Eighth Day Magazine Issue Twenty-seven

EIGHTH DAY

MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY!

DAVE HILL: THE DEFINITIVE INTERVIEW! Wizzard / Showaddywaddy / Kenney Jones / Shel Talmy / Marillion / Vulpynes / Midnight Oil / Tori Amos / The Kut / Sarah McGuinness / mylittlebrother / Weimar

ISSUE TWENTY-SEVEN. DECEMBER. £5.00

IT’S

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

EDITORIAL

Top: Alice Jones-Rodgers Editor-in-Chief Scott Rodgers Photographer and Tinsel Tart 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-seven December 2020

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. Showaddywaddy Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

108. German Shepherd Records Presents: Weimar Interview by Bob Osborne.

17 / 33 / 41. Wasted World A festive instalment of Dan Webster’s legendary comic strip.

114. Midnight Oil Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

18. Shel Talmy Interview by Kevin Burke.

122. Wizzard Interview by Martin Hutchinson.

26. Sarah McGuinness Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

127. Tori Amos Interview and review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

34. Vulpynes Interview by Kevin Burke.

42. mylittlebrother Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

51. Dolly Parton Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Christmas on the Square’.

52. Marillion Interview by Martin Hutchinson.

56. Kenney Jones Interview by Kevin Burke.

63. Billie Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

64. Slade Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

128. Frenchy’s Rants This month: Multi-coloured Christmas!

132. Gary Numan Martin Hutchinson reviews ‘(R)Evolution: The Autobiography’.

133. The Smashing Pumpkins Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Cyr’.

136. The Kut Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Merry Xmas Everybody!

Who Put the Bomp in Christmas?

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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Between 1973 and 1982, vocalist Dave Bartram and his flamboyantly dressed all-singing all-dancing eight piece band Showaddywaddy spent an incredible 209 weeks on the UK singles chart. Their biggest hit and sole number one single, 1976’s ‘Under the Moon of Love’ alone sold a staggering 985,000 copies, but in the cruelest of Christmas twists was denied that year’s Christmas number one position after being knocked off the top spot by Johnny Mathis’ ‘When a Child is Born’.

However, they made up for it with aplomb when their ‘Greatest Hits 1976-1978’ compilation became the Christmas number one album two years later.

To promote their 23 Top 40 single appearances, which aside from ‘Under the Moon of Love’ included nine other top ten hits, the band performed on ‘Top of the Pops’ 51 times. Only Sir Cliff Richard has appeared on the show more times.

That is impressive enough, but we have estimated that performances on other shows during that time brings the total number of appearances on British TV up to approximately 300. In short, Showaddywaddy were everywhere!

Bartram may have bid a fond farewell to his life on the road with Leicester’s premier late-’50s and early-’60s rock ‘n’ revivalists with one final show at King’s Hall Theatre

in Ilkley on 3rd December 2011, but he is still very much part of Showaddywaddy, continuing in the management role that he has filled since 1984. He has also released two books about his time touring the UK as one of the band’s two singers (the other being Buddy Gask), ‘The Boys of Summer’ (2013) and ‘All Mapped Out’ (2015).

When we rang him, the UK had just gone into a second lockdown. “It’s a groundhog day situation”, he tells us before we start the following interview. “It’s bizarre and obviously our industry has been really, really seriously affected and largely ignored, which kind of leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but, you know, that’s the way it is and you know, there’s not a lot we can do, we just have to just keep hoping that this vaccine will prove to be effective and hopefully sooner rather than later. After the first, what was it?

Four or five months, we thought that was it and now here we are again and the cases still seem to be escalating.

Yeah, it’s dreadful. It’s been an extraordinary year, but largely, certainly business-wise, an inactive one and I hate inactivity, it’s just not me! [laughs]. I’ve just thrown myself into a really rigorous keep-fit campaign and it takes your mind off it and makes you feel bodily a little bit better. So, you know, I think you have to find some positives out of it, you know.”

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Firstly, hello Dave 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 and how you came to start performing music yourself?

Yeah, I came across music really from the year dot. As soon as I was able to move, I was plonking away on the family’s piano and I think I bashed out my first tune when I was five or six and consequently, my mum sent me off, I think about the age of seven, to piano lessons, which almost put me off music for life, to be honest! [laughs]. But no, it was an old lady who’s ways were very, very traditional and nothing excited me about it, you know. It was a real drudge to have to have to go to these lessons! [laughs]. I think it did perhaps help to define me a little bit, but it put me off the piano for a while and I think by the age of about ten, I’d picked up a guitar and the piano was abandoned for quite a number of years! [laughs].

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The formation of Showaddywaddy was in fact an amalgamation of two bands, Choise and The Golden Hammers. Could you give us an insight into what these two bands were like prior to the merger and where, when and why you decided to pool your collective talents into one band?

Well, basically, my band, Choise, we had a resident gig at a hotel-come-pub that had a large back room. It was a music venue on the outskirts of Leicester and my band, Choise, had a kind of semi-residency there during the week. I think we used to play on Tuesday nights, Wednesday nights and Friday nights, week in, week out and then we’d kind of go off on the road and do kind of pub type gigs at the weekends. But the other group the guys had, The Golden Hammers had just formed and they used to come across to see us play quite regularly and I think kind of a became, a little bit sort of begrudgingly, fans. And basically, we had a shared love of the kind of the fifties, early-sixties style music ... you

know, the Eddie Cochrans and Buddy Hollys, Elvis and all that sort of stuff ... and, whilst chatting, we decided to invite them to do a jam with us at the end of the night. And we soon found, it happened on a few occasions, that there was something, there was some kind of chemistry there and we decided to try this extraordinary idea of putting the two bands together and oddly, when booking the band out, we came up with this great idea of booking the two bands as the support and then the eight-piece as the headline act. Ever the businessman, even in those days!

But, yeah, we put it together and it was just so well-received that we knew we were on to a winner, if you like.

It was this of course this amalgamation that led to Showaddywaddy being an eight-piece outfit with two vocalists, two guitarists, two bassists and two drummers. This was just one of the aspects, together with the very flamboyant, showy nature of the band that made you such a unique proposition in the ‘70s. When

forming Showaddywaddy, how important was this showbiz aspect to you as a band and how important do you feel it was your success?

Well, the seventies was a very glitzy kind of era and you mentioned that word ‘showbiz’, that was very much part of the seventies. We obviously kind of had the glittery thing with glam rock, like Slade, and everybody kind of tried to out-glam one another. And then a little bit later, we came along and rather than going in a glam direction, we just adorned our brightly coloured drapes and came out and fitted into that era because we were very, very animated. It was about colour, it was about showmanship, it was about trying to out-do the other bands and we were leaping around in all these ridiculous moves, which we were able to do in those days because we were young guys, and it complimented what the band was doing. We were serious musically, but it was such great fun and it was very much part of it. And, of course, when we went out on the road with all these ridiculously animated

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routines, the audiences lapped it up and went crazy. So, we knew we were on to a winner, which was proved pretty quickly.

In 1973, Showaddywaddy took part in the ITV talent competition ‘New Faces’, winning one episode in November of that year and taking part in the “All-winners final”, in which you the runners-up. What are your memories of taking part in ‘New Faces’ and how important do you feel it was to launching the band into the public consciousness?

We were playing a gig in a smoky club in Birmingham in 1973 and a quite sort of sharply-dressed grey-haired man came down to our dressing room and basically, he said, ‘How’d you like to be on TV lads?’ and we honestly didn’t realise that it was kind of the forerunner to ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ of its day, but the thought of going on national TV was really appealing. So, we went along and we found ourselves kind of thrown to the wolves, as it were. I mean, it’s

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a nationwide talent show. But, undeterred, we won the first one I think with a record score and then went on to the ‘All-winners’ where we can second, which was a bit disappointing, but the result was rather dubious [laughs] and it still rankles with me now, because the guy that won it was already earmarked to perform at the London Palladium and various others. It was a guy called Tom Wait, not the American guy [Tom Waits], Tom Wait. Rather different! A very sort of ... a crooner type of guy.

But, oddly enough, he did the Palladium, which went in tandem with him being victorious on the ‘New Faces’ and was never heard of again! It was extraordinary. So, I suppose you could kind of say we had the last laugh, but we were deemed unsuitable for the Palladium at that time, I believe. As they say though, the cream eventually comes to the top! [laughs].

The success of the band was quite astonishing, achieving 23 top 40 hits (ten of which reached the top ten, with seven successive top five entries and one that topped the charts)

between 1974 and 1982, not to mention three albums that also reached the top ten. With each successful record, how much pressure you find yourself under to follow up that success?

Well, it was crazy, because literally after one single had charted, you were under pressure to get something else out immediately. I mean, it’s not the way it works in the current day and age. Now, you find artists will have a single and an album out and that’s kind of the last product you will hear from them for two to three years, but we were under pressure to at least deliver an album every nine months and to deliver four singles a year. The pressure was particularly intense because the band were constantly on the road, so we were literally at it twenty-four-seven for a long, long period of time. But, that’s said, you know, it was great excitement and it was very motivational, so, you know, it was a great time. But certainly, there was a great pressure there to keep coming up with the goods.

Back in the ‘70s, was there a particular moment when you realised you had made it in the music industry and obviously being such a busy band, did you actually have time to be able enjoy the spoils of success?

As I said before, we were constantly on the road, so there was little time to sit back and gloat or really take it all in because we were just so, so busy. You know, if we weren’t touring in the UK, we were touring in Germany or Scandinavia or somewhere, hopping on and off planes and doing TV shows in various part of Europe and the world.

But the time I remember thinking we’ve really cracked it was Christmas ‘78, when we found out ... we were actually due to perform a gig in our hometown of Leicester and the De Montfort Hall was absolutely packed, they were hanging off the rafters. It was an amazing atmosphere out there and we found out, I think two hours before we went on stage that our album was the Christmas number one album and I remember thinking, that’s a hell

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of a thing on your CV! I just remember thinking at the time, blimey, we really have cracked this now and consequently, the gig was just an amazing night. We were number one and the rood nearly came off! It was just one of those amazing nights and, you know, it did occur to me that we were perhaps the most popular band in the land at that time.

Showaddywaddy’s debut single was the self-penned composition ‘Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll’, which reached number two in April 1974. Whilst obviously being talented songwriters in your own rights, many of your biggest hits were cover versions of songs from the late fifties and early sixties. Did you have a personal preference between performing original material and cover versions?

As one of the bands two writers, it was myself and Trevor Oakes who wrote all the band’s original material, it rankled a little bit that we got on to this treadmill of covering old songs, because we were working hard writing stuff. But, as I

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alluded to before, we were so, so busy that I suppose it became kind of easier just to pluck another oldie and go into the studio and get it recorded, rather than have to put a lot more time into making an original song work. So, it was a little bit frustrating at one period, but I know certain members of the band were perfectly happy to go on covering oldies. I don’t know, we were perhaps a little bit resentful of the fact that Trevor and myself were churning out all these original songs, maybe, that never came to be recorded, which is sad to say. Yeah, we were pretty prolific at one time and that was one of the downsides of being a busy band.

We obviously can’t talk about the seventies without asking about ‘Under the Moon of Love’, which hit the top of the UK top 40 in December 1976, staying there for three weeks.

It replaced ‘If You Leave Me Now’

by Chicago at the top of the charts and was knocked off by the Christmas number one of that year, Johnny Mathis’ ‘When a Child is Born’ on Christmas Eve. How

Showaddywaddy on Top of the Pops, 1976

hopeful were you that it would remain there to be that year’s Christmas number one and how frustrating was it to be pipped to the post at the last minute?

It was a bit frustrating because they’d never previously had a chart on Christmas Eve, so we thought we would be number one for Christmas and we got knocked off by a hell of a record by Johnny Mathis! [laughs].

Yeah, it was a bit of a boot to the lower stomach, but, no, it was fantastic to have been number one for three weeks anyway. But, you know, as I mentioned, two years later, we had the number one Christmas album, which is one hell of an accolade, so that more than made up for it! [laughs].

We hope we have got this right, but we counted you made a staggering 51 appearances on ‘Tops of the Pops’, whilst performances on other shows brings the total number of appearances on UK television up to approximately 300. What are your favourite memories of performing on

‘Top of the Pops’ during the ‘70s and early-’80s?

I don’t have many favourite memories of recording ‘Top of the Pops’ because it always used to be a really, really tough day and in actual fact, since I’ve sort of slowed down, I’ve had two books published. The first [‘The Boys of Summer’, 2013] was about what was a kind of semi-disastrous tour in the band’s later years, but the second book, ‘All Mapped Out’ concentrates largely on the band’s career. The day going down to London to do ‘Top of the Pops’ would begin at probably about six o’clock in the morning, where we’d all meet at a rendezvous point and set off for London, just getting down there about eight o’clock as the rush-hour was beginning, eventually getting to Shepherd’s Bush Studios probably about nine o’clock-ish and then the whole day was spent sort of doing one rehearsal, then there would be an hour break, then another rehearsal and it was a really long, laborious day. And we would perform on the show, after the various rehearsals, mix in the BBC bar

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Showaddywaddy on Top of the Pops, 1976

Dave now

with all the other artists that we were doing it and various other people that were doing other BBC productions, have a couple of beers, go down to the programme and then back into the car and another two to three-hour journey back. So, by the time we got back it was probably about one, two o’clock in the morning, so I just remember them as being very, very long, tough days, especially in the winter months when the weather wasn’t that nice [laughs], but it was such a great programme to be part of and one good performance from ‘Top of the Pops’ and your single would just rocket up the charts. So, it was a privilege to be able to do it, but it was hard work. [Laughs] Nothing comes easy!

talk about your writing career, why did you decide to leave Showaddywaddy after all those years and what has the experience of managing the band been like in comparison to performing with them?

After 38 years, you left Showaddywaddy on 3rd December 2011, with your last gig being at Kings Hall Theatre in Ilkley. You have since gone on to manage the band and have gone on to work as a solo performer and write two books, ‘The Boys of Summer’ (2013) and ‘All Mapped Out’ (2015). Before we

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Well, the management of the band came easy because I actually set up my own management company in 1984, so I was managing the band all the way from 1984 right through to the current day. So, other than the time-consuming aspect of it, I always enjoyed talking to people and trying to hammer out a deal and all that sort of stuff. And I was astute enough and I was fortunate enough to be able to learn my trade, so I could hammer out those deals. But, I’m very aware from the bands early years that were perhaps too many people dipping into the pot and that it would be more profitable to ultimately set up our own company, which, as soon as our initial management deal expired, I did. So, yeah, it stood everybody in good stead really. But, yeah, I enjoy that side of it as well,

Showaddywaddy in 2020

but when it came to leaving the band, to be perfectly honest and I’ve never really spoken much about this, I was ready to leave really probably about seven or eight years before I actually did, but I think my friendship, particularly with Romeo [Challenger] and Rod [Deas] who were in the band and Trevor and Al James, who is sadly no longer with us ... you know we were kind of like a band of brothers and I just kind of felt as if I just needed to be loyal and stick around. I think it would have been very, very disruptive if I had left, particularly at that time. But I was ready to go, you know, I was tired, I’d had all the fantastic years on the road and, as you mentioned, all the TV performances, all the hit singles and albums and everything else that went with it and travelling the world to various far-flung countries and yeah, I just needed to do something else and I had aspirations to certainly write one book, which extended to two and has now almost extended to three. Yeah, there’s a third one in the pipeline, which I completed in the first lockdown. So, you know, it’s been an

amazing career and it’s still great to be involved with the band. You know, I go to a lot of the concerts, but obviously, currently, it’s really, really frustrating because bands aren’t touring and it’s Showaddywaddy’s lifeblood, you know, touring and being out on the road. So, that’s very, very disappointing, but you know, we’ll get there in the end and there’ll still be a Showaddywaddy when we get to the other side of this.

As we just mentioned, you have released two books, the latter of which, ‘All Mapped Out’ is based around your experiences of visiting 70 cities (69 official and one crown dependency) whilst out on the road.

What inspired you to start writing and because we find the premise of ‘All Mapped Out’ so fascinating, could you tell us more about it and some of your favourite memories that are talked about in it?

Well, not to go too much into it because it might put people off writing the book [laughs], but no, I’ve always been a fan

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of the written word and basically, when I was on the road and we went out socially with friends and whatever, I’d always find myself telling stories about being on the road. And a friend of mine said, you’ve got all these stories, why don’t you write a book and it was something that I had sort of considered but I wasn’t certain that I was capable of producing a book, so I came up with idea of writing about this horrendous tour that the band did of some caravan parks in 2005. It was such a bittersweet sort of memory, this six-week tour. There were so many, pppfff, ups-and-downs, shall we say and I thought, well, this would make an amazing book to read; an almost diarised account of each day. You know, there were tragedies in there ...

I had lost my mother during that tour, you know, which was very, very sad and to run out on stage and perform the day she died was just a really surreal experience. And one of the other boys lost his brother during that tour and there were problems with some of the boys, you know, perhaps drinking a bit too much and, I don’t know, it was

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just an extraordinary tour and the venues left a lot to be desired and I just thought it would make a great story, but very self-deprecating and told, you know, with a very much tongue-incheek. And it started to hang together and I thought, well, I’ve managed to write a book [‘The Boys of Summer’] and now, perhaps, I should delve a little more into the band’s history and tell the tales of being on the road in every United Kingdom city that I’ve been fortunate enough to visit. There probably aren’t that many people who have visited every city in the United Kingdom, but it was a novel idea, yeah.

In 2013, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Showaddywaddy, you released the ‘Anthology’ collection, containing the entire 20th century catologue, including all of your original studio albums, non-album singles complete with their B-sides, alternative mixes and unreleased rarities across 139-tracks and ten CDs. It came with a 7,000 words worth of liner-notes from Showaddywaddy expert Steve

Thorpe, whilst you provided the introduction. Bearing this impressive release and the huge back catalogue contained on it in mind, what are your thoughts on the nostalgia aspect and what do you feel the legacy of Showaddywaddy will be?

Well, I think the legacy will be that we actually injected a lot of fun back into music, both in a live sense and through our recordings. We’ve just added two musicians to the band, two really great musicians and one of the guys, I was going through some stuff with him and I was playing some of the old Showaddywaddy tracks and he’s fifty, so he’s quite a lot younger than a majority of the guys would be, but he was listening to the stuff and he was saying, ‘This stuff’s amazing! It’s so uplifting!’ and it kind of dawned on me listening to it, there was this sort of quality to it, this life that came out of the tracks, it definitely made people feel good. And I think that it certainly the band’s legacy, that through those awful times with the unions in the late

‘70s, when we were eating our dinner in darkness and there were the miners’ strikes and all that, through the sadness of the ‘70s, we actually did give people a lift and you know, I think that’s probably how we’ll be remembered.

Finally, just because we feel the key to getting through these unprecedented times we are living though is positivity and optimism and because we have enjoyed hearing about all your incredible memories from the last half a century, do you have one final favourite memory that you would like to share with us?

Well, there are so, so many, some that are in the books, but I was absolutely astonished last year, 2019, when the band had a top twenty album [‘Gold’, number 15]. It was just astonishing and apparently it was one of the biggest selling CDs of anybody during 2019, which was just incredible. You know, I know a lot of people download or stream their music now, but to physically go out and buy all those CDs, which extended to about 50,000

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CDs, it’s just astonishing! And, I don’t know, it really just gave me such a fillip last year to think, you know, we just won’t go away! You know, people still want to listen to our music. But that was great because I’ve had so many emails through the band’s website, because it’s a double CD collection and obviously one CD had all the hits on it, but the second CD was largely self-penned stuff and so many people have been so complimentary about our own songs that it’s almost as if they’ve rediscovered Showaddywaddy and they missed out on that the first time around, which was very, very satisfying.

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Thank you for a wonderful interview, merry Christmas and we wish you all the best for the future.

Yeah, thank you and you too, it’s been an absolute pleasure. And may I be the first to wish you a Merry Christmas too. www.showaddywaddy.net www.facebook.com/ OfficialShowaddywaddy

Shel Talmy Soundtracking the Sixties ... & Beyond!

Interview by Kevin Burke.

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In August 1964, The Kinks released the song ‘You Really Got Me’ and music changed forever. At the controls of that song was the Chicago born Shel Talmy. A producer who moved from Los Angeles to London in 1962, and began his tenure with Decca Records as an independent producer. Here he began to carve his name into the history books of rock music. With the aforementioned Kinks, he produced further hits such as ‘All Day and All of the Night’ (1964), ‘Set Me Free’ (1965) and albums ‘Kinda Kinks’ and ‘Face to Face’ (1966). Along with this, in 1965, Shel produced the first hit singles by The Who, including ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘My Generation’ and the ‘My Generation’ album.

In many ways, it is easy to state that the producer helped soundtrack what is considered that sixties sound. Shel Talmy is also attached to the genesis of David Bowie’s career, producing The Manish Boys’ single ‘I Pity the Fool’ (1965). As the sixties wound down, the producer extended his reach with artists such as Roy Harper (‘Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith’, 1968), Bert Jansch (‘Birthday Blues’, 1969) and the first three albums by folk-rock pioneers Pentangle, including the 1969 classic ‘Basket of Light’.

Now, in 2020, a year that has seen upheaval, Shel Talmy is remaining as busy as ever. His recent adventures included working with former Bee

Gees guitarist Vince Melouney on his latest single “Women (Make You Feel Alright) featuring Clem Burke (Blondie), Jonathan Lea (Jigsaw Seen) and the duo Strangers In A Strange Land. The latter he has recorded two singles with, and all points to a larger project. In light of all this. I spoke with Shel, to discuss his memories of the sixties along with his views on modern music.

Shel began his tenure as a recording engineer in Conway Studios, Los Angeles before moving onto London.

However, how much of an influence his youthful days in Chicago had on his ideas for sound was the place to start: “I suppose I was probably influenced by it as I was growing up, but it was not something I actually realised, except that I liked the music. So yes, I probably brought it with me.” Did he feel he was a mentor or a teacher to those young bands in the studio? “It’s an interesting question I guess. No, I never thought that, I think that’s kind of arrogant. I didn’t consider myself as a mentor to a bunch of dummies. What I did bring with me was a lot of time that I spent as a recording engineer ... getting better sounds out of drums and guitars.

That I brought with me, and that I guess I taught, not that specifically, but by example.” Shel then gave further inside what he brought to the industry in the UK, and the sound.

“When I first started doing it here in L.A., drums in particular were using

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three or four mics. In the UK in particular the music was ... they themselves labelled it polite, but I didn’t want polite music or polite sounds. I wanted as rock as you could get and apparently it worked.”

Further to his concentrating on the rhythm section he stated: “I guess it’s something I spent a lot of time in the studio in L.A. working out. I always liked the backbeat, going back to when I first discovered R&B, Doo-Wop, whatever you want to call it. That backbeat really did it for me, so I tried to reinforce it, and I guess that’s what I brought with me when I got to the UK.” I question who is important looking back now after half-a-century, or if he was particular in some way in choosing bands to work with, or what did he even look for? “It was actually more a case of bands who were really good, as opposed to bands who were not really good. One of my other major criteria was if they were writing songs they were really good songs, that certainly attracted me to The

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Kinks and The Who, starting with David Bowie as he preceded them.

Songs for me is the number one component, and I’ve also repeated that those bands are gonna have hits, bands with lousy songs are not gonna have hits.” Given the amount of work he produced, upwards of 100 singles and 27 albums released in the sixties alone, on paper it appears that Shel Talmy spent the majority of the decade in the studio. “I didn’t actually realise how much time I spent in the studio till years later. I found when I moved back to L.A. and the last three years when I acquired a historian who knows more about what I did than I do, I realised how much time I actually spent in the studio. It was unbelievable [laughs], I had no idea.”

Time management seems to have been key, but also preparation before going into the studio, as one might feel that recording more than one band at a time was a requisite. “No, I wouldn’t do that. When I got there [UK], the thing to do was the same in L.A. and get things done as quickly as

possible, which meant they were a really good band, because they didn’t spend a whole lot of time screwing around, and they could nail a track in three or four takes. Eventually, as you know, that reversed itself and it became fashionable to spend as much time in the studio repeating and repeating stuff until it became stale.

And not worth listening to. So that’s how I always approached things, I was looking for a band who could really play.” Shel Continued, “I always rehearsed before I went into the studio anyhow, so I knew pretty much what I was going to come out with. We would easily do four or five sides in a daily session because we had rehearsed enough to know how to go about doing that. Not necessarily finished sides but tracks, and overdubs to some degree. The point being it did not take a lot of time because we planned for it not to take a lot of time. Because of that a lot of originality shines through instead of staleness.” But he always allowed the bands to be spontaneous.

“I always went for - if I can hear

hear something in the studio we hadn’t planned for and it sounded great, we would leave it in.”

Shel began to relay the reasons behind the experimentation which he began in the studio. “I figured we were at a great point in the music business where there was breakthroughs coming on a regular basis, and I thought one of my missions in life was to try and find different ways of doing things and come up with different sounds, all that stuff . So that was my raison d’être for being in the studio, and I like innovation, it’s much more fun than copying something.” One of the things which is interesting, is delving into the drive to create something, a sound that there was nothing else out there like it. “I did not want to sound like anyone else, I wanted it to sound like the band I was working with.” For example, something which has become a tale of folklore, is how Decca America supposedly rejected The Who single ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’.

“That’s true, that’s absolutely true.

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They sent me a telegram, which of course was the method of communication at that point in time.

When I submitted ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, they said, ‘We think you’ve sent us the wrong track ‘cos it’s got these funny noises on it’. I had to assure them that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Yeah, a true story.”

Finishing up with The Kinks, and the releases of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and the ‘Something Else’ album in 1967, there is a question of had he gone as far as he could with the band? “That’s never crossed my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever come to a point where ‘that’s as far as I can go’. There’s always another path to take and another way to do something and seek out different ways to do stuff. If you don’t do that there’s no point in doing it, you may as well give up.”

When Shel finished with The Kinks, and his tenure with The Who, he went on to produce some masterworks by the revolutionary Folk acts of the day. But what drew him to folk? “I was a big

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fan of folk music, here, mainly in LA. I used to hang out at a really good Folk Club and it was natural when the music became popular in England that I sought out the best that I could find. The fact is, it was something I was really enjoying doing. That Pentangle happened to be as good as they are was fantastic from my point of view. They remain one of the best folk groups of all time.” Shel continued contemplating his own impact: “I like doing a whole bunch of other things. Hell, I’ve been credited with allegedly being the father of Heavy Metal, which I’m not sure is a compliment or not. Another thing I never had a chance to do was Country and Western, which I like.”

There’s still time I interjected. “Yeah, yeah I agree, there’s still time.”

Back to the early days and the rise of stereo, as I remembered the ongoing argument of which sounds better, mono or stereo? And what Shel himself thought of stereo. “I was absolutely 150% for it because it gave me the opportunity to do a whole lotta

things that were not possible with mono. Albeit with mono, there are some things that sound absolutely brilliant, but in virtually every case that I can think of, and again if you know what you’re doing, then a stereo version of a mono will be equally as good and probably a lot better simply because you have so much latitude to do effects and influence the way the entire track is going to come out. Mono you are kind of stuck in one mode and it requires stereo.” But then, the question arose as to why a majority of those early Kinks classics only came out predominantly in mono (‘Kinda Kinks’, ‘The Kink Kontroversy’, 1965) over a stereo mix. “I did mono because of the fact that at PYE, especially with the dude that was running the company at the time who in my opinion was a jerk, he was not a music guy, he insisted on charging me more for doing it in stereo than mono. So I said, ‘Screw you, I’ll do it in mono!’. I didn’t have a whole lot of money then. So that came out and all of a sudden I wasn’t being

charged extra money.”

Even though the producer is back recording solid music with Vince Melouney, his views on modern music however, does mirror a lot of how music fans and audiences feel. “Oh yeah. I’m having fun when I can do music. I’m not a fan of rap, it’s not music, I’d be happy if they called it ‘urban poetry’ or ‘street poetry’, music, I resent them calling it that.

Also for several years, which I’m sure you’ve been aware, the stuff that’s been in the charts, that is not rap, is repetitive non-music. I’ve been asked about it many times before, and my usual reply is, ‘Name me something now that’s in the charts that you’ll be humming two years from now?’ And there’s dead silence, you know. In the meantime, things like ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘My Generation’ will last forever. So that’s really the difference between what we were doing and in many cases is still happening.” Continuing with his opinion on those classics that still blister across modern airwaves, he

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says, “I’m delighted of course it’s held up. I’m a hands on producer, I’m there for the entire operation.

I don’t check in once a week like a couple of producers that shall remain nameless. I resent them also [laughs].

Especially when they are successful at doing it, it pisses me of. “ He continued, and gave me an insight into how he has embraced technology, but is mindful of its proper use. “We are at a situation I think because music is coming back here, I don’t know if it’s the same thing there [Europe], with access to all the great advances in technology, especially digital and Pro Tools. When I started with Pro Tools, it was appalling, and it’s taken a few years to get to a point where they are as good as they are. But now if you use Pro Tools properly, and unless you are Superman there is no way of telling the difference between analogue and digital. And I stress you’ve got to be using it properly.

There’s a lot of people out there that use it and don’t know how to use it,

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and will never learn.” Though apart from his recent work in the studio, there is also a string of nostalgia being released courtesy of Shel’s Planet Records series. Releases such as ‘Planet Mod’, and the excellent ‘Planet Beat’ provide a gateway back to an exciting time in music. “Yeah, my historian who is doing that, Alec Palao, who has been tied up with Ace [Records] for a long time, who has arranged for all these things to come out and has done a hell of a good job.

The Goldie and the Gingerbreads one is coming out shortly I believe.”

Of course, one could not help but ask a question about working with The Who in the studio, in particular the human whirlwind that was Keith Moon.

“Keith was my favourite. I loved him. I told this story many times - I used to set up the mics on drums, and Keith as you also know was a wild man in the way he would play and all that kind of stuff. And I’d say ‘Keith, I don’t care’, and these were really expensive mics, ‘I don’t care how close you come to the mics, but

don’t fuckin’ hit ‘em!’; ‘No problem [he’d say]’. He was within a millimetre, but he never hit a mic on me!”

As for those of us who can only read about the era, watch films and revel in the music without experiencing the decade, Shel had this: “Well, it was a hell of a time Kevin, sorry you missed it [laughs]. I can safely say it was probably the best time of my life.

It was brilliant. It’s hard to express to somebody who was not yet born how good it really was.”

Finally, producers can be overlooked in the overall scope of music history.

Most recently, Tony Visconti being left out of T.Rex’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a testimony

to this. For Shel though, that question brought out the genuine sincerity of this famed producer, and he left me with something exquisite: “Steven Van Zandt says he’s going to get me into the Hall of Fame as soon as he can.

So I thanked him, I said ‘Thank you Steven, I would very much like that’.

Yeah I have a legacy, I’ve been told enough times, and it will last and that’s very nice. But I’d like it, and I’ve said it to him and it’s mainly true, ‘I’d like to do this for my wife’, it would be nice for her to know that I’m there.” www.sheltalmy.me www.facebook.com/ ShelTalmyOfficial

“Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure of meeting the legendary producer Shel Talmy, a giant in the music industry, having produced such mega stars as The Kinks, The Who, The Easybeats, David Bowie and many more. Shel produced my new record, ‘Women’ and I am proud to say I am now in the company of Shel’s Hall of Fame. A thorough gentleman.”

- Vince Melouney (Ex-Bee Gees).

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Sarah McGuinness Double Christmas!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography by Amanda Searle and Andy Carver.

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It had been a while since there has been a proper Christmas number one. For us, the last two years’ savoury-themed Christmas chart-toppers, ‘We Built This City ... on Sausage Rolls’ and ‘I Love Sausage Rolls’, both by LadBaby, were all pastry and no filling. In fact, the last true Christmas song to reach the number one spot on the Christmas chart was ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid 20 in 2004 and that was the second reworking of a song that had previously been Christmas number one in 1984 and 1989. So, do you, like us, long for a Christmas single with all the hallmarks that made those by Slade, Wizzard, Mariah Carey, Wham!, John and Yoko and Boney M so great and do you dream of it taking the prestigious top spot this year to inject a bit of much needed festive cheer into the charts?

Let’s forget about the Official UK Top 40, because the number one is bound to fail to rise to the occasion.

However, if Eighth Day did a Christmas Chart, it would probably be the best Christmas Chart in the world. But, who in these bizarre times could produce a song great enough to take the number one spot? There is only one song and one person for this task: That song being ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’ and that person being Derry-born Sarah McGuinness.

After all, having just endured the

year we all have, who could resist a Christmas song with such poignant lines as “It’s been such a tough year, and we really didn’t think we could make it” and a spectacular video celebrating the greatest hits of Christmasses past?

We suspect that Sarah McGuinness isn’t a name that you are familiar with, but we guarantee that you will know more about her than you actually think, because not only is she an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter, who aside from ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’ also brought us the exquisite debut album ‘Unbroken’ back in 2017, she is also an acclaimed producer, director and screenwriter.

However, if you search her name on Google, be prepared to wonder if you have hit the mulled wine a bit hard because you will soon discover two Sarahs with very much the same CV: one being McGuinness, the sultry, dark-bobbed singer of the sort of torch songs that made Shirley Bassey and Scott Walker household names in the sixties and the other being blonde-haired Sarah Townsend, a long time associate of comedian Eddie Izzard. Just to clear things up: Yes, they are the same person!

In 2010, with Townsend having worked with Izzard on a vast majority of his video releases, from 1996’s ‘Definite Article’ to 2009’s

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‘Stripped’, this partnership culminated in an Emmy nomination for the documentary film extravaganza ‘Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story’ (2009), which she wrote, directed, produced and provided the soundtrack for. And if McGuinness / Townsend wasn’t already interesting enough, in 2015, her directorial and writing skills brought her a place on the BAFTA shortlist for her documentary ‘Noma: Forgiving Apartheid’, which tells the fascinating life story of actress Noma Dumezweni.

So, having documented the lives of others as ‘Sarah Townsend’, is ‘Sarah McGuinness’ an alter-ego, which has allowed her to step out into centre-stage herself or is it merely an attempt to compartmentalise the various aspects of her work? We recently caught up with Sarah to find out more about her own incredible story, our number one Christmas single this year and much more.

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Firstly, hello Sarah and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. We have been enjoying your Christmas single, ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’ over the last few weeks and would like to say how refreshing it is to hear a PROPER Christmas single!

Could we start by asking how the idea to write and release a Christmas single came about and a bit about the recording process of the song?

It was sparked by a real situation. I was away from home and missing the kind of Christmas feeling I used to love, where you think everything will be okay if Santa just comes. The joyful anticipation was such a healing thing, and I was remembering the past and trying to relive some of that magic.

Once it came to the music production, I was trying to capture the feel of those classic Christmas songs, where there’s an authentic sentiment laid against those seasonal sounds. When it came to making the video, the idea was a local ‘Christmas Fancy Dress Party’, where you see what it’s like to feel slightly on

Sarah McGuinness in the video for ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’

the outside while everyone else is having a wild time ... we’ve all been there ... while honouring all those greats, from Wizzard to Slade, Mariah to George Michael. There was supposed to be a preamble shot of the poster outside an old village hall to put the costumes in context but we ran out of time!

‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’ is accompanied by an equally Christmassy video, which pays homage to some of the great Christmas singles of the past, including Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ (1973); John and Yoko’s ‘Happy Christmas (War is Over)’ (1971); Boney M ‘Mary’s Boy Child - Oh My Lord’ (1978) and Wizzard ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ (1973). This leads us to ask, what do you consider to be the greatest Christmas single of all time and why and with ‘Christmas Everyday’, which of the songs parodied in the video were you hoping to capture a similar magic to the most?

I’d say possibly ‘Last Christmas’ [Wham!, 1984] because of its heady mixture of regret and Christmas spirit, like a good weepy movie that gives a big satisfying cathartic release. And ‘White Christmas’ [Bing Crosby, 1942] with its irresistible nostalgia, because we love to think of brief happy moments of past Christmasses. They’re like nuggets of childhood innocence captured in amber, for us to dust off annually and cheer ourselves with in the darkest season of all.

We noticed that as a child, you sang carols with Peter Cunnah of D Ream.

Could we go back to those days and ask how you first became interested in singing and the arts, how you came to pursue these interests as a career and could you give us an overview of your career so far?

It was something that came so naturally I never even questioned it. I was singing and organising a group that performed at adult talent competitions at nine ... we even got into the finals! ... and directing my poor brothers and

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Sarah Townsend with Eddie Izzard

sisters in short scripted ‘shows’ even earlier…they might say I pressganged them into it I suspect … A precocious and annoying child indeed lol, though I certainly got that knocked out of me over time!

It goes without saying that you have had something a varied career in the arts (So much so, that we can’t possibly fit everything into this interview), but one aspect of your career that you are best known for is your association with Eddie Izzard.

After working on a number of Eddie’s stand-up productions, in 2010, you received an Emmy nomination for your work on ‘Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story’ (2009), which you wrote, produced, directed and provided the soundtrack for. How did you first become as associated with Eddie and could you give us an insight into your work together?

I wanted to bring a production to Edinburgh festival but did not have access to funding, so I discovered that

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if you were willing to kill yourself working, I could take over a venue, let other people book their performance slot from you, and pay for it with all their contributions, leaving one slot spare to put my own play in. The only slight drawback being that I had to build a temporary legitimate theatre from scratch in what was then a soup kitchen, entertain twenty-two visiting shows per day, seven days a week for a month and simultaneously direct, promote, manage, house and look after my own large cast. One of those visiting shows was Eddie Izzard, who was so bemused by the amount of work I was doing, decided I was clearly as mad as he was and we hit it off from that point on.

In 2015, you wrote and directed the fascinating BAFTA-shortlisted documentary ‘Noma: Forgiving Apartheid’, which tells the story of Noma Dumezweni. For those unaware of Noma’s story, could you tell us a bit about it and how become involved in making a film to tell it?

I had worked with Noma over the years and we knew each other well, we’d spoken about our mutual feelings of exile in a culture that wasn’t our own, and yet where we were welcomed, and she’d always said she arrived in London with her mother and sister from Uganda. I was visiting her at the last night of Henry V in London when she said she was going to South Africa to do a short run of a South African play … and to see her father for the first time in thirty years! I was shocked as I thought there had been no communication - and that they were from Uganda. For the first time she said, no, we escaped from Uganda but came from South Africa. My immediate reaction was that we had to document this, even if no one saw it, because it was so important and she might only get one chance at it, so being able to watch it back would help piece a lot of things together for her. With less than two days to organise it, I pulled together a tiny crew and we got ourselves out there to capture the moment. After that much of it was exploring the circumstances that led to

the situation. Her mother eventually agreed to talk to us in London and gave a fascinating interview. One day I hope we’ll be able to revisit this film and add some of the extra interview footage we had to cut to fit the submission rules, as it gives such an insight into the perspective of a family on the run in a racist environment.

Your debut album ‘Unbroken’ was released in 2017. It is an astounding piece of work which, with its backing from the Guy Barker Orchestra, production from Ed Buller (best known for his work with Suede) and emphasis on the type of very emotive torch songs one could imagine artists such as Shirley Bassey or Scott Walker performing, but with almost ABBA-style pop sensibilities, really felt like a culmination of a lifetime’s creativity. Did it feel like that whilst you were writing and recording the album?

Oh yes, I wanted it to be like one of the classic albums many of our parents would have had that might not be huge

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hits, but are beautiful and thoughtful and timeless so that you come back to them again and again as you get older … I dread to use the phrase ‘adult oriented’ but ‘adult themed’ sounds a little risqué! It’s about grown-up miseries and joys and self-questioning so I wanted a ‘classic’ sound for the songs, so it’d be like a forgotten vinyl album from years ago that’s been rediscovered in a record store.

It has been suggested on several occasions that you adopted an ‘alter-ego’ on ‘Unbroken’, but how much of the album is an alter-ego and how much is you writing from your own personal experiences?

It’s a bit of both. Often my musical and lyrical notes come out of immediate emotional reactions to things. Later, I flesh them out like characters speaking for themselves and developing past the initial thought. It’s quite freeing and definitely where the songwriting crosses over into film sensibility.

Returning to ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’, it really is the sort of song that we needed after living through 2020. In 2021, when hopefully we will return to some sort of normality, do you plan to follow the single up with more new material and what other plans do you have for the future?

I’m working on that now, after a long hiatus. Like most people I felt too

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shocked, too viscerally affected by what’s been happening to even think of being creative. Now that there’s light on the horizon, I’m beginning to ease into it. What was it Wordsworth said ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is the road to creativity - definitely true.

Roll on more tranquillity for all of us as soon as possible, I say!

Thank you for a wonderful interview, we hope you have a lovely Christmas and wish you the best of luck for the future.

Thank you so much, it’s been a lovely interview. sarahmcguinness.com www.facebook.com/ sarahmcguinnessmusic ‘Christmas Everyday (No More Sad Songs)’ is released on 4th December through G&T Records.

Vulpynes Us Against Them Interview by Kevin Burke.

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Molly Vulpyne Talks Music, Influence and Creativity.

Vulpynes define attitude within their incendiary sound. Formed in Dublin, the duo of Molly (guitar/vocals) and Kaz (drums) Vulpyne have blazed a consistent trail of quality, fusing Punk, Garage Rock, and Grunge with clever melodies against a wall of addictive noise. Vulpynes have already garnered a steady following, constantly playing the festival circuit, including Blackpool’s own Rebellion Festival. Their previous EPs, the self-titled 2018 debut and last year’s acclaimed ‘Dye Me Red’ laid the foundations for further adventures and grander releases.

‘Us Against Them’ EP, I chatted with Molly Vulpyne about the band, looking directly at the creative process, whilst also examining the influence and journey that has led them to this point.

Congratulations on the new EP, but I guess condolences on not getting the album done. How far through it were you guys?

This year, the band were set to record their debut album, until of course the scourge of COVID lay waste to their plans. Instead, they took what was recorded and turned it into their third and latest EP, ‘Us Against Them’, a release containing four tracks that ache for the live stage. Either side of the lead single, the fuzzed out ‘Sister’, are tracks that cement the band’s explosive reputation. With a stripped back, and raw sound, songs ‘One Horse Mind’, ‘The Motor Is Me’ and ‘Control Is Not What I Need’ are bursts of deafening, stylish energy.

We have a lot of material, we have so many songs and we always work so quickly because there’s only two of us.

For the few months before we went into the studio we had a lot of material ready, we weren’t even sure what we were going to record. We’ve always worked like that, we are very last minute putting songs down. It’s always the week before we decide what we are going to record. We were in Black Mountain Studios, it was the end of February and I remember listening to the radio in the car down, it said, ‘There was no cases in Ireland, but potentially one case’. When we were on the way back, it was ‘COVID is everywhere!’ We had more studio time booked, but we only got four songs recorded all-in-all, so it was enough for an EP but not an album.

Before the Halloween release of the

There is a live feel to the EP, because

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there are two of you. Do you feel you can harness that live sound in the studio better?

Yeah, I think with our last EP, ‘Dye Me Red’, we experimented a lot with layering and harmonies, different guitar tracks, drum tracks. I think we were a little bit hesitant to try that out because we didn’t want to put something out that we couldn’t replicate live. And then when we put it out, we said to each other, ‘God, the next release we do, we should go back to basics’. We wanted to do one guitar track, one vocal track, no layering. We wanted it to sound like you are listening to us live. So the tracks on this latest EP, it’s just one guitar track, there’s no overdubs, because we wanted to recreate that live sound. It is hard to do in a studio, but the guy we work with, James Darkin, he recorded some of our early stuff and he knows exactly how to capture that. He knows how to get a good take, and he nudged it along so working with him definitely helped.

The title of the EP ‘Us Against

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Them’. Is that some message about society or something deeper?

It’s taken from a lyric from one of the songs, ‘Sister’. The reason why we chose that is because myself and Kaz always felt like ... we’ve been through so much as a band, loads of ups, loads of downs, and we always say to each other, ‘We can get through anything together’. So it’s us against them. We are going through some shit at the moment but the band will always be okay and we always took that as a motto. So it’s us against whatever gets thrown at us. There’s a lot of music industry politics, stuff that you go through when you’re in a band. There’s some brilliant people, independent artists even with PR, but I’ve always done it myself, I’ve never had anyone do it for us. I send out the emails to DJs and stuff, it’s the way we’ve always been, you get to build up relationships with people then.

I heard you got some airplay in the states through Rodney Bingenheimer on SirusXm in the States?

That is a total fluke, I don’t know how he did. I remember when we recorded our first EP, we sent him a copy of the CD as he was only accepting physical copies. I never heard anything back and that was four years ago, and then I got an email from his producer saying he was playing [‘Sisters’] us that night.

And do you feel you are building a fanbase in America?

I guess that’s really hard without touring there. The funny thing about American radio stations is they are really loyal. There is a guy in Brooklyn Matt [Attack] who runs a radio station called the Rodent Hour, he plays so many Irish artists and he played our stuff before any other Irish radio stations were playing us. We are played in Brooklyn, but we wouldn’t be played during the day [laughs]. Except Dan Hegarty [RTÉ 2FM], he sticks by us, he plays our stuff. To build a fanbase in America is really hard, but if they like music, they’ll play you on rotation.

They’re just loyal.

The sound of Vulpynes is influenced strongly by Punk, but are there shades of Nirvana, L7 in the mix?

I grew up listening to L7, my Mam was a huge L7, Hole fan. So I got that influence from her. Myself and Kaz do have different tastes in music but we do meet in the middle when it comes to bands like Alice In Chains, kinda like the nineties heavy sound. But even when we started of we felt there’s no way we are going to be played on Irish radio or get into these venues, so we just shoe-horned our way in [laughs].

Your music is not predominantly feminist based, it’s non-gender driven and not for one particular audience. You’re not influenced by the Riot Grrrl movement?

Yeah, you’re bang on, that’s 100%. It’s a little bit intentional as well. We are just two female musicians who happen to play a certain type of music. We didn’t want to be remembered for having lots of feminist anthems. Not that we’re not feminists, because

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obviously feminism is about equal rights, like who isn’t down with that?

But it’s not our manifesto, and lyrically I wouldn’t be coming from that place at all.

These songs on the EP are not love songs, they are about societal issues, even mental health. Would that be a fair observation?

Definitely. It’s a lot of mental health, and songs from that perspective. A lot of them may have been written when you come through a particular event, phase or time when you begin to feel strong in the retrospective. That’s the stuff that inspires me lyrically. I couldn’t imagine writing a song about just being female.

In the writing process, do you write independently and just come together to finish it?

So, Kaz writes all the drum parts, and I write all the lyrics and the guitar. The way we used to write was I’d have half a song, a verse, a chorus, a little bit

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of a melody, then I’d bring it into the rehearsal room and Kaz would write a drum beat to that. Then we’d structure the song and make up a middle eight or whatever. But it would usually be done quickly, sometimes I’d write a complete song and I’d send it to her, and she would have a go at playing drums to it at home. But it doesn’t come together properly until we are in the same room together, we are both involved in the sound.

There’s a Velvet Underground type sound in ‘Sister’, a feel of something from ‘White Light/White Heat’ (1968). Is that a fuzzed bass making that sound?

No. For that recording, I kept effects stripped back. I use pretty minimal stuff anyway, I don’t like pedal boards that would have fifty things on them, I think it’s unnecessary. There’s a pedal I use on that song, it’s a ‘Big Muff Pi’, it’s a new one, the one that Billy Corgan [The Smashing Pumpkins] was endorsing. There’s a lovely setting on it that sounds like an octave, so it has

a real bassy tone, ‘cos it’s a distortion or a fuzz as well. So I’ve used that in nearly everything for the past two years.

You guys are perhaps very like the Cramps. They didn’t use a bass for their first recordings and there are no long, drawn out solos. Are they a massive influence?

That’s one of my favourite bands. I mean, Poison Ivy, she’s one of my heroes. I think she always said the key to her guitar playing was not to over play, and leave space between the notes. You don’t have to have this ripping solo, like we are not Metallica at the end of the day, there’s only two of us [laughs]. We do write a certain way, and we have to be mindful that ... when I’m writing the guitar parts, I don’t want them to sound too empty. So there is a particular way I write for this band that seems to work.

Is it difficult that there are two of you in the band, or does it have advantages?

Yeah, it’s challenging. It can be exciting when you’re in a rehearsal room and we’re going through a breakdown [of a song], and Kaz would say, the next time I’d bring in the chorus she’d try half-time on the drums, use a different effect or I’ll stop singing. We will always try and create a tension in our songs, just for dynamics.

It is certainly more of a challenge but it’s fun.

There are comparisons made between the Vulpynes and The White Stripes, but I don’t agree. I think your sound is directly from the foundations of Punk?

Definitely more Cramps than White Stripes. I mean, I love Jack White, but there is no way we are like them.

Is it difficult not being able to promote the release with shows?

Yeah, it’s really difficult. We had a few ‘false alarm’ gigs planned, that were cancelled last minute. With the way [COVID] road maps were changing.

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I just had this thing in the back on my head saying, ‘I don’t think these gigs are going ahead’. So we did a live session for Extra.ie, but I don’t think it’s out yet [as of October 27th]. We filmed it in the Wild Duck [Dublin Venue] with no audience. And it was weird. But, it really made me miss it so much more. Even bringing the gear and checking it, I love every part of it.

So yeah we are finding it tough, I know everyone is in the same boat but it’s such a huge part of our lives. So we are just adapting the best we can.

Vulpynes are down to play Rebellion Festival in 2021, with Henry Rollins, so hopefully all goes ahead.

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Fingers crossed. I’m at the stage where I can’t get excited about anything [laughs], I want to, but I’m just afraid to.

Vulpynes latest EP ‘Us Against Them’ is available via FOAD / Advance Records. They have also been announced to play Rebellion Festival 2021. Fingers crossed.

‘Us Against Them’ is out now on FOAD Records. www.facebook.com/ vulpynes

mylittlebrother

Cumbria Calling

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography by Gem Smith (unless otherwise stated).

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There is evidently something in the water up in Cumbria which gives impetus to the creation of great music, a fact proven by the recent release of ‘Howl’, the second album by the North West county’s mylittlebrother.

Created by singer-songwriter Will Harris as a solo project to fill time in between touring commitments playing piano for Scottish band Aaron Wright and the Aprils, with whom he worked with everybody from members of Teenage Fanclub to Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura to The Blue Nile, toured with the likes of The Charlatans, Ocean Colour Scene and Eliza Doolittle and appeared at festivals such as Glastonbury, Benicassim, Latitude, T in the Park and Electric Picnic.

Six years ago, mylittlebrother, then very much Harris and a selection of invited musicians, released the acclaimed debut album ‘If We Never Came Down’. Since then, mylittlebrother have expanded into a fully-fledged four-piece band, with Dan Mason on guitars and vocals, Robin Howson on bass and vocals and Simon Buttress on drums and vocals. They have gone on to wow crowds with their cleverly constructed blend of indie, West Coast American rock and classic pop songwriting prowess at festivals such as Kendal Calling, which they

headlined, and Krankenhaus, curated by another band with strong Cumbrian links, British Sea Power.

The band has also toured in support of acts such as Glasvegas and Juniore. ‘Howl’, which was preceded by the stupendously infectious singles ‘Janey’ and its title track, is the outfit’s first album release on Big Stir Records.

To learn more about mylittlebrother and their latest release, which is certainly one of the finest of the last twelve months, we recently got in touch with Harris for a chat.

Firstly, hello Will and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking where, when and how mylittlebrother came together and could you introduce us to your members? mylittlebrother actually just started as a solo project in Carlisle, Cumbria.

When I was touring regularly, playing piano with Aaron Wright, we had a rare break, and my girlfriend said I should record my own stuff. This resulted in the ‘Nosedive’ EP [2012] being recorded in my bedroom. ‘Nosedive’ then went on to be played on BBC Radio 6 Music and Radio 1, and gig offers flooded in, so I thought ‘Oh, I need a band here!’. I’d known Dan Mason [guitars and vocals] for years, and always wanted to be in a band with him as we are totally on the same page musically, so he joined me and we built

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the band around that. We’ve have had dozens of members through the years, but just over two years ago, Simon Buttress [drums and vocals] and Robin Howson [Bass and vocals] joined, and we really feel like a solid and committed unit now.

So, Will, you are also a member of Scottish band Aaron Wright and the Aprils, with whom you have worked with members of Teenage Fanclub, Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, The Blue Nile and various others, toured with the likes of The Charlatans, Ocean Colour Scene and Eliza Doolittle and appeared at festivals such as Glastonbury, Benicassim, Latitude, T in the Park and Electric Picnic. Could you tell us a bit about Aaron Wright and the Aprils and how does being a member of mylittlebrother compare to being part of your other band?

It’s totally different, to be honest. Some of the best days of my life ... so far! ... were playing with Aaron. I joined his band when I was in Edinburgh in 2006,

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when I was at the festival trying to escape an horrendous ex-girlfriend. I was living on sofas and in my van, and busking through the day to make money for food and beer, and to be honest I really wasn’t in a good place.

Then at 5am one morning at a folky music pub, Aaron started to play one of his songs, ‘Teardrop Sunday Clown’.

I’d already seen him at open mics, and fallen in love with the song, so I started playing along on the pub piano. He asked me to join his band then and there, and that was that! We became a really close-knit band of really good friends, and we went from meeting in that pub to working with Norman [Blake] and Francis [MacDonald] from Teenage Fanclub in a matter of months.

We travelled all over Europe, working with, touring with and hanging out with household names and playing at some of the biggest festivals on the planet. It was all such a wonderful experience, and quite surreal to be honest. Playing with mylittlebrother is entirely different, and a little more low key so far! We have supported great bands such as Glasvegas and Juniore, and

played wonderful gigs and festivals across the UK. But, a fundamental difference for me is that I write the songs for mylittlebrother and hearing 350 people singing songs I wrote back to me is a feeling like no other, and not even playing Benicassim with Aaron can beat that!

It is quite apparent that there are many different influences at play in mylittlebrother’s sound, ranging from indie-rock of the last thirty or so years to ‘60s pop from both Britain and the US (for example, we can certainly hear a healthy dose of The Beach Boys in your harmonies and overall songwriting-style). Who or what would you cite as your influences and being from Cumbria, how do you feel that this location has shaped the songs that you write and the overall sound of mylittlebrother?

Yes, the album is influenced by so many different bands and genres. It keeps getting reviews saying that we’re hard to pigeon-hole, which I am delighted with! I was raised on ‘60s

Pop from my parents, and still listen to a lot now. Some of my earliest memories come from when my Dad first got a CD player, and I would get up before school and listen to his CDs, and some of his vinyl too. I used to make mixtapes which generally consisted of Simon & Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, The Hollies, Buddy Holly and all finished off with either ‘Telstar’ [The Tornados, 1962] or ‘Red River Rock’ by Johnny & The Hurricanes [1959] ... or the B-side, ‘Beatnik Fly’.

I am stunned at myself that I can still remember this! Then as I got older, the ‘90s happened and I had an older brother and sister who listened to a variety of things. My brother is a massive R.E.M. and Teenage Fanclub fan and my sister listened to a lot of Nirvana and Radiohead. Meanwhile I was obsessing over Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ [1994] and ‘Tubular Bells II’ [Mike Oldfield, 1992]. I think this all sank in too. At university, I discovered Elliott Smith, Grandaddy and Flaming Lips. Elliott Smith, in particular was a game-changer. I realised what was really possible with a melody, and I

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became much more ambitious, and in turn more confident, with my songwriting. These are, of course, only my influences. I know that each member of the band has their own distinct influences too, from Julian Cope to Prefab Sprout and Arcade Fire, and the sound of the album is hugely dictated by their musical tastes too. I’m not sure whether living in Cumbria has much effect on the songs, but I do think that if you live in Cumbria you have to have a real appreciation of beauty, with the landscape and the scenery being like it is. Looking back over my influences, I think there is a consistency in that most of them do create beautiful lush sounds as well as just great songs, so this may be an indirect influence from Cumbria for my tastes.

Where did the band’s name come from?

As I mentioned earlier, the first mylittlebrother EPs were solo projects.

I hate self-promotion, and the thought of saying ‘Hey, listen to Will Harris, he’s great!’ made me cringe. When I

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was a teenager, whenever my sister introduced me to her friends, she would say ‘This is my little brother’ and never tell them my name. It wound me up at the time, but I thought it was a decent stage name. And it stuck. The lack of spacing is mostly just for Google’s sake!

You have recently released your second album, ‘Howl’ through Big Stir Records. Before we talk about ‘Howl’, how did mylittlebrother come to be involved with Big Stir Records and how has the experience of releasing and promoting the album with them been so far?

We met Rex and Christina at The Cavern Club in Liverpool during the International Pop Overthrow Festival a few years ago [2016]. I think we were on just before them, and we both fell in love with each other’s music. When we met, it was also clear that they were two of the loveliest people you could meet, and had a passion for music that was beyond compare. A couple of years later I helped them organise a gig in

Edinburgh and we’ve been in contact ever since. As soon as they heard we were planning an album, they said they wanted to put it out! Obviously we were over the moon with the idea.

Working with them has, unsurprisingly, been as good as it could possibly have been, we keep in touch regularly and they are getting us loads of airplay in countless countries. And obviously, they have also lined us up with fantastic interviews with some of the finest magazines in the world!

There was a six-year gap between your debut full-length album, ‘If We Never Came Down’ and ‘Howl’.

How would you say that ‘Howl’ differs from ‘If We Never Came Down’ and could you give us an insight into what the band got up to between the release of the two albums?

‘If We Never Came Down’ wasn’t exactly a solo project, but some of the songs were. Others were just me and Dan, but none of them had mylittlebrother playing as a band.

Frequently I was drumming and playing bass, and we got our friends Jude Connelly and Jim Lang heavily involved too. ‘Howl’, on the other hand, is very much a ‘band album’.

We had been playing live regularly and had built up a new sound, and people would look back on ‘If We Never Came Down’ and say ‘It’s great, but you don’t sound like that any more’, which was totally fair. We very deliberately set about creating an album that was more representative of what we have been doing live over the past couple of years, and I’m delighted to say it worked.

Could you give us an insight into the writing and recording process of ‘Howl’?

‘Howl’ was written over a very long period. In fact, rough verses for the song ‘Howl’ are probably nearly twenty years old! I’d been sitting on them for ages, but nothing worked until suddenly the chorus appeared and the song made sense to me! Most of the album, however, was written over two years before recording. Some of the

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songs, such as ‘Time of Our Lives’ and ‘The Start’ are deeply personal reflections on changes happening in my life at that time. Others, like ‘Chicago’ and ‘Responsibility’ were more affected by changes to the world at that time ... And some songs just fell out fully formed, such as ‘Janey’ and ‘Goldmine’ and I’ve actually had to analyse my own lyrics to see what I was going on about ... Generally it seems they’re a combination of my personal life and the state of the world though! We recorded Howl at The Music Farm studio in Egremont, Cumbria, with their engineer Lee Shackley. We had been gigging the songs so much at that time that we just wanted to go in and play them ‘as live’ and then add things and edit if and when needed. All of the members of mylittlebrother were super-professional about everything, and it didn’t take too long to get the crux of the songs down. We then took early recordings home and planned any edits or additions to our parts to make it sound better. We then repeated this process four or five times until we came up with something that not only

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represents the band, but each member of the band too.

We have been amazed by the incredible songwriting exhibited across the eleven tracks on ‘Howl’, but one lyric we particularly wanted to ask you about was “Because I’m stuck in little England, and I’m ill, annoyed and down!” in ‘Chicago’.

Could you elaborate on this lyric and was it any way written as a reaction to Brexit?

Thank you! That’s very kind. And yes, well spotted. It was a reaction to Brexit, but also to the culture of division that has taken hold in a lot of countries. It was really getting to me, and the day I wrote the line I was particularly wound up by it all, and I was also rather ill and had been for a while. It is a very honest and literal line. However, I have to also admit that despite it being a genuine scream from the rooftops, I also liked the ill-annoyed and Illinois-ed pun in a song called ‘Chicago’!

Whilst we are on the subject of

Photograph by Mark Littlejohn

songwriting, what do you consider to make a great song and what makes you tick as a songwriter?

Wow this is a good question, and honestly I don’t know. I think one mark of a truly great song is when it touches you emotionally or even spiritually in some way but you can’t explain why.

I’m also a huge fan of any song that sounds simple, but when you analyse it you find it is actually quite complex.

‘God Only Knows’ by The Beach Boys [‘Pet Sounds’, 1966], or ‘Wichita Lineman’ [Glen Campbell, ‘Witchita Lineman’, 1968], are great examples of this and they are two of my favourite ever songs. Elliott Smith was also a master of it. Something I always try to consider when songwriting is to keep it varied, but to maintain identity. On ‘Howl’, for example, ‘Janey’ is an unbelievably simple song. I found myself apologising to Robin, our bassist, when I told him quite how long I wanted him to just play an ‘E’ for!

But then ‘The Start’ is harmonically far more complex, but they still very much sound like mylittlebrother. I think

mixing it up is key.

We have already touched upon Brexit, but England (and indeed the world) has more recently had another much bigger issue to contend with, the pandemic. Did you manage to perform any of the material on ‘Howl’ in a live setting before COVID-19 hit and how has the experience of releasing and promoting an album during all this, without the ability to get out on the road, been?

Thankfully, yes. We very much used the eighteen months before recording to hone our sound, and really get to know the songs. I think that we performed eight out of the ten tracks live ... and given that one of the ones we didn’t play is backwards and unplayable, that’s not too bad! We performed them at festivals and at gigs across the country. It is infuriating not to be able to play them now they’ve finally been released though. We did consider postponing the release, but no-one really seems to know how long this will

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last, and with it being six years since ‘If We Never Came Down’, we just wanted something out there. Whether that was a wise business decision remains to be seen, but we have no regrets, as we’re so proud of the album, we wanted to show it off and get cracking on the next one!

Have you made any plans to tour in support of ‘Howl’ when we return to some sort of normality and what else can we expect from mylittlebrother in the future?

Hopes for a tour, yes. Plans for a tour, no. We’re avoiding making too many live plans yet, as we just don’t know how long it will be before any form of normality returns, or what kind of normality that will be. For now, we’re just enjoying the release and reaction that ‘Howl’ is receiving. We’ll plan when we can plan again. Just before

the first lockdown kicked in, we started working on new material though, and we are continuing with writing and arranging that. So we’re not just twiddling our thumbs, I promise!

Thank you for a wonderful interview, merry Christmas and we wish you all the best for the future.

bigstirrecords.com/ mylittlebrother www.facebook.com/ mylittlebrothermusic ‘Howl’ is out now on Big Stir Records.

Photograph by Callum Latimer

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these elements are presented with such fondness for this type of wholesome family viewing, and the festive season itself, that it is hard not to like.

Christmas on the Square

Holly Dolly Christmas!

Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

If this was any other time of year, we would probably suggest that a film with as much schmaltz and familiarity as ‘Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square’ was a tragic waste of camera film.

However, because it is the season to be jolly and this year, more than any other, it is good to be able to try to seek out at least one film that reminds us that it is Christmas, this actually becomes the greatest attribute of the 74-year-old country legend’s latest Christmas treat.

Taking liberally the message from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square’ is, at its heart, the sort of Christmas film that television channels have been making for years. However,

Dolly plays an angel who comes to save a whole town’s worth of people who just happen to be able to sing and dance their way through a crisis from Regina (Christina Baranski), a wicked, money-driven property developer who has ordered everybody out by Christmas Eve so that she can build a big shopping mall. If anybody can show this Scrooge the error of her ways, it is Dolly dressed as a rhinestone-encrusted angel, right?

For all the familiarity on show in ‘Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square’, it does attempt to bring something new to the table with a lavish spread of plot twists. Whilst not always convincing, they are somehow pulled together by a soundtrack consisting of fourteen brand new Dolly songs, two of which are featured on her latest Christmas album, ‘A Holly Dolly Christmas’, released to coincide with the film. The songs, it has to be said, aren’t her best work and the singing-talking dialogue of the film can be a bit nauseating at times, but if you are looking to get fully immersed in the Christmas spirit, there are far worse films with which to do it. dollyparton.com www.facebook.com/DollyParton

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Marillion There is Light at the End of the Tunnel Interview by Martin Hutchinson.

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Marillion have seen ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’! With the long, dark days of COVID-19 hopefully behind us by then, Marillion will shed some light across the stages of Britain with a ten-date tour entitled ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’ Tour in November 2021, culminating in two nights at the London Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith. Tickets are on sale now.

Lead vocalist and lyricist Steve Hogarth says: “We’re currently writing album number 19 and, as you might imagine, looking forward with every sinew to getting back on the road and playing it to you. Not as much as my wife’s looking forward to getting me out of the house though !”

Marillion are: Steve Hogarth - lead vocals, lyrics, keyboards, percussion; Steve Rothery - electric and acoustic guitars; Pete Trewavas - Bass, Guitar, Backing Vocals; Mark Kelly keyboards and Ian Mosley - drums, percussion.

“We are extremely fortunate, we had set aside this year to make our 19th studio album and so we saved up a bit and we budgeted for a year on the ground, before this plague broke”, says Steve.

2020 has been a terrible year for everyone and Marillion are grateful for the continued support of their family

of faithful fans, particularly the wonderful donations from the Couch Convention weekend in September, which raised £31,530 for their crew, who have been hard hit financially by the pandemic.

Of the successful weekend, keyboard player Mark Kelly said: “What a weekend it was! We were totally stunned and knocked out by everyone’s involvement in everything that went on, from Steve Rothery’s late night cocktails to Pete’s Bass Masterclass. Ian’s Drum Q&A and my early morning fun run and all the music, chat and fancy dress in between. It was fun for us to be in the audience, too, reading and reacting to all the comments as the shows were streamed. The crew tip-jar was overflowing with your generosity, and the fans raised a substantial sum for our wonderful crew. The money will go a long way to helping them survive a difficult year.”

Having formed in 1979, the band scored a chart-topping album with ‘Misplaced Childhood’ (1985). This was followed by a string of best-selling albums, such as 2001’s ‘Anorakphobia’. Hit singles included ‘Kayleigh’ and ‘Lavender’ (both taken from ‘Misplaced Childhood’) and ‘Incommunicado’ from 1987’s ‘Clutching at Straws’. The band’s early hits featured Derek Dick, aka Fish, as lead vocalist, but he was replaced in 1989 by Steve Hogarth.

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L/R: Steve Rothery, Pete Trewavas, Steve Hogarth, Mark Kelly and Ian Moseley.

I caught up with guitarist and founder member Steve Rothery who tells me that the new album is in progress: “Thanks to the first lockdown, I wasn’t able to work with the band for about four months and then when the restrictions were lifted slightly the band worked without me for a couple of months as I had some things on and I joined them again in August, but now of course we’re in lockdown again. We are about halfway through the album now and we’re still writing material for it.

We’ll take stock of what we have and hopefully it should be out in the first half of next year.”

Steve is the only remaining founder member in the band and he lists some big-hitters as his personal influences: “Yeah, I’d say I was influenced by Pink Floyd, Genesis, Camel, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. Then I got into songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Neil Finn.”

Speaking of Genesis, it has been said that the early Marillion albums seemed

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to sound like early Genesis. Steve sort of agrees: “You could say that. There were some comparisons to Genesis lyrically and when Fish wore face paints. We were also more edgy and guitar-led back then. From the album ‘Misplaced Childhood’, we got our identity.”

The music world was shocked when Fish left in 1988 (he was the band’s second lead vocalist, replacing original singer Doug ‘Rastus’ Irvine in 1981) and many thought the band wouldn’t survive without their frontman. “No, it wasn’t really a problem”, Steve says.

“We had a lot of faith in our music and we were lucky to find Steve Hogarth. The band has now had the same line-up for over thirty years.”

Going back to the album, Steve tells me, “On every album we try to do a little different and this one is no exception, we do have some very strong ideas about it.” And when the band tours, we’ll get to hear some of the songs: “That’s right, when we tour a new album, we normally do

about 50% of it, but it depends. The important thing is to have a balanced set. You don’t want to give people a lot of new stuff in one show, they also want to hear their favourites.”

For the band’s last tour, they had an orchestra with them, so will the next tour be the same? “No, we did that last tour with six orchestral musicians, but just for that tour. This time it’ll be just the five members of the band, although we might include a string quartet for a couple of the songs.”

Some of the music is quite intricate. If all goes well pandemic-wise, when will the band start putting the tour together?

“Well, we are scheduled to start on November 14th next year. We normally have August off, so we’ll hopefully start rehearsals in September.”

Steve released his first solo album, ‘The Ghosts of Pripyat’ in 2014 and he tells me that he’s hoping to do another one: “That’s right, I’m hoping to record my next solo album between finishing the new Marillion album and starting the tour.”

Marillion’s The Light at the End of the Tunnel tour dates for November 2021 are as follows: 14/11/21: City Hall, Hull 15/11/21: Usher Hall, Edinburgh 17/11/21: St. David’s Hall, Cardiff 18/11/21: Bridgewater Hall, Manchester 20/11/21: Corn Exchange, Cambridge 21/11/21: Symphony Hall, Birmingham 23/11/21: Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool 24/11/21: Forum, Bath 26/11/21*: Eventim Apollo, London (seated) 27/11/21*: Eventim Apollo, London (standing) *Please note the Apollo Hammersmith shows will be one night seated and one night standing. www.marillion.com www.facebook.com/ MarillionOfficial

Meanwhile, Steve is looking forward to getting out and about on tour: “It’ll be great to play live again. There’s tracks that are great fun to play and we always try to keep it fresh and interesting.”

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Kenney Jones Mods and Rockers: The Sixties and the Faces at 50 Interview by Kevin Burke.

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“It was like the audience were on stage with us, and we were in the audience ...”

The word ambitious defines perfectly the advances made by sixties band the Small Faces. Coming into their own in 1966, the line-up consisting of Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian McLagan emerged as a R&B, Rock outfit. A beacon for the then Mod revolution, they had a string of hit singles before switching gears, embracing the experimentation of psychedelic rock and releasing an album which earned the title ‘masterpiece’ then, and still is regarded as such today. 1968’s ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’ is and will remain one of the true artistic treasures of the decade. Within two years, and a line-up switch, the band would change and dominate the early seventies music scene.

As Steve Marriott departed to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, the core of the band remained, only to be joined by Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart. A half-a-century since the release of their debut album ‘First Step’, the Faces remain as relevant as ever. Tales of wild antics both on and of stage dominated their career, but the music and the sweat driven performances have become the stuff of legend. This year, at the climax of the

Brit Awards in February, the Faces, albeit the remaining members reformed, and stole what could have been a pretty bland affair. After a solo Stewart rendition of ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ (‘Atlantic Crossing’, 1975), he was joined on stage by Ronnie Wood and this man, Kenney Jones.

That performance may now feel like the closing ceremony to 2020. The irony of watching the drummer play isolated within a plexiglass-style surround, when it has now become an everyday norm in society. But, it proved that rock and roll will never go out of fashion, a thought in my mind when it came to approaching Kenney Jones. Since year one of the Small Faces, he has given interviews and talked about every part of his adventures in music. In 2018, the drummer released a book, ‘Let the Good Times Roll: My Life in Small Faces, Faces, and the Who’ (Thomas Dunne Books), a chronicle of his career, and an insight into some of the greatest music recorded in the 20th century. Nevertheless, through a brief encounter, I found a charming man, who speaks with a nostalgia that is endearing, a Face in this crowded

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Small Faces, 1966

world of pretentious rock stars.

After the original cockney Mod relayed all our feelings, “For me it’s a funny time, I’m doing the best I can, it’s like living in Groundhog Day isn’t it?”, I started, well at the start and asked about Kenney’s own influences, and if he was influenced by the jazz sound, similar to Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts? “Yes, without a doubt.

I mean when I learnt to play drums, and one of the records I learnt to play to was ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ [Pee Wee Hunt]. It’s like a jazz track.

I got into jazz big time. I can play with my left hand, I can play in like a Mingus and a rock and roll style both ways”. As the decade continued, the Small Faces progressed musically very quickly. A change happened, marked by a shift in labels from Decca, and the management of the infamous Don Arden. Moving to Andrew Loog Oldham and his legendary Immediate label brought a freedom with it.

“You’re bang on, yes absolutely. I mean, once we got into Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate, we had a lot

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more studio time. We practically lived in the studio and we were free to do actually what we wanted to do. And that’s how we got more and more creative, and learnt to experiment”. Those experiments in sounds created the memorable classics ‘Here Come the Nice’, ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘Tin Soldier’ and the release of their eponymous 1967 second studio album held a lot of the changing style that would forge the way for their third studio album.

The mammoth album ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’, released in May 1968, has caused speculation as to the length of time it took to record. An album which sits alongside the Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967) and the Who’s ‘Tommy’ (1969), Kenney points to the truth of the matter: ”Funnily enough, it didn’t really take that long to record. What we had to do was ... I mean, some people said it took a year and stuff like that. What happened was we had to record going in and out of the studio in between doing gigs and stuff. So we’d

Faces, 1973

have to stop recording and do some gigs, and then go back into the studio and that’s what took the time”.

Similarly, how pressurized the creation of that masterwork was, was something he also expanded on. “No it wasn’t. It wasn’t difficult at all”, Kenney states, along with, “It was glorious to do because basically when we got into it, it was like a new adventure and very exciting to actually see it all come together. And Glyn Johns, our producer was well into it as well, and he got some great sounds”.

The changeover from the Small Faces, to the brief outfit Quiet Melon, and finally the Faces was something that the percussionist welcomed but not something he had to change his style to do. “The thing is, I mean it’s funny because people call me a rock drummer when I was in the Small Faces, especially now, but we never played rock and roll, we played our own music, and tracks and stuff like that. We did play the odd rock and roll song, you know, but it was a new

adventure, because with the Faces it was like going down a different road completely”. The workload of being in the Faces doubled for all involved, and even through solo albums everything was integrated. “I mean, Rod had his own solo stuff as well, so we had to kind of go along with that as well.

So we were virtually playing on each other’s albums basically”. Kenney played drums on Rod’s ‘Gasoline Alley’ (1970), ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ (‘71), and ‘Never a Dull Moment’ (‘72) albums, while at the same time being a member of the Faces.

In his book ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, Kenney relayed how the Faces set up a bar on stage. With stools and even a barman [roadie Royden Walter Magee] “The audience loved it. It contributed to breaking down the barrier between them and us, which is what we always wanted” (excerpt, Chapter 8). I asked Kenney about the Faces and if he thought they were one of the first bands to connect with the audience like this. “I think we must’ve been,

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because basically, we were all enjoying each other. One of the things we liked to do, and we all liked to drink as well, so we would all get a bit merry before we went on stage, so we had a great time. It was like the audience were on stage with us, and we were in the audience, it’s kinda strange, like one great big giant party”. Of course, those legendary stories are well documented, such as Rod Stewart announcing from the stage that the band were having a party back at the hotel, and all were invited.

There is that question of now, the present and after fifty-years of the Faces, when they get together, has it all changed with ageing? “Funnily enough, we recently did a gig for prostate cancer, about a year ago [Wentworth Club in Surrey]. It was great, and we raised a lot of money”.

At the gig, Rod Stewart had revealed a battle with prostate cancer, for which he had secretly undergone treatment for three years. “But funnily enough, nothing changes when we get together. It’s like going back in time,

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because we still have a great time together. The reason is because we’ve always never stopped seeing each other”, Kenney continued with a touch of that unbreakable friendship that was and is at the core or that band. Then again, to him it feels like the Faces, albeit the remaining members, are something like a family: “We get together two or three times a year.

[Laughs] I just got off the phone to Ronnie Wood. So we speak to each other and we still go out to a restaurant, or a bar or whatever, and still cause havoc”. What’s next for the Faces, when the world returns to normality is something on everyone’s mind. But, getting together this year, was it significant for more than just a chance to play live? “That’s right, yeah. I mean we are working together right now on some old catalogues because it’s our fiftieth anniversary, what’s left of it anyway.

So I’ve been working on it as it’s the lockdown, on various bits from the back catalogue stuff, and there’s a few gems I found. We talked about it when we rehearsed this year, and it

The Who, 1982

sounds really good, so we’ll be putting that out …. releasing it in the early part of 2021”.

Of course Kenney also, and with reservations, joined The Who on drums. From 1979-88, he replaced the late Keith Moon, both on tours and on The Who albums ‘Face Dances’ (1981) and ‘It’s Hard’ (1982). On explaining how difficult it was, Kenney states, “The only thing that was difficult really was learning The Who’s entire repertoire intensely, finding my own way of playing them, and then going out and doing a gig with them, and getting ready to rehearse for a tour”.

Kenney played his first gig with the Who on 2nd May 1979 at the Rainbow Theatre in London. However, crossing over into the ranks of The Who was not that big an upheaval for Kenney. Both bands of musicians had crossed paths at times over the years, and were already extremely familiar with each other’s music. “It’s always been ... The Who and the Small Faces used to tour a lot together. We toured all over Europe together, and we toured England and

Australia, and New Zealand. I was working with Pete on his own anyway when he was in between doing stuff with The Who, and I also did Tommy [movie soundtrack] when I was still with the Faces, so we were all used to each other anyway”.

Kenney would play on Pete Townshend’s ‘Empty Glass’ album in 1980, but as a member of the Who, he provided the backbeat to their explosive performance at Live Aid in July 1985.

Turning to his book again, and the fact for a man who was so immersed in the good-time vibes of the ultimate good-time band the Faces, had he kept a diary or how did he in fact remember so much with such clarity? “No, no.

The reason I got the book together, it was basically over the years I was asked to write a book and why didn’t I do my autobiography? I’d get all fired up and thought, ‘oh yes, I’ll do that!’ Then I start to work on it and then I’d sort of stop and feel a little bit weird about it. I thought, ‘hold on a minute, it’s the story of my life and

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I’m only thirty years old’, so I parked it till I got a lot older. When I was approaching sixty-five, I thought I better do something or write something”. Of course how his bandmates reacted to his book was unsurprising, as Kenney was now following a trend. “They thought it was great, they were pleased I brought a book out, ‘cos Woody brought a book out, Rod brought a book out, and I brought a book out,

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so we all have a book”. That’s where we left it, and what I was left with is the feeling that at 72 years of age, Kenney Jones may be well aware of his accomplishments, but he is modest about them, and that itself is endearing. kenneyjones.com www.facebook.com/ kenneyjonesdrums

edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44 on 17th July 1959. At the time of her death, she had just $0.70 in the bank.

Billie Strange Fruit

Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

‘Billie’, written and directed by James Erskine, is quite like unlike any music documentary you will have ever seen, but then its subject matter, Billie Holiday, was quite unlike any other music star the world had ever seen.

Holiday may have been blessed with one of the greatest voices to grace the stage, but her life was far less blessed.

A proud black woman who preferred to sing to white audiences and a blues singer who didn’t sing the blues, preferring to give the world such seminal works as 1939’s ‘Strange Fruit’, which condemned the lynching of black Americans and made her an enemy of the state, ‘Lady Day’ as she became known, was exploited as an artist, became a violent drug addict and alcoholic and died from pulmonary

Twelve years after Holiday’s death, journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out on a mission to write the definitive biography of the controversial artist.

Over the next seven years, she interviewed over 200 people associated with Holiday, including friends, family members, band members, peers from 1930s Harlem, pianists, psychiatrists and even a pimp. However, when Kuehl was found dead on a Washington D.C. sidewalk in 1978 after attending a Count Bassie concert (the police deemed her mysterious death to be suicide, but many suggest that she was murdered by the very people who exploited Holiday because she was getting too close to the truth), the work lay unfinished and she left behind 125 audio tapes and a wealth of papers including police files, transcripts of court cases, royalty settlements and hospital records.

Now, the fruits of Kuehl’s labour have been put to good use in the simply stunning ‘Billie’. However, the film is far from a straightforward re-telling of Holiday’s tale. Instead, it successfully manages to tells the stories of both Holiday and Kuehl, the lives of whom will forever be intertwined in tragedy.

‘Billie’ should also be commended for not focusing on Holiday’s inner demons, but rather the cause of them.

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MERRY XMAS EVERYBODY!

IT’S

DAVE HILL: THE DEFINITIVE INTERVIEW!

By Alice Jones-Rodgers.

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It is early November and very soon, radio stations all over the world will start to bombard their listeners with a host of festive favourites. Whilst, in the current climate, it is a safe assumption that Christmas will be very different for most people this year, these radio stations’ playlists will remain very much the same as they have done in previous years and consist of a handful of songs that have become as synonymous to the season of goodwill as the turkey and the tree. One such song that it just wouldn’t be Christmas without is Slade’s evergreen classic ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’.

‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ was released against the backdrop of another turbulent time, one of strikes, powercuts and three-day weeks at the end of 1973, selling millions of copies and hitting the Christmas number one spot to lift the nation’s spirits and bringing much needed joy and hope into the lives of people all over the UK. But there was much more to Slade, the origins of which can be traced all the way back to the formation of The Vendors (soon to become The ‘N Betweens) in 1964, than this classic piece of festive cheer and frontman Noddy Holder’s impassioned cry of “It’s Chriiiiiistmas!”

‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ was the sixth of Slade’s number one singles in the space of two years; those other

classic singles being ‘Coz I Luv You’ (1971); ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’ (1972); ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ (1972); ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ (1973) and ‘Skweeze Me Please Me’ (1973). At this point, they were, without question, the biggest band in Britain with a run of chart toppers that would only be equalled in the 1970s a few years later by ABBA. During the early ‘70s glam era, they also scored three top ten albums, with two, 1972’s ‘Slayed’ and 1974’s ‘Old New Borrowed and Blue’ topping the charts and 1974’s ‘Slade in Flame’, the soundtrack to their very own feature film, ‘Flame’ reaching number six.

However, keen not to be just a relic of glam era, the band even managed to survive the punk era and in the ‘80s, having adopted a quite different image, they not only returned to the UK top ten with the singles ‘My Oh My’ (number 2, 1983) and ‘Run Runaway’ (number 7, 1984), but in the wake of all of the big US rock acts that they had influenced during their glam days, such as KISS and Aerosmith, making it big, also finally broke the American market that had proved so elusive a decade earlier.

There was also much more to the legendary Birmingham band than their sideboarded, mirrored top hat wearing frontman. Equally important to the band becoming such

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a runaway success in those heady days of ‘70s glam excess were Holder’s songwriting partner, bassist, violinist and backing vocalist Jim Lea; drummer Don Powell and last but by no means least, there was charismatic guitarist Dave Hill, who’s vastly underrated but always unmistakable guitar playing truly brought their songs to life and was always accompanied by a choice of outfit that ensured that they would forever be imprinted on the public consciousness.

Just as his band need no real introduction, neither does Dave Hill. He is simply a legend and one who now, a full twenty-eight years after Holder and Lea decided to call it a day and after the departure of Powell earlier this year is still out there keeping Slade’s flame burning brightly with a different line-up. In this, the definitive Dave Hill interview, as arguably the greatest ‘best of’ album of all-time, entitled ‘Cum On Feel the Hitz’ rides high on the UK album chart, he gives us an

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in-depth insight into what it has been like to be part of one of the biggest selling rock acts of all-time, from their very beginnings to present day.

Firstly, hello Dave and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Could we start by asking a bit about your early life, how you first became interested in music as a listener and how you came to start learning to play the guitar and pursue music as a career?

Nice to speak to you too, yeah! If you like, you can listen to the story, I’m quite good at that. So, it will give you an insight into how it took place, right? I had a kind of situation at school where my head teacher at my junior school thought I was a bit of a clown, right, and because my grandad is a classical pianist ... he isn’t alive of course and he wasn’t alive then ... from my mother’s side, which is where he comes from ... his name was David and I was called David, you see and now, at school, you have a situation where you’ve got a mum who’s very

intelligent and is the War Cabinet Minister’s secretary and can write really good letters, right? And you get a funny thing at school, where some of the teachers get a bit awkward when somebody intelligent writes them a letter. So, she wrote a letter and insists to the head teacher that Davey was musical because of his grandfather, et cetera, and she wrote a very good letter, but the woman in question [laughs] said, ‘This is ridiculous! Your mother’s writing to me, asking me to put you in a class’. And I was probably ten years of age then and she said, ‘Well, you can’t be in a music class, you can’t read music!’ Well, I mean, it’s like because nobody’s taught me, you know, but she’s totally ignored everything I’ve said. Now, basically, the only thing at school in those days, I don’t know what your school was like, was you either learnt to play the violin or you played that horrible recorder. So, by default, I left that school and went to a senior school and a lad right near me, this was right out of the blue, had got this acoustic guitar. So, I went round and I said, ‘What’s this?’ and he said, ‘Oh,

it’s an acoustic guitar, we’ve bought it from Kays Catalogue, you see’, which was a mail order catalogue in the fifties ... probably the early sixties it would have been then. And I said, ‘Wow, this is great, this!’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m just learning to play it, you see’. I said, ‘Okay’ and well, I knew this kid quite well and I went back and asked dad if he’d get me a guitar. I said, ‘Well, the teacher won’t let me get in the music class and maybe this is something really good for me’. So, dad said, ‘Well, let’s have a look at the Kays Catalogue’, he saw some guitars and some were very expensive because they were jazz guitars and this one that was £7.50, which doesn’t sound much to you now, but it was quite a bit in those days. So, he said, ‘Well, look son, I’m not going to spend lots of money but I’ll get you this and if you decide you don’t want to learn it, at least I haven’t lost too much on it’. So, we sent for it and it came in a cardboard box and I’m left-handed you see, Alice, and the awkward thing is, there were no left-handed guitars and there was no Beatles in those days, so I never saw

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Paul McCartney with a left-handed guitar, so there was nothing like that.

So, he said, ‘Well, you need to go for some lessons’. Well, I’ve got it the wrong way round, you see, because I’m trying to play right-handed, so I go to the teacher, he’s a jazz guitarist, and he said, ‘You can’t play the guitar like that, it’s upside down! The strings are the wrong way. Put it on your knee and play it right-handed. You’ll get used to it’. And he was absolutely right! It’s not anything I’d considered, because I wrote with my left-hand. But what actually happened, Alice, is that my left hand being the strength of my hands, I think it’s also the most musical side of my brain. And I started to then learn to play and the next step was to form a band, because a lot of kids on the estate ... there was always somebody singing or somebody who looked like Cliff Richard, or something like that, and I formed what you call ‘a little group’ called The Shamrocks, who were all basically mates in a class. One lad played bass, he was one kid I always knocked about with, you know and he came in and there was a kid up the road

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who said he could sing. So, we got this silly little group, you know, which is quite nice and it was like, ‘Ooh, let’s go down the youth centre’, you see.

So, we go down the youth centre and there’s this nice man, you know and he said, ‘Yes, you can come’. ‘I’m all for people learning music’, he said, ‘it keeps you out of trouble!’ Well, that’s absolutely right, you see. So, I thought, well, okay, we started to learn to play and then what happened, and it does happen so much, is that bit by bit, what happens with a lot of kids is that they get disinterested. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered! I want to play football’ or whatever and I stuck it out; I took the guitar and then I got my dad ... because my teacher said, ‘You need to get a better guitar Dave. You’ll never get anywhere with that one’. So, of course, the next stage was the electric guitar, which was pretty remarkable, you see.

It was like, ‘Wow, what is this?!’ You know, this was at the time of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and this electric guitar was solid, and then The Shadows made it, Cliff Richard and the Shadows and, of course,

The N’Betweens, with Dave (top right) and Don (bottom right)

immediately ... I’m a very musical, melody-minded person and I loved learning the instrumentals of Hank Marvin, you see and Hank Marvin wore glasses, so he looked like Buddy Holly. So, it all started off there and what happened was, the group fell apart and I met some other people, and obviously we were much better, and then one day, somebody saw me ... I’d got in this kind of pub group and this guy was looking for a lead guitarist to join a group in Bilston and he spotted me and he could see me smiling on stage and so, he came to my house. I don’t know how he got my address, but then he took me to the group and the group were really impressed with me and in the group was a guy called Don Powell, who eventually ended up with me when we became Slade, you see. But that’s how it started and from that group ... eventually that group lost interest, you know, but I’d turned professional by then. The Beatles had made it and I had a Beatles hairstyle, you see and I felt very confident carrying on and I was experimenting with the clothes, you know, trying to

look something on stage, because Elvis has always got a gold jacket on or something like that. Yeah, so that was the early days and I mean, there were no colour televisions, bearing that in mind, so if you wore any colours, it isn’t good on TV, they wouldn’t see the colours.

The foundations of what would become Slade were of course cemented in 1964 with the formation of The Vendors, who soon afterwards changed their name to The ‘N Btweens. How did the classic Slade line-up of yourself, Noddy Holder, Jim Lea and Don Powell came together and was the chemistry between the four of you that would go on to make you such a successful act instant?

That group split up and me and Don decided to form another group. Now, what actually happened was, I’d got this amazing idea that I wanted a group with three lead guitarists. Yeah, and I know that sounds really bizarre, but what I thought was that a bass player

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Steve Brett and the Mavericks with Noddy Holder (top left)

could play the bass, but to have a big sound, he could play exactly the notes that I’m playing and we’d have a rhythm guitarist to make a big sound, you see. And therefore, it wasn’t that they’re going to play the lead, it was just to enhance certain parts to the songs to give them impact. Do you get the idea? It became quite a unique sound, but the singer I eventually chose, by default in a funny sort of way, was in another band. And so, there was me and Don and we auditioned for a bass player first and he was quite young and he [Jim Lea] played bass guitar like I’d never seen anybody play a bass. He played bass guitar like Jimi Hendrix would play a bass, you know. So, it was a bit sort of like, ‘Wow, this is really different!’

And this kid says, ‘Well, I’m interested in joining you. Who’s the singer?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re looking for someone at the moment. We’ve got somebody in mind’. And I’d heard about this Noddy Holder. He was in another group and he wasn’t the main singer, you see, he was like one of the backing singers in this group. And this group was one of

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these groups where it was always Johnny somebody and the Pirates or Johnny somebody and the ... It was one of them groups and it was Steve Brett and the Mavericks and Nod was a Maverick. And when I heard about him, because I thought, well, I’m not sure about his voice, but he’s very good when the main singer goes off stage and he talks to the audience and we were looking for somebody who’d have a nice persona. You know the kind of thing I mean? Somebody who was, how can I put it? Anyway, I saw Noddy ... you know how strange things happen in life? ... I happened to be in Wolverhampton town and they’d got this department store called Beatties and really weirdly, Nod was standing outside there and I saw him and I thought, oh right, and I walked up to him and I said, ‘You’re Noddy Holder aren’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you’ve met me before’. I said, ‘Yeah, sort of. You were in the Mavericks, weren’t you?’ and he went, ‘Yeah, I left them’ and I went, ‘Oh, okay. Well, we’re looking for a singer’. He said, ‘Are you?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’ve got this

idea for three lead guitarists’ and he went, ‘Oh, I like the sound of that!

That’s really original! I’d be interested!’ So, what we did was we got Jim Lea, Don, me and we went down to a pub opposite Nod’s council house and we rehearsed and it was just something in that first rehearsal that we played together. Right, we didn’t know each other really and there was just something magical, something really good about this. We all knew a certain song or two, so we played something we all knew and it just instantly happened. It was like, ‘Oh, there’s something about this!’ And from that, obviously after years and years of development of becoming a really, really good band and popular locally in the Midlands ... Now, bearing in mind, at that time, there were a lot of Midlands groups, right? In the Black Country, right? And in the Midlands, you had for instance, Black Sabbath, you had Jeff Lynne, you had Roy Wood and all these people lived in this particular area where it was like a melting pot, a bit like Liverpool, where The Beatles come from. There was a

lot of really good bands who would eventually make it, like Sabbath, ELO, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, so we were all pretty good and the other one was Robert Plant, who ended up being in Led Zeppelin. He was local. I mean, Nod used to drive him in his group’s van to gigs! Yeah, it’s a great story and from that point of view, obviously, I did play lead guitar, we went and developed a really good act, but we also very interested, especially me and Nod, in visual things, so Nod was always wearing hats and I was always wearing colourful clothes. I used to go into women’s clothes shops and choose funny glittery shirts and all that. I was also interested in, you know, something that you’d get seen in, you know, like when someone saw you on stage. I remember I bought this woman’s blouse once and you wouldn’t know it was a blouse when I wore it on stage, you thought it was a silky shirt, you know and I wore this on stage and of course, our bass player didn’t like my clothes [laughs], he’d just joke, ‘You’re not gonna wear that are you mate?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I am!’ So, I went on

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stage and there’s all these people smiling at me and I thought, now this is brilliant! This is really good! And it was just like a visual impact of standing there and I don’t know, you hear this from people in showbusiness where they go, ‘Ooh, I went on stage and I sang a song and everybody clapped me’ and suddenly they’re going, ‘Now this is what I really want’.

Well, it was a bit like that for me but I was very conscious of my guitar playing, it was always paramountly important. It’s one thing looking great, but the other thing is the visual side of entertainment, you know. I’d grown up watching films with Doris Day and Fred Astaire and all these people and ‘Showboat’ [1951] and musicals and I was big on Judy Garland and all those kind of people. So, I’d seen a lot of things at the cinema and America was always an interesting place. It always seemed to have great looking pop stars and colourful personalities, you know, with Dion and ... there were tons of them, you know, from America and it was such an impression on British people. The Americans always looked

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like they were having more fun than us British, you know! We looked a bit dour, while they had big cars and they were flashy and it was all that really and I developed a style because I understood how to play rock ‘n’ roll, you know, the way Chuck Berry played it ... Certain guitarists have styles, you know, like you know when Eric Clapton’s playing or Brian May or, I don’t know, Peter Green or things like that. There are certain people who have a sound and style and I have a definite style and a definite sound.

Interestingly enough, I was on Johnnie Walker’s ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ on Sunday [BBC Radio 2, 01/11/20].

Yeah, he was doing this thing about the hits album [‘Cum On Feel the Hitz’, 2020] being in the charts, our latest release, and when he played some of the tracks, you could really hear the guitar playing on them. I hadn’t heard them for quite some time. You can really hear the sound of the records that our manager Chas Chandler, who was our producer, got. He really understood rock and roll records because he managed Jimi Hendrix and

he was in The Animals and so he understood how to make great records.

You see, what really happened was that before we met him, we got spotted by a talent scout who came from London looking for groups and he came up to our youth centre in Willenhall, which is near Wolverhampton and he’d heard about us because somebody had said, ‘Ooh, there’s a nice group in that youth centre. They’re pretty good, you know.

Very entertaining’. So, he spotted us and he said, ‘How would you like to make a record?’ So, we said ‘Yeah!’, you know and he said, ‘I’ll pay for it.

Come down to London, come down in your van and we’ll spend a day in Fontana Records’, you see. We thought, wow, this is moving forward!

So, we went down there and we had one or two songs which we’d written and we had one or two songs which were covers and he said, ‘That song and that song, those are pretty good’.

So, we recorded two songs and then he said, ‘I’m going to release them on a French label’, you see and we thought, oh, this is weird, but the boss of the studio, called Jack Baverstock ... he’s

quite important in the story ... Jack Baverstock heard the two tracks and he came in and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll have a chat with you’. So, we said, ‘What’s it about?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ve just been listening to the two songs you did for that talent scout’ and he said, ‘I thought they sounded really good. How about you making an album in the studio and I’ll see if I can help you?’ And we were thinking, wow, this is great and we said, ‘Who’s paying for it?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll pay for it’. He said, ‘Let’s make an album’, so we used to go backwards and forwards from Wolverhampton to there and we made this album, you see and it was called ‘Beginnings’ [1969] and when he finished it, he said to us, he said, ‘You’ll never get anywhere with northern management, you need someone in the big city of London’ and he said, ‘I know some really good people’. So, it was a bit like ‘Oh, yeah?’ And he knew these agents called Rick and John Gunnell and Rick and John Gunnell knew Chas Chandler, right? So, you can see a jigsaw puzzle there and what happened was, he said,

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Manager Chas Chandler (left), formerly of The Animals, with Jimi Hendrix

‘I’m going to get in touch with the agent and put you in one of my clubs and then maybe some people can come and see you and maybe be interested in managing you’. It was a bit like, ‘Oh right’. So, we met this John Gunnell and he put us in a club in [New] Bond Street called Rasputin and we went in there [laughs] and it’s one of these tiny places where you go downstairs, it’s on until three in the morning and you’ve got a tiny stage up in the corner, you see? And he said, ‘I know a guy called Chas Chandler’ and we said, ‘Oh yeah? He’s Jimi Hendrix’s manager, isn’t he?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, he’s a friend of mine’; he said, ‘He’s looking for a band and I’ve told him to come and have a look at you’. So, we were really scared, you know, thinking Chas Chandler? He’s not going to like us, managing Jimi Hendrix, you know.

And I’m thinking, gosh, what’s he going to think of my guitar?! And he came down to Rasputin and saw us and watched us for an hour, right? And this is no word of a lie, Alice, he got up and we saw him coming across the dancehall [laughs] and he walked up to

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us and he says ... and he’s a Geordie, so he sort of goes, ‘Hey, wha’ y’doin’ man, think ya’s great, man! Wonderful!

You’re a breath of fresh air an’ that!’

He said, ‘I’d really want to manage ya!’

And we’re all flippin’ outraged, you know, trying to be cool! So, he said ‘I want to manage you’ and we all sort of went back home and told our mums and dads, you know. [Laughs] We said, ‘This bloke’s come to see us and he want to manage us. We didn’t really believe it at first, but he’s serious!’

And then, what he did, we were under contract to an agent in Wolverhampton, so he negotiated the contract with them and he bought us for £500 [laughs] and he bought us out, you see, because he [the agent] said, ‘Well, you’ve got to do this lads; great opportunity!’

After changing the band’s name to Ambrose Slade, you released the debut album ‘Beginnings’ in mid-1969. Following the commercial failure of the album, then manager Chas Chandler (of The Animals fame, also Jimi Hendrix’s manager) suggested you shortened the band’s

The skinhead years

name and adopt the radical new skinhead look in an attempt to gain publicity. What are your memories of the band taking on this look; personally, was it a look that you were keen to embrace and what are your memories of this period?

And so, Chas Chandler started managing us and we started doing recording and he said ‘I want to work on trying to get you known’, you see.

And we had long hair then, so we all looked pretty hippy, cool, you know, great, but we couldn’t get any press because we weren’t known and we probably looked like a lot of groups of the time. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Chas had this publicist called Keith Altham. If you look at him, he’s famous, he is. Now, he said to Keith, he says, ‘I’m trying to break this band. We’ve altered their name, because they were called Ambrose Slade before, now we’re just calling them Slade, it’s a much better name’, you see. So, he’s chatting to Keith Altham and Keith Altham says, ‘Well, there’s a skinhead movement

in our country and they don’t have a group’ and Chas goes ‘Wow! Brilliant!

I’ll get them to cut all their hair off!’, which was the worst thing for us, you know, because we looked good, you know. He [Chas] said, ‘Look lads, I’ll make you millionaires!’ He said, talking to me, ‘Never mind your hairstyle Dave, let’s do this! We’ll make a fortune! There’s no group for these skinheads’, you see. And I said, ‘Well, we don’t play skinhead music’.

He said, ‘That don’t matter, it’s the image!’ [laughs]. So, he got us all down the barbers, we all cut our hair [laughs] and apart from our bass player, I think we all lost our girlfriends! [laughs]. So, we went into the barbers, we all had our hair cut off and I went home to mum and dad’s and they said, ‘Oh, what’s happened?! You’ve cut all your hair off!’ And I said, ‘Chas Chandler, he’s had a brilliant idea! I’m going to be a millionaire!’ You know, it was all a bit like that. I was really suckered into the idea of, you know, something really happening. And we didn’t want to say ‘no’ to Chas because he’s a big manager and if we said ‘no’,

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he might decide to not manage us or something like that, so we said ‘yes’, you see. So, what happened after that, we had a song called ‘Wild Winds Are Blowing’ [non-album single, 1969].

You can check this, it’s on the hits album. [I reply, ‘Yep, I know it’] You know it? And after that, we had another one called ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ [‘Play It Loud’, 1970]. [I reply, ‘Yes, of course’] You know that song? And all of these were all try out singles, right? None of them made it, but these were like various things and the weird thing with the skinheads, there were some bits of trouble going on, you see. We weren’t about making trouble, we were just punks in a way; I suppose we were trying to be a bunch of punks. And for me, I was very uncomfortable in wearing those jeans and braces, I didn’t get on well with those, because I was always more flamboyant, you see. But, the point was, in a way, it did get us known and then bit by bit, Chas said, ‘Well, we’ve tried that lads, you might as well grow your hair’. So, what we did, we started to grow our hair and

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from that, what happened was, my hairstyle came out of that. I started to grow it and I had a shortish pageboy fringe, right? And I cut it a bit shorter and then I had long sides and that became an image, you know, like a look. And then Nod had these sideboards and grew them and he started to wear this flat working man’s cap and if you look at early pictures, he was wearing the flat cap when we were skinheads, so he kept that working class flat cap going and then eventually, he was experimenting with other hats and the famous one came along. And then, with me, I suddenly really went for designing and I started to design and create clothes in my dad’s front room.

I used to hang things on the wall, I used to get tins of car spray because I had dark coats, and I used to spray them silver. Yep! You might know the story, it was up against one door and I was spraying away and when you pulled it away, you had the shape of the coat on the door! [laughs]. [I reply, ‘I bet your dad wasn’t pleased!’] Oh yeah, it was a bit like ‘That stupid son!’ [laughs]. It was so funny! I mean, I was really

getting into it with the colour and then bit by bit, of course, things were changing, you see; colour television was starting! And then I went to Kensington Market in London and believe it or not, Freddie Mercury used to work in there, I don’t know if it was selling boots or T-shirts, but I went in there and I was looking for ... because there were a lot of individual designers in this market in Kensington and a lot of interesting, weird clothes, do you know, like coats with moons on and it was all a little bit hippy and essence of petunia sprayed around the place when you walked about. It was all a little bit hippy-dippy and Marc Bolan was in the charts and all that was going on.

And I used to go round there and I saw this bloke making boots, you see and I thought, what’s this? He said, ‘Oh, I’m experimenting with boots. I’m making them with a platform on’, you see, ‘It makes you look taller’ and I said to him, ‘That’s a great idea, that! I said, ‘I’m not very tall, you see’ and he said, ‘Well, I can make you half a foot higher!’ [laughs]. I was going, ‘You’re joking!’ He said, ‘No, no, these boots

are good. They’re strong, they’re not like female boots. I can make you boots with a platform or two’ and I said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t you make me some with three platforms and could you colour the sections of the platforms so it looks like three different colours?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I can do that! I can work on that’. I said, ‘But I want the boots to be silver all over’. He said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.

I’ll make the boots silver with the platforms in colour’. I said, ‘Yeah, because I’ve got this jacket’ ... I’d just seen this jacket in Kensington Market and I said, ‘It’s black leather, but I’ve spoke to the bloke and he said he can make it in any colour I like, so I’ve told him to make it in silver’, right? Now, if you go way back to the beginning, you’ll see me with a silver coat on and the high boots and that was the costume I wore when colour television was just coming in. So, eventually, when we had a hit record in the end with ‘Get Down and Get With It’ [1971], which creeped into the charts and got us on TV, I wore that outfit. It was a great song, that one.

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Slade’s big chart break came in mid-1971 with the release of ‘Get Down and Get With It’, which reached number 16 on the UK Top 40. It was accompanied by your first ‘Top of the Pops’ performance.

What are your memories of performing on ‘Top of the Pops’ for the first time and after so many years of vying for success, how did it feel to finally be achieving it?

The reason we released that song was because when we played live, everybody used to go crazy over that song, so Chas Chandler said, ‘Look, we should record that song because it’s always going down great at the gigs.

Why don’t we record it?’ And before that, we hadn’t had any success, if you know what I mean? So, we released it, and by then, I was spraying up clothes, I was doing all sorts of things and I’d got my hairstyle and of course, as soon as that went in the charts, it was like ‘Wow, great, get them on ‘Top of the Pops’!’ And, of course everybody’s going ‘What the heck’s this lot?!

Where did this come from?!’ It was

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like ‘Who’s this new group?!’ and of course, we go on telly and of course, with the clothes, with the image, with the hairstyle and when Nod eventually got a top hat with mirrors on, of course it was ... the rest is history! But, of course the next song, which is most important ... Chas told Nod and Jim ... well, told all of this ... to write songs.

He said, ‘You want to write songs.

Write your own, you’ve learnt all these songs, now write your own songs.’ So, we all split off writing with each other and Nod, of course, wrote with Jim Lea, right? And they came up with this song because Jim Lea played violin and we used to have Jim playing violin on stage doing Stéphane Grappelli, like jazzy music, you know. We used to do things like that and Nod came up with this tune, which was ‘Coz I Luv You’ and it was kind of like a boot stamping thing, you know, a bit like ‘Get Down and Get With It’ but it’d got some stamp in there and they’d got this [mouths rhythm of the song] kind of rhythm going, right? And then Nod had got his acoustic guitar and Jim got his violin and they played it to Chas,

just like that and Nod says to Chas, ‘We’ve got this song and it’s simple lyrics, you know, and it’s called ‘Coz I Luv You’’. So, they played it to Chas and he went, ‘Fellas, I think you’ve got your first hit record! In fact, I think that’s a number one!’ And to be honest with you, we didn’t think it was a number one and I didn’t think it was a number one until I got excited about it when we recorded it and when we recorded it, it just had a magic about it and in those days, we used to have what you call an acetate, which is like a demo cut of the record and Chas would say, ‘Take this home fellas and play it to your families. See what they say’.

And it was my sister, who’s a singer, dancer and entertainer and I said, ‘I’ve got this record to play you. And I put it on the old mono record player and she stood there and she was absolutely gobsmacked. She was going, ‘Oh, that’s sent me really funny!’ She said, ‘All my hairs are tingling!’, like the tingling hairs on the back of your neck.

She said, ‘That’s really great! I mean, what a record!’ I said, ‘Yeah, Chas is really keen on this coming out’. Chas

said, ‘You definitely want to release it’ and so, we released it and it went in the charts at 16, then it went up to number eight, right? And then my sister, Carol, who used to have a lunch break from an office, was sitting there in a car and Alan Freeman or Tony Blackburn were doing the rundown of the charts, you see. Carol knew we were number eight, but she didn’t know where we were going to go after that. So, she’s sitting in the car and it goes all the way up to number eight and we’re not there, right? She’s going, ‘Ooh, what’s gone wrong?!’ You know, ‘Has it dropped out?!’ Then it went up to number four [laughs], still nothing there and she started to go, ‘It’s dropped out of the charts!’ And it got to number one and her friends are sitting in the other car and she started screaming her head off and she’s there going ‘My brother’s number one!’ [laughs]. You probably know I’ve got a life story out in audio, don’t you? I got her to tell that story because I did an audience with in the Midlands, where I was playing a bit of music on acoustic guitar and telling stories and I got my sister to come up

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and tell the audience, because a lot of them were fans, how she was the day her brother got to number one.

Because my sister can act, she came up on stage and does a visual impersonation of herself [laughs] and the audience are laughing because she’s visual like me. And it was really, really nice and you probably don’t know this, but when we had the hits later, she used to come down to ‘Top of the Pops’ and she used to be in the audience. If you look at ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ [laughs], you’ll see my sister dancing right in front of the stage! It was so funny!

Obviously, I can play things beside the rock guitar. I can play classical guitar and I can play piano. Not piano like my grandad, but more I would say I write on piano more experimentally. I don’t play like a pianist, you know, I’m not trying fluent in winging notes up and down, but I play things that seem to affect people. Because I’m writing a solo album, I don’t know if you know this story, but due to lockdown, I’ve always written some bits and bobs on

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the laptop when I’ve been away touring and because we can’t tour or play, I decided, and I got someone to help to help me, that it’s about time I did this album. And, of course, I’ve been experimenting with the kind of voice I have, not trying to sing like Nod, high, I’m more depthy in my tones.

It has more of a lower end vibe to it, you know, it’s almost like I’m like I’m telling you a story, but I’m singing the story. I’m working on that, I’ve got probably about thirty or forty songs now, which I’ve written over a period of time and I’ve got somebody working with me to help me write the book, so he’s become somebody I can bounce it off. I don’t play to the family, you see, I keep it quiet at the moment because no one knows what I’m up to, but I play to him because I don’t want anybody to hear it until I go in the studio and do it properly, you see. I think in some ways, and I wouldn’t thank COVID for anything because it’s horrible and all the things it does to people, but it’s because of being forcibly kept at home and when you’re someone with my personality because

I’m so used to playing to people all over the world and it’s like somebody pulling a plug out of your back from everything that you love to do. Okay, we’ve put all the work back until next year, we would have done that tour that you were originally promoting in the UK and obviously, we’ve rescheduled the tour until next year and I’m hoping by then, we have some sort of cure and hopefully we can start working again. I mean, I don’t know, one has to be optimistic, but I think, really, the history of the band is fairly remarkable in everything that’s happened to us. I mean, for instance, I don’t know if you’re aware, but we’ve had more than one comeback in our career. The one pivotal comeback was Reading Festival in 1980, when I was leaving the group ... well, I was thinking of leaving the group, because we were not selling records and things were tough and I’d got a family and Chas Chandler thankfully stepped in and talked me out of it and told me to do this festival. I was going, ‘Well, surely, they’re going to have all these new rock bands on there’, you see and Chas is going, he

says, ‘Dave, man, you’ve had the most success, the people down there are going to love it’. Because I hadn’t considered that there were people at that festival who were at school when I was having hits, or at college. Now, we weren’t even on the bill, you know, it was just when Ozzy pulled out and we went and did it, you see, and I couldn’t believe it when we went on stage, it was just ... It was a bit like when Dolly Parton went on stage at, you know, that festival in England [Glastonbury Festival]. It’s just like, sometimes, you can lose sight of what you’ve done, but because of that Reading show, we then went on to more success in the ‘80s, with ‘My Oh My’, ‘Run Runaway’ [1983 and 1984, respectively, both from ‘The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome’, 1983], ‘We’ll Bring the House Down’ [‘We’ll Bring the House Down’, 1981] and many, many more hits, and abroad as well. And we kept going until we finally split up altogether when Nod left. And Nod and I are great friends anyway and Nod had just had enough, so what basically, the situation was, was that I’d got a

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family to support and Suzi Quatro’s husband, Len Tuckey he’s called, he was in her band, rang me up and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m stuck, I don’t know what to do’. I said, ‘Nod’s left, Jim doesn’t want to do it, Don’s working in a pub and I’m basically not sure what to do’. And he says, ‘You’re joking, man, I wouldn’t worry about that, you’re Dave Hill of Slade! You want to do what you’re known for; you can’t go back to the pubs in some new group, you’ve done it. Use the name!’ So, I rang Nod up and I said, ‘I need to use the name’ and he agreed. He said, ‘Yes’, because didn’t want to do it and it was probably the best thing I ever did in my life. I was scared at first because I was having to go on stage in front of people who might have been expecting Nod to be the singer, you see; like ‘What’s happened? Where’s he gone?’, you know or something like that. But, because I was so well-known, it really helped. I obviously chose a good singer at the time. He’s not Nod but he was doing a good job and I chose a good bass player and off we went and I

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started to see all these places which we’d never been to in the original band, certainly Russia anyway. I didn’t know how big we were there until I went over and all these places like Czech Republic and Eastern Bloc countries.

All those places, I was playing to thousands of people. It was as if I was having a hit record again and I wasn’t!

Then I went to Norway, and we were huge in Norway! Beautiful place and we’d got a big following there. So, bit by bit, it kept me playing. So, that was in 1992 and I’m still doing it to this day. And yet, along the way, a lot of things have happened. Obviously, I wrote my life story and I’ve now done an audio version of it of me speaking the story, which isn’t hard for me, as you can probably imagine, as I’m talking to you right now and I’m quite fluent in what I’m saying. And people seem to like my voice and say ‘It’s nice, I could listen to you all day’. And what I’ve done basically, I did the hardback version and the paperback version because I thought it would be good for people to play in their cars and all that, you see. But, of course, I

couldn’t imagine the success of this latest release of ‘Cum On Feel the Hitz’. This big record company approached us, BMG, and their boss is a big fan. He said, he loved the band and he wanted to put together a really good compilation of all the hits and all the songs that didn’t quite make it but still are as good. And it was great because they remastered it and it sounds really good. And they got this team on it, you know, and me and Nod, all the band were doing interviews, were really great interviews to the other side of the world. We were doing Australia; we were doing America. Nod was talking to Alice Cooper the other week on his radio show in America and he was saying to Nod, ‘You’re huge here!’ And Nod was going, ‘Well, we never really made it in America’ and he said, ‘Oh, you did! Everybody knows you!’ And it was really quite nice and of course, when it shot up into the top ten, as Johnnie Walker said on his show, he said, ‘You haven’t been in the top ten with an album since 1974’ [‘Slade in Flame’, reached number six].

And you think about people who are

not with us right now from our generation, with Bowie, who we knew quite well, and all the people like that, you know, a lot of people have come and gone and lots of tragedies of course, I’m more than happy to be a part of ... For me, Alice, it’s not a job, it’s a life. If I couldn’t do it on stage or do it properly, I wouldn’t do it. But the point is, keeping playing guitar has meant that I maintain my ability. I can get up on a stage and I can really go for it as if I was twenty-odd again or something like that. I just haven’t lost it. Because if you don’t use it, you lose it, so in my case, I haven’t lost it because I keep using it. And also, abroad, there were a lot of groups that hadn’t got all their original members in them. Oh yeah, tons of them! Some people had died! What’s their name?

Sweet. I mean, the singer [Brian Connolly] died, but there’s still Andy Scott. because it’s all about the music to be honest with you Alice.

Memories, music and I think with me, there are many sides to touring. I’m very passionate, you probably sensed that off me. The way I see it is, the way

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it is now, is it’s a day at a time and to try and rise above what we’re going through to try and look through and see a better day. I’ve got five grandkids, you know, and I hope it’s a better world they’re going to grow up in, you know.

I mean, my growing up, I don’t know what yours was like, but mine was ... It after the war I was born, most people hadn’t got much money and Christmas was quite simple. But they were still fun. You know, I live just up the road from the council house where I grew up and I can remember everything because a lot of it’s still here. The cinema becomes a supermarket, you know, but I can walk up and down and I sometimes even drive my car round and I park outside the old council house and I can see myself standing at the door! [laughs]. Dad’s long gone and so’s my mum, but they’re not gone in my mind.

They’re alive because they’re in me and I suppose the memories of life is what it’s all about. But I think being in music, I feel I’m still doing a great purpose and when people talk to me, they tend to smile a lot or they like me.

That’s the thing with me, it’s memories

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it’s good music and there’s the aspect of people in the business who are fans ... Noel Gallagher is one, particularly, and as Noel said to me when I said ‘Were back in the charts’, he said to me, ‘Of course you are, you were a great band then, the music’s great now.

It doesn’t date’. It’s like The Beatles early stuff, you still love it when you play it, you know. They were a great help to me, The Beatles, you know. I was in this lousy job for three years and I used to take my stage clothes in a polythene bag and put them in the desk [laughs] and then the group’s van would come outside the door and pick me up and take me to a gig, you see. I sort of upset them at one point because they saw me getting in the van and the personnel officer called me in one day and he said, ‘What’s going on with you being in a group? This is a job for life, you want to concentrate on this!’ And I thought, I’m not really that good at spelling, which I wasn’t. I’m not like my mum, who was really clever, and I was filing things in the wrong places! [laughs]. For me, Alice, people say ‘Was the best time of your life when

you made it’. Well, of course that was great, but to be honest with you, when I came home one day, I was eighteen and I said to my mum and dad, ‘I want to leave this job and I want to turn professional and when they said ‘Yes’, it was sort of, you know when you stick your fist in the air and go outside and go ‘YEESSSS!’, it was like freedom!

You can grow your hair, because if you work in an office, you have to have short hair and I didn’t want short hair because my ears stick out a bit, you see, so when you’ve got long hair, you don’t notice that! [laughs].

As you say, ‘Get Down and Get With It’ was of course just the start, with six of the singles that followed over the next two years hitting the number one spot (‘Cuz I Luv You’, 1971; ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’, 1972; ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, 1972; ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’, 1973, ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’, 1973 and ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, 1973).

Meanwhile, your third album, ‘Slayed?’ topped the album charts.

With each successive chart success,

how much pressure were the band under to follow it up?

Well, there is a thing about consistency in music. If you think in terms of most bands will probably have three to four very good years, five if they’re fortunate, right? I would say, when you’re only twenty-odd, 21 or whatever I was, I don’t think we saw it as pressure, we saw it as demand. Yes, we had a great record company, which was Polydor, the boss loved us, but of course when you have one number one, in most cases, you probably think you need another number one and therefore you’re in a situation where Nod and Jim were writing consistently and our manager would be consistently encouraging it. When you say ‘pressure’, pressure is an interesting word. Sometimes pressure can actually be very creative. I think the last thing that you tend to want is like, ‘Oh, we’ve just had this number one, let’s all relax’, you know, ‘Let’s all go on holiday’. No, you don’t do that. I mean, when you have your first number one, you don’t see any money for quite

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Noddy Holder

Dave Hill

some time, it’ll probably be twelve months. So, I mean, nothing changed.

I was still at Dad’s house, I hadn’t left and apart from the neighbours twitching around the curtains or looking at me like ‘where have I come from?’, you know, I was still with Dad and then even when we had more number ones, I was still with Dad, because we hadn’t bought any houses or anything like that. So, there was a consistency with Chas Chandler, because Chas understood success and the idea is that ... what happened after ‘Coz I Luv You’, you got more rock stuff coming out. You know, there was ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’; there was ‘Look Wot You Dun’, which wasn’t exactly that much rock, but they were leading towards what would become the huge number ones, you know, like ‘Mama We’re All Crazee Now’ or ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ or something. Now, if you think all of this started in 1971, I think, and then in ‘73, we started to get these massive straight to number ones, right? So, you’ve got the years before that of a consistency ... you become very popular, you become popular

abroad, you become popular in Australia ... A lot of places are hearing about you because England is a very infectious country and England tended to domineer what was happening, so with The Beatles and the Stones and The Who and all those bands, they dominated abroad too, right? Whereas America dominated England in the ‘50s and the early ‘60s, but after we’d learnt from America, taking the songs back to them in a different way. The Beatles certainly did that. We didn’t have that much success in America but we were popular, but everywhere else, we were really big. We were big because a lot of people liked us because we were working class blokes and we weren’t manfactured, but Chas was very conscious of the releases, you know.

So, for instance, he might say ‘What you got Nod?’ and he’s say, ‘Well, we’ve got two or three songs’ and he’d say ‘Okay’ and we’d go down to his house and we’d play him the new ones.

Sometimes we’d go down to his house, we’d play the new ones and one time we went ‘We’ve got this new one that sounds a bit like ‘Coz I Luv You’ and

Jim Lea

Don Powell

Chas went ‘Oh, right, alright, let’s have a listen’. So, he has a listen and we’re playing it and we’re expecting him to go ‘Oh, great!’, you know. And we went, ‘Well, we’ve got this other one Chas’, you know and then we played him this other one, which was ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ and he goes ‘That’s the one!’ [laughs]. So, you’ve got someone who’s directing you in a way. You need somebody on the controls in that studio, somebody with a focus. Chas was very focused and understood success. The Animals were big, Hendrix was huge. He understood consistency and consistency, every artist has it. Ed Sheeran has it, Adele had it, there is a consistency. But in Slade’s camp, when you talk about pressure, I thought, for me personally, it was a lot of fun. I was totally on the top of my game with my playing, I was on the top of my game with my clothes and considering I was a real shy kid at school, I wasn’t part of any gangs, I wasn’t popular ... you know, my sister always said I was always up the corner of the playground and Nod said in my book, I never followed the herd, never

followed what other people wanted to do, I think when we get older, it’s something we suddenly feel confident about. It suddenly enhances and energizes you to the fact, like ‘the next time I go on ‘Top of the Pops’, I’m going to wear this!’ So, there’s a consistency in my clothes, there’s a consistency in the songs ... I mean, if Nod and Jim don’t come up with a really good song, then of course things might not be that good but I think there was the confidence. Same as what happened to The Beatles when they met George Martin. Once he took them on, then they were bringing in loads of songs, you know. It was like ‘here comes another one!’ Paul and John were consistent, you know and really wonderful. But we could never have told you that everything was going to be so. I could never have told you that the Christmas song would be so big.

I could never have said that because when Nod and Jim wrote that, it was purely an idea. We thought, well, of course it will be a hit because it’s 1973 and we were the biggest band in the country at that time, but I didn’t know

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Dave’s house in Solihull

Dave at home, early 1973

that you’d be talking about that song forty-something years later to you and newer people. That song has become like the big, BIG one but all the other ones are equally as important. I tell you what’s quite poignant to tell you is that Chas knew we could do other types of songs, right? We were quite clever as a group. But Chas would always say, ‘Don’t outgrow your fans’. He said, ‘It’s like The Beatles doing ‘She Loves You’ and suddenly starting to do ‘Sgt Pepper. Nobody would be ready for that two minutes later’.

Smokeless zone, because where I come from there were near all the smoky chimneys and that. It was just by default, it was quite funny really, because I’d had no intention of moving to Solihull. It was a bit like I was looking for a place and Nod had got a place, Jim Lea had got one, Don had got a flat, I think and it was all a bit ‘my turn’, I think. I was trying to think what I was going to do. And there was this estate agent near Solly and he said, ‘Come over here, there’s some nice properties over here’ and I said, ‘Oh, Solihull’. I’d never been there, you see. And he said, ‘Well, there’s a house for sale down this road, but I think it may be sold. Why don’t you pop down and have a look at it? It’s a really nice road’. So, I went down this road and it was all leafy and, you know, and not what I’m used to at all, and there’s this mansion and I thought, what the heck’s that?! And at the end of this nice road, there were there these gates and I thought, it’ll be some lord or somebody. So, it was the house down the end of the road and it said ‘sold’, but the estate agent I was with said,

With this chart success came all the trappings of fame. There is a very famous clip of you showing reporters around your new home, with a crowd of screaming girls in the front garden. What are your recollections of moving into this house and what was it like to literally have fans sleeping in your front garden?

[Laughs] Haha, yeah! Solihull! Well, it’s a very sort of POSH place, you know, it’s not quite where I come from, you know, it’s completely different ...

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Slade enjoying their success in 1973

Dave and wife Jan showing off gold Rolls Royce with number plate ‘YOB 1’

‘You never know Dave, sometimes the sale falls through. I’ll go and knock on the door and see how it’s going’. And this posh woman comes out and she goes ‘Hello’. He [the estate agent] said ‘Sorry to bother you madam, I understand the house is sold’ and she said, ‘So and so and so and so’s going to buy the house. He hasn’t signed the contract yet, but we’re very hopeful’.

He said, ‘Would you mind somebody else having a look?’ So, she gazed across and said, ‘Well, I suppose it would be okay’. And he said, ‘Well, he’s a very unusual gentleman. His name’s Dave’ and of course I’ve got a big hat on, you see! She’s goes, ‘Ooh!’, all hoity-toity like, ‘You look familiar!’, you know, to me, but she couldn’t quite get it. And we went in and she goes ‘Well, here’s the dining room’ and there’s this dining room with all these oil paintings. And I’m only used to a council house walls and I thought, ooh, this is nice and I went round the kitchen and there’s a fitted kitchen and one of those gardens with beautiful trees and I was thinking, I wouldn’t mind a bit of this, you know.

Then she said, ‘Would you like to come upstairs and look at the bedrooms?’, so we went upstairs and she said, ‘This is my daughter’s bedroom’. We opened the door and there’s a ruddy great big picture of me on the wall! [laughs].

And she says, ‘Oh my God, it’s you!’

She said, ‘I thought I recognised you!

Oh, my daughter will be so excited when I tell her when she comes home from college’. Anyway, what was really funny was, the house was sold, apparently, right? So, we said ‘goodbye’ and the following day, guess what? He [the estate agent] gets a phone call from the people who own the house and it’s the owners of the house. He [the owner of the house] says, ‘What is Dave thinking of buying the house for?’ and the estate agent says, ‘Well, the house is sold, isn’t it?’ and she says, ‘Yes, but the deal hasn’t been concluded yet. What do you think he might offer?’ ... And eventually, I bought this house. I felt under pressure, like do I deserve this and it’s a funny feeling because that’s what I thought. And I never asked the question about what was next door and

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this is the funniest part: When I signed the contract, the documents came and I signed the contract and the whole thing was done and he [the house owner] said, ‘Well, I hope you will be okay Mr. Hill. Of course, you do realise there are 500 girls next door?’ I said, ‘500 girls’ and he said, ‘Yes, didn’t they tell you? That school! You’ll probably be besieged with them’. I said, ‘Oh, that’s really useful!’ and then the Midlands Today TV got on to it and said ‘We’d love to do a piece about Dave moving into his house next to 500 girls’ and they’re going, ‘Yes, he is crazy! Have you seen his clothes?!’ You know what I did, I put a gold costume on [laughs] and I drove down in a Jensen car and I pulled in the drive and all these girls were screaming on the other side of the fence, right, and there was someone going ‘Go on, move on, you can’t disturb him’ and it was all really weird and then you’ve got this posh interviewer going, ‘Oh, super, Dave!

It’s so funny, hahaha, you’re not only number one in the charts, you’ve now got 500 girls living next door to you.

It’s funny that!’ I said, ‘It’s not good! I

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said, ‘It’s not good! I didn’t know!’ I couldn’t go out! You know, like when they were out playing tennis or something like that and then they got into my garden, then they were smoking cigarettes behind the bushes!

Yeah! We went to America, me and my wife, because I got married, I’d obviously thought about selling the place, you know, because of the trouble and I couldn’t go out of my front door, and we came back six weeks later and some of them ... you know what lattice windows are, right? Well, some of them had got in, right? They’d taken a piece of glass out, got their hand on the handle and got in through the window and when I went into the house, I said ‘Somebody’s broken in here’ and there was like a cigarette ashtray in the lounge ... and we hadn’t got any furniture, by the way ... and it had got cigarettes stubbed into this thing, but there was no dirt anywhere and the phone rang and when I answered the phone, it was these girls and they were going, ‘We’ve rang to tell you we’re so sorry we got in to your house, but we just wanted to see what it was like

inside. Please don’t tell the police’. I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t going to tell the police’ and they said, ‘We were a bit disappointed with the house, Dave’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and they said, ‘We thought you’d have a house that was spectacular and silver. This house is very old-fashioned’. Because what they didn’t realise was that it was just a traditional quality property, you see. And they said, ‘Well, we didn’t sleep in your house, we slept in your treehouse’. I said, ‘My treehouse?’.

They said, ‘Yeah, at the bottom of your garden, you’ve got a treehouse. We kept it all tidy’. So I went down the garden and I thought, where the hell’s this treehouse, and it was hidden round the corner and there was like fruit trees round it. And the daft thing is, there’s a ladder leading up to this treehouse and when I got up to the top of the ladder, there was a large picture of Donny Osmond in there! [laughs]. I thought, what a cheek! They’ve broke in my house; they’ve slept in treehouse and there’s a picture of Donny Osmond in there! One of them must have been a Donny Osmond fan and they’d stuck

it up in my treehouse! It made for a great story! It’s so ruddy funny!

We can’t talk about those Slade hits of the early ‘70s without talking about the phonetic spelling, with titles written in the Birmingham dialect. It was a brilliant gimmick, but how did the idea come about?

Well, the phonetic spelling is very interesting actually because you could argue what actually looks correct in how something sounds to you as a person. So, you might say, ‘Well, it’s not in the dictionary’, or it wasn’t then anyway, but the way that we say things, if you said to somebody, ‘Can you spell what I just said to you on the way that it sounds? Would you write it in perfect English?’ Unlikely that you would. With the phonetic spelling, it was more like what you might call the texting of the day and how you abbreviate text messages to people on your phone, we were doing that because what the idea was, ‘Cuz I Luv You’ when it’s ‘C.U.Z’, right, ‘Take Me Bak ‘OME’, ‘O.M.E’, if you live in

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Wolverhampton or Sedgley, a bank is a ‘bonk’, right? Or ‘the bonk’, you know and the word ‘not’ is ‘bay’. ‘We’re bay doing that’: That means ‘We’re not doing that’, right? And there was a lot of things like that were interesting.

You know, there’s another saying that we use in one of the songs that goes, ‘Please help WE’ [‘Pouk Hill’, ‘Play It Loud’]. Now, if you say ‘please help we’, that means ‘Please help me’, right? ‘We’ is a reference to us. People outside the members may not understand that, but there’s a lot of other things that I don’t understand either in the Midlands, especially in Bilston. I’d been to Bilston and joined the group and couldn’t understand what they were saying half the time, because they were really broad in their accents.

But I think the idea is that when you used to send messages to girls to go out with them, or in your case, boys, sometimes you’d use things like ‘SWALK’, ‘sent with a loving kiss’, you actually used letters and you don’t say the words, so the ‘Cuz’ is ... people used to write that, ‘cuz’. They wouldn’t say ‘because I love you’, it

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was ‘cuz’ and ‘love’ was ‘luv’. There was an abbreviation. And the idea was put on ‘Cuz I Luv You’, the first number one. It was just a different way of writing the title to the song. If you can imagine it, [puts on broader Birmingham accent] ‘Cuz I luv you!’

It’s not [adopts RP voice], ‘Oh, because I love you!’ So, we did it for ‘Cuz I Luv You’ and Chas said ‘I quite like that, that idea of abbreviating everything, let’s do it on the next song!’

And then, of course, it became, if look at the titles on most of the really big ones, they’re all what you might call ‘mis-spelling’ ... ‘Crazee’ in ‘Mama ...’ and ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’ and ‘Look What You Dun’ or ... The ‘Merry Xmas’ one was a bit of a problem because Chas was concerned we’d got to be careful what we said with a Christmas song, because of the reference to Christ. You know, we didn’t want to be doing anything wrong in that area, so obviously we were very cautious about that one, although it was well-meaning in what we did with it.

All the other songs, basically, we had a whole run of it, you know ‘Skweeze

Dave plays Earls Court, 1st July 1973

Me Pleeze Me’ ... I think ‘Everyday’ [number 3, 1974, ‘Old New Borrowed and Blue’] was okay because it was just ‘Everyday’. I don’t think that was mis-spelt. I think ‘Far Far Away’ was not mis-spelt [2, 1974, ‘Slade in Flame’] either. A lot of the later ones weren’t. So, that slightly changed. I think from that point onwards, there was a change in the writing, some people have analysed that we got a bit more serious with songs like ‘Far Far Away’ and even songs like ‘How Does It Feel’ [1975, number 15, ‘Slade in Flame’]. They’re not mis-spelt but they’re actually really good songs.

That’s from the film, ‘Flame’. So, all that developed into where we didn’t continue to mis-spell the tracks. It’s like when you do something but it reaches the point where you go, ‘Oh, we don’t do that anymore, we’ve moved on from that’. You don’t wear the same clothes that you did four or five years ago, you change. And so did I in my clothes. In the later days, in the ‘80s, I was wearing cowboy hats and was a little bit more rocky looking because we were appealing to a more

rock-orientated crowd, you see. We were doing Reading Festival and we were doing Donnington Festival with AC/DC. We wanted to cross over into that kind of market and I thought we did it quite well actually. So, we had songs like ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ [29, ‘Till Deaf Us Do Part’, 1981], all that going on and instead of wearing top hats, we were wearing cowboy hats. So, my hairstyle didn’t become part of the deal anymore because I was wearing the hats. So we changed.

We didn’t wear platforms either, we stopped wearing them. You discard ...

It’s a bit like what you wore when you were young, you’re not likely to carry on wearing it. And I think really, at the time, if you think of the age of the teenagers who were following us, they were very, very much part of what we were wearing. For instance, we did an amazing gig at Earls Court in London, right? You go back to, I think it was ‘73, Bowie had played it a few weeks before and he hadn’t sold it out. It was a funny kind of place. It tended to be a bit echoey or something like that, it was rather big. And we did it and it was

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Slade at Earls Court, 1st July 1973

completely different. What happened was that the transport people and the people organising the tubes, put on extra tubes to cater for people who were coming in from probably the outer parts of London to bring them into the centre of the capital. And they laid on extra trains and we were staying at The Holiday Inn, Swiss Cottage, I remember that and we had to sneak out the back doors and all that kind of thing, we were waving at the fans from windows and all that. It was a bit like The Beatles, you know. We were surrounded by fans; they all found out where we were staying. And Earls Court was a big deal and Nick Kent [NME] wrote about us for that gig, he was there and he cited us as the most important band of the time. It was at that particular gig that he did that review on us. It was really good because sometimes the NME could be a bit alternative in their reviews. There was NME, there was Melody Maker, there was Sounds, there was Record Mirror. A lot of them, we knew all the writers at that the time; you recognised half the photographers half the time

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that used to take pictures of us! ‘73 was particularly awesome. You’ve got Australia, with Status Quo [and Caravan and Lindisfarne]. We went to Japan; we were very big in Japan and we did a tour of Japan on the bullet trains. We went to New Zealand, which was great. They’d only got one channel on the black and white TV, so that was quite interesting. But ‘73 was such a big year for us. There was some tragedy, but ...

During the release of ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’, Don was unfortunately involved in a car crash on 4th July 1973, which left him in a coma and killed his fiancée Angela Morris.

Whilst the main concern was obviously Don, how much doubt was there about there about the band’s future during this time?

As John Lennon said, ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans’ and so, you know, the dreaded phone call at four o’clock in the morning, you always know if someone’s ringing you at that time, it’s

Portrait drawing with Chas Chandler and co.

serious. And we didn’t know quite what had happened, we thought Don had had a bump. We didn’t realise the ferocity of what can happen in life like that and it was very tragic. My sister was best friend to the girl who got killed. It was a terrible time. They were playing ‘Everyday’ regularly on the radio and so it was very mournful.

We didn’t know whether he’d recover, but he did, thankfully and he obviously rehabilitated and had to stop touring for a while, which you do, to obviously give him time and things like that, you know. But when you think about the ‘70s, with all the great bits, sometimes you get a knock in life, you know, it’s life isn’t it? And that happened. But if you think about much later on in the year, in America and the making of the Christmas song, then there was a lot of strikes in England, which was really hard on the public. It was pretty dramatic. There were three-day weeks, there were pickets, there was trouble, there were powercuts and all sorts of stuff going on and it is true to say that, at that time, that song, that Christmas song came out and lifted the nation and

it’s a very, very British thing really. It’s like Captain Tom said on television the other morning when he was talking about pulling together. He was in the war and he understood, when the Battle of Britain took place that the British people come together. We’re in a crisis now, you know and I think in the ‘70s, there was a certain song comes out and it’s not ‘Jingle Bells’, it’s like ‘Wow!’ Big band and here’s Nod shouting ‘It’s Christmas!’ and all the other things that went with it and I remember I was in Solihull at the time and Chas Chandler rang me up and he said, ‘I hope you’re sitting down, Dave?’ and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You just sold a million records today!’ Well, you would never sell a million records today and it was just like ... and they would run out! They had to import records from abroad because the demand was ferocious! It was just, you know, the actual climate ... all things must have come together but of course, we hadn’t got a clue that this would carry on. We thought, my God, we’ve won the Olympic medal on this one! It was just a bit like that. And we were

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taken aback with the whole aspect of it, you know. It was like, well, we’ve had big hits before but this is in another league, you know. And it’s difficult because it’s a double-edged sword.

In one way, you glad you had it, but in another way, other things happen because you had it. And sometimes, people might stop me in the street and you often get a little kid come up saying, ‘My Dad says you’re on that Christmas record’. You know, just like a little kid who wasn’t even born when it was a hit. He said, ‘Oh, I really like that record and my Dad says you’re on that record’. You see, he hadn’t got a clue who I am, but because of that record, he knows the name of the group and I suppose from that point of view, we’ll always be remembered, because it will go on and on and on. That’s a nice thing. Sometimes, that song can distract from the other great number ones we had and a good example of this is, on Sunday gone, Johnnie Walker started to play some of the tracks as he was doing the interview with me and he asked me to choose some tracks and I chose ‘How Does It Feel’ and I chose

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‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ and ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ and interestingly, after that reaction, on Monday I had a letter from the record company, who were raving about me doing it and said that the sales figures on Amazon had shot up because Johnnie had played the songs and they’d heard me do an interview.

Later that year, you of course achieved arguably the greatest Christmas number one of all time with ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, which competed with Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ for the top spot. What are memories of the recording, release and promotion of ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’?

When we were in America and Don was getting over his bad crash, we had studio time in New York. John Lennon had decided to cancel some studio time and so we had this Christmas song. I didn’t really know it that well at the time. I knew it had been written, but I thought it’s a bit like a gimmick, you

Performing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ on Top of the Pops

‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ 1981 reissue

know and Chas said, ‘You know that Christmas song? We’ve got nothing to do at the moment, we’re not working, so why not go in and record it? What the heck ...’ Well, at that time, Don wasn’t fully recovered from his accident, you know, so we were in the studio and I’ve learnt this song two feet standing on the ground, on the hoof, as they say. I’ve learnt the song in the studio and Jim’s going ‘It goes like this, then it goes like this, this is this ...’

I didn’t know the lyrics or anything, we were just there like we were rehearsing down the pub, you know; ‘I’ve got this song and it goes like this’ and ‘What’s the chorus? Oh, let’s have a look at that’. And then, what happened in the studio was, which we’d never done before ... We’d always do the thing as a band, right, where we’d record it, then pull the bass back, then what we’d do is keep the drums and replace the bass, we’d replace the lead and all the rest of it, you see, then Nod’ll do his vocal.

This song was different. We’re in the studio, we’d probably spent a couple of days learning it and we went to put it down. When we put it down, Don

didn’t know it really well and he had memory problems, so he could start off at one part and then he’d forget the rest, you see. What we had to do was we had to kind of building block it, you know. We had to get through it and get a take. And what we did with Don, we actually replaced the drums, which we’ve never, ever done before. But, what we did when we did replace them: he had a certain style, what we call a shuffle rhythm that he’s always played since he was a kid and Chas said, we ought to have that on this record, it’ll give it a nice swing feel, you know and when I put the big chords on, you can hear a rhythm thing going on underneath and basically, it’s almost slightly Chuck Berry, but what I’m doing is, I’m almost playing rhythm as if I’m playing the bassline within my rhythm playing and what it does is, it gives it a great swing. So, ‘Put that on, it’ll give it more power’. So, basically, what it did, it added to the commerciality, so it didn’t sound lightweight, it wasn’t like ‘Oh, I’ve got this Christmas song, it’s played on piano with an acoustic guitar’, that was

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The ‘metal nun’ outfit

nothing like that! And that bit at the end where Nod shouts ‘It’s Christmas!’: an ad-lib! That was not even thought about! The point of having ‘It’s Christmas!’ at the end is, he wants to let everybody [in the studio] know that the song is coming to an end and that’s the end of the tune! I didn’t know that before he told me the story.

And I didn’t know that he’d gone down to his Dad’s house after he’d had a few beers and wrote the lyrics. He went down his Dad’s council house! He was just out and he’d had a few beers and decided to sit and write about what people do at Christmas and it wasn’t a religious song, it was what we all do, you know. We want presents, we want booze, we want family and the granny and all the rest of it. It’s so true, with the granny saying ‘the old songs are the best’ and ‘she’s up and rock ‘n’ rollin’ with the rest’. Granny was rock ‘n’ rollin’ with us! [laughs]. We have a lot of grannies at our gigs! [laughs].

You have already talked about your outfits, but the most famous of all has to be the one that has become

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referred to as the ‘metal nun’, which you wore for your performance of ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ on Top of the Pops in 1973. Could you tell us the story of this particular legendary outfit?

What I’m saying is that, in life, you can’t really say what is going to happen for you. If you want to learn to play football, you better get in that field and start kicking a ball, right? So, if you think of that in the theory of music, if you want success, you find something that is a niche, it’s your personal thing.

You’re happy with the way you play, you’re happy with the writing in the band, so we left it to Nod and Jim and we used to have a saying in our group which is quite a famous saying, ‘You write ‘em and I’ll sell ‘em!’ And that was a saying that I came up with one day when Jim Lea was laughing at my costume. I made this costume that I thought was Egyptian and people called me a ‘metal nun’, and I was in the dressing room in the toilet area and funnily enough, Nod was listening at the door and he could hear hairspray

going, I was putting glitter on my head, you see, or something I was up to and he was saying, ‘Come on, what you got?!’ You know, it was all a bit daft.

And Chas was in the dressing room at ‘Top of the Pops’, and everybody was there, and I walked out with this metal nun suit on and he said, ‘What the heck’s this?!’, you know [laughs] and you’ve got one of the band, like Jim, going ‘Oh, you’re not going to wear that are you?!’ ‘Of course I’m going to wear that!’ Chas is going, ‘Sweet baby Jesus, another number one, man!’.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an advert called Cadbury’s Smash advert when all the metal things are all on their backs laughing and peeling potatoes? It was almost a bit like that and yet we knocked Rod Stewart off the top of the charts. We knocked him off the top of the charts and I think Ronnie Wood, who was in the Stones but he was in the Faces at the time, made a joke about me and my costumes, something like ‘It’s that bloke, you know!’ I mean, it’s not just that, a record has to sound great. You can be as visual as you like, but if you

haven’t got a great record, it just won’t sell. I think the point is, The Beatles looked great, the Stones looked great, Rod Stewart had his hairstyles and all that; everybody has an image, Bowie with his dressing and you’ve got to think that the ‘70s was a happy time, you know. There were things like strikes going on in 1973, but you know, we’re a million miles from what it’s like now. I mean, I don’t know what your growing up was like but most people who grew up in Slade days, they’ll be in their fifties now, but they often say to me, ‘Thanks for making my youth great’. I’m more than pleased when I run into people ... I’m quite recognisable anyway, so I’m quite used to it and I’m always appreciative of what people say. If I was to bump into Paul McCartney on the street, I’d have to stop him to talk to him because I’m a massive fan, you know, and Paul would have that all the time. What I’ve tried to do is I’ve never been rude to people, because I know how they feel.

Some people want to approach me, but they freeze and they don’t know what to say and yet, I’m a moderately easy

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easy person to approach, to talk to, because I’m very human. I relate to people.

In 1974, you released two albums.

The first was ‘Old New Borrowed and Blue’ and the second was the soundtrack to the full-length feature film ‘Slade in Flame’. The film is a gritty look at the music business, which tells the story of a fictional band called Flame, who are picked up by a marketing company, only to break up the height of their success.

How much of the dark side that the film focuses on had you seen yourselves at this point in your career?

Well, when we made the film, I suppose we did show the dark side. I know the producer who used to produce ‘Top of the Pops’ and he was a friend of Slade’s, he always had a soft spot for us and he came to the premiere and there was Diana Dors there and Alan Lake, Tom Conti, all sort of people, Sweet were there, loads of people and of course, they weren’t expecting the

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sort of film that they would see. I think, for me, I was a bit concerned about the film because of the dark side, because you’ve got things like chopping peoples’ toes off and the band falling out and things like that, you know. And it’s hard to sort of think that when people are watching it, for them to kind of think, well, these are the guys we really love, but they seem to be acting and like they don’t get on with each other, or something like that.

There were aspects to ... probably for me, I would have preferred to have made a ‘[A] Hard Day’s Night’ [1964]’ film, just concentrating on the humour and the fun of the songs. So, when the film came out, the guy from Top of the Pops said to me, ‘I admire what you’ve done Dave, but do you really think this was the right decision?’ And I said to him, ‘Actually, I’m not sure it was the right decision’. I said, ‘I think the idea was, we were trying to make not just a pop film, we were trying to make something that had got some credibility about it’. I think previous films like ‘Performance’ [1970] with Mick Jagger and things like that [influenced the

film], and we used some of the people from that. I think the aspect was to make something of a serious piece of work. Now, I think at the time, there was something I felt where people were quiet while people were watching it.

I think the wife didn’t quite ... I don’t know what she really thought, actually, but she was dead quiet all the way through it. I think really, because the aspect of the end of it was we split up.

Now, it’s exactly what happened to us anyway years later. So, there was something like where people might say, ‘Oh, I watched that film and you fell out and you split up and it’s come true, hasn’t it?’ Well, it’s not that it’s come true, it’s just a natural aspect. But, having said that, I’ll say something positive now to you: I went to showing of ‘Slade in Flame’ just over a year ago in the Regent Street Cinema [London], opposite the BBC and in the audience, there were actors, actresses, general public and one or two press people and I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘Doc Martin’ on ITV,? There’s a girl who plays his wife and she’s called Caroline Catz, right? And the interesting thing,

she was there and I was selling the book in the next room after the showing of the film and I was signing it. I did sneak down the side of the cinema so they couldn’t see me and I started to watch the film and I thought, actually, it looks pretty good now, now we’re all older, it was looking like a good piece of work. It was like, oh, that looks quite good, we all acted quite well in that. And I sitting by the bar and signing my books and then I saw this girl walking towards me and you know when you look at someone and you think, I know you ... like when people recognise me, you know ... and as she got closer, I said, ‘I think I know you!’ And it’s only because I watch ‘Doc Martin’! And she went, ‘Maybe you do’. And I said, ‘Doc Martin’. She said, ‘Yeah. I’ve just seen that film, it’s really great! I was really surprised how good it is. I’m actually a big fan of Slade and the film’. And I said, ‘Well, you’re not old enough to really remember that’. And she said, ‘Oh yeah, I am, it was being played at the playhouse when I was young and I was eight years of age and I’ve got a

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photograph of me with your hairstyle!’

And from the whole aspect of meeting her, it turned into a real positive, because what happened afterwards, a well-known fashion person who’s married to a guy who works for The Sunday Times approached me because I had to do ‘an audience with’ after the film, you see, telling them how we made it.

She approached me and she said, ‘Do you know what? You ought to do ‘an audience with’ in Port Eliot to a big book fair [Port Eliot Festival]’. Well, I never knew what Port Eliot was and Caroline Catz said, ‘Yeah, that’d be great! I could interview you!’ Because the idea was, they’d do an interview with me and show on a screen all the costumes that I wore. And it was one of the nicest, funniest things I’ve ever done! So, I went down to Port Eliot and Caroline Catz interviewed me and she showed the picture of her with my hairstyle! It was hilarious! It was like exactly the same hairstyle! And I don’t know if you ever saw it but there was a picture of Beyonce in The Daily Mail with some sort of wig on and it was

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exactly my hairstyle! With a picture of me next to it, saying ‘Beyonce was influenced by ...’! So, making the film, in hindsight, it’s great. At the time, I was concerned and there was a few comments because when you’re popular, you don’t want to upset fans.

And the last thing I want to see with any band I love is the arguing and falling out, so I never liked that. What I like about The Beatles is when they were running round in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ being extremely funny and they weren’t rude, they were just lads.

That’s what I really like, not the later years with all the fall-outs, but the bit where they’re all together. So, all in all, it was an experience and in hindsight, it probably stands up now. [I tell Dave that it is one of my favourite films and I had it on VHS video recorded off TV for years and watched it over and over] Oh, did you? I’ll have to show it the wife again [laughs], she’ll probably think it’s alright now!

You briefly moved to America in the mid-’70s in a bid to break the country, but at this point, chart

success was unforthcoming.

Strangely, you went on to break America in 1984 with the single ‘Run, Runaway’ reaching number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. What do you feel had changed in America between the mid-’70s and early-’80s that allowed you to finally break the country in 1984?

Well, someone who worked for us, he was quite clever actually, but he just said to me that ‘Maybe in America, when we first went there, Vietnam was still in the air’. The after-effects of Vietnam affected the music, you know, in America. A lot of the songs were protest songs, a lot of folky stuff about, you know, whether it was Dylan or ... it was a sort of Woodstock time and the bands of the time tended to be long solos and there was a lot of sitting on the floor and not jumping around and whilst we got Europe going crazy over us, with the clothes and the atmosphere, we went to America and no one really knew us. We were hailed as next Beatles, which is always a mistake!

Nobody’s the next Beatles! And we

didn’t get a good reaction from the press because you don’t go to the press in America, a lot of the band who made it in America went through the back door. Zeppelin did it, lots of bands did it. They didn’t go shining with armour from number ones everywhere else, The Beatles didn’t go until they had their number one [in America], and when we went the shows on TV were very diverse. There wasn’t any ‘Ed Sullivan Show’, so we couldn’t just do a mime thing. And we’d be on the bill with Grateful Dead and all sorts of strange bands thrown together and people were kind of probably not used to what they were seeing. It probably all looked a bit bizarrely strange, you know, with the kind of singer we had, with the kind of clothes we wore.

And yet, in the audience, interestingly enough, were people who were influenced by us, like KISS. They hadn’t made it; they were watching us!

And Aerosmith and various other people watching us. A lot of people were influenced by us in America and KISS were a good example. If you look at their clothes, although it’s a bit

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‘The punk years’, 1977

bizarre, it’s a lot to do with big shoulders, boots ... they wore lots of makeup, which we didn’t wear.

They’re a concoction of Slade meets Alice Cooper and all sorts of stuff.

And there were always a lot of people in America saying, ‘You’re doing it wrong lads!’, because we were going in and going from massive audiences and mass hysteria to people sitting on the floor going ‘What’s this?!’ There was still a bit of peace and love, you know and they’ve got those the California songs going on, you know, the Eagles in the charts and a lot of ... you know, you’ve got The Allman Brothers, you’ve got all sorts ... Doobie Brothers, all sorts of Southern bands and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, and it was a bit like, where do we fit? Now, if KISS had have made it and we went over and supported them, we’d have probably done really well. In actual fact, KISS supported us when we first went and the next time we went, we supported them. And we were on the bill with Ozzy Osbourne. That was completely wrong! [laughs]. But then, we were having success with ‘Run Runaway’ in

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in the ‘80s. But in the ‘70s, when we arrived, there was always Americans going ‘Hey man, you’re going to be the biggest thing since with The Beatles.

We’ve got the whole procedure going!’

Well, I think America could have loved us, but we weren’t there at the right time and therefore, being there too early was as bad as being there too late.

You know, you’ve missed the boat if you’re too late, right? And you haven’t bought your ticket to get on the first one, because nobody knows you, so you’ve got to buy a ticket to get know.

I think none of us knew, because for our manager, Chas Chandler, it was a natural step to go to America and make it big. I think in some ways we did do good, because if Alice Cooper is raving about us on radio, then it’s because he watching us! And if you ever met Gene Simmons, he’d tell you about Slade.

He’d tell you quite straight that when they used to rehearse, they used to put Slade on to get them in the mood!

The punk era must have been a very strange time for Slade and many of the other acts associated with the

early-’70s glam rock era. What were your thoughts about punk and Slade’s position in the music industry at the time?

Well, when punk in, which was obviously via the Sex Pistols and all those other bands, I thought it was quite interesting and we did adapt. in fact, I shaved my head, if you remember, at the time and I wore an earring and they used to call me the Kojak of rock ‘n’ roll, which is quite a funny line! But I shaved my hair off, because I had the hairstyle in the band, and I quite enjoyed some of it. I wouldn’t wear chains on my earhole and stick it up my nose, I wouldn’t do anything like that.

There was no way I was going to go that far, but I went round the Kensington Market and they were selling some punky-type almost like plastic trousers, you know, shiny, and I was wearing studs in jackets. I adapted to it. I thought some of it was interesting, but I didn’t like the spitting, I didn’t like any of that. I think it was a reaction to maybe the way the business was at the time. There was a lot of

complacency in the market, but some of the bands I really liked that came out of that were The Stranglers and I think The Police came out at that time.

The Stranglers’ songs, they were good!

Like the ‘Peaches’ album [‘Rattus Norvegicus’, 1977]. There were aspects of it that remind me of a real band playing, because to be honest with you, it was pre-’80s, pre-[New] Romantics era. I think it was a reaction, but some of it wasn’t nice.

Musically speaking, some good stuff came through and there’ll always be that, but I don’t like all of the bands. I don’t like anything that’s aggressive, I’m not comfortable with that. I think there’s enough aggressiveness in the world that we’re dealing with.

Moving forward to present day and following the departure of Noddy and Jim in 1992 and Don earlier this year, you are now the only remaining member of the original line-up.

About now, you would have been undertaking your Christmas tour, which has now been postponed to December next year when hopefully

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Slade in 2020

everything should be back to some sort of normality. Could you introduce us to the current Slade line-up and for those planning to come and see you live next year, what can they expect from the shows?

Oh yeah, of course! The current line-up’s really good! New drummer, Alex Bines. He’s been in quite a lot of groups, he worked with Wilko Johnson. He’s a very good drummer.

Well, he’s been in The Rubettes, he’s been in all sorts of groups along the way. He reminds me of one of the Small Faces, someone like that. And the new singer, which is a shared situation, because we have two singers.

We’ve got Russ[ell Keefe]. I’ve always had the idea that maybe we should have someone who plays piano because a lot of our songs have piano in them, you know, ‘Everyday’, ‘My Friend Stan’ [number 2, 1974, ‘Old New Borrow and Blue], ‘My Oh My’, lots of them have got piano in them and I handle all the guitar rather than having a singer that plays guitar. Because a lot of people don’t play guitar like Nod and

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Nod is in tune with me with exactly what the style of Slade is in my playing, he’s always said that to me.

We speak frequently anyway. So, sometimes you get a second guitar player and they don’t do things exactly the way you do things. It’s hard to explain. You know, you could put somebody who plays good guitar with Eric Clapton, but it would still be Eric Clapton that obviously you want to hear. And I think it’s more defined, the aspect of how I play, I’ve got it now.

We couldn’t get a singer who played guitar and sang good enough, but now we have a really good singer and his name’s Russell Keefe. He, oddly enough, was in Bay City Rollers for a number of years. He was with them in the last incarnation of the Bay City Rollers, but he’s been in a lot of groups.

He writes songs, he’s a very talented, natural keyboard player, he’s a good singer as well and he sounds great on a lot of the tracks. But the guy who’s been with me that I really rate, and he’s a great guy to have in the band and he’s been in so many big bands and his name is John Berry [vocals, bass and

violin]. He’s been in Mud, Sweet, he’s been in The Tremeloes, he’s been in tons of bands. He’s a natural musician, very good ears. His father was a bass player and guitarist. He’s a bit like Jim, he’s very intuitive. It’s always good to have someone in a band that is mindful of tuning and stuff like that. And he’s took on the role of singing a lot of the singing, like ‘My Oh My’ and stuff like that. He didn’t do all the singing originally but he’s really developed into a very good singer. So, I would say we have two really good singers in the band, that’s John Berry and Russell Keefe and obviously I do backing vocals and all the rest of it. It’s a very happy group and we didn’t stop playing until March this year. Do I miss them?

It is hard. I always say good things about ex-members of the band, I wish them all well. I’m a positive person. I think it’s like me and Nod, we always say, none of can ever have anything individually that’s as great as what we had together as a group, because individually, the greatness of what we are comes from that four-piece group, in what we’ve achieved together, and we’ll never have anything like that again. We’ll go on to do other things, but there’ll be nothing quite like having something like that when you’re young.

I always think that I’m glad we were together; I’ll always be proud of that.

had been more a lovely and enlightening three-hour chat, but also told me how impressive he thought my work was. Personally, having been a Slade fan for many years, I couldn’t help feeling that it should be me flattering him.

However, when I eventually managed to, he seemed almost reluctant to be praised for what he has achieved over the course of his career: the mark of a true gentleman, one who is kind, humble and, although we could have easily forgiven him for it, has never let success go to his head. I thank Dave for this truly remarkable opportunity to spend so long chatting to him, wish him a very ‘Merry Xmas’ and all the best for the future. www.slade.uk.com www.facebook.com/ OfficialSladeBand

As the interview drew to a close, I was surprised when Dave took the time to not only tell me how much he had enjoyed our interview, which

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Weimar German Shepherd Records Presents:

Curse the Songs Interview by Bob Osborne.

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You know when you get that chill up your back when you hear music that is genuinely different and exciting? It doesn’t happen very often but when it does it’s a great feeling. When I first heard the debut single by Weimar I got a sense of something new and groundbreaking. Perhaps, in respect of the type and style of music they play, the most important band to come out of the Manchester music scene since Magazine.

Weimar is the latest endeavour of North West based musician and auteur Aidan Cross. They are a four-piece Art Rock band currently based in Manchester who released their debut single, the double A-side, ‘John Doe’ / ‘Curse the Songs’ in 2019. Both songs were produced and mixed at 6dB studios in Salford by Simon ‘Ding’ Archer of The Fall, Pixies and PJ Harvey fame. The single was released digitally by German Shepherd Records and physically by Weimar’s own label Marlene’s Hat. It was accompanied by two stunning videos. Visual art is a key component of the Weimar experience. There was a very positive response to the debut with glowing reviews on many sites. Legendary Salford DJ Stephen Doyle said “An early contender for single of the year – brilliant stuff!”

The group’s fame spread as far as Cambridge where broadcaster Dave Hammond of Cambridge 105 said:

“For the listener, the weight of anticipation can sometimes tip the balance of appreciation the wrong way, leaving he/she underwhelmed by what’s been presented after a long wait. Fortunately for this listener, that wasn’t the case with the debut single from Weimar, which has just arrived fully a year after I was first told about the new venture by singer Aidan Cross. ‘John Doe’ has a great pounding bass line wrapped around scratchy guitar and a vocal with real presence. Better still, ‘Curse the Songs’ builds over four phases from a relatively quiet opening to a galloping second section, a thrilling third and an epic finale with a vocal that matches each passage with relish. Highly recommended.”

Aidan’s previous band The Bacillus had a great reputation and their album ‘I Can’t Adapt to This Prison You Call Society’ is also available on German Shepherd Records.

A second single, ‘Marvel to the State’ / ‘Undesirable Master’ followed in November 2019. The two new songs featured the guest vocals of Rose Niland, singer with German Shepherd Records bands Rose & the Diamond Hand and Poppycock.

Stylistically, the new songs were significantly different from the previous single. ‘Marvel to the State’, written as a celebration of female figures throughout history who have stood up in the face of oppressive

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politics, is a duet between Aidan and Rose, set to a jazz-funk inspired backing. ‘Undesirable Master’, meanwhile, is a romantic torch song with an ethereal backing vocal from Niland. Both songs are also accompanied by promo videos directed by Nikos Pavlou. Niland co-stars in the video for ‘Marvel’ while the ‘Undesirable Master’ video guest stars screen thespian Indigo Azidahaka, who is also vocalist with Granola Suicide.

Original Weimar lead guitarist Johann Kloos left the band in September 2019 and was replaced by Stephen Sarsen, bassist with Playground and previously vocalist with Frank Is Dead. The current line-up of the band is Aidan Cross (vocals and rhythm guitar), Stephen Sarsen (lead guitar); John Armstrong (bass) and Anthony Edwards (drums).

Weimar have played regular gigs on Manchester’s underground circuit since 2017. Their music incorporates

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elements of Post-Punk, Indie and Experimental Rock together with touches of Cabaret, Chanson, Alt Folk and Dark Circus. Aesthetically and lyrically, they take influence from historical and cultural sources, basing their image and outlook around the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Their songs are preoccupied with the seedier side of culture and the darker elements of humanity, and the need for cultural and artistic rebellion in the face of political oppression.

Weimar are currently finalising work on their debut album, recorded at Vibratone Studios, Manchester and produced by Adam Crossley and Chris Guest. The band are aiming for a spring 2021 release. I took the opportunity to have a chat with Aidan about what is currently happening with the band.

What is the progress on the new album and what can you tell us about it?

Aiden with Rose Niland

We finally completed recording in July.

We were one session away from completing the album when the coronavirus pandemic struck in March and we all went into lockdown. With lockdown rules relaxed in July we went back to the studio and made the finishing touches, and the songs are currently being mixed. It is all brand new original material and includes quite an eclectic mix of styles, with bits of blues, folk, cabaret, chanson, Spanish flamenco ... we have a nice mix of different styles and influences in there. Several other musicians also make special guest appearances on the album, including a few other artists from the Manchester underground.

What are your earliest musical influences?

If you’re talking early early, then The Cure were one of the first bands I got into, way back when I was a kid, and were a big influence on me during my teens, together with other bands prominent in the ‘80s such as Soft Cell and OMD, and certain Indie bands of

the ‘90s like The Wonder Stuff and Space. By my twenties, I’d really delved deep into ‘80s Post-Punk and New Wave and became very influenced by bands such as Joy Division and [Echo and] the Bunnymen, as well as ‘60s and ‘70s stuff like The Doors and The Velvet Underground. Though it was The Bolshoi ... the band, not the ballet ... who really resonated with me on the deepest level and inspired me to take up music myself and start a band of my own. They’ve always been obscure and criminally underrated, but have been a massive influence on me musically. Of course all of us have widely differing and eclectic influences - John is very influenced by the No Wave and New York art rock movements of the late ‘70s and artists on the ECM jazz label, Eddy by classic ‘70s Punk and Ste by bands such as The Smiths and Half Man Half Biscuit.

We all bring our individual influences to the band and I think it makes for a good mix.

What current music are you listening to?

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Stephen and Eddie

Aiden in the studio

I have discovered a lot of fantastic underground acts during lockdown, such as Daphne Guinness, Hightown Pirates, Victims of the New Math and Chenél No.1. Also been listening to a lot of Momus, always a huge influence on me, as well as classic chanson such as Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel.

as many people as possible with it.

Since we’re not certain when live performances will become a possibility again given the global situation, we’re going to look at other ways of promoting it, possibly streamed online shows or video productions. The lockdown situation gives us the opportunity to get creative with other forms of media and make Weimar a kind of Gensamkunstwerk, bringing in more elements of visual art, film and video production. Once the album has been released we hope to get to work recording the second album, which I am already writing songs for!

Other than musical influences what other artistic/cultural influences are brought into play with Weimar?

We take influence from a variety of sources, including literature, theatre, film and history. A few songs on the album draw influence from film noir and directors such as David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. We incorporated some of our filmic influences into the videos we made for John Doe and Undesirable Master. Also German Expressionist film and other art forms of the Weimar Republic era.

What are your aspirations for Weimar going forward?

We want to release the album and reach

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What have you been up to during the lockdown?

It has been the perfect opportunity to write and record new material at home, and I have written lots of new songs during lockdown, recording demos at home and sending them to the rest of the band. We have at least half an album’s worth of new material already, and I’ve been surprising myself with some of the new directions I’ve been

branching into. Aside from that I’ve been collaborating on three different side projects with other musicians, and immersing myself in music, films and books.

When the current lockdown is over what have you got planned for the band?

When live shows are a thing again we intend to get right back out there and play as many gigs as possible, branching as far afield as possible.

Hopefully we’ll get to give the album the live launch show it deserves, with guest appearances by the other musicians who’ve guested on the album. And of course, get back into the studio and get to work recording the second album!

Describe the Weimar live experience - What can people expect when they come to see you?

We try to give the audience a different experience every time, no two shows should ever be the same. We like to vary the set a lot and try new approaches to the songs. I can’t say with exact certainty what you should expect when seeing us live as spontaneity is the key, but we do our best to make a real ‘Happening’ out of every live event and leave the audience feeling inspired and on a high. weimarbanduk.com www.facebook.com/ WeimarTheBand

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Midnight Oil Beds Still Burning Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography (this page) by Awais Butt.

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Outside of their native Australia, Midnight Oil are best known for their worldwide smash hit single ‘Beds are Burning’, a condemnation of how Aboriginal communities were often forcibly removed from their land, which a full two years after appearing as the opening track to their classic sixth album, 1987’s Warne Livesey-produced ‘Diesel and Dust’, finally set the world ablaze and peaked at number six on the UK singles chart and number 17 on the US Billboard Hot 100. More impressive still, the single hit the top spot in South Africa, Canada and New Zealand. Meanwhile, back down under, the band, who are fronted by the enigmatic Peter Garrett, are affectionately known as ‘the Oils’ and had been together since 1972, were already nothing short of legends, with two number one albums (1984’s ‘Red Sails at Sunset’ and the aforementioned ‘Diesel and Dust’) and a number one single, the 1985 EP ‘Species Deseases’ under their belts to prove it.

Garrett, having already extensively about the struggles of Indigenous Australians and environmental issues for many years in his music, went on to pursue a successful second career as a Labor Party politician, entering parliament in 2004 and acting as Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts between 2007 and 2010 and Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth between 2010 and 2013.

Following the global attention received for ‘Beds are Burning’ and ‘Diesel and Dust’, Midnight Oil poured their hearts, souls and minds into another classic Livesey produced album, 1990’s ‘Blue Soul Mining’, which again topped the charts in Australia. Four other top ten albums followed before the band called it a day in 2002 following the release of their eleventh, ‘Capricornia’ and

A few weeks ago, we gave Garrett a call at home in Australia to conduct the following interview.

Unfortunately, less than a week later, Bones Hillman passed away after a battle with cancer. We would like to dedicate this interview to his memory, the 23-years that he spent with the band and his work on what is aguably their finest work to date, ‘The Makarrata Project’.

In 2016, Midnight Oil announced that they had reformed and a year later, undertook the mammoth The Great Circle Tour, which saw them perform 77 concerts in sixteen countries. Now, Garrett, along with guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey, bassist Bones Hillman and drummer Rob Hirst return with their first album in eighteen years, ‘The Makarrata Project’, a magnificent seven track masterwork featuring collaborations with sixteen First Nations artists, which also sees Livesey return to produce.

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Firstly, hello Peter and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. You have just released your twelfth studio album ‘The Makarrata Project’. Before we talk about the album itself, it has been a full eighteen years since you released your last album, ‘Capricornia’ and you quit the band to refocus on your political career shortly afterwards. This is probably a very different opening question to one you will have been asked before, but for those unaware that you spent the interim period as a successful Labor party politician, could you give us an insight into your achievements during this very different second career?

[Laughs] Wow! Yeah, I’ll say! Well, let me talk about three things quickly.

The first would be, at my direction, we took the Japanese government to the International Court of Justice to prevent them from killing whales in the Southern Ocean, ostensibly in the name of science. They call it their Scientific Whaling Programme, which we

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thought was bogus and ridiculous and horrible. And Japan is probably our third or fourth major trading partner, so I had to convince the government that we should take Japan to court and then we had to convince the court of the merits of the case and Australia won that case and whaling in the Southern Ocean stopped and I was very pleased with that. The second one is that I introduced something called a ‘Retail Loyalty Scheme’. What it basically meant was that ... I think you might have it in the UK. I think they’ve got it in Europe, but if an artist sells a painting or a sculpture and then the painting or sculpture is resold, then they receive a small commission of the difference in price. Anyway, we didn’t have it here in Australia and many artists were very poor and they had no chance of making a very good living, so I was pleased that we could introduce that legislation. And the final one would probably be that in my second term, we had a female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard and she actually gave me all her portfolios, including education and we made a major change

to the way education was funded in Australia, so that it was funded according to need, in other words, according to the socio-economic background or income of families all around the country, to make sure that every student had a fair start in life.

Midnight Oil reformed in 2016. How did you come to reform, why did you feel it was the right time to do so and what were the most difficult aspects of putting the band back together?

Okay, so, we didn’t think we would reform, but we thought we should get together in a room and play and see what happened and when we did that, we found that we got excited about the sounds that we were making, even though it had been a long time. We then thought, why don’t we go and just do some shows just to people in Sydney, you know, in a pub or a small room? But a lot of, lot of, people wanted to see those shows and so it grew from there. And the most difficult thing was maybe ... I mean, we didn’t want it to be nostalgia, Alice, we

wanted it to be new, so we had to relearn 106 songs, so we could do anything, any night. It was a lot!

‘The Makarrata Project’ really is an astounding piece of work, so could you tell us a bit about how the ideas behind the album formulated and a bit about its writing and recording process?

So, back in the ‘80s, Midnight Oil had a rare experience for a city band in that we went on a tour all through Aboriginal communities in Australia, particularly in the remote desert areas, playing with Aboriginal musicians and ‘Diesel and Dust’ and ‘Beds are Burning’ emerged from that experience, and we also developed a very strong interest and concern that we needed to try and fix up our history. And when we regathered many, many years later, there were a number of songs that addressed that issue, which we thought we should record, but we needed to record with Indigenous Australians; not sing about them, but record with them.

We picked a really important document

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Photograph by Tony Mott

called the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Uluru is the big red rock in the middle of Australia from the tourist brochures. Aboriginal delegates had a road map for modern Australia to make peace with Indigenous Australia and at the time, when it was released, it had been ignored by the Conservative, the tory government, but we felt it needed to be re-energized, re-presented and so we used that as the underpinning document for the album. It’s very different from normal rock music, but this is how Midnight Oil does things.

And then we had a bunch of songs and we invited other people to sing them and the result was ‘The Makarrata Project’.

Midnight Oil have pledged to donate its shares of any proceeds received from the album to organisations promoting the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for the creation of a “First Nations Voice” enshrined in the Australian Constitution. For those unaware of this cause, please could you tell us more about it and why it is a cause

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that you feel so strongly about?

I think the short answer is that, and I don’t want to make English people, or British people, feel bad about the past, but when the British sailed to Australia, they essentially took the land of the Australians who were there and unlike other countries, say for example New Zealand or India or whatever, there was never any treaty, there was never any agreement, there was never any settlement about that historical action of taking the land and taking peoples’ lives. So, that’s what ‘The Makarrata Project’ is about. We think, as modern Australians, that it’s a really important thing for us to get right, to give healing, to unify the nation, to bring black and white together. And as I said, in the statement itself, there’s a roadmap for us to do that and now we’ve provided some music for that.

The album features a whole host of collaborators across its seven tracks.

Could you tell us a bit about the people who you have worked with on it and are there are any you are

particularly proud of collaborating with?

So, I think that all of the collaborations worked better than we ever expected.

We have sixteen different artists on the record. Some of those people were people that we knew, you might call them elders or old fellow, artists who we met back in the day; Some were people who have achieved prominence in the Australian entertainment industry and who are very talented, like, say, Jessica Mauboy or Dan Sultan, and others were up-and-coming artists and we really felt that we wanted to give everybody a shot at joining with us on our songs, and its the collaborations that make ‘The Makarrata Project’ special. It’s not just about Midnight Oil playing these songs and essentially saying what it thinks, even though that’s pretty good, but it’s much bigger and better than that because of the participation of First Nations people.

‘Beds are Burning’ brought largescale worldwide attention to the band, but by the time of its release in

1987, you had already been together for fifteen years, winning or being nominated for several high profile music awards in Australia, achieved the first of three number one albums with 1984’s ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ and a number one single with 1985’s ‘Species Deceases’ EP. Could we go right back to the beginning and could you give us an insight into the early history of the band over in Australia?

So, Midnight Oil is a strange beast.

Firstly, for UK or British listeners, you only started to hear about us after we’d been playing in Australian pubs probably for, I don’t know, five years and we never really saw ourselves as becoming a global band, or even having successful records. We really saw ourselves as journeymen who would play in some corner of your world, you know, down the road from the pub or in your sports club or in your school hall with songs that were never, ever played on radio at all. And we despised the music industry, the commercial pop world. It meant nothing to us as musicians. However,

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over time, we continued to build and build an audience and it basically just expanded from Australia to other parts of the world and we really haven’t changed all that much. I mean, we’re older but we’re the same people.

‘The Makarrata Project’ was produced by Warne Livesy, who also produced ‘Diesel & Dust’; ‘Blue Sky Mining’ (1990) and ‘Capricornia’.

Why did you choose to reunite with Warne for this album?

Yeah, look, Warne is a very good producer. I mean, he’s English, he’s an Englishman, even though he now lives in Canada. He may have produced The The back in the day [‘Infected’, 1986 and ‘Mind Bomb’, 1989]. So, he’s a very musical producer and he’s someone who we trust and we thought the records that we made with him were great and we liked the idea of catching up with him and swapping stories.

Of course, the world is currently in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic

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but have you made any plans to head back out on the road to tour the new material once it is over and what else can we expect from Midnight Oil in the future?

So, one of the three big ‘C’s in our world, Alice, are COVID, China and climate. They’re the ones that are going to preoccupy us and they certainly preoccupy Midnight Oil as songwriters and activists. We would like to play in Australia as soon as we can, where transmission rates are very low, but we do have very cautious governments and arrangements for playing, so it may still be a number of months. We would love to play in other parts of the world, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen soon, we just have to wait and see. I mean, at our concerts, it’s not really sitting there and clapping. It’s not like you’re listening to Graham Norton introduce you, it’s a bit wilder than that. So we just think that we’ll have to wait until we get the green light and hopefully that’s sooner ... rather ... than ... later!

And we hope it is sooner rather than later for you as well, so you can get back out on the road and play this great album.

‘The Makarrata Project’ is out now on Sony Music Australia.

Well, we hope so too and it’s been nice to talk to you. All the best hon.

www.facebook.com/ midnightoilofficial

www.midnightoil.com

Photograph by Daniel Boud

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Wizzard After the Christmas Magic Interview by Martin Hutchinson.

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Fans of Roy Wood and Wizzard are in for a treat as not just one album has being reissued, but TWO! We have seen these before, as they were both released twenty years ago, but have both been remastered.

Back in 1974, Wizzard were on a roll.

The band, headed by ex-Move and ELO mastermind Roy Wood, had just had four top ten hits (including two number ones with ‘See My Baby Jive’ and ‘Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)’ in 1973) on the Harvest label and had recently signed, along with fellow Don Arden-produced act ELO, to Warner Brothers.

Following the Christmas classic ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ peaking at number four on Christmas week 1973, Wood had the idea of a change of direction, more in line with the experimental music of the Wizzard B-sides and the 1973 debut album ‘Wizzard Brew’. So the plan was to record an album of rock and roll, and a jazz album.

The rock and roll album was completed, but rather than wait for the jazz album to be recorded, the record company released what they had. The result, ‘Introducing Eddy and The Falcons’ was a fond pastiche of the rock and roll greats with Roy faithfully recreating the artists’ sounds and reached number 19 on the UK album charts in 1974.

We start with a couple heading to a concert by the fictitious band, Eddy and The Falcons (strangely enough, one of Roy’s early bands back in the sixties was called The Falcons). The pair enter the hall and we are treated to Eddy’s Rock, a Duane Eddy-like instrumental.

The rest of the album follows suit. With hints of Elvis Presley on ‘I Dun Lotsa Cryin’ Over You’ and Del Shannon on ‘Everyday I Wonder’, whilst on ‘Crazy Jeans’ and ‘Come Back Karen’, we get more than a soupçon of Gene Vincent and Neil Sedaka respectively. The album also has little piano ‘incidental boogies’ by recently-arrived keyboard player Bob Brady, who also shares vocal duties with Roy on the album’s finale ‘We’re Gonna Rock ‘n’ Roll Tonight’.

The band had a hit single from the album with the lush ‘This is the Story of My Love (Baby)’, and ‘You Got Me Runnin’ was also almost released as a single, but was later covered by Smiley and Company in 1975. The bonus tracks are ‘Nixture’, a track written by sax player Nick Pentelow and featured on the flip side of the single, plus both sides of the singles ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Winter (Loony’s Tune)’ and ‘Are You Ready to Rock’, the latter of which proved to be Wizzard’s last hit.

As with the previous reissue of the album in 1999, the writers of the B-sides are omitted (although Nick gets a mention in the sleeve notes this time around. For the record, all the tracks

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were written by Roy Wood except Nick’s ‘Nixture’, ‘Dream of Unwin’, which was written by percussionist Charlie Grima, and ‘Marathon Man’, which was penned by drummer Keith Smart and Mike Tyler, who in actual fact was Mike Sheridan from another of Roy’s old bands, Mike Sheridan and The Nightriders. Mike also ran the Wizzard fan club.

The cover images show the band dressed as Teddy Boys entering a café and a fight breaking out. All the band seem to be entering into the mood except for the other sax player, Mike Burney, who has his normal clothes on and just stares at the camera looking none too happy.

Nick Pentelow, Roy’s sax and flute player, and now with Andy Fairweather-Low and the Low Riders explains why Mike just sat there: “When we went to the café, which was in Hampstead, we all had horrendous hangovers. There was this pinball machine and Mike sat on it. He went through the glass and

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broke it. So he just sat there looking mean.”

Mike, who ended up in the Syd Lawrence Orchestra and sadly passed away a couple of years ago, was a big influence on Nick. “Yes, it was very sad when he died. He was about ten years older than me and became a big influence. When we went to New York, we went to all the jazz clubs together. He knew all the history and when in the clubs, he would point out all the musicians.” Nick and Mike worked together post-Wizzard too: “Yeah, we formed The Old Horns Band in a pub called The Old Horns near Birmingham.”

The second reissue is the ‘lost’ Wizzard album ‘Main Street’. This was recorded in 1976 when Wizzard had moved to Jet Records and is an out and out jazz album. The record label didn’t think it would sell and it languished in the vaults until 2000 when it came out on the Edsel label. It has been excellently remastered by Cherry Red for this reissue and it sounds like a different

Wizzard on TopPop, 1974

album. It is a lot more clear and full of life. The album pointed the way to 1977’s ‘Super Active Wizzo’ album which is also jazz, but a lot more accessible.

Two tracks from the album did see the light of day, with ‘Indiana Rainbow’ being released as Wizard’s final single in 1976, but ultimately proving too esoteric for the record buying public, and ‘Saxmaniacs’, an instrumental which became the B-side to Wood’s 1979 solo single ‘We’re On the Road (Again)’. The bonus track on this reissue is ‘Human Cannonball’, a track recorded for the album, but rejected by Wood at the time. It first saw light of day on a collection in 2007.

The album’s opener and title track would have made a decent single, and the track ‘French Perfume’ was performed when Roy and the Wizzo Band recorded a ‘Sight and Sound – in Concert’ for BBC2 in 1978. “I haven’t heard ‘Main Street’ much, but I was in the line-up for the ‘Sight and Sound’ show when we did

Nick Pentelow (right) with Mike Burney.

Photograph courtesy of Simon Pentelow Photography

‘French Perfume’”, Nick tells me.

“It is nice to see it out again, there’s some great songs and Roy spent a lot of time on it. The problem was that the album was finished just as Wizzard was in the process of splitting up. Roy would let us all make suggestions, and Mike [Burney] and I would some up with ideas and when it came to ‘Main Street’, Mike was a big influence.

As he was older, he had a lot more experience and he introduced us to the 1950s West Coast jazz musicians.

You can hear the influence of one of them,Lenny Tristano, on ‘French Perfume’”.

While speaking to Nick, I asked how he joined Wizzard. “I was in a band called the Rockin’ Rockets Road Revue which contained some old Brummie music legends like Mike Sheridan [Nightriders], Gerry Levene [The Avengers], Danny King [Mayfair Set] and Keith Smart, who also joined Wizzard. Roy came to see us in early ’72 and asked me if I’d like to play at Wembley Stadium!

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Definitely a no-brainer. It turned out to be Wizzard’s first gig, at the Wembley Rock and Roll Festival with Bill Haley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.”

As Roy played a lot of instruments on the records, as did most of the band, reproducing Wizzard’s sound live was problematic. “It was absolute chaos!”, Nick tells me. “The sound systems were less sophisticated then, these days it’s much better. But you couldn’t hear yourself. We did our best but recording is different than doing it live, but we had some good players in the band. We could have done with a few more gigs. We did some tours – not many outside the UK, although we did go to the US.” He has one outstanding memory of touring the US: “There was a lot of hanging about, but my main memory is of being knackered.”

Nick went on to me that he is still in touch with some of his Wizzard bandmates: “Yeah, I’m in contact with Bob Brady, Charlie Grima and Keith Smart. I also was in touch with cellist Hugh McDowell and of course Mike Burney before they sadly passed away and I occasionally see Roy.” Although it would be great for the fans, Nick doesn’t think that there could ever be a Wizzard reunion: “No, I don’t think so. There’s other things to do. That was then and this is now.”

‘Introducing Eddy and The Falcons’ and ‘Main Street’ are available now on Esoteric Records, a division of Cherry Red. www.facebook.com/ WizzardMusic

Wizzard, with Nick Pentelow (back, centre) in 1973. Photograph by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

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Tori Amos Snowflake Girl Interview and Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

It has been a ‘pretty bad year’ for many, but on 4th December, Tori Amos hopes to spread a little seasonal joy with the release of her new Christmas-themed EP, ‘Christmastide’ through Decca Records. The four tracks featured (‘Christmastide’; ‘Circle of Seasons’; ‘Holly’ and ‘Better Angels’) are the first new material from the acclaimed singer-songwriter-pianist since 2017’s ‘Native Invader’ album.

‘Christmastide’ will be released digitally via all good streaming platforms, but we suspect the legion of fans that Amos has amassed since the release of her debut album ‘Little Earthquakes’ back in 1992 will be eager to get their mittens on the limited edition vinyl version, which comes complete with a collection of stunning illustrations by graphic artist Rantz Hosely and a special Christmas card with a message from the artist.

Meanwhile, musically, Amos calls on the services of seasoned session drummer Matt Chamberlain and equally prolific bassist Jon Evans, both of whom she has worked with since 1998’s ‘From the Choirgirl Hotel’, to back her intricately woven, hauntingly beautiful melodies and thought provoking lyrics.

As Amos recently told us, ‘Christmastide’ was envisioned in order to create a safe space for listeners to reflect on the many challenges that 2020 has presented and offer some encouragement, strength and hope as this strangest of years is consigned to the history books: “With ‘Christmastide’, it was important to be positive and to try and lift people’s spirits. It’s a time of year that can be both joyful with family and friends, but also can sadly be a very lonely place for some. There will be many families who will be unable to be together this year because of the Pandemic, so I hope these songs contained in this beautiful package can be a small treat to help along the way.”

Amos concluded our brief chat by saying, “We will get through these tough times together with strength in unity and hope.”

‘Christmastide’ is released on 4th December through Decca Records. toriamos.com

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Frenchy’s Rants This Month: Multi-coloured Christmas!

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

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And suddenly, here we are again: it’s Christmas time! Time flies when you’re not having fun trying to avoid an invisible enemy…or are we being sold a dud?! Honestly, I don’t know who or what to believe anymore. All I see is people suffering one way or the other. If COVID-19 doesn’t get you, the restrictions put on you will: this is a game where there are no winners, except the pharmaceutical companies baffing out millions of vaccines!

I don’t know about you but Christmas always brings out very conflicting emotions in me. On one hand, you get all the family around a big table and eat, drink, be merry and play stupid games. That’s the good side of Chrimbo although this year, you’ll either give it up or cheat and hope that none of your neighbours grass you up. Then you got to buy loads of presents, wrap them up, write the little cards that go on them so you’ll know on the 25th what present goes to who: that’s commercial Chrimbo, the side that gives Amazon and their mates a hard-on. We’re all guilty of it, overspending at Christmas is like getting a cold, it just happens!

Then January comes round and the horrible reality sets in: “Oh, my gawd!

Look at that credit card bill!! Darling, did you spend 25 quid at Better Massages?”; “Er ... no! NOOOOO… not me! What’s that then?” And so it goes on for a few days where every item is scrutinised just in case they’ve made a mistake and you don’t really

owe the credit card provider that much money: they NEVER make mistakes.

You owe them what it says on the bill.

No mistake! Pay up or else Paul and his bailiff mates will be round to itemise your house valuables! Then comes acceptance and you swear to yourself that next Christmas, you won’t do that, you’ll set a limit and won’t go over it although deep down, you know it’s a load of bollox. If it was down to me, and sadly it isn’t coz the missus and her wicked ally, my daughter, have got it all sewn up, but if it was, if I was the PM or Trumpet/Bidet, I’d make it law that we can give each other presents as long as we made them ourselves! How lovely would that be? A meaningful present just like when your off-springs were little and they brought back drawings from school or wobbly ashtrays made of papier-maché: come on, admit it! You loved those more than the latest version of the iPhone. I know, I still have it all: drawings, ashtrays, dolls, poems, etc all made by my kids and I tell you what, they mean a lot to me. I love them. Some of them are framed even and I wouldn’t swap any of them for all the tea in China.

It’s a weird disease, Christmasitis: it gets you by the short and curlies and won’t let go until you feel you’ve expressed your love by buying a suitable amount of pressies. When I was a kid, Christmas started when my dad and uncles went into the Alpine mountains and brought back trees for everyone: no going to the local garden

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centre and paying £70 for a tree or 100 quid for a plastic one with bells on. No, we had the real McCoy and that would have been the first Saturday around the 15th of December. By the 25th, the tree was mostly dead but the house smelt of proper Christmas. My mum would put clementine peel on the fire and some chestnuts: it was heavenly, that smell of Alpine trees, orange and chestnuts. On the 25th, at silly in the morning, us kids got one big present each and a bag of sweets or a bag of oranges and we felt like kings! No credit card bill though.

Then you grow up and you want to pass that feeling, that happiness on to your children but the world changes and kids from one generation to the next expect more. They want the latest gadgets and new Converse and that costs. But you want them to be happy so you use that pesky credit card. Christmas has lost its meaning, the birth of Jesus and all that and it ain’t a bad thing coz that was another load of bollox. Christmas now is just a massive family holiday with too much food and too many presents: it’s the 21st century equivalent of the love fests of the past. And don’t the retailers know it!! Black Friday, Cyber Monday … come ‘ere, my lovelies and let me take your wonga!

That time of year means different things to different people but very little is about religion or believing in Jesus … or not. I couldn’t care less about religions: it’s all a big con. Religions were invented by men in order to control the people, but we all know

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what happened backstage at the St Kushty of Nazareth church with the choirboys and girls: thousands of lives ruined. We’re better off without religions, preachers and all that circus: it’s unhealthy and crooked, bent in more ways than one. But there are still some good people around doing good things at Christmas: volunteers feeding the homeless, spending hours on the phone talking to the lonely and generally making Christmas a better time of year for many. That’s the real Christmas spirit or even the real Christmas full stop. If more of us were to do that and I am as guilty as most for not doing enough, wouldn’t the country be a better place? And wouldn’t we feel better come January because even with a big bill to pay, we’d know that it hadn’t been only about money and spending and buying, that it had been, for a few hours, about just giving, giving a bit of yourself for the greater good?

There it is, brothers and sisters, my two pennies worth about Christmas: twenty20, a year that promised so much, delivered more and most of it bad, is almost over! Let’s try and get over the line into 2021 without too big a bill to pay in January. But if you have a bit left over, send it to the Brothers of the Sacred Rip Off: PM me for details!

Happy Christmas everyone and try and be good ... but not too good. www.flickniferecords.co.uk

music star/legend. His humility comes across very strongly, which is something I didn’t expect. He seems truly bemused and grateful for his talent and above all his fans.

(R)Evolution: The Autobiography

By Gary Numan

Review by Martin Hutchinson This book lays Gary Numan bare.

He holds nothing back and in doing so, will no doubt gain many new fans. The book had been started and abandoned many times, but after the COVID pandemic took hold, he revisited it, started it again from scratch and it took him just seven weeks to write. surprisingly, due to his nature, he is methodical about the whole process and does not waver from the timeline he has even labelled the chapters with the year that they cover. I have rarely read an autobiography that is so forthright and soul-bearing. Rightly regarded as a pioneer of electronic music (although he modestly states that his hero John Foxx had already done three albums with Ultravox before he started his first), Gary takes us through the trials and tribulations of being a

After Gary burst upon the scene in 1979 with two chart-topping albums and singles, his career petered out somewhat. He faced bankruptcy and the main ‘storyline’ of the book is the 30-year climb back to the top. He is extremely candid throughout and tells in great detail how his Asperger’s has affected his interaction with people.

The book is not without humour either.

As Gary goes into great detail about the IVF treatment he and wife Gemma went through, his recounting of having to give samples is hilarious - although I suspect that it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Although it is an autobiography, it does read like a novel - a novel about someone who went swiftly up, went swiftly down, but clawed his way back up. It is written in such a way that you feel elation when Gary recalls his emotion when his 2017 album ‘Savage’ got to number two in the charts.

Excellently written - the only thing missing is a discography, but that isn’t really surprising as (and Gary tells us about this) his back catalogue has been plundered mercilessly. garynuman.com

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The End is the Beginning is the End:

The Smashing Pumpkins

and the Art of the Double Album in the Digital Age

Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Cyr’.

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We live in an age where the album as we once knew it (i.e. a body of work designed to be listened to from start to finish, with a beginning, a middle and an end) only loosely exists, largely replaced instead by a band or artist putting together a collection of songs under one title and the listener dipping in and out at will on a streaming platform such as Spotify. Many listeners will even listen to just one song and move onto another release and it is a sad fact that, in accordance, any sense of track ordering in order to enhance the listening experience is no longer the primary concern of many of those making an album.

The Smashing Pumpkins know the impact that such changes to the way in which people listen to music have had only too well. However, now in the second year of the partial reformation of the original line-up (original bassist D’arcy Wretzky, despite a large amount of persuasion from the group’s only constant member over the last 32-years and driving force, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Billy Corgan, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, declined to be involved) which gave us such classic albums as ‘Gish’ (1991); ‘Siamese Dream’ (1993) and ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ (1995), they return to follow up 2018’s slightly underwhelming ‘Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun’ with something that will completely

confound those who (a) are guilty of cherry-picking songs on Spotify and (b) their own fanbase: a double 20-track, 112minute album which finds them completely disregard the guitar, bass and drum driven heavy rock sound that they are most associated with in favour of a synths and contemporary pop.

Entitled ‘Cyr’, The Smashing Pumpkins’ eleventh studio album overall is the second part of a trilogy which began with the aforementioned ‘Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun’, but bears little relation to its predecessor. We are told that the third part of the trilogy, which is reportedly already under construction, will also be a sequel to ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’, the band’s first double album, released back in a time when even a 28-track, 121minute seemed almost sensible. Exactly what ‘Cyr’ is gearing up for on its successor is still completely unknown and with this record in mind, we aren’t quite sure the sequel to ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ will do anything to recapture the endless glory of that sprawling monolith with its era-defining singles such as ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’; ‘1979’; ‘Tonight Tonight’, ‘Zero’ and ‘Thirty-three’.

That isn’t to say that ‘Cyr’ doesn’t offer up some truly magnificent moments, but all of them were released amongst the five double A-sides which preceded its release. This leads us on to another point about the way in which an album

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is promoted and released in the digital age: too much of album already having been heard prior to the release of the main event can dampen the excitement surrounding even those that are most hotly-anticipated. The Smashing Pumpkins’ movement into unchartered wholly synth-driven excess with the audacity to put out a vast body of work should have been a wonder to behold, but by the time you put ‘Cyr’ on the first time, the ten tracks which had already been released sound ‘old hat’ and the ten remaining tracks struggle to incite anywhere near the level of excitement that their counterparts did when we first heard them.

The title track, which has now been thoroughly lived in since August and now undeniably finds itself as an album highlight, finds Corgan and associates looking back to the ‘80s, without even a hint of guitar to be heard, just a deluge of synths and a huge, catchy chorus. Corgan has stated that the riff was originally played on guitar and, try as we might, we cannot help but think that if it had been presented in this way, The Smashing Pumpkins might have given us a track as monumental as ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’.

However, harking back to the glory days of the band is not the order of the day here and they should be commended for the way in which, this far into their existence, they have strived to push forward by finding new ways to present their ideas, even if the end result doesn’t say anything new.

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This, of course, isn’t the first time The Smashing Pumpkins have dabbled in electronics, with 1997’s often overlooked ‘Adore’ being drenched in programmed drums following the departure of Chamberlin and pulses that would have been more at home on a trip-hop record of the time than one from the heavy rock genre. In The Smashing Pumpkins’ catalogue, ‘Cyr’ most resembles ‘Adore’ and, even if some critics at the time were dismissive of it, it would seem that Corgan is still very fond of that post-grunge era, even donning a similar gothic look in this album’s promotional materials. Further evidence of the connection between these two albums can also be found on the almost country ballad styled ‘Dulcet in E’ and the infectiously poppy ‘Ramona’, on which amidst all of their electronicallyderived sounds, Corgan, in a similar way to how he ditched the electric guitar for acoustic instruments (guitar and piano) on a large portion of ‘Adore’, plays acoustic guitar.

So, fans of Corgan in full Uncle Fester regalia will be satisfied, but those who were hoping for Smashing Pumpkins anthems in the vein of say those aforementioned singles from ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ or ‘Today’ and ‘Disarm’ from ‘Siamese Dream’ will be sadly disappointed.

Some consolation, however, might come in the form of ‘Wyttch’ with its big crunching guitars and crowd pleasing, singalong chorus (that is if

the band were able to play live at the moment) or the menacing ‘Purple Blood’. ‘Cyr’ also lacks the sort of unfettered musical abandon which would find the band heading off on all manner of wild tangents on their early albums. Instead, as with much of The Smashing Pumpkins output of late, everything sounds a little too restrained and unwilling to really let its hair down. Part of the problem is that many of the synthesiser tracks, with the possible exception of opening track ‘The Colour of Love’ with its New Order style bass groove and highly effective harmonising from backing singers Katie Cole and Sierra Swan, all tend to follow the same pattern and by the time ‘Cyr’ fizzles out with possibly the weakest song of the set, The Killers (the later material, not the good stuff) mimicking ‘Minerva’, much of the album becomes quite forgettable.

as a single album. As a double album, it is a brave effort in the digital age, but after listening in full once, we doubt many will revisit the experience. If anything, its lack of cohesion or any real sense of that all-important beginning, middle and end is likely to cause most people to revert to those cherry-picking ways in order to just enjoy its stronger moments. Perhaps it has been designed so that listeners can dip in and out at will, or perhaps this will be used as an excuse to disguise the fact that it doesn’t really work. We can only hope that its follow-up, which we suspect will also be a double album, finds The Smashing Pumpkins able to overcome the obstacles presented by modern listening habits with a better realisation of their obviously still unwavering ambition.

There is no doubting that Corgan is still capable of writing some great songs, but ‘Cyr’ may well have worked better

www.facebook.com/ smashingpumpkins

smashingpumpkins.com

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The Kut

Caring Christmas Kut Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

“We never thought we would be doing a big push at an unofficial Christmas number one”, says Princess Maha. “We really need some backing though because Christmas just regurgitates pre-existing songs, so independent acts get no look in.” She has a good point, but if any independent act can change this, it is her band The Kut, with their Christmas classic in the making, ‘Waiting for Christmas’, released on 18th December through Criminal Records.

In 2019, former Eighth Day Magazine cover stars (November 2019) The Kut were nominated as Breakthrough Artist at the Live UK Music Business Awards, whilst their knack for a great tune, as evidenced on their quite spectacular debut album ‘Valley of Thorns’, which spent two weeks on the UK Rock

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Albums Chart, peaking at number 7 and reached number 18 on the UK Independent Albums Chart, saw them reach the semi-finals / finals in the UK Songwriting Contest for three consecutive years.

But, there is a much bigger reason for backing The Kut to be the unofficial Christmas number one than them simply being a great band: 100% of the proceeds from sales and streams of ‘Waiting for Christmas’ will be donated directly to The Red Cross in order to support those affected by poverty as a result of the pandemic. Speaking of this great cause, Princess Maha told us: “So many people are suffering right now. People who have lost loved ones due to coronavirus, as well as a result of hospitals cancelling vital treatments. The situation right now means that many families are not even able to grieve together, while also facing financial hardship such as being furloughed, made redundant or even homeless ahead of Christmas. The Red Cross has an incredible reputation as a charity

and were early to announce their Coronavirus Crisis Fund to support those affected by poverty during the pandemic”.

A piano-led, string-laden Christmas anthem, ‘Waiting for Christmas’, which was recently premiered on Kerrang Radio by Johnny Doom, is The Kut as you have never heard them before.

Meanwhile, you are unlikely to hear lyrics that will prove more poignant for many people under the current circumstances than “So how did it get so strained? We’re talking ‘bout money again”. And to really get the single’s important message across, ‘Waiting for Christmas’ was recorded at Fiction Studios London and mastered at Abbey Road by the legendary Frank Arkwright, best known for his work with not only The Verve and Coldplay, but also on one the UK’s biggest selling charity singles of all time, Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ (1997).

Talking about their hopes for the single, Princess Maha, who’s strong interest in mental health issues led her to help redefine how risk for schizophrenia is measured in her recent PhD thesis, with major implications for earlier detection of those at risk of developing a psychosis related illness, said of ‘Waiting for Christmas’: “We know the single is an underdog, by the design of the music industry, but I am appealing to our supporters and to Christmas and music lovers in our community ... if we can raise even a

few hundred pounds for those affected by poverty during the pandemic, and support families, we would love to do that. We have lost so many people before their time, and so many families are suffering and feel alone. With the single, we are collectively raising a candle for all those we have lost and showing solidarity with our wider community this Christmas.”

The Kut have set up a specially dedicated website for the fundraiser (below). Here, you will find three single versions (the official release, radio edit and instrumental), the music video and CD singles, which come complete with limited edition artwork.

‘Waiting for Christmas’ is released on 18th December through Criminal Records. www.waiting4christmas.com www.facebook.com/TheKut

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