Eighth Day Magazine Issue Twenty-two

EIGHTH DAY Making Plans for Colin The Manfreds / Vicki Peterson / Tony Prince / Vince Melouney / Gary Lucas / Chamber / Uhr

ISSUE TWENTY-TWO. JULY. £4.50

XTC

EDITORIAL

Alice Jones-Rodgers Editor-in-Chief Scott Rodgers Photographer, being headhunted by British Steel Thank you to all this month’s contributors.

If you would like to contribute to future issues, please Email samples of your work to: eighthdaymagazine@outlook.com

Facebook: eighthdaymagazine / Twitter: @EighthDayMag ... #2020inthebag

CONTENTS 4. The Manfreds Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

78. Gary Lucas Interview by Kevin Burke.

30. Vince Melouney Interview by Kevin Burke.

88. German Shepherd Records Presents: Electronica Now! Different noises for your ears. This month featuring Moongoose, The Junta, Jed, Night Operations and The Screaming Love Collective.

35 / 53 / 87. Wasted World Another instalment of Dan Webster’s legendary comic strip.

36. Tony Prince Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

50. The Senton Bombs In the third part of an exclusive series, bassist and vocalist Joey Class reveals all about the band’s new single ‘Lake’.

54. XTC Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

67. The Godfathers Alice Jones-Rodgers reports on the London punk / R&B influenced outfit’s brand new double A-side single.

68. Vicki Peterson Interview by Kevin Burke.

74. Chamber Interview by Peter Dennis.

92. Frenchy’s Rants This month: The Day Hate Came to Town.

95. White Riot Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews Rubika Shah’s directorial debut chronicalling the formation and work of Rock Against Racism.

96. Joy Division Paul Foden celebrates the 40th anniversary of ‘Closer’.

100. Bob Dylan Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways.

106. Introducing: Uhr Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

The Manfreds The Mighty Tom! Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

4

When Tom McGuinness joined Manfred Mann on 20th December 1963, replacing original bassist Dave Richmond, they had just recorded what would shortly afterwards become the theme tune for one of the sixties’ most defining TV shows, ‘Ready Steady Go!’, ‘5-4-3-2-1!’ A self-taught guitarist who had already started to make a name for himself on the London club circuit with his band The Roosters, which also featured a certain Eric Clapton, he had never played bass before. “I got the call and joined them on a Saturday night playing at the Ealing Club in West London ... And I walked on stage with them that night, no rehearsal, they just told me the key and that was the first time I had ever picked up a bass guitar.

Someone once said to me, ‘Confidence is something you have before you are fully aware of all the facts’! And it worked! I learnt on the job”, he tells us during the following interview.

That job lasted for the next five years. In that time, Manfred Mann chalked up three UK number one singles, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ (1964), ‘Pretty Flamingo’ (1966) and ‘Mighty Quinn’ (1968). ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, originally recorded by American vocal group The Exciters making little or no impact on the charts, also topped the US Billboard 100 and saw the band tour there in late 1964 at the height of the British

Invasion that had started with The Beatles’ first visit there at the beginning of the year. Manfred Mann also released five studio albums: ‘The Five Faces of Manfred Mann’ (1964); ‘Mann Made’ (1965); ‘As Is’ (1966); the soundtrack ‘Manfred Mann Go Up the Junction’ (1968) and ‘Mighty Garvey!’ (1968).

Manfred Mann are also notable for having achieved their enormous success with two different frontmen, with original vocalist and harmonica player Paul Jones having been replaced by Mike d’Abo in July 1966.

And this wasn’t the only change.

After guitarist, saxophonist and flutist Mike Vickers left the band in 1965, Tom was reunited with his primary instrument and the band poached John Mayall’s Blues Breakers bassist Jack Bruce to take over bass duties until he left a year later to form Cream with Tom’s old bandmate Eric Clapton and former Graham Bond Organisation drummer Ginger Baker. Jack’s place in the band’s rhythm section alongside drummer Mike Hugg was filled by Klaus Voormann, also a graphic artist, who in the same year had designed the cover of The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ album.

As the swinging sixties drew to a close, Manfred Mann decided to call it a day, some sources suggesting through frustration with the limitations of being seen as purely a

5

6

Paul Jones

Mike d’Abo

hit singles band. The band’s keyboardist, Manfred Mann himself, went on to form Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1971. By this time, Tom had already assembled a new band of his own, McGuinness Flint with former John Mayall’s Blues Breakers drummer Hughie Flint, vocalist and keyboardist Dennis Coulson and singer-songwriters Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle and had stormed the UK top ten all over again, reaching number two with the single ‘When I’m Dead and Gone’. Their eponymous 1970 debut album was also a top ten hit. It was followed up by number five hit single, ‘Malt and Barley Blues’ in 1971 and one more album featuring the original McGuinness Flint line-up, ‘Happy Birthday, Ruthy Baby’ in the same year. After the album failed to chart, Gallagher and Lyle parted company with the rest of the band, going on to achieve major success as a duo, particularly with their 1976 UK number six album ‘Breakaway’.

In 1979, Tom co-founded The Blues Band, where he was reunited with Paul Jones. They are still going to this day and have so far released a staggering nineteen albums. The Blues Band played at the same gig, held in honour of Tom’s fiftieth birthday, where Manfred Mann, minus Manfred who was (and still is) touring with the Earth Band, were reunited in 1991. At the suggestion of their erstwhile keyboard player, they were rechristened The Manfreds. The current COVID-19 pandemic has been the longest period that the band, who now consist of Tom, both Paul Jones and Mike d’Abo and former drummer Mike Hugg now on keyboards, along with newer members bassist Marcus Cliffe, saxophonist and flutist Simon Currie and drummer Rob Townsend, hasn’t been on road in the last twenty-nine years. That is nearly five times longer than Manfred Mann were on the road in the sixties.

“I am assuming that it will all start again at some point”, Tom tells us

Mike Hugg

Marcus Cliffe

shortly after picking up the phone.

“If I didn’t think that, I would be definitely morose.” I bet you are glad for the time off through?, I ask him, to which he replies, “Well, the time off would be much more fun if I could see my children and grandchildren and see friends and just have a coffee or a glass of wine with people, you know. Yeah, but we’re all in the same boat”, before adding with his usual wit, “Apart from Dominic Cummings.” We muse upon how unbelievable Cummings’ actions were. “The sense of entitlement, you know”, he says.

“Anyway, don’t get me onto that or we could spend the whole morning on it.” I jokingly reply, “An interview just about Dominic Cummings?” He replies, “He doesn’t deserve it”. And so began the interview with the legend that is Tom McGuinness ...

back together as The Manfreds in 1991, why you decided to shorten the band’s name and could you introduce us to your current line-up?

Firstly, hello Tom and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking you how the former members of Manfred Mann came

Right, well, in 1991, I was fifty, which is an astounding thought and in 1990 ...

I play in two bands, I play in The Blues Band and The Manfreds now, but The Manfreds didn’t exist then and, you know, we’d broken up in 1969. What happened, I was doing a gig in Germany. I was on tour in Germany with The Blues Band in 1990 and I woke up on my birthday morning feeling pretty miserable because I was far away from home and my wife and my two young children. You know, they’d put a card and a couple of little presents in my suitcase when I left, so I opened them, but I felt very down, but then that night I did a gig and it was a really good gig and I was really enjoying it and I thought, well, there are worse ways to spend my birthday and I thought, next year is a big birthday and I know what I’d like to do, I’d like to have a gig and get everybody I ever worked with together for one

7

8

Simon Currie

Rob Townsend

night. So, that’s what we did. It was a very nice gig at a place in London called The Forum in Kentish Town and I got together ... Well, The Blues Band was together anyway, we opened the show and then I had another band that was successful in the early seventies called McGuinness Flint with two singer-songwriters, Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, so we got together with Hughie Flint and we did a set, mixed, of McGuinness Flint and Gallagher and Lyle and then we got The Manfreds together. I got as many of the original sixties line-up as I could.

Manfred [Mann], our keyboard player, he was in the road with the Earth Band, so we couldn’t call it Manfred Mann for that reason and it was Manfred who said, ‘Well, why don’t you call it The Manfreds?’ Because that was what it was always called for shorthand in the papers, a bit like, you know, ‘Stones to Tour America’, ‘Manfreds New Single in May’ or whatever, in the music press and also a couple of singles we put up were very self-referencial and they actually mentioned ‘The Manfreds’, like the theme tune for ‘Ready Steady

Go!’ that we did, ‘5-4-3-2-1’. The hook on that was ‘Uh-huh, it was The Manfreds’. So, I got together for that gig with Mike Hugg, our original drummer, who was also a keyboard player. He also played vibraphone in the band back in the sixties as well as drums. So he came back on keyboards; Mike Vickers was there on saxophone and flute; Paul Jones, our original singer on vocals and harmonica; Mike d’Abo, who replaced Paul in the mid-sixties on vocals and keyboards as well and myself on guitar and mandolin with McGuinness Flint and on bass for that night, we had Tom Robinson. Tom is a lovely man and he is a big Manfred Mann fan and so he was happy to do it. And yeah, it was a lovely night. I was on stage stone cold sober, we’d rehearsed all afternoon and the day before and it went down a storm. The place was packed out and that was it to be honest. We came off stage and had a few glasses of wine and whatever and a chat and then we said goodbye to each other, as far as The Manfreds were concerned. But then, what happened was, Universal Records put out a

Tom (right) with Manfred Mann in 1964

Manfred Mann greatest hits TV package and Brian Berg, who was the head of the label, rang me up and said, ‘You did that gig, would you do some more gigs to promote the album?

And it just happened naturally. We never set out to get back together and stay together and yet, here we are, it’s twenty-nine years later, we’ve been going a lot longer than we were in the sixties and we’ve done a lot more gigs than we did. I’ve found, Alice, that the best things in life, not just the music, happen by chance, you know. I think it was John Lennon who said, ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’ and that’s very true I think. And a Christian said to me once, I’m not a believer myself, but he said, ‘How do you make God laugh?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, how?’

He said, ‘By making plans’. I’ve found, musically, I’d occasionally been nudged into doing things I’m reluctant to do and I was right to be reluctant and they didn’t work out and other things, the chance arises and something really good comes out of it.

Going back to 1964 and you joined Manfred Mann replacing original bassist Dave Richmond. Could you tell us a bit about your music career prior to joining and how you came to be part of the band?

Yeah. It was actually December 1963 that I joined and before that, I’d been in a little band ... Well, I’d started off with Lonnie Donegan and skiffle. Rock ‘n’ roll had already happened. I mean, sadly, Little Richard died recently, but Little Richard was the one who opened my ears, the first real rock ‘n’ roller that I ever heard, records like ‘Tutti Frutti’ [1955], but although I thought it was wonderful, I thought, this is American, this is not something I can ... It didn’t directly inspire me to play, it was Lonnie Donegan in 1956. He had a hit with ‘Rock Island Line’ and I’m not the only person, Alice, everyone of my generation, Paul McCartney, Eric Burdon, Van Morrison, Lonnie Donegan was the door opener. We all bought acoustic guitars, figured out the three chords you needed to do Lonnie Donegan, to do skiffle and in six

9

10

Paul Jones

Mike Hugg

months, we all realised that if you got an electric guitar and played the same three chords, you could do Buddy Holly tunes and Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins and all that sort of stuff. My first playing was in the local youth club with school friends and youth club friends and then we were playing, I won’t say rehearsing, but we were sitting round at my friend Frank Dunn’s house, it would be between Christmas and New Year, probably 1958, 1959, I can’t remember, somewhere there and Frank’s father came in, we were all sitting around singing and strumming Buddy Holly songs and Lonnie Donegan stuff and he said, ‘Ooh, the landlord of the pub on the corner wants to know if you’d like to play there on New Year’s Eve?’ Well, yeah, you know. We didn’t have any amplifiers, we didn’t have a microphone, we didn’t have anything and we went down there and we sat in the corner and we played the ten songs we knew, which were probably all Lonnie Donegan and Buddy Holly and a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis and then we played them again, the same ten and they really liked it

and someone passed a cap around.

And the reason I’m telling this story, Alice, is that it was an eye-opening moment for me. They passed the cap around and I got the equivalent of 25p, five shillings in old money, and I can remember looking at this and thinking, you can earn money by playing music!

It had never occurred to me that we’d ever get paid for having fun, you know.

So, gradually, my school friends and youth club friends bought electric guitars. I didn’t have one at first. I didn’t come from a well-off family in any way, they couldn’t afford the hire purchase and I was still at school, so my good friend Frank Dunn, who became the bass player in our first band, he let me borrow his electric guitar. So, I became the lead guitarist, Mick became the singer and rhythm guitarist, Frank became the bass player and we found assorted drummers who came in and out and we had a band.

And eventually, I left school and got a job and I was able to buy my own electric guitar and we played around the pubs of South London and we opened for Screaming Lord Sutch and

Mike Vickers

Manfred Mann

the Savages, but I knew by about the beginning of 1962 that what I was finding myself increasingly interested in was rhythm and blues, R&B, in the fifties / sixties sense of R&B and the band was playing, you know, Cliff Richard hits and stuff like that. I didn’t dislike it, but it didn’t speak to me musically, so I just announced one day that I was leaving. I was really into Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It was very difficult to get their records and in fact, at that point, I didn’t even have a record player, I couldn’t afford that, but I was buying records because my girlfriend had a record player and I’d play them and leave them at her place. I decided at the beginning of ‘62 that I was leaving and my friends said to me, ‘But no one wants to hear Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley’ and I said, ‘I know, but it’s what I want to play’. I didn’t feel like I was being brave or doing anything adventurous, I knew I was making a foolish move. It’s like the old joke, how do you become a millionaire? By playing jazz! You start off with two

million! You know, I knew I wasn’t going to make money out of this, but then I saw an advert in the Melody Maker. The Melody Maker was the great paper for musicians looking for other musicians. Pages and pages of adverts, musicians looking for gigs, people looking for musicians. And I saw an advert, which said something like, ‘Rhythm and blues piano player in the style of Otis Spann looking to join a band playing Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf ...’ and I wrote in and said, ‘Listen, I don’t have that band, but I’d like to be in that band with you’. And he was a man called Ben Palmer. I went down to meet Ben, he was in Oxford, he was a bit older than me, he’d been in the army, he was probably getting on for being ten years older than me and he introduced me to Paul Jones, who had just been thrown out of Oxford University for not working.

Paul was hanging around Oxford. In fact, Paul was at the same time in contact with Brian Jones [later of The Rolling Stones], talking about getting something together. But I went down and Paul and Ben and myself spent

11

12

Jack Bruce

Mike d’Abo

most of spring and summer of 1962 trying to find like-minded musicians who wanted to play what we wanted to play, Chicago-style blues, and we couldn’t find anyone. So, we kind of drifted apart and Paul, later than year, joined the fledgling Manfred Mann group. I remained in touch with both Paul and Ben and by ‘63, something was starting to happen. The Stones had formed, I used to go and see them at The Station Hotel in Richmond every Sunday, and I saw an advert again in Melody Maker looking for a guitarist to join an R&B band. So, I replied to the advert, went down to the phone box at the end of the road, put my money in ...

No one had a phone, as far as I knew, at home. Well, well-off middle-class people did ... And I phoned up and, you know, the conversations that you had with people then, it was like speaking in code. I’d say ‘John Lee Hooker’ and he’d say ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ and then I’d say ‘B.B. King’ and then he’d say ‘Freddie King’ and then I’d say ... you know, it was like that and in the end, he said, ‘Can you come to The Station Hotel, Richmond on Tuesday night?

My band’s playing there’ and, you know, ‘Bring your guitar and an amp’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that’, you know. And I said, ‘By the way, what do you play?’ And he said, ‘Trombone’ and put the phone down. And I thought, trombone? Trombone?!

Anyway, I went along and the minute I opened the door ... I went with my girlfriend too, who after many years, is my wife, but there was forty years in between being my girlfriend and becoming my wife ... Anyway, I went along for this audition and the minute I opened the door ... Do you know Edward Hopper? The painter? It was like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting. I was standing there with my guitar in one hand my little amp in the other hand and there’s a brightly lit bar behind me and there’s a very dimly lit room in front of me with a band on stage. So, I’m like this dark figure silhouetted and I really don’t want to go in, I know it’s the wrong band.

There were three trombonists on stage, a string bass player, a drummer and a piano player. Now, I’ve got nothing against this band but what they are

The Roosters. Tom, right and Eric Clapton, left

Klaus Voormann

playing is like Kansas City, Count Bassie swing stuff and it’s not what I want to do , but he spots me, you see, and it’s a guy called Dave Hunt, who I realised quickly was Dave Hunt from Dave Hunt’s Confederate Jazz Band.

They were a jazz band who dressed in confederate uniforms, but they weren’t dressed in those that night and he was trying to make the transition into R&B, as quite a few jazz musicians were at that point, people like Graham Bond came from jazz. I got up and played one tune with them and he said, ‘Another one?’ I said, ‘No, not really’, you know. So, I got off stage and my girlfriend said, ‘How was it?’ and I said, ‘Wrong time, wrong place, wrong band’. She said, ‘Never mind, this is Eric, I’m at art school with him, he likes the blues’ and it was Eric Clapton.

So, Eric and Ben Palmer, the piano player that I’d met the year before, we got a band together in ‘63 called The Roosters, which opened for Manfred Mann at the Marquee Club a couple of times and we played around all the clubs of London, the Scene Club and places like that and we played The

Ricky-Tick, which is where The Stones and The Yardbirds were playing by this time. But, as a band, I’d no idea how good or bad we were, The Roosters, but we had no idea of how to run a band between us and it so much end as there were no more gigs in the book. And then, within a couple of weeks, Eric joined The Yardbirds and I went and sat in with them and then ... There was a lot of cross-fertilisation going on and of course, just going back one step, I only discovered a couple of years ago that Ray Davies [The Kinks] took the job with Dave Hunt’s band. I didn’t know this. He did an audition for him and actually got the gig for a while! That’s what I’ve been told. Anyway, I stayed in touch with Paul and this is the end of the long answer to your question ...

Paul explained to me that they weren’t happy with Dave Richmond as their bass player, not because he wasn’t a good musician, he was a fantastic musician but he was a jazz musician, who found playing twelve bar blues quite limiting and what’s important is the feel rather than having a lot of technique and ability. And anyway,

13

Paul suggested that I could play bass with them. I’d never played bass, but I felt very confident that I could do it because it’s that confidence of when you’re young, I can play guitar which has six strings, so bass has to be really easy because it’s only got four strings, ignoring the fact that there’s a real talent to playing good bass! I just thought, I can do that. So, yeah, I got the call and joined them on a Saturday night playing at the Ealing Club in West London, which would be about December 20th 1963. And I walked on stage with them that night, no rehearsal, they just told me the key and that was the first time I had ever picked up a bass guitar. Someone once said to me, ‘Confidence is something you have before you are fully aware of all the facts’! And it worked! I learnt on the job. And just talking about that cross-fertilisation thing, we’d be at the Marquee every Monday night, that was our residency, it would be packed every Monday night. I was very lucky. Paul had joined the band in late ‘62 when they first formed and they’d built up quite a following by this time, so that

14

the Marquee on a Monday night, and Monday night is a dead night for gigs, they’d be queuing round the block to get in. And, you know, It holds four, five, six hundred people. It would be packed out. But, you know, people would come down and play with us.

Eric Burdon got up and sang with us, Eric Clapton got up and played with us. Dick Heckstall-Smith, the great jazz saxophone player from Colosseum and bands like that. He’d get up and play with us. Pete Bardens, who was in Shotgun Express, he’d played with Long John Baldry, he’d get up. Otis Spann from Muddy Waters’ band came and played with us. Matt Murphy, who ended up in the Blues Brothers, the guitairst in the Blues Brothers, he came down and sat in with us. You know, if somebody was in the audience from another band, they’d get up and sit in with us. Keith Relf from The Yardbirds got up and sat in with us. If we were there, we’d play with them. I can remember sitting in with John Mayall’s band [John Mayall’s Blues Breakers] when Eric didn’t turn up one night, playing guitar with him. It was just a

thing we did. It was very loose. Not in a moral sense! But there was that as well!

In the year that you joined, the band scored a number 11 UK hit with the self-penned ‘Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble’ before hitting the number one spot for two weeks with one of the songs that you are best known for, a cover of The Exciters’ ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’. How did you come to cover ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ and what are your memories of learning that the single had reached number one?

Well, ‘Hubble Bubble ...’ had been the follow up to ‘5-4-3-2-1’ [released 10th January 1964], which, because it had been the theme for Ready Steady Go! had gotten great publicity and I think got to about number four [number five] and again with the naivity of ignorance, we thought, ooh, great, well, we’ll write another hit now and then ‘Hubble Bubble ...’ came out and it just about crept in at eleven and we thought, this isn’t so easy. And we were under

pressure from our record company, EMI ... John Burgess was our A&R man and he was sort of old school and he kept saying to us, bands don’t write their own material, you’ve got professional songwriters to write songs for you. And bear in mind that EMI had the most successful band in the world, of course The Beatles, writing all their own material, and he sort of chipped away at our confidence. He didn’t mean to. He was old school, songwriters write songs, bands record the songs. Well, Paul had bought the record of ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ by The Exciters, a black vocal group who’d had a few hits in America. And ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ came out, it wasn’t a big hit in America, it wasn’t anything like a hit here. And we were doing it live on stage. We’d learnt it because Paul had said, ‘Yeah, it’s a good song’. To be honest, we’d reached the point where it wasn’t going down well on stage. The songs that were going down well on stage apart from ‘5-4-3-2-1’ and ‘Hubble Bubble ...’ were things like ‘Smokestack Lightning’ by Howlin’ Wolf and ‘Got

15

My Mojo Working’ by Muddy Waters and ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ didn’t strike a chord with the audience. We’d had it in the set for a few weeks and we were thinking, you know, this isn’t working, we’ll probably drop it. But we were with John Burgess and we were recording our first album at the time, which meant going into Abbey Road and John would say, ‘Which else haven’t we recorded from your live set?’ And, at some point, someone said, well, there’s this song we’ve been doing but it hasn’t been going down well, we’re thinking of dropping it. And he said, ‘Let’s hear it’ and he played it to him and he said, ‘That’s a hit!’ You know, we repeated, ‘John, it’s really not working live’ and he just said, ‘Believe me, it’s a hit song, let’s record it!’ We recorded it and John was completely right, you know. It came out and, you know ... I can remember us being so excited when we heard that ‘5-4-3-2-1’ had entered the charts at 27 or something like that. We were like school kids. But suddenly, we’d got this record that came in at 27 and a week later it was 11 and a week later it

16

was four and a week later it was two and a week later it was one and then ... oh, you know, we couldn’t believe it! Apart from anything else, there was all that bullshit of the papers all saying ‘Manfreds Knock Beatles Off Number One!’ But someone had to, do you know what I mean? It was just sheer chance, but it makes a good headline for a tabloid. And, you know, the sales were just astounding. I remember one week where we were climbing the charts and The Beatles were number one. I’ve forgotten what record it was at that point in mid-’64 for them [‘A Hard Day’s Night’], but we sold 65,000 in one day on EMI and The Beatles had outsold us that day. You know, they’d sold 72,000 or something like that.

Those were the sort of figures you were doing in those days. It was a big hit and yeah, it went to number one here, went to number one in America, went to number one in a few other places around the world as well and sort of opened things up for us. It opened up America, we went to America in late ‘64 for a tour, which, you know, didn’t really ... It slightly soured America for

us and we never went back, all through the sixties when things were really happening for groups. It was the one tour ... We were the opening act for Peter and Gordon. They were very big in America at that time. They had quite a few hits there. And, we found it a very strange experience opening for them. They were being accompanied by a guy called Travis Wammack, a great southern guitar player, still around as far as I know, and he had a minor hit at the time [‘Scratchy’]. And it was weird, we’d go to ... America was still very regional at the time and we’d go to this town and we had ‘Sha La La’ out, it would be number four in the charts there and Peter and Gordon’s record would be number twelve and Travis Wammack’s record would be number sixteen and then we’d go to the next town and Travis Wammack would be number two in there and we’d be number four and Peter and Gordon would be number one. So, it was all strange. It was a lot of travelling and when we came back and got the accounts, we found we hadn’t made any money on this trek around

America. In fact, we found we owed money to people we didn’t know with Italian names, who ran trucking companies and security companies, which we weren’t aware of having hired at all. So, yeah, we came back slightly bruised but it was fun being there, having radio stations playing Howlin’ Wolf and playing [Smokey Robinson and] the Miracles and playing Mongo Santamaria and switching channels and arriving in New York and the radio stations would just be playing the music we loved. On my birthday, December the 2nd 1964, I went to see the John Coltrane Quartet at the [Village] Vanguard in New York.

Fantastic! McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums and Charlie Mingus came in whilst we were there. It was like living the dream, you know, that Manhattan Skyline the first time you see it and we went to L.A. and went to Gold Star Studios that Phil Spector recorded in and we recorded there. So, you know, it was fun going to America, being number one, all that. Wow! What’s not to like. I read interviews

17

with people ... You see, I’ve no idea what’s happening in pop anymore and I’m not sure anybody calls it pop music anymore, but I get The Guardian and I’ll read that so and so is really annoyed at having a number one hit, ‘Success has ruin music for me’, you know and I think, oh God! And all I can say is that when we had a number one hit, we were like kids let loose in a sweet shop.

And I still feel like that about playing.

It’s such fun and hey, having fun, getting paid for it and people enjoying their night out. You’re giving people such a wonderful thing. You’re playing to the audience, the audience gives back to you. Alice, I’m digressing all over the place!

Before Paul Jones’ original departure in 1966, Manfred Mann released two albums, ‘The Five Faces of Manfred Mann’ (1964) and ‘Mann Made’ (1965). Whilst both albums feature a number of original compositions, as was the trend at the time, there are a large number of R&B covers present. How did you select which songs would appear on these albums

18

and could you give us an insight into their recording processes?

The first album, ‘The Five Faces ...’ was largely the live set that we were playing at the time, so there was a bit of jazz on there, a bit of blues, a bit of R&B, which was what the love set consisted of. Because the band was formed by Mike Hugg and Manfred Mann and they came from jazz, as did Mike Vickers and really, getting an R&B band together was a way of trying to make a bit of money and Paul came in and brought in the blues and the R&B stuff and I did, to a certain extent, when I joined. So, the first album was easy, it was the live set. With the second album, bands are always alliances and there is the jazz thing in the second album, ‘Mann Made’, there is more poppy stuff than on the first album because we had gone from being an out and out R&B band to being a hit making machine to a certain extent and I have always loved ... or had always loved, alongside my love of blues, jazz and R&B, I’d always loved good pop records as well, particularly American

records. So, I think I brought in a song called ‘Since I Don’t Have You’, which was a hit for an American doo-wop band called The Skyliners [1959]. So, how were songs chosen? It was a bit like how is the Pope elected, no one really knows. You know, coalitions form and, you know, you accommodate each other as well as encouraging each other and, you know, I’m sure ideas were rejected as well, but it wasn’t much of an agonising process I will say, with either album. The first one was easy, it was the live set and the second one, we just chose some songs and played them. Of course, alongside the albums, Alice, we were doing EPs, which were also selling in hundreds of thousands, so that was another outlet for original songs, and for other people’s songs. With a song like ‘Watermelon Man’ [‘The One in the Middle’ EP, 1965], originally by Mongo Santamaria, it’s still in our live set fifty years later, because the audience likes it. We like playing it and they like hearing it, you know. It’s an instrumental. Well, no, it’s got a bit of a vocal but it’s mostly instrumental.

There was no big thought process. The album as an idea hadn’t really happened when we did those two albums. You know, things like ‘Blonde on Blonde’ [Bob Dylan, 1966], ‘Pet Sounds’ [The Beach Boys, 1966], ‘Revolver’ [The Beatles, 1966], ‘Sgt Pepper[‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, 1967], the idea of going in to do an album or even like a concept album, it just didn’t exist, you just went in and recorded. You know, we would go into Abbey Road and we would record three songs in a morning. You know, there were four tracks we recorded onto, there was very little overdubbing, you just do them. You know, on a good morning, you would get three done; on a bad day, we would get one done. Bearing in mind that if you did three a day, you could do an album in four sessions. Of course there would be a bit of mixing afterwards, but you frequently weren’t there for the mix. ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ originally had an organ solo in it, but when the record came out, we found the organ solo had been cut out, the middle-eight had copied and a second middle-eight

19

put in. We’re talking about cutting up tape and going a generation on the middle-eight, stuff like that, you know.

So, recording at Abbey Road was very easy, they had the best possible equipment and we had a very good engineer called Norman Smith, who actually went on to have hits later as Hurricane Smith. But yeah, he was a bit older than us, like John Burgess, probably ten years older. Abbey Road had a strange hierarchy. There were technical people who wandered around in white lab coats all the time and then there were the engineers, who tended to wear sports jackets with leather patches on the elbows and smoked pipes and then the sort of people who delivered things to you wearing brown storeman’s coats. It was all very hierarchical. You know, we’d do a take and John would say, ‘Oh, that sounded good’ and we would listen and say, ‘Yeah, perfect, very good’. And then someone with a white coat would say, ‘There was distortion on the bass guitar at one minute, twenty-three seconds’ and we would listen to it and we couldn’t hear it and they would say,

20

‘No, no, I can see it on the meters it’s outside the parameters for correct recording’ and we’d have to do it again because of this. We went to the Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. I think Brian Wilson used it as well as Phil Spector and the revelation there was that most of the needles on the desk didn’t work. They were stuck in the red or the arms were broken on them.

No one looked at the needles. And when we came back from America, we did have a slightly different attitude and if someone said, ‘I think there’s slight distortion on the piano’, we’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter!’ But, you know, they had the best equipment, the best microphones, great studios. They’re still great studios, the actual physical construction of them. You know, the reverb unit there, if you were recording late at night ... and The Beatles changed everything because The Beatles became so successful at Abbey Road that sessions used to be ten to one, two to five, six to nine and you couldn’t go outside those hours. There was always an hour break so the engineers could have a cup of tea or a bite to eat. Well,

Performing on ‘Ready Steady Go!’ with Jack Bruce

The Beatles started recording through the night, going right through. So, if you were in Abbey Road late at night, the engineer would turn up the reverb channel, though they actually used a chamber, a sealed room. You fed the sound into that room and that gave it a natural reverb and if you turned up that reverb room late at night, you’d hear the mice rustling around in it! But you couldn’t hear that until The Beatles persuaded Abbey Road that they should be able to go in and record whenever they wanted and other people did as well.

After Mike Vickers left the band in late 1965, you moved to guitar and for a brief time which culminated with a second number one hit, ‘Pretty Flamingo’ in 1966, Manfred Mann were joined by former Graham Bond Organisation and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers bassist Jack Bruce, who was soon to become one third of Cream. How did Jack come to join the band and how did you find working alongside him?

Well, we all knew Jack from the beginning of it all, when he was with Graham Bond and then he went on to join John Mayall. And, well, as I mentioned to you, I only played bass guitar because I was offered the gig with Manfred Mann, I would have been a guitarist before that and to be honest, I played guitar on some of the singles anyway, as well as playing bass guitar, I put both parts on. So, anyway, Jack came in because we stole him from John Mayall. We all sat round and said, ‘Well, Mike Vickers is leaving’ and I said, ‘Well, I want to go back to playing guitar then’, because Mike played guitar and saxophone and flute.

And we all said, ‘Let’s get a bass player in’ and we all agreed that Jack was the one we wanted. And Manfred said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that’, because John Mayall lived on the same road as Manfred and was a neighbour and friend and colleague, you know. So, yeah, we stole Jack away from John Mayall. John wasn’t pleased about it and wrote about it that everybody thinks is about a love affair, but it’s not, it’s about us stealing Jack. The song is

21

called ‘Double Crossing Time’ [‘Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton’, 1966].

Jack came in and, yeah, I think we were exploring things then and in particular, the more jazzy side of things. We got a saxophone player and a trumpet player in as well; great trumpet player, still one of the leading jazz trumpet players in England, a guy called Henry Lowther. I mean, he’s a world-class player. He came with Lyn Dobson, who played saxophone and flute. They were very much in the modern jazz area, but they came in and, as Aneurin Bevin said of the doctors when he founded the [National] Health Service ... They asked Aneurin Bevan, ‘How did you persuade the doctors to join when you founded the Health Service’ and he replied, ‘I filled their mouths with gold’! So, we offered them money. We were a very successful band and we were able to hire them.

We hired Jack, we hired Henry, we hired Lyn. I mean, you know, it was great fun having these three incredibly talented people in, but Jack was a fantastic bass player and we never expected him to stay and well, I

22

imagine he joined because the money was good, but it wasn’t challenging for him. But, yeah, Jack was great, I liked Jack. He was like the shop steward.

Jack was a man of left-wing principles, which struck a chord with us because we were pretty well on the liberal left of politics as a band and Jack would speak up himself and Henry and Lyn in terms of expenses and say ‘we want proper travelling conditions’ and that sort of thing. I liked Jack a lot, I really liked Jack a lot. I was very lucky to have played with him. But then Paul announced that he wanted to leave and Jack decided to leave at the same time, basically. And Paul was a complete gentleman about leaving and said, ‘I won’t leave until you’ve found someone’. I think it was autumn 1965 he announced he was leaving and he didn’t leave until the summer of ‘66, it might have been May 1966, because it took us a long time to find a replacement. And over that period, we recorded ‘Pretty Flamingo’ with Jack on bass and Jack is singing the harmony vocal line on that and, yeah, it came out and it was a huge hit! Which

With Mike d’Abo (second from right)

made things harder for us really because Paul was leaving to go off on his solo career but we had just been on Top of the Pops yet again with our number one single and we were left, Alice, with EMI saying, ‘Well, we’ve signed Paul Jones and thank you and goodbye.’ They didn’t want the new band with a new singer.

That must have been a very strange situation to be in ...

Yeah, it was. I think the feeling was we’ll give it a try but we’re never going to be successful again. You know, everything was against you replacing a successful lead singer. Precedence showed it just didn’t work. But Mike d’Abo, we came across him when we were doing a TV programme and he was in a band called A Band of Angels and they’d all been at Harrow School together and Mike Hugg, Manfred and myself, who were going to be the ones carrying the band on after Paul had left, and Jack, we sort of converged on other from opposite corners of the studio saying, ‘He’s the one! He’s the one!

He’s the one!’ We hadn’t seriously considered anybody else up until that point and he went out for lunch with him and his wife and our wives and had a chat and he came in. Although the first single, a cover of a Bob Dylan song, ‘Just Like a Woman’ [June 1966] was only a moderate hit, the next one, ‘Semi-detached, Suburban Mr. James’ went to number two and so, suddenly, the whole hit machine was rolling again. That song was originally called ‘Semi-detached, Suburban Mr. Jones’.

Well, we changed it from ‘Jones’ to ‘James’ because we didn’t want anyone to think we were singing about Paul and being rude about him. But we were very lucky with Bob Dylan songs because we had a manager called Ken Pitt, we’d left him by mid-’66, who was also Dylan’s PR man. In the film ‘Don’t Look Back’ [1968], Ken features quite heavily. And first of all, we had a hit EP with Dylan’s ‘With God On our Side’ on it, which became a showstopping live number, because it was like five minutes long and, you know, it just built and built and built and that EP got into the singles chart

23

and got to up to about number five, six and it’s called ‘The One in the Middle’ [June 1965, also number one on the UK EP charts]. Also, we did a Dylan song called ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ [September 1965, number two on the UK singles chart]. Manfred and I were watching doing a solo BBC in concert and he sang the song, which he hadn’t released on album or anything.

Manfred and I looked at each other and said, ‘That sounds like a hit, that song’.

So, we saw that programme on Sunday, Ken made a phone call on Monday and

by Wednesday, we had an acetate of Bob Dylan singing it, just him and an acoustic guitar. So, that of course all leads on to the third number one, which was of course ‘ Mighty Quinn’ [January 1968].

‘Mighty Quinn’ hadn’t been released anywhere at the time either, had it?

No, it hadn’t and again, chance plays a role. Again, we were very well connected by this time and Al[bert] Grossman, who has Dylan’s manager came over and we went to Feldman’s

24

Publishers in Denmark Street and Al Grossman played us ‘The Basement Tapes’ [Bob Dylan and The Band, recorded 1967, released 1975] and it was really funny because Dylan’s vocal approach changed after he had a motorbike crash [July 1966], so Al played us about three songs and Manfred ... Now, you’ve got to think that Manfred is South African Jewish, Al Grossman is New York Jewish and Manfred said to Al, ‘Al, why does Dylan get this terrible guy to do his demos?! He’s got such a terrible voice!’ and Al Grossman looks at him like, ‘You putting me on?! That’s Dylan!’ And Manfred was like, ‘Oh, he’s changed a bit, hasn’t he?!’ Al played us ‘I Shall Be Released’ and ‘This Wheels on Fire’, ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ and ‘Too Much of Nothing’ and we took various away with us and we thought, we can do something with this. And we started recording two of them, ‘Please, Mrs. Henry’ and ‘Mighty Quinn’ [Dylan’s version is titled ‘Quinn the Eskimo’] and then we really persevered with ‘Mighty Quinn’. This is where chance

comes in. And then we decided it wasn’t working and we’d forgotten about it to a certain extent. It had been some weeks since we’d done it. And then Mike d’Abo went out for supper one night with Lou Reizner, who was the head of Mercury Records in America, and then Lou Reizner went back to Michael’s place and said, you know, basically, ‘Since you joined Manfred Mann, they haven’t had a big hit in America’, which was true, none of the singles ... Even though ‘Semi-detached ...’ had reached number two in England, it barely registered in America. And likewise, ‘Ha! Ha! Said the Clown’ [March 1967, number four on UK singles chart]. In fact, ‘Ha! Ha! Said the Clown’ was a bigger hit in America for The Yardbirds [July 1967, number 45 on US Billboard Hot 100] as a single. So, Lou Reizner said, ‘Is there anything you haven’t released?’ and Michael played him our demo, an acetate of ‘Mighty Quinn’ and Lou Reizner said, ‘That’s a hit!’ And then Michael rang us all up the next day and said, ‘Listen, come round, Lou Reizner thinks ‘Mighty Quinn’ is a hit!’ So, we

went back into the studio, we added a few tablas, we added a piccolo flute and we sped it up a semitone and it came out and it was! It was number one here, it was a big hit in America [number 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100] and it would never have been released ... No, I won’t say never, but if Michael hadn’t gone back to his flat with Lou Reizner and played him the acetate, we might never have finished it. Chance again! And, in fact, I’ll go straight on from that because the success of McGuinness Flint happened by chance. Hughie Flint and myself were trying to get a band together, trying to find other musicians. Ideally, we wanted people who wrote because with Manfred Mann, we’d always been looking outside the band for singles, so I wanted to be in a band that was self-contained, because things like Traffic was happening, The Band was happening in America ... Everyone was writing within the band, so we wanted to do so. But we weren’t finding these people. And then, Hughie went for a drink. This was Hughie Flint, the drummer, formerly of the

25

Bluesbreakers alongside Jack Bruce and Eric and John. And Hughie went out for a drink one night and ran into Tony Reeves, who was the bass player in Colosseum, but also an A&R man at Decca Records and the conversation came around to Tony asking Hughie, ‘What you doing?’ And Hughie said, ‘Oh, trying to get a band together with Tom McGuinness’ and he sort of outlined the fact that we were looking for musicians who wrote and Tony said, ‘Oh. I’ve met these two Scots guys; you should meet them!’ And it was Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle.

And, literally, Hughie phoned them up that night or the next morning and they came over the next day and they sat down, they brought their guitars, they played like two or three songs to us and we knew we’d met the people who we wanted to be in a band with. Again, chance. If Hughie hadn’t gone to the pub and met Tony Reeves, the band might never have happened. Chance, again.

During Manfred Mann’s career, you were very much seen as a singles

26

band. With the band featuring a number of strong songwriters and, in my personal opinion, your albums seeming somewhat underappreciated compared to the singles you released, did you find this frustrating at the time and how much of an impact did this have on your decision to split in 1969?

Honestly, a lot of that frustration, and there was frustration, particularly after Mike d’Abo joined, because whilst he was with us, he wrote ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ [recorded by Chris Farlowe in 1967, reaching number 33 on the UK singles chart, Rod Stewart in 1969 for the album ‘An Old Raincoat Will Never Let You Down’, failing to chart as a single and Stereophonics in 2001, reaching number four on the UK singles chart] and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ [recorded by The Foundations, released December 1968, number two on the UK singles chart, number one on the US Cashbox chart].

I don’t think he even offered us ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, for reasons which make sense because he wrote it with

The Blues Band, also featuring Tom and Paul

Tony Macaulay, who was producing The Foundations at the time, but we did try ‘Handbags and Gladrags’, we just didn’t nail it, you know. I think Michael found it most frustrating because he thought of himself as a singer-songwriter, but our frustration was to a great extent alleviated by being so successful! Because if you’re having hit records and the royalties are rolling in and, you know, girls are screaming at you and all that, you know, it makes it very bearable! But, yeah, most things in life are trade-offs, you know, nothing’s perfect and so, yes, it was frustrating but if one was really frustrated, you could walk away.

In terms of splitting, I didn’t make that decision, I was presented with that decision. It was a decision made my Mike Hugg and Manfred initially.

They really wanted to explore the more jazzy side in a big way and get away from the hit-making machine. They spoke to Mike d’Abo first and said, ‘Listen, this is what we’re planning to do’ and Mike said, ‘Cool, I’ll get my songs out there now, I’ll be a solo performer’ and, you know, he got a

deal with A&M Records and then he came and told me and Klaus Voormann, who was our bass player by that time, ‘This is what we’re doing’. And I can remember, we broke up in ‘69. We had a modest hit with a song called ‘Ragamuffin Man’ [UK number eight], which, I think ... I listen to it now and it isn’t too bad, but we were a bit of a hit-making, churning them out machine by then. It’s not a great hit record, it’s not a great song. I’m not damning it, it isn’t too bad. I can remember do the Eamonn Andrews TV show and it was the last thing we were doing with Manfred Mann and Eamonn and I really hit it off because I come from an Irish background. We stayed long after the programme had finished, in the green room. He and I were the last to leave and we had, by that time, demolished a lot of a bottle of brandy.

We got to discussions about Ireland and Irish roots and stuff like that and I said, ‘I better head off’ and he said, ‘Take the brandy with you’. I staggered out of the London Weekend Television studios, which were in the centre of London then and hailed a cab to take

27

to take me home, sat in the back of it with this bottle of brandy in my lap and thought, well, that’s it, it’s all over now.

You know, you don’t get another bite of the cherry, what am I going to do? And I just went home. Money was not a problem and I just spent the summer of ‘69 just having fun and having friends round and drinking and sitting in the garden and meals and, you know and dinner parties and all that business and thinking, well, what am I going to do now? And what I did was McGuinness Flint, luckily.

What a strange time for the break-up to happen, right at the end of the ‘swinging sixties’. It really was the end of an era, wasn’t it?

Well, I strongly thought that, probably a bit like when Mike d’Abo replaced Paul, I want to try this but it probably won’t be successful. I felt the same about McGuinness Flint, particularly when we met Benny and Graham, tremendous talents. I thought, mmmm, yeah, well, I hope it is a success. Well, it was, to a limited extent.

Unfortunately, after two albums [‘McGuinness Flint’, 1970 and ‘Happy Birthday, Ruthy Baby’, 1971] and two hit singles [‘When I’m Dead and Gone’, 1970, UK number two and ‘Matt and Barley Blues’, 1971, UK number five], Benny and Graham wanted to strike out on their own and have more control over that was happening, which was completely understandable. But, yeah, that was

28

more of a blow than Manfred Mann breaking up, the only reason being that I felt that we’d only scratched the surface of possibilities of what we could do. But you can’t keep people from what they want to do. You know, it’s like when a marriage breaks up, you can’t stay together. They wanted to head their own way.

Moving on to present day and you have been touring with The Manfreds since 1991. What is your opinion of the current state of the music industry in comparison to that of the sixties and how do you find the experience of touring these days compared to back then?

Well, first thing is, I’ve absolutely no idea what is happening in music these days. I mean, I hear things and think, God, that’s really good! Who is that?, you know, and it turns out it is somebody who has already had eight hit singles, I just don’t listen to ... I’m a Radio 4 listener, I listen to Radio 3 and then I play CDs still, I don’t even stream and I’ve got vinyl as well. So, I have no opinion on what’s currently happening because I don’t know what’s currently happening. You know, I hear things and think that sounds good but I never know how much of it is created in the studio or how good people are.

There are people who are good, like I’ve heard Rag and Bone Man and going back a few years, Adele and who is that poor girl who died? English singer, Jewish ... Amy Winehouse, you

know, I loved some of those singles.

But I tend to like the things that sound like they could have been made in 1966. That’s part of the problem. So, I have no opinion on what’s currently happening. But then it’s not aimed at me. My parents hated ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard. There’s nothing worse for a teenage grandchild to find their grandfather likes what they like. I mean, how embarrassing is that? So, it’s quite right that I have no idea about grime and all that. What’s it like touring now? Fantastic! I love it! I mean, I hate being away from home, I hate hotel rooms ... Well, hate it is too strong a word but, you know, I wish I had a TARDIS like Doctor Who and I could get into the TARDIS at 7.15 and come out at 7.16 on a stage in Gateshead ready to do the gig at 7.30 and then at 10.30, I’d climb back into it and I’d be back home to go to bed at eleven with my cocoa. No, I don’t have cocoa ... I don’t want you to think it’s too domesticated! I love playing live! Do you remember I told you about the gig in the pub on the corner and the 25p? The idea of playing live is why I got into it, I can assure you it’s why The Stones got into it and The Beatles and The Animals and The Spencer Davis Group and all those bands that happened when Manfred Mann happened. We all got into it because we liked playing, we liked making music with other people and that’s still true. But what’s awful at the moment is that the small venues are going to find it difficult to restart and

all that is so important, because if I hadn’t played at the pub at the end of the road, I wouldn’t have had the knowledge that you can have fun playing music and you can earn pocket money. All of that is important. So, I play live because I need to. I need to for my own pleasure and I’m very lucky that I’m in two bands, The Blues Band and The Manfreds and we have an audience that turns up. I think it’s going to be slow for audiences to come back. Probably for younger people, it’s going to be easier but our audiences tend to be older and they will be more reluctant to come out and spend time in confined spaces and all that. So, it’s going to be an interesting time, but I hope it continues to roll along, because I don’t want to stop doing it.

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you all the best for the future. www.themanfreds.com www.facebook.com/TheManfreds

29

Vince Melouney The Past, the Present and the Gibbs Interview by Kevin Burke Photography courtesy of Vince Melouney (unless otherwise stated).

30

The Australian guitarist and songwriter Vince Melouney is an energetic pulse running through rock music since the mid-sixties. His guitar work was an integral part of the Bee Gees’ early success. Vince’s sound was a major factor when listening to those monumental albums, ‘​ Bee Gees’ 1st’ (1967), ​ ‘Horizontal’ (1968), I​ dea (1968) and the mixed bag of ‘​Odessa’ (1969). ​ Indeed, the man also holds the esteem of being the only non-Gibb brother who had his own composition appear on a Bee Gees’ album, the 1968 track ‘Such a Shame’ (‘Idea’).

Following his departure in 1969, he has remained an active figure in rock music, whether as part of bluesrockers ​Fanny Adams, ​rejoining his original outfit ​The Aztecs or indeed his own project, The Vince Melouney Sect. Now, in this time of isolation, and pandemic surrealism, Vince returns to burst through the grey clouds with a ray of sonic sunshine.

On June 5th, he released a new single via Burger Records and it is mind-blowing. The track, ‘Women (Make You Feel Alright)’, a cover of the Australian rock group the ​ Easybeats’ 1​ 966 classic, reaffirms the purpose of rock and roll. It is a spirit-lifting slice of garage rock and power pop, skillfully replicated with the original’s authenticity, but anchored respectfully in the 21st century.

On this adventure, Vince is not alone. Backing his vocals and guitar work are some classy heavy-hitters, including C ​ lem Burke ​of ​Blondie ​on drums, ​Jonathan Lea o​ f The Jigsaw Seen on guitar and ​Alec Palao on bass and ​Paul Kopf o​ n backing vocals, both of San Francisco-based band Strangers in a Strange Land.

However, there is one last piece not to be overlooked, all of these musicians work beneath the gaze of legendary ​Kinks ​and ​Who ​ producer ​Shel Talmy ​at the desk. All these factors combine to create a stunning piece of music.

Just prior to the release, I got a chance to put a series of questions to Vince, which are of course, not all simply about his new music. I also asked about his influences and working with those Gibb brothers on their original masterpieces.

The sound of Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs is similar to the garage rock / British beat groups of the time. How big an impact in Australia did The Beatles and The Who have?

The English sound was what everybody was trying to emulate, The Beatles were huge in Australia. When they came to Australia [in 1965], Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs were number one in the charts with ‘Poison Ivy’ and The Beatles were number 2, 3, 4 and it stayed that way the whole time they were there.

31

The first Bee Gees album you appeared on, ‘Bee Gees’ 1st’, sounds very much like session musicians backing the Gibb brothers. Were you a fixed member of the group going into those recording sessions?

The Bee Gees were a five piece band from the beginning, we never used session players, what you heard was Barry, Robin, Maurice, Colin and myself. Yes, I was a fixed member from the beginning, March 1967.

With four albums in less than two years, it’s obvious the Bee Gees were extremely productive. Did it feel like you were caught up in a whirlwind?

Looking back at that time, I really do not know how we managed to fit so much in, but at the time it did not feel like a whirlwind, we were enjoying what we were doing, not only the recording, but the travel to the US and Europe for TV shows and performances.

‘Horizontal’ is an exceptional album.

32

Was the band working as a complete unit at the time?

Yes, the whole band were right into it, enjoying every moment.

There is a hint of Jimi Hendrix on ‘The Earnest Of Being George’. Did the guitarist have an effect on you as a musician?

I think Jimi had an effect on everybody, even Eric Clapton suggested guitar players should go see him play.

When it came to ‘Idea’, it was a more mellow affair and songs such as ‘Swan Song’ point to a change. Was there creative friction starting to emerge at that point?

Yes, friction was starting to creep into the group and our manager Robert Stigwood was leaning towards using more strings on the tracks. The beginning of the end. Such a shame.

How much persuasion did it take for someone who was not a Gibb to get

a self-penned track on a Bee Gees’ album?

It was not looked upon favourably, the Gibb Brothers didn’t have a problem with it, but Robert Stigwood didn’t see it as a good idea.

How difficult was the recording of ‘Odessa’? Were there any good times during that period?

It was up and down, we weren’t having fist fights or anything like that, but the vibe was not great. I was only involved in, I think, four tracks that were recorded in New York at Atlantic Studios.

At the time of release, ‘Odessa’ got mixed reviews, but it is now thought of as a classic. What was your impression of the album at the time?

To me, the album was a bit all over the place, classical-style tracks to country to bluesy rock. Was not a favourite of mine, maybe I would think differently now, I will have to have another listen,

haven’t heard it for years.

Was it the right time for you to break away at that time?

Yes, it was time to go, it would have been good if there hadn’t been so much outside interference and Barry and Robin had got along better. Maurice was the one who held it together, he was the man in the middle.

Fanny Adams released a great album (‘Fanny Adams’, 1971) and had a great blues-rock sound. Was that band a breath of fresh air for you as a musician?

Fanny Adams was a lot of fun for a while, but there too was problems internally and externally. A good idea but obviously not meant to happen.

How emotional was it for you to join Barry, Robin and Maurice during the ‘One Night Only’ show in 1999?

It was really great to be see the guys again after such a long time and to be

33

Photograph by Michael Kohlhaas

on stage with them for three songs in front of 65,000 people was a real blast.

Yes, it was recorded live, only way to go if possible.

How did you assemble the cast of Shel Talmy, Clem Burke, Jonathan Lea, Alec Palao and Paul Kopf to record your new music?

Is this single leading up to a larger project, an album perhaps?

That was all due to my friend Jonathan Lea, he organised it all. I had previously only met Clem very briefly and met Alec and Paul at the first session. Same with Shel, I had known of Shel, as his reputation had preceded him, but only met him at the studio the first night. The sessions were fun and to have all those great players on my track was just wonderful.

The sound of ‘Women (Make You Feel Alright)’ harks back to The Aztecs. It sounds so loose and raw.

Did you record it live in the studio?

Yes, it was recorded live, only way to go if possible.

It sounds so loose and raw. Did you record it live in the studio?

34

I am looking forward to the next project, an album would be good, already working on songs.

Thank you Vince, keep in touch.

Thank you Kevin, appreciate you asking me. Will keep you posted. www.facebook.com/ thevincemelouneysect

Tony Prince Radio Royalty Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography (this page) by Tobias Stahel.

36

It is fair to say that Tony Prince is somebody whom without his influence, foresight and passion for his art, the world of radio broadcasting would simply not be the same.

In 1965, after stints working as an apprentice jockey, a toolmaker, the singer with the pre-Beatles band The Jasons and a presenter on pre’Ready Steady Go!’ pop music TV programme, ‘Discs A Go-Go’, Tony became one of the original Pirate DJs on Radio Caroline alongside other broadcasting legends such as Tony Blackburn, Emperor Rosko, Tommy Vance and Bob Stewart.

After the Marine Offences Act brought the pirates ashore in 1967, he moved to Radio Luxembourg, remaining there until 1984. He became programme manager in 1977, radically overhauling the station’s output to play disco and soul and introducing the hugely influential Disco Mix Club Show from 1981 onwards. It was also during his tenure at Radio Luxembourg that Tony, such an Elvis aficionado that he became president of his fanclub, interviewed the king of rock ‘n’ roll twice, in 1972 and 1973.

A serial ideas man, it was at the tail-end of working at Radio Luxembourg that Tony launched the revolutionary record subscription

club for professional DJs and enthusiasts, DMC (Dance Mix Club).

With mail outs of all the latest remixes and megamixes at a time when such innovations were in their infancy, subscribers also received a sixteen-page black and white magazine called Mixmag. Mixmag was later sold to EMAP and is today owned by Mixmag Media Ltd, reportedly reaching 1,000,000 people per month. However, Tony did not just stop there, he has also made a forays into the travel industry with his holiday company Nightlife Holidays and television production with the Sky channel Wedding TV. His latest idea was realised in 2018, with the launch of United DJs, a brand new radio station aiming to bring back the personality DJ and directed squarely at the forty-plus market. Joining Tony on his latest venture are a plethora of superstars from radio’s illustrious past, including Mike Read, David ‘Kid’ Jensen, Emperor Rosko, ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton and many others.

See just many of your favourites you can spot in the photos taken at one of the United DJs garden party come bonding sessions at Tony’s house later in this interview!

Firstly, hello Tony and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Before we talk about United DJs, could we ask how you first became interested in music and how you started as a DJ?

37

On the set of ‘Discs A Go-Go’.

From left: Billy Fury, Kent Walton, unknown, Tony, Cilla Black and Dave Clark.

Okay, I first became interested in music when I heard Elvis Presley sing and it infected my whole life. I was in art school in Oldham, Oldham Municipal Art School, and I got my first guitar, made it in woodwork class and I used to mime in front of my mum and dad’s long mirror in the bedroom pretending to be Elvis and that’s how it all began.

The spirits of rock and roll! Then, I left school, I became an apprentice jockey in Yorkshire and I was going round all the stables singing all the pop songs.

I was just mad crazy on it, so people like Willie Carson, who was one of my colleagues, would yell out a song and I’d have to sing it. So, it became quite a thing in my life, music. And then one day, I went to Butlin’s holiday camp.

I’d be about sixteen, seventeen years old and the band on stage were Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. That was Ringo Starr’s first group before The Beatles. And I got up in a talent competition and sang with them and sang a bit of ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, Gene Vincent [and His Blue Caps, 1956] and it went down pretty well because I fell off the stage and the people loved it

38

and I heard my first applause ringing in my ears, not because I was a fantastic singer but because I’d made a prat of myself, which was great. So then, a bunch of guys came up to me at that holiday camp and they said they were a band from my hometown, Oldham, and they’d like to know if I’d like to sing with them. So I said, ‘Are you mad?!’ And that led to my first singing job, with The Jasons, who became quite a big band in Lancashire, before The Beatles broke. The band wouldn’t turn professional, The Jasons, so I said I was leaving them. I went solo for a while doing all the clubs around Manchester and so on. And then, a new ballroom opened in my hometown, the Top Rank Astoria and I took a young lady along and we were stood at the bar, there was a big band on stage, fifteen-piece and when they had a break, there was a table with a guy behind it wearing glasses, didn’t look very cool, but he was playing records, which we’d never seen in ballrooms before. And we hearing Lulu [and the Luvvers] ‘Shout’ [1965] and ‘The Loco-Motion’ by Little Eva [1962]; ‘The Twist’, Chubby

Checker [1960] and whilst these records, the band leader came over to the bar and I’d known him from a previous ballroom when we used to work together, my rock band and his big band and he asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘Well, I’m at a bit of a loose end really, I’m doing solo gigs, talent competitions’. So, he invited me to become the singer of the band, which was quite an honour really, because it was a big fifteen-piece orchestra, great sound. So, I took the job. It allowed me to become professional, I packed in my day job, because I’d become an apprentice toolmaker by then and I was able to pack it in and become a full-time professional. Then one day, the manager came up to me and the DJ who played those records hadn’t shown and he asked me, did I want to earn a few quid extra? And I said ‘Oh yeah, please!’ So I became the DJ when the band had a break. And then we moved to Bristol, the band and myself and the same policy existed, I was the DJ when the band had a break. I was working all night. Five lunchtime sessions a week, three sessions on Saturday, Sunday,

club, I was working every night, it was just unbelievable. But, you know, I was earning good money and I was happy and then the Musicians’ Union came to see me and they made me aware that I was breaking union rules, “Keep music live”. They didn’t want records. They didn’t want records anywhere near the ballrooms because they were putting live musicians out of work ... They said! So, Top Rank used me as a scapegoat, we had a big union meeting and of course, the meet was all musicians from the other ballrooms in Bristol and I was voted out of the union. So I became a full-time DJ and I stopped singing at that point. That will be a big relief to all the world of music lovers! So, then I did a TV show in Bristol called ‘Discs A Go-Go’ [ITV, 1961-1965] where I introduced all the big names of the time. Tom Jones did his first TV show; Marianne Faithfull; Millie, who just passed away; Paul Simon. They all came down to this for this TV show and I also became the producer’s assistant in selecting the bands to come on the shows. It was a pop music show, a bit like ‘Ready,

39

With, among others, Radio Caroline founder Ronan O’Rahilly (left)

Steady Go!’ [ITV, 1963-1966] but before ‘Ready Steady Go!’ So, that was wonderful. I was doing the Top Rank and I was doing the ‘Discs A Go-Go’ and then I met Tony Blackburn and my life changed again. Tony had a record out, he came down to Bristol and I’d read in the NME magazine that he was a pirate DJ. But we couldn’t hear it in Bristol, Radio Caroline. So, he told me all about it during his visit to TWW’s ‘Discs A Go-Go’ and told me who to get in touch with. Two months later, the TV show came to an end and I applied to Radio Caroline and I got the job and spent two years as a pirate. So, life was a getting a little bit choppy now! I was out at sea, first on [Radio] Caroline South with Tony Blackburn, Emperor Rosko and all those guys and then they realised I had a northern accent and moved me up to the Isle of Man to Caroline North, where I stayed for a year and a half. A very, very happy period of my life, a happy period. It was wonderful.

As you just mentioned, in 1965, you joined Radio Caroline, where you

40

were given the title “Your royal ruler”. What are your favourite memories of working for Radio Caroline?

My favourite memories? Just the fun we had on board the ship. The excitement of learning to be a DJ. You know, you don’t just get on a ship and start talking on a microphone, there’s a lot to learn and thankfully, the pirate ships had lots of professional DJs from places like America, Canada, Australia, places where commercial radio existed and where these guys had been trained, and they taught us so much. That was a great period, learning to be a great DJ. We all did it. How to edit tapes, how to make commercials, how to talk into the microphone, your relationship with the listener - you don’t talk to an audience, you talk one to one and you don’t talk AT someone, you talk TO them. All those kind of things, you know. So, that was great and the Marine Offences Act [1967] came in. Harold Wilson scuppered the pirates and we all came ashore. Well, not all of us, but I certainly did. You know, we were

With Kid Jensen

either going to go to Radio 1 or Radio Luxembourg and after a few months, I went to Radio Luxembourg.

After the Marine Offences Act banned Pirate Radio in 1967, you joined Radio Luxembourg. You become Radio Luxembourg’s programme manager in 1977 and stayed with the station until 1984, by which time you had revamped the output to play predominantly disco and soul from 1977 onwards and had introduced the hugely successful and hugely influential Disco Mix Club Show in 1981. How different was working for Radio Luxembourg in comparison to Radio Caroline and what was your proudest achievement whilst working for the station?

Well, you see, when I got the Radio Luxembourg job, before me, they’d all been pre-recorded shows sponsored by record companies. We never knew that as kids. Radio Luxembourg was our oasis for music every night from 7.30 at night to three in the morning. It was it a station coming from the centre of

Europe and it had lots of static. It was on the AM frequency, we called it the ‘medium wave’ [MW] and it wasn’t great to listen to, apart from the fact we were starved for music. Now, when I joined, they’d been through the pirate era and funnily enough, Radio Luxembourg started doing far better business than they had done without the pirates, because the pirate ships make the advertising agencies more aware of radio, so they benefitted from that.

But, just like the BBC, when the pirates were made illegal, they knew they had to change their act. They had to have live DJs, they had to have some form of the spirit of pirate DJs. The BBC started Radio 1 [on 30th September 1967] and I joined Radio Luxembourg in April 1968. I got on a plane and flew out to Luxembourg and I joined Paul Burnett and Noel Edmonds joined us, Kid Jensen, Mark Wesley and we were the first live team for Radio Luxembourg, broadcasting every night from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

We lived there, we partied there, I got married and my wife came out there, we had kids out there. I was with

41

With Elvis

[Radio] Luxembourg for sixteen years and I have to say, the best years of my life stretched across sixteen years.

During your time working for Radio Luxembourg, you interviewed Elvis twice, in 1972 and 1973. How was this experience, what sort of questions did you ask and did he give any surprising answers?

Haha! I think he was more surprised at me putting a microphone under his nose, which Colonel Parker had given me permission to do. But, you know, it was just before he went on stage and I knew I didn’t have very long, so they were very short and sweet questions and answers. ‘72 I did the first interview and they were just dumb questions. You know, things like ‘Are you going to do some more rock ‘n’ roll soon?’, ‘Who designs your clothes?’, all that kind of stuff. The ‘73 questions, the big question I asked him was ‘Look, you’ve never been over to Britain to perform or Europe to perform. We’ve got everybody in Europe listening to this Elvis special.

42

With Linda and Paul McCartney

Do you have a message for your fans?’

And he kind of hesitated and laughed and he said, ‘I know I keep saying this but I want to thank them for their devotion and I promise we’re gonna come see ‘em. We are gonna come see ‘em!’ And then Colonel Parker yells out, ‘Come on, we’ve gotta go now, Elvis is going on stage!’ But I got the question that every journalist and Europe had been wanting to hear, answered by Elvis himself. He did intend to coming to perform. I think the plans were afoot. He’d already done Hawaii and yeah, I came away with that recording feeling very, very emotional. And then of course, the slippery slide happened and of course we lost him. I was on air the night he died. That was probably my most challenging radio show because I was very close to Elvis. I was president of his fan club. Yeah, so that’s the Elvis story.

You launched the record subscription club DMC (Dance Mix Club) in 1983.

In the same year, you launched the club culture magazine Mixmag,

With Suzi Quatro

With Cliff Richard

which was later sold to EMAP. It is currently owned by Mixmag Media Ltd (previously Wasted Talent Ltd) and claims to reach 1,000,000 people per month. How did the idea for Mixmag come about and did you have any idea that it would become the phenomenon that it would?

copies. Where do we get them?’ So then I went to the BPI committee and sat down and Christine, my wife, came with me and the two of us said, ‘We want to start a new company. It’s a new idea that will save you a fortune in promotion and will actually see DJs buying your music rather than you sending it to them for free’. So, I told them about my idea, a remix club exclusively for DJs and that’s how DMC was born. And DMC stands for Disco Mix Club. And very swiftly, we started building our production team who started creating great mixes and remixes and membership grew to something like 7,000 within two years, DJs from all over Europe. So, my prophecy about how successful this club would be for the record industry was really made. The point was made and we started the World DJ Championships. But back to Mixmag.

When I launched DMC in February 1983, my impulse was to make it a real club with a newsletter. So, they’d get a cassette ... they eventually got three cassettes a month but originally, they got this first cassette with a sixteen

Well, when I was at the end of my sixteen years with Radio Luxembourg, I had a show on the air called the Disco Imports Show and we played all the big, new, late ‘70s funky stuff from America. And within the process, I’d met a guy who mixed records together, which was something that was never done, not even in clubs in those days.

Anyway, this kid had copied a few Americans who were doing it and I heard it on a cassette and we started a programme called the Disco Mix Club and we put that on Radio Luxembourg.

And then I get all these letters from DJs all over Britain and Europe saying, ‘Where do we get these mixes?

Because when you played them on Luxembourg, all we could hear was static’, you know, ‘We want nice clean

43

page mono, black and white magazine and I called it Mixmag, to go with Disco Mix Club. That’s how Mixmag was born and I edited that for a few years before I brought in new editors and concentrated on other things. So, that’s the Mixmag story. It was very, very influential and I think it changed the club-land. I think DMC with its remixes and production techniques caused the DJs to put their microphones down for a while in nightclubs and discos and start playing some mixes.

That’s how it all began. In terms of did I have any idea how big it would become, yeah, I did. I wouldn’t have left Radio Luxembourg if I hadn’t have felt that this was going to be something special. I was passionately aware that the mixing format was just something phenomenal and would change and revolutionise the disc jockey world.

I’ve always, because of, you know, my story, how I was thrown out of the Musicians’ Union and forced to be a DJ ... I’ve always, since that day, been very passionate for the DJ as an industry, as a profession and I thought, you know, I think I can influence these guys here

44

to stop rabbiting in between records.

They all talked after records in clubs.

Can you imagine? I mean, you’d be dancing away, the record would end and the DJ would chat for thirty seconds to a minute. I mean what an atmosphere killer that was! So, we changed that. Yeah, I had a very, very profound feeling that this was going to be significantly popular, and it was.

Moving forward to present day, how did the idea for United DJs come about and what did you hope to achieve with the station?

You know, I’ll tell you what Alice, I wake up in the middle of the night with ideas and I just have to stop doing it!

You know, I’m getting on a bit now, but this was the last idea I had. I mean, I had an idea for a holiday company when we were doing Mixmag and DMC. I started a holiday company. I used to hire bloody aeroplanes and hotel rooms and take people to Ibiza and Majorca and Miami and we’d give DJs free holidays, the customers who went on holiday would get into the

clubs for free, everybody was happy, but I couldn’t afford to keep it going after two years. That was called Nightlife Holidays. That was another idea, but this one, United DJs came about because I had a TV channel called Wedding TV on Sky Television, which was targeted to women who were getting married. Now, all the content was films and we had a production team and I learnt how to make film. When Wedding TV ended ... We couldn’t afford to keep it going.

We’d gone for five years, it cost a fortune, so my partners and I closed it down, but I’d inherited this desire to make film and I had nothing to do. I was back to DMC and my wife and the team at DMC were running it fine and I wasn’t really needed, so I found time to make a film series called ‘The History of DJ’ and it’s still there on our website, on DMC World and we’ve put it now on United DJs website. It’s sixteen episodes long and it’s pretty intense, you know. It goes through everything the DJ ever did, from the discovery of the radio through to the American rock jocks and shock jocks. Everything is in

that series, you know. So yeah, that was how I killed time when I came to the end of Wedding TV. What were we leading to now? United DJs. Okay, haha! Well, United DJs was just another idea. I mean, if I get an idea and I feel the adrenalin pumping, I’ll give it a go, you know, and the adrenalin was phenomenal. Oh, I know why I was mentioning the film series, because the last episode in that series was a bunch of my old colleagues from radio telling me how dissatisfied they were with radio, how it had dumbed the personality DJ down, how it had tightened playlists up and the DJs of old, the pirate kind of mood of being a personality, happy, moving, music loving animals was gone. All the DJs now are remote with tight playlists, they are told what to play by people in suits. That was the essence of the last episode of ‘The History of DJ’ and while I was making that episode, talking to those colleagues, those DJs that I got the idea that this spirit of wanting to get back to personality DJ could be something we did. And then we heard about streaming. I realised

45

that streaming could take over, like, you know we used to have AM, Medium Wave? FM took over from Medium Wave and I don’t know about DAB, that’s very, very expensive for the radio industry. I thought, do you know what? This streaming has got to be something to investigate. So, I did and well, what do you know? We started a radio station, we’re two years old now, the audience is building fantastic I’ve got to say and we’ll carry on and after the corona period has gone, hopefully we’ll come out the other side with some audience figures that will attract advertising. At the moment, I’m supporting it myself. I’m selling my record collection to keep the funds coming in for the radio station, but we’ve got thirty-two DJs broadcasting from thirteen countries, they’re all loving what they’re doing.

Mike Read is doing the breakfast show, Bob Lawrence does the morning show, we’ve got an incredible team. The old school! Kid Jensen used to live with me in Luxembourg and he’s back on board and, you know, we’ve had DLT [Dave Lee Travis] on, but I’ve got

46

some really dynamic DJs from all over the world. It’s really worth listening to and music lovers will appreciate that you’re going to get DJs who know what they’re talking about and they’re playing music from seven decades, not just two hundred records that keep spinning round time and time again.

So, that’s United DJs, we’re off, we’re running and we’re living in hope.

The DJs who work for United DJs are all veterans of radio broadcasting, many of whom who have suffered at the hands of various station revamping exercises. Various stations, most notably BBC Radio 1, have been accused of ageism regarding the DJs they employ over the years. What is your opinion of older DJs working in broadcasting and what do you feel that they can offer that younger DJs can’t?

I’ll tell you what, I feel sorry for the DJs working in mainstream radio.

They are all automatons. I won’t even discuss the BBC DJs; I don’t want to.

The BBC is the BBC. The wider world

of radio, I think, has let the public down. I don’t think they’ve got it right.

They may have had it right for a time.

They learned like America learned, if you just keep rotating on a ‘gold station’ the same fifty records, people don’t listen all the time, they’re the ones they like, let’s just keep playing them. You know, so you get Capital Gold, which I worked on for a while and they’d have a playlist of about two-hundred records and it would drive you nuts as a DJ, so I don’t know what it did to the listeners! And we all felt the same way. On Captial Radio, there were all the big personalities there, you had Mike Read, Neil Fox, Kid Jensen, Kenny Everett, Tony Prince, we were all on that station. And then one day, Richard Park, the boss, who is a great guy and he himself was a pirate DJ, but he was a businessman, he decided he didn’t need those big name personalities. He decided the music was all he needed and a good quality presenter who wasn’t necessarily well known. So we all got fired, you know, a bit like the BBC fired a lot of DJs. For whatever reason, they decided to

do that. They do that from time to time, they just take the old school ... and I’ve never been able to understand why the BBC, who’ve got this Radio 1, Radio 2 ... and they’ve got 6 Music, which is brilliant, I like that, but it’s not for the people I’m targeting. United DJs is targeting the forty-plus. I hope we’ll attract younger people who’ve got catholic tastes in music too. But the BBC have not done that. They’ve made these DJs into superstar jocks and dropped them off the edge of the cliff and we’ve never seen them again.

Wave goodbye, off they go! And I think that is a terrible shame. I mean, I’m not worried about the moral aspect of them sacking someone, I’m worried more about the general public being disenfranchised from that personality DJ and that period of time or a radio station that will play seven decades of music, today’s music, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and the DJs that can do that and can playlist their own programmes are the ones who lived through it. And that’s what we’ve got.

And I’m sorry for the BBC that they didn’t think about that, maybe they will

47

do one day. Maybe the two parts of this world one day will wake up to what I’ve got, but I’ve got to say, there aren’t many jocks with the wealth of music knowledge and love of music that I’ve got on this radio station. So, I hope that explains my passion for why I did it and why I’m really sorry that no-one else did it. The problem is, Alice, the program directors who’ve got jobs in those radio stations would be afraid to give the selection of music to the DJs themselves. They wouldn’t want to do that because they’re putting themselves out of work, you know. I mean, I’ve got a program director now, Bob Lawrence, one of our DJs who does nine to eleven every morning.

He’s the program director, but he doesn’t choose music for the other DJs. It’s a cardinal rule on the station: ‘Guys, choose what you want! Make it what the people will love and be a great radio personality!’ Bob does other things. He makes sure the station rolls out and doesn’t have any problems, sorts out the promotion and the advertising. So that’s what his title, program director means. So, I hope that explains why the radio stations have not brought around a radio station like we have. They’re afraid of giving the job to the DJs. I put whole trust into the DJs. I totally know they know what they’re doing and we’ve been going two years now, I listen all the time and they’re just wonderful. You never know what’s coming next.

United DJs recently celebrated its

48

second birthday. Do you feel you achieved what you set out to and what plans do you have for the future of the station?

Well, two years. We would have been having a big garden party. We’ve had about three or four now. It’s part of my bonding system for the DJs, to see each often. That’s the problem with a lot of them. I mean, the radio stations I’ve worked on, we all lived together, loved together, partied together. [Radio] Caroline ship, Radio Luxembourg in Europe. We always pulled together as a team and virtually lived with each other and I’m trying to achieve that with the current team. We have a party at my house every couple of months.

Well, twice a year I would say. And we haven’t been able to have one this year because of the coronavirus. But anyway, as soon as that’s gone and we’re all able to inter-mingle again, they’ll be down here. And it’s wonderful, it’s a great day and you can see them all chatting and just radio all the time! It’s just wonderful! So, yeah, I think I’m very satisfied with where we’re at, having just got an amazing two-page feature in The Daily Express, which came really unexpectedly. That was only two days ago, on Wednesday.

Two pages in full colour, photographs and everything, explaining what the channel is all about. Now that’s the kind of publicity that’s going to push us forward, because we can’t afford a big advertising campaign to tell those forty-plus we’re here. Look, we’re

here! We’re waiting for you! I’m hoping we’ll get more publicity as time goes by and I’m hoping we’ll make some money from advertising income on the station, so we can spend that money on marketing the station. And the other thing, Alice, is that we’re global. You know, it’s very difficult to market a global station, but I’m passionate that we should be talking to the world and that’s what we’re doing.

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you and the other DJs at United DJs all the best for the future.

Tony can be heard on United DJs from Monday to Friday, 3-5pm. You can listen to the station worldwide via the United DJs website, like the Facebook page to stay updated and interact with all of the DJs on the Facebook group. www.uniteddj.com www.facebook.com/uniteddjsradio www.facebook.com/groups/ uniteddjsthestationofthestars

Clockwise from left: Bob Lawrence, Tony Prince, Mike Read and Peter Antony

49

The Senton Bombs Breaking the Record: ‘Lake’

In the third part of this exclusive series, vocalist and bassist Joey Class gives us an exclusive insight into the new songs from the band’s upcoming sixth album.

50

Some people may wonder how a punk rock and roll band started playing southern rock and country nine years into their existence. The truth is, variety was always the target and we just needed to acquire the skills to execute. The way The Supersuckers flip the coin to country, NOFX to ska, Springsteen to anything, it has always fascinated me when bands defy generic conventions and chart new territory. A stylistic mix-up was always on the cards, sometimes you have to wait for the right hand.

From Townes Van Zandt through Steve Earle to Jace Everett, from Uncle Tupleo through Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell – ‘Darkest Horse’ was inevitable. When we stuck it on our 2013 album ‘Chapter Zero’, I honestly didn’t know what to expect from listeners and initially my bandmates.

I had been writing country songs for years, I just never thought the Bombs would bite. Fortunately, they did and more importantly, so did the listeners and now you couldn’t pry it from our live set with a crowbar. ‘Black Chariot’ followed, as did ‘Red Shield’, ‘Wedlock Horns’, ‘Remind Me of the Moon’ and the ‘Outsiders’ album title track. It’s no longer a shock when we interrupt the ferocity in records and sets, bring down the BPM, shift mid to chest voice and twang those guitars.

That’s why the arrival of our new single ‘Lake’ will not surprise many.

Like its aforementioned siblings, ‘Lake’ is an opportunity to tell a story.

Our albums have loose concepts and themes, but it is in these songs where we tend to take a tangent. ‘Lake’ tells the story of someone walking out at night and noticing a dead body below the surface. The discoverer doesn’t know the deceased but his mind begins to race about how they got there: “Was your heart taken or did it just break?”; “Are you a victim or is it bad luck?”, was it an accident, crime, or suicide.

Upon witnessing, “All those words they put in that book, what a waste of time”, hints to religion seeming suddenly meaningless, unable to shake the haunting image.

In the chorus, his mind turns to how he could have saved the person, a method for dealing with the trauma, anything to rid himself of the image, anything to “see your face out of that lake”. It’s a sad song, with life lost in such a sad setting.

The underpinning themes here are that people die all of the time. We don’t necessarily know them, their story, or even how it happened in some cases, but we empathise with a life cut short and occasionally wonder if we could have done something to help. Therein lays the positive, check in on those you care about, and maybe even those you don’t. Tragedy is never far away but neither is a helping hand.

You can listen to ‘Lake’ across all

51

digital outlets from Monday 27th July.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this series as much as I have writing it, there is much more to come. Much love to all during these strange times, there’s a flicker of light at the end of this lengthy tunnel. Stay positive, stay brave but most importantly, don’t be divided when unity is paramount.

Down Home Bombs Seven Country Greats!

‘Darkest Horse’ Single from ‘Chapter Zero’, 2013 ‘Black Chariot’ Single from ‘Phantom High’ EP, 2014 ‘Red Shield’ From ‘Mass Vendetta’, 2016

www.sentonbombs.com www.facebook.com/thesentonbombs

‘Wedlock Horns’ From ‘Mass Vendetta’, 2016 ‘Outsiders’ Single from ‘Outsiders’, 2018 ‘Remind Me of the Moon’ From ‘Outsiders’, 2018 ‘Lake’ Single from the forthcoming sixth album, 2020 All of the band’s releases so far are available from all good digital outlets.

52

XTC

Making Plans for Colin Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Cover photography by Simon Hogg.

54

Last year, it was widely reported in the press that Colin Moulding, former bassist, co-vocalist and co-songwriter with XTC had bowed out of music, wishing to spend more time with his family. Two years previously, he had delighted fans of the band he co-founded with guitarist, co-vocalist and co-songwriter Andy Partridge and drummer Terry Chambers in 1972, firstly as Star Park and later Helium Kidz before settling on the name XTC in 1975 and adding keyboardist Barry Andrews (replaced by guitarist and keyboardist Dave Gregory in 1979) the following year, by reuniting with Chambers for a new duo called TC&I. Speculation of a full-blown XTC reunion had never been more rife. However, after releasing just one well-received EP, 2017’s ‘Great Aspirations’ and playing a number of sell-out hometown shows at Swindon Art Centre in the same year, Moulding’s announcement paid short shrift to these rumours.

Now, seemingly spurred on by the need to be doing something during the ongoing lockdown, we can exclusively reveal that Moulding is making music again, with an aim to release his first solo album early next year. We recently caught up with him to ask him all about XTC, his songwriting contribution, which resulted in the band’s first three charting singles, ‘Life Begins at the Hop’ (1979), ‘Making Plans for

Nigel’ (‘Drums and Wires’, 1979) and ‘Generals and Majors’ (‘Black Sea’, 1980) and TC&I. We also quizzed him as to whether his return to music might ever lead to all four members of XTC putting the differences exacerbated by disagreements regarding various reissues of their twelve studio albums (including two as sixties psychedelia influenced ‘side project’ Dukes of Stratosphear) behind them and get back on stage together.

Firstly, hello Colin and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking how you first became interested in music as a listener and how you came to start playing music and writing songs yourself?

Oh God, I’ve got to go a long way back now! Well, I think my parents kind of ... We always had records in the house in the 1960s, when I grew up. You know, my father would go out on a Saturday morning and buy records in town, bring them home and play them that evening, you know. So, it kind of seeped into me really and when I was old enough to buy records myself, I used to go for the more underground sounds. I’m talking early seventies.

But of course, chart stuff, that had a bearing on my outlook on music as well, but I tended not to respect people who were in the charts if you know what I mean. I preferred underground stuff but that’s all part of growing up, you know, you like to pursue the music

55

XTC (1978), L/R: Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Terry Chambers and Barry Andrews

that’s different to your parents, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve began to acquire a taste for it, so ... But I shouldn’t split music into categories because it’s too good for that, you know. I like all sorts of music really as I have gotten older and I really don’t have any preference in style. I like jazz, classical and pop and I don’t have any preference now.

Well, getting back to it, we formed a group in the early seventies, you know, with local pals, who we used to meet in record shops and music shops. You know, the usual thing, you see who’s playing around and you think, well, I can offer something to this band and, you know, you get together as teenagers and start kicking things around and, you know, before you know it, you’re on Top of the Pops!

Not any different to any other bands that start really, you know; your parents start you off with their music, then you find your feet and you pursue your own, you know and then you want to play an instrument. You know, you think, blimey, that sounds like a good job, I think I’ll have a go at that myself, you know. But you have many

56

years trying to get to a place of accomplishment, you know and it’s not that easy, but with perseverance, you know, you get your foot in the door and before you know it, you’re away.

How did XTC come to form and what are your memories of the early years of the band, including making your first studio recordings, the ‘3D EP’ (1977) and debut album ‘White Music’ (1978) with producer John Leckie?

Well, we called ourselves something different before XTC. We were the Helium Kidz and before that we were Star Park, until we settled on XTC in around 1975. There was me, Andy and Terry, that was the nucleus of the band and we eventually got a deal with Virgin Records and recorded at Abbey Road, the ‘3D EP’. That was our first recording and it was very exciting because, you know, Abbey Road with The Beatles and all that. It was a big thing going into that place. You were in awe, you know. You saw heroes had recorded there many times. I was

scared to death I think, really, because in the studio, you’re under the microscope really, you know and that was one of the things where you think, Christ, am I good enough to be doing this, you know. That’s your initial kind of fear I think, that you won’t stand up to the rigours of the studio and, you know, after you make the first record, then you make another and you become an old hand at it really, you know. It’s just getting used to it really, you know, that environment. It’s very intimidating, you know, but yeah, once you’ve acclimatized to it and got used to the people who work in it, you know, then you’re away.

During the early years of the band, XTC were criticised by the music press for refusing to conform to the simplicity of the prevailing punk movement. What were your thoughts on the punk scene, the music scene in general and how XTC fitted into it during that time?

Well, I don’t think we were really a punk band because punk was more

political, I think, but I think we were grateful to punk for actually kicking the door down, because in the mid seventies, it was really hard to get a recording deal, you know. I think the people in charge had an idea of what they wanted and anything new was kind of fended off, you know. So, when punk came along, it was that ideology that says anyone can get up there and do it and they really didn’t know what to do with it, really, you know, but they realised there was commercial potential, so the record companies started to take these bands on, not really knowing what they had or whether it was talented or not and we kind of followed in the door after these other bands, you know, like the Sex Pistols and stuff. I think record companies were signing anybody, you know, and the cream rose to the top after a while and a lot of the bands got dropped and what not, but we happened to be still there after a couple of years.

So, we were kind of grateful to punk really, in order that we could get a foot in the door really, you know, and I think had it not been for punk, we’d

57

have struggled.

How do you feel that XTC’s roots in Swindon came to influence the band’s sound and songwriting during your career?

Well, it’s bound to rub off on you when you’ve lived there all your life, you know. I remember when we first got signed, our management said, ‘Don’t mention the fact that you come from Swindon!’, you know, it was the kiss of death! And to be honest, until punk came along, if you were from the provinces, you weren’t really taken that seriously, you know, but then you had bands like the Buzzcocks from Manchester, you know and there were groups from Northern Ireland and stuff and I think where you came from mattered less, you know, and that was when we were around. So, yeah, we had the mick taken out of us a few times, the fact that we come from this place in Wiltshire, you know, but now, it seems to have proved an asset. I think when people think of Swindon, they think of XTC, you know. So, we

58

don’t mind that, it gives us a sense of place. And obviously, coming from a small town, it rubs off on your songs.

Yeah, it does and we’re not worldly people, you know, we’re small town people, so that’s what we write about.

Speaking of songwriting, you were of course responsible for XTC’s commercial breakthrough hit, 1979’s ‘Making Plans for Nigel’. Was the song in any way autobiographical and did its number 17 chart placing surprise you?

Well, it should have gone higher, apparently! There was a mix up with the computer. We got demoted to number 23 and they promoted us the following week back to 17, but by that time, it had kind of lost its momentum a little bit. So, there was a bit of a mess up with the computer, so who knows where it would have gone, what it would have achieved, had there not been the mess up, you know. I don’t know what happened but, you know, we don’t even bother to ask. I know that in 1979, you had to sell a hell of a

lot of records to get to there. But anyway, ‘...Nigel’, yes ... Well, there was an awful lot of strikes and that in the seventies. These things were mentioned on the news, like militancy in British Steel and all-out strikes and wild cat strikes and, you know, I suppose it all went in and if I’ve invented this guy called Nigel, then where does he work? And I thought, I know, he works at British Steel. Oh, he doesn’t work in the factory, he works in the offices, you know. And I was kind of having this story go by in my mind about where this chap who I’d invented, where he would work, you know, and because I think British Steel was mentioned in the news quite a bit, that kind of popped out. Is it autobiographical? Slightly, in respect of ... my father really didn’t think there was a career in music for me, that it was not very stable, but, you know, when you’re that age, you want excitement and you live on the edge a bit more. You want to take a chance, you don’t want to be in a job that’s kind of destined for you by the other people, you know. Like British Steel! I

wanted to leave school, you see, and kind of find my own way and my father wanted me to stay on in further education, but that summer, I grew my hair enormously long, so that kind of decided the issue because they wouldn’t let me in! So, I had this fight with my father about having my hair cut, you know, because it was all part of the image of being in a band, at that time, to have long hair. It was a rebellious kind of thing and being different and stuff, you know. But I think I’d made up my mind, I was going to try and have a crack at music as best I could and see where it led me and then, who knows, five years down the line, I might come back with my tail between my legs and say, ‘Okay, I’ve tried that, I’ll try something different.’ But, you know, I stuck my neck out and it worked out. So, a bit of luck, but you need luck, don’t you?

During the XTC years, how do you feel that the way in which you wrote songs differed from the way in which Andy wrote songs?

59

XTC (1980), L/R: Dave Gregory, Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Terry Chambers

We’re different people, that’s the only answer I can give really, you know. I think for the first couple of albums, I was trying to find my feet. See, Andy was the original writer before we had a deal and all the songs were written by him and then somebody said, ‘Hey, Colin, you ought to try writing or you’ll missing out’, or something. I think it was one of the roadies and I said, ‘Well, alright, I’ll give it a go’, you know. But that’s the thing, you know, we were already in the public eye so I had to, you know, try out these songs in the public eye really. It took me a couple of years to find my feet, you know, and I think after Barry left, it was like a catalyst for me, it was like ... For some reason, the way the band operated then wasn’t allowing me to be myself, so when he left ... I don’t know what influence he was having over me or whatever, but when he left, I thought to myself, well, I’m just going to be myself and write stuff that I like. And as soon as I started doing that, I started to have hits, you know, so I thought, oh my God, that’s the secret then, you know, and that was it. My writing then,

60

okay, it probably took a different turn from Andy’s, but slowly, I think we felt, in a way, the two complimented each other by being different, so that’s the way it went on really.

What makes you tick as a songwriter and to you, what makes a great song?

What makes me tick as a songwriter and what makes a great song? Well, yeah, that’s kind of a tricky one. I suppose when you know what the song is about or the audience knows what it’s about very early on in the song.

If you can nail the first line and state in that line roughly what the song is about, then I think with an audience, that really registers and then you’ve got them then. I think grabbling the audience’s attention in those first few lines is essential and that’s what I think is the main part of hooking the listener, to capture them in the first couple of lines. And I think the pursuit of that makes me tick then. You know, if I feel a song hasn’t got that, then I’m recoiling already, you know. I’m thinking ... well, I’ll try it out on people

to see what they think but if it doesn’t grab them, I’m thinking, well, maybe there’s something wrong with this, you know. You know, so that’s what I pursue most days is to find that formula whereby, you know, you capture the audience in the first few lines, so that’s my quest.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the ‘Black Sea’ album. What are your memories of the writing and recording process of ‘Black Sea’ and how do you feel about the album forty years later?

Not much, it was just something I did in the past. I don’t sit down and put my records on, you know, I’m more interested in what I’m doing at the moment. The same with any of our albums, they’re done and for the public to consume now and pick the bones of. I’m proud of them but I don’t have great feeling for them. I’m proud of what we achieved and what we did but I don’t think about them now, they’re stored away. If somebody plays a track, I’ll think we did pretty well on

that, but that’s as far as it goes, you know. But I wouldn’t sit down and listen to them now, you know.

Going back to your bass playing, I was amazed to learn that you always put your bass parts on XTC songs last. What do you feel the advantages of working in this way were and have you continued to work in this way for your releases following the band’s breakup?

Yes, I certainly do. I just think that you can listen to the rest of the band and you can fit in so much better. You don’t tread on anybody’s toes sonically and part-wise. I’ve always done it and I think it stemmed from McCartney used to do that when they used to do four-track recordings. They saved the last track for Paul’s bass.

That was always at the back of our minds and I thought, well ... Obviously, we had twenty-four tracks to record on, we didn’t have the limitations of four tracks, but that was always stuck in my mind, but we did it because I just find it better to actually fit my part into, you

61

TC&I (2017): Colin back in the studio with Terry

know. I can par my part down and get away with playing less! If you were paid by the note, I would have second thoughts, I’m sure! But I’ve not been paid by the note and my notes are valuable, so I’m playing less of them, you know. So, yeah, you just get a feeling that that’s the way to do it for me. A lot of people just lay the drums and bass down first but they really don’t know what’s going on top, you know. You might be playing a little run on the bass where someone does some singing and the singing should take precedence really, so I always found it the way to do it really. I still do it now.

I’m working on a couple of tracks now and I’ve got the backing track down and got a lead vocal part down and now I can concentrate on the bass, you know. I’ve just finished the bass part now and you can slot it in so much better, you know.

So, you are working on something new at the moment?

Yeah, in the lockdown, I thought I ought to use the time wisely. You can’t

62

really go with other musicians now and, you know, it’s difficult. You can actually work with other musicians over the web but it’s difficult to explain to them what you want. When someone’s in the studio with you, you can explain as they play on your song just exactly what you want, but that’s very difficult when you haven’t got that one to one, you know. With the lockdown that’s happening at the moment, I’ve kind of been working solo really and I’ll probably release it in the new year. It keeps me out of mischief, you know and what do you do in a lockdown? You’ve got to be doing something, haven’t you, or you’d go crazy.

I was going to ask you actually: Last year, when you brought the TC&I project with Terry Chambers to an end, you released a statement saying that “music itself is on the back burner for now”, as you “wish to spend more time with my family”.

This was then widely interpreted by the press as your departure from the music industry. I take it that music

TC&I: Photograph by Geoff Winn

is now firmly back on the agenda?

Oh yes, I just think that after we did the gigs ... We did some gigs, you see. We hadn’t toured for about thirty-odd years and Terry and I decided that would do some gigs and I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to tour as such, why don’t we set up some gigs ourselves and we’ll do them in a stationary place?’, you know, like putting on a show in a West End theatre or something, where you do it in one place, you know. So, I said, ‘Well, choose a venue and we’ll stage it and do it ourselves’, you know.

I said, ‘That appeals to me more than parading around the country and stopping in strange hotel rooms’, you know, so that’s what we did. And after that, because we hadn’t toured for such a long time, it took a hell of a long time, a hell of a lot of rehearsal to get things right and after we did it, I was exhausted, you know. So, I said, ‘I don’t want to tour as such’, but the thing was that with Terry, that’s what he likes to do, so we had a difference in outlook about how the band should operate, you know. So, I said,

Photograph by Geoff Winn

‘Principally, I’d like to do some more recording’, but he, although he doesn’t mind recording, his thing is touring really and playing live. That’s how he operates, you know, that’s how he expresses himself, so I said, ‘Well, obviously, we’ve got a difference of outlook, I think I’m going to knock it on the head’. I prefer the recording end of it much more than the live playing.

That’s a thing I’ve always done over the last thirty years, you know, since we came off the road all them years ago in ‘82. I’ve kind of become accustomed to working in the studio and I’ve come to like it, whereas Terry, being away from it all those years, he was raring to go on the live side. You know, so we had a difference of outlook and I thought, well, that’s going to rear its ugly head time and time again, so it’s probably better to knock it on the head now. So, yeah, that’s what I said, you know, and he was happy too, so fine.

As we just said, you reconvened with Terry Chambers for the TC&I project in 2017, released the well received ‘Great Aspirations’ EP in

63

Photograph by Hannah Thielen

October of the same year and played six sell-out shows at the Swindon Art Centre in the following October / November. What was it like working with Terry again after all those years and could you tell us a bit about the writing and recording process of ‘Great Aspirations’?

Yeah, well, I’d started to work on an EP because I thought for a good few years ... I’d bowed out of music for a couple of years ... and then I was being sent ...

I better tell you the story of how I got back into it, I suppose. I started to do sessions for people, mainly American guys on the west coast of America and prog stuff. There’s this guy called Billy Sherwood, he’s the bass player with Yes now, and he got me back into it really. I started to do some singing and then after that, it kind of rekindled my interest in wanting to write really, you know. So, I had a few songs in the bag and then, lo-and-behold, Terry came into the country at precisely the time when I started to do some recording of the tracks, you know and he said he wanted to meet up and of course we

64

went to a pub and got steaming drunk and a couple of weeks later, I thought, maybe I should ask him if he’d want to record on this EP I’m thinking of making. And then the idea of having a group name came into my head and I thought, well, let’s call ourselves something, you know, and the TC&I thing came from that old film ‘Withnail & I’ [1987]. And fortuitously, the ‘TC’ was the tail-end lobbed off the end of the XTC name. It wasn’t intentional, but people say, ‘Well, that’s where it came from’. I always say, ‘Well, it came from Withnail & I’ really. TC has always been Terry Chambers, you know. So, yeah, we thought, okay, we’ll form an outfit to do it under, you know, so we recorded the EP and we were surprised at the reaction. It was funny, I suppose, working with the chap I’d worked with so many years previous, you know, but he’d been out of it for so long that he had to get back in and do some serious kind of practicing really. He’d been out of the game so long that, yeah, he had to really work hard to get back on form, so we had some serious rehearsals to

Photograph by Simon Hogg

Photograph by Simon Hogg

do. So, it worked out really well and then the gigs thing came, whereby Terry said, ‘Well, I’d like to do some gigs’ and I said, ‘Oh, well, alright, we could do, I suppose’, because I knew he wanted to play live, but ... So, I said, ‘Well, alright, we’ll do some then’ and then there was the other idea about setting up a venue especially for putting these gigs on, you know. So, we had a couple of years whereby it was really quite lucrative, you know, and quite therapeutic and it was really working out fine, but after that, I kind of thought to myself, well, it’s going in a slightly different direction to how I’d like it to go. I’d like to have done some more recording, whereas I think Terry’s take on it was more in the live idiom, you know, so I thought, well, it’s best to knock it on the head now then. So, that was it.

Well, when we started, we had a six album deal, you know, and I don’t think people are signed for six albums now.

If you don’t make a hit record on your first attempt, then you’re out the door, you know. In our day, they used to give you a second chance, you know. I remember on the first couple of albums, we never had a hit single on those at all, but the record company thought we had something and hung on to us and lo-and-behold, we started to have hits and then we started to sell records. It’s a thing called artist development, you know. I don’t think that happens these days. It’s pretty easy come, easy go now I think and if you don’t have immediate success, then record companies start to get jittery. It was a lot more in for the long haul when we first started out. It’s pretty hit and run now.

Having been part of the music industry for so long, what is your opinion of the way in which it has evolved over the years and its current state?

XTC never technically broke up in a legal sense. What are your thoughts on the later years of the band and as the years pass, does a full reunion seem less and less likely?

65

A reunion? No, I don’t think so. Too much bad blood has gone under the bridge, I think. Well, we’ve had a few fallings out, you know, you can’t pretend otherwise really, mainly over the release of the material, reissues and so forth. I suppose the band pretty much dissolved around 2006. I thought we were going to make another record and I didn’t know that Andy didn’t really have any intention of making another record. Being Englishmen, Englishmen don’t seem to talk very much, if we’d have talked and explained what our thoughts were on the future, we could have knocked it on the head probably in about 2002, you know, about four years before. It’s just, these things drag on and people don’t talk and people get the wrong impression about how things are going to proceed, you know. So, it kind of

just fizzled out really through lack of doing anything and when the arguments started coming in with the release of the reissues, we became a little estranged. With the exception of Terry possibly, the other three were a little bit standoffish towards each other.

That’s a shame, but that’s most bands for you. There’s always arguments, isn’t there? So, you know. We’re probably speaking more now than we have been in the past, so reason to be optimistic.

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

Photograph by Geoff Winn

66

www.facebook.com/ tcandimusic

Photograph by Sean Robert Haworth

The Godfathers An Offer You Can’t Refuse!

Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews the London punk / R&B band’s brand new double A-side single.

Legendary London punk and R&B influenced, mob-attired rockers The Godfathers are this year celebrating the 35th anniversary of their first gig The Embassy Club. To mark this occasion, the band, which after many line-up changes over the years now consists of vocalist Peter Coyne, guitarist and vocalist Richie Simpson (previously of Heavy Drapes and Baby’s Got A Gun), guitarist and vocalist Wayne Vermaak, bassist and vocalist Jon Priestley (previously of The Damned) and drummer and vocalist Billy Duncanson (Simpson’s bandmate in both previous bands), are about to make you an offer you can’t refuse with their latest double A-side single ‘I’m Not Your Slave’ / ‘Wild and Free’.

Recorded prior to the recent events concerning the coronavirus and race, but released in their midst on 17th June, both tracks seem particularly relevant to the times we are currently living through. ‘I’m Not Your Slave’ is a huge, dark and sinister number with a sound that appears to owe more to the key bands of the ‘80s gothic rock scene, The Mission and The Sisters of Mercy in particular, than to their punk and R&B roots. However, amidst all this bleakness, the band transmit a message of hope and striving for something more to a world that has decended into utter chaos. Meanwhile, ‘Wild and Free’ returns us to more familiar, but no less exhilirating, territory for a foot flat to the floor, white knuckle ride of a song about railing against authority and the banishing the many injustices of world into oblivion. “I’m gonna start a war against ignorance and hate”, states Coyne with utter conviction against a backdrop of glorious Stooges-esque double guitar interplay, pounding bass and crashing, unrelenting drums.

For obvious reasons, The Godfathers are taking a well-earned break from touring but will return in the New Year for a World Tour in support of a highly anticipated brand new album. If ‘I’m Not Your Slave’ and ‘Wild and Free’ are anything to go by, it is likely to be their best yet. www.facebook.com/ TheGodfathersFamily

67

Vicki Peterson Bangles, Psycho Sisters and Continental Drifters Interview by Kevin Burke.

68

Through the decades, all-female rock and roll bands have dominated the landscape, from the sixties with ​The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las and into the seventies with ​The Runaways ​and then The Go-Go’s. As each band ran their course another outfit would appear to carry the torch of prowess.

In 1985, ​The Go-Go’s ended their initial run and as if out of nowhere, another all-female, ass kicking band arrived on the scene, ​The Bangles They consisted of S ​ usanna Hoffs, Michael Steele, Debbi Peterson a​ nd​​ lastly guitarist ​Vicki Peterson.

Although formed five years earlier, in 1986, the band exploded and reached the dizzy heights of fame with a ​Prince ​penned track ‘Manic Monday’. Within three years and three albums, the band would break up, each going their separate waves until a reformation in 1998, followed by two further albums and reunion tours.

In late May, I spoke to guitarist ​Vicki Peterson, focusing naturally on her career with ​The Bangles, but more so what ​she​did post break-up with projects such as the cult supergroup ​ Psycho Sisters, Continental Drifters, her latest adventure ​Action Skulls and how ​The Bangles ​found their creative mojo again in the 21st century.

Thank you Vicki for taking time out to do this, and thank you for your

contribution to music over the years.

My pleasure.

I always believe there is a hint of Bonnie Raitt in your sound. As a guitarist, who would you cite as a major influence on your style of playing?

Bonnie Raitt is a spectacular guitarist and I only WISH I could play half as well, or with such natural feeling. I did read every Guitar Player magazine that had an article on her when I was in high school, but my tastes ran more to pop and rock than blues. I think I was probably most influenced by George Harrison’s playing. It felt right to me to play what the song suggested, rather than cut a blazing solo through it no matter what was happening in the rest of the recording.

There is that sibling connection between yourself and Debbi, but what was the chemistry like when The Bangles first got together?

Debbi and I had been playing together in a band since Debbi was still in high school, so by the time we started what became the Bangles, we had a solid working relationship. We shared a musical history and had many of the same influences. Of course, there is that big sister / little sister dynamic at play here, but we also benefited from what I call the sibling blend (that sonic magic that happens when siblings sing

69

together - see Beach Boys, Cowsills, Everly Brothers ...) and that helped ground the Bangles’ vocal sound.

In the early days, as an all female outfit, was it difficult for The Bangles to get taken seriously as a talented band of musicians?

With a couple of exceptions, I had chosen to play with other young women since day one, and was determined to have an all-female band that excelled for reasons other than gender. I think I was intentionally oblivious to most of the discriminations that were made against us. It was easier to push forward if I ignored it. But yes, it was difficult. To this day, I think there are people who don’t think the Bangles play instruments or can write songs, which seems incredible, I know. It was still a “novel” idea, I guess, for four women to make music together in the early 1980s.

One of the bands first major hits in Europe was ‘Manic Monday’ (‘Different Light’, 1986). When you

70

heard the song, what were your first impressions of it?

I thought the song was clever, and personal, and highly relatable. I loved the harpsichord sound that was on the demo. I also thought (hubris alert!) that it sounded like something that I could have written with Susanna. If only! What that meant to me was that, although I preferred to record songs that originated within the band itself, I felt connected to ‘Manic Monday’ and thought it was a good fit for us.

I saw The Bangles first time round at Slane Castle in Ireland, where the band supported Queen in 1986.

Playing in front of 80,000 that day, how surreal was it to reach such a pinnacle?

Wow, you were there?! I have to say that whenever we’re asked what our favorite performance was, or to name a highlight of our career, the Slane Castle festival is right up there. I remember looking out at the soggy, happy audience and thinking that it looked

like a pointillist painting, because the crowd spread so far into the distance it became just dots of rained-out color.

We were privileged to stand in the wings and watch Queen mesmerize that crowd. It was a masterclass.

On ‘Everything’ (1988), there is a definite sixties feel to the sound. Is the album as a whole the band’s homage to the music of their, and your youth?

Actually, I think every Bangles album has a Sixties feel - or should! That is collectively where our musical love lies.

By 1989, artistic differences aside, did you feel personally the band had achieved as much as it was going to at that point?

Nope! Again, my powers of denial were mighty, and I believed we had much farther to go. We had just come off a number one song [‘Eternal Flame’ (‘Everything’)], were about to tour Australia ... I was not ready to throw in

the towel. A couple of my bandmates felt differently.

Following The Bangles split, you played in both The Continental Drifters and The Psycho Sisters. Was it a more relaxed experience than the pressure attached to being a Bangle?

I think if you look at my outfit choices, you’ll have your answer. I went from mini dresses with garters holding up thigh-high boots to overalls and plaid flannel shirts. I should be clear and say that both fashion choices still reflect a true side of who I am, but yes, the early ‘90s and my time with the Continental Drifters and Psycho Sisters was like falling back into a warm pool. I was surrounded by extraordinary musicians whom I adored and it was music (Americana, folk, rock, harmonies galore) that I really connected with.

It was exactly what I needed at that moment.

The Go-Go’s tour of ‘94-’95, filling in for Charlotte Caffey. Were you sorry it was so short-lived?

71

This was a novel experience for me - to be the “side chick” and just have a job to do, with no worries about the larger picture. I really, really enjoyed touring with the Go-Go’s, loved learning Charlotte’s guitar parts (and trying to emulate her piano parts on guitar), thought it was a kick to be in the “other” all-girl band from LA. (there’s a wink in there). Charlotte had originally asked me to do just a short leg of the tour, so I was pleased that I did as many shows as I did, including dates in London and Europe, TV appearances, etc.

In 1998, with the reformation of The Bangles, were you weary or anxious about getting back together in case the same problems that led to the break up were still prevalent?

I resisted jumping back in with the very people I had been resistant to let go of. In conversations with Susanna, I wanted to make sure that we would be creating new music, not just touring with ‘80s nostalgia packages, which was something I was being pitched

72

frequently and had no real interest in doing. But we had honest, substantive talks about what we wanted out of a reforming, and soon we were writing new songs and getting together in the studio.

The 2003 comeback album ‘Doll Revolution’ was a well-received release, containing quality songs.

How did newer songs such as ‘Stealing Rosemary’ stand up on stage next to the older classics?

You always expect that little energy bubble-burst when you announce that you’re going to “play something new” onstage. I think many of the songs on ‘Doll Revolution’ and ‘Sweetheart of the Sun’ [2011] fit seamlessly into a live Bangles show, but we were careful about it. In the end, the audience really does want to hear the songs they know by heart, and I get that.

The most recent Bangles release, ‘Sweetheart of the Sun’ can be easily viewed as the band’s best work. Do you feel, even as a three piece, it is

The Psycho Sisters

is the Bangles most collaborative work?

We did collaborate on almost every aspect of ‘Sweetheart of the Sun’ and it is one of my faves. We started tracking the album with Matthew Sweet, and then moved into home studios (Susanna’s and mine) to finish vocals and guitars. We worked sporadically and a bit piecemeal and it took awhile to finish, but that’s how it had to be, prioritizing kids and other aspects of our lives at the time.

The Psycho Sisters album ​‘Up On the Chair, Beatrice’ (2014) with Susan Cowsill ​is a modern classic.

Can we expect more or did that release put the project to bed?

I adore Susan Cowsill and the Psycho Sisters! We joke that it took us 20 years to make that record, although that is technically true. We treated it as if it was created in 1992 and lost, mysteriously reappearing in 2012.

Susan and I are real-life sisters (in-law) and I would never say we were

anything but Psycho. So, yes to more Psycho Sisters (as far as I am concerned)!

When this pandemic passes, have you anything lined up?

I have a musical ménage-a-trois with my husband John Cowsill and our friend, musician and actor Bill Mumy.

Bill wrote a dozen or so pandemic themed songs in two weeks during the Quarantine, John and I sang harmonies all over ‘em, and we (the ACTION SKULLS) released a full-length album called ‘A Different World’ in March.

We’re also very nearly finished with what was really supposed to be our second record, so the third (or “second” second) Action Skulls record will be out likely in the fall, or early next year.

Stay tuned!

Thank you Vicki, I wish you all the best and stay safe.

Thank you, you as well! www.facebook.com/VickiBangle

73

Inside

Chamber Interview by Peter Dennis.

74

One of the most incendiary metalcore acts on the scene today are Chamber. With new vocalist Jacob Lilly at the helm the band are going from strength to strength. Having terrorised UK audiences earlier this year whilst touring with Counterparts, I thought it was high time to catch up with the aforementioned Jacob.

Hi Jacob, I know you’re new to the band but can you give me a brief history of Chamber?

Initially our guitar player Gabe [Manuel] was in another band called Hanging Room, which was also from Nashville. They broke up because members had life changes, so Gabe was uncertain if he wanted to start another band but he hooked up with drummer Taylor [Carpenter] and bassist Chris [smith], they were both in other bands, but they got together and started writing tunes and later down the line I joined …

I understand you joined the band mid-tour. How easy was that?

It was kinda difficult but I knew Gabe for a while and being there with him he was a big help. When I did the first show with Chamber, it was really bad ... I only knew half the words so I had my phone by the kick drum lit up and I’d scroll through my phone to see which lyrics fit where. But the third or fourth gig in it felt good, it felt like we

were meant to play together.

How have the fans taken to you? Has it been warming?

Yeah, basically it was there first tour so there’s not a whole bunch of people who have seen Chamber without me, I’d say more people have seen us with me, some people preferred the old vocalist but who cares? It’s just yelling into a microphone!

Why did you decide to re-record the vocals on your 2018 debut EP, ‘Hatred Softly Spoken’?

Once [record label] Pure Noise contacted us, in my mind it was either re-record the vocals now or re-record them for a re-release in five years time, so in my mind, it was either now or then. I think it made sense and seems how they wanted to put out a record we recorded a new track and re-recorded the old stuff for release.

How does the line-up gel now? Are you all really good friends?

Yeah, our older guitarist, Taylor, decided to leave the band and we got our good friend Mike in to play guitar.

There’s some days where we’re like ‘Hey, I need some space’ and that’s where good friends come in: they understand that. We all get along in well in the van and on stage we have fun and I think that’s why we’re all here.

75

Nashville is not my first thought when thinking of hardcore music.

Do you feel isolated being in a heavy scene?

The hardcore scene in Nashville is pretty good, there’s a lot of bands coming through ... Cloverfield are a younger band coming through, it’s pretty decent. I’m from North Carolina but every time we play Nashville it’s amazing. We played there on New Years Eve with Chemical Fix (from Philly). On New Year’s Eve, you think everybody’s going to drink Budweisers on Broadway but there was eighty kids there on a Monday and you can’t really beat that anywhere. It’s neat.

How did the environment of Nashville shape Chamber’s sound?

I’m not sure if it did because there’s so much Country and Western music going on. I think Taylor, Mike and bass player Chris, just from going to hardcore shows when they were younger to see bands that they really cared about made them want to start a band.

At the moment hardcore and metalcore seem an unstoppable force.

Do you think it’s symptomatic of society that people are finding an outlet in this aggressive music?

Yes, I think so. There’s a lot of crazy things going on with politics, especially in America, I guess a lot of bands are

76

coming out and playing at that higher level, not just in their garage. There’s so many bands like Knocked Loose who are playing to so many more people than I would ever imagine I’d play to or even they’d play to. You start a band and you want to put out a CD and that’s it and it’s got so much bigger, it’s not mainstream but record labels are helping out and I think that’s a big part. Also, life is hard and that’s the reason I got into heavy music, bands would talk about hardships and politics and bands that were not cool but were cool to me.

How would you describe Chamber’s sound?

I think Chamber is a metal band, we have the fast parts, we have the circle pit beats, we have the noodle-y crazy bits and we have the breakdowns.

I would say were just a metal band, maybe metalcore but metal makes more sense than any other genre.

What influences do you draw upon to create your sound?

We all love Gojira, Deftones. Me personally I love Converge, Turmoil.

We like Slipknot and that Gojira / Deftones tour was announced yesterday and we were all like: “We have to be home for this!”

How about lyrical inspiration?

Mike and Gabe work on that and it all

comes from personal hardships whether it be relationships or what we dealt with when we were younger or sometimes it’s experiences from being on tour...just hardships through life. We do have a political song on our next record so all three of us sit down and write and bounce ideas off each other.

For me it’s growing up with a single mother or a deadbeat father, trying to deal with life. I grew up with a single mother which I hated but I think it could have been so much worse.

How does it feel to open yourself up like that in your lyrics?

I think in reality we’re all vulnerable, just because we get onstage in front of 50-200 kids a night, we want people to come up and talk to us about our experiences and even if they don’t they can realise that everyone goes through this. That was cool for me, bands who said ‘this is how I feel and this is what I write about and if you feel that way come to our shows’ and I liked that. I think playing any type of music you’re vulnerable, your writing an album, putting months of time into it and you’re going to release it: You like it and everyone hates it, that’s what makes you vulnerable.

Chamber has a lot of riffs, and that’s something easy to look over, it’s riff-riff-riff and people who listen to your music want to hear something that comes back like a chorus or a melody.

That’s not something were doing to be mainstream or bigger, we just want to show more musicianship. We went into the studio and did some really cool stuff: It’s Chamber but it’s bigger, better and heavier too.

How do you walk the line between experimenting and keeping your fan base happy?

That’s a difficult question ... I don’t know who our fan base is. Of course we have some because we’re here but to me personality as long as we’re all having a good time, somebody who likes chamber ... we wrote the songs for them and not anybody else.

Thank you for a wonderful interview and we wish you all the best for the future. www.facebook.com/chambertn

You have a new album dropping later this year. What can people expect?

The new album is more structured, for sure. We went into the studio and

77

Gary Lucas

Grace at the Captain’s Table Interview by Kevin Burke.

78

Almost four decades ago, a young guitarist by the name of Gary Lucas became a part of rock folklore, finding his first outlet inside the magic and wild mystery that surrounded Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet). After two albums, ​‘Doc at the Radar Station’ ​(1980) and ‘Ice Cream for Crow’ (​ 1982) and the Captain’s withdrawal from music, Gary Lucas began carving out a career built on his own talent. His unique style of innovative guitar playing has earned him great acclaim: “​... perhaps the greatest living electric guitar player” (Daniel Levitin).

In September of this year comes a long awaited compilation, ‘​ The Essential Gary Lucas’. ​This 36-track album looks back over G ​ ary’s​40 year career, including his work with Beefheart and​Gods and Monsters, the starting point of his collaboration with the late J​ eff Buckley. Along with ​Jeff, Gary ​forged the early sound and music that would become ​ Buckley’s 1994 masterpiece, ‘​ Grace’. ​ We should also not discard the thirty albums which G ​ ary Lucas ​has released under his own steam and the fifty plus other collaborations.

On the 29th of May, the 23rd anniversary of the passing of J​ eff Buckley, ​I spoke to Gary. With the aim of looking back at those times in his career when he was viewed as a sideman, but has proved to be so

much more. From the get-go, the interview was a masterclass in humility, a down-to-earth discussion about the incredible musical journey of a prestigious talent.

You have your latest album, ‘​ The Essential Gary Lucas’ ​coming in September. Is it your way of celebrating your four decades in music?

Yeah it is, because the earliest track on there is a live track of me in New York with Beefheart doing this piece ‘Flavor Bud Living’, which put me on the map as a player. I think if there was one moment where I kind of emerged, and people were paying attention. The record that was out, ‘​ Doc at the Radar Station’ ​was my first appearance on any kind of album, and it was on the Virgin label ​. Yeah, you know, we toured in the UK and a bit in Europe and then in the US. So that was when we played in New York. It was a great moment because the band would leave the stage and Don (Van Vliet) would introduce me and I would come out cold, and try whip through this piece.

You know usually you need to get warmed up a little bit, but often I didn’t even have that luxury. So, I was just flying by the seat of my pants. Yeah, that gave me a taste of what I wanted to do, and this is what I should do, and it spurred me to keep going.

Did you feel as a guitar player, working your first gig with Captain

79

Beefheart helped you develop a unique style?

Yes, totally, in order to play his style of music on a guitar, I had to invent my own little technique. Because his basic idea was, as he said to me once, “​ a guitar is merely a stand up piano”. ​A lot of the music he gave me then were pieces that he banged out on the piano once, and then tape himself doing it.

Then he handed the tapes to me and said, “Here! Learn this on the guitar”.

I’d have to stretch my fingers to try and get the proper voicing and a lot of people who I have seen on the internet playing are really playing it incorrectly.

They approximate it. In order to really do it, comes from knuckle-busting positions of the hand I didn’t even know you could do. My history as a player was like a straight flat picking style, I like rock guitar, I love folk and blues too. But I do it all with a flat pick.

Then a little bit later on when I got up to University, I had some friends who were very accomplished finger-pickers.

I don’t know how they learned to do it, but they had it down and they used

80

some metal picks. I couldn’t do that exactly, but I got my own thing going just using my flesh, my fingertips. So with my right hand I became a lot more active, and it kind of developed my finger picking technique that way.

When I got into the Beefheart situation, I was like, ‘okay’, I know how to do this, to get these sort of two-handed piano pieces he’s banging out on the six string, but I’m also going to have to stretch with the left hand, some of those notes there was like a big division in register. So what you hear on ‘Evening Bell’ [‘Ice Cream for Crow’] is my approximation at best. Then it was later coached and modified by Don, like “You got to use my exploding notes here to play correctly” and I’m like, “well, what’s that?” [Don would say] “Play every note like it had no relation to the previous note, or the subsequent notes!” He wanted a real like machine gun-like attack like you spitting out notes on the guitar.

I had heard something similar and that he had done the same when

creating ‘Trout Mask Replica’ (1969).

He taught the guys on a piano and they learned it that way, so he always kept to that format?

That’s right. I think the individual band members should get a lot of credit. He [Don] could get some really great things going himself, like on a harmonica and sax. A lot of it though with this piano, he couldn’t repeat it, but he could get on it and really improvise some beautiful things. but it was unrepeatable to him, they were one-offs, just captured in the moment and then he said, “Okay, learn this!”.

What you are learning is something that would have causes, and leaps, and maybe some mistakes. Although he would never admit to it. He was of the ‘first thought - best thought’ school, the Allen Ginsberg School, whatever pops into your head get it down on paper.

When you were recording ‘Ice Cream for Crow’, was there any hint that this was going to be the Captain’s last album?

Well, I guess so, but I was in denial, he never came out and said it. Once we finished it I said “what about the tour?” and he said [impersonating Don], “I hate touring, I don’t wanna go back out there!” He made money, I can tell you.

He liked being on the stage, but the comings and goings, on and off, was not something he was into. It was hard to get him to budge out of the breakfast nooks in these motels. He just didn’t want to climb back into the car, or two cars as it was, that’s how we did it. In lieu of touring, I said, “Well, why don’t we make a video?” because MTV had just started. So he said “Yeah, let’s do that, okay”, so we brainstormed what became the ‘Ice Cream For Crow’ video. He said [again in Don’s voice], “We’ll have spiders, rubber spiders, and they’ll come down over Cliff Martinez’s head.”

In retrospect, it’s a great video, and I know it was influential. I can think of two instances. That scene at the beginning with the tumbleweed, that was his idea and that was picked up by the Coen brothers for their film ‘The

81

Big Lebowski’ [1998]. And they used a Beefheart song on the soundtrack.

The Dude is listening to ‘Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles’ [‘Clear Spot’, 1972] in his apartment in one scene.

My friend Anton Corbin who took a lot of photos, he took the classic one in the desert that’s on the cover of Ice Cream For Crow. He made a film with George Clooney called The American about an assassin in Europe. The very last scene is like a bird, some CGI effect of a spirit or something that flies up out of the dead corpse of the guy, just like the end of the Ice Cream for Crow video, where you see a little crow take off out of a tree. We were really lucky to get that shadow right as the sun was going down in the desert.

Did you manage to stay in touch with Don afterward he retired?

I did for a year or so, and then I quit because ... it’s a long story. You see, he didn’t want to do anything and Virgin was still interested. So I took my guitar out to visit him and he was just incredibly difficult to be around. Plus, I

82

had drummed up business with a very prominent gallery in New York City, who could do an exhibition of his paintings. It was a break for us. So I spent a week visiting him and his wife and cataloging all the paintings and drawings going back to the sixties that they had stashed up in their attic.

He was irascible to be around, I don’t really want to dwell on this. I just thought it isn’t healthy anymore to stay.

Then I got back to New York and I just wrote him a letter. He freaked and called me one last time and said, “What are you doing abandoning me?” I was like “Don, we can do an album, and I’ll play on it ‘cos Virgin wanna do it”.

And then I said “I got you this Gallery in New York, you can go have a show.

I just don’t want to be involved in the day-to-day.” I never felt comfortable with it [being Don’s manager], I’m not a businessman despite what people think. I had to do some of it because I put myself in a position of representing people like Don for a minute, but only because he asked me to do it. It wasn’t like a commercial proposition. But I think that was it, I never spoke to him

again. I think I waved to him once from a distance through another person and he waved back. In my heart I treasure what I’d done and I just want to remember the good stuff. I wanted to do my own music and one thing about working with Don he was incredibly possessive and jealous. And if you had ideas to do any music on your own, he was very upset by it. He went out of his way to keep Eric Drew Feldman off the album, because Eric was playing with the Snakefingers at that point. People were trying to make a living and you can’t make a living waiting round for Don. So anyway, had I not really made a clean break then I couldn’t have become Gary Lucas in the way I did.

What you did afterwards, with Gods and Monsters, then with Nick Cave, Lou Reed and John Cale. Having worked with all of these names, is there anyone left you would still like to collaborate with?

I worked with some of the greats, and they were great. I had the opportunities to work with them and I feel very

blessed that they saw something in me to make them want to work with me.

I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I’d love to work with Van Morrison, and I’d love to work with [Bob] Dylan, I think their situation is such that it’s unlikely unless some mutual friend lobbies for it to happen [laughs]. I love to work with younger artists, they have a lot less baggage. Especially now, I can’t force anything to happen, I’m doing what I can do. I’m recording on my iPhone here in my apartment, and I’m writing new music all the time and posting online. I’m just trying to keep my name out there.

One thing you love is touring. Do you miss it now in the midst of this pandemic?

Yeah, I mean that’s where it all happens. You come alive. But things aren’t as they were, there are too many distractions with the internet and social media, a lot of different entertainment options than going to see an artist. But, I think that it’s still the best place to make new fans, and to get some

83

feedback so you’re not feeling like you’re doing it all in a vacuum. I mean, I love to meet people. Now it’s come to an adventure every time I go on the road. There’s a romance about it.

Do you come up with many ideas on stage?

Sure, I try to change everything up.

I never play the same piece the same way twice, and I try to improvise within the piece.

Is that sort of improvisation similar to your approach with Captain Beefheart?

I have a musician friend, who’s a very good composer and he saw it and he said, “I could never do this” and it’s because his whole thing was improvisation around, like a jazz musician. You got to have your head and then you wing it, then you come back to the head. that you have [explaining improv]. There are various ways of doing it but improvisation, with Beefheart, what sounds

84

improvised, or the only real improvisation going on, with that record is Don, singing and playing on his horn. Once in a while we snuck in stuff when he wasn’t looking. I mean sometimes he’d be vague with his instructions, he’d just walk off saying “You know what to do”. If he heard it and he didn’t like it you would know “What you fucking around with my music for?”

I didn’t realize this until earlier on today that it’s actually 23 years since Jeff Buckley’s passing I am sorry, it must have been so hard for you.

There was a creative click between the two of you.

It was really tragic. I was really broken up to hear that. Well, I didn’t even believe it for a few days. I was in denial, like, “Oh, you know Jeff, he’s just taking a break, he’s just disappeared for a few days, he’ll be back” So, then when it was confirmed, I just broke down, you know, for about a month [an obvious pain in Gary’s voice]. But you know, I always refer to

Jeff, and play some of that music that we shared. The fans keep the torch burning. Too many young people don’t even know who he is, and that’s like unbelievable to me.

I think your book ​‘Touched By Grace -​ ​My Time with Jeff Buckley’ (Jawbone Press) has become the go-to book about Jeff Buckley and the creation of ‘Grace’. Can you tell me a little about it?

I got the opportunity to write it, and I put down everything I could remember.

Once I finished it I said “Damn, I should have mentioned that”. But I think it’s a definitive statement of what it was like from my point of view to be involved with Jeff Buckley. I tried to keep it honest and real throughout, and despite it not being like a typical rock biography, because I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the book that reflected the warts and all. I didn’t spare myself.

I was just keeping it real. Yeah, and then people who read it, you know, the response has been , “Yeah, that’s probably right”, that’s probably

accurate. I think that has been because it has that ring-of-truth to it, at least from my point of view. I got one shot to get this right. I’m glad you like it.

Your album ‘Songs to No One 1991 1992’ came out in 2002 and that kind of reaffirmed the connection between yourself and Jeff, and what a lot of people didn’t know also. Did you feel similarly to the book that it was something that needed doing?

The problem was Sony, and their PR and marketing, maybe Jeff to a degree, just didn’t really want to share much.

So, they quickly disappeared me from the narrative, the story of Jeff Buckley, as far as what they told the fans and the press. I mean, it happened [that way], I’m certainly not the first person it happened to. Therefore a book was a good chance to just set the record straight once and for all from my point of view. And if you want to know about it, there it is, you know, boom! It’s there waiting to be discovered.

There are rarities on the second disc

85

of ‘The Essential Gary Lucas album’. Is there anything from the ‘Grace’ era?

Yeah, you know, I have the ‘Grace’ demo that came out on ‘​ Songs to No One’. ​I have a track with a symphony orchestra in Amsterdam done with a Dutch singer. So that’s two of the Jeff related tracks. Unfortunately, I have more, but his estate was not willing to allow me to put them on there, so what can I say? Thing about it, it’s unfortunate but I would not be controlled by an estate. As far as getting my music out there, and getting my story out there and not getting steamrolled over and they keep trying to do it. I wrote a few letters to Sony when they put out this ‘​ You and I’ ​[Posthumous Jeff Buckley] record [2016], they marketed it as saying it’s the first-ever recording of ‘Grace’.

Well, I’m like “I beg your pardon, I have this record called ‘​ Songs to No One’​and there you’ll hear the demo”.

So like ‘what the fuck?’, surely the product manager knew it, everybody knew it. So a guy wrote back from Legacy, “Well, it was certainly not intentional”. But the damage is done.

I spent a good two days trying to find reviews of it in every English language citation reviewing that album, and if there was a place to write notes, to correct them in a respectful way. It was just another indignity I had to suffer along the way, as to not get steamrolled over because I refuse to die that way. I mean, there’s a good chance I might

86

yet. I’m like well when I die they are going to say ex-Captain Beefheart and maybe a little footnote saying ex-Jeff Buckley [laughs]. It’s funny ‘cos I’ve done so much other work.

I interject: That’s undeniable, 30 solo albums, at least 50 collaborations ...

Yeah, and they are still trying to write me up as just a sideman.

Upon that, we slowly wound down our conversation, exchanging pleasantries and goodwill for the future. I came away with the sense that Gary Lucas is an incredibly honest person, and not just a talented musician, but also with the idea that his impact on music will make sure his legacy remains more than a footnote. garylucas.com www.facebook.com/ Expubident

German Shepherd Records Presents:

88

Electronica Now!

A good proportion of German Shepherd Records releases fall into the broad category of electronica.

Of course the electronica genre in itself comprises multiple sub-genres ranging from ambient/soundtrack music, via pop and rock, all the way through to techno and EBM. The German Shepherd roster includes a wide variety of artists representing that broad church of music. In this article, we explore the recent work of some of those musicians.

Moongoose The latest recruit to the German Shepherd roster, Moongoose was established in 1999 by David “Yorkie” Palmer, former bassist and producer for platinum selling indie giants Space.

Palmer also was the producer of Liverpool legends Shack’s last album, 2006’s ‘On the Corner of Miles & Gil’ (for Noel Gallagher’s Sour Mash label).

He has also produced many other bands, most notably Seven Seals, Ivan Campo and Windmill.

The main core of Mongoose is Yorkie whose previous work other than with Space includes The Dance Party, Egypt For Now, The Balcony and Windmill.

There is also Paul Cavanagh, who is also a member of The Balcony, but also known for The Room, Gloss and Cabin in The Woods and who is currently working with The Room In The Wood.

The third member of the team is video maestro Mark Jordan, who has worked

with Derek Jarman and ATV and is also closely associated with The Room in The Wood.

Moongoose have released five singles, three EPs and four albums up to 2019.

The music is totally instrumental and impressionistic and blends modern recording techniques with traditional instruments and approaches to recording.

On their last album, ‘Tokyo Glow’, the band completed their sci-fi trilogy and ruminations on the encroachment and reliance of technology on modern life, with a look at Japan and its many wonders and pitfalls.

Moongoose joined German Shepherd in early 2020 for the release of two EPs ‘Yellow’ and ‘Black’. Both releases will support the homelessness charity Shelter, with all proceeds from sales and streaming being directed to assist the vital work of that organisation.

The EPs focus on cinema, with 1970s Giallo movies from Italy being subject of ‘Yellow’ and 1940s and 1950 American Film Noir being the focus of ‘Black’. The Giallo films were full of terror and suspense and they usually had groundbreaking visuals and stunning Soundtracks. Film Noir was wonderfully atmospheric and very bleak. The Moongoose recordings capture the unique qualities of both of these periods in cinema history.

89

The Junta (pictured on page 88) The Junta is the alter-ego of Salford musician John “Monty” Montague.

Monty, aside from delivering electronica via The Junta also plays bass in two other German Shepherd bands KIT B and Positronik and is a DJ on Salford City Radio and can also be seen DJing in local venues on a regular basis . Inspired by the electronic masters like Jean Michel Jarre, John Foxx, Cabaret Voltaire, and early Human League, Monty delivers dance focused techno music occasionally bringing guest vocalists to the mix. His first two albums delivered driving beats and epic sounds with his music being used to support video installations at events in Manchester City Centre. He has recently been remixing his earlier recordings and developing eye catching videos to support them.

His latest album, ‘J3’ is due in the autumn and has been trailed with a recent single, ‘Tech Noir’. He can be seen gigging regularly and has played at many key venues across the north west including the Salford Music Festival. A keen student of electronic music, Monty’s one man show is a master class in the genre delivering tunes that inspire the listener to move with the beat.

Jed Jed Stephens is a multi-instrumentalist

90

with a passion for electronic music of all kinds, his music is a mix of electro, techno, D&B, house and ambient. He has been a song writer, producer and performer for many years, previous bands include Bass Bandits and Exchange, he is currently in the North West UK based Synthpop covers band Elektrio.

Jed’s musical influences range from Sibelius and Bartok through to The Chemical Brothers and Orbital, via The Beatles, Kraftwerk, New Order, 808 State, Frankie Knuckles, Arthur Baker and Vince Clarke.

March 2020 saw the release of his debut album with German Shepherd Records, ‘Black Gold Texas Tea’, which combines soundtrack styled themes in the spirit of John Carpenter with dance floor friendly more upbeat pieces. His live performances are stunning with a state of the art lighting rig creating a memorable audio-visual experience.

Night Operations Alongside Jed Stephens in Exchange was singer and multi instrumentalist Mike Powell, whose solo project is Night Operations. He began in 2011 with the release of the long-deleted ‘Colour & Number’ EP on Prescribed Records.

Mike was previously the keyboard player for KIT B, and has in the past

performed and released music with several other bands including the aforementioned Exchange, The Shelltones (2007-2011) and Five Days Of Static (2003-04) as well as releasing two singles under his own name, ‘Behind the Wheel’ (2010) and ‘Dancefloor’ (2011).

The Screaming Love Collective At the core of The Screaming Love Collective is Bryn Thorburn. He is the drummer for German Shepherd artists The Mind Sweepers and has years of experience both playing and writing in bands including the Glasgow based self-proclaimed art noise terrorists Spacehopper and the Edinburgh based psychedelic band Gram Solo. He also has a side project called Øre.

The Screaming Love Collective are described as a psychedelic punk rock groove sensation. The project was originally masterminded by Bryn Thorburn with label mate Issac Navaro with Bryn taking the sole lead after the first release. Relentlessly prolific Bryn has released eleven albums to date with a new one planned for the summer of 2020.

Repetition, found sounds and driving hypnotic beats are key elements of the Screaming Love Collective sound.

Examples of all of the music in this article can be found on the artists pages at: www.germanshepherdrecords.com

Moongoose

91

Frenchy’s Rants This Month: The Day Hate Came to Town

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

92

I keep hearing people saying ‘We live in strange times’: I think we have always lived in strange times, going from one cultural revolution to the next, throwing some political issues in the melting pot and hoping we all come out better off. Problem is, we don’t: some get left behind and most cultural revolutions end up being just new fashions … but new fashions that open doors to many, and it all started with the famous British Invasion in the 1960s.

The British Invasion was a cultural tornado of the mid-1960s, when rock music acts from the U.K and other aspects of British culture, became popular in the United States and significant to the rising ‘counterculture’ / ’underground’ on both sides of the Atlantic. Pop and rock groups such as the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals and actors such as Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole, etc, as well as fashion icons such as Mary Quant, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton became the rage in the USA. Not only British groups, mind: Australian bands such as the Easybeats and the Seekers were put in the same bracket and it also helped American bands such as the Beach Boys, the Byrds as well as garage rock, folk-rock and Motown. It was a PHENOMENON: anything British was fashionable. But it couldn’t last: the Vietnam war in particular shifted attitudes from the ‘groovy’ and ‘cool’ to the more sobering ‘No War’. One of

the events that damaged British culture everywhere was Eric Clapton’s drunken rant in 1976: it was so bad that I can’t bring myself to write his words, all that hatred coming from someone who was nicknamed ‘God’!.

He later ‘apologised’ (kind of) but the damage was done: it gave birth to Rock Against Racism (R.A.R) which sparked / strengthened punk in the UK. R.A.R (an organisation started by Red Saunders, Roger Huddle and others) did some fantastic work in the late ‘70s in tandem with the Anti-Nazi League (ANL): I remember the April 1978 march to Victoria Park: we started in Trafalgar Square and marched the few miles to Victoria park. There must have been 80/100 000 people there, loads of them punk and Rastas. I thought the revolution had arrived, I thought we were going to change the world! The Clash, Steel Pulse, Misty In Roots, TRB and many more played for free: for obvious reasons, punks had allied themselves to Rastas and reggae and many thought we were a force to be reckoned with. We were comrades.

Again, in September of the same year, another march went from Hyde Park to Brockwell Park where Aswad, Elvis Costello and Stiff Little Fingers played. I’m not going to go through all the events they organised and all the organisations it gave birth to. If you’re interested, look it up. But the thing is that we were united: it didn’t matter what colour you were, where you came from, all that mattered was that your

93

heart was in the right place. Sadly, the party had to end and I now wonder if we did make any difference at all.

I look around the music industry (as it’s where I work) and I don’t see many non-whites in position of power. For an industry that was ahead of its time on such matters, it has made very little real progress since the ‘70s. Yeah, there are some Afro-American stars, even some Afro-Caribbean ones and K-Pop is getting massive but on the executive side, nothing much has changed: on the whole, the music industry is still very WASP. I might be wrong but I don’t think there has ever been a non-white president of the B.P.I, the industry’s trade association. Considering all the breakthroughs made during the ‘60s and ‘70s, it doesn’t look like much has changed except for those who did it themselves like Snoop, Sean Coombs, the good folks at Trojan, etc. Another missed opportunity. I’m not in a position to say ‘we should do this’ or ‘we should do that’ because every time I do, I get a whole lot of pressure and negativity, a lot of people telling me ‘don’t say anything, stay well away from this’; but are we being part of the problem if we are not part of those who speak out? I don’t think I’m stupid (although I can think of quite a few that would disagree), so I know it’s impossible for me to even start to understand what people who have a different skin colour go through, every day, at every opportunity. I won’t insult them by pretending I do. Still, I’m in

94

their corner like I have always been and I’m not alone: like many (albeit not enough), I judge a person on his / her worth rather than his / her race / origin.

Shouldn’t everyone be judged by what they can bring to the whole rather than being excluded because of the few?

This is a thorny, difficult situation that has been hundreds of years in the making: many don’t know what to do or say so they don’t say anything at all.

People who suffer from racism have got to tell us what to do, how we can help. Many don’t want to get involved because they are afraid to put a foot wrong. So nobody does anything until a moron comes along and gets all the other morons to vote for him. Is that what you want? Isn’t it better to make the occasional faux-pas for the right reasons rather than make no step forward at all?

Because if that’s what you want, it’s what you gonna get ... unless we all speak out.

www.flickniferecords.co.uk Page 92: Frenchy (third from right) and friends before seting off for the R.A.R march in Trafalgar Square, 1978.

White Riot Peeling Away the Union Jack

Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Rarely has the timing of a film’s release been as apt as that of director Rubika Shah’s documentary ‘White Riot’. The film transports us back to an era in Britain’s history of high unemployment and industrial turmoil, coupled with a shift to the right that made the National Front a prominent fixture on the streets and in parliament. It tells the story of how, in August 1976, the grassroots anti-fascist organisation Rock Against Racism was born out of these troubled times in an attempt to unite black and white through music and went on to the stage Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park on 30th April 1978. With appearances from The Clash, Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse and others, the concert has gone on to be regarded as one of the most legendary of all time.

With ‘White Riot’, Shah sets the scene with an absolute passion for her subject matter and result manages to be in equal measures entertaining, educational and empowering. All the key moments that led up to the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Victoria Park concert are delved into, including Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous 20th April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ criticising the then current rates of immigration to the UK and a drunken Eric Clapton’s impassioned, racist rant on stage at the Birmingham Odeon on 5th August 1976 declaring his support for Powell.

Also discussed are the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival race riots, which directly inspired The Clash’s 1977 debut single ‘White Riot’, which, in turn, gave this film its name. Meanwhile, the accompanying archive footage is often brutal but always extraordinary.

Clash drummer Topper Headon is just one of the many people to offer their views, recalling how ‘White Riot’ was taken completely out of context by the right-wing, who focused on the word “white”. However, the greatest insight of all into Rock Against Racism and the events and attitudes that brought the organisation about come from one of its founders, Red Saunders: “Our job was to peel away the Union Jack to reveal the Swastika”. Fast forward to 2020 and, sadly, this statement still seems incredibly relevent. www.modernfilms.com/whiteriot

95

Forever Closer: A Reappraisal of Joy Division’s Second Album

By Paul Foden.

96

This day has been getting Closer for years. I have no Control over it; it’s just something I felt compelled to write, or something like that. The Substance of my subconscious, I suppose. Right, I’ll spare you any further suffering and just get on with it.

“Where Have They Been?”

On the heels of their successful 1979 debut album ‘Unknown Pleasures’, writing its follow-up might have been a daunting task, due to the weight of expectation placed upon the band by themselves, their record label and fans, alike. However, vocalist Ian Curtis was actually enjoying the writing process, focussing upon the literary works of a plethora of authors, and found it easier that writing their debut album, as Joy Division manager Rob Gretton attested to, some years later: “With ‘Closer’, Ian abandoned the cut and paste method he’d used for some of ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Instead, he wrote about subjects that really mattered to him, feelings that he was experiencing, and he didn’t exactly suffer from writer’s block. You could give him half an hour, and he’d come up with a whole new verse or chorus. All that, while suffering grand mal seizures on an almost daily basis, by then.

Incredible, really, when you think about it”.

Although the album was recorded

between the 18th and 30th March 1980, much of the album’s material was written during the latter half of 1979 and, indeed, those songs (‘Atrocity Exhibition’, ‘Passover’, ‘Colony’, ‘A Means to An End’, ‘Twenty-Four Hours’) were played live at some of their 1979/80 tour and various other gigs in support of ‘Unknown Pleasures’.

“This Is The Way, Step Inside” The album was recorded in London, at Britannia Row Studios in London, the band staying in adjoining flats on York Street, on the edge of the West End, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and manager Rob Gretton sharing one flat; Bernard Sumner (sleeping on the dining room table!), Ian Curtis and, Curtis’ girlfriend, Annik Honore, the other. Cushty. Camaraderie within the band was seemingly as good as ever, with their usual practical jokes in evidence, as these excerpts from an interview with Uncut magazine attest: Peter Hook: “Me, Barney and Rob had a terribly evil sense of humour, we would wind Ian up. From a working class point of view, we were used to getting our own way with the women we knew. Then along came Annik, who was a strong woman. She just went, ‘Fuck off!’ I’d never met anyone like Annik before. We were always messing about and she hated it. She’s Belgian, for fuck’s sake. They weren’t blessed with a sense of humour.”

97

Bernard Sumner: “We were very much a band, but very much not a band. The way I like to think of it was, we were all stood on our own pedestals, and there was no cross-fertilisation.”

My favourite, since you ask (You were going to ask, weren’t you?) is ‘Twenty Four Hours’.

Again, the album was produced by the maverick Martin Hannett at the knobs and sliders, plonking his own unique fingerprint on their sound, whether they wanted it, or not (they didn’t). Hannett, alongside John Caffery and Michael Johnson, also engineered the album.

After recording the album, the band supported The Stranglers at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park where, according to Hooky “The Stranglers’ crew behaved like utter bastards ... swanning about as if they owned the place”, and the Factory residency at the Moonlight in Hampstead, the same night; Ian suffered seizures at both gigs.

At the very least it was is distinctive, as not many album sleeves had such well-detailed sculptures on their covers; a cross, or an angel, sometimes, yes, but never something as ornate as this.

The image was taken in 1978 by Pierre Wolff, of the Appiani Family tomb in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, in Genoa, and which bassist Hooky finally visited in 2015.

Peter Saville and Martyn Atkins both designed the sleeve. Saville later said of it:

Joy Division’s final live performance would prove to be at the University of Birmingham on 2nd May 1980, after which they went on a break before touring North America but, on 20th May, the day before they were to fly to New York, Ian took his own life, spelling the end for Joy Division.

Track Listing: Side One: ‘Atrocity Exhibition’; ‘Isolation’; ‘Passover’; ‘Colony’; ‘A Means to An End’; Side 2: ‘Heart And Soul’; ‘Twenty Four Hours’; ‘The Eternal’; ‘Decades’.

98

The Album Sleeve

“I showed the band a selection of photographs and I guess this one worked, for Ian. Perhaps if I’d been sent a draft of the lyrics, and had any kind of sensitivity, I might have thought, I’m not going to indulge that route. Let’s have some trees, instead.”

Ah, the benefit of hindsight, I guess ...

Release Preceding the album’s release, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was released as a single and in honour of Ian, reached no.13 in the UK singles chart and no.

1 in the Indie singles chart. Following this, the band regrouped as New Order.

The album (Fact 25) was released on

18th July 1980 and became one of the fastest-selling independent-label LPs in British New Wave history, reaching number six on the UK album charts and number three in New Zealand, to mainly positive reviews and was described as dark and Gothic rock, almost instantly, the intended effect of contrasted light and shadow, the chiaroscuro, never lost in translation.

In its wake, came an entire legion of Joy Division emulators, most notably Section Twenty-Five, Crispy Ambulance, Mass, Sort Sol and The Names.

Nearly all retrospective reviews since have given it full-marks, which is a bit over-the-top and somewhat fawning, in my honest opinion. I mean, it is a great album, certainly, but better than ‘Ziggy’ (1972)? I think not. ‘Unknown Pleasures’? Maybe. ‘Seventeen Seconds’ (1980)? Yes, just about.

Listening Again Now, I’m not going to try and tell you that you should like Closer (even though you bloody-well should), or why you should like the album, as the experience is various and it’d be trying to teach you how to suck eggs; all patronising and condescending.

However, on a personal note, it really hacks me off when people say that Joy Division are depressing; they either just don’t get it, because they won’t listen, or Ian’s voice is too deep and sonorous for them; a case of the message being

lost in the shadow of the voice, perhaps.

But, yes, some of their songs are about mortality, but in a good way (not “woe-is-me” self-indulgence or self-pity), and also about escaping whatever it is that is holding you back or down. It is actually a fairly positive sounding and uplifting album, when listened to with intent. If anything, it is an album was ahead of its time (if that is actually possible) and, in all, it’s nothing less than a surpassing testament to the life force itself.

Eternal Closure Yes, it’s a huge pity that it was the band’s final album, but what a great album it was and still is and, perhaps more importantly, what a great legacy for many of us outside the mainstream to enjoy. What ifs, eh?

All that said, I’ll leave the last word on ‘Closer’ to Hooky, from an interview in Consequence of Sound: “Look, Joy Division was very pure, you know? They didn’t embarrass themselves the way that New Order have. Joy Division kept the mystique, the purity, the heart all quite intact. We weren’t sullied by success. The music wasn’t watered down by it, and the money didn’t change anything.” www.facebook.com/ JoyDivisionOfficial

99

Bob Dylan Rough Diamond Alice Jones-Rodgers reviews ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’.

100

It was a foregone conclusion that ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ would gain unanimously positive reviews because before even listening to it, everybody was already imbued with the notion that ‘it is Bob Dylan, probably the greatest songwriter of all time, so therefore it must be great’. At this stage in the game, thirty-nine studio albums and countless live and rarities releases in, Dylan could have frankly put out a record comprised entirely of Outer-Mongolian donkey flatulence and it still would have been well-received. This is a very curious honour only bestowed upon artists of Dylan’s stature that allows us to completely forget even the very worst efforts from their back catalogues.

So, before we go into listening to ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ assuming it will be the utterly brilliant, thus potentially setting ourselves up for disappointment, let’s just remind ourselves that whilst Dylan has given us Bonafide classics such as ‘Blonde on Blonde’ (1966), ‘Desire’ (1976), nestled smack, bang in the middle of the two was his attempt to rid himself of the spokesperson for a generation tag with the most diabolical thing he could commit to tape, 1970’s ‘Self Portrait’. Also take a second (but only a second) to remember the two albums releasing during the ‘80s slump which also befell many other artists of his generation, 1986’s ‘Knocked Out Loaded’ and 1988’s ‘Down in the

Groove’. Done? Right, you are nearly in the right frame of mind to listen and have an informed opinion about ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’.

But first some background information ...

‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is Dylan’s first new album of self-penned songs since ‘Tempest’ eight years ago.

Between then and now, he gave us three tributes to the crooner era, ‘Shadows in the Night’ (2015), ‘Fallen Angels’ (2016) and ‘Triplicate’ (2017).

Many other artists of Dylan’s generation have followed the same path, most notably Rod Stewart on his ‘Great American Songbook’ series, but to see an artist revered by many as the greatest songwriter of all time doing it, particularly for three consecutive albums, was a little strange and very disappointing. Some even feared that, with his advancing age (he turned 79 in May), he had lost his songwriting muse or had finally run out of things to say.

These fears were compounded when he was accused of plagiarising Spark Notes, an online version of Cliff Notes, when delivering his Nobel Prize lecture in 2016. Now, perhaps inspired by the times we are currently living through, Dylan, the singer-songwriter makes a welcome return and brings with him an armoury of historical and cultural references. To attempt to decipher all of them would be foolish as even his classic albums from decades ago are still revealing new things to us now and we suspect that in years to come, we

101

might still be unravelling ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ too.

‘Murder Most Foul’ was unexpectedly released as “an unreleased song” on 27th March, suggesting that it should stand on its own and would not be part of an album. What we heard was also unexpected: Dylan’s longest ever song at just shy of seventeen minutes and a homage to the 1963 Kennedy assassination. On ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’, ‘Murder Most Foul’ is the closing track of the ten-track album and is given its own separate disc (double CD and vinyl versions), leaving the listener to decide whether it should be part of it or not. Before we decide, let’s listen to the rest of the album. Yes, you are most certainly now ready ...

Opening track ‘I Contain Multitudes’ introduces the ‘rough diamond’ character that appears to inform a number of the tracks on ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’, here making boasts like “I drive fast cars” and ridiculous and nonsensical claims such as “I’m just like Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, And those British bad boys, The Rolling Stones”. For a song with such lyrics, which find Dylan at his most playful, the musical accompaniment is a surprisingly laid back and sparse affair, with little more than a guitar and steel slide guitar courtesy of Donnie Herron.

However, as we will discover as the album progresses, this is a common thread throughout the whole album.

102

Moving on to track two, ‘False Prophet’ and Matt Chamberlain’s drums finally introduce themselves to back up the first of three gritty, swaggering twelve bar blues songs on the album. In this case, Dylan gives us an insight into the R&B numbers that inspired him during his formative years and the music is based on that of Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson’s 1954 Sun Records single, ‘If Lovin’ is Believin’’. It is the sort of song that in 2020 now lends itself wonderfully to Dylan’s gravelled vocal style. Meanwhile, the rogue who was introduced in ‘I Contain Multitudes’ continues in the same boastful vein, this time informing us, “I’m first among equals, Second to none, The last of the best, You can bury the rest, Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold, Put them six feet under and pray for their souls”.

By this point in the album, it is fairly obvious that rumours of Dylan having lost the storytelling magic that has endured for six decades were completely unfounded. It is still there, still exciting and still endlessly interesting. However, one thing to notice about ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is that this exquisite level of songwriting prowess more than ever favoured above melodies, hooks and choruses, because you certainly won’t find many of any of these ingredients on this album. Instead, the music that backs Dylan is repetitive with no real discernible dynamics, a criticism (or maybe just an observation) that could

be levelled at the following track, ‘My Own Version of You’. Yes, with its free and easy, shuffling jazz style backing that reminded us of Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’, it rolls along nicely enough but, like the backing on the whole album, it lacks any sort of real punch. But then, once again, there are the lyrics, which have now taken a darker turn and inspired by Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ tell the story of a man who feels so lonely that he constructs a replacement to fill the void left by a departed lover. Dylan speaks of “visiting morgues and monasteries” to harvest body parts before waiting for a bolt of lightning to bring his creation to life and it is more than enough to grip the listener for most of the song’s near seven-minute duration ... until we realise that, unlike most Dylan songs of old, there is no conclusion to the story, almost like the end of the song is as absent as the protagonist’s lover.

The gentle (but too gentle for placement after the previous song) waltz ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’ presents itself as a love song. However, scratch beneath the surface and it is far more likely to be a song about mortality and preparing to give oneself to God, particularly when you remember the number of times that Dylan has placed religious imagery in his lyrics previously, most notably in his born again Christian era between 1979 and 1981, which resulted in the full-blown gospel albums ‘Slow Train Coming’ (1979), ‘Saved’ (1980) and

‘Shot of Love’ (1981). Taking into account that ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’ probably is about death, then we also can also surmise that the titular ‘Black Rider’ in the following track is the grim reaper.

However, the sparse and foreboding spaghetti western tinged arrangement, complete its minimal percussion (just some well-placed snare hits here and there), could point to the character being an assassin, thus neatly linking the song with the aforementioned ‘Murder Most Foul’. It is this openness to interpretation that has kept us enthralled with Dylan’s work for this long and ‘Black Rider’ is a welcome addition to the long list of songs that we will be poring over for meaning in the years to come.

‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ is one of album’s absolute standout moments.

Dylan has often paid homage to his influences in the past, but now he does so by name for the second twelve bar blues-based track of the album. With a slew of great lyrics such as “I can’t play the record because my needle got stuck”, ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ should be regarded amongst Dylan’s greatest work. It is unlikely that ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ will entice many to discover Dylan, but for long term fans, the track’s musical similarity to either ‘Pledging My Time’ or ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ from ‘Blonde on Blonde’ will also be pleasing to the ears.

However, it is the only point on the whole album where Dylan really lets

103

go, which is a shame because the sound of whole band finally getting stuck in (harmonica, drums and all) for this number is very nearly as glorious as when he traded the acoustic guitar for the electric to rock out with The Band back in 1965.

The tempo is all too prematurely taken back down for ‘Mother of Muses’.

However, it is a wonderfully pretty song which incorporates elements of 19th century American folk with a whole host of references to historical figures “whose names are carved on tablets of stone, So the world can go free”, including “Sherman, Montgomery and Scott ... Zhukov and Patton, Who cleared the path for Presley to sing, Who carved the path for Martin Luther King”. There is once again minimal percussion, but the solitary drum that is heard is heard deep in the mix, evoking the many battles spoken of is a nice touch that adds to the epic nature of the track.

Crossing the Rubicon’, the last of the twelve bar blues numbers is, at seven and a half minutes, the shortest of the three huge pieces (if you include ‘Murder Most Foul’ in the tracklisting) which bring ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ to an end. More historical references abound as Dylan this time, in a voice that appropriately sounds the most weathered it has done on the entire album, puts himself in the position of an aged conqueror. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49BC of

104

course precipitated the Roman Civil War, ultimately leading to him becoming dictator and the rise of the imperial era of Rome. Here, with lyrics such as “I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope”, it could also be taken as a euphemism for death, i.e. passing the point of no return.

Dylan chooses to end the first disc of the album with the nine and a half minute utterly bizarre addition to his catalogue, ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’. Whether it is utterly bizarre in a good or bad way is very much dependent on the listener, but we couldn’t help feeling that the narrative arc of the song, which begins as a love letter to Key West and the narrator hearing news of President McKinley’s assassination on a European pirate radio station being transmitted all the way over to the States, before changing to talk about the beauty and wonder of the location and then changing once again to tell the story of how he was forced to marry a prostitute at the age of twelve, was more than a little confused, or at least confusing for the listener.

Returning to ‘Murder Most Foul’ and the earlier question of whether it should be considered an official part of ‘Rough and Rowdy ways’. This is of course up to you but having heard the first nine tracks, we feel that most listeners will be satisfied for the album to end at this point. ‘Murder Most Foul’ was an extraordinary return for Dylan and,

particularly considering its length, should be considered to be a piece that strongly stands on its own merits and will undoubtedly go down in annals of history as one of his greatest achievements. But, is ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ one of his greatest achievements too? In terms of its lyrics, it is an undeniably brilliant and endlessly fascinating album, even in spite of (dare we say it) Dylan’s storytelling either not being as fully rounded or perhaps a little too impenetrable in places on this

occasion. Meanwhile, as far as its music is concerned, we couldn’t help feeling that it could have also done with a bit more oomph to make it truly exceptional. But then, who are we to judge? For many, probably including us, it will be a rough diamond that will only truly shine once it has been made more sense of. www.bobdylan.com www.facebook.com/bobdylan

105

Introducing:

Uhr

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Over the last few decades, Preston has proven itself to be something of a hotbed of musical and artistic creativity. From bands such as Dandelion Adventure and Big Red Bus presenting their own very unique artistic vision in 1980s, through to Treehouse 3 garnering major record label attention and Cornershop giving the city its first UK number one artist with ‘Brimful of Asha’ in the 1990s and onwards to present day via a plethora of more recent bands such as Ludovico, Crossbill, The Common Cold and Ginnel (both variously featuring ex-members of the Dandelion Adventure, Big Red Bus, Cornershop and Ludovico), One Sided Horse and Evil Blizzard (both featuring former Treehouse 3 member Mark ‘Side’ Whiteside and and the latter featuring Pete Brown,

106

who as well as also previously having shared in Treehouse 3’s successes has just become the newest member of Ginnel). As you will have probably noticed, all of the above bands have either been off-shoots of previous bands or brand new bands utilising the services of the city’s musicians available, often sharing them with several other outfits. The latest welcome addition to Preston’s ever more intricately intertwining rock family tree is Uhr. And Uhr truly are a family affair, consisting of Jack Harkins, who has previously been the bassist with Ludovico, The Common Cold and Ginnel and his father John Harkins, who is currently also the guitarist and banjo player with Crossbill. Joining them is David Chambers, who has previously played drums with Cornershop and Common Cold.

However, as Jack recently told us, Uhr, who have just the presented the first taste of what they are all about with the rather wonderful post-punk styled double header ‘Two Gulls (PreUhr Act I)’ and ‘Written Reply (PreUhr Act II)’, which are each accompanied by brilliantly imaginative videos, are not just another band. In fact, they are not a band at all. We think you better elaborate Jack ...

“Firstly, it’s very important to note that Uhr are not a band, they’re an artistic collaboration. The idea for Uhr being an artistic collaboration came from

what we saw around us being unimaginative on a small scale. People seem to be content with turning up, thrashing out some music for thirty minutes and then having a social. This was becoming quite repetitive and not particularly challenging and also not particularly stimulating to consume.

Uhr are not interested in limiting ideas to strictly musical ones, at risk of appearing pretentious. It’s also an attempt to break down the stigma in the music scene / industry that art is a bad word. It comes across as taboo, which seems like a step backwards in terms of creativity. It should be encouraged, not hindered. After all, music is art. Uhr intend to create inspiring work across many spectrums. The work will be presented at live events and exhibited online and in curated spaces. Uhr’s work will be minimalist, stark, clean, functional and abstract. Uhr find the visual aspects just as important as the audio aspects. Uhr are currently writing songs with intent to exhibit them at live events. Exciting ideas for live events are very much being thrown around.”

When asked about ‘Two Gulls (PreUhr Act I)’ and ‘Written Reply (PreUhr Act II), Jack continued:

accompaniment. I brought the text to the session and we worked on the musical aspect collaboratively. I am inspired by Samuel Beckett both in text and minimalist structure of visual and often audio aspects. The idea of having objects to interact with in a sparse environment was very much brought about after reading Beckett plays. In terms of recording, we have an efficient process working in our home studio. It was self-produced, mixed and recorded.

We intend to change this as we don’t like limits.”

To find out more about Uhr and listen to / watch ‘Two Gulls (PreUhr Act I)’ and ‘Written Reply (PreUhr Act II)’, visit their website or Facebook page now. It is guaranteed to be the most intersting thing you have ever seen featuring a suitcase, a deckchair and a ladder. We are already looking forward seeing just how they decide to display their work in a live setting. uhr.fyi www.facebook.com/UhrFYI

“The piece of work known as ‘PreUhr’ is intended to be an introductory piece.

We’ve written plenty of pieces and decided to work further on the most well suited pieces we had written with intent to release this. ‘PreUhr’ consists of two acts with musical

107

www.eighthdaycommunications.co.uk