under the name of The New Yardbirds. The band was put together by Jimmy Page and Peter Grant, so Robert [Plant] and Bonzo [John Bonham] for a short time were hired hands. So Peter Grant’s way of doing things ... he was very clever, very smart. We had a handshake agreement. Obviously we had to sign papers a little bit down the way. For want of a better word, he was a good manager. We found out later that there had been a bit of conniving when all the dust settled. Swan Song broke up, and Peter Grant eventually died 25 years ago, but we found out that we had signed away quite a little bit of our

money to him in perpetuity. We were like so many bands of the sixties and seventies who were taken advantage of by management. But at the time we were happy just to be free of the bonds of our previous bands. The first five or six years of Bad Company was just outstanding.

When Bad Company started, do you feel there was an expectation that audiences expected Free in another form? And was it difficult to separate yourselves from the legacy of that previous band?

Good question. We did field several calls at various concerts, play ‘All Right Now’ or play ‘Heartbreaker’.

I remember one gig when Paul said, ‘Listen! We are Bad Company, we are not Free mark two, this is a brand new band’. That got a big round of applause, but the other side of things is there was a lot of affection for Free, even though we were only around about four years.

It still resonates today, there’s a lot of affection for the band, and I think the fact that we were now, as Bad

Company playing 90% of the time in America, a lot of people thought we were an American band over here. I think there was a little resentment, a little wistful resentment that we had left England and come over to America.

But that’s the way the cards were dealt.

We took advantage of the fact that we could tour America pretty much incessantly, and not play the same market twice. Of course England and the UK were much, much smaller. I like to tell people over here [America], ‘You can fit England into Lake Superior’. We were quite happy over here, and we did go back to England several times, and toured to great success. Then it did start to unravel around about 1979, 1980.

There was an upheaval between ‘Desolation Angels’ and ‘Rough Diamonds’ (1982). Was that the marked low point of your career?

For sure, yeah. Well, ‘79 was really, I think, the last really good album from Bad Company. ‘Desolation Angels’ was really, really good, but we followed that

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Bad Company

up with a hundred date tour. Something like a hundred dates. I was drinking too much, and taking coke, other members of the band were as well. We were all getting a little crazy. Then that took us into 1980 when the tour finished, and of course that was the horrible year, 40 years ago. Lennon was shot, and Bonzo died, Zeppelin broke up, Peter Grant went to pieces, and the management fell apart. Paul Rodgers said ‘I’ve had enough’ and he went off. So yeah, it was a rough time, very rough.

into rehab, and I was at a real low point for sure. But what they do say is ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’. A few years later, for better or for worse, certainly in terms of Bad Company’s career, which will always have a question mark over it. When we reformed with another singer, that kept the name alive with Brian Howe, but it took Bad Company down a different direction, a different musical road.

Did that mean that the whole support structure for Bad Company was literally gone? And the band was another victim of John Bonham’s loss?

I just want to say that Brian died recently [May 2020]. It’s funny when someone close to you, I mean that in the literal sense, we worked together for several years, we didn’t get on, I won’t pretend we did. But he was a hard worker, and when someone dies all bets are of the table, and all animosity I harboured for the guy is gone. Because a mother’s lost her son, a daughter’s lost her father. He did what he could. We were under a lot of pressure to continue the band, and it’s funny, I was looking back over some of the Bad Company with Brian Howe

It was hard, and we fell apart, and we were all pretty fucked up at the time but this was really….when Peter Grant went into seclusion, Swan Song and Zeppelin broke up, Robert and Jimmy left Peter Grant’s management, we were pretty much on our own. When Paul left, we just kind of twiddled our thumbs for a couple of years. I went

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Simon continued about that time:

concerts [on YouTube], and some of the comments that accompany songs, there are a lot of people who liked Brian Howe, who thought he was a better singer, in some ways, then Paul. I’m not suggesting that at all, I much prefer Paul’s singing hands down. But we did keep the name alive. I think had we not gone with another singer, I think the band would have died and that would have been it.

That decade of the seventies was bookended by tragedy, with Joplin, Morrison and Hendrix at the start, and Keith Moon and Bonham towards the end. I take it from how you speak, you are aware of how lucky you are to have survived it?

I gave up drinking and drugs years ago and that certainly did help. It took me a while, I won’t lie, but it did take me quite a while to put it all behind me.

But, I am a survivor, a lot of my friends didn’t make it, but I help. I’m involved in a couple of societies, charities that help kids with addiction and it keeps me on the straight and narrow.

Now, with your solo albums, do you find yourself measuring your work to what you created in the past?

No, my creed is that ‘I just want to make music that I like’. I know it’s not going to sell. I’m beyond that, I’m kind of a dinosaur, and I’m out of that loop.

I make songs that I like. Fortunately, the only reason I would like them to sell is just for my own insatiable ego.

It’s not going to make me a lot of money, and the three albums that I’ve made, I can look back with pride and say ‘You know what? They were pretty damn good!’ As long as my kids like them, then that’s all I need, that’s good enough for me.

You have a very powerful, bluesy voice and I guess that comes from years of doing backing vocals to Paul Rodgers?

Paul’s singing and my singing are miles apart. He’s very soulful, I’m much more melodic. I’m more McCartney and I guess Paul’s more Otis Redding.

He’s a phenomenal singer and he gets

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better and better with age. I did sing before Free and Bad Company. I had a band called Heatwave and I was the lead singer. So I’ve always sung, but when Paul came along obviously we started out as a sort of Blues-based band, harmonies were not really required until we came to do ‘Tons of Sobs’ [1969]. There was a song called ‘Over the Green Hills’, a little acoustic song that Paul came up with.

He wanted to do these harmonies, [sings] ‘La la la la’ with me, him, and Andy Fraser. We did this three-part harmony and it was like ‘Wow, that’s nice!’ So really, I became a backup singer from then on, and did the harmonies on ‘Feel Like Making Love’ and ‘Shooting Star’ [both from ‘Straight Shooter’]. Then I got to write my own song. I did a couple songs that I wrote with Bad Company, and I co-wrote the song ‘Bad Company’.

That was a big lift for my songwriting prowess. That really put my kids through college that song, it’s amazing.

Looking at your upcoming show for Stageit.com*, are you prone to

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throwing in surprises or obscure tracks at those events that don’t get the attention they deserve?

Very good question. Yes, is the short answer. I am putting in a couple of things that probably people haven’t heard. And I’ve asked people to ‘ask for their requests’. I’ve had a couple of requests and I’ve been like ‘wow, I barely remember that song!’ ... [something from] the ‘Kossoff Kirke Tetsu Rabbit’ album [1972], which is in some ways a solo album. Someone asked for a song called ‘Dying Fire’, which I think was the first song I ever wrote and I’ve got to dust that one off, and it’s actually really nice. I am going to do a couple of the hits, of course I am. But I’m a little limited in what I can do by myself, but I am going to do some backing tracks, I’ve got my studio here. So I will be playing with me, backing myself on a couple of songs. But there will be a couple of surprises I guarantee. *Interview conducted before 18th December.

Can you see any plans for 2021 as yet?

Oh yes, now we have the vaccine coming round the corner, though I don’t see ‘us’ playing until this time next year. I was talking with Mick Fleetwood recently, because everyone is just dying [to tour], like greyhounds waiting for that rabbit to come around the corner and the traps to spring open.

We are all dying to get out there. I said, ‘How about we go out on a package tour with Fleetwood Mac, Bad Company, Aerosmith and the Eagles all on one bill?’ [Laughs]. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’ There are plans currently, I can’t reveal anything yet, and I don’t wanna jinx it.

But, it will be late 2021.

I spoke to Arthur Brown recently, and even he is looking forward to touring next year, and I know you’ve crossed paths in the past?

It’s funny you should mention Arthur Brown, and package tours, because Free was involved in one of the great

package tours of the late sixties. It was opened by Free, we would have twenty minutes, then it was The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, then it was Joe Cocker, the Small Faces and The Who. All on one bill. That was a helluva show, I can guarantee you. Back then, The Who were at the height of their powers. In 1969, they were the best live band in the world. They really were absolutely stunning. You know Moony [Keith Moon] was only about 19, and an incredible drummer. You had the Small Faces with Steve Marriott, and they were all in their early twenties and they were peaking; Joe Cocker had the big hit, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. It was just a magical night, and we got to see it for about twenty-five shows. It was stunning.

One final thing Simon: Last year (2019), we celebrated fifty years of Woodstock. Is it true Free or even Paul Rodgers turned down the festival?

Ah! What happened was, we were in New York. Yes, we were in New York

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doing the Blind Faith tour. And we had, I believe, a week off. I remember walking into my manager’s hotel room, Tony Glover, Tony Glover from Island records, and he’s on the phone talking to someone, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said ‘Listen, there is this festival upstate, it’s about five hours away. We got no gear, it’s going to rain, do you want to do it or you can have two or three days off ?’ I think Paul was with me or maybe he heard a half an hour later, but we emphatically said ‘No! We don’t want to do it’. And that was Woodstock. I think we as a band told our management, ‘No, no, no fucking way are we going to do it’, and we turned it down. The only three days we had off, we weren’t going to slap all the way upstate. So yeah, we turned it down [laughs].

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Dedicated To: Paul Francis Kossoff 14 September 1950 – 19 March 1976 Andrew McLan Fraser 3 July 1952 – 16 March 2015 Raymond “Boz” Burrell 1 August 1946 – 21 September 2006 Brian Anthony Howe 22 July 1953 – 6 May 2020 officialsimonkirke.com www.facebook.com/ SimonKirkeOfficial

12 Limbs

... and Music with Teeth!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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A band made up of three Russian dentists? We are sure there is a ‘three Russian dentists walk into a music venue ...’ joke in there somewhere, but don’t reach for the laughing gas just yet, because, er ... brace yourselves, 12 Limbs are really rather great!

Formed way back in 2003 (where else other than dental school?), this unique indie rock trio, who’s line-up consists of Ben (lead vocals / keyboards}; Art (guitar / bass) and Roman (drums) hail from Chelyabinsk, also known as ‘the meteor city’, and finally drilled in to the UK music scene two years ago.

Since the lockdown, Ben, Art and Roman have been entertaining fans by releasing new and original songs, with acommpanying videos, every month. Their latest single, ‘Memoirs’, released last November, is a call to arms to stand strong during these uncertain times. Their strongest single to date, ‘Memoirs’ is infinitely better than an unknown frothy pink substance in a papercup.

There were healthy smiles all round when we recently got in touch with Ben for an oral examination. In the following interview, he takes us back to 12 Limbs’ roots, gives us an insight into the band’s forthcoming debut album and tells us how 2021 is the year that the Russians are coming to make a tired old UK indie scene

decayed by last year’s relative inactivity spit out its dentures.

Firstly, hello Ben and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Could we start by asking where, when and how 12 Limbs got together and could you introduce us to your members?

First of all we‘re happy to hear you liked our track! It was the beginning of our study in medical university ... we were studying in dental school. Roman sat next to me and played virtual drums with his pointing fingers on the table, while the professor left the classroom for a minute. That sparked our first conversation about our passion in music. That was back in 1999. The same year, we started rehearsing behind the scenes of the university main hall, and went on to win a local bands competition for students. Our band was called The Others and thinking back on that award winning diploma, it makes us smile, it meant so much to us then, but hold now power today. Three years later, we moved to Ekaterinburg for the final stage of our study. This city is famous for its rock bands - unlike Chelyabinsk. The progressive spirit of the big city inspired us to dream big about the music. We made our first record in the studio, and started jamming with local musicians. Searching for the permanent rehearsal space, we met Art, who worked as a sound engineer at the concert hall. He was a shy, small town

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boy, obsessed with music. His multi-instrumental and producing skills brought us to an absolutely new level in making music. So our three piece got together in 2003. Some footage from those times is used in our video ‘In My Room’.

You hail from Chelyabinsk in Russia.

As you are the first Russian band that we have featured, could you give us an introduction to your home city and its music scene?

There’s an image of Chelyabinsk as a ‘harsh’ city across Russia. Like Manchester in the UK, but without the glorious music scene. The steel industry, bad ecology and working class people shape the specific atmosphere there. The only famous band from the city emerged in the ‘70s.

Ironically, the drummer of this band helped us to get on the local TV back in 2006. If we’re talking about modern Russian rock scene, Chelyabinsk has nothing to be proud of. We are doing our best to bring the fame to beloved city.

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How do you feel that Chelyabinsk has shaped the sound and outlook of 12 Limbs and what other influences, musical or otherwise, have informed you as musicians?

When we started, we were inspired by the indie rock wave of mid 2000s. We covered Kings of Leon, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and all that stuff trying to find our unique sound.

It was at a time before the advent of social media and we could hardly get any real feedback from the people.

After performing several shows, during which we sang a mixture of covers and our own original material, we realised the power of ‘word of mouth’ in the city. But it wasn’t enough to break somewhere else at those times.

We noticed you have been together for seventeen years. During this time, how have the band evolved into the band we know today and having recently been gaining a following in the UK, why do you feel that now is the right time for music fans over here to catch onto 12 Limbs?

Our band is like a long running TV series. We had the first season from 2003 to 2007, which ended up with nothing, for the reasons mentioned above. It was purely local activity at that time. In the final episode of it, we went to Moscow with demo CDs and visited all the record labels that existed in Russia at that time. They’ve shown no commercial interest at all in our music. The second season started in 2019, when all three of us found ourselves in Moscow. All the other musical projects that we’d been in had ended. We just had no people around who really wanted to go on with music.

There were a few talented musicians out there, we tried to align with them, but for one reason or another, we couldn’t make things work. So we took a second chance at forming our own band and our old chemistry sparked immediately - being empowered with better musical skills ,we gained working with other musicians in between the two seasons.

Your latest single, ‘Memoirs’ is a warning about standing strong

during the pandemic. Could you tell us a bit more about the idea behind the track?

Knowing our long story, you can imagine how mad we were to realise that we can’t play live anywhere in the world this year. Even the trendiest people in the industry admitted that online gigs suck, and a live show is impossible to recreate in any other way. Spending 2019 writing the tracks, we planned to start live activity in the spring of 2020. We felt as if we were being hoaxed by some evil powers (and they can be named), cursed and robbed by the destiny. So the track was born out of despair.

‘Memoirs’ also leads us to ask, how have the band coped both personally and professionally during these unprecedented times?

We concentrated on creating new stuff like all the other artists are being forced to do right now. Building our following is our primarily purpose at the moment.

Traditionally, rock bands would build

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their fan base by playing as many live gigs as they could. And that was our plan as well. We were ready for the road musically and physically. The internet was flooded with so much musical content by aspiring and successful artists, long before the pandemic. Now it’s a tsunami of new music as artists have nothing to do but record. Rock music isn’t really a genre that’s ever gone viral online, it can hardly compete there with rap, pop and electro. All these thoughts lead us to the decision to concentrate more than we planned on visuals.

During the course of the pandemic, you have been releasing new and original songs each month, complete with accompanying videos. Could you tell us a bit about the tracks that you have released aside from ‘Memoirs’ and are there any plans to compile them on a physical format at some point?

Suffering from the lack of live shows, we filmed a live performance of five tracks in August. We picked the tracks that show the full scale of our genre spectrum. We are to release the next video from this pack called ‘Understand’, which reminisces on good-old Oasis-ish britpop, enriched with live strings section. We have the pure commercial pop rock sound of the song ‘Anesthesia’, we change to semi-acoustic, yet unreleased ‘Waterloo’. The fifth video is ‘Millions of Miles’, which represents our indie

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electro direction of evolution.

We are also told that your debut album is planned for 2021. What can we expect from it?

The most comfortable number of the tracks in the album of 12 Limbs is …

13. We can guarantee this baker’s dozen (in Russia we call it devil’s dozen) won’t sound like one long song.

We hate to write even two tracks people can confuse with each other.

There goes the process of finding the balance between traditional rock stuff, that still influences us from 2000s, and modern electro based indie tracks. So there’ll be a gentle blend of the last twenty years of musical history. Thanks to the pandemic, we keep writing new tracks and there is plenty of choices.

Could you give us an insight into the usual writing and recording process of a 12 Limbs song?

In most cases, it starts with a short catchy piece of melody, accompanied by guitar or piano, written by one of the band members. Then we develop it to the full-scale track with pseudo-English or mumbling vox, at our home studio.

We get the atmosphere of the track at this stage. Listening to this demo, I write the actual lyrics later. Usually, it happens on the planes. After recording the new demo with the lyrics for three or four tracks, I go to a London-based studio, sometimes accompanied by Roman or Art. There, I work with my

English production team, polishing the lyrics and vocals. Returning to Moscow with the finished vocal tracks, the band mix and master the song.

You are known to switch instruments mid-performance. How important is the members’ ability to be able to play a range of instruments to the sound of 12 Limbs both on record and on stage and for those who have never witnessed one of your live shows, what can they expect?

If a man can swim, he can swim in any waters. We have to change the instruments because the songs we write are quite different and demand various colours. Lately we bought a ‘comb’, that’s what we called a keytar. Ben used it to play solo parts in a number of tracks. We love the powerful way our songs sound live. In a perfect world, we would record tracks in the big studio fully live.

As ‘Memoirs’ is very much a song about fighting back amidst the current situation the world has found itself in, what do you feel that musicians and others in the music industry need to do in order to ensure that the music scene returns to full strength once we return to some sort of normality?

guarantee they will be lifted forever and never comes back. Planning for long tours a year upfront should be forgotten, we believe. The industry has to act quick, organizing big shows in shorter periods of time - and spontaneously. Otherwise, there will be a constant risk of losses in case the virus comes back. See you on our live show whenever and wherever it will happen!

Thank you for a wonderful interview.

We wish you all the best for 2021 and the future.

‘Memoirs’ is out now on Right Track / Universal Records. www.12limbs.com www.facebook.com/ 12limbsband

Unfortunately, there’s not much can be done from the side of the industry.

Once the restrictions are lifted, it will reсover quickly. But no one can

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The Priscillas

Interview by Peter Dennis.

Holloway Queens 98

Formed in 2003 in Holloway, North London, the terminally cool The Pricillas are a pleasing amalgamation of power-pop, glam and garage punk.

Having performed with the likes of The Cramps and The Damned and terrorised audiences from the UK to the USA, I decided it was high time to catch up with lead singer Jenny Drag.

Can you start by telling me about your musical lineage. What first fired your interest in music? Who influenced you then and who influences you now?

My personal faves as a kid started off with stuff like The Beatles from early memory. We often had the radio on and my parents and siblings played lots of records on the hi-fi, so I remember music ranging from traditional Irish music to pop, country, classical, punk, rock, folk. I took piano lessons and was involved in mainly vocal music at school. My brother Jim, he plays guitar, and I would sing together and write songs from an early age. We shared a house when we moved out of the family home and had a basement studio that we had put together. I found a local music video channel when I was in high school called U-68 that played lots of underground music and British imports. Also, college radio and a station out of New York called WLIR exposed me to lots of new music at the time ... I was a DJ for a little while on a pirate station as well. Now, I wouldn’t

say I’m influenced by any particular band as such, but there are definitely some great bands and musicians on smaller labels, or not yet signed I’ve gotten into over the past several years ... and some I have worked with ... like Otherworldly Things, Marc O, Belle Scar, Mum Dad and the Kids, Mz Moxy.

London, and Holloway, in particular seem very important to you. What do these locations mean to you as an artist?

Legend has it, The Priscillas met in the now defunct all-female Holloway Prison. This has never been verified or disproved. Let’s just say, we spent a lot of time in the area ...

What was the reason for forming the band? How easy was it to find three other people with the same vision?

I moved over from New Jersey in the early 2000s after having had bands of my own for years, playing the NYC circuit. I searched for musicians, did some auditions, but the girls who were starting to form The Priscillas got in touch with me through word of mouth.

Apparently, the founding drummer, Mavis used to see me walking around Camden Town and thought I looked cool. The rest is ... herstory ...

The band’s line-up has fluctuated over the years. A good or a bad thing?

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The fluctuating line-up has mainly been due to life-style changes. The original fellow founding members all eventually went on to have families and other careers. That was never on the cards for me and since our fans never lost interest in us, I thought it would be silly to stop. We haven’t been as active as I’d have liked over recent years, mainly due to changing line-ups, but we’ve had some great opportunities and done some cool little tours, shows, festivals, radio/TV and events. Over the years we’ve played from basement bars in New York to the top of the Gherkin in London! We decided a while ago to have stand-ins for when someone was unavailable so that’s helped us to not miss out on things we really want to do.

Last year, Lisa was on hiatus so rather than put everything on hold, Jola from Adam Ant’s band played drums with us while Adam was off tour. That was great fun. And Dieselle May stepped in on guitar for Val when we played with Rose McDowall, which for me was a dream come true, being a long-time Strawberry Switchblade fan.

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How does the current line-up gel together?

You tell me! You were at the Electric Ballroom show. We hadn’t actually all played together in that line-up for over a year, come to think of it! So, I’d say we snapped back into it pretty quickly, after one rehearsal!

It’s been eleven years since your debut album, ‘10,000 Volts’. Why so long and when can we expect another album?

Yes, regrettably, we haven’t released anything for a long time. It’s not to say I’m not writing all the time. I have a ton of song ideas to get through. We’re all in various other projects too. I’m involved in an electronic pop band called The Mild Perils and Val plays bass with Lene Lovich. We’ve written some new stuff inspired by the plague, like I’m sure many others have. Who ever could’ve predicted we’d get a plague in our life-time in case the well ran dry with inspiration?! Not to mention all the other nonsense that’s

happening at the moment. A plethora of material which will no doubt be making an appearance if I ever get my stand-up comedy career going!

You’ve performed and been well received all over Europe. What makes your sound resonate with foreign audiences?

We adore playing in Europe. It just seems fresh for some reason. I think in the UK, particularly in London people tend to not show their emotions as much. I guess it’s either down to being generally more reserved, or the fact that live music is easier to come by here so we take it for granted. Not sure. We’ve made Spain our home away from home and it’s always such a blast to tour there. Not to mention being treated so well with nice food and wine, music gear taken care of, warm hospitality ... the weather! It just never seems to be a struggle, even if we’re playing nine shows in seven days in eight different cities. We also have a great tour manager / booking agent there which also helps a lot.

How has the band functioned / promoted itself during the current Coronavirus malarkey?

We’ve gone a bit quiet, to be honest, which I don’t think is such a bad thing.

We’re keeping busy with various different things like taking courses ... and playing with kitties ... the important stuff! But like I said, we have been inspired by the madness. We tried doing some zoom rehearsals but the latency was hard to deal with. So, when we were asked to play the Ballroom, it was like a godsend. We have all been very cautious throughout lock-down and beyond so literally hadn’t seen each other for five months!

How was it playing the socially distanced gig at The Electric Ballroom with Glen Matlock and his band last September? How did you approach a gig like that?

It was brilliant playing the Ballroom. I hadn’t played there for ages.. We supported (in a previous line-up) Seasick Steve in 2007 I believe, which

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was a hoot. This time it was fabulous but quite different. We were very excited to play a proper show again and it was great, albeit with a different atmosphere. The staff handled it very well with COVID-safety precautions: temperature check upon arrival, seating spaced out, masks worn at the bar ...

And of course, playing with a Sex Pistol, it was extra cool. We’ve known Glen Matlock and Neal X for a number of years. Lisa was in Sigue Sigue Sputnik with Neal in the ‘90s so they had a nice little catch up. Really glad we did it. The audience was fantastic, despite having to stay in their seats, we felt the love.

Finally, what can people expect from The Priscillas over the next twelve months? Can you even plan in this current climate?

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If only I had a crystal ball. But the ice has been broken with meeting up for rehearsals and song writing so more of that is definitely in the plans. The shame about London now is what in the industry is surviving. Some of our favourite studios have recently closed down which is quite devastating. Much more needs to be done to save the music. Please, government and people with disposable income, if you’re reading this, we need help! In the meantime, we just have to keep positive and come up with new ideas.

It’s hard but there really is no alternative. www.thepriscillas.co.uk www.facebook.com/ thepriscillasband

On the Trail of the Awesome Rhyme Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Never ones to rest on their laurels, Big Stir Records move into 2021 with the signing of Florida-born but Texas-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, film composer and visual artist extraordinaire John Lanthrop, a one person musical and visual tour-de-force who is gearing up to take the new year by storm with the release of his fourth album under the name The Stan Laurels.

‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ comes two years after his previous album, ‘Maybe’, the soundtrack to the Phillip Lybrand directed comedy-drama ‘Maybe Shower’.

‘Maybe’ was something of a breakthrough in the power-pop genre, so much so that it found The Stan Laurels being played on radio stations all around the world and being included on a number of “Best of 2018” lists. If the success of ‘Maybe’ is anything to go by, ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’, released on 23rd January, The Stan Laurels’ finest work to date, will almost definitely be greeted with even more praise and exposure.

For a one-man outfit, The Stan Laurels make an awe-inspiringly enormous sound, one that draws influence from right across the musical spectrum, from sixties pop such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Zombies through to classical musicians such as Claude Debussy via The Flaming Lips and ‘70s

stadium and progressive rock monoliths such as Yes. However, despite the fact that the music Lanthrop makes owes much to his vast knowledge of musical history, nothing on offer on ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ sounds at all familiar. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic and endlessly enthralling album packed with a myriad of intriguing twists and turns, where the light and dark suggested its title collide beautifully to form the most complete realisation of this truly gifted songwriter’s unique vision so far.

To learn more about what, mere moments into 2021, is already likely to be one of your favourite albums of the year and gain a better understanding of the wonderful world of The Stan Laurels, we recently got in touch with Lanthrop to conduct the following interview.

Firstly, hello John and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Could we start by asking how you became interested in music as a listener and how you came to start making music yourself?

Hello and thank you so much for inviting me! I am honoured to be here.

Well, music has been a part of my life literally since infancy. My parents were constantly playing music of all kinds.

They had a massive vinyl collection, and played records every day until

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the wee hours. They have pretty great taste, too. We would sing a lot, and apparently I’m told I could carry a tune decently at a very early age – my mom still has cassette tapes of me singing stuff like Billy Joel’s ‘Movin’ Out’ [‘The Stranger’, 1977] when I was three or so … I guess it was an early form of karaoke. My dad was (and still is) a drummer, so I would always get behind the kit and mess around, or jump on the organ at my grandparents’ place. We also had a mandolin in the house (for some reason) and other random instruments, and I would play anything I could get my hands on. I always thought I was just playing around as a kid – and I was – but it turns out I was also embarking on a lifelong pursuit of playing music!

Why did you choose to work under the name The Stan Laurels?

This is a not-subtle-at-all homage to Stan Laurel, as I am a huge Laurel and Hardy fan. I thought it would be funny to be a “The Somethings” band even though I’m just one dude doing it all,

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kind of to confuse people (and it does).

And to perplex them even more, I made my “The Somethings” the plural of an actual human being. So, yeah, a lot of people don’t seem to get it, but it’s pretty simple: I love Stan Laurel, so I created a band called The Stan Laurels.

On 23rd January, you release your fourth album, ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ via Big Stir Records. The album is far from “another fine mess”, but could you tell us a bit about its writing and recording process?

Haha, nice reference and thank you!

Almost all of my songs start with me playing around on guitar or keyboards and finding a cool chord progression while humming melodies over them.

When I hit on something that seems to work, I keep at it until I have something I really like. Then I record it on a portable recorder so I don’t forget it. I have a folder of well over a hundred of these little bits and add to it almost daily, so when it’s time to write a full song or even a whole record, I

can listen to them, figure out what sparks, and start arranging full songs.

In 2019 I wanted to follow up my record ‘Maybe,’ but didn’t have time to do a full album (when you do everything yourself, the amount of hours involved is absurd), so I released ‘Lost & Found’ as a single and people seemed to really dig it. In that song, I very purposefully focused on the arrangement to make it quite varied in mood and unpredictable … I like how it turned out, so in 2020 I set out to write a full album of songs in this manner, and ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ was born!

‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ is your first release for Big Stir Records and you are the label’s first signee for 2021. How did you come to be involved with Big Stir Records and how has the experience been so far?

Indeed, and I couldn’t be happier about that! So Nick Frater, another Big Stir artist, and I were on a Christmas song compilation together: ‘A Kool Kat

Kristmas Vol. 3,’ released by Kool Kat Musik in 2019. I liked all the songs, but his ‘Christmas is Cancelled’ was a particular favourite. I think I messaged him out of the blue on Facebook telling him I liked it and he reciprocated, telling me he was listening to my back catalogue and digging it. I then listened to more of his stuff, and it turns out we’re big fans of each other’s music.

We’re also into a lot of the same things and hit it off quickly as friends, so we message each other quite frequently.

When he was signed to Big Stir, I congratulated him and asked how he liked it. (I’d been noticing Big Stir’s roster and releases being really good stuff.) He raved about Christina and Rex from Big Stir, and offered to “introduce” me to them, which he did via messaging. Come to find out Rex and Christina were already aware of my music and enjoying it - who knew? We started chatting and the rest is history.

It’s just beginning, but it has been super fun so far and Christina and Rex are every bit as cool and supportive as Nick said they were!

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In 2020, you made a guest appearance on fellow Big Stir artist Nick Frater’s album ‘Fast & Loose’.

Could you tell us a bit about your contribution to ‘Fast & Loose’ and aside from Nick, which other artists on the Big Stir roster do you have admiration for?

Nick told me about the album he was writing (shout out to ‘Fast & Loose’!) and asked if I’d play drums on the instrumental opening track. He was doing a sort of funky Zappa-like early ‘70s thing with cool guitars and organs and wanted a strong Led Zeppelin-ish beat. He knows my favourite drummer and biggest influence is of course the great John Bonham, so my style seemed to fit the song. We discussed the beat, swapping ideas, and then I went to town and sent it to him – it all came about pretty fast. As for other Big Stir artists, honestly, everything I have heard on the label has been outstanding, but some of my particular favourites are In Deed, Spygenius, The Corner Laughers, Simmons, Dolph Chaney, Irene Peña, and of course,

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The Armoires. But to be fair, there are many Big Stir bands I haven’t yet had a chance to listen to!

The Stan Laurels’ back catalogue is equally as impressive as ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’, with your last two albums, 2018’s ‘Maybe’ and 2013’s ‘Billi & Theodore: Music from the Motion Picture’ both being movie soundtracks. For those unaware of the movies that these soundtracks accompany, could you tell us about them and how you came to provide their music?

Thank you, I appreciate that! As for the how, NETWORKING! I met writer / director Ronald Short at a sort of “office party” held at a club, as our wives were working together at the time. We all became friends and I gave him a copy of my debut album, ‘Death of the Sun’ [2009], which I had just released. He liked it and asked if I would compose the score and a few original songs for his upcoming film, ‘Billi & Theodore.’ The writing, performing, and producing of ‘Death of

of the Sun’ was such an immense undertaking for me, as so much of it I was teaching myself and doing for the first time. But after having that release under my belt, I felt at least somewhat confident that I could maybe write a film score … I mean, a lot of my music has cinematic components as it is. That said, I was also completely insecure and thought – to use a mixed metaphor - the whole house of cards could crash and burn at any time! But it turned out to be a great decision for both of us, as we are both quite happy with the film and the music! A few years later, this led to Phillip Lybrand – who was the editor on ‘Billi & Theodore’ - asking me to do the score and songs for his film ‘Maybe Shower.’ We discussed many different music styles, but ultimately decided on doing a soundtrack comprised almost solely of original rock songs. This made me happy because I was able to do a full power-pop album that would work well for the movie but also be just as listenable detached from the film. ‘Billi & Theodore’ is a very cool comedy / drama about best friends reuniting after

a long hiatus, in the buddy / road trip genre. ‘Maybe Shower’ is a great comedy / drama in the ‘Dazed and Confused’ [1993] vein about three friends who are all young and single and all find out at the same time that they might be pregnant; hilarity (and terror for some) ensues. I highly recommend everyone check these out!

How did you find the experience of film scoring in comparison to just making a so to speak ‘normal’ album?

Scoring is a very different experience; you literally have to watch the film while composing to ensure you not only get the mood right, but also the timing of everything needs to be perfect. And it’s a balancing act between capturing the feel and helping to create it, as music adds so much to a scene. Even writing original songs for film can be tricky, as sometimes it also needs to be tailored to scenes, timing-wise, and the lyrics (usually) need to fit the scene and movie. It’s cool because you’re sort of like a train

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on a track – you just have to stay on that rail. Whereas when writing an album not connected to a film, there is no rail. You can go all over the place (and I usually do!) It’s great to have that freedom, but I also like writing music that serves a greater purpose than “just” releasing an album for the sake of having music out there. And I’m a huge fan of movies, so any time I get the chance to work in the industry, I am happy to do it.

The Stan Laurels is very much a one-man outfit, with you being responsible for the songs, the vocals and all the instruments. However, we were struck by the sheer enormity of the sound on ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’. We can imagine this might be a long list, but what instruments do you actually play and as we move into 2021 and there is more promise of live music getting back up and running, have you thought about how you will recreate the sound we hear on the record in a live setting?

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That’s a wonderful compliment, thank you! Well, the list is not as long as you might think; it’s just the basics, really: guitar, of course (acoustic and electric), bass, drums, all kinds of keyboards, and I dabble a bit in banjo – which I bought and started learning for the ‘Billi & Theodore’ soundtrack. But I definitely do like to have lots of layers in the music, so you will often hear a ton of different guitar and keyboard tracks together overlapping one another, adding to the “largeness” of the sound. The live show is unfortunately a tough premise, for many reasons; one, of course, being that we don’t know when (if?) everything will become “normal” again. I had a live band several years back and we played a few shows, but all of us have such busy lives and so many things going on that it’s quite difficult to coordinate schedules for practices and shows. But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer so I wouldn’t rule it out completely, but I would say if I do play live, it will probably just be for special one-off events. Or perhaps stripped-down acoustic shows …

We can hear a lot of potential influences on the sound your music, from The Beatles to Debussy via The Breeders, The Kinks, The Zombies and The Flaming Lips and there even appears to be a bit of a ‘70s stadium rock and progressive rock influence in there somewhere, but for those new listeners who might be about to discover your music when ‘There is a Light Without the Dark’ is released on 23rd January, how would you describe the music you make and who would you cite as your key musical influences?

This is the ultimate question, isn’t it?!

So, the bands you listed are definitely some of my biggest influences, but The Beatles are unquestionably number one. I know I am not alone or original in any way by saying this, but it’s simply the truth! They are just everything to me musically. You can also add The Beach Boys/Brian Wilson in terms of always making melody the most important focus, but also trying to use sounds not usually found in “traditional” pop or rock music as well

interesting, non-standard song structures. I feel fairly confident in saying at this point in my musical career, I have created a pretty original sound with The Stan Laurels … it’s hard to pin it down and hard to say it sounds like this or that. But don’t worry - I’m not dodging the question!

Describing it is a tall order, as it’s so varied; one could simplify it by saying it’s (usually) guitar-based indie or alt rock, but there are countless bands one could say that about. What sets me at least a little bit apart, I hope, is I try to throw out the bits that are “meh” and just keep the good stuff. I think I trim the fat pretty well. It’s all about being harmonious and melodic first and foremost, and I do that with all kinds of different moods and sounds. And especially lately, I also try to make songs not too repetitive, add twists and turns, and go places the listener does not expect to go. In terms of comparisons, it’s fair to say if you’re someone who loves The Beatles, The Breeders, Badfinger, The Flaming Lips (especially ‘The Soft Bulletin’ [1999] through ‘At War [with the Mystics’] era

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[2006], The Cars, and early Yes (there’s that ‘70s prog-rock influence), you will hopefully dig The Stan Laurels. And I realize there may very well be only like four people out there who REALLY LOVE all those bands … and I’m one of them!

We were also struck by the level of songwriting craftsmanship on the album. We are told that opening track and recent single ‘Florida Man’ is partially autobiographical. Could you tell us the story behind this song and as a songwriter, what do you feel makes a great song?

Wow, thank you! I am from Florida, which in America is often the butt of the joke and Floridians are known for being just super weird and utterly ridiculous … like, ‘Tiger King’ levels of absurdity. And for good reason. The stereotype is pretty spot-on. The song is about the fact that I sometimes still do stupid things in my life, despite being well over 20 years removed from living in Florida. Basically, you can take the man out of Florida, but you can’t

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necessarily take Florida out of the man. In the song, I sort of blame the dumb and immature things I did in my late teens and early 20s on Florida, singing, “like the old PSA, I learned it by watching you,” a reference to an old anti-drug commercial that became famous in a humorous way. What makes a great song to me is the magical combination of pleasant melodies over cool chord progressions/notes/riffs. It could be something quite complicated (like ‘South Side of the Sky’ [‘Fragile’, 1971], to bring up Yes again) or simple (like ‘My Little Corner of the World’ [‘I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’, 1997] by Yo La Tengo). It could have heavy, rocking guitars (like ‘I Want You to Want Me’ [‘In Color’, 1977] by Cheap Trick) or be completely mellow with no distortion (like ‘Hackensack’ [‘Welcome Interstate Managers’, 2003]

by Fountains of Wayne). The thing all of these songs have in common is strong melodic drive and that sort of magic that creates goose bumps when you hear it (or sometimes even when you just think of it). And that’s what makes a great song to me, which is

something I at least try to do in all of my work.

Finally, aside from the release of ‘There is No Light Without the Dark’, what else can we expect from during 2021?

Well, I’m always working on making more music! Can’t say when the NEXT one will be released, as this one isn’t even out yet, but you can count on me to be always creating something! I also do pop art, so there will be a ton more of that on the way in 2021. Gotta keep creating! I know no other way to be.

Thank you for a wonderful interview.

We wish you all the best for 2021 and for the future.

And thank you so much for having me, Alice and Scott. This has been fun and I am honoured to be included in Eighth Day Magazine!

‘There is No Light Without the Dark’ is released on 23rd January through Big Stir Records. thestanlaurels.com bigstirrecords.com/ the-stan-laurels www.facebook.com/ TheStanLaurels

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Dean Hutchinson In Yer Face!

Interview by Paul Foden Photography (this page) by MarthaFPhoto.

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I have known Dean “Fuckin’” Hutchinson for just a couple of years now and he’s one of the nicest chaps you’ll ever meet, both a charismatic and engaging blurk, always willing to have a chat with, well, just about anybody, luckily for me.

But beneath all that, his lyrics and onstage projection are angsty, delivered with both gusto and sincerity, bashing through a swathe of socio-political subject material, eg. injustice, inequality, racism, bigotry, capitalism ... i.e. the things that very much matter, and are worth making a stand upon.

Originally from County Durham, he now resides in Plymouth and he’s been a recognised cog in the town’s vibrant live DIY original-music community for a few years, as witnessed at 2019’s Plymouth Punx Picnic (Issue Thirteen, October 2019) where, as well as performing his own solo set, he joined headliners No-Robell onstage for a few raucous numbers, proceeding to gaffer-tape the drummer’s mouth and WILLY!!, mid-set.

As well as writing and recording his solo acoustic music, Dean holds down a job at The Pit and the Pendulum music pub, on Plymouth’s slightly hipsterish Ebrington Street, which was a last-minute co-host venue of the 2019 edition of Plymouth Punx Picnic. He’s a busy lad.

Dean’s latest EP, which is his third since he moved to Plymouth, but only his first online, according to his Bandcamp blurb, was written and recorded by himself.

There are three tracks on the EP. ‘Crash and Burn’ is song about realising that something is wrong and collectively changing things for the better, but not in a preachy way; just get off your arse and rise up (after the pub closes); ‘Drink Beer’ is a song about forgetting your troubles and just having a few drinks with your friends (nothing wrong with that) and ‘Almost Famous’ is my personal favourite of the EP as it deals with solving your own shortcomings, and is a bit of an ego-kicker.

Overall, and this isn’t a mates rates review, I’m giving this EP four stars out of five; it’s ballsy, plucky, it’s shouty, yet refined, and flicks the V’s at the establishment, whilst remembering to enjoy yourself (it’s later than you think!) So, it hits the spot, and is a great remedy if you’ve had that kind of day.

Greetings and thanks etc. out of the way, we took a socially-distanced seat each in Plymouth’s Skiving Scholar pub, opposite the university, in early August last year and chewed the cud over a few cold ones. Pour yourself a long drink and strap yourself in, as it was a lengthy interview ...

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Photograph by MarthaFPhoto

Photograph by Paul Foden

So, how did this kid from the North East happen to move to Plymouth?

music. Even the performance side was all just essays, which wasn’t really my cup of tea, so I got shifted out for reasons that are far and few detailed.

When I was kicked off the course, I nearly packed my bags and headed back home, but then we opened The Pit and the Pendulum, so I had a more valid reason to stay here. I was in student accommodation at the time, and started-off the new contract, then I found I was off the course, so I had no student loans coming in and, even though I was working full-time, it just didn’t cover the cost. So, when The Pit came along, I thought, ‘Oh, I can start putting gigs on myself, and make another venue in Plymouth, and it’s been going strong ever since, until COVID-19.

That was over six years ago, this September [2020], and I’d been in a touring band and I’d done loads of solo acoustic gigs in the North East, but the problem with there is that everything is so spread out, so it was really difficult to get gigs or get established, and even the smaller gigs were a pain in the arse. So, I slowly stopped doing it and worked in a factory instead, but I’ve got an education in music and it’s what I’m passionate about, but I was sat about not doing anything and I needed to do something about this, I needed to move as far away from the region as I could, without leaving the country, and actually go and do something. I applied for Plymouth University and packed my bags, jumped in my dad’s car and drove down here. I just kicked-on from there, and it’s been pretty solid ever since. Unfortunately, I got kicked off the course because I was doing more gigging than coursework and the course wasn’t exactly what it said it was, as it was more the academic side than actual

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What’s your role at The Pit and the Pendulum?

I’m the Assistant Manager and I book the bands. There’s me and my mate Adrian, he’s the Manager. The entire point behind The Pit is we wanted to create a pub that we wanted to drink in,

so we did. We put in a juke box, with plenty of rock music, a pool table, a massive selection of drinks at reasonable prices, and a good atmosphere, independent, making a community, rather than a random pub that you’d have one drink and leave, with all the Goths, Punks, Rockers, Metalheads, and everyone gets on with each other. The one rule of The Pit is ‘Don’t be a dick’, but I suppose everyone is, at some point.

What were your earliest musical influences, and how and when did you become quite angsty (not that you shouldn’t be, of course)?

[Laughs] My dad likes everything that he can. He listened to folk-artists, metalheads, progs; so much variety. I was spoilt for choice, but my personal influences were the Lefty folk side, artists like John Arberson and Robb Johnson, especially, who I’ve done quite a few gigs with, that was my insight into political music, without being too heavy-punk, writing stories of what you want to get across. Then I

got into heavier stuff, like Rise Against and bands like that, which started to influence myself, then to the point of seeing all these acoustic artists that have songs with meaning behind them but they don’t have that aggression. So, that’s how I became a shouty Northerner, which has worked quite well. Everyone’s got something to shout about and, if you’re given a stage, you’ve gotta talk about stuff.

I have been known to rant, but do my best to keep to the music and the socialist idealisms because, if we can all agree on something, then we can all be happy on that, whereas, if it’s all ‘Listen to me! Listen to me!’, then that’s a kind of Leftist fascism, which shouldn’t be a thing, but people are hard to convince these days.

With your onstage charisma and projection, and if you do make an album, do you intend touring with it, eg a mini-tour or a weekend tour, or maybe obtaining spots as support for touring bands/artists?

Weirdly, I did have a lot of plans for

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2020. I do have an album in the works, but it just keeps getting delayed. We’re about half the way done with it now, in the recording process, with a mix of songs people know and new material, and I did have a plan to do a southwest tour, like Exeter, Bristol, staying at mate’s houses and seeing bands while I’m there. I was supposed to be doing Two-Thousand Trees this year and I’ve been in talks with Tim Holehouse to do a UK tour with him because we get on really well, and he’s done several UK, European and US tours. He’s a fantastic musician, so maybe next year, once the album is done, we might do a joint-tour. We’ll have to see what happens, because I know he’s got a lot of new material in the works, too.

I think that’s what all musicians have been doing, right through Lockdown, writing new material. There’s always been ifs and buts, in plans, tours and stuff, but this was going to be my gig year, my make or break year, especially falling the high-profile gigs that I did the year before, but it totally didn’t happen, everything’s at a standstill, but it’s going to give me more time for

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rehearsal and recording, getting merch together, as you can’t travel much without the merch, as that’s what pays your train tickets, or your petrol, to get to the next gigs. It’s a double-edged sword, as I don’t necessarily want to make profit on my music, but I need to profit to get about and do it.

The plans are there, which is obviously a good thing, as you can then implement it when the gig ban is finally lifted?

There are plans, but nothing in writing.

As soon as gigs open up again, I’m right on it. In fact, I was possibly the first musician to play in Plymouth as I did the Café Kiss gig, and I had planned to play the following Friday at the Underground, but that was when we found out that all indoor gigs were getting postponed again.

What was the Café Kiss in aid of, and how did it come about?

For the past couple of years, when Pog [folk-punk band] visited from Brighton

to do either Philfest or Punx Picnic, and because they like to stay a couple of days in Plymouth, we needed something like a tick-over, to keep them in Plymouth, and maybe sell a few extra CDs. Thankfully, Mary who runs Café Kiss is more than happy to accommodate an afternoon or an evening gig, and because they’ve got a kitchen and a bar, and a licence inside and outside, they can put music on.

accommodate for us. We’ll just see who’s up for it and make it a fortnightly thing, just so everyone can get their foot back in the door. The difference between playing a room and playing a live gig is that, if no one’s played a live gig in six months, even in practice, everyone’s going to be rusty. It’s not easy to get people even back into the practice rooms as they’re not one hundred per cent comfy with that yet.

Was it all Acoustic? I missed it as I was up north for a non-COVID funeral.

When’s The Pit reopening?

It ran through a small vocal amp, but everyone was an acoustic artist. I didn’t even need a microphone, although the microphone was there. We’re trying to make it a more regular thing there, until gigs start up properly, as there’s nowhere really.

What, all acoustic?

Well, even just stripped-down versions of bands in Plymouth to come down as we’ve got the PA, and Mary will

That’s another thing we’re not sure about yet. We were hoping for early September [2020], but there might be another change of guidelines, so we’re basically holding out until we have it confirmed that it’s alright for us to reopen because, as we’re independent, we have no [financial] backing.

Back to the EP, what can you tell the readers about how the songs came about, what influenced them, your writing process and, also, your projection when you play your live solo set?

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Performing with No-Robell

Well, the songs ‘Crash and Burn’ and ‘Drink Beer’ are nearly a year old now, and I’ve always been meaning to get them both down on an EP, but last year I moved house a few times, so had no time to settle down. But, weirdly, at the start of [the first] lockdown, I had time and space with my girlfriend to organise a home studio and turn the spare room into an office, but then all my music equipment broke down, and I had to re-buy all that, then I had to sit-in and learn all the new software.

Then I said, ‘Right, I’m going to record an EP, here and now. I need to record something because I hadn’t done in ages!’ So, it’s been all over the place, with nowhere to just sit down and record, and I’ve been with Maker View [Plymouth PopPunk band] doing a side project, the vocal takes on that, but we couldn’t get into the studios for that. So I had all this new gear, I’ve got reasons to sit down and write and record, and the first one was ‘Crash and Burn’, as I open the majority of my sets with that.

It’s political, but not too on the nose political, it’s an interpretation of what I talk about. Then I thought of sticking

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a sing-along in there too. For a short EP, you need a good atmosphere, and ‘Drink Beer’ is a happy song, it’s jaunty, it makes you want to move and dance a bit, and sing along, but it’s a song about dealing with your mental health through alcohol; ‘Have a drink and it’ll be alright’. As long as you’re with mates and they’re musical, everything’s good. And ‘Almost Famous’ had been in my head for a little bit, but I hadn’t penned it down, so after a day recording, I started playing around with chords I thought that I had something good, worth writing down. The entire idea behind ‘Almost Famous’ is towards a disappointment in myself, about how slow I am to do things, like my EPs and merch. Gigs are no problem at all, but it’s the other, business side of being a musician that I really struggle with, like advertising, getting further out to play gigs, because I do them far and few.

The EP came about as a self-evaluation and self-analysation, that I can be better than what I’ve done, so why haven’t I? But I put their all into it, for whatever reason, or if you don’t have enough

faith in yourself. A lot of my material is about dealing with mental health, and about understanding that you can do what you want to do. If I had as much faith in myself as other people have in me, I’d be much further down the line but, you know, I’m getting there. The writing process is a funny one because I don’t really have a writing process.

Some songs are when I have an idea in my head and I just sit down and write them, about a subject that jumps out of my head, and those are the songs that take the longest, for me, because I don’t want the songs to be too structured.

Some of my best song ideas are just when I’ve had a few beers and something comes into my head, and I’ll grab the guitar and start bashing some chords out, then I’ll start talking absolute bollocks to myself, out loud, and there’ll be something that works.

With my ADHD I really struggle to focus sometimes, and a lot of stuff just falls out, and I can’t remember half of it, so I keep it in that Fall-Out format and, eventually, it just falls out similarly enough that I can glue it back together. Like ‘A Little to the Left’,

that’ll follow me to the grave.

‘A Little to the Left’ is on an earlier EP? It’s on the EP which is no longer available, because that was a hungover day in university, where I had eight songs, plus one I did ad-lib, recorded it all in a day in the studio, when I was supposed to be doing uni work, and I just couldn’t be arsed with it. I just mixed it in the full-access music suite there. It was really easy and I ripped about fifty copies of ‘Dean Hutchinson - Return to Roots’ and I’d sold it all few later, by my 23rd birthday, and donated some to Punx Picnic. I wrote on them “Dean Hutchinson. You can’t find this anywhere. It’ll make a really nice beer coaster”. I think Jack Hopkins found about five copies behind the Nowhere Inn couch, upstairs, in the flat. I don’t even have the master file any more, because it was on my university account. It’s going to be re-recorded, maybe under a different title.

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As you say, you started very young.

So when did you first play live and record your own material?

I’ve done probably about thirty EPs now, and my very first EP I recorded age thirteen, and there’s two songs from that EP that I still play. I’m just taking it really, really slow. I’ve been gigging live since I was ten, and my very first gig was at Saltburn Folk Festival, and that was because I’d written a song at school and, when we were at the festival, I wanted to sing my song, so I did it and everyone was really impressed. This same weekend, Jon Harvinson took my dad and found a guitar for us, an acoustic, and that’s when I started learning guitar but, because of my attitude, I got kicked out of lesson, so everything I do is self-taught, and learning from bands around the north-east. When it comes to musical instruments, I really piss my dad off. One year, either my 19th birthday or Christmas, he bought me a new guitar and an electric mandolin, on top of it, with the course book. So, he says ‘That’s a challenge, for you. Try

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and learn that.’ So, I went up to my room, then, a few hours later, I got shouted down for my dinner, and I came down with my mandolin and said ‘Dad, check this out!’ and I bashed out three songs on it, and my dad’s going ‘Fuck off. You’re supposed to take weeks over that; not just run up into your room, and come down after bashing out a load of songs three hours later.’

So, your current live set; do you plan it all out before, or have some sort of outline, or just play it all off the cuff?

Well, some people say ‘Drop ‘Drink Beer’, you don’t want to be remembered for that song.’ I’ll never be remembered for ‘Drink Beer’; I’ll be remembered for ‘A Little to the Left, and some of the more controversial songs that I do. ‘Drink Beer’ is just that one that I do, the drinky, shouty one, where everyone has a sip or two of their beer and join in. It’s not a comedy song, but it is a more light-hearted song. That’s why I bunged it onto the EP, as it’s an enjoyable song

that people want to join-in with, live.

Usually though, the set depends on the venue. I tend to put at least a guideline down so that I know where I’m going, and have a feel for the set, but also to save my voice, where I’ll put a less demanding one in, just to break it down and have a bit of a rest between songs, because it does take its toll on my vocals. Towards the end of the set is where I’m really shouting, especially with ‘A Little to the Left’, as there’s been so many times that I’ve been pissed singing it that, at the back end of it, I’ve nearly passed-out from holding out the ‘We’ll be aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalriiiiiiiiiiight!’ ending. My head just started spinning. Most sets start off with ‘Crash and Burn’, which is usually done slowly, but sometimes, depending on the length of the set, I’ll do it faster to get into stuff that I know people really want to hear, and get more punkier, and that leads into ‘Born to Die’ as ‘Crash and Burn’ finishes on the same note as Born to Die’ begins, and it means that I don’t have to stop in between; straight in. During afternoon gigs, I tend to remove the more sweary

numbers and keep the more sort of PC ones, but the problem is that most of my songs have some swearing in them because they need it. I try to make an effort to include ‘This Hurts’ [a very emotive ballad] in every set, that people tell me is well-written song that draws people’s emotions, and they really connect with, sometimes to the point of crying. It’s because of losing my mates [to suicide] left, right and centre, and that’s not supposed to happen to someone only in their mid-twenties, and the song is the only way that I could put across those feelings adequately. It’s fucking shit that they’re not here anymore, we survived that but they didn’t, so you should always raise a drink and remember who they were to you, especially when they were core members of your circle of friends. I played ‘This Hurts’ at a festival gig in Richmond, near Harrogate, in North Yorkshire, with a broken hand, my arm in a sling and a plectrum taped to my hand. And this giant of a dude, Kingsley, who became a great mate of mine, stood at the front, with piercings

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all over, Mohawk all spiked up, and his battle-jacket and huge boots on, and he was completely out of place with all the other people, but he stood there and was going ‘Yes, mate! Yeah!’, really getting into it. It was the end of my set, but he starts shouting for an encore, and then the crowd joined in, so I did ‘Separate Ways’, which is a fast, punky song, and he lost his shit to it, he’s gone mental. So, I finished up and he’s gone ‘I’m getting you a beer, right now!’, and I spent the rest of the day just drinking with him, and then I spent all the next day drinking with him, and every time we met-up we had a few beers. I only knew him for a year, and music was Life to him. I moved down here and, not long after, I heard that he had died, so the next gig, I did ‘Separate Ways’, but much slower, and it had more power and impact. I put that slower version on the ‘Remember the Good Times’ EP, which was recorded on a battery-powered Tascam 800B eight-track, which was time consuming, and I’ve still got the master for it somewhere, but I don’t think it’s digitally-transferable. I put it on

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MySpace. Remember that? That’s how long ago it was. It was all a learning curve, with being on the university course at the same time, and I didn’t even have a laptop; couldn’t afford one at the time.

Despite COVID-19 putting mockers on the gigging and recording scene, how has it affected you?

Mostly, I don’t know how to shut up now when I’m with someone because of working behind bars and being a musician, at the same time.

True! That’s about half of the stuff we talked about! And on that bombshell, thanks, Dean, for doing the interview. deanhutchinson. bandcamp.com/releases www.facebook.com/ dchmusic

It definitely has everything anyone would need, or want, to know about these eventful two years as the band formed and began to consolidate and grow into the phenomenon it eventually became.

The emphasis is firmly on the two main members – Blackmore and Dio, even to the photographs which adorn almost every page. We get a few images of drummer Cozy Powell, but you have to look closely to find images with the rest of the musicians. But that doesn’t really bother me.

In the Shadow of the Wizard: Rainbow 1975 - 1976

By Jerry Bloom

Review by Martin Hutchinson.

For fans of ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, this book is a ‘must have’. For the rest of us music lovers, it’s a great look behind the scenes of an embryonic legendary band.

Covering just the first two years of the band, it covers how the band was formed and changes (only two of the five band members appeared on the two albums covered in this period Blackmore himself and singer Ronnie James Dio).

What bothers me most is that it’s an expensive book to cover just two years (OK, it IS a Limited Edition), but a lot of the photographs (which most of the money will have been spent on) are not very good quality. Because they are photos taken at concerts, they are mainly grainy and indistinct. But that is my only criticism of this obvious labour of love.

Publisher: Wymer Publishing ISBN: 978-1-912782-41-3 Hardback - A4. 224 pages.

Illustrated throughout. www.wymeruk.co.uk

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Frenchy’s Rants Happy New Year!

The twenty-second part in an exclusive series by Flicknife Records co-founder Marco ‘Frenchy’ Gloder.

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So this is 2021, “a happy New Year, I hope you have fun, let’s hope it’s a good one ...”, as Lennon once sang.

Personally, I don’t feel any different.

It doesn’t feel like much has changed for the better yet but there is still 360-ish days for all that to happen!

Maybe, just maybe, 2021 will be a great year. Let’s have a look at what will happen during this new year, the good, the bad and the ugly ... especially the bad and the ugly.

Apart from being the 21st year of the third millennium (AD), the United Nations has declared 2021 as the International Year of Peace and Trust, the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development, the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables and the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour: all very worthwhile, I am sure you’ll agree! On the UK front, by 1st January 2021, we will no longer be part of the EU which means that everything you took for granted about going to France to refill your wine cellar will no longer apply. So better check your passport before you set off. On the positive side, duty free shopping will return so deal or no deal, getting paralytic will be much cheaper! Over in America, on the 6th January, Congress will formally validate the Electoral College votes and will declare Biden the new prez of the USA ... as long as Trumpet’s legal team doesn’t throw a spanner in the works!

Talking about elections, the UK is scheduled to hold elections to the

Welsh and Scottish Parliaments as well as the London Assembly and the mayorship of London.

In sports, we’ll have the football Euro 2020 finals (no, it’s not a misprint, it’ll still be called UEFA Euro 2020) while the Lions will be touring South Africa (that’s rugby union, the one with 15 geezers or geezerettes giving each other brain damage). The other rugby code, rugby league (with only 13 geezers or geezerettes) will have its World Cup and guess where this will be held? Yes, in England!

The greatest scientific/physics/nerdish event of the year will be the launch of Artemis 1 mission to the moon and 2021 will end in beauty with a show only nature can throw and man never equal: a TOTAL Solar eclipse! The ‘Arts’, not to be left behind, will bore us stiff with the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards (had anyone heard of Lizzo last year?!) and the 78th Golden Globe Awards. On this side of the water, we will have music aplenty with the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, held in Rotterdam: can’t wait! I still think that an indie band would do better and this year I’ll nominate one of ours: The Scavengers doing ‘Leave Me Here’ is a sure-fire winner ... and if it doesn’t win, it’ll encourage all of us to get pissed more often!! Job’s a good’un!

This is just a quick look at the highlights of 2021 and to be honest, it ain’t much to write home about, fairly

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routine to be fair coz none of us know what will really happen, not even those who pretend to know. Actually, people who talk a lot and pretend to know it all, tend to know fukk all. The more someone talks about any given subject, the least I trust him/her which is why I don’t trust politicians who’ve been trained to make bullshit sound like the truth. Yes, we got a vaccine but will it work for everyone? Will it work at all?

Or is it some scam to let the authorities know where we are at all times? Or worse, control our behaviour!?!?

Nobody knows, not politicians, not big-mouthed bloggers, not preaching fools who had dreams sent to them and them alone by God, nobody ... except those few trillionaire vampires who control the world from some dank, dark cellar deep underground in the Ural Mountains! And don’t tell me that the medical profession wouldn’t let that happen coz doctors put drugs they know next to fuck all about, into bodies of which they know even less, to cure diseases they had never heard of before March 2020. So GPs will do as they are told, like the rest of us!

into the vaccine scam: they don’t need to inject anyone with some kind of evil dye transmitting our whereabouts.

They can do that now with CCTV cameras, mobile phones, ANPR, etc. I really don’t think there is a scam at all regarding the whole virus episode: if the powerful and mega-rich wanted to enslave us, they wouldn’t need a virus: turn off the WiFi and close down Amazon! They’ve got us where they want us already, slaves to the TV and lazily dependent on Amazon: we’re fukked with or without virus and you know it.

This is the age of the Digital Gestapo and don’t you forget it: today, a free man is not someone who can pay his way, not someone who’s done good and can stick two fingers at HMRC. No, nowadays, a free man is someone who’s free in his head, someone who can still dream and escape, preferably while listening to DOREMI FASOL LATIDO! And that’s why I don’t buy

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Let’s be good boys and girls in 2021, let’s get vaccinated and try to get back to some form of normal life. All of us workers will need to work twice as hard to pay the debts caused by COVID-19, through the inevitable forthcoming increases in taxes. And we’ll have to do that on our own as we’re now in control of our affairs, no longer answering to unelected Brussels and no longer having allies. That’s what the people wanted and that’s what the people got ... with bells on!

www.flickniferecords.co.uk

role of lead vocalist, flautist, keyboard and guitar player.

John Hackett The Piper Plays His Tune Interview and Review

by Martin Hutchinson.

John Hackett, is best known in the world of progressive music for his amazing flute playing, but here he has produced a rock album recorded alone while under lockdown.

His career began when he was a twelve year old guitarist with a passion for twelve bar blues, but then he saw the original King Crimson and his fate was sealed. He took up the flute and began a career in classical music. As well as his career in the classics, he joined his brother Steve Hackett’s band just as Steve was leaving Genesis and to this day, he appears alongside Steve playing flute, guitar and bass pedals.

Since 2005, he has released a number of well received progressive rock albums and with his own John Hackett Band, he’s developed his skills as a multi-instrumentalist by taking on the

The current pandemic was the catalyst for John to follow in the steps of other rock musicians by recording an album alone, entitled ‘The Piper Plays His Tune’. He explains: “I had in the can a whole bunch of songs I had written over the years that I thought were never going to make it onto an album and so would probably never see the light of day. Plus I had some new material I had started working on in early 2020 before the world was turned upside down. So I decided then and there that, as it was at that time impossible to record a studio album with my own band due to lockdown, I would work on a completely home produced project where I would write, sing and play all the parts myself. [Laughs] If you pick up this album expecting to hear twenty minute epics with gargantuan solos and constant changes of time signature, then please put it quietly down right now and retreat to a safe distance.”

The ten-track album certainly has prog leanings, whilst remaining gentle and melodic with a definite nod to his brother Steve’s guitar work. I particularly enjoyed the tracks ‘Julia’ and ‘Loved By You’ for their lyrics and general feeling. As a DIY album, it’s excellent, with very few rough edges. hacktrax.co.uk

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Paul McCartney Maybe We’re Amazed

Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘McCartney III’.

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“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me”, Paul McCartney once sang on ‘Let It Be’, the title track of The Beatles’ penultimate recording but farewell release in 1970. It is this divine inspiration when things reach crisis point that have made for some of the most interesting moments of his ensuing solo career.

McCartney’s eponymous debut solo album was released in April 1970, much to chagrin of his former bandmates, a whole month before the ‘Let It Be’ album. Recorded in complete secrecy by McCartney on his own utilizing very basic home recording equipment (lo-fi before it was cool) during a period of depression and confusion following John Lennon’s private departure from The Beatles in September 1969, ‘McCartney’ was universally panned upon its release and even found its creator being seemingly vilified for ending his former band.

Even Lennon called the album “rubbish” and referred to it as “Englebert Humperdinck music”.

However, in more recent years, ‘McCartney’ has been reappraised, with standout moments such as the melancholy ‘Junk’ and the triumphant ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, which would later become a staple part of Wings’ live set, in particular going on to seen as classic McCartney moments.

In June 1979, following the release of Wings’ final album ‘Back to the Egg’,

which coincided with a drug bust, a cancelled tour and general weariness with his post-Beatles band, McCartney once again retreated back into his home studio on his own to make ‘McCartney II’. Released in May the following year, the resulting album, which this time found McCartney experimenting with the prevailing synth-led sounds of the day, was, just like ‘McCartney’, met with a barrage of negative reviews, many dismissing it as a slight work.

Nether the less, ‘McCartney II’ topped the UK charts (‘McCartney’ had been kept off the number one spot a decade earlier by Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’) and his since gone on to be cited as a major musical influence by artists ranging from Hot Chip to Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. It is even said that the innovative opening track and lead single ‘Coming Up’ (number 2, 1980), with its sped-up vocals created with the use of a vari-speed tape machine, even prompted Lennon to return to recording after a five-year absence, whilst elements of follow-up single ‘Waterfalls’ were incorporated into TLC’s single of the same name from the 1994 album ‘CrazySexyCool’.

Last month, forty years since ‘McCartney II’ and fifty since ‘McCartney’, the now 78-year-old legend unexpectedly released the third part of his self-titled trilogy. Even McCartney himself hadn’t expected to be making an album last year, but, as another crisis ensued, this time the

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COVID-19 pandemic and the world being forced into lockdown (or “rockdown” as he calls it on the sleeve of this new release), he decided to do a bit of spring cleaning, put together an eleven-track album consisting of rediscovered song ideas dating back to the early ‘90s and new songs and ‘McCartney III’ was born.

Just as with the previous two instalments of the trilogy, McCartney played all the instruments on the album and produced it himself and has once again created a collection of songs that is more for himself than for anybody else, with us being invited to listen to what he has been up to. ‘McCartney III’ once again finds him experimenting in pushing his own limits to create something different, but whereas this approach was met with disdain three and four decades ago, the new album has thus far been met with widespread critical acclaim. So, is this simply an example of an artist who, due to his stature, could have dug up an archival recording from his days on the Scottish farm of a sheep being manhandled by its horns until it bleated out a nursery rhyme and it would have been lauded as a classic or is ‘McCartney III’ actually worthy of such praise?

Well, opening track ‘Long Tailed Winter Bird’, a rustic psychedelic lo-fi number built around a dizzying, bluesy acoustic guitar riff that all guitarists will want to have a go at playing (much like the one from another avian-related,

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metaphor-charged song, ‘Blackbird’ from 1968’s ‘The Beatles’ aka ‘The White Album’), is a promising start and quite possibly the strongest opening few minutes of any McCartney solo album. The blues-based rhythm is a nice follow-on from the closing track of similarly blues-styled ‘C-link’ at the end of 2018’s ‘Egypt Station’ and listeners will be amazed at the complexity that actually lies within this at first quite simple sounding composition, which even manages to incorporate a nod to ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ (1967) era Beatles (namely ‘Flying’) with its guitar crunches and flute work. Meanwhile, the wonderful occasionally interjecting high in the mix crashing drums only go to add to the feeling that this is an artist having the most fun in the studio that he has had for years as a way to deal with the whole world going to pot around him outside. Speaking of the music presented here, the track makes it quite apparent that experimentation is the order of the day on ‘McCartney III’, with lyrical content very much taking a back seat. McCartney mouths (or rather coos, in reference to the titular bird) just a few simple words (“Do you miss me?, Do you feel me?”) and the overall effect is a song that reminded us a little of The Cooper Temple Clause’s ‘Did You Miss Me?’, the opening track of their 2002 debut album ‘See This Through and Leave’. However, the title alone sets the scene for an album which concerns itself with a creator in the winter of his years, a time in which

whilst staggeringly, still striving to create something new and innovative, he is also proudly looking back at past glories.

Probably due to years of constant touring all over the world, McCartney’s instantly recognisable vocal tones have sounded somewhat strained in recent years, but it would seem the break enforced by lockdown has done him some good. Make no mistake, his voice can often sound very much one of a man in his 70s, but on tracks such as ‘Find My Way’, complete with its falsetto chorus, this actually works incredibly well, perfectly complimenting the paranoia and anxiety that comes with age expressed in the lyrics. ‘Find My Way’ is perhaps a continuation of the character study that McCartney first seen in ‘When I’m 64’ (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, 1967) now sung from the perspective of somebody who reached that age fourteen years ago. Musically, ‘Find My Way’, in part, also has the same sort of whimsical quality of ‘When I’m 64’, but also manages to recall ‘Drive My Car’ (‘Rubber Soul’, 1965) in terms of its rhythm and ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ (‘Revolver’, 1966) with its horn section (synthesised, perhaps as a nod to ‘McCartney II’). Meanwhile, the almost trip-hop style drum beats and the quite glorious ascending and descending guitar breaks and growling machinery provide the track with a more contemporary feel.

The album takes a darker turn with ‘Pretty Boys’, an acoustic-led song about the way in which photographers treat their subjects. Presumably inspired by having spent nearly sixty years in the public eye and becoming one of the most photographed people on the planet, ‘Pretty Boys’ finds McCartney (who it is important to mention here, was once married to a photographer, Linda McCartney nee Eastman) offering up a dissertation on the psychology of being observed, reminiscing about the teen hysteria that came with his rise to fame from the perspective of somebody living in the age of the manufactured boy band. In the context of ‘McCartney III’, already by no means a normal album, ‘Pretty Boys’ is a strange addition, if for no other reason than being the only song that demands any sort of real focus on the depth of its lyrics rather than its music, but it is certainly an album highlight.

In these difficult times, McCartney offers a plea to be decent to each other on another album highlight, the following track ‘Women and Wives’. A rare example of McCartney producing a love song to a collective of people rather than one person in particular, ‘Women and Wives’ could be seen as this decade’s equivalent to ‘Lady Madonna’ (1968), an idea that is reinforced by the track being piano based. However, in stark contrast to knees-up ivory-tinkling jollity of the piano in ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Women and

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Wives’ finds McCartney hitting the ebony keys, echoing the plaintive nature of the song’s lyrics. The effect is a song that would have fitted more comfortably on one of his finest, but oddly most underappreciated albums, 2005’s Nigel Godrich produced ‘Chaos and Creation in the Backyard’ than on ‘McCartney’ or ‘McCartney II’.

In an album that across its 44 short minutes constantly continues to throw up surprises, McCartney returns to the music that inspired him pre-Beatles on the rockin’ and a-rollickin’ ‘Lavatory Lil’. Particularly after the relatively sombre tones of ‘Pretty Boys’ and ‘Women and Wives’, this fun two and half minute ditty recalls those found in the eight-song, sixteen-minute medley on the second side of ‘Abbey Road’ (1969), such as ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’ or ‘Polythene Pam’. However, beneath the cheery veneer lay some of the most vicious lyrics that McCartney has committed to tape since the Lennonbaiting opening two tracks of 1971’s ‘Ram’, ‘Too Many People’ and ‘3 Legs’. McCartney has stated that he will never divulge who ‘Lavatory Lil’ is referring to, but with remarks about a gold digger imbued with a voice that is audibly filled with half-venom and half-hurt, such as “You think she’s being friendly, but she’s looking for a Bentley, And she’d rather go and swallow a pill”, the listener is left in little doubt which of his former female companions he is singing about here.

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Much to the credit of the enjoyable nature of ‘McCartney III’, it seems no time at all before we reach the centrepiece of the album, the eight-and-a-half minute ‘Deep Deep Feeling’. Surprisingly, for a song that is that length and offers very little in the way of lyrics, ‘Deep Deep Feeling’ also seems to pass by in no time at all, a trick achieved by the playful nature in which McCartney is able to take what is at root level, an incredibly simple idea and expand on it to create something altogether more interesting.

This technique is instantly apparent in the song’s constantly shifting sonic backdrop, which again may owe something to working with Godrich on the aforementioned ‘Chaos and Creation in the Backyard’. By 2005, of course, Godrich had worked with Radiohead on not just the seminal ‘OK Computer’ (1997), but also the three albums that followed it (2000’s ‘Kid A’; 2001’s ‘Amnesiac’ and 2003’s ‘Hail to the Thief’), all of which sought to dismantle the band’s image as a rock / indie band and plunged deeper and deeper into experimenting with electronic, ambient, krautrock, jazz and 20th century classical influences. With its long, lingering minor-note piano notes, interjecting synthesised sweeping strings and multi-layered soundscape ethic mixed with minimal lyrics which convey everything they need to in a matter of lines and no more, ‘Deep Deep Feeling’ is slightly reminiscent of a Radiohead track from this era.

Interestingly, such is his obvious admiration for Radiohead that sometime back in the 2000s, McCartney even asked Thom Yorke to collaborate with him. Yorke turned the offer down, but with songs such as ‘Deep Deep Feeling’, it would seem that McCartney is still imagining how that collaboration might have turned out.

Following track, ‘Slidin’’ is yet another surprise on an album that thus far delivered them in spades. Here, we find McCartney presenting his most unabashedly heavy moment since ‘Helter Skelter’ (‘The Beatles’), complete with masses of distortion and some truly astonishing drumming, whilst his vocal performance more than repays the compliment of ‘Helter Skelter’ being the originator of the heavy metal genre. ‘Slidin’’ is neatly positioned before ‘Kiss of Venus’, a simple, very pretty, finger-picked acoustic love song just to remind us of the sheer diversity of the music that McCartney has produced over the years: i.e., for every ‘Helter Skelter’, there is a ‘Yesterday’ (‘Help!’, 1965).

‘Kiss of Venus’ is notable for McCartney’s use of a higher-registered voice, which perfectly complements the dreamy, lullaby-style quality of the song.

‘Seize the Day’ potentially finds McCartney repaying yet more compliments, this time to Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals for his love of

‘McCartney II’, by writing a song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a SFA album circa ‘Phantom Power’ (2003), particularly in terms of its simple, poppy presentation juxtaposed with wonderfully off-kilter lyrics (“Yankee toes and Eskimos can turn to frozen ice”). By this point on ‘McCartney III’ it is quite apparent which artists have been floating McCartney’s boat (or rather sinking his submarine) in recent years, but it is fair to say that even if we weren’t in these strange times of self-isolation, he wouldn’t be an artist to particularly feel the need to collaborate with the hip young gunslingers of the music world to appear relevant to modern ears. Sure, he has guested with the Foo Fighters on ‘Sunday Rain’ from their 2017 album ‘Concrete and Gold’ and Kanye West’s 2014 single ‘Only One’, but one gets the feeling that he is simply joining forces with such artists for the love of the music and to make something new and different. And on that note, with its message of living for the moment as opposed to thinking about tomorrow, one that is absolutely relevant for the circumstances everybody in the world finds themselves in right now, and just like the earlier ‘Women and Wives’, just appeals to us to be good to one another, ‘Seize the Day’ should be regarded as an absolute anthem.

For those who haven’t quite managed to, or haven’t found any inclination to live for the moment right now, then

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‘Deep Down’ concerns itself with making plans for after the corona-nonsense has finally packed its spike and has been forgotten about.

But don’t get too excited because whilst the lyrics of ‘Deep Down’ promise “a party every night”, the ‘80s soul-inflected musical accompaniment, complete with horn section that was presumably played on a small Casio keyboard from the era unfortunately sounds positively knackered and in no fit state to do so. Perhaps the fact that the sentiment of the song and the presentation don’t quite gel is deliberate in order to suggest that whilst we all want to get back out into the real world, live our lives, party our disco socks off and not just exist in some virus-induced Armageddon, we now, more than ever, don’t know what the future will hold and are genuinely frightened to fully commit ourselves to the wondrous thoughts of full-scale out on the town carnage that the lyrics seem to be attempting to suggest. For all its efforts in finding a new way to convey the age-old call to arms of “we’re gonna throw a party”, ‘Deep Down’ is certainly no ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ (1979), but on the other hand, it is at least more interesting than ‘Dance Tonight’ (‘Memory Almost Full’, 2014).

‘McCartney III’ bows out with ‘Winter Bird / When Winter Comes’. For those who like to make comparisons to an artist’s previous work (a bit unavoidable with McCartney, who at

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times is the king of self-reference ... and if you were McCartney, you probably would be too), this is the perfect song. As you may have gathered, the 26 second first section of ‘Winter Bird / When Winter Comes’ is a reprise of the opening track, a touch that at first made us wonder if it was a reference to the reprise of ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ on that album. However, ‘Winter Bird’ and ‘Long Tailed Winter Bird’ were actually born from McCartney creating a passage for ‘When Winter Comes’, a track that dates back to 1992, when it was produced by George Martin and recorded on the same day as ‘Calico Skies’ and ‘Great Day’, two songs that would find their way on to the ‘Flaming Pie’ album five years later.

‘When Winter Comes’ was rediscovered during preparations for last year’s ‘Flaming Pie’ reissue, but deeming the track too good to simply be a bonus track, McCartney set about making a short film to accompany it.

As he recorded the short introductory piece for the film (‘Winter Bird’, which then gave birth to ‘Long Tailed Winter Bird’), the world went into lockdown and he went into “rockdown”.

If you were expecting a Beatles evoking masterpiece, then ‘When Winter Comes’ may prove disappointing, but in the context of ‘McCartney III’ it provides the perfect final flourish, its lyrics about battening down the farm before the harsh weather arrives and its music consisting of just

McCartney plucking an acoustic guitar, despite it being written and recorded two decades later, immediately transporting us to those days in the early ‘70s when, following the break-up of The Beatles, he and Linda withdrew to High Park Farm in Campbeltown, Scotland. It was here that some of the songs would make up ‘McCartney’ were written, whilst at the end of the decade, with McCartney once again bunkering down as Wings imploded, it would provide the backdrop for a good portion of the writing and recording of ‘McCartney II’. Now in the 2020s, McCartney has returned to the farm, albeit this time in Sussex, to ride out a shitstorm that is affecting not just him but every last

one of us, and has produced an album that, whilst evoking the spirit of both ‘McCartney’ and ‘McCartney II’, is on the whole better than both of them.

Not only that though, despite its (very few) lapses of judgement, ‘McCartney III’ is simply one of the most wonderful, inspired and interesting of his entire solo career.

‘McCartney III’ is out now on Capitol Records. www.paulmccartney.com www.facebook.com/ PaulMcCartney

Photography: Page 128 by Mary McCartney / this page by Sonny McCartney

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Blithe Spirit Resurrecting A Classic

Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

The mark of a great piece of writing is its ability to transcend generations: a point proven by the latest film adaptation of Noël Coward’s classic 1941 theatre play ‘Blithe Spirit’.

As well as being resurrected in theatres and on television numerous times over the last eighty years, the darkly comic play has of course been successfully transferred to the big screen before, when Margaret Rutherford, Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings and Kay Hammond took on the roles of Madame Arcati, Charles Condomine, Ruth Condomine and Elvira Condomine, respectively, in David Lean’s 1945 adaptation. Now, in the

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third decade of the 21st century, ‘Blithe Spirit’ has been given a new lease of life by director Edward Hall, with Dame Judi Dench, Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher and Leslie Mann taking on the aforementioned main roles.

‘Blithe Spirit’ tells the story of writer Charles Condomine, who, struggling for inspration, decides to hold a dinner party. He and his second wife, Ruth, invite a few guests including eccentric local medium, Madame Arcati, who is tasked with performing a seance after the meal. During a number of bizarre rituals, Madame Arcati inadvertently summons the spirit of Charles’ late first wife, Elvira. Only visible to her bewildered widow, Elvira takes up residence in the house and, as annoying in death as she was in life, refuses to leave.

76 years ago, Hammond gave a magnificently frustrating performance

as Elvira and in 2021, Leslie Mann (best known for ‘Knocked Up’, 2007 and ‘Blockers’, 2018) brings a very similar quality to the role, whilst her co-stars Stevens (‘Downton Abbey’, 2010-12 and ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’, 2017) and Fisher (‘Wedding Crashers’, 2005 and ‘The Great Gatsby’, 2015) were both excellent choices to fill the roles once occupied by Harrison and Cummings and are equally adept at bringing the film’s ensuing bizarre love triangle to life (as it were). However, just as Margaret Rutherford’s glorious depiction of Madame Arcati will be best remembered in the 1945 film, it is Dench’s performance that will be best remembered in this latest adaptation.

Rather than opt for a modern day setting to tell this ghostly tale, Hall has wisely chosen to transport the audience back to the time period in which the play and the original film were set and in doing so, has captured the essence of the era beautifully, the set and costume designs both adding to a film that is every bit as extravagantly presented as Lean’s classic. However, Hall’s adaptation deviates somewhat from Coward’s play and Lean’s film adaptation in terms of narrative structure. Whilst these liberties with Coward’s original script are an obvious attempt to make the story more accessible for modern audiences, the end of this film disappointingly loses the irony and comedy of the 1941 play and the 1945 film, whilst Madame

Arcati’s story arc has been not altogether successfully overhauled. For those watching the film without any prior knowledge of ‘Blithe Spirit’ and its incredible history, this won’t make much of a difference, but it may grate on those going into it as a fan of Coward’s writing and the previous theatre and film incarnations of this celebrated work. For this reason, the 2021 film version of ‘Blithe Spirit’ isn’t exactly the best adaptation you will ever see in any area of the arts, but it is still a fun piece of screwball comedy that is, for the most part, very well delivered and stands as a testament to the timelessness of Coward’s story.

‘Blithe Spirit’ is released via Sky Cinema on 15th January.

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