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The Mutton Birds

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I loved The Mutton Birds, a New Zealand band who spent some time in London in the late 1990s. This interview with their singer Don McGlashan was done around the corner from Virgin Records. It appeared in Mojo, July 1997.

When you’ve sold a record to nearly every human being in New Zealand, argues Don McGlashan, there is nobody left except the sheep. Then again, since they’re sheep, you’d only have to interest one of them because the rest would follow anyway… As a marketing plan it’s magnificent, yet somehow flawed. Fortunately for his band, The Mutton Birds’ Don McGlashan is profoundly better at songwriting than at marketing.
   Failing the woolly embrace, he says, a top New Zealand band would normally move on to Australia. “Then they get beaten up. The Australian music scene is not all that friendly to New Zealand music. Crowded House were generally considered to be an Australian band so they didn’t figure in that equation.” The Mutton Birds were spared this fate when a three-month visit to England turned to an indefinite stay, thanks to interest from Virgin Records. The band’s two “platinum” NZ albums (sales of 15,000 each) were compiled into a 1995 set called Nature, followed this month by the UK-recorded Envy Of Angels. Carrying the recent single Come Around, their new record is lean and tuneful, bright with harmonies and guitars, yet with a darker undercurrent of melancholia. McGlashan believes it’s something to do with coming from the edge of the world.
   “There is a thread running through a lot of New Zealand songs that is a fear of falling off the edge. You’re so far away from the centre of things that you might disappear and nobody would know. A lot of my songs seem to involve driving along, looking at the countryside with ambivalent feelings. It’s a strange place because it’s apparently very normal, but there’s a sense of the absurd. The whole Anglo-Saxon part was conceived as a bit of Britain miles away from Britain, so the idea of being an outpost, rather than a real place, is somewhere in everybody’s psyche. There is that sense of being marginal, of being from nowhere.”
   McGlashan’s own ancestors left their farm in Scotland, unable to pay the rent. And in the jangling beauty of The Mutton Birds’ music there is often something unsettling. One song, The Heater, has a man talking to a domestic appliance. There are tales of rural suicides. McGlashan’s original manifesto was: “Write about ordinary things – cars, streets, gunshop owners, mad people on the street. Use well worn phrases that make you shudder.” He draws inspiration from the neat suburbs of Auckland, “where you express yourself through your choice of car-port roof rather than through words.”
   He’s also worked in theatre groups and with film maker Jane Campion, hence the narrative strength of his own songs. “Wherever you’re from, you’re writing about your childhood. Overt or covert, you write about the place that surrounds you. We also come from a long line of New Zealand bands who are strummy and jangly and have somewhere in their record collections The Byrds, Neil Young, Big Star and the Velvets. The major consideration when we formed was finding the centre of each song.”
   A reluctant exile, McGlashan liked the freedom New Zealand gave him as a young writer. There isn’t the crippling hipness of Britain, nor the forlorn craving for fame. “If you do the wrong thing, you’re denied fame. But fame in New Zealand is not something that anybody worries about, because it’s a small thing anyway. The Prime Minister flies around the country on domestic flights and probably does his own shopping in the supermarket.” Pausing at our restaurant table, the Kiwi waitress hears Don’s accent, correctly guesses he’s a Mutton Bird, and declares him a real “Jafa”, just like her.
   A Jafa? Even McGlashan looks puzzled.
   “Oh, you know,” replies his starry-eyed admirer. “Just Another Fucking Aucklander.”

With The Beatles

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

“With The Beatles” is the first LP I can remember hearing, round at family houses in Liverpool in the 1960s. (Our own home did not possess a record player.) Nostalgically at least, it’s perhaps my all-time favourite. This article was written for a Mojo Beatles special in Autumn 2002, and reprinted in a 2004 Mojo book, The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook The World (Dorling Kindersley).

November the 22nd, 1963, was the 9/11 of its era - – a day of abrupt, shocking catastrophe. Driving through Dallas in his open-topped limousine, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead. On that same day, in London, Parlophone Records released the first great album of the decade. Had it been a record by anyone else the bleak coincidence of its release date would be an irrelevance. But this LP was “With The Beatles” and it stands, in the history of its times, as an event of no mean significance. Where the killing of Kennedy suggested the crushing of youthful hope and the onset of a morbidly pessimistic age, the arrival of The Beatles in the global imagination would herald the very opposite.
   The magic began at Abbey Road in mid-July. Having two self-written Number 1s to their credit, the group kicked off their new album sessions with a growing confidence in themselves as composers. (Soon there would be third triumph, She Loves You: its “yeah yeah yeah” refrain would seize the nation’s brain that Summer and must have pushed morale inside the EMI studios to astronomic levels.) This time around the LP’s original tracks would outnumber the cover versions. The only snag was that their own songs weren’t written yet, To get the juices flowing therefore they used the initial days to record other people’s numbers, most of which had already been road-tested at the Cavern and elsewhere.
   Foremost among the covers must be John Lennon’s Motown trilogy, comprising Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got A Hold On Me, The Marvelletes’ Please Mr Postman and Barrett Strong’s Money. In common with most of their Liverpool peers, The Beatles were never really blues scholars like their London counterparts in The Rolling Stones and Yardbirds. But they were among the first young Britons to recognise the genius of Berry Gordy’s label in Detroit. And of all the Motown talent, Smokey Robinson, of the Miracles, was their songwriting idol.
   It’s one of the cliches of rock’n’roll history that white performers stripped the sex and danger out of black material and cleaned up in the process. That might be true of Pat Boone covering Little Richard, or Bill Haley doing Big Joe Turner, but it was not the case with Elvis and nor was it true of Lennon’s Motown covers. For better or worse, he turns the yearning submission of Smokey’s song, You Really Got A Hold On Me, into a smouldering declaration of sexual impatience. Please Mr Postman becomes almost violent, the passive chant of its girl-group original replaced by John’s aggressively demanding bark. And Money, positioned at the album’s close to supply the same blazing finale that Twist And Shout had given the first LP, is absolutely hard core. Written by Gordy himself, the song was intimidating enough when sung by Barrett Strong, who invested his request (“I need money, that’s what I want”) with macho menace; in John Lennon’s hands it becomes one long howl of desperation. A soul connoisseur could argue that The Beatles’ Motown covers lost the sophistication of the originals, but they are not wanting in passion.
   Paul McCartney had yet to emerge as a composer of plangent, romantic ballads (a reputation he would soon establish with And I Love Her on “A Hard Day’s Night”). Here however was another of the songs he evidently honed that craft upon, namely Till There Was You. The number had been around for a few years, first aired in Broadway show “The Music Man”, but it was Peggy Lee’s single of 1961 that brought the song to Paul’s attention. His own reading takes a step back from Lee’s huskily intimate delivery, and there may already have been a sense that such a track was slightly square in this new decade. But it remained for a while a staple of their live act, offering a dash of that “versatility” required of any act with claims to being all-round entertainers.
   George Harrison is well represented on “With The Beatles”. He chalks up his first songwriting credit with the slight but attractive Don’t Bother Me; he takes the lead vocal on Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven (itself a lead guitarist’s showcase) and effects a gender switch for yet another girl-group number, The Donays’ Devil In His Heart. And Ringo, in the tradition initiated by Boys on “Please Please Me” is given his own romp in the spotlight on I Wanna Be Your Man: Paul and John had begun to write the song with their drummer’s limited range in mind, but they finished it sitting in the corner before a Stones session, in a comradely response to an appeal for material. (The juddering Bo Diddley rhythm has always seemed more right for Jagger and co, and their recording would soon become their first Top 20 hit.)
   There was, at any rate, one new Lennon and McCartney number already available for the second LP. Hold Me Tight had been attempted in the course of that heroic one-day session for the first album, just a few months earlier. Somehow the song had failed to gel that time, and it was resurrected now for a fresh effort. Yet there is still an impression of unfinished business in Hold Me Tight: it’s an efficient little rocker but there’s a general unsteadiness of pitch in Paul’s vocal: the glitches in his approach to the two middle eights, in particular, are probably the biggest boobs in The Beatles’ official catalogue. The leisurely days of endless re-takes were not yet at hand: the pressures of time and money meant the old dictum “close enough for rock’n’roll” ruled even a figure as fastidious as George Martin.
   A few of the other new compositions are hardly in the front rank of Lennon and McCartney’s work – Little Child is nearly anonymous, saved by John’s harmonica, while All I’ve Got To Do is more evidence of his apprenticeship at the schools of Smokey Robinson and Arthur Alexander. Few would nowadays nominate Not A Second Time as one of The Beatles’ greatest, but it claims the strange distinction of having prompted The Times’ classical music critic to hail that celebrated “Aeolian cadence” and make cautious comparisons to Mahler. Valid or not, the comments served to open a generation of well-stocked minds to the possibility of real art arising in pop disguise.
   The outstanding additions to John and Paul’s portfolios, without a doubt, are It Won’t Be Long and All My Loving. Each abounds with the respective partners’ signature characteristics: urgency and tension in Lennon’s song (“You’re coming home! You’re coming home!”), optimism and consolation in Paul’s (“I’ll pretend that I’m kissing the lips I am missing”). It’s no accident that both take for their subject a theme of lovers’ separation: they were developing their melodic and harmonic powers by the day, but their lyrical ideas were still off-the-peg. Just as they understood the potency of personal pronouns and stock scenarios (Love Me Do, From Me To You, She Loves You), so they were aware of radio listeners’ devotion to the “missing you, darling” songs of the BBC’s “Two-Way Family Favourites”, forever stocked by tremulous requests from lovelorn soldiers in Cyprus, sorrowing sailors in Valparaiso and homesick emigrants in Australia.
   In between the sessions’ end and the LP’s release, the British newspapers invented a new word, Beatlemania, while the Queen and courtiers were invited to rattle their jewellery” at the Royal Command Performance. Within a week of “With The Beatles”’ appearance, just in time for a million missives to Santa Claus, the boys unleashed I Want To Hold Your Hand and the surrender of America was imminent. But for now, amid the gathering madness, all that mattered in British homes was getting a copy of this record. It looked so well on the low-slung stereogram that had just replaced the wind-up gramophone in the corner. And the cool, strangely austere artwork already hinted at something deeper and darker to emerge from these funny young men. In that early satellite age, their four faces hung like brand new planets, half-lit in the inky blackness of space, full of a wonderful promise.

Raul Malo's Seduction Mix

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

At the time of this interview, Raul Malo was still leading The Mavericks. Done for the Mojo issue of August 1998, it followed that magazine’s “Home Taping" format: subjects were asked to compile two sides of an imaginary mix-tape. Back in those days the whole exercise was highly theoretical. Nowadays you can actually follow through by using, say, Spotify.

Anyway, Malo was a delight. He took to the task with libidinous relish…

On the blower from his Nashville home, Raul Malo explains the strategy behind his tape. “I think the overall theme has to do with, if I were to make a tape of fun stuff, romantic stuff, stuff that would guarantee you to get laid. I think that’s what inspired it. Gettin’ laid. The prime directive of the male species.”
   If you could really guarantee that, then sell it, you’d stand to make an awful lot of money.
   “Yeah! Who needs Viagra? Just let me make you a couple of tapes…”
   And a burly cackle comes down the trans-Atlantic phone line. We’d actually asked The Mavericks’ frontman to compile a party tape – maybe something with the same rug-cutting properties as their recent Top 5 smash, Dance The Night Away. He readily agreed: in fact this tape is one he had prepared earlier. But to hear him explain his choices, you’d suspect he was planning a party with just one other name on the guest list. (And if you’re a bloke, it isn’t yours.)
   Malo is a Miami native, born to Cuban parents, which would explain the pungent Latin flavour on display here. But there is a more puzzling feature. The Mavericks are a rockin’ country band. Why are there no country acts on his tape?
   Malo considers. There is a note of regret in his voice. “That’s probably because country music is like birth control. It’s definitely not gonna get you laid. At least not women with teeth.”

SIDE ONE

Frank Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim
Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (Reprise)
Probably one of the most romantic records ever made. I love the blending of the two: Sinatra, the swinging guy from Jersey, and then the suave Jobim, real suave music from Down South. A brilliant collaboration.

Eydie Gorme y Trio Los Panchos
Piel Canela
Eydie Gorme y Los Panchos (Sony)
Los Panchos was a Latin-American trio, acoustic guitars, they had real romantic sound too, mellow and beautiful. Eydie Gorme did a complete album with them, and when I was a kid in my house that album played constantly. She really endeared herself to the Latin community by singing these beautiful Spanish songs. This album was such a part of my childhood and I recently rediscovered it. It livens up a party real good. It’s one of those albums you can play anywhere and people will start to dance. “Piel Canela” is basically brown skin, and it’s about a beautiful brown-skinned woman.

Perez Prado
Mambo No. 5
Original Mambo King (Sony)
Perez Prado was the undisputed King of the Mambo, and if you want to get a party going, Mambo No. 5 is the song to play, one of the ultimate party songs. The mambo is Cuban. I’m proud to say that along with the finest cigars in the world, we invented the mambo. But the only thing we’re allowed to import to the States is misery!

The Beatles
Flying
Magical Mystery Tour (Parlophone)
For some reason it’s always been one of my favourites. I love their psychedelic screw-the-world era, when they’d made so much money and had so much notoriety that they did whatever they wanted. I love that song, it’s got a groovy little melody.

Etta James
At Last
The Essential Etta James (Chess)
This to me is definitely another one of those songs that’s guaranteed to get you laid. That’s Viagra all the way, baby! There’s so many compilations out now, I don’t know what the original album is, but I got this from her Greatest Hits.

Nat King Cole
When I Fall In Love
20 Golden Greats (Capitol)
You wanna hear perfection in vocal performance, in a romantic song, this is it. I grew up with this, it was constantly playing in my house, and it’s funny because when I grew up, it’s constantly playing in my house now.

Ray Charles
You Are My Sunshine
Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music (ABC Paramount)
You see, there’s a country one! Ray paid country music its ultimate tribute, by doing a pretty standard hokey country song and turning it into a soulful, energetic, tear your gut out kind of song. It’s an amazing rendition. Country music and black music were always interrelated. Nat King Cole recorded country songs. Country has always been part of popular music whether people want to admit it or not. Tony Bennett’s first record was a Hank Williams song. The Beatles covered a lot of country songs. Chet Atkins was one of George Harrison’s heroes.

Harry Nilsson
Me And My Arrow
Personal Best (RCA)
Oh man, that song, it just gets me in a great mood. It’s so groovy, you’re sitting around having a couple of drinks with friends, and inevitably somebody will get up and start doing the Grateful Dead dance when that song goes on. I’m not a Deadhead so I don’t know how to describe it, but you ask any Deadhead and they’ll know.

Elvis Presley
Sentimental Me
From Memphis To Nashville (RCA)
Sentimental Me was recorded in the period that was actually my favourite Elvis period, in 1961. I know that aficionados don’t like this era, because it was a little mellower, but I think Elvis really matured and came into his own as a singer. I know he had a lot of cheesy stuff, all the movie stuff, all that crap. But he still made some great recordings in that era and Sentimental Me is one of them. The song was originally on an album called Something For Everybody, but the easiest reference is the box set From Memphis To Nashville.

Vicente Fernandez
El Rey
Los 15 Grandes Exitos (Sony)
He is probably one of the biggest international singing stars ever. He’s Mexican, he’s made movies and tons of records. He’s like a singing Clint Eastwood, if you can imagine that. Totally bad-ass in his movies, he ropes cattle and he gun-fights, always dressed in the mariachi outfits. And this song, El Rey, is The King, just Latin testosterone all the way. I had to pick it for its machismo.

SIDE TWO

Tony Bennett
I Wanna Be Around
16 Most Requested Songs (Columbia)
He’s an absolute favourite and I Wanna Be Around is probably one of my all-time favourite songs, melodically and lyrically. The performance of Tony singing that song is incredible. And my God he can still sing.

Ella Fitzgerald
Where Or When
Sings The Rodgers & Hart Songbook Vol. 1 (Verve)
Another of my favourite songs ever, written by the great Rodgers & Hart team. So many of their songs were covered by so many artists, including Frank, and Mel Torme, Louis Armstrong, all the greats. But I think when Ella recorded Where Or When you really get the essence of that song. The vocal on it, I think, is just terrific. Her version is more on the understated side and it makes a deep impression.

Engelbert Humperdinck
The Way It Used To Be
Greatest Hits (London)
Oh man, he’s not taken seriously in England? I love Engelbert! Oh yeah! This song, The Way It Used To Be, it’s so good. Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy, but if you play it at the right time, and to the right woman – phew! – gets ’em goin’ every time. I think he’s a really good singer who’s done some cheesy stuff, but Release Me was a great rendition of that song, and A Man Without Love, The Mavericks do that live.

Ray Conniff
That’s What Happiness Is
Greatest Hits (Columbia)
I think he’s had over 200 albums. Somebody ought to do a count on him, and just stop him. Anyway this song, That’s What Happiness Is, is probably in that strange category of really bad yet really good. And it’s a great barometer. It’s a great first date song, when you’re getting to know your girl. You pop it in the tape: if she laughs, and gets it, then she’s a cool chick. If she tells you how awful it is, how she can’t believe you’re listening to it – open the door and let her out. She’s too uptight. You’ll notice that all these songs are tied into the prime directive. It’s the recurring theme here, isn’t it? I’m tellin’ ya, man. It’s why we do everything we do.

Tito Puente
Timbalero
Fania Legends Of Salsa Vol 3 (Fania)
This is just a great Latin song with a great rhythm to it. The horns are vibrant, guaranteed to kick-start any party, a great danceable song.

Smash Mouth
Walking On The Sun
Fush Yu Mang (Interscope)
Walking On The Sun is one of those songs that, for some reason, reminds me of something and I don’t know what. You hear any great song and it touches a nerve, but you can’t quite pinpoint what it reminds you of. That’s what it does to me. Plus, when you’re trying to impress a girl, she’s young and she’s hip, you can’t be playing all of that old fogey stuff. “I’m a little hip, honey! Look, I got Smash Mouth!”

Terry Snyder
Binga Banga Bongo
Mister Percussion (United Artists)
He was a percussionist-drummer extraordinaire. During the ’50s and the ’60s there were all these records made by instrumentalists and they were a big deal. Whereas now you might have jazz instrumentalists but you don’t have a lot of pop instrumentalists, with the exception of Kenny G. These guys like Terry Snyder were pop artists. I don’t know why my Mom bought this, but it was one of those audiophile records, where everything was recorded perfectly. And this particular track, Binga Banga Bongo, I challenge any engineer in the world today to make a record that sounds as good, sonically. And the energy is inspirational, it was the inspiration for the last Mavericks album.

Eydie Gorme
Blame It On The Bossa Nova
Greatest Hits (Columbia)
Again it’s one of those songs like the Ray Conniff thing, it’s one of those barometer songs. You play that and if the chick gets it, she laughs, you’re in. If not, then run. Eydie Gorme’s not a Latin artist but she sings beautifully in Spanish. She’s not trying to cop some feel, she really sings it perfectly. It’s definitely a novelty song, Blame It On The Bossa Nova, but it’s obnoxious enough to clear out a party that you want cleared out.

Chet Baker
You’re Driving Me Crazy
Chet Baker Sings It Could Happen To You (Original Jazz Classics)
If you’re closing the night out, now, Chet Baker was for me the ultimate in cool. If James Dean could sing, he’d be Chet Baker. I love his instrumental records, his horn playing was terrific, especially for a couple of brilliant years. But I love his singing, which nobody ever talks about. His phrasing is just so suave, nobody can sing like that. Even if you tried to sing that soft you’d sound like an idiot. There’s no way to do it and be that cool, but he did it.

Frank Sinatra & Duke Ellington
All I Need Is The Girl
Francis A & Edward K (Reprise)
Well, I think the title says it all. All I Need Is The Girl. There’s our prime directive again, summed up in that one song!

Matraca Berg Interview

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with a favourite country snger and songwriter of mine, Matraca Berg. I met her in London and the piece appeared in Mojo, December 1997. Nice little Neil Young anecdote in here, too.

"Yes," she says, quite firmly. "Nashville is still full of songwriters, same as it ever was. Hey, I got a question for you."
   Uh-huh.
   "It's a Nashville joke. How do you get a songwriter off your porch?"
   I admit my ignorance. How do you get a songwriter off your porch?
   "You pay for the pizza! Ha ha haarrgghh!"
   From the sleek and petite frame of Matraca Berg there erupts a laugh of delightful bulk and volume, sufficient to ruffle the hush of this pretentious London hotel, her HQ on a promotional visit to Britain and Ireland. "And I know all about it," she adds. "Hey, I made pizzas, too." She can afford to be nostalgic these days. Matraca ("Muh-trace-her") Berg is currently the hottest songwriter in country music, and becoming a star performer in her own right. It's time for the other strugglers to bring those pizzas to her – with extra toppings, if she so chooses. Born and bred in Nashville, Berg is emerging from a long obscurity and may soon be joining her home town's elite. And if she does, her revenge will be sweeter than pecan pie.
   Like her friend Gretchen Peters, Berg leads a wave of women writers who unite the disparate traditions of Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton: movingly confessional in one breath, shrewdly humorous, wickedly perceptive commentators in the next. At 34 she is young enough to accept the MTV culture as natural, but old enough to recall a time when country was imbued with a working-class glamour, rather than ruled by know-nothing radio programmers. "We're losing listeners," she says, "because country music has become so homogenised. Radio is interested in what their consultants tell them they should play, and it’s a small list. It’s usually songs that sound like commercials. But there is a subtle change on the way and in five years' time it's gonna be drastic."
   Raised by her mother, a Nashville session singer, Berg gatecrashed the Music Row scene by co-writing a Number 1 hit (Faking Love) when aged 18. The early success nearly ruined her: "It was so unsettling, people figured I was a child prodigy and came to me for songs. But I had nothing, so I froze up. I was like a deer in the headlights. I ran away with a musician to Louisiana." The elopement was a disaster, and she returned to her mother with a stock of experience that has fed her songwriting ever since. Her next break was a backing singer's gig with Neil Young: "He was in Nashville recording Old Ways. The first song I'd ever learned on guitar was Heart Of Gold. But we were doing a rehearsal one day and they were doing Helpless, and I could not bring it to my brain. So I raised my hand and I said, Could you play a few bars of that, so I’ll know what to do? He looked at somebody and said, 'Who brought this kid in here?'. I wanted to die. Still, he took me on the road with him. I did Live Aid. I was the 20-year-old girl to his right, shaking like a leaf."
   Soon Matraca was writing hit material for the likes of Reba McEntire, and made a 1990 debut herself, signed to RCA Nashville for a superb album called Lying To The Moon, including a title track and one other, You Are The Storm, that are slowly getting recognised as classics. Despite the chorus of critical acclaim, she says, the album only did well in US "yard-sales", equivalent to our car-boot affairs. A follow-up record was banned by RCA altogether. The company transferred her to their pop department in Los Angeles, where she made an album, The Speed Of Grace, that she hates: “They wanted me to be whatever chick was happening at the time, a rock chick. [Simply Red producer] Stewart Levine had A&R people whispering in his ear, VH-1, VH-1…” She left RCA, and survived by selling her songs to other singers: "Nobody would sign me in Nashville. I just said, Screw it, I'll pitch my songs instead of singing them myself. And they all got covered.” She wrote country hits for Pam Tillis (Calico Plains), Trisha Yearwood (XXX's And OOO's) and Patty Loveless (You Can Feel Bad) to name a few. Deana Carter's colossal debut, Strawberry Wine, has won awards, to its author's bemusement: "A five-minute waltz about losing your virginity is not my idea of a first single. Deana's obviously smarter than all of us."
   Nowadays married to Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and newly signed to the Rising Tide label, she has made an album that is just as good as her first, in Sunday Morning To Saturday Night. As the country world awakens to the star it has overlooked, Matraca Berg allows herself a smile of satisfaction. "I guess," she concludes, "they can call me The Artist Formerly Known as Songwriter."

McCartney's favourites

Sat, 29 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Asking Paul McCartney about his favourite records gave me one of my favourite interviews. I think it was a pleasure for him, too, making a change from trawling through the oft-told tales once more. The article was done for Mojo Collections magazine, Spring 2001.

One Spring afternoon we ask Sir Macca to nominate some platters that matter in his collection. “Oh, it’s a bitch, this,” he winces, pained by the prospect of leaving anything out. “I never remember. I should really write them down as I listen to them and go, God, that’s a killer record.”
Within a minute, though, he’s in full flow. Anyone passing the window of his London office this day will hear impressions of Yarwoodesque accuracy (Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire are specialities of the house). He imitates his faves with the fluency that he demonstrated on Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock. His audience then, a local Ted called Lennon, was so impressed that he signed him up to his band.
“My record collection now is very varied,” McCartney considers. I’m not really on the scene, I just use music. It’s functional for me, rather than being like the Nick Hornby thing, a definitive collection. I just carry a lot of CDs in my bag. Things like Frank Sinatra: I never used to listen to Frank, but [adopts Hoboken croon] “This is a lovely way / To spend an evening…” You know, when you’ve got the candles going, and you’re having dinner with your bird – as I am currently – with a glass of wine, there’s no finer record.”
Well yes indeed. And we set the controls to Maximum Smooch for Selection Number One…

Nat King Cole: When I Fall In Love
I love Nat King Cole. I’ve taken to playing him a lot now. I loved him when I was a kid. I remember being in the kitchen of Forthlin Road, listening to him on the radio: ‘When I fall in love…” thinking, he’s a good singer, that’s a good song. Now I just think he’s the best. I love his stuff and I love that era of songs.

Fred Astaire: Cheek To Cheek
I’ve always liked Fred Astaire, and Cheek To Cheek has always been one of my favourites. As a songwriter, particularly as you do more of it, you find yourself looking at the craftsmanship. It’s like if you were a chairmaker and you turn the Chippendale upside down. You go, The joinery in that! Looking at Cheek To Cheek it comes back on itself: “I’m in heaven [sings entire song to illustrate the repetition of “heaven” in the verse structure]…” That is so neat, the way the writer did that, and the way he sings it.

Duke Ellington & Louis Armstrong: Duke’s Place
I’m listening to a lot more jazz than I ever listened to. Miles Davis, Chet Baker, I love those guys. We weren’t great jazzers in The Beatles, but I love that now. I heard this Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong record the other day, called Duke’s Place. It’s like one note: “Down-to-Duke’s-Place.” Louis is singing, and he goes “Take it away, Duke!” Duke’s on the piano, and the cheek of him, he goes “dn-dn-dn-dn,” like one finger. Next verse comes around you expect him to go [mimes flourish of triplets], but it’s just “dn-dn-dn-dn.” It’s almost embarrassing, except it’s just so ballsy.

Whitney Houston: If I Told You That (off My Love Is Your Love)
I really like Whitney Houston’s last album. I thought If I Told You That is a killer track, the piano opening, a killer song. People make fun of her but I think she’s [upper class accent] an awf’ly good singer, a jolly good singer… Well, [in Liverpudlian] fer a taart, like…

Rodgers & Hammerstein: The King And I
Oh, the game is up, here. The King And I: damned good record! Yul Bryner. Rodgers & Hammerstein, their writing is great I mean, talk about men and women’s relationships: “He will not always say, what you would have him say / But now and then, he’ll say Something Wonderful.” I go for that.

Elvis Presley: Louisiana Hayride
Elvis in ’55, which is just unbelievable, the sound on it. It was recorded live at the Louisiana Hayride, and it’s got all his stuff, like I Was The One. It’s got him doing comedy, being funny, which I remember Elvis being. It all got deadly serious later. Well, in people’s minds it did. I don’t think he ever took it seriously.

Julian Bream: Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto / Benjamin Britten’s The Courtly Dances from Gloriana
It’s an old record, it’s been deleted now, but he does Rodrigo’s Guitar Concerto and Benjamin Britten’s The Courtly Dances from Gloriana, which I always thought was cool.

Fela Kuti & Africa 70: Shakara / African Woman
Around the time of Band On The Run somebody had just given me his old Africa 70 record, and that’s really cool. Shakara Woman is a great track. He had an unbelievable band, 30 topless wives singing back up. He got busted coming into England with a suitcase full of dope. Only Fela could do that! God bless him.

The Quarry Men: That’ll Be The Day/In Spite Of All The Danger
I have that locked away, cos it’s so vintage and such a one-off. I had copies made for mates: I sent one to John, I think, and anyone to do with it. So I had very faithful copies made. The original shellac is in the vaults somewhere. You know the story, it got passed around. I think it was five quid and there were five of us: me, George, John, Colin [Hanton] and Duff [John Lowe]. So we all put a quid in and the idea was we’d each get it for a week. So I had it for a week, George had it for a week, John had it for a week, Colin had it for a week – and Duff had it for 23 years! And in the end he wrote to me and said, I’ve got it, you know. I went, OK, what’s the rest? He says, I’ll sell it to you. At slightly more than a fiver. But it was still worth it, he was a good guy, I went to school with him. He wasn’t really in the band, but that was OK.

Albert Ayler: The Marseillaise (aka Spirits Rejoice) (off Spirits Rejoice)
I like a record by Albert Ayler, the jazz sax player. The main track, I remember using it on some of my home movies I used to make, was The Marseillaise, the French national anthem, but he plays it like he’s on drugs. Or he plays it like someone who can’t play the sax [mimes an asthmatic kazoo noise]. And the bass goes [manic plunking] and the drums [frantic percussion sound]. So it’s just mad. I had this little film of a gendarme trying to stop the traffic and it’s all going through him. I lost it years ago, but that used to work great on it, this mad Marseillaise. Albert Ayler. Barry Miles turned me on to him.

Sting: Fields Of Gold (off Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Eva Cassidy: Fields Of Gold and Over The Rainbow (off Songbird)
I really like Fields Of Gold. People always used to say to me, Is there a song you wish you’d written? And I always used to say Billy Joel, Don’t Go Changing, cos I thought that was nifty when it came out. But Fields Of Gold is a great song, man, it’s now become The One That I Wish I’d Written. And Eva Cassidy does a really cool version of it. [Is told it was released by ex-Apple assistant Tony Bramwell] Good luck to him! It’s such a soulful story, that whole Eva Cassidy thing. And it just so happens that I like Over The Rainbow a lot. It’s such a song of hope, of belief. After all the cynicism, it’s still there. I’ll make it one day! Hope is always out there somewhere. It’s really soppy and possibly a bit of a fantasy, but I don’t mind that. So it’s reappeared in her version.

Eminem: Stan (off The Marshall Mathers LP)
I kinda like Stan. I liked it that Elton did it with him at that Grammys thing, cos he was suspected to be homophobic. So I guess that put that down. Which is good, because it is only showbiz. Even Eminem is only showbiz. It’s good to remember that, otherwise you start thinking, What the fuck’s happening in the world, man? It’s like, my son was the first in our family to get into rap, and he’d go through these lyrics like, “Slap my bitch,” denigrating women, and I’d have to say, Er, are you sure about this? And he says, It’s only a song, Dad. It reminded you that we had all of that with rock’n’roll: Elvis isn’t trying to shag anyone, he’s just moving his hips! Whereas all our parents went: Oh! The *state* of him! We never saw it until they said it. I think it’s all the same again. But if anyone takes it too seriously, it’s not too cool.

Marvin Gaye: Yesterday (off That’s The Way Love Is)
Marvin Gaye! Man, I’m major league into Marvin. Yesterday won one of these MTV things and Geoff [Baker, press agent] says to me, You know who’s recorded it? Sinatra. Elvis Presley. Marvin Gaye. Ray Charles. So I said, Get me them. And Marvin’s version of Yesterday is my favourite ever, even beyond mine. Just so cool. And the flakiest version is Elvis. Cos he doesn’t know the words. I love Elvis to death but it’s flaky, it’s a live version and the pianist is trying to intro him, and Elvis is … (silence)… then the drugs give him a moment’s relief and he comes to. [Mimes Elvis as drunken pub singer] “Yezzurday, love was such an easy game to play / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay…” Which doesn’t actually make sense! But I love him. I think it’s an American trait, but the other thing all these guys do, is none of them do what I do. I own up in the song and say “Why she had to go I don’t know… I did something wrong.” I own up. But they all go, “I must have done something wrong,” like they’re putting a little disclaimer in there. They all do it!

Lennon biographer Philip Norman

Thu, 27 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

John Lennon: The Life is a fine biography. I wrote about the book, and interviewed its author Philip Norman, for THE WORD in October 2008. The version below contains some extra material unused at the time.

It’s bloody enormous, for a start. I had intended to take my review copy away on holiday, until it arrived by courier in two huge A4 binders. I would literally have needed an extra suitcase. The author tells me it runs to about 300,000 words and that was after he’d cut 60,000. Can there still be so much to say about John Lennon? Or indeed about anyone?

I would pitch Philip Norman’s blockbuster somewhere in between its two best-known predecessors, namely Albert Goldman’s The Lives Of John Lennon (a book he calls “malevolent, risibly ignorant”) and Ray Coleman’s Lennon: The Definitive Biography (“an honourable attempt”). But I would place it above both of them – more accurate, more perceptive and far better-written. The great surprise for people like me, who have spent too many years reading about The Beatles, is the revelatory material that John Lennon: The Life actually contains. So, yes, there really is more to say.

The first eye-opener is John’s incestuous desire for his mother Julia – a flighty and spirited woman who left him, as a child, in the care of her sister Mimi. (She was killed in a car accident when John was a teenager.) He spoke to Yoko of this fixation repeatedly; he confided it to others and speaks of it in a 1979 audio-diary. At 14 he lay next to his mother during her afternoon rest and wondered how far she would let him go.

Then it’s suggested that he had a crush on Paul. “On the principle that bohemians should try everything,” writes Norman, John had contemplated an affair, “but had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality.” Yoko, again, is party to this speculation. She recalls hearing people in the Apple office who called McCartney “John’s Princess”. One is never sure whether John really had those leanings – or just an intellectual curiosity and appetite for mischief. The same ambiguity surrounds his early Spanish holiday with The Beatles’ gay manager Brian Epstein. (Although, when a Liverpool DJ unwisely made a jibe, Lennon battered him savagely.)

Norman writes with a shrewd eye for the wider context. He’s especially good on the post-War, middle-class world of Lennon’s childhood. We follow John from semi-detached tranquillity to art-school and Hamburg, to the London Palladium and the world. We are necessarily in familiar territory for a lot of the time, thanks not least to the author’s own Beatle book, his estimable 1981 biography Shout!. Yet there is always an arresting new fact around the corner. Connoisseurs of trivia will enjoy learning that “eight days a week’ was not a Ringo-ism, but a quip by Paul’s taxi-driver on the way to a songwriting session with John. Nor had I known of John’s fling with the pop singer Alma Cogan – a woman whom poor Brian Epstein, ironically, had once considered marrying.

More startling, though, is the business of Norwegian Wood. This song was always read as a coded admission of adultery – but with whom? The journalist Maureen Cleave is often suggested – she was pretty and clever and Lennon adored her – but Norman’s evidence points elsewhere. When John moved to London with his wife Cynthia and their child Julian, they took a flat in South Kensington. It had been found for them by The Beatles’ photographer Robert Freeman, who lived downstairs with his beautiful wife, Sonny. Now, she was German but preferred to say she was Norwegian. The Freemans’ pad was fashionably wood-panelled. When Robert was out and Cynthia upstairs, John slipped down to see Sonny Freeman and they did, indeed, have an affair…

The book’s numerous sources include both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, The Beatles’ producer George Martin and their right-hand man Neil Aspinall. There are long-lost girlfriends from Liverpool and the “primal scream” therapist Arthur Janov. I even provided a few scraps myself. Documentary evidence comes from the private papers of Aunt Mimi and John’s autobiographical notes and tapes. A Lennon biographer always has the benefit of his songs, which are among the most candid ever written. And there are the ever-engaging public utterances: he was, says Norman, “perhaps the only celebrity in history who never did a dull or dishonest interview.”

What must it be like to write a Lennon book with Yoko looking over one shoulder and Paul over the other? The author had Yoko’s blessing for the project – though she’s apparently unhappy with the finished result – and Paul agreed to be interviewed also. The tone is scrupulously fair to both of them. Yoko appears to have been pulled reluctantly into Lennon’s orbit. She did not push her way forward to bag a Beatle. And McCartney has shown a forgiving side. I doubt whether he has forgotten Philip Norman’s Sunday Times attack from years ago, a parody poem that ended:-

O deified Scouse, with unmusical spouse

For the clichés and cloy you unload,

To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon

In the middlemost midst of the road.

Of all the stories told within this teeming tale, few are as strange as that of Alfred Lennon, John’s wayward father. A rascally Scouse seaman, it’s true that he abandoned John in childhood, but not without a struggle to keep him. Later, as a penniless drifter, he sought the company of his Beatle son but never expected much. At 54 he eloped to Gretna Green with a teenage bride and they had two sons – Lennon’s little-known half-brothers. Unaware the superstar now wore a beard, he once took along that quintessentially 1970 gift, a bottle of aftershave. The visit enraged Lennon, who responded with brutal fury and threatened to have him killed – poor Alf was so shaken he filed a statement with a solicitor, in the event of his unnatural death.

It’s another instance of John’s propensity to extreme nastiness. His behaviour towards his first wife, Cynthia, has some repellent aspects too. Such stories, and they’re well-documented, make you question the posthumous sanctification of Lennon. The Man of Peace was, in a way, the classic idealist – he loved the human race in abstract, but could be a complete bastard with individuals, including his own family. He admits as much in one of his last-ever songs, I Don’t Wanna Face It: “You wanna save humanity / But it’s people that you just can’t stand.”

But there, in the humour and self-awareness, we catch a more endearing man as well. Quick, funny and frequently kind, Lennon never stopped learning, questioning and revising his ideas. Where he was headed, we can only guess. There was never much need to “expose” or “de-bunk” John Lennon – in his songs, from Cold Turkey to Jealous Guy, he always got there before you. Lennon: The Life may be a warts-and-all sort of book, but it’s also respectful and affectionate. In the end, it’s the portrait of a complex man, and it’s as big as it needs to be. This is the best Lennon book so far.

Philip Norman Q&A

Lennon’s biographer grew up in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. (He takes some pride in claiming the town’s ferry service as the inspiration for Ticket To Ride). As a young reporter on the Sunday Times his assignments included P.G. Wodehouse, Elizabeth Taylor and Colonel Gadaffi. As well as novels and plays he has written heavyweight biogs of Elton John, Buddy Holly and The Rolling Stones, but is probably best-known for his 1981 book Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles. Philip Norman sits this morning in the Groucho Club and ponders the epic voyage he took into the head of Winston O’Boogie. “I suddenly thought, He really deserves a book,” he says. “A real biography, as if he were John Keats or Mahatma Ghandi. Not a pop person but a major, towering presence in his century.”

How did you feel after finishing this book? Relieved? Bereaved?

The normal feeling when you finish a book is that I feel dead inside…. I would like to hide and go on to something else.

Was it difficult not to cut-and-paste yourself?

I had to make a vow not to do that, so I set myself this hellish task on three levels. Firstly to get new information, secondly to make the familiar new and thirdly not to plagiarise myself.

Has writing this book changed your opinion of Lennon?

I began with the view from my book Shout! which was of a rebellious, lovable, quite screwed-up bloke. I ended with much more reverence for his music, his writing and his intellect, something he always took pains to hide. I realised he could not have written a song like Norwegian Wood if he did not have the mental self-discipline of Samuel Becket. He would never have admitted that, even though he read everything, ever since he was a small boy, thanks to his Aunt Mimi. So it led to more respect for his mental power and self-discipline, and also the fact he could write a tune as much as McCartney could, though he always thought he didn’t. Also, a lot more sympathy for how vulnerable he was, how easy it was to hurt this seemingly tough, cynical person.

What was Yoko’s involvement?

I went to see Yoko and said, “Can I do this?” She said “OK, you can do it,” and she would be available for interview. It would not be authorised, but otherwise I was free to go ahead. I’d met her in the Apple days, doing a piece for the Sunday Times, I’d spent the morning in the Apple office just watching John and Yoko be John and Yoko. I was allowed to do that. When I published my book Shout! she invited me over to the Dakota Building – this was only five months after John’s death. And over the years, every couple of years, I was back to interview her.

How did your view of Yoko evolve?

Though conceptual art is now a familiar concept in mainstream culture, in the 60s very few people understood it. Yoko was thought to be a charlatan seeking attention with these weird stunts, many of which are now recognised by people like Tracy Emin as being pioneering. Yoko was famous in her own sphere, and she didn’t want to leave that fame and be a mere appendage to a Beatle, so she was reluctant. She was Japanese, and in those days, even for someone from a powerful family as she was, there was still a way that a Japanese woman was with a husband. And it was not dominating. She is very funny, highly educated, very cultured, good to talk to. Very much like John in a strange way: you can see why they hit it off, both totally frank, unshockable. And as she told me what went on in their interior life I developed much more sympathy for her. The incredible racism that was in play in those days, she suffered unbelievable abuse. She was resilient. Growing up in the Second World War she had to be strong to look after her siblings in Japan. John wanted her in the Beatles, and she didn’t want to do that. She was pulled in.

But she finally withheld her endorsement?

What we had on paper allowed her to read the book for factual accuracy, which she did. And I had always written about John in a way that she liked, which was a reflection of how she talked about him – obviously very loving, but also rather knowing and humorous: “You’ll never guess what he did then…” He could be impossible but most of the time you couldn’t help loving him. But she did not like the totality of that, so she withdrew her endorsement.

Why, specifically?

To my surprise, for things she had told me in previous interviews, in a rather amused way. She said she thought I’d been mean to John. I don’t agree. I don’t believe you can write a biography if you hate the subject. You have to empathise and not just do an Albert Goldman and tear them apart. So that was upsetting.

Did Paul McCartney give you his co-operation?

He did and I was amazed. I thought with the post-John politics, if Yoko was helping me then McCartney would not. But he phoned me one day and he said “I can’t sit down and talk to you because you’ve written some things about me that were hard.” And they were. So I said, “I know, but there are certain things you could tell me, that only you know. Would you do it by email?” He said yes, and he always answered generously, in lots of detail. But I saved it for the important questions, such as “Were you a witness to John kicking Stuart [Sutcliffe] in the head?” And he has no memory of it. I don’t think you’d forget it if you’d seen it. And a minor thing: “Is it true that you and John, left- and right-handed as you were, could play each other’s guitars?” And he said yes: together they were ambidextrous, and in their personalities as well. John could finish a Paul song and vice versa. Or was John really drunk when he met you at the garden fete? “I don’t think he was, he might have had a drink, you know…” Do you remember John walking into the boardroom at Apple and saying he was Jesus Christ? No, it never happened.

Tell us about John’s sexual feelings for Julia, his mother.

It was right there to the end of his life. When I said to Yoko, “Did he often talk about Julia?” she said “Oh my God! You’ve no idea! He never stopped.” She was a very good listener, but she had to take in this stuff for years and the theme of Julia never really stopped. I can’t explain it, because I don’t imagine for a second that she would have given him a sexual come-on, it was just in his imagination. He would even talk about it, not just to Yoko, he told at least one journalist but it couldn’t be printed. It was so near the surface and he would admit it. He would tell you anything. If you asked the question seriously, he would answer it.

Do you think he had homo-erotic feelings for Paul?

They shared rooms and beds as teenage boys used to do and there was never anything overt. Yoko had a theory that there was some sub-conscious feeling that they were like a married couple, and he was betrayed by Paul. He did once say, according to Yoko, that Paul hurt him so terribly. You can’t really see why, McCartney didn’t do anything that bad. I think John was one of those people who, as in the famous speech by Oscar Wilde in the witness box, show there is a love between David and Jonathan, an intense platonic love between men. Other societies have recognised that this was possible. I think John was capable of that. He needed to have a sidekick, a blood brother. I just think it was that, this need to have brothers and be a brother.

The big musical revelation is the identity of John’s mystery girl in Norwegian Wood.

The folklore is that it was Maureen Cleave, an extremely proper woman: John would have liked her because she wrote like Richmal Compton, and she was incredibly cute. If you ever see the press conference with Bob Dylan, she sits next to him and the rest of the press are somewhere else, she sort of whispers in his ear and he adores her. So I can see there was a powerful… John liked clever young women.

I believe in this thing called Biographer’s Luck. I don’t think you can write a biography unless you believe in luck and I did have a lot. I had worked as a journalist with Dean Freeman, Sonny Freeman’s son, who is a well-known photographer and it just popped into my mind to wonder if his mother would have some memories. In those days she said she was Norwegian, John lived above her flat with Robert Freeman, it was wood-panelled, wood was the big thing at the time, they had an affair, under everyone’s noses. So the guilt and half-confession of the song seems to be fairly conclusive to me.

When did you meet The Beatles?

I first met them in Newcastle on what nobody then knew was the their last British tour; they came to the City Hall and I somehow got in. Now I know how pissed off they were with touring, particularly John. In fact when he got out of the car he was quite sardonic to the assembled press and myself. But in the subterranean dressing room at the City Hall they could not have been nicer. He and Ringo sat down to talk to me, McCartney came up. Only Harrison would not stop watching The Avengers – I saw this pale, discontented face floating in the twilight, in a polo neck. Then McCartney threw me his bass so I could see how light it was, and how cheap. He said, “It’s only 50 quid but I won’t change it cos I’m mean.” I asked if I could stay around and it was “Oh sure!” But then Neil Aspinall said “Get out.” “But they said…” “I don’t care what they said. Get out.” Which is what his job was.

What other sources did you uncover?

Again, it was purely Biographer’s Luck. I happened one Sunday evening to switch on The Antiques Roadshow and a woman was showing an expert some letters. This woman was a Beatles fan, a young girl in the 1960s who decided to write to John’s Aunt Mimi, and she had started writing back. Very funny letters about what John was doing, how she’d been on tour with him. This was Mimi being like this brisk, Dickensian Betsy Trotwood: “Did you see John’s hair on TV last week? It was disgusting! We had a row.” Seeing those letters was sheer luck.

Aunt Mimi is terribly important, isn’t she? The one constant presence through his entire 40 years of life.

And the code of behaviour that she inculcated in him. Even at his most “Naughty John” he would still write thank-you notes, as she had taught him. Derek Taylor defined the characteristic of John that he most liked as grace. You might think John extremely graceless in many ways, but it was there, because of his aunt. But there were other aunts, also playing a powerful part, a circle of women. In fact, at the Cavern he once looked out and there were at least three aunts watching him. It was like P.G. Wodehouse.

And you have material from Dakota, like the taped autobiography he began in 1979.

Again the surprising thing was to find out how learned John was, and how much he read. And how many connections he made in that audio diary. There’s a reference not only to Truman Capote but also to E.M. Forster: Forster had said to people he always thought that when he got old his sexual urges would subside, but they were even worse when he was 90. And we know Capote had his own demons, so here is John making a direct line between himself and E.M. Forster through Truman Capote. Part of his motivation for the Lost Weekend is that he’s read Nigel Nicholson’s book about Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West. Really nothing escaped him.

You were also helped by Pauline, the widow of John’s father Alf?

Yes, Alf does this extraordinary thing of marrying this extremely attractive young woman, who is totally unfazed by the fact that Alf is older than her father. By whom she has two sons. She showed me that he was extremely well thought-of in his occupation at sea, he was very good at being a steward and head waiter, but a point comes when he decides he can’t be bothered and becomes an itinerant character washing up in hotels and so on. And Pauline was wonderful.

John’s treatment of his father looks particularly awful.

It’s a familiar syndrome, it happened with Elton John as well. The child of divorced parents goes with the mother and in the mother’s family the father is painted in the worst possible light. His father was a hapless character and he liked a drink, but he behaved on some important occasions very well, with honour. The business of him “not being around”, well, it was the Second World War when every man was away, and he was doing something dangerous and admirable.

Did John’s “primal scream” therapy, with Dr Janov, re-awaken the anger towards Alf?

I don’t know why it went so deep with John. His mother was always around, he was surrounded by attentive females. I can’t quite see why this awful pain and agony seems so deeply embedded, this horrible vulnerability, this inability to forget any pain he’d been caused. And I think Janov did unlock something extraordinary. People didn’t talk about their childhoods in those days, everything was buried. So a lot of rage came out.

Did you find it hard to sustain your interest in his later music?

The amazing thing to me was how good he was. There was a sort of flow that one had gone along with, to say that John’s solo career was erratic and misguided, but I thought his solo career was stupendous. I got more and more fascinated by his music. What I had to do was not only find new information, which was quite hard, but I had to revisit all of the known information and find new things to say. It is very hard to write about music itself but you have to do it. I found new things in his music that I had not known were there. I knew I had to make the creative art a very important part of the book. And I don’t think he ever slackened. On the White Album: he had to be serious, he couldn’t mess around, if he messed around then he did lose it. I think George Martin knew that as well, a lot of the White Album he was larking around and that was when he lost my interest, but only then.

Had John not died, would he still be a creative force?

I think there’s no doubt. And he would have come back to Britain. He was one of those people, like George Orwell, who could not help his incredible love of Britain and things British.

Was it important to give his story historical context?

It’s self-evidently necessary to relate the art to the times, and what is going on outside this bubble of The Beatles. But to do that and not go in Pseuds Corner is bloody difficult. The absolute exemplar, in my mind, of how to do it badly was a “Rock’n’Roll Years” kind of thing I heard by Alan Freeman. One of the lines was: “The year was 1962. In East Germany they were building a Wall… But that didn’t stop Bobby Vee having a hit with Take Good Care Of My Baby!”

Ringo: A Quick Q&A

Tue, 25 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A short conversation with Ringo, to accompany the review of Vertical Man in MOJO, August 1998. You can see the much fuller interview, from which this extract was taken, here.

It’s been called your best album since 1973.

Well, I keep saying that. I think it’s the best since the Ringo/Goodnight Vienna period, really. You look at my musical career and from Goodnight Vienna it started going downhill. And now we’re on the way back. I had the Time Takes Time album (1992) which I thought was brilliant. But people didn’t seem to want to go for it.

It wasn’t widely heard over here.

No. Well it was on Private Music. Which was so private… you had to be a member to hear it. Ha ha! No, I could make excuses, but you put your record out and you hope for the best.

You’re putting yourself about a bit, promotionally speaking.

Sure. Being with the new label I thought, I’ll do my bit, and this is what you have to do. It’s not like the old days where you put a record out and said ‘Hey! My name’s Ringo’ and that was all. Now you’ve gotta go and promote the hell out of it.

You’ve covered Love Me Do, though George Martin didn’t let you play on The Beatles’ version. Do you think you’ve got the hang of it now?

Yeah, I’ve got the hang of it now. Love Me Do was a party. We worked out the key and did it quickly. Originally we backed off the John Lennon harmonica line, because I thought that might be pushing it. So Steven [Tyler] did some sort of scat version, then the next day I said ‘No, c’mon, it’s so silly we’re hiding from this.’ So he did the harmonica again.

Is that George playing guitar on King Of Broken Hearts?

Yeah. I went over to visit him one evening and I played him some of the tracks and said, Here’s King Of Broken Hearts, I’d like you to be on the album. Anyway he wasn’t in the mood. Two weeks later I phoned him up from LA just to say Hi and what are you doing? ‘Oh I’m in the studio playing with the Dobro.’ I go: Ooh, a Dobro would sound good on my album! So he goes, ‘Oh all right, send it over then.’ I wanted that slide guitar. His soul comes out of that guitar, it just blows me away.

You’ve said the album’s key line is “Let’s all get well together”?

Yeah, I think it’s great. Let’s all get well together. It’s how I feel now. Peace, love and understanding. Let’s all get well together. If only we could. We’re all doing our best. I also sing “Be your own guru.” Well, there are many gurus out there who can help you. But it’s true, you’ve got to help yourself as well. Then you can pass that on. But I don’t mean, ‘Help yourself, let’s go down the market and grab a few T-shirts!’

Seven Golden Voices

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Seven of my all-time favourite vocalists, extracted from MOJO Magazine’s 100 Singers feature, October 1998.
They are:-
John Lennon
Kate Bush
Van Morrison
Steve Marriott
Dusty Springfield
Luciano Pavarotti
Chrissie Hynde

John Lennon
Born October 9 1940 Died December 8 1980
Jaw-dropping moment: The hoarse, imploring demand at 0.05 of Don’t Let Me Down (on “The Beatles 1967-1970” Apple 1993)
Recommended album: “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” (Apple 1970)

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy… and a torrent of honest, rock’n’roll energy. John Lennon’s voice could encompass all these things because his heart did, too. He never liked his own singing, and used to beg his producers to smother it with echo, or distortion, or anything to take away its natural sound. And yet his voice was unbeatable – a hard, dry, nasal thing that just couldn’t help singing from the soul. Lennon’s is one of the most natural voices in rock, without the traces of theatricality you hear in Elvis, or Jagger or Buddy Holly. It’s a shockingly direct tool of communication: he rarely had the patience to try for anything fancier. And he recorded very few instrumental numbers – it seems that if he didn’t have the chance to *say* something, then he couldn’t see the point of performing in the first place.
It’s difficult to specify the virtues of John Lennon’s voice: like Dylan’s, so much of its power is bound up with your idea of the man himself. “It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from,” says the drummer Jim Keltner, who worked with both men. “When you hear a Lennon or Dylan song you’re going to be moved.” Reaching the audience was the only vocal quality that Lennon cared about. “You don’t have to be trained in rock’n’roll to be a singer,” he once remarked. “I can sing. Singing is singing to people who enjoy what you’re singing – not being able to hold notes.”
But he was technically accomplished, in spite of himself. Sifting through tapes for The Beatles’ “Anthology”, their producer George Martin remembered what natural singers the group had been. “Even when we did a simple thing,” he says, “such as the opening of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ where the three of them sing in harmony, they would naturally do it live on one mike. They would balance themselves and get the harmonies right. And sometimes, in a thing like She’s Leaving Home, when John and Paul both sang on the song, I had very few tracks to play with. I’d already used up two tracks. I had two tracks left for my vocals but I wanted to double track them. So they had to sing together and I had to put a different echo on one voice to get the space. So when they’re doing ‘She’s leaving… what did we do with our lives’ and so on, that was on two mikes but on one track, and they did that perfectly. So then I said, ‘Right, fellas, now do it again, and we’ll double track it.’ And they did. That was how good they were.”
Lennon often sounded at his happiest when he was singing other people’s songs: the version of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll Music, on “Beatles For Sale”, is one of his greatest performances. He learned to roar like that in the cauldron of those early Cavern gigs, and in the mayhem of the Hamburg shows. You hear the fruits of that savage apprenticeship on Twist And Shout – the final triumph of the all-day session for The Beatles’ first LP “Please Please Me”, when his larynx was nearly pulverised: “John must have built himself a set of leather tonsils in a throat of steel to turn out such a violently exciting track!” wrote their sleevenote writer Tony Barrow.
Those were screams of animal joy, maybe, but when it came to confessional songs such as Cold Turkey, he’d learned to howl his pain. It was on his first post-Beatles LP, “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band”, that Lennon’s urge to bare his soul was at its strongest. You could put that down to his new-found freedom from the old group, to his Primal Scream therapy, or to the daredevil encouragement of Yoko Ono. To his son Sean, John’s high-wire recklessness was a key attribute: “That’s what I admire most about my Dad,” he says. “He fucking came out with ‘Two Virgins’ after ‘Sgt. Pepper’, think about the balls it takes to do that. What a rebel.
“Listen to ‘McCartney’, that was Paul’s first record after The Beatles, it’s a great record, but it’s definitely not such a drastic fuck-you. I mean, my Dad made ‘Plastic Ono Band’ which I think is one of the top three albums of all time. That’s an insanely brilliant record, so raw and stripped down and so exactly not what The Beatles were doing. It’s so him, and he’s completely torn away from that pop sweet harmony world. It’s like punk before there was punk.”
At the other extreme of his range are the tender expressions of longing and vulnerability, like Julia or Jealous Guy; and summoned from somewhere else are the trance-like intonations of Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am The Walrus or A Day In The Life. Lennon, the voice, was always and everywhere the testament of Lennon the man.

Kate Bush
Born July 30 1958
Jaw-dropping moment: Heart-rending emotional gear-change, as post-romance bravery gives way to grief at 0.54, You’re The One (on “The Red Shoes”, EMI 1993)
Recommended album: “The Whole Story” (EMI 1986)

It was pierced ears all round when Kate arrived in 1978. Those pet-worrying shrieks on Wuthering Heights suggested an eccentric talent, but not a voice you’d come to consider sensuous. Yet the pre-Raphaelite nymph with Minnie Mouse’s soprano went on to surprise us all. Her voice, like her material, gained an unsuspected depth and richness, very soon revealed on masterful sequels such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes. From “Hounds Of Love” (1985), through “The Sensual World” to “The Red Shoes”, Bush’s delivery has become even more intimate and perhaps less pyrotechnic. On the one hand she’s the most secret star in British pop; on the other, she bares her longings and her pain with unparallelled frankness.
At first she was a convent schoolgirl with an imagination that was almost too vivid to be usefully channelled. If she was EMI’s “favourite daughter”, she was not unlike the company’s favourite son, Paul McCartney – both were blessed with a prodigious gift for melody that their conceptual abilities struggled to keep pace with. Three or four albums into her career, her songs stopped sounding like scrapbooks and turned into diaries, with all the corresponding emotional freight. Here is where her singing switched from a beguiling novelty to a darkly potent brew. It still swoops through the octaves with a giddying swiftness, but given the greater sophistication of her songwriting in recent years, the effect is to dramatise her emotional range, not merely to parade the colourful characters in her dressing-up box.
The sparseness of her output and the guarded privacy of her life have conspired against her reputation: it’s too easily forgotten what a quietly influential presence Kate has been. Of late she’s made a welcome habit of collaborating with The Trio Bulgarka, whose ethereal voices blend wonderfully with her more strident tones – each, in its way, presents you with something that’s incapable of insincerity. Bush is still a gawky lyricist at times, but in her singing she achieves an emotional truth that words alone can rarely locate.

Van Morrison
Born August 31 1945
Jaw-dropping moment: Van locates the Eternal Now, in Belfast circa 1955, at 7.44 of Take Me Back (on “Hymns To The Silence” Polydor 1991)
Recommended album: “Astral Weeks” (Warner Bros 1968)

He grunts, he growls, he snorts, he mutters – and still it sounds like a sacrament. Not everyone is enchanted by the voice of Van Morrison, but to those who are, there is no other voice that seems so spiritual. The best description is probably his own: The Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart.
Uniquely for a white singer of his generation, Van was already steeped in blues before he heard Elvis Presley. Unlike Lennon and the rest, he was not smitten by the arrival of rock, and never fixated upon the flash or the glamour. “Pop has just never been my music,” he says. “Because I’ve always heard the real stuff, y’know? I grew up in a household where I heard all the real music, so when I heard pop I didn’t have to rush out. I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but I had the background of hearing this other music since I was three. So it wasn’t such a big injection, like with rebellious teenagers when they heard rock’n’roll. I’d already heard similar music that was called rhythm’n’blues, which was where rock’n’roll came from. So it wasn’t any big diversion.”
As a consequence he never developed along the same lines as other rock singers. From the yappy snarl of his first recordings with Them, to the rumbling meditations of his later work, Morrison grew ever less interested in making a show. He doesn’t project, or express, for the benefit of his audience: we are merely allowed to eavesdrop on some obsessive, private dialogue. On the pivotal “Astral Weeks” LP we can hear his voice mid-way between the edginess of his youth and the deeper, more measured resonance of his maturity. But he’s already begun to sing in tongues: “And I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry/Hey! It’s me, I’m dynamite and I don’t know why” (Sweet Thing).
He’s the least precise of vocalists, and maybe the most eccentric, but Van can genuinely seem in a trance when he performs – like he’s forgotten who, what or where he is. “When he was on stage he would look like a space cadet,” recalled one of his musicians. “But then he’d open his mouth, and you would realise that he had channelled everything into the sound of his voice. The rest of it was just a shell that was there for the purpose of producing this voice.”

Steve Marriott
Born January 30 1947 Died April 20 1991
Jaw-dropping moment: “Gotta! Gotta! Gotta!”: one last push at 2.18 sees All Or Nothing safely home. (on “The Decca Anthology 1965-67”, Deram 1996)
Recommended album: “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” (Immediate 1968)

The Small Faces passed through a few different phases in their brief career, from mod soulboys to music hall nostalgists, by way of woozy psychedelia. But if there was one thing you could rely on, it was the passionate blaze of Steve Marriott’s voice. This was a voice that came out of a skinny little Cockney kid yet sounded like it could tear up telephone directories. It was a voice that battled loyally for every band he played with, including his next group Humble Pie and the procession of pub-rock acts that he led until his premature end in 1991. Like a lot of great rock singing, Marriott’s style was a triumph of sheer spirit.
In a way it was a result of his influences, and of the obstacles in his path. The first Small Faces gigs were a cacophony of technical ineptitude: the band was “loud, notoriously loud!” he recalled. “If you can’t play, play loud!” The later Small Faces shows were no easier: “It was mad. It was a bunch of noise, a bunch of screaming little girls. It was just a screaming row. The PAs were sort of archaic, you could never hear. Monitors to me were people who brought the milk round at school. You used to stick your finger in your ear to hear yourself properly.” How could he cope except by hollering until his eyes watered? In any case, he was born to be an R&B shouter. He loved Little Richard, James Brown, Otis Redding. He could be soulful and explosive, and both at once if required.
Even the perfumed gardens of English flower power did not sedate him. The Faces’ organist, Ian Mclagan, confessed a distaste for Marriott’s softer moments on Itchycoo Park: “I can’t bear it when he sings with the pretty little voice like that. I want to smack him!” But then comes a roar (“It’s all too beautiful!”) and we’re back in business. Marriott’s reputation has grown since those days. “It’s not surprising,” says his friend Jim Leverton, laughing. “ Steve always said, ‘It’s hard to kill vermin.’”

Dusty Springfield
Born April 16 1939 (Died 2 March 1999)
Jaw-dropping moment: The diva’s imperious return to the hit parade at 1.36 on What Have I Done To Deserve This? (1987 Pet Shop Boys single, available on “Goin’ Back”)
Recommended album: “Goin’ Back: The Very Best Of” (Philips 1994)

It was Cliff Richard who first called Dusty “the white Negress”, in an awkward attempt to praise the sensuous force of her voice. But as her producer in Memphis, Jerry Wexler, has noted, “you won’t hear much of a black intonation in her voice.” From her beginnings in The Springfields, in fact, Dusty moved through folk-pop, mascara-blinded ballads and the funkiest R&B, maintaining a tone that’s all her own. Her taste in songwriters, from Bacharach down, was pretty faultless, too. “She’s deeply soulful,” says Wexler. “As with Aretha, I never heard her sing a bad note.”

Luciano Pavarotti
Born October 12 1935 (Died 6 September 2007)
Jaw-dropping moment: Tension ascending deliciously, U2 and Eno make space for Il Maestro’s majestic entrance at 2.53 of Miss Sarajevo, from “Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1” (Island 1995)
Recommended album: “The Ultimate Collection” (Deco 1998)

As the Pav will inform anyone who asks him, the tenor voice is not a natural sort of noise at all. It’s really an artificial construct that the practitioner must remake each day. His throat swathed and swaddled, he lives in constant fear of losing this mysterious force inside of him. Watch him in close-up on the TV, and he looks amazed by the sound coming out of his mouth. They don’t call him The King Of The High Cs any more, but he’s still the living bridge between high art and popular culture. Truly, it’s not over until the fat bloke sings.

Chrissie Hynde
Born September 7 1951
Sublime moment: Imaginations run riot at 1.56 of Brass In Pocket (on “Pretenders”, WEA 1979)
Recommended album: The Pretenders: “The Singles” (WEA 1987)

When a sceptical Nick Lowe got a demo tape off Chrissie Hynde, her voice was a revelation: “It was *fantastic*,” he recalled, being neither the “Janis Joplin/Maggie Bell squawk which so many girl singers seem to choose” nor “the simpy hearts and flowers, floor-length dresses stuff.” Smitten, he agreed to produce The Pretenders’ debut Stop Your Sobbing, and her career was launched. It’s a wonderfully poised voice that never strives for effect or mere “attitude”, yet pulsates with sex and a self-protective edge of menace. There’s a fully-formed personality in every note, fascinating and dangerous.

Clint Eastwood: Unforgiven

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

And you will know him by the trail of dead... A review of Unforgiven, from Word magazine, March 2003. It’s the Western that Clint Eastwood made when he decided he had killed enough men for one lifetime.

Unforgiven
Director Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris

“I don’t deserve this,” croaks the dying man, bleeding on a saloon-room floor and gazing up at Eastwood’s smoking gun. Tiny-eyed, many-teethed, Clint spits back the last words his vanquished foe will ever hear: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
   The moral of the story being, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, there’s just a meanness in this world. Maybe there are two basic types of Western movie: the Jon Bon Jovi and the Bruce Springsteen; the uncomplicated shoot-em-up and the brooding meditation on fate and character. Clint Eastwood is of course your man for the latter type of Western and he was never more Springsteen-ish than on 1992’s Unforgiven. He was specifically the Bruce of Nebraska’s title track: “Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path.”
   Eastwood, as we learn from one of the many extra features included with the 10th Anniversary DVD, picked up the script for Unforgiven after Francis Coppola’s option had lapsed, and duly banked the document away for his old age, knowing it was a role he would grow into. He was 61 by the time of its making, and claimed “It was everything I wanted to say in a Western.” He dedicated the movie to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel who had directed him in the “Man with no name” and Dirty Harry periods respectively, and indeed he plays a sort of composite of those two roles, burdened by the fatigue of age and a gnawing awareness of the prodigious body-count he’s left in his wake.
   We’re in a Wyoming brothel in 1880. An inexperienced young whore commits the *faux-pas* of giggling at her client’s small penis. He and a fellow cowboy retaliate by slashing and disfiguring the girl. When the town’s sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, lets the attackers off with a fine instead of a whipping, the prostitutes are furious and put a thousand-dollar bounty on their tormentors’ heads. Thus “the Whores’ Gold” attracts opportunist killers to the district. (One such, played by Richard Harris, is a blustering gun-slinger who is accompanied by his credulous biographer; they’re nearly irrelevant to the plot but symbolise the pulp-fiction beginnings of Western mythology, the same beast that Eastwood has wrestled throughout his screen career.)
   Enter, reluctantly, Eastwood’s character: a taciturn, flinty widower who has forsaken his violent ways for life as an honest but impoverished pig farmer. Only the prospect of money for his bare-footed children persuades him to join a callow, hot-headed bounty-hunter in pursuit of the two cowboys. The stage is set for a slowly-unfolding drama of vengeance that knows no proportion: once set in train, violence means the death of reason and, ultimately, of almost everyone who crosses Clint Eastwood’s path. In a world where only a bottle of whiskey will show a man some mercy, Eastwood represents a kind of justice. But he knows that with each life he takes he loses another piece of his soul.
   At the heart of Unforgiven is the fatalistic outlook of a natural conservative. We are what we are, and we are cursed to live out the consequences. “I guess he had it comin’,” says the young bounty-hunter of a freshly-slaughtered victim. “We all have it comin’, kid” replies Eastwood, bleakly. Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it. These are interesting themes, but they do not necessarily make great entertainment. Unforgiven paces its maze of moral ambiguities with a sure but ponderous step. Eastwood’s earlier work The Outlaw Josey Wales, though a cruder film in its way, is a much friskier ride through similar terrain. An evening spent with Unforgiven, especially viewed with its thoughtful DVD commentary, may be unforgettable, but keep your whiskey neat and prepare to pass that time entirely in a minor key.

Buy the DVD at Amazon.co.uk
Buy the DVD at Amazon.com

That'll Be The Day and Stardust

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Stardust (1974) are two of the great rock films. Both feature David Essex as the rising (and eventually falling) star Jim Maclaine. This review of their joint appearance on DVD appeared in Word, September 2003.
At the end is a capsule review for the same magazine in June 2006.

That’ll Be The Day
Director Claude Whatham
Starring David Essex, Ringo Starr, Penelope Leach, Robert Lindsay

Stardust
Director Michael Apted
Starring David Essex, Adam Faith, Larry Hagman

In bed with a pair of beautiful blonde girls – twin sisters at that – Jim Maclaine has the contented look of a man who feels he has taken the right course in life. A few years earlier he had decided to become a rock star and a rock star he became. But at what cost to his soul? And can the good times really roll forever? These are the dark doubts that will gnaw at Jim Maclaine, and they underscore these two fine British films of the early 1970s. A parable in two halves, That’ll Be The Day and Stardust amount to a cautionary story indeed. The next time you are invited to bed by beautiful blonde sisters, you may want to bear it in mind.
   Or maybe not. But you will enjoy the DVD. David Essex plays Jim Maclaine, a youth whose choirboy prettiness conceals a turbulent spirit. In That’ll Be The Day we meet him as a bored teen in drab, post-war Britain. Revolted by the purgatory of small town respectability, he walks out on his A-levels in search of sex, adventure and the new-fangled American rock’n’roll. He runs away to the seaside and lands a job in a holiday camp, where he’s adopted by a worldly Teddy Boy called Mike (played by Ringo Starr). He watches with interest as girls flock around the visiting rock act Stormy Tempest (Billy Fury) whose band includes a manic drummer played by Keith Moon. Under Mike’s seedy tutelage, Jim acquires some rudimentary seduction skills – rare is the maiden who can refuse a Babycham and a packet of crisps.
   When the chalets close for winter, Mike introduces Jim to work on a travelling fair, where the rockin’ sounds of Buddy Holly and Little Richard reverberate over the squeals of girls in dodgem cars. Mike takes care to educate his protégé in every trick and fiddle (“Remember, it’s a shillin’ for you and a shillin’ for them”), and Jim is a willing pupil. In time, however, realism compels him to go home – to the job in his mother’s grocery shop, early marriage to a local girl and, with awful swiftness, fatherhood. Yet the call of the wild cannot be ignored. The first film ends with Jim walking out on his family and buying an electric guitar…
   The story might be slight but it’s told with lots of charm. Ringo Starr and David Essex perform with a grit that neither would later be noted for. And I've always loved the look of this film. Though the actors’ hairstyles are of imprecise vintage, That’ll Be The Day does 1950s England brilliantly, from the chintz and linoleum of terraced parlours to the gaudy tat of its places of public gaiety. It’s no surprise to find it was filmed on the Isle of Wight, always good for a period flavour 20 years behind the mainland.
Stardust is a heavier proposition. Jim becomes a pop star with his beat group The Stray Cats and, by 1967 or so, he’s a drug addled rock legend, making quasi-religious concept albums. The character of Mike, who has become Maclaine’s personal manager, is now played by a convincingly wily Adam Faith. The old pals plot and fornicate their way through the music industry’s snakepit, menaced by its nastiest inhabitants and not above the odd spot of skullduggery themselves. (Every sacking, you’ll notice, is signalled by an arm around the shoulder and the dread words, “Fancy a drink?”)
   Given its bigger budget, exotic settings and a certain loss of focus, Stardust is the less likeable of the two films. But its feel for the dynamics of decadence is exactly right. The journalist Ray Connolly, author of both stories, was intimately familiar with the pop business and was shrewd enough to know the first requisite of stardom is not talent, but selfishness. To Jim Maclaine, other people exist only as abstractions. The question is whether his detachment will prove fatal.
   To that extent he is a difficult character to feel sympathy for, and we watch his final turmoil with more curiosity than concern. But the fiendish machinery of stardom has seldom been more cleverly revealed. And these two films are still a treat. They are, if you will, the serious Spinal Tap.

Capsule review for The Word June 2006:-

Cute as a button but ripe for moral corruption, the young David Essex starred in this 1973 film as a restless schoolboy in 1950s Britain, bent on becoming a rock’n’roll star. Yet more urgent, though, is the need to get his end away – and what better ruse than a summer job in a holiday camp? Soon he is tutored by a sly Scouse Teddy Boy (Ringo Starr) whose own way with the gentler sex involves some Babycham, crisps and a quick tickle “to see if she’ll go”. The film of Ray Connolly’s book is more than a cheeky romp, however: sexual conquests follow in profusion for the Essex character, but they are horribly cold transactions. In the sequel to That’ll Be The Day, our boy becomes the pop deity of Stardust, where his emotional selfishness will be fatally indulged. Given the choice, will he accept the love of one good woman over the bodily devotion of thousands? Take a guess.

Buy the DVD at Amazon.co.uk

Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

It's often said that Dennis Wilson made the best solo record of any Beach Boy, 1977's Pacific Ocean Blue. This account appeared in The Word of July 2008.

"They dropped the body of Dennis Wilson into the blue Pacific Ocean, of which he’d once sung so beautifully."

What most people know is that Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who really was a beach boy. Where his elder brother Brian was a musical genius, but also a chubby geek who never went near a surfboard, Dennis was the real deal, a bronzed Californian Adonis who wowed the beach babes with his dazzling smile. Seemingly a simple, hedonistic soul, he inspired Brian’s early visions of a sun-kissed teenage heaven on America’s Pacific shore. You may also know the darker tales that followed – of his friendship with Charles Manson, for example. Or of how he became the Beach Boy who actually died by drowning.

Then there is the happier fact of Dennis Wilson’s short life, namely that he made the best solo record of any Beach Boy. This was never in the form-book. He was a decent drummer (though they often used a stand-in on the records) and a good singer, though not so pure and clean as Mike Love and the other Beach Boys. Yet his 1977 album, Pacific Ocean Blue, is widely and rightly considered a classic. It’s rather as if Ringo Starr had slipped away one day in 1966 and quietly made Revolver.

How did that happen? Pacific Ocean Blue is a great, lumbering, soft-rock Frankenstein of an album. It’s scruffy and passionate. Most of its songs lurch abruptly from lonely-boy-at-piano into vast conflagrations of a thousand overdubs, possibly with a New Orleans marching band thrown in. Like Wilson himself, it’s brazenly undisciplined but undeniably large of heart. The achievement is all the greater because Brian Wilson did not take part, though younger brother Carl contributes here and there. Beach Boy harmonies are used sparingly, and Wilson’s own singing is raw and vulnerable. On several tracks he sounds just about heart-broken.

It is in no sense “a drummer’s album”. He builds each number from a plangent piano base, slow and stately, usually to a crescendo. Farewell My Friend, an elegy for someone’s father, is sad and lovely (and was played at Wilson’s own funeral). River Song and Pacific Ocean Blues are stirring hymns in praise of nature. At a point when The Beach Boys themselves had lost their creative force and settled for being an oldies heritage turn, Wilson seized the chance to channel his creative frustrations. Here he holds nothing back.

The mystique of Pacific Ocean Blue has been helped by its rarity: it was only briefly available on CD. But this reissue is made doubly special by its second disc, containing the unfinished sequel Bambu. Previously unheard outside the community of swivel-eyed bootleg collectors that every great act attracts, Bambu is tremendous. These later tracks ebb and flow, swell and falter, with the same romantically wrecked grandeur as the first album. It’s good to have them around. Bambu should have sealed Wilson’s reputation, but he cancelled plans for a solo tour and never completed the album.

What went wrong?

Well, by 1977, Dennis was already looking weather-beaten. In less than a decade the former teen dream had gone from Ricky Nelson to Willie Nelson. He looked like an alcoholic Old Testament prophet. He had, as they say, “his demons”. He opened his home to the future mass-murderer Charles Manson and his harem of zombified hippy chicks. It was a terrible error, but as a female friend explained, “Dennis was all about sex. He called his penis The Wood and it had its own identity. It really ran him.” He clocked up five marriages and a major drug addiction. He fell apart. A colleague in the Beach Boys called him “a drugged-out no-talent parasite.” (Others were less charitable.) In his last conversation with Brian, he rang to cadge some cocaine money. Brian, battling through rehab, held firm. Dennis invited the family genius to “take a flying fuck”.

Drunk, he jumped off a boat in a California harbour in 1983 and was hauled up dead. Burials at sea are not normally legal in the USA but special dispensation was obtained from President Reagan, who was apparently a Beach Boys fan. So they dropped the body of Dennis Wilson into the blue Pacific Ocean, of which he’d once sung so beautifully.

Buy the CD at Amazon.co.uk

Buy the CD at Amazon.com

Sinéad O'Connor Interviewed

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

I interviewed Sinéad O’Connor in Dublin, where she was promoting a reissue of her most famous album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. Here is a basic Q & A of our meeting. The piece appeared, in a different form, in The Word’s issue of May 2009.

“I really needed to get rid of ‘Sinéad O’Connor’ for a few years, to let that die…. I was going to get a housekeeper job for a while.”

So we’re zooming through Dublin on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent and 40 days of repentance. On the whitewashed walls of a building used by U2, angry graffiti calls for that band to mend its ways. Amid the messages of love written in Spanish and Japanese are newer scrawlings that denounce the band’s tax strategy (U2 are channelling some earnings via Dutch banks). It’s been a big controversy in Ireland. “Stop hiding your millions, Bono!” the scolding slogans say.
   Then we arrive at a boutique hotel in south Dublin. Even here, in its chic cocktail bar, there is a moralistic air. Wealthy-looking customers are wearing the black smudge of ash on their foreheads, evidence they’ve attended Church this morning. It’s all a bit bewildering to our party of English media types – journalists and music business people, photographers and their assistants – who mill about in a jumble of flight cases and lighting equipment. It takes a few moments before most of us notice we’ve been joined by a newcomer.
   Quiet as a hologram, a small and drably-dressed woman has somehow entered the room. A fringe of dark brown hair falls over her face. If you stared at her for an hour you might – but only might – say she looked a bit like Sinéad O’Connor.
   It’s Sinéad’s more outgoing manager, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who makes the introductions. His client nods at each of us in turn with a mournful, doubting look. Before we know it she has slipped away again, to smoke a cigarette on the hotel’s freezing forecourt. (Later I ask if she’s giving up anything for Lent. The cigarettes are all she would consider, she says, “but I know that’s not gonna happen.”)
   I get the feeling she’ll be a reluctant interviewee. In the past few years she’s fretted that press reports have made her seem… well, a bit barmy. In 2004 she took out a full-page ad in the Irish newspapers to complain. But The Word is here on a more innocent mission. We’re invited to discuss her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, due for reissue on a deluxe CD. It was her second album and it made her a star. It’s the one that has her fabulous cover of the Prince song, Nothing Compares 2 U, which in turn produced that famous video – Sinéad’s face, in close-up, tear-streaked – that probably lives in all our memories.
   The song was brought to her by Fachtna, who was her first manager (and for a short while her lover). They parted ways in 1989 but 20 years later he looks after her career once more. In the meanwhile, it’s fair to say Sinéad has had her share of notoriety.
   To briefly recap… She caused anger in 1990 by refusing to perform if a US venue played America’s national anthem; on Saturday Night Live in 1992 she tore up the Pope’s picture as a protest against child abuse; soon afterwards she was howled down by audience members at a Dylan tribute show. More recently there were headlines saying she had become a priest in a breakaway Catholic sect; that she was leaving the music business (but then came back); that she had become a lesbian (but then changed her mind); that she had attempted suicide. There is above all her insistence on the traumas of her childhood. She has accused her mother, who died in 1985, of abusing her in cruel though unspecified ways.
   The album aside, I will try to tackle a few of these subjects, if I get time. Sinéad comes into our interview room like a woman walking to the gallows. She sits and stares at me with big, resigned eyes. “I fucking don’t remember a thing, to be honest,” she tells me. “So your job’s going to be quite difficult.”
I hand her the CD booklet, hoping it will help to jog her memory. “Well, let’s see,” she sighs, unimpressed. “This is terrible. You’re gonna have such a hard time with this one.”

Do you look at the girl on that album cover and think, “Who was she?”
I just think I was very young. I was really only a baby. I was the age that my eldest son is now, so that’s weird.

It’s an autobiographical record, isn’t it? Like a first novel?
Records were always my life story, always like diaries. Which is one thing I do remember about this record. When I went to Ensign [her label] with the finished record they said they didn’t want to put it out because it was like reading somebody’s diaries, and they didn’t think anyone would buy it. Their exact words were it would “end up on the warehouse floor like Terence Trent Darby’s second album.”

Did you have any qualms about being so personally revealing?
No. I couldn’t help it. The attraction of music was it was a world where you could say all the shit you couldn’t say in life. It was an off-loading place. My first couple of records were what I would call Recovery Records. I had grown up in a pretty severe situation and I was using music as a way of healing myself.

Do you mean the business with your mother?
Yeah. So a lot of the songs on this record were really about her. Even the fucking title I got from having a dream about her, and in this dream she said to me, “I do not want what I haven’t got.” In my mind, even Nothing Compares 2 U was me thinking about her… [She leafs glumly through the CD booklet.] The Emperor’s New Clothes was actually about U2, believe it or not.

Really? What were your feelings about U2?
Well, I didn’t like their records. I used to make ash-trays out of them. You could melt the vinyl records over the cooker… Feel So Different was a song about my mother. I Am Stretched On Your Grave speaks for itself really [she laughs bleakly]… You Cause As Much Sorrow was about my mother…

It’s a demanding business that expects people so young to make ten or 12 big statements per album. What do most of us know at that age?
All I knew was that I was incredibly fucked-up. So I was writing songs to help me deal with that, and as it happens I was lucky enough to be fucked-up enough to come up with a couple of albums from it.

But you wouldn’t recommend it.
Being fucked up? No.

At the beginning of the album you recite that little prayer, about having the wisdom to know what you can or cannot change. Have you measured up to that advice?
I don’t know. Again, I put that on there because my mother always liked that prayer. I didn’t associate it with me, I wasn’t saying it for myself. I suppose I’m quite good at accepting things that can’t be changed, mostly.

Do you really think you were good at accepting what you couldn’t change? You were always standing up and shouting and making a point.
Ah, but that didn’t mean I thought that I alone could change things. Everybody has to do their bit.

Would you do everything again the same way?
Of course I get asked that question a lot. I always say the only thing I would change is that I was quite young and my self-esteem was so fragile that I allowed myself to become very affected by what people would say about me. I allowed myself to get very wounded by that. That’s the only thing I regret, that I didn’t have a strong enough sense of identity. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been so bothered by everyone going on about what a wanker I was.

A lot of artists say they create a second character around themselves, as protection.
Well, that portrayal of me as some kind of crazy person, or controversial person, to me that wasn’t me. That was something media people were making me into, but as far as I was concerned, I was simply being me. For some reason everyone else was making that out to be controversial.

Making that record took you to a new level of success and attention. Did life change?
Life changed and people around me changed. That was quite shocking, how the people around me changed. Then the career began to interfere with things I wanted to do personally, like taking college courses. People around me started perceiving me as something other than what I thought I was. When you’re that young you don’t have a very strong sense of identity anyway. I was only making records because I was fucked-up. I didn’t give a shit what happened to the record after it came out, because the object of the game for me was to get this shit off my chest. So I couldn’t relate to the whole music business and everyone wanting me to be materially successful and be a pop star and go around the place miming songs on TV shows. And I couldn’t understand why anyone was into what I did. I was that low on self-esteem.

Why was your self-esteem so low?
I felt like an impostor. I felt I didn’t belong in the world I suddenly found myself in.

You must have got some pleasure from it, at some level?
What kept me going was that I had all this emotional shit that I had to get off my chest, so writing songs and performing allowed me to work through a whole lot of emotional shit. That’s all it was for me. As you get older it becomes something different, because you’ve got it off your chest. But certainly in those early days I was a right fucked-up dude.

Were you under pressure to be a pop star?
Yes, and I was a square peg in a round hole. I saw myself as a protest singer, really. I was representing child abuse survivors. That’s how I saw myself. So I didn’t fit in to the pop star thing. And I couldn’t see myself as an artist from the outside. All I saw was from the inside. I felt I was an impostor. I didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t find the “I” in it all. So I felt lonely. I understood what people meant when they say “Loneliness is a crowded room.” You’ve got people all around you but they’re not relating to you, only to some projection of their own. Mostly, they’re relating to someone they’re making a living out of. Then your friends start treating you differently. People in your family don’t relate to you in the same way. They have different emotional reactions to what’s happened to you. So you get lost at sea. And when you’re young nobody sits you down and tells you how to deal with the press, for example, how to conduct an interview without getting yourself into trouble. Then when you’re in the shit they all leave you. Most of the time when artists are in rehab, the manager’s sunning himself on some yacht somewhere. I couldn’t relate to myself as an artist. I wasn’t good at taking compliments.

Did you not see yourself as attractive?
No. I didn’t see myself as attractive at all.

Was the shaven head meant to show you weren’t playing the game of conventional attractiveness?
Yeah. Well I was heading in that direction anyway. I had a kind of Mohican on the go at one point, so it was like this much was bald but the middle wasn’t. And the record company asked me would I grow my hair, so that I’d basically be sexier and wear short skirts. And then Fachtna, when I told him, said “Ah you should fucking shave it.” So I did.

Nowadays they would say it was a brilliant stroke of marketing.
Well that was down to Fachtna. And so was Nothing Compares 2 U.

So you’re working together again. Why did you part?
I was very young. We’d been working together since I was 17 or so. This was no fault of Fachtna’s but I had identity issues, as you do at that age, and probably more so when you come from a fucked up background. So it became that I was more like Fachtna than me. If Fachtna liked something I liked it. If he didn’t then I didn’t. That wasn’t down to him, but me. To find an identity of my own I had to break free.

You announced you had retired from the music business?
Yeah. At the time I was certain I wasn’t going back to it at all but after a while – it’s a bit silly if you have some kind of talent but you’re not actually using it. So I got a bit fed up after a few years and I needed to make some kind of music.

So you thought, not only will I not be signed to a label, I won’t even make music?
Yeah, I got rid of my instruments and everything. I wouldn’t even look at an instrument.

What did you plan to do instead?
Just look after my kids. At that time I had two. Then I got so I would break out in a rash if I went to the supermarket. So I said I’d go back to work so I could get a housekeeper and she could go to the supermarket for me. That’s one of the perks, I now have a housekeeper who does the shopping for me.

Didn’t you miss it?
No, I didn’t at all. I really needed to get rid of “Sinéad O’Connor” for a few years, to let that die. Spend some time forging my identity as an ordinary person, dealing with ordinary things like an ordinary Mum. I didn’t miss music at all. Then after a few years I did miss it, but I wasn’t sure how to get back into it in a way that wasn’t going to be hurtful. I was very damaged by all the “Sinéad O’Connor’s a cunt” stuff. That was hard. If you’re a good artist the reason you are is because you’re so sensitive, and being a sensitive person I didn’t handle that shit very well at all. I had to figure out, “How am I going to get back into music in a way that nurtures me, instead of feeds off me?”
My family never took me seriously when I said I wasn’t going to do music. I got annoyed and told them I wanted to get a 9-to-5 job. Which I still quite fancy. But they’d just laugh at me. I was going to get a housekeeper job for a while. They’d say, “You’re fucking mental. You need to be doing music.”

Sinéad never did take that housekeeping job. She began a tactical retreat from mainstream pop with a beautiful album of traditional Irish songs, Sean-Nós Nua (2002). More recently she made the roots reggae-based Throw Down Your Arms (2005) and Theology (2007), the latter a stirring set of spiritual numbers, replete with Old Testament eloquence. These more specialised records have seen her blossom as a vocalist and mature as a performer. She plans, in early 2010, to release a conventional pop album. The songs she’s written so far, she says, are rather unusual for her – they’re proper love songs.
   In fact O’Connor paints a picture of domestic contentment at the moment. Now 42 and living in the seaside town of Bray, just south of Dublin, she likes to call herself a suburban mother-of-four, who never sees the TV news because her kids control the remote. The four children were each conceived with different fathers. “It was tough to get a balance,’ she says of her private and professional lives. “But I suppose it also protected me from getting lost in the decadence of the music business. I’m sure if I hadn’t had kids I would probably have got involved with Class-A drugs.”
   Her eldest, Jake, has just set off to travel the world, which gives her a mother’s pang. Her youngest child, Yeshua, is shared with her current man, an American: “I have a lovely partner. It’s our anniversary today and we’ve been together for three years. But we sensibly don’t live together, we live down the road from each other, a few minutes walk. He has two kids of his own and we have a kid together and then I have my kids. So if we lived together it would be fucking chaos. His name’s Frank, and he’s lovely.”
   (Actually, the background story is even more complicated. As readers of the Irish tabloids know, Frank Bonadio was formerly long-term partner to the Galway singer Mary Coughlan; whilst his relationships with the two women did not overlap, O’Connor and Coughlan have had some bitter exchanges. Coughlan’s new album, The House Of Ill Repute, is a brilliant, if cynical, exploration of romantic disillusion. Promoting the record, Coughlan explicitly links it to her 13-year relationship.)
   I start to ask Sinéad about her turbulent times, but she is now looking restless. Of the Bob Dylan show at Madison Square Garden she says: “It wasn’t one of the worst experiences I’ve had. Y’see, when people write about it they don’t mention that half the audience were cheering. It was half-and-half and it depends which one you focus on. I don’t think it was one of the worst things. It was a little embarrassing… But to be honest, my biggest regret about that night was the fucking outfit I wore. That bothered me more than what actually happened. I just wore the worst fucking outfit. Terrible.”
   She has to leave, she says, suddenly. She has another appointment. She tells me she was trying to read my wrist-watch, upside-down, across the room. In all, I think the interview has been an ordeal for her. Her nervous tension was evident. With an apologetic smile she hands me back my CD booklet, which I’d noticed her kneading all through our talk. And yes, it’s utterly buggered.
   Just before the end, I wondered whether Sinéad ever saw her own experiences in the lives of newer female artists? Her answer seemed quite autobiographical.
   “I suppose with some singers, like Britney Spears… She gets a similar type of shit to what I used to get. In many ways it’s worse, because she gets shit over how she looks, if she’s fat, or she gets shit as a mother and that must be really difficult. Then you’ve got people like Amy Winehouse, who I love. Everyone’s after her. In a way it’s understandable, because she doesn’t seem good at taking care of herself. But when you’re that fucking talented it must be hard to feel normal, to just feel like a girl like everyone else.
   “She probably parties a bit harder, just to fit in. I suppose she sparks controversy because it’s unusual for a woman to be in that state in the public arena, its generally the men that are like that, like Shane MacGowan. But she’s also very young. If your talent is so much bigger than you are, at that age, it’s hard to have much in common with other people.”
   So I look up from my tattered CD booklet, and the quiet hologram has disappeared.

Neil Aspinall Interview

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Neil Aspinall, who died in 2008, was a man whose story intertwined with that of his employers, The Beatles, for nearly half a century. He was their intimate friend. We can only wonder what Beatle secrets he took with him to the grave.
I met him several times and always found him pretty close-lipped. My first encounter was at the Apple HQ in Knightsbridge, where I was introduced by The Beatles’ affable press man Derek Taylor (who was back at Apple to help with the Anthology project). It was Derek, gamely trying to break the ice, who discovered that Neil and I came from the same street in Liverpool.
A little while later I was granted a rare interview with Neil, again at the Apple office. The piece ran in Mojo, October 1996.

When even George Martin calls you “the Fifth Beatle” then you have a pretty good claim to the title. But Neil Aspinall doesn’t want it. For 35 years he has been closer to the band that anyone else has. But he dislikes publicity. He scuttles from the spotlight like a bug whose stone has been upturned.
   He’s been in charge of Apple, The Beatles’ company, since it began in 1967, except for the brief interlude when their affairs were handled by Allen Klein. Before that he was their road manager and all-round Mr Fixit. When The Beatles were a baby-band, Neil Aspinall would ferry them through the Mersey Tunnel to local gigs, humping their primitive gear past squealing fans and scowling Teddy Boys. He drove them down to London for their first auditions with Decca and EMI. He’d been at school with Paul McCartney and knew George Harrison, a boy in the year below. Later on, as a trainee accountant, he lived in digs at the house of Pete Best, the group’s original drummer.
   Throughout the pandemonium of Beatlemania, under the guidance of Brian Epstein, the self-effacing Aspinall kept their show on the road with the help of Mal Evans, another old Liverpool buddy, a former bouncer at the Cavern. Epstein died in 1967; tragically, Evans himself was killed in 1976 after a shooting incident with the LA police.
   In the unhappy years when The Beatles had ceased to trust anybody, including one another, they still trusted Neil. He is the one constant presence in their story. After the group split up, and Apple vacated its famous Savile Row HQ, Aspinall carried on, patiently untangling their business problems in a succession of rented premises around London. At one point Apple’s staff was down to just three people.
“Poor old Neil,” McCartney once remarked to me, after yet another phone call to the Apple office. “He’s been a real solid guy for us. But I don’t think we’ve always been good for him.” Decades of hard, loyal service had been tough on his health.
   But Neil Aspinall’s finest hour was still to come. He’d begun compiling archive footage of The Beatles in 1969. By 1989, when assorted contractual snags were cleared, he started work in earnest on what has become The Beatles Anthology. The TV series was only a truncated version — cut for the needs of the US networks — of the full 10-hour film. It’s finally released this September and October, as eight videos, around the same time as Volume III of the Anthology CDs.
   Today, if Aspinall feels pride and relief at the completion of this gargantuan project — as well he might — he betrays no sign. A stocky man, both quiet and forthright, he strolls around Apple’s smart new base in Knightsbridge with an unfussy air. And if he ever wore a moptop like his masters’ (and the photographs are few), it’s long gone. His eyebrows, however, are bushier than ever. “I don’t really have a job title,” he shrugs, settling in his office and eyeing the tape recorder uneasily. “I guess I’m just manager of Apple. When the four guys asked me to do this, when they got rid of Allen Klein, they basically asked me to do ‘it’. But ‘it’ was never defined.”

Apple is a tighter ship than it was in the old days, presumably.
Sure. There’s a lot of controls in place. I can’t go off and do what I like. The Beatles were always like an inverted democracy. If one of them doesn’t want to do something then generally it doesn’t get done. I have to pass everything I do by them. So there are no surprises. Everybody knows what’s going on.

You still seem to have a pretty small team.
That’s a carry-through from when we were on the road. There was four Beatles, me and Mal, and a press officer. It meant that everyone knew what their role was, you knew where the buck stopped. If something went wrong, there wasn’t 80 people to search among to find who made the goof.

You knew Paul and George at school, but Pete Best was your mate, wasn’t he?
Yeah, but I only met Pete when I was about 18. His mother ran the Casbah Club and that’s where I met him. I left home and I ended up staying at Pete’s place, so that made us closer. When the four of them, with Stu [Sutcliffe], were going to Hamburg they asked Pete to go as their drummer. And when they came back and needed transport, I had this little beaten-up old van. I was training to be an accountant so I only got £2.50 and some luncheon vouchers a week, which wasn’t really enough to live on. So to drive the band around and get £1 a gig, it was found money.

Was money the first motivation, rather than the crack?
It was for the money. But at the same time, I’d seen them perform when they came back from Hamburg and they were a really good band. They certainly impressed me.

What was the drill? You’d start with Pete in the van then pick up the others?
No. I’d normally just take the equipment to the gig and everybody made their own way there. I’d leave the equipment there and go home and do my accountancy correspondence course. Then I’d go back and pick the gear up. If they wanted a lift I’d drop them off wherever. It started that simply.

You moved to London when they did?
Sure. It wasn’t that fast. They got more and more gigs. Gradually I wasn’t doing the accountancy any more. Then they got bigger and more successful and when they moved down, I moved down. I was with The Beatles, doing whatever needed to be done.

How did Mal Evans become part of the set-up?
We knew Mal because he was on the Cavern door. I was ill with a temperature. We were due to come down to London for some radio stuff. In the Cavern, I was, [groans] Oh, I’m not going to be able to make this. So I told them and Brian, I can’t drive to London tomorrow. So they say, “Well you’ll have to get somebody else, won’t you?” No sympathy [laughs]. And I didn’t have a clue who I could get. I went up the Cavern steps into Mathew Street just to get some fresh air, and Mal was standing there. So I just said to him, What are you doing for the next couple of days? Would you like to drive The Beatles to London? “Yeah sure.” So I say, Hold on a minute. Went back into the Cavern, into the dressing room: Hey, Mal’ll drive you to London. And they all go, “OK.”
Six or seven months later it was really getting too much for one person to handle, and I said to them and Brian that I really need some help. And they said, “Well, we’ll see if Mal will do it.” So we asked Mal and he gave up his job as a telephone technician. He drove the van and looked after the equipment after that.

Was it tough for you when they sacked Pete Best? You were close to him — did you have a conflict of loyalty?
It was a little strange because I was close to Pete. But it wasn’t a conflict of loyalty. Brian wanted to see him, I don’t think Pete could drive at the time, so I drove him into town to see Brian. I was in the record store looking at records, and he came down and said he’d been fired. He was in a state of shock, really. We went over to the Grapes pub in Mathew Street, had a pint. And I just said, I’m going now. And Pete said, “I’m staying here for a while.” I just left. That night I think we had a gig somewhere over the water, Birkenhead side. I had all the gear in the van. So when it was time to go, I don’t think Pete had even come back from town. I just got in the van and drove to the gig. I think that John, Paul and George might have been slightly surprised. But, hey, I’m turning up, this is my gig. What happens outside of that is nothing to do with me.

You’re down in London, Beatlemania takes off. Was that a shock or did it build gradually?
I’m just trying to think back. If you look at the queues outside the Cavern when The Beatles were on, they were right the way down Mathew Street, and that was beginning to happen in various places up North. It just got bigger and bigger, very fast, but it wasn’t like one day there was nobody and the next day there were 10,000.

When you started the big tours, that must have been a strange experience?
It was certainly nerve-wracking for me, because every time we went anywhere it was new in terms of what you had to cope with. We went on the Helen Shapiro tour and the first theatre we got to, the tour manager was a guy called Johnny Clapton. I remember just standing to the side of the stage about 3 or 4 in the afternoon when we got there, and Johnny Clapton was saying, “Who’s The Beatles’ road manager?” I’d never heard the term before, so I didn’t answer. So he ended up saying, “Is there anybody with The Beatles?” So I said, Yeah, I am! “OK, you’re their road manager.” Oh, OK! I still don’t know what a road manager is, quite frankly. But that’s where the term came from for me.
   And he said, “Have you got the lighting plot?” What lighting plot? “Well you know, for the spotlights and the footlights and the sidelights. The lights change with each number.” I said, No. That was not within my experience. So he said, “Give me the playlist. I’ll do the lights first house, after that you’re on your own.” Now, for a 20-year-old kid that was a big deal. Suddenly I had to do all the stage lighting. And I did it, second house, probably very amateurishly. But after that I got into it. The problem was that every theatre that we went to, the colours of the lights depended on what the pantomime had been the previous Christmas.
   I wasn’t really putting on a light show, it was just having different colours. Reds and oranges, like fire, for an uptempo number, blues and greens for a slow number, then combinations of that in between. Sometimes the hardest part was the people who did the spotlights, because they were normally the guys that operated the movies during the week. Occasionally they’d be on John when Paul was singing or vice versa. I was constantly on the microphone: Put the light the other way round! That was all part of the gig.
   When we went on tour to foreign countries it was always like that. When you got to somewhere like Shea Stadium there was a lot of police and security and press and getting in and out of the place and a lot of other stuff you had to deal with.

Did that get you down, as well as the group, in the last days of touring?
I was tired. We’d been doing it for a long time. But I don’t think it got me down in the same way as it got them down. They were the centre of attention wherever they went and it was always people wanting a piece of them or their autograph, or an interview or whatever. If they’d decided to keep on touring, that would have been OK with me.

Were you at a loose end when they did stop touring?
No. Mal Evans did the amplifiers, that was his job, he set them up on stage and looked after the guitars and made sure everything was working. There was a great deal of trust among everybody about all this. They’d run across that field to get on stage at Shea Stadium. They’d plug their amplifiers in, plug their guitars in, and they knew that they were going to work, because Mal made sure of it. That was his gig.
So he did ask me, when they stoppped touring in ’66, since we weren’t on the road any more, “Neil, what do you think we’re going to be doing this time next year?” And in that period of time, The Beatles did Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, as singles and videos, Sgt. Pepper, All You Need Is Love; Brian Epstein died; they met the Maharishi; we made Magical Mystery Tour. So when you ask me, was I at a loose end? The answer is No, there was a lot going on.

Did you spend much time with them in the studio?
I was there all the time. For them, they were working, they were composing, recording, and on occasions that could get boring for me. But I learned to play chess with Ringo.

Did you ever chip in on the records?
Maybe I chipped in twice or three times in 8,000 recordings. For example with Yellow Submarine everybody in the studio sang “We all live in a Yellow Submarine.” So I sang with everybody. I think there might have been another occasion when I banged a tambourine, but they were only minor things.

You never contributed a line or a word here or there?
Yeah, on a few occasions. They’d be searching for a line, various people would throw out a line. Not that it was ever used, but everybody would do that.

Apple Corps was set up before it began as a label. Did they just say to you, “You’re in charge”?
No, I don’t think anything is that simple where Apple is concerned. Apple got set up when Brian was still alive, early in ’67. I think it was more music publishing. Then Brian died and there was really nobody looking after The Beatles’ business interests, because Brian had done all of that. So there was various people were nominated or put themselves forward to run it.
NEMS was Brian’s company, with offices and everything, but The Beatles ended up with nobody. They didn’t have offices, they didn’t have anybody working for them other than Mal Evans and myself. And they decided that they would set up their own organisation and we started off with little offices in Wigmore Street, and brought in various staff to run the record label, like Pete Asher. We brought Derek Taylor over from America. Like I said, a lot of people were nominated or put themselves forward. But there didn’t seem to be any unanimous choice here.
So I said to them, foolishly I guess, Look, I’ll do it until you find somebody that you want to do it. That was the basis I was doing it on when we went into Savile Row.

It must have been a steep learning curve, taking over The Beatles’ business?
Well, we didn’t have single piece of paper. No contracts. The lawyer, the accountants and Brian, whoever, had that. Maybe The Beatles had been given copies of various contracts, I don’t know. I know that when Apple started I didn’t have single piece of paper. I didn’t know what the contract was with EMI, or with the film people or the publishers or anything at all. So it was a case of building up the filing system, finding out what was going on while we were trying to continue doing something.
Then Allen Klein came on the scene, and Lee and John Eastman came on the scene, and I don’t want to get into that, but I got off the scene and let them get on with it. Because that was the business and it wasn’t something that I really wanted to do.

After the split, did you think that was end of your involvement?
When the band split up? Well it wasn’t like they were together on Friday and split up on Saturday, it took quite a long period of time. It was traumatic for everybody, including me. I didn’t have a clue what was going on or what I was going to do. And in all of that there was Allen Klein and lawsuits starting. I really started making movies and music for movies.
I put together the music for That’ll Be The Day [the David Essex/Ringo film; its soundtrack featured Keith Moon, Vivian Stanshall and others]. Then I was making a little movie out at George’s place. But I never finished it, because they fired Allen Klein and asked me to do this.

Was it hard to keep in with all four Beatles, amid the legal crossfire? Was your policy to be completely neutral?
No, what happened was that John, George and Ringo asked me if I’d run Apple. I said OK, but as long as it’s OK with Paul. Because I wasn’t going to get into any three-on-one situation. I’d always been with the four of them. So I rang up Paul and said, Hey, the other three have asked me do it, is that OK with you? He said “Sure, that’s fine.” So I was back. I’m working for the four of them. Now, the individual battles that you just mentioned, might be going on between their individual advisors, if you like, but I was neutral to that, I was looking after the interests of all four of them, inside Apple, as The Beatles.

After that there was a long period when nothing appeared to go on. We used to be amazed to learn that Apple was still in existence.
I know. People used to say that. They’d ask me, and I’d say I’m running Apple, and it was “Oh, is that still around?” [Laughs.]

Was it a strange time, running this organisation with nothing underneath it as there had been before?
Hey, there was a lot going on. First of all, when I started running Apple again there was still the internal lawsuits between Paul and the other three. The second thing that had to be done was Allen Klein. There was that lawsuit with him had to be dealt with.
After that it was looking at various contractual commitments. Trying to sort out the legalities of what was going on with our record company, that took from 1978 to ’89. Sorting out what had happened with Yellow Submarine. What had happened with those 39 cartoons that had been made? What was the deal? There was a lot of stuff. So the hiatus period that you’re talking about was really pulling as many strings together as you could, so we had some idea what was going on. A lot of it was establishing what you owned and what you didn’t own.

You began what was then called the Long And Winding Road project very early on, didn’t you?
In ’69, in all the chaos, the traumas — things were falling apart but they were still making Abbey Road — Paul called me saying “You should collect as much of the material that’s out there, get it together before it disappears.” So I started to do that, got in touch with all the TV stations around the world, checked what we had in our own library, like Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, the promo clips, what have you. Got newsreel footage in, lots and lots of stuff. We edited something together that was about an hour and three quarters long. But The Beatles had split up by then, so there was really no chance of anything happening with it. I sent them a copy of it each which they all quite liked, then I put it on the shelf. And it stayed on the shelf from 1971 till ’89, about 20 years.

So in ’89 the logjam broke, because the legal difficulties were cleared.
The prolonged legal situation with our record company was settled, much to everybody’s relief, and we put out the Red and Blue albums [the CD versions of the two Beatle compilations]. It was round about then, in 1990, that I talked to the guys and Yoko and suggested maybe trying to put together The Beatles’ story. I had no idea how to do that, the one thing I did know is that I didn’t want a commentator. They all said “Yeah, OK Neil, are you going to do it?” And I said Yeah and off we went. I knew we had to do everything in-house because most of the stuff with The Beatles is piratable. So we set up our own facility in Shepherds Bush. Then somebody said, “Oh it’s like an anthology that you’re doing?” OK, then it became The Beatles Anthology.

Was the making of this film the origin of the idea to do the Anthology CDs as well?
Might have been the other way around. It’s confusing because everything happened at once. The idea of having the musical element was obvious, because that’s what The Beatles are about. Even then we had to archive the music. I was amazed that Paul had That’ll Be The Day, the first track that they’d ever done [as The Quarry Men, in 1958]. Duff Lowe, their pianist, had kept it. I think everybody got to keep it for a week. There was only one copy, so maybe John had it first, then Paul, then George, then Colin Hanton the drummer, and maybe Duff Lowe was the last one to get it for a week. But he had nobody to pass it on to, so he just kept it. Twenty years later he still had it, he was going to put it in an auction, he phoned Paul and he said, “Hey, I’ve still got this thing, d’you want it?” So Paul bought it off him.

What prompted the idea to make new records, using John’s tapes?
The idea of interviewing the three of them and using interviews of John’s was there. But it was needing some incidental music as part of the Anthology, which would give them the opportunity to make some music without any pressure. This idea developed into, If it was going to be The Beatles then it had to have John in it. The only way you could have John is if you used a piece of music that he was actually playing on. So that’s where it developed from, to Free As A Bird and Real Love.

Is there more unreleased stuff in the pipeline?
No. The Beatles were always generous in terms of musical content. They’d have say 14 tracks on an album and if they put out a single it wasn’t on the album, et cetera. And with these Anthologies George Martin has trawled through everything, taken the best stuff and they’ve put it all out. They haven’t left stuff there, thinking, “A-ha! We can put that out later.” Or: “If we do a box set of the Anthology in a couple of years’ time then we can have a few bonus tracks on there.” The bonus tracks are already on there.

Which Beatles music are you fondest of?
I really like it from Rubber Soul, Revolver onwards. But it’s difficult to say, because some of the early stuff brings back memories for me of the Cavern. They also bring back a couple of little regrets, I always wish that they’d recorded What’d I Say? They used to do a great version of that.

Did you ever feel left behind by what they were doing, as everyone else did? People thought, they’ve lost the plot and gone so weird, growing moustaches, going off with Maharishi.
I guess I was close enough to them to be able to follow the plot.

Did you have a policy of keeping out of the limelight?
Yes. I’m very shy. Or I was in those days. I also thought that all the hoop-la that was going on was not because of me. It was because of them and what they were doing. People didn’t want me in the shot, thank you very much. So I stayed out of it.

There is a tendency around the famous for others to bask in reflected glory.
Well that’s for other people to say. Quite honestly, the only reason we’re talking today is because of The Beatles, it’s not because of me. That’s the bottom line, and I’ve been aware of that from the very beginning.

Even George Martin describes you as the fifth Beatle. How do you feel about that?
Oh, I keep trying to lay that on George! There is no fifth Beatle. I think if there was such a thing, it would be Pete Best or Stu Sutcliffe, not some outsider who wasn’t in the band. A ridiculous suggestion.

Victorian Sensation

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Victorian Sensation, by Michael Diamond.

Gutter press scandals of a bygone age: I greatly enjoyed this book and used some of its material in researching my own London work, In The City. This review appeared in Word Magazine, May 2003.

Everyone loved a good hanging in the old days. They were a public spectacle not to be missed. We may find that strange today, but even odder was the tone of some reporting. When the murderess Maria Manning went to her reward on 14 November, 1849, the Morning Chronicle reviewed it thus: “Even the distortion consequent upon the mode of death she suffered could not destroy the remarkably fine contour of her figure as it swayed to and fro by the action of the wind.”
   The great novelist Thomas Hardy was similarly struck by the execution of another female: “What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.”
   You might suppose this throws some light upon a dark nook of the male psyche, but the crowd at such events was often thronged with women. The same was observed of public galleries at notorious trials. And the seller of one Victorian scandal sheet remarked that “mostly all our customers is females.” The fact, as Michael Diamond’s excellent book demonstrates, is that the 19th century British were united by a love of “sensation”: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, they were insatiable in their appetite for the extraordinary.
   The explosion of printed periodicals was one source of the mania. Sex and death were quickly spotted as allies in the circulation wars, and the promise of a glorious scandal could set the populace in a frenzy. News of the Royals was likewise prized: whilst the Victorians seemed to sincerely love their Queen, they were ready to pounce upon the lesser family members, whose stock could rise or fall dramatically. Does that sound familiar? They also loved the “spectacles” of novel performers such as tiny Tom Thumb, dashing Buffalo Bill and the acrobatic Frenchman Jules Leotard (who “flew through the air with the greatest of ease” and developed the clingy garment that bears his name).
   Melodramatic stage plays were another obsession (“Dead, dead, and never called me mother!”) especially if there were astounding special effects. The taste for satire was rife as well and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the period’s most popular drama, spawned several parodies. Most of all there was the Music Hall, which fulfilled the role of our modern tabloids – by turns funny and scurrilous, thumpingly patriotic in wartime but otherwise scornful of pomposity. As for Charles Dickens, his live performances were a universal passion, delivered with such force that they hastened his death.
   Downfalls of the famous were of course savoured. Oscar Wilde in his time enjoyed celebrity on first name terms, such as Kylie does today. But the national fascination with flamboyant “Oscar” made him a target, too. The failure of his libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry led to his arrest on charges of sodomy and indecency. Though the case became a sensation, Reynold’s Newspaper was alone in relaying the more graphic details. Its readers learned, for example, that Wilde’s co-defendant Alfred Taylor owned seven pairs of trousers with the pockets cut out “so anyone could pass their hands straight through.” Having milked the public interest, Reynold’s performed a classic press manoeuvre in deploring that same curiosity, claiming it showed “a lack of moral stiffening” – as distinct, presumably, from Alfred Taylor’s trousers.
   Of course we can smile at such audacious humbug, and condemn the intolerance that brought it about. But the inescapable logic of Victorian Sensation is that we are no different, and that everything changes except human nature. The 20th century was accustomed to looking down on the Victorians: they were uptight, narrow and moralistic, whereas we were funky, open and liberated. But historians of the future might wonder at this view of the era that abolished slavery, held by the century that invented nuclear war. An old BBC hand, the author is entirely free of such condescension. “They were not only our ancestors,” he concludes, “but our brothers and sisters under the skin.”
   Is that good news for them or bad news for us? Read these corking stories of moustachioed seducers, suburban poisoners and flagrantly immoral actresses and decide for yourself.

Buy the book at Amazon.co.uk

Punk-Rock 1977

Sat, 2 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE PUNK WARS, DADDY?

Most of my own experience of London punk rock, such as seeing the Sex Pistols and getting recruited by the NME, is in this article. It was commissioned by The Word in February 2007, thirty years after punk rock took hold in Britain. I adapted some material from In The City, the book I was currently writing.

To flesh out the piece I interviewed several key figures from each side of the barricades:-
Lemmy of Motorhead
Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues
Andy Partridge of XTC
Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle of Buzzcocks
Colin Newman of Wire
Eugene Reynolds and Jo Callis of The Rezillos
Rick Wakeman

We are in London in the dying days of 1976. Picture a youthful idler, fag perhaps in hand, perusing his end-of-year issue of the New Musical Express. Like all NME readers, he knows this has been The Year Of The Punk Rock Revolution. The paper’s irreproachably groovy writers have repeatedly told him so. And now, as 1977 approaches, London is calling to the faraway towns. Let dinosaur rockers quake in their caves, and sellers of flared trousers look to their business plans! Wise up, you rancid hippies! The old rock game was over. And from 1977, new rules applied.

Or did they?

Our idler was, in all probability, still wearing flares himself. His favourite band? I’m guessing Genesis. For all the trillions of music press pages he’d read about punk, his collection of actual punk music consisted of just one single: The Damned’s New Rose. Last week he increased his holding by 100 per cent, buying the Sex Pistols’ debut, Anarchy In The UK. To be honest, he didn’t quite get the whole punk concept. Still, here in the NME’s back pages were some reassuringly familiar ads; one for “Continental Clogs”, another for denim dungarees, and yet another for sweatshirts bearing these suggested slogans – “Sex Appeal: Please Give Generously” and “Hi! I’m Mandy and I love Starsky & Hutch”. (The first mail-order bondage pants were not yet a gleam in the rag trade’s gimlet eye.) And what was this? A write-up of the NME’s prodigiously hip Christmas Party! Philip Lynott, it’s reported, showed his punkish leanings by wearing a small swastika. Someone else was pleasured by a girl from a record company. Oh, and they had a stripper on, too.

I wasn’t there that year, but I rocked up to many NME parties that followed. Suggesting we book a stripper, or wearing a swastika, would by 1981 have become too shocking to contemplate. (I think the girl from the record company was still invited, though.) The point is that the Glorious Revolution of 1976 took a long time to work its way through the hearts and minds of all who later claimed allegiance. Actually, it wasn’t a revolution at all. Punk was more what Thora Hird might have termed “a hoo-hah and a to-do”. And mostly it happened a bit later than the history books suggest – in 1977 rather than 1976. The world did not tilt on its axis, to be sure. But it was an extraordinary time. And it brought to the world’s attention some extraordinary boys and girls. If punk wasn’t everything, I have to say that I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

******

A sign scrawled in Biro was stuck in the clothes shop window. “New band. No flares. No cripples. Ask for Sid Vicious.” It took some courage, in the Summer of 1976, merely to enter Malcolm McLaren’s Sex shop in the Kings Road. To ask for someone or something called Sid Vicious must have taken nerves of steel. Perhaps nobody did. I certainly didn’t. In the end, Sid joined his friend Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols, after they fired Glen Matlock.

The Sex shop sat beyond a kink in the Kings Road, just where the fashionable boutiques stopped and a drabber stretch began. Further along was a Victorian pub that gave the immediate area its deliciously apocalyptic name, World’s End. It’s the special magic of London that it throws up spots like this, where guttersnipes and aristos might mingle; it’s what gives you those uniquely London characters from, Marc Bolan to Russell Brand, and punk itself was a hybrid of theory-driven art school and fly-blown sink estate. I’d known of McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood for a few years, having visited the shop in its Teddy Boy incarnation Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die. Nearly opposite, and equally intimidating, was the shop of Bryan Ferry’s designer Antony Price. I haunted both places – in a world of denim baggies and cheesecloth mediocrity, they shone as beacons – though they were not remotely affordable.

Sex, especially, was a cultural crash-course, thanks to its bizarre assistants, the spooky mural of an upside-down Piccadilly Circus, and the range of strange shirts, emblazoned with pictures of Karl Marx and Third Reich insignia. There were pornographic trappings, too, but no atmosphere of sex itself. The key to it all was probably extremism, whether aesthetic or political. Even in 1976, when sensitivities were lower than today, Sid’s phrase “no cripples” looked unfeeling. But McLaren’s little charm school excelled in calculated offensiveness. “No flares” underlined the ideological purity of it all. There was not a punk movement, as yet, but I kept coming back to this shop because it felt like something – something undefined – might kick off here.

Then I saw the Sex Pistols and, finally, everything made sense.

Here is how it happened. Oxford Street is long and straight, like a New York Avenue, and facing due west it offers glorious sunsets. One evening I turned from the blood-soaked sky that hung above the site of Tyburn Gallows (the broken bodies of martyrs and malefactors were dragged along this way to meet their grisly end). Stepping down to an old jazz joint the 100 Club, I was expecting to see a band called Roogalator (who were pretty good, though their cutesy name already smelt of 1975). For some reason, however, Roogalator were not playing and the Sex Pistols were. These Pistols were incredible.

Tourists stood about the wide, shallow room and stroked their beards uneasily. They wore clogs and dungarees like the ones advertised in the NME. Some fool probably had a sweatshirt saying “Sex Appeal: Give Generously”. Almost nobody in the audience was dressed “like a punk”, because the style was not yet established. There were some Roxy Music/David Bowie types, and I remember girls in Cabaret styles, with swastikas on their cheeks. Most of the crowd were average rock boys, in cap-sleeved T-shirts and wide jeans, drinking lager from plastic beakers. Only the Pistols, on stage, were conspicuously dressed by Westwood and McLaren. And when they began to play, the noise bore out the same spirit of violent dislocation.

Johnny Rotten sang an old Small Faces hit, changing its lyric: “I want you to know that I HATE you baby.” There was a Muppet drummer behind him, a thug guitarist on the right and a perky bass player on the left. Another song was something to do with anarchy; it name-checked paramilitary groups from Ulster and Angola. The sound was chaotic but brutally exciting. It bristled with references to life outside of the self-regarding Californian rock consensus. It seemed desperate, pinging between extremes of euphoria and anxiety. If the tunes were crude, they were stirringly melodic. And between numbers, Rotten hung limply from the mike-stand, dazed and panting. He was always staring, but at nothing. He kept blowing his nose: I‘d never seen anyone do that on stage. It was extraordinarily hot in that basement. Now stupendously bored, he stood upright and looked around for Malcolm: “Mow-currmmm! Mow-currmmm! Can. I. Have. A fakkin’ drink. Pleeeeeze…”

Then he slumped, suddenly, like a firing squad victim. “Rasta-faaarrrr-iiiiii,” he groaned, weakly. The truth is that nobody in the whole room understood what they were watching. I’ve seen an old newsreel of Elvis Presley on stage, young and outrageous, and the audience are laughing – actually laughing – because they hadn’t yet learned what rock’n’roll was supposed to be. So it was with those Sex Pistols shows. Some laughed, some fled. Most of us just stood there, transfixed. Fascinated. Perplexed. Here, indeed, was a terrible beauty being born. Or maybe still-born. Who could say? And the next week I came back for more.

A couple of times that summer I got the same Northern Line tube home as Johnny Rotten, who sat by himself, drained and vulnerable. Punk was still a secret thing, and Rotten unknown. To everyone else in the carriage, I think, he looked like a disagreeable little weirdo. His hair alone was a sort of provocation – short and turbulent instead of long and placid. The narrow collar, the skinny tie, the Steptoe trousers, were all at odds with everyone else. None of it should matter much, I know, but there was a menacing atmosphere in Britain back then. Lots of people had a feeling 1977 would not be good year. There was tension across the country, and the Sex Pistols’ singer – that runty, furtive, vaguely disturbing boy – would become a sort of lightning rod in the storms that lay ahead.

One forgets, in time, how much hatred was swilling around in those days. Some of it found expression in street politics, of the left and the right. On tube trains we wore out our thumbnails trying to scrape away the horrid little stickers the National Front put everywhere. They used good glue. There were always strikes, and picket lines, which turned into pitched battles. There was inflation, unemployment and a sterling crisis every two weeks. The Labour government seemed old and confused. Talk of a right-wing coup was taken quite seriously, even at Westminster. And the communists were always presumed to be plotting something. For the first time since World War II, there was a general sense that something drastic was about to happen. And, what’s more, had to happen.

Punk was brewed in that environment, and to begin with you didn’t know which way it might go. Culturally it appealed to a mini-generation – the later contingent of the baby boom – whose outlook was shaped by darker influences of the early 1970s (A Clockwork Orange, Ziggy Stardust, sexual decadence), rather than the optimistic idealism of their hippy elders. You had heaviness on the streets, and Nazi chic in trendy circles, both of which attached themselves to punk. The far right and the broad left competed for punks’ loyalty, and though the Sieg Heilers lost out eventually, the result was far from guaranteed. When the NF marched in strength through London it tended to concentrate the mind. Flirting with swastikas for the sake of style no longer looked very clever. In 1977 the politics of race, emblemised by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, proved decisive in swinging the punk vote leftwards.

Soon there were routine denunciations of rich “rock czars” who’d chosen to live in tax exile. Slowly punk was forming a distinct look and a particular point of view. Some were orthodox leftists, others adopted the actual creed of anarchism. A lot of us were hypnotised by reggae’s Biblical militancy. Others again were simply stylists – butterflies, not Bolsheviks. Where the rhetoric reached unanimity was in its contempt for the musical establishment. The Rolling Stones were especially disliked; Eric Clapton condemned; prog-rockers ridiculed. The only traditional rocker of much standing was probably Bruce Springsteen, but his career was stalled by legal matters in the punk years, which kept him out of the war-zone. John Lennon, likewise, who might have held some sway, spent the late ’70s in New York isolation. The credible elder brother, really, was David Bowie. In these years he made three LPs (Station To Station, Low and “Heroes”) that lacked nothing by way of anguish and bleakness, not to mention downright strangeness. They immunised him from charges of superstar complacency.

And of course 1977 was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The whole nation was suddenly bedecked in Union Jack bunting, which punks instinctively rejected. They’d already become an outcast tribe, after the Sex Pistols’ notorious appearance on Bill Grundy’s early evening show in December 1976 – the night Malcolm McLaren would later term The Big Bang. Add their anti-Jubilee leanings and punks became an endangered species, physically, even as the commercial world woke up to their money-spinning potential. Ultimately, however, the doom of the punk movement would not come from the fists of bigots, but the fatal bear-hug of show business.

******

Punk changed many lives before it died, including mine. Back in the summer of ’76, my head still spinning from those 100 Club shows, I answered an NME ad for “Hip Young Gunslingers” to join its staff. After posting the required sample review, I made the short-list of 16 from around 1,000 hopefuls and trooped off to the publishers’ ghastly high-rise office to be interviewed. My interrogator, the late Tony Tyler, correctly surmised I was nobody’s idea of a gunslinger, but deemed me young and hip enough to write for the paper – almost certainly because I kept insisting the still-unsigned Sex Pistols were the most important band in the world. I doubt that he agreed, but it was what the NME wanted to hear. It told them nothing about your musical taste, but everything about your tribal affinities. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill got the first staff jobs; I was taken on later. Thanks to punk rock and the Sex Pistols, I have earned a living from writing half-baked nonsense about pop music ever since.

Through ’76 and ’77, punk spread outwards from London to the towns and hamlets of Great Britain and Ireland. From Manchester to Londonderry it struck root and produced local variants, some of them truly inspired. Boys and girls adopted the look as best they could – the first mail-order bondage trousers were beginning to appear – and some of them formed groups. Then there were the existing bands, like The Jam in Woking or XTC in Swindon, who seized the moment to re-define themselves. These were among the great bands to come out of punk, because they were not just imitations of the Pistols. Too many others took punk to mean a template, instead of a licence to create your own ideas. Grim it was, in those times, to hear Northern boys singing in a Cockney whine, as if Johnny Rotten’s voice was the only type allowable.

From penthouse and pavement, the West London aesthetic dominated punk in its early years. (Its dull East London counterpart, called Oi!, came a few years later.) As XTC’s Andy Partridge recalls: “To our managers at the time, our not coming from London filled them with horror. They knew that I could hide my Swindon accent better than the others, so they said ‘Right, you do the interviews.’ When the others opened their mouths it was like The Troggs Tapes. We were told not to say we were from Swindon. But I actually liked coming from a non-place. It kept us out of the rabble.”

Not everybody took to it, of course, but you seldom hear them talk about it. It’s like the French Resistance: after the war, everybody seemed to have been in it, when clearly they couldn’t have been. Chief among the champions of Vichy Rock, so to speak, was the defiantly old-school Derek Jewell, rock critic of the Sunday Times. On 28 November, 1976, he wrote: “Punk rock is the generic term for the latest musical garbage bred by our troubled culture, British and American… Punk is anti-life, anti-humanity. You will probably hear much more about it, although not from me, for it will be exploited by writers desperate not to be thought ‘old’ and record companies without shame. When it dies, it will not be mourned.”

In the Melody Maker, Allan Jones declared: “Honestly, if either Patti Smith or Johnny Rotten represents the future of rock – and I don’t think they do – then I’m off with the old lady to the air raid shelter until it all blows over.” Meanwhile on Sounds’ letters page, an unimpressed reader frowned: “I consider it somewhat of a joke that the [New York] Dolls should be compared to such notoriously incompetent no-talents as The Ramones and Sex Pistols.” So wrote young Steven Morrissey, from Manchester.

If rock was based on rebellion, punk rock was the first internal rebellion against rock itself. It sought not only to change music, but savaged the system and its figureheads. Established stars responded in different ways. Phil Lynott embraced the new wave (his band Thin Lizzy, like Mott The Hoople and The Faces, were the sort of laddish outfit it was hard to condemn as aristocratic and out of touch). Ray Davies wrote a smirking satire, Prince Of The Punks (“he acts tough but it’s just a front”). Lemmy of Motorhead says: “The punks loved us. The only reason we weren’t in that lot was because we had long hair, so obviously we must be heavy metal. That was the thinking, but a lot of kids heard us without seeing a picture so they thought we were a punk band. Whatever. I always thought we had a lot more in common with The Damned that we did with Judas Priest.

“I used to love The Damned,” he continues. “I went down to the Roxy to find out about the punk number and all these punks are sitting there with needles through everything and I walk in with me flares on. I’m at the bar and this voice behind me goes, ‘Hawkwind! I used to sell acid at your shows.’ It was Johnny Rotten. He used to sell acid at the Kings Cross Cinema, when he had long hair and a big Army great-coat.”

Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues, who were by 1977 the least punk band imaginable, was stolid and tolerant: “Oh I loved all of that. I didn’t feel it as a threat. We were so far along our own road that it didn’t really affect us. That was the time when we were having mega success in America. Just as there was an explosion of young people making music in the ’60s it happened again in the ’70s with punk. And I was proud of it because I was English. In America punk was more of a fashion, whereas being English I really identified with the boys and the girls in the tower-blocks, or even the lower middle class like I was. I could see it. Sid was so fantastic, and for it all to end so tragically… but it had to, I suppose. His My Way: if I were able to, without people just laughing at me, I’d put it in my Top 10, it’s a masterpiece.”

Weep ye not for the “dinosaur” bands”; as Rick Wakeman says, they adapted and survived (“there was always somewhere in the world you could go and play”). Spare a thought, instead, for the baby bands whose tender growth was crushed through bad timing. Lest we forget: Racing Cars, The Count Bishops, Cado Belle, Deaf School, City Boy, Easy Street… Or the groups who were nearly punk but not quite punk enough: Eddie & The Hot Rods, The Hammersmith Gorillas… And admire the dexterity of bands who were plainly not punk at all but somehow smuggled themselves on board like stowaways: The Stranglers, The Police…

In fact, once the punk movement grew out of its nihilist early phase, through 1977 it broadened quickly and was increasingly called New Wave. By lowering the barriers to entry, it had liberated raw talents that might otherwise have gone unheard: The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Undertones… And by overturning standard notions of glamour, it raised the wire for some invaluable misfits to scramble underneath: Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Joe Jackson… None were punk, but punk made their success more possible. (For my NME trial I’d written a tribute to Kilburn & The High Roads, a cult pub-rock band; I never foresaw their elderly, disabled front-man Ian Dury ending the decade as a Smash Hits pin-up.)

Was it a sex-less phenomenon? Historians have judged it thus. Although McLaren’s shop was called Sex and displayed rapist masks and T-shirts of well-endowed cowboys, the implication was always of contempt for eroticism. A few new female acts – The Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, Ludus in Manchester – used the new atmosphere to thrive outside of the sex-kitten strategies of predecessors like Suzi Quatro and The Runaways. Feminists often approved of punk. And the most successful punk girls, namely the early Pistols follower Siouxsie Sioux and the New Wave star Chrissie Hynde (who had once worked in Malcolm’s shop) had a hard, assertive edge to them. All the same, human nature is enduring. Twice at punk gigs in the Nashville Rooms, my wife was colourfully propositioned by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. At the same venue, she was invited by Iggy Pop to accompany him and Elvis Costello to the latter’s flat “to play some records”. As we say today, “Yeah, right”.

And now it’s all as distant from us as World War II was in 1976. People pay lip service to the punk legacy, but it’s amazing how much the new groups resemble punk’s arch-enemies. The Feeling, The Darkness, Orson, Scissor Sisters… reading their press you find them approving of, or being likened to, The Bee Gees, Queen, Wings, Supertramp and Elton John. Even Madonna has just had an Abba phase. As insurrections go, punk was a bit of a flop. And all those Stuff The Jubilee T-shirts were nostalgic oddities by 2002, when Queen Elizabeth racked up yet another 25 years. More hurtfully still, I once heard Bob Geldof suggest the true political heir of punk was Margaret Thatcher -– individualist, iconoclast, slayer of institutions, headbanger and all-round go-fuck-yourself specialist.

Still, for a time, it all added to the gaiety of the nation. A hoo-hah and a to-do. I know Bob Harris got beaten up in a nightclub, just for the crime of being Bob Harris, and nobody wants to see that happening again. There were some thrilling records made, a vast amount of rubbish talked, some careers curtailed and various scoundrels handed a meal-ticket. The self-destructive Sid, having made the punk classic My Way, destroyed himself in February 1979, which was the true ending of punk. But as the great Nik Cohn once wrote of Merseybeat: “seen now only as a farce, an embarrassing lapse from sanity… Still, I enjoyed it. Right now, I wouldn’t mind swapping.”

ANDY PARTRIDGE (XTC)

Thirty years ago! I feel so old. I’m sat here on the sofa and my prostate woke me up twice last night. I’d be dead wood in a punk universe – in fact “dead wood” is what punk meant. Or “the anal playboy of the king-pin in prison.” The Americans probably used “punk” in that “worthless wood” sense, because they carried on a lot of old English words that we forgot. Anyway what do want to dig all this up for? Let sleeping Slaughter & The Dogs lie, I say!
   In 1976 I felt very disconnected from the norm. I tried to make the band look modern; I customised a white shirt by tearing little triangular bits out of it and writing “Rip” under each one. I had a black tie which I cut short and wrote in white paint “Snip”. We did gigs wherever we could, but not at the places where journalists and the music industry would hang out and say “Ooh, they’re good.” So people thought we were comedy music, playing short, noisy songs without 20-minute drum solos. It was the time of mud-sodden loons with the bottoms rotted off, and ex-Army greatcoats and shoulders hunched to make the hair look even longer. I know it sounds stupid but I wanted a new world. Everybody of a certain age felt they wanted their own thing, not this flatulence.
   For wearing the clothes I wore in ’76 and ’77 I was threatened in my home town a lot. You’d be walking along and a lorry would pull up, the window down: “You punk bastard!” and they’d spit at you. And you’d think, “What do I represent that upsets them so much?” Was it to do with the Jubilee? Not in my case. How very English to get annoyed about royalty. It was too far removed from me to get annoyed about. Why get annoyed about the Queen? She was just a harmless old lady.
   In fact I thought the whole political thing was complete nonsense. When things really blew up in ’77 all these pretend-political statements got put into music and I thought that was fake: “Let’s talk about Yoof! Unemployment!” It was horribly fake. When you’re that age you want to pull girls, drink beer and make some noise. Politics was from another planet, it was for older people. But the country was a hot house. England was shut in like Kew Gardens’ palm-house, and you could notice the growth in inches per day. Bands were forming and disbanding like amoeba on speed.
   The more headlines it got, punk was like a big dumb battering ram that banged the door down and suddenly anything that came through was considered punk. If you played accordion in 1977 you were punk accordion. Or a pub R&B band became punk-pub. Punk-opera! Punkabilly! Everything had to be squeezed through, like a Play-Do Fun Factory with only one shape. And I disliked all that.
Was it a good thing? It was a necessary thing. Like any music movement when you look back, the majority is rubbish and 10 per cent is really good and fresh and will stand up for ever. But so necessary and unstoppable. Back then there was only Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test, which you sat through in disgust because it was Rita Coolidge or some Eagles knock-off, and you had to find bits and pieces where you could.
   But now there’s the availability of pre-chewed pap to keep everyone happy. I must admit I want kids to possess their own music and I don’t see that spirit now. I mean the do-it-yourself, grab it, skin it and wear it yourself. Kids today. No rebellion! Too busy playing with their Game Boys. Couldn’t afford Game Boys in my day! You had to make do with your penis.

STEVE DIGGLE AND PETE SHELLEY (BUZZCOCKS)

Steve Diggle: 1976 was a powerful year. I remember growing some tomato seeds in my Dad’s back garden and they grew just like punk rock did. It wasn’t even a garden, it was just clay, really, and I didn’t think they’d grow but they did, all over the place, and to me that was the Biblical thing: the tomatoes have grown and we’re gigging with the Sex Pistols.

Pete Shelley: Howard [Devoto] and I were doing Iggy Pop songs and then we read about the Sex Pistols doing a version of No Fun, so we thought, Good, there’s someone else. Cos everyone else was just standard rock. I was on the National Union of Students committee and I got the train fare to London for a meeting, then Howard said we could borrow a friend’s car and use the money to try and find this band. So we set off and scoured a copy of Time Out but there was no mention of any Sex Pistols playing. So we rang the NME and I believe we spoke to Nick Kent, and he didn’t know of a gig but said their manager had a clothes shop in the Kings Road. So we arrived just as the shop was closing up. Malcolm was bemused by these people from Up North trying to find the Sex Pistols. But they were playing that weekend so we drove off and we saw them. It was a revelation: it was the kind of music that we were aspiring to. The next night we talked to them and Malcolm said he wanted to get gigs outside of London, so we said we’ll try to get you on at the Bolton Institute of Technology, but they weren’t interested so we put the gig on ourselves.

SD: I used to live in a house with people who took acid and I thought, It would be great to see a band like The Who again, with three-minute songs, that smash up their guitars. That concept was way, way gone, it was all about Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. But I wanted to be in a band that was relevant to our generation with coming up for a million on the dole. I was on the dole myself cos I was a conscientious objector to work, but in the meantime I was in the library reading poets like William Blake and trying to write music. Next thing I met Pete and Howard and away we went. There was two gigs at the Free Trade Hall, within three weeks of each other; Pete Shelley was collecting tickets on the door and I was outside waiting to meet this guy to form a band like The Who. Next thing Malcolm McLaren approaches me and says, “They’re inside, the Sex Pistols.” And I said, I’m gonna form a band like The Who and he says, “Well, the Pistols do Substitute.” He took me in and I met Pete and we had a rehearsal the next day. We plugged in the one amp and to quote Yeats a terrible beauty was born, screaming and shouting.

PS: We weren’t part of any Manchester music scene, we didn’t know anybody else, so it was a surprise that there were other people who liked that kind of music. They wanted to do their own bands but didn’t know how. “There must be a law against it”: that kind of mentality. But then you realise that there’s nothing stopping you but a lack of imagination.

SD: So we played at the second Pistols gig three weeks later, we opened up for them, and that was where the punk rock atom was split, even more than London, because all the London journalists wrote about the Pistols and about a local band, the Buzzcocks, which they didn’t expect. So that was groundbreaking in making local scenes. People realised they could have their own punk scenes in their own towns, it wasn’t just about going to London on your hands and knees looking for a deal.

PS: The fact it turned out the way it did beggars belief, but it was screaming to happen. The best inventions are the ones where people go, Why did nobody else invent this?

SD: Once the Daily Mirror got hold of it and it was all plastic bin-liner parties at colleges, and it was all seen as a bit of a fun, then I thought the initial force and questioning was disappearing and it turned into a parody. But it changed my life, and the audience. It took me a while to come to that conclusion: for many years people would say, as if you were Jesus, Well show me how it changed, turn the water into wine. But it was an intangible thing, a feeling, and people you meet to this day, in TV or wherever, say, “If it wasn’t for punk rock I wouldn’t be doing this.” People took a spirit from it. The whole country was shaking from “What’s this punk rock going to do?” It was like a life-threatening assault on the senses.

PS: It was a very exciting and creative time. I remember when I went with Steve to see 24 Hour Party People I said, If I’d known it was going to be that important I would have paid more attention.

COLIN NEWMAN (WIRE)

At some point in ’75 I’d cut my hair and started wearing straight trousers. I remember turning up at a party and being told I looked like a convict. There was something oppositional. There was this whole sense that a new music was coming but nobody knew what it sounded like. You couldn’t hear any examples.
Punk was a fantastic media hype. It’s hard to imagine that Britain had four weekly music papers; it was your major source of cultural information if you were a young person; you couldn’t get it from the TV or radio. It was American punk at first, The Ramones and Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman. That was exciting and actively deconstructing pop music. In 1976 New York and London were quite close, culturally; there are points when they touch or move apart. The Ramones had this cavalier attitude, they were like heavy bubblegum, and that was fantastically transgressive at the time.
   My friend arranged for the Pistols to play at Middlesex Polytechnic. There are certain bands who are like a line in the sand, you’re either with them or against them. It’s not about whether they’re any good or not, it’s a cultural identifier. And that kicked in in ’76.
   By the time Wire was starting up it was already obvious that there were lots of punk bands, so we were thinking about being the next thing. The Sex Pistols were hugely entertaining, they were in many ways a comedy band, cartoon-like. But it hasn’t aged well. By the time Pink Flag came out, in late ’77, it was obvious that you wanted nothing to do with that, dear. You distanced yourself from the pack. British bands tend to be long on style and short on content; the great British things that have longevity tend not to come out from those movements.
   The interesting thing was post-punk, a way of looking at the world that irrevocably changed in ’76 and ’77. You had to do more than say you were new, you had to be new. That was the energy of post-punk, that produced the biggest bands world-wide. I really don’t subscribe to any concept of a movement; it’s rubbish. It just remains the easiest way for four spotty boys or girls to get in a room and make a very satisfying noise on a basic level. In the ’80s early techno was also a kind of punk rock of its age, where people can get the technology cheaply enough to make a noise. You always have to have that entry-level music. People of 19 and 20 may not have much money and if you want to make your impact you’re going to choose whatever comes easiest. Today I suspect it might be folk music.
   Punk was also responsible for creating the next generation of dinosaurs. No punk, no U2. Or Simple Minds. But that’s just par for the course. I refuse to say that any one period of youth culture is superior to any other. The one that you experienced is obviously going to be important to you.
   Punk created possibilities, however, even for bands to play live. A guy a few years older than me said, “You are doing covers, aren’t you? You won’t get anywhere with original material, you won’t get gigs.” That was the mind-set, and punk cleared that away. I remember seeing The Jam, who had come up from the working-men’s clubs and they were still doing Route 66. They were a turn, basically.
   I thought the Pistols handled the comeback thing so badly; people were hungry for them to come back and be good. Instead it was, “We’re just trying to be clever and rip everyone off.” It’s sad, that attitude deprived the world of something that could have been interesting. I know so many people at that gig who were disappointed. Everyone has to deal with the legacy of what they’ve done, and if people genuinely loved it then don’t fuck with it. You can do anything you like but just don’t be crap.

EUGENE REYNOLDS AND JO CALLIS (REZILLOS)

Eugene Reynolds: We were in Edinburgh when it happened. We were already playing in a band and though we fell under the auspices of “punk rock” we really weren’t. It wasn’t like we heard the Sex Pistols and thought, Oh, we must do that. But it helped give validation to what we were doing. We just thought, Hold it, there is something happening that is very similar to what we’re doing. I was walking around in white winkle-pickers from the 1950s, with green drainpipe trousers and wraparound glasses, because I liked that look, and Fay [Fife] was wearing mini-skirts and Mary Quant eye make up when people thought it was nuts. But we wanted to be different.
Then, to be told by people who were wearing de rigueur clichéd punk clothes that we weren’t real punks, you just thought, Oh fuck off, you don’t know anything. I think Malcolm McLaren represented the most commercialised aspect of it. Maybe the Sex Pistols at the time didn’t make much money but the way Malcolm McLaren and Boy and all that thing was managed it was about making money. It was packaged. And once a movement becomes pigeon-holed then it’s dead. But we’ve never changed our ways, we’re just the same as we always were. Before 1976 you’d hear American acts like the MC5 or The Dictators, but you didn’t think of it as a movement; we were all for taking influences from everywhere and reinventing it. Before it became defined by fashion, you had people in shirts with Rezillos written on them but also Motorhead or Deep Purple.

Jo Callis: Once you got into the provinces and out of town, kids didn’t differentiate. You were allowed to do it all, whether it was punk or heavy metal. You’d see guys with denim jackets that said Status Quo and The Clash, in felt-tip pen, which was quite sweet. And you’d play out in the Borders of Scotland and there’d be guys apologising because they “didnae have the gear”: “We’re sorry, we cannae buy it in Castle Douglas.” They’d turn up in those 1970s suits with the big flappy collars. Brilliant.

ER: We’d had all the power-cuts, the work-to-rule and the three-day-week, and when we were touring with The Rezillos there’d be a firemen’s strike going on. And in a way, though it was all disruptive, you kind of miss all that. People just roll over and accept it now, it’s spun to them in such a way that it’s in their best interests. And nobody objects. After punk happened, from the music it would spin over into other parts of the media: magazines springing up, new people presenting TV programmes, little things like that. I suppose the downside is you start getting the commercial versions of what was street fashion in Miss Selfridge, but what the heck. The thing I loved living in Scotland was you’d see bunches of guys walking down the street in all their punk gear, not bothering anybody, just having a bit of a laugh on a Saturday afternoon. Whereas a few years before, they’d all have been in gangs, stabbing each other. Now they had something that galvanised them, that gave them a bit of purpose.

JC: For something that had that bad reputation of being violent, it was anything but.

ER: There had to be a smack in the gob for all those older bands, even if you end up being a bloody dinosaur yourself. Once you’ve been around long enough you become your own trademark and you deserve a smack in the gob from another band. It was all kicking against that, and it was interesting to hear established acts bemoaning that they couldn’t get a gig anywhere and no one wanted to do a record deal with them. It just collapsed over night, when punk came along no one was interested in that prog rock stuff. Not that it went away, but it certainly took the wind out of their tyres for a long time. It was back to basics and great music could be written with three chords, without fancy time signatures and all those histrionics.

JC: It helped create local scenes, too. When you had the Goth thing and the Bowie/Roxy nights mid-week at nightclubs, which were the platform for the ’80s New Romantics, you wouldn’t have had all that but for punk having happened just prior to it. It was self-styled, you made it up for yourself and that carried through into everything after that: post-punk industrial or Brit-funk or whatever. And there’s really only the Goths left now.

RICK WAKEMAN

We were aware of a change, which normally happens every 10 years. What came before prog rock were the pop bands, like Gerry & The Pacemakers, from a generation of groups who had come in and killed the crooners stone dead. When prog rock came in, that killed the pop bands. Then punk came and killed prog. I always look on music as the first thing that anyone really owns in their life. You inherit what your parents liked, but you don’t want that, so you try to kill it and discover something of your own.
   So we knew something was going to happen, though I don’t think we expected the sheer vitriol that was directed towards anyone who could tune their instruments. This was an all-out attack. Punk didn’t completely kill off prog but it put it in its place. What was interesting that sales died overnight. Many bands went into retirement for a long time. That is, the bands who could afford to – those of us with various divorces couldn’t. But there was always somewhere in the world you could go and play. As Pete Townshend says, There’s always someone who wants you. South America, Italy, Eastern Europe, you could always work.
   Certain bands from that era have stood the test of time. I thought The Clash were brilliant, and The Tubes. But it was a strange time. I’ve read a few articles by musos and they’ve said rather nice things about Yes. But the music press was suddenly taken over by a very young group of people who were promoting what was new as opposed to reporting what was happening. People were being told by the press, “You must like this and hate this.” You survive in the long term but it’s a real wake-up. Life is good and you’re doing what you want, suddenly things change and the record company doesn’t want you anymore.
   Now we have a generation that was born long after rock’n’roll started and they don’t stamp dates on things; they’ll listen to everything. The punk era wasn’t new, The Who did all that. It’s a full circle. I started like everybody in the ’60s in a 12-bar blues band, then a few musos wanted to do a bit more outside of that structure, and it got so you had to be a virtuoso.
   I’m still very much the old school, I like to play places where people can’t get to you. But you can never win in this business, and I got into trouble for playing Cuba. I got accused by some Americans of being a Communist sympathiser, and as a fully paid-up member of the Conservative Party I find that a little strange. Music isn’t political, it’s about people. I want to have some fun. In the studio recently I was using a lot of equipment that hadn’t been used for 30 years. A lot of it didn’t work, and some of it only played certain notes, so we had to write pieces around that. The most common sentence in the studio was, “Can you smell burning?”.

Ray Gosling: Him Off The Telly

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

My first encounter with TV was in a rainy Liverpool suburb one day in the 1960s. The Granada company's young reporter was Ray Gosling, attempting to give a voice to the voiceless. I idolised him then and I admire him today. This review of his precocious memoir, Sum Total, was written for Word magazine in November 2004.

At the end is a brief review of the late Nick Clarke's fine book, The Shadow Of A Nation.

In the North of England, in the 1960s, Granada TV had an early evening show called On Site in which a peculiar young man fought the rich and powerful. Ray Gosling used to stand outdoors, shivering in his raincoat, reporting and supporting some small-time campaign. Back in the studio, warm and smug, his adversary sat with the fat cats – captains of industry, councillors, whatever – and would say: “Now come along, Gosling, you’re being unreasonable.”
   The first time I saw a TV camera Ray Gosling was in front of it. I forget the issue that week – it may have been a strike, or Mums demanding a Belisha Beacon – but I remember the local amazement at a TV visitation. The Great Eye In The Sky had turned its gaze our way. And there he was, “him off the telly”, shivering in his raincoat while, behind his back, V-flicking urchins gurned and tumbled.
   In a Them And Us sort of world, Gosling was always for Us. It’s startling to learn he had already written his autobiography, but in it he said: “I was for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind.” That was in 1961, when he was barely out of his twenties.
   Sum Total was a raw book, by a passionate and awkward new writer. Gosling describes his Midland upbringing and adolescent travels: he drops out of Leicester University, works on the railways and in a shoe factory, converts to Catholicism. There are hints of a painful love affair. There are wonderful period details, like the air upstairs on a workers’ bus, all hair oil and cigarette smoke. And he predicts: “Wherever I go I’ll still be the same wild and rather frightened little man.”
   Apart from his periodic spots on Radio Four, I’d more or less lost sight of Ray Gosling until a few years ago, when he was the subject of a poignant documentary, Bankrupt. By now an elderly man he was still battling the powers-that-be, on this occasion the government departments who were threatening to evict him and his dying partner, a man named Glyn. Despite the passing of decades Ray was still recognisably “him off the telly” and still fighting like a terrier. Basically, the man’s a hero.
   This reissue of Sum Total arrives with a great new preface by Gosling, who reconsiders the young man he used to be and looks out – once again from the upstairs of a bus – at the teenagers of today. They’re the beneficiaries of his rebel generation’s struggle – but what do they do with that freedom? “You’re into ‘your thing’. Into your thing. Which is often some thing ‘they’ have sold you. You have ‘willingly’ let yourself buy what is marketed for you to think it is yours and it isn’t, my dear.”
   The same decades that separate Ray Gosling’s book from its preface are dissected, meanwhile, in Nick Clarke’s The Shadow Of A Nation. The former BBC man compares the country of his own 1950s childhood with the media-saturated present. He cannot help but feel disturbed by the way TV has subverted our lives, and replaced our own, authentic perceptions with its own version of the world. We are materially prosperous, for sure, but the culture has become synthetic.
   By way of illustration his book looks at the lives of some key actors in this drama. Princess Margaret and Arthur Scargill were each, in their different ways, Faust-like victims of the media: with their co-operation it built them up, and without their say-so it knocked them down. By contrast, David Frost and the advertising man Charles Saatchi were survivors: they learned the new rules faster than anyone. From the Festival of Britain in 1951 (a riot of misplaced optimism) to the Millennium Dome (a monument to emptiness), Clarke observes some of the same decline that Ray Gosling speaks of. The TV has isolated us to the point where we know of no reality except the flashy, shallow one it creates for us.
   There’s an irony, therefore, in the way Clarke’s book has gone into paperback with a new sub-title. “The Changing Face Of Britain” has been amended to “How Celebrity Destroyed Britain”. It’s what we’d now call sexing up the document.

Sum Total is published by Pomona
The Shadow Of A Nation is published by Orion

Zeffirelli's Romeo And Juliet

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

“Their love shames our hate”

A review of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film Romeo And Juliet, starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting.
This appeared first in WORD May 2003.

It’s a surprise to be reminded that Romeo And Juliet was not supposed to be a Romance, but a Tragedy. That defining image of the bird on a balcony, pining for her panty-hosed swain (“Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo”) is deep in our collective memory. But it’s like something we remember from a Morecambe & Wise comedy sketch. In general the couple are our cultural shorthand for some sublime idea of love triumphant. To be a Romeo is to be the smooth-talking ladies’ man.
   But the Romeo of Shakespeare’s story is only a boy, and he’s Fate’s plaything. It’s really quite a horrible affair. Romeo And Juliet is as much about hate as love. These young lovers look for heaven in one another’s eyes but there is no heaven on earth that will outlast the lark’s song in the morning. The author of Romeo And Juliet was evidently no sentimentalist. Love may be sweet, but death is strong. The best you can say is that death takes the lovers before their love can wane or be destroyed.
   Maybe it’s the violence at its core that helps Romeo And Juliet transfer to brutally updated settings. The warring clans of Montague and Capulet became the flick-knife hoodlum gangs of West Side Story. Even Baz Luhrmann’s flashy 1998 version, Romeo + Juliet, where guns replace rapiers and transvestite disco divas replace lute-plucking minstrels, is true in its feel for the lovers’ harsh, fractured world.
   Franco Zeffirelli’s film was made in 1968, when the golden reign of youth was at its zenith (he very nearly persuaded Paul McCartney to play the male lead). But his loving vision of comely youngsters in full Renaissance fig is tinged with appropriate anxiety. It is a gorgeous movie to look at, from the twilight lushness of Italian palace gardens to the sun-baked killing grounds of the public squares. In his almost unknown stars, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the director found two exquisitely pretty actors whose obvious inexperience only makes their performances the more affecting – Romeo and Juliet, remember, are bewildered by everything, good and bad, that happens to them. The entire proceedings are drenched in a sort of beautiful sadness.
   In what’s presumably a faithful likeness of sixteenth century Verona, the two young aristocrats set eyes upon each other and are smitten. They are only momentarily thrown to learn that they are on opposite sides of an eternal feud between the town’s great families, the Montagues and the Capulets. A friendly Friar blesses their union and marries them in secret, hoping his news will reconcile the sworn enemies. Even he feels compelled to warn them against excess of passion: “These violent delights have violent ends… Therefore love moderately.” But the families and their supporters cannot renounce their hatred and the bloodshed does not stop.
   Against the clash of arms, the lovers’ stolen moments, whether upon the balcony or together in bed for the only night of their married lives, are intensely tender and charged with eroticism: “Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace on thy breast,” sighs the departing boy. “Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest.” These are lines that take the spoken word as close to the condition of music as it can ever come. But the actual music, scored by soundtrack maestro Nino Rota, is equal to the challenge – his love theme sounds as ravishing as ever, despite a cruel period of servitude introducing Simon Bates’s Our Tune.
   There is so much to delight the eye and caress the ear that you cannot fail to enjoy Romeo And Juliet. It’s true that it represents some views we are not used to nowadays. As “star-cross’d” lovers it is simply not in Romeo and Juliet’s fate to be happy. No amount of counselling will change that. Love cannot conquer all, because there is evil in the human heart as well. Love is not all you need. And yet the story still inspires us. The two beautiful corpses, final proof of the lovers’ devotion, humiliate the living for the folly of their squabbling. Their love shames our hate. Doomed or otherwise, their love shone like a ray of some divine light that periodically pierces the clouds of earthly existence.

Buy the DVD from Amazon.co.uk
Buy the DVD from Amazon.com

Bebel Gilberto and Suba

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

My interview with the Brazilian star Bebel Gilberto was focused on her late producer, Suba. It was done for Word magazine, April 2003.

Our story starts in a pot of boiling water, deep in the Amazon jungle, some time in the mid 16th century. Peering inside this receptacle we discover its unhappy occupant, who is none other than the Bishop of Brazil! That is correct: Dom Pêro Fernandes Sardinha himself.
   If there is one thing worse than a dinner party with people you don't especially care for, then it is surely finding yourself the dish du jour. Had the Bishop only known, however, he might have been consoled by the contribution he was making to the history of Latin American music. You could almost draw a line between his demise and the writing, over 300 years later, of The Girl From Ipanema. For in boiling, carving and consuming Dom Fernandes, his cannibal hosts - a tribe of Amazonian Indians with issues around the Portuguese conquest of their land - were committing what later Brazilians would celebrate as "anthropophagism".
   Loosely defined as the act of eating another culture, this became the classic metaphor for describing a process in Brazilian art - of swallowing whatever the Western world brought your way and using it to make something distinctively local. In other words: devouring the enemy to assimilate his strengths. Nowhere has Brazilian anthropophagism been more marvellously successful than in music. Think of the Bossa Nova, that smoothly persuasive fusion of Brazilian samba and cool American jazz. Think, indeed, of The Girl From Ipanema, an almost peerless pop hit from 1964 which matched the talents of guitarist João Gilberto, singer Astrud Gilberto and saxophonist Stan Getz. The famous Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso (himself a leader in the Beatle-inspired "Tropicália" movement) actually said that "Brazil was born the day the Indians ate Bishop Sardinha."
   Now let's move a few years forward, to 1999, and the appearance of an album called São Paulo Confessions. It is one of the great albums of recent times. It was by a Yugoslavian musician named Suba, and released by an off-shoot of the Belgian label Crammed Discs. If you cared to look at its contents, you'd spot a track entitled Antropòfagus. As in anthropophagism. Now you know what he was on about.
   The point about Suba's São Paulo Confessions is that it's a brilliant example of cross-cultural experimentation in music. The canny Belgians knew their man: he had a fantastic aptitude for tuning in to other traditions. Exposing a host of Brazilian vocalists and players to his sophisticated electronic technique, Suba made a uniquely modern record. São Paulo Confessions has the crispest Western edge but also the dark, sensuous pulse of his adopted country. Earlier dance producers specialised in taking what was human and making it sound technological. With Suba, you sense the transformation is taking place the other way around. The machine is finally acquiring a soul.
   The next beneficiary of Suba's studio science was a Rio de Janeiro-raised singer, Bebel Gilberto. She would, in Brazil, pass for musical aristocracy because she is the daughter of Bossa Nova's founding father João Gilberto and the equally eminent singer Miúcha . (Just to be clear, Astrud Gilberto, who sang on The Girl From Ipanema, was an earlier wife of João's.) Together, Bebel and Suba created yet another extraordinary record.
   First released in 2000, Bebel Gilberto's album Tanto Tempo is one of the stealth success stories of the new century. Like São Paulo Confessions it was issued on the Ziriguiboom imprint of Crammed Discs. Last year it was picked up by the much bigger label EastWest, who have watched its sales rise ever closer to one million. Tanto Tempo has made Bebel Gilberto an international star, and it will doubtless keep on selling. You should certainly hear it, if you haven't already - her vocals are dreamily delicious, hovering seductively above the electro-tropical arrangements. It's one of those rare instances when music seems to speak to anyone, of every age and preference.
   The tragedy was, of course, that Suba would not live to hear it.

**************

"Suba? Aaahhh!" Bebel Gilberto remembers her late friend with a sad smile. "He was very intelligent and very funny. Completely Brazilian, he could speak Portuguese so well. A genius. And crazy, crazy, crazy - that's why he died the way he did. You know? He was probably smoking a cigarette and that's what happened... But anyway... He was pure music."
   From the city of Novi Sad in Serbia, Mitar Subotic was the son of a TV journalist. He was formally trained in classical music, but extended his studies to everything from ethnic folk song to electronic composition. In Belgrade and Paris he pursued an equally adventurous career, making funk, ambient and dance music as well as scoring films and fashion shows. When he received a grant to research Brazilian music, he moved to São Paulo and became infatuated. In the sleevenote to his album he wrote:-
   "São Paulo, Brazil. The world's fourth megalopolis with over 18 million souls, and more arriving every day. A stressful maze of massive skyscrapers, kilometric avenues and relentless chaos. Think Blade Runner in the Tropics. Life in São Paulo is fast, crazy and dangerous, as reality changes constantly. The city is full of people from all over Brazil and foreigners, all trying to make sense out of it. With time and patience to dig deep enough, you can make discovery after discovery, you find very strange people and very special places... Here, they call me Gringo Paulista. I've been in this city for ten years, and it already feels like I've led several, parallel Paulista lives."
   In late 1999, the 38-year-old Suba had almost completed work on Bebel's album and was due to visit Europe in support of his own record. In the early hours of November 2, smoke was discovered coming from his São Paulo studio/apartment. After contacting Suba on the intercom, the caretaker broke down his door and discovered him alive, but suffering from the smoke and flames. All might have been well, but Suba returned to his burning studio - reportedly to rescue back-up discs of Bebel Gilberto tracks. Stricken by the fumes, he died later that day in hospital.
   Suba, therefore, did not survive to see the release of Tanto Tempo. It might well have made him one of the sought-after producers in the world.

***************

Whatever the darkness in its history, Tanto Tempo will be for many a perfect accompaniment to the Summer of 2003. It's already brought Bebel Gilberto the sort of attention she has not known since she was the little girl of Brazil's first family of music. (She made her stage debut at Carnegie Hall, at the age of nine, appearing with her mother and Stan Getz.) Today she sits in a London photographer's studio, where there are stylists and stylists' assistants at every turn. Tomorrow there will be another session, this time for Vogue. Rarely has word of mouth worked such commercial magic.
   "I keep meeting people who don't know who I am," she says. Her accent is distinctly Latin, though she has lived in New York for many years now. "And when they discover they go, Oh! I've been listening to your album. Or my mother plays it, or my boyfriend plays it. So it is interesting, I can make old people happy, young people happy, which is really cool. It's a totally personal album."
   Gilberto's provenance made her career a forgone conclusion: "I couldn't be a lawyer, that's for sure. I left school pretty early. I always sang. I worked a lot as a child, doing jingles, helping my mother. So I think it was meant to be. I was born in New York then I moved to Mexico because my father was making an album there. We watched the World Cup in the '70s. Then we went back to Brazil and I was raised there. When I was 25 I put some money aside and decided to move back to New York and I never came back to Brazil, except to visit.
   Her decision to leave Brazil suggests that being the daughter of João Gilberto was a mixed blessing. "I was a lot under my father's shadow, and it was very difficult for me. When I moved to New York I studied music, I studied English, I worked as a babysitter, as a model for a painter, and I'm glad I did all that. When people saw me I was not the daughter of a talent guy that really helped me out; I was the daughter of a talent guy that really ignored my talent because he was so into his own talent. Which I don't blame him. My mother was trying to fight against his talent too. I was not raised to be a prodigy girl. I was not Shirley Temple.
   "I had to prove on my own. My father and mother did not even listen to Tanto Tempo until it was done. I think they like it. There are things that they don't understand very well, but they definitely respect me. There is a different attitude now."
   During her years of struggle she spent a while in London, living with her French boyfriend. She even made her TV debut on Jools Holland's show. Back in New York she performed with David Byrne. But it was through the eclectic Brussels label, Crammed Discs, that she formed a musical partnership with Suba. Initially, Bebel remembers, it was not a matter of chemistry so much as practicality. "He was one of the few producers that wanted to work with me for free, to invest time and money. I didn't doubt him. I'm like the daughter of the traditional Bossa Nova guy - pure, pure music. Then I met Suba, who's the king of the samples, and computers and playing tapes backwards. I was fascinated but I thought, How could I do that? Sometimes I would think this was not going to work. But in the end it did work."
   At the personal level they found themselves to be as different as their respective Brazilian homes: "I am very Carioca," Gilberto explains, "which is how you call when you are from Rio. And from São Paulo is Paulista. And they are very different; it's like I am from LA and Suba is from New York. Rio, where I am from, is totally more laid back. There is less money and the people are looser. In São Paulo are lots of yuppies running around after the money. Not that Suba was like that. Suba just got his own studio there, and I think that's why he settled. But Suba was more Brazilian than any Brazilian in the end."
   I ask her for her favourite memory of him.
   "Waking me up. We used to stay at the studio until six in the morning, then I would stay at my uncle's house which is in the same street that he had his apartment. I had to lock myself in my uncle's house, switch my cell-phone off, then sleep-sleep. Then, around two in the afternoon I would switch the phone on, because I knew he was going to wake me up. It would ring, I would answer, and he was, 'Good morning Princess! Let's have breakfast!' So at three we would walk to the boulangerie and have coffee, pretending it was only eight o'clock."
   The final tracks of Tanto Tempo were completed in the weeks after Suba's death. They include the song that Bebel wrote in his memory, Lonely.
   Bebel Gilberto is currently finishing her next album, and is quick to admit the difficulty. "I am without Suba. It's been a terrible frightening. It's the worst to make an album after an album with a producer that died. It's like double-killing. But I guess I'm taking over my instincts as a musician. This album is more acoustic, less electronic, lots of composition by me. It's more Bebel now. Every day I ask myself if someone's gonna like it. But hopefully they will.
   "On Tanto Tempo is Suba's touch. But there is a lot of me too, because he gave me freedom. When you move away from a country, and I lived away from Brazil for 12 years, you have to change because you hear different influences. If I was still in Brazil I would not have made this album. I am definitely influenced by electronics, samples, classical, jazz, contemporary, rap, house, and this is the result."
The next album should be ready by late 2003. Whereas Tanto Tempo was allowed to emerge and grow slowly, its successor will face the weight of expectations. She must also deal with a degree of stardom. "I know," Bebel says. "I would rather be in the situation I was in with the first album. It's more healthy. I don't know how people manage. I don't know how Madonna manages to be Madonna. If I knew the recipe I would give a course! You gotta be really strong to face all that. Or really pretentious. And I'm not. I'm totally into the music. I wanna do right instead of being commercial, so it's kind of a game."
   I launch upon a boring, convoluted question about the place of "anthropophagism" in her music. Naturally she looks quite baffled. Perhaps it lost something in the translation. But I would not be surprised to learn that Bebel Gilberto has never eaten a bishop in her whole life.

Obsession and The Inconvenient Girl

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

From The Beatles To Football, There Is Only One Obsession Worth The Name…

A column commissioned by Men’s Health magazine for their Jan/Feb issue of 1998.

We hear a great deal of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, and Malibu’s “babe-tastic” golden beaches. But how many visitors to Los Angeles think of visiting its lesser-celebrated attraction, The Air-Conditioning & Refrigeration Industry Museum? The answer, I’d venture, is very few. But here is the point to grasp. Somebody visits it. Or else it wouldn’t exist. There are in this world some people so obsessed by air conditioning and refrigeration that they require a museum to satisfy their lust. Can this be healthy? There is a fine line between collecting teapots and believing you are, yourself, a teapot. Are some obsessions weirder than others, or are they all the symptoms of a sick mind?
To those of us who are not obsessed by anything much, there is nothing so tiresome as people who are. Rare is the golfer whose conversation could not be improved by a five-iron, or whatever it’s called, being shoved down his gullet. In Kansas you will find The International Brick Collectors Association, and we are fortunate it’s no nearer. Also, apparently, there is a growing obsession with collecting body parts of famous dead people: for example Napoleon’s penis or Hitler’s teeth. These macabre obsessives were thrown into confusion when the market threw up two skulls belonging to Oliver Cromwell. Then it was explained that the smaller skull was Cromwell’s when he was a child. Since obsessive people are fiery rather than bright, this explanation was accepted.
Nowhere is there more obsession per square foot than in the world of rock’n’roll. When I worked on a music paper the office reception was often clogged with foggy-witted characters believing they had arranged to meet David Bowie there. There was one poor man who claimed he was David Bowie, having acquired a new body, like Dr Who at the end of a series. A woman used to ring up every day asking for news of Kevin Rowland. To this day I cannot meet a Gary Numan fan without feeling a chill of anxiety. And there are people who get obsessed in reverse. I knew a man whose chief passion was hatred of the singer in Simple Minds. Everything came back to Jim Kerr. He would listen to Beethoven and sneer in triumph, “Ha! Just imagine Jim Kerr trying to write that!”
Because I write books about The Beatles, I meet Fab Four obsessives regularly. They assume I am one of them, but I am not. I just like the group. As a child I went to school in Liverpool, where my bus said “Penny Lane” on the front. But it never occurred to me to go the extra stops and see it. Not until last year did I visit the famous roundabout where a pretty nurse had sold poppies from a tray. Yet there are daily coach parties there, full of folk from Ohio and Osaka, gasping in awe like pilgrims reaching Mecca. The natives will smile and wave to them, all the time thinking: “There goes a coach load of complete knobheads!”
Creepiest of all was promoting my recent book about John Lennon, on US radio talk-shows. Late-night phone-ins were the worst. The airwaves were commandeered by raspy psychopaths: “Uhhh… I gotta question for the gennelman from England…” I think of Beatle music as fresh and fun and life-affirming, but not when it’s in the hands of lonely males in Cleveland with nobody to talk to at 3am. I kept picturing Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Then you go on-air in Boston – a town not short of pseudo-Irishmen with sentimental ideas about the IRA – and you encounter two types of obsessive rolled into one. Thus: “Hey! Ya talk about the pain in John Lennon’s songs. But ya don’t talk about the pain he felt bein’ Irish in Liverpool! Spat on! Treated like a dog!” One tries to reason: “Erm, It’s not like that. Nearly everyone in Liverpool is a bit Irish. It’s not a problem. And John was not very Irish anyway.” But it’s no good. In the full energy of his ignorance, he clung to his cherished vision of Johnny O’Lennon, shamrocked victim of British imperialism.
Rock obsessives are sad. Political obsessives are mad. And religious obsessives can be the most worrying of all. The only obsessives I feel some sympathy for are trainspotters, partly because they are harmless, but mostly because they are routinely derided by the smug, under the illusion that they themselves are hip and full of interest. A word, too, on behalf of genuine football fans, whose obsession is sincere but is now travestied by adverts for anything from Coca-Cola to Sky TV, poncing off the lifeblood of an authentic passion. Yet the monomaniac of any stripe is apt to be a bore, and normally an over-talkative one. Whether your foible is gas-lamps, computers, conveyancing or cormorants, please obsess quietly. Thank you.
There is to my own mind only one obsession worth the name. A man’s life is a more or less well-ordered thing, until… she arrives. The Inconvenient Girl. She is so inconveniently lovely, and so inconveniently fascinating, and so inconveniently prepared to give you the time of day, that you cannot concentrate on bricks, golf or Oliver Cromwell’s head any longer. Even the air conditioning and refrigeration industry loses some of its appeal. When The Inconvenient Girl has installed herself in your life, all other infatuations are sent scampering. Your obsession with her is the only obsession she will ever tolerate. Indeed she seems to expect it as her due.
Friends will abandon you, but you will not care. You are possessed by a nobler emotion now, and there is something of poetry in your soul. Why, you might even chance your arm at a sonnet, or something. You will spend whole hours trying to remember what you ever used to think about before you started thinking about this woman. Your new obsession is more than a pastime – it is destiny. It’s the one that’s worth going all the way to Penny Lane for. Or to Abbey Road. You’d go to the Octopus’s bleeding Garden if it seemed necessary. Love is the sudden, blinding flash of understanding – now you understand that obsession is madness. And that madness can be divine.

McCartney on Lennon: the 2001 interview

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

From the Mojo issue of July 2001, this interview was mostly devoted to the break-up of the Beatles and Paul’s years with Wings. Along the way he talks surprisingly often about John Lennon.

After that is a quick Q&A done for Mojo of June 2001.

And, at the end, is a quick guide to Wings’ albums.

Wings were a band who seldom felt the feathery end of the critic’s quill. But this year we’re seeing Paul McCartney’s biggest effort so far to rehabilitate the second most popular group he ever belonged to. He’s released a double-CD and a documentary, both called Wingspan, that tell the story as he would like it told. And you soon realise that there’s more than a muso’s pride at stake in this project.

“The great thing is,” he says, “it vindicates Linda. I know she wanted to do the Wingspan thing. She knew if it was laid out correctly, people would get the idea. With all the slagging off she got, like the famous tape at Knebworth…” (This illicit cassette, from the mixing desk of a live show at the outdoor venue, was for years a dependable source of satirical mirth in music business circles; Linda McCartney’s off-key vocals circumnavigate the chorus notes of Hey Jude, while anonymous engineers hoot cruelly.)

“The truth was,” her loyal widower continues, “she was doing this [he stands, raises his hands to clap above his head]. She was being the big cheerleader: “Hey Jude, naah-naah-na.” But you don’t see the visual, you just hear this out-of-tune voice, and I know she always wanted the record put straight. And this does. You see her playing. You hear her singing beautifully. And you see what she was to the group. You see why she had to be in the group. She becomes the ballsiest member of it…”

He settles back on the sofa, here in the Soho office of his MPL company. Around his neck is a slim pink tie of the kind that Elvis used to wear. On his feet are trainers that look less like a gesture to trendiness than a concession to comfort (and, I suppose, to veganism). Just behind him is the Art Deco statuette that appears on a couple of Wings LP sleeves. The other great thing about the Wingspan film, he says, was being interviewed by his daughter Mary. (That’s her face you can see, peeping out from Dad’s jacket on the cover of the first solo LP, 31 years ago.) “I’d never had such a long natter with her, as doing this. And I used to say to my kids, You’re the only ones who never ask me about The Beatles. Their friends would come round and say, What was it like being in The Beatles? I’d go [adopts pompous old git voice], Well, let me tell you… And my kids would all go out the room: Oh bloody hell, he’s off… That’s how kids are, they don’t want to hear about that shit, But their friends would, so I’d chunder on…”

In fact he chunders on about The Beatles a lot more than you might expect. Or at least about one Beatle in particular. The World’s Most Famous Living Liverpudlian is anything but reticent when it comes to the World’s Most Famous Dead Liverpudlian. It’s quite contrary of him, because for the first 20 years after the group split up, he showed a stubborn reluctance to discuss the subject with his interviewers. They wanted to ask about John Lennon; he wanted to discuss Back To The Egg… Then came a reconciliation with his past that culminated in the Anthology exercise, when the moratorium on Beatle talk was entirely lifted. And now, in 2001, when the promotional agenda has switched back to Wings, you almost have to coax him off the subject of John Lennon. Is it just force of habit, or maybe the need to exorcise some kind of long-nosed, bespectacled, sharp-tongued ghost inside his head?

Taste restrains Paul from claiming any posthumous victories over John, though it’s no secret that he still has some differences with Yoko that are as wide as the Atlantic that normally separates them. But he can’t resist smiling at the irony of Lennon spending his last few years championing the sort of domestic cosiness that was once a derided part of the McCartney stereotype.

“Yeah, it’s lovely. But you’re right to say they were stereotypes. Everyone thought John was the hard, working class hero. As you know, if you look at his house, he was actually the middle class one, from Woolton. We were the scruffs. He had the full Works Of Winston Churchill: nobody any of us knew had that. A set of encyclopaedias was the most that anyone in our class had. But he had The Works Of Winston Churchill, and he’d read ’em, I think.

“There were so many stereotypes of John. And I love the fact that in the end – it’s one of the great blessings of my life, seeing as he got shot -– that during the last year, we made it up. Thank God for that. I would be just be so fucked up now, if I’d still been arguing with him and that had happened. I was thinking about it just the other day. It was cool that I’d started ringing him. We’d had a bread strike over here and I rang him and I was saying, What are you doing? He says, I’m baking some bread. Oh! Me too! Imagine, with the stereotypes, John and Paul talking about baking bread. He’d just had Sean, and he was talking about just padding round the apartment in his dressing gown, putting the cat out and changing the baby.

“And I’d been doing all of that, and as you say, I’d been stereotyped for it, just cos I’d been open about it. I loved that. It was really warm to be able to talk to him that ordinarily, finally. It was like we’d got back to where we’d been when we were kids. It was like we could actually talk about stuff that didn’t matter, but somehow it did matter…”

Back in 1970 neither John nor Paul, nor George or Ringo, would find The Beatles an easy beast to walk away from. Paul and Ringo seem to be at peace with it now; John would probably have become so; George never has. Besides the legal wranglings and the personal rancour that persisted between them for a while, there was the unique problem of getting used to living in a world that you no longer ruled.
Pop in the 1960s was like a pyramid. At the top, obviously, were The Beatles. Around them and just below, were Dylan, the Stones, the deposed King Elvis, and so on down to the broad base of innumerable also-rans. But pop in the 1970s was more like range of mountain peaks, topped by anyone from Elton John to the Sex Pistols. There was no unified hierarchy any more, and there hasn’t been one since. McCartney can’t have found the new world order an easy proposition. But he overcame his doubts the same way that he overcame his blacker periods in The Beatles. In other words, he worked.

It’s those first post-mop-top albums that we discuss in detail today. McCartney (1970) and Ram (1971) were curiously anti-climactic in their day. The first was home-grown, small-scale, contendedly modest, like a record made for his private diversion. The second was sprawling and eccentric, full of unfinished tunes and nonsense rhymes. This was an era when former Beatles were still expected to return from the mountain bearing tablets of stone (which Lennon and Harrison certainly attempted to do), not these gaudy, giggling indulgences. Three decades later, McCartney and Ram have endured far better than anyone expected.

It’s typical of McCartney, though, that he’s still insecure about their worth. He has a peculiar, wrong-end-of-the-telescope way of assessing his talent. He tries to talk up McCartney by telling you that “Dave Stewart really likes it”, or boasts that a hippy van driver once yelled across the LA traffic, “Ram! Great album dude!”. Recently his girlfriend Heather Mills put it this way: “He is a genius but doesn’t realise it, which is delightful.”

PDN: Towards the end of The Beatles you were dying to get back to playing live in a band, weren’t you? But your first move is to go the opposite way and do a totally solo album.

PMcC: Yeah. I couldn’t have another band because I wasn’t sure The Beatles had actually broken up. It was on the cusp: we hadn’t broken up when I started it, so it was just me doing some solo stuff. And then we had broken up, but things hung on. It basically started from John’s decision to leave the band, which came when I said I think we should get back together and do some little gigs. And he said, “Well I think you’re daft, and I wasn’t going to tell you until after we signed the Capitol deal but I’m leaving the band.” [Mimes an axe falling.] That was, like, The Moment The Beatles Broke Up. But it wasn’t in the open until a few months later, when I issued the McCartney album and did this press release with it, which virtually had the announcement.
I finally blew the whistle on it. And John was annoyed, even though he hadn’t said anything. It turns out, he told me later, that he wanted to be the one who announced it. He was jealous that I beat him to it. But I felt that three or four months was enough to wait around. Either we were just going to fuck about for another year, or we had to actually say to people, “You know what? About three or four months ago we actually broke up.” So that was how that happened.

So, in your head, The Beatles were still together when you were making McCartney. Whereas the outside world heard it as “what Paul did after leaving The Beatles.” I think it seemed a strangely low-key record, as a result.

No. It was on the cusp. There were a lot of funny things around at the time. Allen Klein: he was the one I wanted to sue to get out of it all. But everyone said, “He’s not party to any of the agreements, he’s just an outside guy. So you’ll have to sue The Beatles.” So I got into this terrifying thing of having to sue them, scared more than anything of the fact that, as you say, people would just see this album come out, hear my announcement and then hear I was suing The Beatles, without knowing any of the context.
So I knew I was in for problems. And I tried my best in the press to say, “Oh, blah blah blah, it was Allen Klein, blah blah.” So it was a shitty time for me. The only option was to either let him take it all, and the guys just swim along with him, or fight it. The truth of the matter is that he was a total cunt. He said I was fine, “Don’t worry, McCartney loves me” and all of this. And I knew I was hating the bastard. But to get out of him I had to sue the guys. And. as you know, Liverpool, the mates, no matter how much we were arguing, it’s one thing you don’t ever want to have to do.
So I knew the perception of me would, like, be deadened from there on in. And I suppose in many ways I’ve been fighting that for 20 years. But it was a clear choice: do that and possibly save it all -– or even lose it and pay the lawyers’ bills, which was not a terrific option – or just let Klein take it all. Cos the others were just with him, gung ho. So I took the option of suing him and had to live with that perception, including: “This is what Paul’s done as his first move after leaving The Beatles.” Which was actually the nicest bit of the perception: I did an album after The Beatles, so what? The worst thing for me was, I sued my best mates.
But the thing is, looking back on it, they now say “Thank you, you got us out of it, we wouldn’t have Apple, there’d be no Anthology, no Number 1 record, it’d all be in someone else’s pocket now.” It was the right thing to do, but I knew I was walking into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Very scary, but it was one of those moments in your life when you have to do it.

And, of course, we were hearing the album just after Abbey Road, which was at the opposite extreme.

Very produced, yeah.

Despite the problems going on around it, McCartney sounds a pretty cheerful affair.

Yeah, it was, because of Linda. I was just starting with Linda and in my mind the album was my escape from it all. I’d get home, new baby, that joy… any readers who’ve got a new baby, it transforms your life. I hadn’t had a baby before, though we had Heather was from Linda’s first marriage. Home was great solace for me, and making this record was “Yeah, this is what I love to do.” The rest, outside, was shit, but coming inside it was like a little cocoon. So I either made the album all at home or went down to a little studio in Willesden. Lin and the baby in the control room. Young married life is a very special time.
And I always liked doing things on my own. I was the kid in Liverpool who sort of went on a bus to the next stop, to Penny Lane, and got off and just looked around: “Who lives there?” I still like that, it’s in my personality to just go somewhere and watch people. Last night I took the tube home. We went to the theatre, couldn’t get a taxi anywhere in the West End. I really get a charge off that. George never used to. His Dad was a bus driver. I’d say to him, even when we were famous, I love getting on a bus. He’d say [astonished], “The bus? Why? You’ve got a car!”
But you’re just looking at people. And now of course, with fame, they’re looking at me a bit. There’s one or two on the tube last night, cracking up laughing. Guy in a baseball cap, decides he’s got to cool himself out, pull it together, gets off at the same stop: “Al’right mate? Good luck!”
So that’s where the record got its happiness. And when the time came to release it, I finally had to deal with Mammon, which was Apple. Ring them up and say, “Er, can I have a release date?” Neil [Aspinall] gave me a date. I was kind of boycotting Apple, and suddenly Mammon decided to change my release date for [adopts sarcastic tone] the massive Let It Be album. And I’m, “You fucking bastards! I’ve got a release date worked out! How can you do this?” I can’t remember what happened, but I certainly shouted loud enough. So it was Rage Against The Machine, me against them.
That’s why it was a good album for me, and it’s pretty funky, some of the little pieces like Momma Miss America have a great sound on them. I was like a professor in his laboratory. Very simple, as basic as you can get, a joy to make. [Scans the track list.] Teddy Boy was good, I’d tried to make that with The Beatles but no-one was having much patience with me. Maybe I’m Amazed was about the biggest song on it. And Kreen Akore was about an Amazon tribe I’d seen, who were fighting for survival, I went into the studio and recorded the sound of a bow and arrow going past the mike. Even now that album has an interesting sound. Very analogue, very direct.

The next album, Ram, is famous for its supposed attacks on John and Yoko, isn’t it?

Well, Too Many People was a bit of a dig at John, because he was digging at me. We were digging at each other in the press. Not harsh, but pissed off with each other, basically.

Have I mis-heard, or does it really start with the words “Piss off”?

Yeah. Piss off, cake. Like, a piece of cake becomes piss off cake, And it’s nothing, it’s so harmless really, just little digs. But the first line is about “too many people preaching practices.” I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn’t need to be told what to do. The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, each to his own. Freedom. Suddenly it was “You should do this.” It was just a bit the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it. So that one got to be a thing about them.
And once you start, the ball starts rolling. And there was a picture that we had for Hallowe’en of the two of us in silly masks that we picked up in a kids’ shop in New York. I’m Wimpey out of Popeye, and Linda was another character which looked a bit Oriental. We heard later that they thought that was a dig at them, but it actually wasn’t. We were digging at them, but some of the digs that weren’t digs got taken for them. So then John did a piss-take [in a postcard given away with his Imagine LP], he held a pig instead of the ram. This wasn’t posed. Me and Linda decided to catalogue all our sheep, so there’s a photograph of me holding every bloody sheep in the flock that year. Over 100 of them. I was supposed to be cropped out.

Is that where the title came from?

I remember driving up to Liverpool at some point and deciding that Ram would be a good title for the album, then the picture came, and you can “ram” a door down, and a “ram” is a male, like a stag. It just seemed like a good word.
Monkberry Moon Delight I liked, so much so that it’s in my poetry book. Long Haired Lady is very period piece, [fey Californian accent] “My long-haired lady.” Very ’70s. Ram On is a cute little thing on a ukulele, cos I used to carry one around with me in the back of New York taxis just to always have music with me. They thought I was freak, those taxi-drivers. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey was an epic thing, a Number 1 in America, surprisingly enough. I like the little bit that breaks in: “Admiral Halsey notified me, da-da-da, had a cup of tea and a butter pie.” It’s a bit surreal, but I was in a very free mood, and looking back I like all of that. It must have freaked a few people, cos it was quite daft.
Back Seat Of My Car is very romantic: “We can make it to Mexico City.” That’s a really teenage song, with the stereotypical parent who doesn’t agree, and the two lovers are going to take on the world: “We believe that we can’t be wrong.” I always like the underdog.

I think John might have taken Dear Boy as an attack on him.

Dear Boy wasn’t getting at John, Dear Boy was actually a song to Linda’s ex-husband: “I guess you never knew what you had missed.” I never told him that, which was lucky, because he’s since committed suicide. And it was a comment about him, cos I did think, “Gosh, you know, she’s so amazing, I suppose you didn’t get it.”

The LP sounds like you had more tunes lying around than songs to use them in. A lot of the tracks are like medleys of different ideas.

Yeah, Long Haired Lady goes off a bit, Back Seat Of My car goes off a bit, Big Barn Bed comes off Ram On, that’s right.

No writer’s block at that point, then?

No, I’ve been very lucky about writer’s block, touch wood. It occurred to me the other day that me and John sat down on, what was it, 295 songs me and John wrote? And on those 295 occasions, we never came away without a song, which is fucking phenomenal. The only time we nearly did, was Golden Rings, which became Drive My Car. It was “duh-duh duh-duh golden rings…” Um, this is not gonna compute. Finally we had ciggie and a cup of tea and our humour came back and Drive My Car came out of that. Some people analyse songwriting. I’ve never known about it. It’s fingers crossed, every time I sit down to do it. I just dive right in and hope for the best, and it seems to work.

Were you feeling in competition with the other ex-Beatles, now?

Yeah, we were all in competition. Which was a weird thing, trying to avoid each other’s release dates, like we’d avoided the Stones’ release dates in The Beatles. When John or George released an album I’d check it out, to see where he was up to. I think the truth, as a lot of people have said, is that we were missing each other. We missed the collaborative thing, of John saying “Don’t do that,” or “Do that”. Sparking each other off. For a while I was certainly very conscious of it. The only good thing was that I had been writing without John for a while, towards the end of The Beatles, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was still a pretty big shock. You know, just not to be hanging out with these guys. Cos I’d hung out with them since I was 17.

Even when you were not writing together, on later Beatle records, there must have been a stage in the process where the others listened to your songs, and vetoed them or otherwise.

Exactly. I mean, John would sort of bring me Glass Onion. I remember him out in the garden in St John’s Wood and saying “Here, what do you think of this?” So we would just run it past it each other, like you would run it past a mate or a producer. And he actually asked me, “D’you think I should put in this line about the Walrus was Paul?” I said, Oh yeah! It’s brilliant. I mean, I just generally tended to agree with his stuff, and he tended to agree with mine – like in Hey Jude, I was going to knock out that line about “The movement you need is on your shoulder.” He said, “You’re not, you know. That’s the best line in it.” So, often it wasn’t so much negative as just bolstering each other up. I might go through the whole studio experience thinking, This line’s not right. But the minute he’d signed off on it, I thought, This line is ace! Similarly with him and Glass Onion. It was the strength of unity.

It’s always striking that, of the four solo Beatles, George and Ringo got off to the strongest starts.

Yeah, George’s All Things Must Pass. As he said, it was just like diarrhoea, he must have held it in for so long. And he had Phil [Spector] and a lot of really good people. And George was just so pissed off with us. I mean, all that anger just came out. Which is a good thing for an album, the “I’ll show you” factor, which I had later in Band On The Run, when two of the members left the night before. So George and Ringo did get off to very good starts. John and I took it a bit hard, but all in all throughout the years we all did pretty well as single acts.

You formed a band for Ram, but it’s not yet Wings.

Not yet, no. Denny Seiwell turns out to be in the band. Hugh McCracken who plays on a lot of it, who was nearly in the band. He came to Scotland to rehearse, but he was such a New York guy that he didn’t really like to be away from America, and I can see that. New York is such a satisfying town, you can walk one block and get anything, whereas you can’t do that in the Mull of Kintryre…

The first official line-up of Wings, which makes Wild Life, includes Denny Laine.

Denny came in from The Moody Blues. I’d seen him when we were out on tour with The Beatles and we’d played with them. My enduring memory is of one night up in somewhere like Edinburgh on tour, we’d had a few drinks and we decided that The Moody Blues would play The Beatles at snooker on this very beautiful, full-sized snooker table. Instead of being sensible and playing one at a time against each other, in a kind of league, they all got at one end of the table and we all got at the other, and I’m afraid the table got trashed. Oh shit.
So I knew Denny, I knew we could get on personally and I liked his voice, particularly from Go Now, which I championed. I remember taking that around the BBC in its early days and saying “Have you heard Go Now by The Moody Blues? It’s my favourite record of the moment.” And those producers would take notice of us. I was also used to having another lead voice in the group with me, so Denny became that.

And this time there’s a friendlier song for John.

Dear Friend was to do with John, a bit of longing about John. Let’s have a glass of wine and forget about it. A making up song.

Finally you do what The Beatles wouldn’t agree to do, and get back on the road.

I got to do my little dream. It seemed to me that for a band it’s essential. We’d given it up in ’67 with Sgt. Pepper when our new decree was, “The record will go on tour and we won’t. We’ll make a great record and send that out instead.” But what happened after that was, we made some good records, but missed the stimulus of going out on tour. We missed seeing the whites of their eyes and getting a reality check: “They liked that one, they didn’t like that one.” And we hadn’t done it for so long that my choice was, Either give up music, or continue to make it; I wanted The Beatles to go out as a live band, therefore I ought to go out as a live band.
So we got a band and hatched the plan of going out on the university tour. Didn’t want a big supergroup, a Blind Faith-style thing. I wanted to try and learn the whole thing again, and hopefully learn some new things, rather than just repeat The Beatles thing again, which had all been done, and been about as successful as anyone in the world was ever gonna get with anything. So we went up the motorway in a van.

But you took the informality to extremes, didn’t you? Not even booking hotels.

No gigs or hotels or anything. Looking back, I can’t believe we did that. We had the van, the dogs, the kids, and it was just madness. It was like I’d never been in The Beatles, I couldn’t rely on any of that fame as a crutch. We went up to these universities, and fate had it that a lot of them were having exams. We didn’t ring them up and ask if they’d be ready for us. And the other thing was we walked into power cuts: it was the time of the Great British Three Day Week. My image now is of trying to find our way around the dark North with a torch. Is anyone in? Like trying to find a gig in a mine. But we found a couple. Nottingham was one. Lancaster we played. Newcastle City Hall. Durham. When we did find places it was really cool. The students had a good time.

And you had the unfamiliar experience of handling money again.

Yeah, it had all been cheques and accounts and stuff, bank statements. And suddenly it was 50p on the door. So we came away with these bags of coins, which reminded me of Peter Sellers in Tom Thumb: One for you, two for me… We just counted them out in the van afterwards. Good experience, going through all those hardships, and it got us together as a band.

But that line up wasn’t to last, and nor did any Wings line-up. What was that down to?

I’ve never actually thought about it. I know it happened but I’ve always blanked it. Probably, in my mind, a band is a democratic unit. Everyone has an equal vote, and in The Beatles for 10 years that had been the case. So if Ringo didn’t like one of our songs, which wasn’t often, Ringo could veto a Lennon and McCartney song. That meant everyone felt good about themselves. But in Wings that wasn’t the case. I was the ex-Beatle. So I saw myself as the leader of the group, which I’d never been in The Beatles.
There wasn’t a leader in The Beatles. People had said that John was, and later people had said that I was, but neither of us ever acknowledged it. It wasn’t the deal. People would ask, “Who’s the leader of the group?” We’d say there wasn’t one. I think once or twice in Hamburg, in the early days, John said, “I am.” But we got pissed off, so it became a democracy. But Wings wasn’t. It wasn’t a dictatorship, but we weren’t all equal.

By the ’70s there were suddenly lots of other big acts: Led Zeppelin, T.Rex, Bowie, Pink Floyd, even The Osmonds in their way, or Abba. Was it difficult, as a Beatle, to adjust to the new landscape?

I knew it was going to be difficult. There was this thing of Follow The Beatles. You found yourself just one of the acts in the Hit Parade, rather than the undisputed leaders. But it was something I knew was going to happen. It wasn’t like it surprised me. I knew by starting the group from scratch that we had to work our way up. So anyone like Zeppelin or Bowie who’d been building during the ’60s and had now arrived, naturally took precedence. You just had to understand that there are people bigger than you. And it was good because it gave us a benchmark. We thought, “We’ll be as big as you one day.”
It was very weird for me, starting all over again. But it wasn’t the world’s worst thing. It was quite sobering, really. It’s good to be knocked off your perch. There was a lot of that with Wings. Not only was I doing things for myself with the band, I was personally doing things for myself, living up in Scotland, mowing the field with my tractor. In The Beatles, the office used to buy your Christmas tree for you. Now I was buying my own Christmas tree, and I enjoyed that.
Like I don’t have a problem with going on the tube and stuff. It’s unhealthy to think you’re the big cheese all the time. Within The Beatles, we each reminded each other that we weren’t. But I think there is a big risk with stardom. You know, I’d ring up a restaurant and say, Have you got a table? “Sorry sir, we’re fully booked.” It’s Paul McCartney here. “Oh! Certainly! Mr McCartney, please!” You get used to that, and I’ve never been comfortable with it. Oh yeah? You’ll let me in now, will yer? Bastard. I don’t like that.

It seemed like you were uncomfortable with The Beatles’ legacy for most of your time with Wings.

The big thing about Wings was that we bought into the myth that it could never be as good as The Beatles. I knew it was the world’s most difficult thing to bite off. Everything we did was in the shadow of The Beatles, which had recently been this phenomenal band. So we did everything with quite a lot of paranoia. And it’s only on looking back, now, that I think we did a lot of great work. You look at ’76, we have this big, big tour, and at first everyone wants to know [in US announcer’s voice], “Is this gonna be a Beatles reunion? It’s rumoured that McCartney blah-blah-blah, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are apparently going to join him on stage, and John Lennon blah-blah-blah.” So it was rumoured The Beatles were going to reform. So it bugged us that, you know, even in our most successful year they were taking our success off us. It was, “Well maybe The Beatles will re-form, that would be good.”
But the great thing was that three weeks into the tour it was suddenly, “Who cares?” You can see it on the footage. It doesn’t matter. This is a great band. And it was. And at the end of it we go and set some big world record, So that’s good to see. We did this thing that we set out to do. And we needn’t have worried.

A QUICK Q&A

Why a Wings compilation now?

Now is maybe a good time for all the people whose teenage years it was a soundtrack to. People who are trying now what we tried in Wings – to cope with a career and raise a family.

You’ve got some non-Wings solo tracks in there, too.

I gave myself a loose brief. You don’t have to be too heavy breathing on this. The main thing I wanted was a CD I like. It doesn’t stick to any strict rules, it’s not chronological, but it’s the best of that period as far as I’m concerned. There’s also been talk of doing a boxed set with a DVD in it, and then you’ll have room for everything. Scraping The Bottom Of The Barrel, Part II. That was going to be a Beatles title, after the Anthology. Still might be.

Wasn’t Wings always seen as being in The Beatles’ shadow?

Most of all by me and Linda. It haunted us. People would say, Why don’t you do Beatles songs? We’d go: We don’t do Beatles stuff! We’re Wings! But it’s gonna surprise a lot of people when the whole Wings story is laid out as a body of work. It looks more impressive than even I remember it. One nice story about Coming Up was that apparently John heard it when he was in New York. His recording manager was saying, I brought this record of Paul’s to John and played it for him. John went, ‘Oh fuckin’ hell, the bastard’s done something good! I’ve gotta work!’ I love that. I like the idea of forcing him up off his arse.

WINGS ALBUMS

Wild Life
December 1971
Still on that romantic quest for free-spirited spontaneity, McCartney opens Wings’ account with a sketchy collection of underworked ideas, including one song, Bip Bop, that he came to consider “the weakest song I have ever written in my life… I’d heard about Dylan making albums in a week, and I wanted to see if I could do that too.” The two Dennies (Seiwell and Laine) complete the first line-up of a band with something of a revolving door personnel policy. Laine alone will accompany Paul and Linda to the bitter end of Wings’ story.

Red Rose Speedway
May 1973
With the addition of guitarist Henry McCullough (ex Joe Cocker sideman) the band delivers a second LP of sturdier texture and more considered production values. It coincides, unhappily, with a dip in Paul’s songwriting form: tracks such as Single Pigeon and Little Lamb Dragonfly are as unrewarding as their titles promise. But the torch Paul carries for Linda burns brightly enough to inspire one romantic masterpiece in My Love.

Band On The Run
November 1973
The unexpected exits of McCullough and Seiwell meant Wings flew off to Lagos as a trio. Recording was famously fraught, with tensions raised by Paul’s mugging. The resulting album is nevertheless acclaimed as Wings’ finest – attention was guaranteed by the all-star “jailbreak” sleeve – and the title track is unquestionably fine. Helen Wheels and Jet are other stand-outs, but the overall quality is variable. “When we got back,” Paul remembers, “people said ‘Ah, out of adversity has been born a fine album.’ I hate that theory. I hate the idea that you have to sweat and suffer to produce something good. It may be true as well.”

Venus And Mars
May 1975
Spinal Tap-style brevity of drum-stool occupancy sees new sticksman Geoff Britton replaced by Joe English; meanwhile the gap left by Henry McCullough is filled by new guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, ex of Thunderclap Newman. Best of a middling set of songs are Letting Go and Love In Song, and the hit single Listen To What The Man Said. A namecheck for Jimmy Page in Rock Show is the ex-Beatle’s acknowledgement of the new stadium rocking hierarchy he has to compete against. And that version of the Crossroads theme? “I do some weird things. At the time, it seems a laugh. We were out of the country at the time, you see, and these things seem more appealing when you’re out of the country.”

Wings At The Speed Of Sound
March 1976
Often mocked as a misguided exercise in group democracy (lead vocals and songwriting opportunities were passed around the line-up), the fifth Wings set is stronger than posterity allows, and McCartney still defends it doggedly. Opener Let ’Em In is tunefully trance-like, Silly Love Songs is winningly defiant, and there are some neglected gems in Warm And Beautiful, She’s My Baby and Must Do Something About It.

Wings Over America
December 1976
Although the fiery young McCulloch brought more turbulence to Wings than its leader would have liked, he helped make this the band’s definitive line-up, and Over America is a double-CD document of the group at its commercial peak, touring all the hits (with a clutch of Beatle songs reluctantly thrown in) around those US enormo-domes that Paul’s previous band had only begun to tackle. “I think we were a pretty good band by that time,” he says. “It’s a bastard, because I meet people now who say, I was a real Wings fan. You never thought anyone could say that. That tour of ’76, some of the kids who were there hadn’t particularly been into The Beatles.”

London Town
March 1978
By the time of the sleeve’s artwork Wings were back to the nucleus of McCartney, McCartney and Laine, for an album with the usual quotient of melody, whimsy and grit. But in an age of punk, disco and heavy metal, Wings were more of an oddity than ever. The kudos of being an ex-Beatle was now at its lowest ebb (but, where John responded to public indifference with indifference of his own, Paul was ever game). Title track has surreal charm; Girlfriend caught the ear of Michael Jackson; With A Little Luck captures that quintessential Macca hopefulness. “We recorded it in the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands. You take yourself out of your normal environment and get a fresh perspective on it all. The only strange thing is that we never put Mull Of Kintyre on it. Afterwards you think, Am I kidding?”

Back To The Egg
June 1979
Drummer Steve Holly and guitarist Lawrence Juber joined to make a record whose reputation is hobbled by its terrible title and the absence of hit singles. Soon, Lennon’s murder and Paul’s Japanese jailing would spell the end of Wings, but the failure of this LP probably helped. McCartney himself has called it his worst album, but now considers it his most overlooked. “These days you talk to some young people and it’s really cool if you don’t make the charts. It’s very alien to my way of thinking, but there is a lot of that about now. So in a way it’s quite cool to have a few albums that didn’t make it. I didn’t mean it to be underground, but it’s nice.”

Pavarotti: The Day I Met Il Maestro

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I met Pavarotti, the great Italian opera singer, in Turin in early 1996. My interview appeared in Q Magazine's May issue of that year.

If this guy’s anything to go by, Italian football managers look just like their English counterparts. Except they’re 15,000 times better dressed. The evidence is striding down a Turin hotel corridor, to a suite that’s acting as the day’s HQ for the world’s favourite operatic tenor. Our dapper and silver-haired specimen, who is frowning and silent, is the coach of famous local side Juventus. He has sought a brief audience with the singer – a singer invariably referred to as “Il Maestro” – because the team has not been playing well of late. Il Maestro, it is said, has studied their poor results. And Il Maestro is “unhappy”.

The manager disappears behind some ornate double doors. The rest of us – a great many of us – wait in the corridor. Twenty minutes pass. No sound can be heard from inside. But then – at last! – the doors re-open. The “Juve” supremo re-emerges and he is beaming. An expensive-looking overcoat is draped about his shoulders. He heads towards the exit with a fresh spring in his step, dispensing a gracious nod and a happy "Buona sera!" in our direction.

We do not know the content of his conversation with Il Maestro. But if we examine the matches in Serie 'A' across the weeks that follow, one fact is impressively apparent: those Juventus boys have finally got their shit together ...

It's all in a day's work for Il Maestro Luciano Pavarotti - and today is a busier day than most. In town to perform a centenary season of Puccini’s La Bohème, the Pav has set aside some hours for promotional duties. Q’s own encounter with the big man is already running late. First he had a lunch date with his great chum from the crazy world of rock'n'roll, Bryan Adams. Then there was German TV. And French radio. And something else, then another thing. Oh, and then he had to take a phone call from Nelson Mandela. And then - yes, yes, Nelson, mate, but there's another caller on the line - a chat with Elton John. This evening Luciano will have dinner with his Italian fan club, a delegation of fearsome matrons in fur coats. Phew! Classical music!

In the Turin streets outside, Italian opera's greatest arias are piped all day, every day, from concealed speakers. Our hotel venue is awash with Continental film crews, record company personnel and Pavarotti's personal assistants. The latter category, it's often observed, tend to be of the young, female and gobsmackingly beautiful persuasion (but then, he's Il Maestro and we're not). Whatever, pressurised media people and the entourage of an Italian operatic superstar are not the ideal recipe for calm. In all, there is maximum flappage.

And yet the Pav himself looks merely tired. Emerging from the room, searching for the Gents, he wears an outsized pink shirt, pale baggy jeans and worn-in trainers. Blackly-bearded and vast, he's often likened to a pirate, but this afternoon he is gently led around like some big, sad bear. A keen footballer and horseman in his day, he is now a martyr to his knees, one of which is arthritic. He walks with painful, if stately, slowness. His speech is lively in Italian, but as a courtesy to foreigners he deploys a more faltering English. At one point he announces to the room that he will retire in 2001- and one suspects he will be a happier man in 2002.

He moans dejectedly about the day's schedule. Just before the Q slot, he declares that he can talk no more. A pair of female attendants cajole him into one more interview. "You two," he sighs, feebly. "You two should be killed."

But as Godfathers go, he is vulnerable rather than threatening. The whole point of everything, in Pavarotti's world, is the Voice. It must be pampered and protected. He cannot step into the frigid Alpine air outside. Don't even think about greeting him with a cheery reference to the rotten cold you're coming down with. Every so often he swathes his neck in some gargantuan psychedelic scarf. "Please!" he implores. "No more talk!" And he plucks despairingly at his throat.

Pavarotti's body is just the packaging for the Voice - for the mysterious, sacred thing inside him. The operatic tenor, he explains, is not a natural voice, but an artificial thing. It is a physical construct that demands a lifetime's dedication and daily “re-making". On the stage he is supremely televisual - the camera's close-up shows alarm and amazement in his eyes when this supernatural sound comes out of him. In the beginning and the end, then, Pavarotti is a Voice. The fat man sings, and miracles occur. Something is liberated. The bird flies up the chimney.

*************

Luciano Pavarotti is 60 now, born in the same year as Elvis Presley. (The King sang Now Or Never, Il Maestro had O Sole Mio.) A baker's son from Modena, he was briefly a teacher and an insurance salesman. In 1964 he appeared on Saturday Night At The London Palladium, and was swiftly signed by Decca UK - the people who had just turned down The Beatles and discovered The Rolling Stones. They've held on tightly to him ever since. He's sold more classical albums than anyone dreamt was possible.

He has received love and acclaim in abundance. Some say that his rival Placido Domingo is the better singer, but the Pav has become the best-known tenor in history, surpassing his boyhood idols Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza. His mass popularity invites charges that he's "vulgarised" his art. Others reply that extravaganzas like his rain-sodden show in Hyde Park, and the Three Tenors concerts, are the ultimate reconciliation of high art and popular culture: snob and yob united.

He is called “the King of the High Cs". But are his powers declining? At La Scala in Milan, not long ago, his singing was heckled by the hard-core “loggionisti”, who are a sort of operatic Shed End. More rupturously, soon after our meeting, scandalous rumours about an affair with his 26-year-old personal assistant Nicoletta Mantovani are confirmed by the Pav himself: "We are very happy and it shows. To hide it and deny it would be a crime.” Nicoletta, for what it’s worth, explains that “before knowing him, I was just a girl. Thanks to him, I have become a woman."

His task today is to publicise a new album, Pavarotti & Friends For The Children Of Bosnia – the live record of last year’s festival in Modena, where he was born. An annual cross-cultural wing-ding, its guests have included Sting, Bob Geldof and other stars from the rock firmament. It's in support of War Child, the charity that inspired the multi-artist Help project. Glance at a map and you see that Italy is extremely close to the former Yugoslavia. But Pavarotti had another reason to become one of War Child’s patrons.

“We make a lot of benefits, but not of this intensity or importance,” he says. "It is a very ambitious thing that we want do. We would like to participate substantially in the foundation of a music centre in Mostar [a war-ravaged city in Bosnia]. I think, when the war is finished, everybody would like to sing. Everybody would like to stay together to tell themselves they are alive. They want to go home and spend the rest of their life singing, and not being scared of bombs.”

You think that music can have such value?

“Music has an incredible value. Because I remember, myself, the Second World War. I was ten when the war finished, and the first thing everybody wanted was to have light – because during the war we cannot have light in the night. And secondly, to gather round the fire in the open air and to sing and play. Stupid things, but together. And singing and singing and singing. I think that music, art, is the bread of the soul. So we would like to participate to give nutrition to the soul."

He's called upon more pop stars than ever before. The CD features him in duets with Dolores of The Cranberries (Ave Maria, no less), Meat Loaf and Simon Le Bon. There are local acts such as Zucchero. Michael Bolton is a surprise hit, joining Pavarotti in the operatic standard Vesti La Giubba. And, above all, there is the stage version of Miss Sarajevo, performed with Bono,The Edge and Brian Eno. As on the Passengers single, Pavarotti's entrance is uplifting; the U2 singer is wise enough to keep his own vocal separate and restrained.

Being for War Child, these collaborations have a purpose that will put them above reproach. But at other times, Pavarotti's dalliances with pop music have taken some stick. Classical buffs are apt to be sniffy - even if, as John Peel quipped recently, "Saying Schubert is better than Blur is like saying Tuesday is better than a piece of string." Pavarotti himself has no intellectual pretensions and is unapologetic: “Since I am a kid I always sung: pop songs, that has always interested me… I go 1,000 kilometres in my car. For 800 kilometres I listen on the radio to pop music, for 200 classical music. Because I think is lighter, more dancing, the body moves more. Is less cerebral, more immediate. And I was always like that as a person.

"Bono, he write on purpose Miss Sarajevo. I enjoy. Believe me, is a great enjoyment. They are great people generally, very nice. And they make music today. The music I am singing in the world of opera is written 100 years ago. We are celebrating Bohème now, 100 years old. So Bono has done a song. Of course, I don't want to make comparison between Bohème and Bono song, but is still very good music, very important music and is done now, in the occasion of your life. Is a piece of your life. Is not music that you put in your life, but your life that goes inside the music. Is very gratifying."

You've said you were fascinated by rock people. Do you mix with them easily?

"Very easy. Very fascinated. Very easy. This year we probably make another concert with Elton John. I would like to do that for a very long time while I am singing. It is good, because it make known classic music to the pop kids, and make known pop music to the classic people. A very good combination. Last year we divide the audience exactly in two, the kids were here standing, the other side Lady Diana was sitting in the very first row. It was an incredible experience. Beautiful.”

Among his sunniest memories is the day that he spent on Bruce Springsteen's farm in New Jersey. He actually got to meet the Boss's pet ostritch, and how few of us can claim that privilege. Is Springsteen a friend?

Pavarotti protests modestly: "Friend… It would be an {ITAL]honour[ITAL] to be friend of these people. I know them, I know them very well. I think we are close to be friends. We have to stay together more to use the word friend, really, and that is what I am planning to do; Bruce is a great person, the family is a great family, they are beautiful kids, they give value to the right-thinking world, beside the greatest performances. Then Sting is the same, he is fantastic fellow, beautiful fellow. Bryan Adams has just left my room now, we have lunch together, very sweet person. Bono, I think we will become very close with Bono. It take me time to convince him to come [to the festival] but when he was ready he enjoy. And when he sang the song by himself, all the kids were singing with him. I think he was very touched, he almost cried."

It's said you are nervous of singing with these people.

"1 am nervous ITALanyhowITAL, even in the opera! It was a very different approach to the music, so it's not so easy:"

Surely they must be far more nervous, having to sing with you.

"They say so, but they are very good. I don't see them scared. None of them."

Do you think more people will tum to opera?

"I have no doubt. You should ask Bryan Adams. He was at Bohème last night and he was astonished, really. Because for the first time he realise what is opera. Many people of the pop field didn't understand what opera is because they don’t know. So they go there and they enjoy. It is a big inspiration, Puccini, for a writer of music like he is ... My dream is that one rock person will go with a classic person and together they make an opera. Then it can be that something new is coming out. It must be something new."

Where should a beginner start?

"They always should go for a good drama. For example, Puccini is a good way to meet – Tosca, Bohème. Comic opera like Elixir Of Love [by Donizetti] is fantastic, Barber Of Seville [Rossini]. And then, little by little, they should go to Verdi, who is more important than all the other composers ... For me, I like Mozart and Beethoven in the classic, I like Verdi in the operatic. If I have to choose one composer I will be a traitor of Italy because I will choose Mozart, because he has done classic and opera. In r=the way he has written, I think, he is the greatest genius of al.”

People still suppose that opera is difficult.

“Luckily for me, yes! Ha ha!”

**************

There is another Three Tenors event on its way, to be staged at Wembley, This shrewd alliance has shot its members into new dimensions of success (“We reach one billion and a half. Incredible!”) In public, Pavaroti and his Spanish colleagues, José Carrereas and Placido Domingo, observe a scrupulous truce. Italian singers, he mentions at one point, will always shine because so much great opera was written in their language. There was an English soprano, for example, who could not perform in Italy because of her “abominable” pronunciation. Then he remembers to make an exception for Spanish tenors: “The Spanish speak Italian perfectly.” Tact or subtle point-scoring? It’s hard to tell.

Their rivalry is polite, but real. Domingo in particular is said to envy Pavarotti’s mass appeal. Whatever the men’s technical merits, Pavarotti’s sheer size and public geniality have made him more media-cuddly than his two part-time compadres. His common touch was sanctified when he sang Nessun Dorma for the 1990 World Cup. He gave the game its international anthem. “It finish with the word ITA:VinceroITAL, I will win. So it means you will win in life, that is the reason it is so very popular and it is a beautiful song.

But purists object to this practice of plucking such songs, or arias, out of operatic context. Nessun Dorma is a key passage in Puccini’s Turandot - a work of some two hours in total. Heard in isolation, it lacks the tension built both by the plot and preceding music. The Three Tenors, and the whole idea of “concerts” as opposed to complete performances, are therefore held in some disdain.

“I think it is ITALout of spaceITAL, what they say,” the Big Guy thunders in response. “Full opera, you come in the opera house here to see Bohème, beautiful cast, beautiful conductor, beautiful everything. The Three Tenors, they meet to popularise, people want to hear them in song. There is many people come to the world of opera when I make the big arenas and Hyde Park. I really try to give an enlargement to the world of opera in that way. That is a great result for me.”

Unlike many celebrities, Pavarotti is famous because he is good at something. Perhaps he really is the best singer in the world. But the great tenors are a dying race.

“I like modern composers, but they do not write for the voice,” he says, bleakly. “They cannot. Find one modern composer who is writing for the voice of our kind. Absolutely not.” And these are the last years of his career. Operas get more difficult, since the leading tenor roles are for dashing, romantic types. In Bohème, he plays a young and starving artist… His ass may not be history, but it is certainly geography. His size, which helped to build his image, is becoming a theatrical obstacle.

Later, as Q’s photographer Michael Birt -– coaxing a reluctant subject -– compliments him on his face, Il Maestro makes a curious, forlorn remark. “My face. Is the only acceptable part of my body.”

Madonna as Evita

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

A review of Madonna's soundtrack to the Evita movie, from Q Magazine, December 1996.

In Britain in 1976, it was the Sex Pistols who were vilified, detested and banned. But in Argentina it was Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. The repressive military junta wasn’t perfect, but they knew a crap album when they heard one. Evita was turned back at the frontiers, and the play has not been staged in Buenos Aires to this day. In South America there is a whole nation that never had to grapple with the concept of David Essex playing Che Guevara.

The Argentinians are still touchy on the subject of Eva peron, a national icon since her early death in 1952. When Alan Parker went to film his movie version of the musical there, outrage ensued. When he announced the actress who would play their saintly Evita, the country almost exploded. “Evita lives! Madonna get out!" read the graffiti. “Madonna,” declared the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, "is pornographic and unsuitable."

Yet he was only half right - because, when it comes playing the upstart blonde who came from nowhere to seize absolute power, Madonna is the most suitable woman on the planet.

********

From now until the New Year, when the movie finally opens, Evita/Madonna parallels will be made. The first person to grasp the similarities was, of course, Madonna herself. From the moment the job was advertised, she lobbied passionately on her own behaIf. "I see this role as being my destiny," she said. "1 don't think anyone could have prayed as hard as I did for the film to go ahead. I put on amulets, I lit candles - even consulted fortune-tellers.” Who, then, was this Evita and why is Miss Ciccone obsessed by her?

Maria Eva Duarte was an ambitious provincial girl who schemed her way up through Argentinian show business and married another rising star, the soldier-politician Juan Peron. By 1946 she was First Lady, while Peron emerged as a strongman
who would dominate his country for the next 30 years. "Evita" became the darling of "the shirtless ones”, attacking wealth and privilege (except her own), building hospitals and securing votes for women. Glamorous, loved and feared, she was vital to her husband's popularity, but died of cancer when she was just 33.

Eva was barely known outside of South America until 1976, the year after Juan Peron's death, when Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice conceived the Evita musical, spawning a huge hit in Julie Covington's Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Then David "Che" Essex got to Number 3 with Oh What A Circus, wearing stubble and jungle fatigues. Barbara Dickson, who did not, merely scraped the Top 20 with Another Suitcase In Another Hall. The stage musical opened in 1978, to enormous MOR acclaim, but the movie project has only now come to fruition.

Meanwhile, Madonna was making her own inexorable ascent. Her film career, though, was a patchy thing, never quite capping her 1985 debut Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she basically played herself. The 1990 Dick Tracy film inspired her 1930s-style I'm Breathless album, which she perversely considers her favourite work to date. (Who remembers Hanky Panky? Do you try no to?) Landing this Evita role may be her last stab at the Hollywood credibility she craves.

****

Madonna says that movie success is doubly hard because her off-screen fame gets in the way. The great virtue of playing Evita is that any overspill from her own persona can only reinforce the realism of her performance. Pop stars are hired by directors for box-office clout, not thespian talent, but Madonna first came to New York with her options open: singer, model, dancer, actress - she was up for anything. So was Eva, and she ended up running the country. And Evita is, after all, a musical. If there was ever an ideal vehicle for Madonna's dream of transcendent stardom, this must be it

As it turns out, she brings a good deal to Lloyd Webber's party. The soundtrack carries some of her most commanding vocal efforts so far. Cleverly, her singing develops with the plot When she's a callow showgirl, hustling her way from the pampas to Buenos Aires (which they call "Big Apple"), you hear the old Ciccone squeak. But there is maturity and richness in her rendition of the dying Evita's swan song, the pathos-ridden Final Broadcast

The problem is, unless you're partial to the inherent corniness of musicals, this is Lloyd Webber we're talking about. Apart from exceptions like Lionel Bart's Oliver!, Lloyd Webber's spectaculars are the nearest a Brit has come to rivalling Rodgers & Hammerstein. But our knighted composer has the Midas touch in both senses - if anything he handles turns to gold, it also becomes cold and lifeless. Maybe Alan Parker's movie will breathe some humanity into its story. While Lloyd Webber's theatre productions are full of stuff to startle, there's precious little to love.

As for Evita, it definitely helps if you like Don't Cry For Me For Argentina. The song reappears in various disguises on at least half the soundtrack, Admittedly, it's the closest Lloyd Webber has ever come to an enduring pop music standard. Sunset Boulevard may play to packed houses every night, but who among us can hum a single tune from it? Elsewhere, there is nothing as memorable as Eva's famous theme. Of the "real" actors, Jonathan Pryce sings his Juan Peron parts with due care and attention, but Jimmy Nail sounds downright peculiar as a tango-dancing gigolo. Then there is hunky Antonio Banderas, the same handsome Spaniard that Madonna had a crush on in her documentary film. Here he plays guerilla hero Che Guevara, the story's sardonic narrator (still an irritating, un-historical gimmick of an idea). He copes, but the results are inescapably theatrical.

Naturally there is a lot of Hispanic flavouring, which Madonna need not fear, having toyed with it for years. What's terrifying is the way the soundtrack often betrays its '70s origins with sporadic eruptions of inauthentic heavy metal, or even prog rock. They hardly evoke the atmosphere of '40s Argentina. And Rice's lyrics are apt to clunk instead of click: "That's a pretty bad state for a state to be in!" howls Banderas at one point, like Joe Cocker pronouncing on the decline of Rome.

Love, death and the fate of nations - these are the big ideas that underpin Evita, and they're certain to be trivialised when you try to make a musical out of them. For all we know the movie may restore some sense of drama, but the unadorned soundtrack is kitsch when it wants to be epic, and banal when it wants to be charming. Yet Madonna comes through it unscathed. She gets a hit single specially written into the script for her (the mawkish You Must Love Me) as well as the best tunes in the show - just to sing Don't Cry For Me Argentina will guarantee her the pivotal emotional moments. Even so, her own pop songs are better than most of this, and ten times more adventurous.

But pop music is not quite show business, and show business is where she wants to be. What can MTV offer that she hasn't already had? There is probably nothing as delicious to Madonna as swooning before a movie camera, while crying "So share my glory! So share my coffin!"

The real Evita would have understood. It takes one to know one, and Eva Peron had the patent on blonde ambition before Madonna was even born. Flawed heroines, self-invented drama queens, Catholic pin-ups with a reputation for vulgarity, ruthlessness and sexual guile… they do have to stick together, don't they?

Read my 1994 Madonna interview

David Bowie: the 1990 Interview

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

An interview with Bowie for the April 1990 issue of Q Magazine. Areas covered include the Sound + Vision tour he was planning, Tin Machine, the nature of fame and the origins of Ziggy Stardust.

A New York winter's day, in the 43rd year of David Jones's dependably unpredictable life, finds him – beardless once again, in summer--cool white casual clothes, the ever-present gold crucifix around his neck and a comforting soft--pack of Marlboros to hand – sequestered inside a downtown studio. "What's happening in Britain, then?" he queries – his classless Englishman -abroad voice slipping into south London civvies whenever he wants to strike a matier or self--mocking note .

"Is Heseltine going to take over?" Political shenanigans, of whatever nationality, appear to occupy a considerable proportion of his off-duty thoughts, to judge from his small talk. "Is Thatch-er still dragging us kicking and screaming into the 19th century?

"Ooh, that woman," he adds in another accent from his repertoire – the cod Yorkshire over -the-back-fence job that he reserves for comic pronouncements. "Well I'll go to the bottom of our stairs!"
Indeed, but a few questions first, Mr Bowie, if you please ...

You're busier now than you've been in years: an album and tour last year, another tour now, a second Tin Machine tour and album to follow that. Why so much sudden activity?

I'm not sure. I think I might have been pushed into it from Reeves Gabrels [Tin Machine guitarist]. He really was eager for us to solidify the band and I think I got caught up in his enthusiasm. It was very exciting to work with those guys.

The normal thing would have been for you to disappear for a year or two.

I felt that was wasting time. It's become the thing now to not tour for seven years or so if you've achieved a certain level of recognition. I don't know whether your work's supposed to have become that much more important, which I don't really believe. But it seems to be that you start relaxing. And I guess the fascination of touring wears off after a few years. I would tour regularly up until 1978, every year without fail. All of us did – you did at least six months, and usually eight, a year. That's what your job was. And I think working with the band gave me the feeling that it is what I'm good at doing, and there's really no excuse for not working, that half the excitement of recording was getting the stuff done real quick and not dwelling on it and making a big production of it. Last year that's why the album came out so fast, the band went out on the road so fast, and we went back in the studio so fast.

Your new tour will be a sort of Greatest Hits show, is that right?

It's definitely the most popular songs.

Can you anticipate what people would choose as their favourite songs of yours?

Yeah, about a good 60 per cent. If we're restricting ourselves to a manageable sized show, between 25 and 30 songs, then I'm going to know 18 to 20 of them. But after that it gets a bit grey. Ryko started putting my stuff out in America last year, and did such a great job on it. They said, is there any chance that I would help them work that catalogue and tour it?

Were you much involved in putting together these re-releases yourself?

Yes, very much so. I would look for old obscure tracks and demos and so on and they had their fingers on stuff I'd forgotten about, so between us we compiled a lot of original things that hadn't seen the light of day - and probably never should have! - but are coming out. But what knocked me out about them [Ryko] is the care they take with the product. So there really was no question of who I wanted to go with to release all the old stuff. And they said, as the spearhead of their campaign they wanted to put out a hits album.

I feel odd saying hits because I've had so few. [Laughs] I've had a few singles that have been quite popular but I haven't had that many hits. I've had a couple of Number 1’s, but I'm better known for albums. Although there are things like Changes, which are very anthemic in concert, it was never a single, but it's a really well known song. So there's a few things like that. I guess it's best-known songs rather than . . . The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or Springsteen have hits, I sort of have well known songs. So I’ll align myself with Dylan on that one: he’s the same, he doesn’t sell records either, but he’s really well known. Ha ha!

But it’s odd that there a number of artists, with myself at the forefront, who are well known and their material is well known but their album sales would belie that fact. When you think of people like Foreigner: I wouldn’t know one of them if I bumped into him, but they have these extraordinary… Or Milli Vanilli, six million albums sold. I think that covers my entire catalogue! So it’s a really odd position to be in.

So, popular songs, then. It’s been thrown at me for some years, since the Serious Moonlight tour [in 1983] which was about 50 per cent not so well known stuff, and after that – both from audiences and from producers of rock shows, who’ve said, Why don’t you just go all the way and do all the songs that they know? You’ve never done it and it’d be great. I’d go, Oh, I don’t want to; it’s corny, no. Then I gave in last year when Ryko said it would be great if you would help support this thing, and I said, Let me think about it. So I went away and thought, Well, I’ve never done it before, I’m sure by the end I’ll never want to do it again, so what about if I do these songs for the last time – just do them on this tour and never do them again? that would give me a motivation for the entire tour, knowing each night that I do them, I get tat much closer to never singing “ground control to Major Tom” again. That gives me some reason for doing it, selfishly. And it would be fun to do that, just once, just do the songs that people know. So I am.

Do you have any idea what you might do after Tin Machine?

We decided when we formed that we’d play it from album to album, that if we were still getting on with each other – which was the priority – that we’d continue. and so far it’s going great. So if after the next tour we’re still enjoying the process, we’ll go in again and keep recording. It’s a good search: we’re finding a lot out about ourselves and it’s given me a feeling for what I want to do again as a solo artist, no doubt about it. So I definitely think I’ll be fitting in some solo work next year.

What’s it been like for you, surveying your own past for this re-issue project? Is that something you would do normally?

No. I used to listen to it a lot more, but I haven’t felt a need to for some reason. Maybe it’s been a mistake; maybe I should do. The thing I’ve found interesting is the amount of enthusiasm and fire in the early stuff – there was a real desperate edge to it. This guy really wanted to be heard. I’m not sure if it’s endearing or embarrassing, but you definitely get the impression that this person didn’t want to be left behind.

I find the Ziggy Stardust record very thin. I don’t like the sound on that, it’s much thinner than I always thought it was. It sounded really powerful then; maybe systems have got better, it sounds kind of weedy. I thought Diamond Dogs sounds really good, I like that one, and I’ll always love the Eno/Fripp/Belew stuff [Low, “Heroes”, Lodger]. It’s the very early stuff, there’s a naivety there that’s not disenchanting, but I’m not very comfortable with it.

But there you go, it’s what’s there.

Do you regret that the re-issue programme right back to the Love You Till Tuesday era (ie late '60s Decca tracks, including The Laughing Gnome)?

Oh, thank God it doesn't! I'm glad they couldn't get their hands on it! You kidding me? Aarrghh, that Anthony Newley stuff, how cringey. No, I haven’t much to say about that in its favour. Lyrically I guess it was striving to be something, the short story teller. Musically it's quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall and I don't know what. I didn't know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley.

And as for that cover, that military jacket [on the front of his debut LP, David Bowie, in 1967], I was very proud of that, the first handmade military jacket that I knew of. It was actually tailored.

You've chosen Fame as a single to launch the campaign. What made you return to that song?

My guess was that it's the most popular one. My presumption is that it's either Let's Dance or Fame, since they were the two that were Number 1 over here in America. So it was one or the other and Let's Dance was too recent. And it covers a lot of ground, Fame; it stands up really well in time. It still sounds potent. It's quite a nasty, angry little song. I quite like that.

What sort of resonance would its lyrics have for you today, now you've lived with a state of celebrity for that much longer than you had when you wrote the song?

There was a degree of malice. I'd had very upsetting management problems and a lot of that was built into the song. I've left all that behind me, now ... I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants. Other than that, there's very little about it that anybody would covet. It's really not much of a deal. I still have my favourite times when I'm not recognised, or at least left to my own devices.

And there are some cities ... in London it's peculiar - it's impossible on the streets during the day, it really is. Forget it. It's easy going over to dinner at friends' houses, but anything public in London is just a circus. But here in New York it's not. I understand why so many people want to come and live here. I don't live here, but if I had to move somewhere from where I do live, in Switzerland, I'd come here if I wanted to live in a big city. It's so anonymous, it really is; nobody gives a damn.

It does rather restrict how you’re going to live. It’s nice just to go shopping with the crowds, and that’s virtually impossible in most cities now, which is a shame because there's nothing better than just walking amongst people. And as a writer you're supposed to be the one on the edge looking at everybody and being able to note what's happening, and when it's the other way round, it's not great for a writer to find himself the centre of attention when he should be on the periphery – I whinge ...

There's fabulous aspects to it, the financial rewards of popularity, being able to travel, which is my particular penchant. I'm in heaven: I go anywhere I want, anytime I want. That's a remarkable thing to do, remarkable. But I'm not a "thing" person. I'd rather spend the money on getting somewhere than on getting a thing.

I used to be more of a collector but I stopped collecting because it was too simple to buy stuff. When I was in Berlin I'd find old woodblock prints from the Brücke school, from 1907 to 1921, in small shops, at unbelievable prices, and to buy like that was wonderful. Just when I left Berlin at the beginning of the '80s there was a resurgence of interest in German Expressionist art, and the prices went through the ceiling. That had been with me since art school, I'd always liked that. And now I find I could buy those things at the prices they're asking, but it no longer interests me to buy them.

Maybe I'm just very mean. But I've always liked collecting something that nobody else knows about. When it becomes the fashion, it doesn't lessen my interest in the subject but it does lessen my need to acquire. It was the same with books, and music. I a1ways liked everything until everybody else liked it. It's a very English trait, I've noticed. When somebody else discovers what you like, it's, Mmm, I'll move on to something else.

On its release you put the tide of "Heroes” inside inverted commas, to give a slightly ironic, distancing effect. And yet it's since become an anthem for people, quite straightforwardly joyous and optimistic.

It did adopt that, after multiple live playings. Recording something in a studio, and then putting it to a live audience, it becomes a different animal. And it certainly did, that one particularly; I hadn’t anticipated the way it would become that kind of anthemic thing. Now, of course, to play the thing is going to be rather odd because it’s setting up a series of associations which are no more. [The lyric depicts two lovers meeting beneath the Berlin Wall.] And to play it in Berlin, which I will be doing, will be particularly odd. I’m not quite sure what that song means any more, which is kind of exciting… I can’t contain myself about that one. I’m really looking forward to playing it in Berlin.

Is it true you based the character of Ziggy Stardust on the old rocker Vince Taylor?

Yes, that's right. He looked like a tall, gangly Gene Vincent in his black leather. he thought he was Presley-esque but he was much tougher looking than Presley. he had a very successful career in France – he was the French Presley – and he was very messed up, both psychologically and with drugs. At his last performance with his band in France, he dismissed the band, then went on stage dressed in white robes as Jesus Christ and said, I am the Resurrection, I am Jesus Christ, this whole thing. They nearly lynched him there and then. It was his last performance.

But he did in his own mind become the Messiah. And he came over to London, so we got him. He used to hang out on Tottenham Court Road and I got to know him then. And he had these strange plans showing where there was money buried, that he was going to get together; he was going to create this new Atlantis at one time. And he dragged out this map of the world, just outside Tottenham Court Road tube station – I’ll never forget this! – and he laid it on the pavement and we were both down here [Bowie gets down on his hands and knees, almost weeping with laughter] and he was showing me all this. It was so funny! I’m the kind of person who never says no, and so I’m going, OK! Mmmmm, oh yes… thinking, What am I doing down here? This is so embarrassing!

The guy was unbelievable. He had this six-day party once in some guy’s house, that just went on and on. Just the weirdest kind of creature.

And he always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock’n’roll. I’m not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. Bit of both, probably. There was something very tempting about his going completely off the edge. Especially at my age then, it seemed very appealing: Oh, I’d love to end up like that, totally nuts. Ha ha! And so he re-emerged in this Ziggy Stardust character.

But the last name, Stardust, came from another of my favourites, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, who was on Mercury Records along with me in the Space Oddity days, and he sang things like I took A Trip In The Gemini Spacecraft. His big hit was Paralysed… well, I bought it! He was a kind of Wild Man Fischer character; he was on guitar and he had a one-legged trumpet player and in his biography he said, “Mah only regret is that mah father never lived to see me become a success.” I just liked the Ziggy Stardust bit because it was so silly.

And the Ziggy bit came from a tailor's that I passed on the train one day. It had that Iggy [as in Iggy Pop] connotation but it was a tailor's shop, and I thought, Well, this whole thing is gonna be about clothes, so it was my own little joke calling him Ziggy. So Ziggy Stardust was a real compilation of things.

You summed up the music on Young Americans as "relentless plastic soul", didn't you?

Yes, I shouldn't have been quite so hard on myself, because looking back it was pretty good white, blue-eyed soul. At the time I still had an element of being the artist who just throws things out unemotionally. But it was quite definitely one of the best bands I ever had. Apart from Carlos Alomar there was David Sanborn on saxophone and Luther Vandross on backing vocals. It was a powerhouse of a band.

And I was like most English who come over to America for the first time, totally blown away by the fact that the blacks in America had their own culture, and it was positive and they were proud of it. And it didn't seem like black culture in Britain at that time. And to be right there in the middle of it was just intoxicating, to go into the same studios as all these great artists, Sigma Sound [in Philadelphia]. Good period - as a musician it was a fun period.

I presume, when you were younger, you never expected to be doing this in your forties. In those days, nobody did. Does it feel natural for you now?

[Pause] I think I would feel odd if there was a huge generation gap in the band itself, but all the band that I’m working with are in their thirties, and the music for me still has great resonance. Only infrequently have I written things for a particular generation, things like Rebel Rebel. Those kind of songs are odd for me to sing now. I haven’t done Rebel Rebel since the Glass Spider thing. It felt odd then and it feels odder now, placed in with a lot of other songs that I have no problem with, like TVC15, Station To Station. Those things fit like a glove, I feel like I could do those forever. But the ones that are generationally message-oriented, like Rebel Rebel, I feel very uncomfortable with, and I find I’m throwing them away a bit. I hope it won’t show.

But it’s a point that is quite interesting. It is the first time that any of us have experienced this thing where rock’n’roll gets to this sort of age. Can we carry it off so that people who are 25 now will have something to look forward to when they get to out sagely age [laughs], or do they have to think, Oh God, look at that lot! What a mess it’s all become!

So I think we’re at a kind of crossroads, which is the kind of situation I personally like to be in – it’s a bit no-man’s land. Who of us is going to make a breakthrough and show it can really work? Jazz artists proved it can, blues artists proved it can, but rock’n’roll hasn’t yet. Because we still have the baggage of it being a teenage music. That’s changed tremendously over the last 15 years, however we cannot lose at the back of our minds the idea that it is a teenage music. But it so graphically isn’t. The span of people who buy albums now is so enormous.

So I find it rather exciting, and that’s another reason why it makes it interesting to start Tin Machine and not do these songs again. It gives me a reason to struggle again, and the struggling element is terribly important to the music we play. Whatever Eno says, I think struggle is important, angst, all those emotional things that he despises. He’s have us believe that it’s all very analytical and it’s just a question of selection and arbitrary choices. I like a lot of that as well, but I still have this feeling that you’ve got to keep pulling bits of your soul out every now and then, to give it that edge.

When you don’t have the worrying weight of being a teenager, a teenage seer and a radical fanatic, when you don’t have that adrenaline serving your purposes, you have to create, or at least develop synthetic situations to just… point you in the wrong direction.

I think it’s altogether unsportsmanlike to suggest that we shouldn’t enjoy it any more. I don’t buy that argument any more. Even when I was 33 the question was around: Well, now you’ve reached your thirties, shouldn’t you give your card in? Hang the stack heels up? Yes, a lot of us are tending to reflect on what we’ve done in the past, add certain new pieces to our repertoire, it hasn’t diminished the audience’s enjoyment of what we’re doing. Lots of people do like the few of us who’ve arrived at this age, it’s not like everyone’s lost interest. If that were the case, none of us would be touring.

It’s just a matter of whether we have the ability, without being totally gymnastic about it, to define new areas in the music. And if it just becomes desperate-looking and pose-like, 1 guess we'll try and bow out with the little grace that we've got left.

But I think there is room for adventure somewhere in there. One of us is going to stumble on it sooner or later.

God, please let it be me!

Did you see on the TV news when they were trying to get Noriega out of that building in Panama? The Americans played Let's Dance at him through a loudspeaker. It's a rather ambiguous compliment.

I did. I don't want to be involved! I really don't. I think that whole thing is so messy. Here you have a man who's been condoned by the American government for 20 years, while they've been aware of what he is and what he does, merely so they can have the inroads into their ridiculous war, supplying things to the bloody Contras. It's just incredible. . . They're so keen to let anyone rule a country as long as it's not pinko-commie. They'll let any monster take over ...

These are just lightweight observations; I'm not much of a political realist, I don't know my facts well enough and I always get myself in a furious mess trying to work things out, but it seems to me that there is no-one of the magnitude and strength of purpose of Martin Luther King anymore.

Can rock music ever provide a useful lead, do you think?

I think it's only as good as its leaders. It can observe very well, it can articulate to a certain degree the flavour of what's being thought and said, but it cannot lead in quite that same way. Sixties rock was so powerful because there were such powerful radical leaders at the time, the Luther Kings, the Kennedys, the Abbie Hoffmans – voices that you could not ignore. I don't see those kind of driven personalities any more, and those are the kinds of people that we can support.

But we're not good at that stuff. We have another talent, which is for understanding what's being said and delivering it in another way. But rock as leader is a dubious situation. I go backwards and forwards on these things. I worry when I see an artist who moralises - one feels he's working for a party or is under the thumb of somebody, or has been narrowed to some degree. I don't think it's our position to be morally, spiritually or politically correct. I think all any artist can do is kick and scream and make a terrible row and then stand back and see if anyone can make head or tail out of it.

I get worried by the "This is the right way to think" attitude. I don't think I want that from my rock artists.

Have you thought again about writing your autobiography, as you said you would around 1976, in your Thin White Duke phase?

Absolutely not. Thank God I didn't start it then, it would have been something akin to Naked Lunch. No, I'm not too driven by the idea of what people are going to think of me when I'm dead. It's not something that occupies my thoughts much. I'm far too interested in how I'm feeling about me and how my relations are with people in my immediate vicinity. I'm not really concerned with what the general public think of me, or my motives or my actions. I don't really give a damn, and less and less as I get older. It really doesn't occur to me that it's something I should bother myself with.

Read my 2003 Bowie interview

U2: A Miscellany

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Reviews of U2's album The Joshua Tree, Eamon Dunphy's book about the band, Unforgettable Fire, and the Zooropa album. These were written for Q Magazine in 1987, 1988 and 1993.

U2: The Joshua Tree

The second and fastest track to impress on this, the fifth studio album by U2, is called I Still Don't Know What I'm Looking For. It could be that's the line which best describes how matters stand with U2 in 1987. Because, for all that The Joshua Tree is an accomplished and musically superb LP, the record's greatest

strength is in its restlessness. There may be no more powerful album made in mainstream rock this year, but the source of that potency lies in a kind of spiritual frustration - a sense of hunger and tension which roams its every track in search of some climactic moment of release, of fulfilment, that never arrives.

The Joshua Tree is dedicated to Greg Carroll, a young member of U2's road crew killed in a motorcycle accident last year; the tone of it all is sombre, the sleeve itself is lavish but black. It carries a cover shot of the band, unsmiling, frowning (bass player Adam Clayton, once the cherubic playboy of the four, looks to have aged by decades). And the last track is especially solemn: Mothers Of The Disappeared concerns those tragic women who gather in public squares in Latin American dictatorships, imploring the authorities for news of their sons and daughters, missing presumed imprisoned or dead. The lyric sheet ends with a message to join the organisation Amnesty International.

So far, so grim. But no music is finally depressing when it breathes the generosity of spirit that U2' s best efforts possess - compassion, not self-pity, is the keynote - and these vast, yearning soundscapes are alive with the will to uplift.

Four years ago U2 were an orthodox, if fiery, post-punk group. Then they met the production team of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno and made The Unforgettable Fire, an astonishing work which turned the old sound inside out, its shape stretched wide and gorgeously textured. The same collaboration has given us The Joshua Tree, a record that's every mile as spacious as its predecessor.

Subdued instrumental passages are common; elsewhere there's a red-blooded physicality - even lust (Trip Through Your Wires) toughened by the truculent thump of Larry Mullen's drumming, the grudging bump of Clayton's bass. There are sad strings (One Tree Hill), and Eno's careful keyboard backdrops, but there is still The Edge, the man whose electric guitar is on hand to scour and gash the surface smoothness. U2 have never lost faith in rock's possibilities, the way that Paul Weller did.

Lyrically Bono tackles theme of loss, of anger, regret, and draws on fairly obvious images of savage grandeur - mountains, rivers, sky and sea - in some impatient desperation to express the intensity of feelings he evidently needs to share. That the perfect words elude him is not a failing, but rather an asset. His recent delvings into blues music find their echoes everywhere, but never reach that condition of majestic resignation that characterises older masters of the form. Once more, just as it was seven years ago when U2 made their explosive debut Boy, the striving is all.

The music is only sporadically tempestuous, and much of it is softly meditational. But all of it has the one thing vital to worthwhile rock, a thing so often absent: the urge to exist.

**************************

UNFORGETTABLE FIRE by Eamon Dunphy

Eamon Dunphy's career is, if anything, even more extraordinary than U2's. An Irishman, he spent the '70s as a professional footballer in England, including a nine-year stint with MillwalL Having hung up his muddy boots he moved into journalism, and produced one of the few classic books on soccer, Only A Game?

His latest undertaking, a massively thorough biography of Ireland's most successful rock band, is every bit as substantial. Dunphy's own Dublin upbringing enables him to explore the social backdrop to U2's story with an informed eye, certainly affectionate but ever on his guard against the trap of romanticising "Irishness".

Dunphy is a fan of his subject, and it's to fellow-fans that the book will, naturally, appeal the most - few of the uncommitted, for instance, will care to wade through four chapters on the boys' schooldays,. But there is enough detail in his telling of U2's rise from garden shed rehearsals to mega-stadium stardom to render the bulk of the story a satisfactory deal for anyone with half an interest in the way the music business operates in the 1980s.

The portrait which emerges is one of four unusually rootless young men: none of them is a product of the classic Catholic Irish upbringing, The Edge and Adam Clayton were immigrants (Anglo- Welsh and upper-crust English respectively) while Bono's family was half-Protestant. The implication seems to be that, denied the standard sense of national and religious identity, U2 were drawn together in a search to create their own,

If that sounds improbable (most pop stars, in Bob Geldof’s phrase, embark on that career to get "rich, famous, and laid"), then there were moments when U2 nearly quit, afraid that rock and their own stubborn spirituality wouldn't mix. The only exception was Adam Clayton, more attracted to the pop life than his colleagues, and very nearly lost to them because of it.

There's an intriguing contrast - and Dunphy makes it - between U2 and their Dublin predecessor Phil Lynott, whose self-destructive, swashbuckling hedonism was an embrace of the myths that U2 were repelled by. Like Springsteen, U2 have acquired a glow of nobility that strikes a certain chord for the Live Aid generation. As Dunphy expresses it: "The most decadent child of all, rock'n'roll, had survived and matured to become in the mid-1980s the defender of truth and decency, the most vigorous agitator for a spirituality lost in the changing times."

U2 are not quite ready for sainthood, though. It's not so long, for instance, since Bono was a Dublin punk given to stopping the traffic by dropping his trousers in the street ~ even if he was undergoing instruction with a religious prayer group at the same period of his life, Dunphy's book recounts it all.

***************************

U2: Zooropa

U2's new album Zooropa stands, in relation to its mighty predecessor Achtung Baby, somewhat as Rattle And Hum did to its mighty predecessor, The Joshua Tree – basically a child of the same creative surge, birthed amid the mind-warping turmoil of the global enormo-tour that attended the original record. Against the parallel is the fact they've not expanded this package with live tracks. On the other hand, there is a teaming with one Grand Old Man of Music – Johnny Cash this time, instead of B.B. King. All the world loved The Joshua Tree, but Rattle And Hum fell back on the band's fan-base for support. All the world (give or take a few dissidents) loves Achtung Baby, so what fate awaits Zooropa?

These 10 tracks began as ideas from Achtung Baby's Berlin sessions, or at Zoo TV sound-checks, or in hotel bedrooms. Being a band that seems these days unable to stop being a band, even for a week, U2 used any pause in touring to get those excess ideas on tape in a Dublin studio. This was once meant to have been an EP only, but the way they tell it, Zooropa is music that just insisted on getting made.

There's a freewheeling fee1 of going with the flow all across the record - rootless and loose, restless and unsettled. Freed from the need to make a standing start, there's not the sense of U2 "re-inventing" anything, but there is evidence in some songs of the band relying on familiar templates (like the slow, unfolding clatter of Stay and Dirty Day) as well as a few deliberate borrowings from Achtung Baby. Even more, though, it's a time, as Bono declaims at one point, for the four to "dream out loud". Co-producer Brian Eno urged them to improvise, and they have.

In the absence of explicit lyrical viewpoints, what emerges first is Bono's fascination with insincerity; the opening title track is a string of advertising slogans ("Be all that you can be ... Fly the friendly skies ... ") sung with a sensual tenderness in line with current Bono-think about pulling your own poetry out of media saturation, surrendering your psyche to a million random, fragmentary messages until they begin to coalesce into some perverse new logic. Enter sci-fi novelist William Gibson, whose "cyberpunk" writings such as Neuromancer with its sky "the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel" are cited as a primary Zooropa influence - and the basis of Billy Idol's new concept album, which rather subtracts a few snob-value points - and you're in a place where everything that's human is falling to pieces but renegade technology is forging ahead every minute.

One song is actually called Numb (its lyric is intoned by The Edge in passionless Kraftwerk fashion); another title is Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car, whose similarity to another Eno co-production, Always Crashing In The Same Car, points up the kinship of this music to Bowie's late 70s studies in future-shock Low and Station To Station: But here is U2, the foremost rock'n'roll band on the planet, seeing if rock can be fashioned from sonic technology in the way that so much dance music has been. Rock has always been electrical like a tractor, ploughing its soily emotional furrow, but not electronic like a rocket, I taking us somewhere new. Zooropa refines the first steps in this attempt that Achtung Baby took; and U2 are on powerful form right now, monstrously tight as a performing unit and fluidly inventive as composers, so the results transcend the merely experimental.

Finally, The Wanderer anchors its predecessors' conceits, the vocal going to rumbling country icon Johnny Cash: Adam Clayton takes instrumental lead with what resembles one of history's great bass lines, that played by Barry Adamson on Magazine's A Song From Under The Floorboards, while Cash lends his gravelly majesty to this tale of a soul that stalks apocalyptic landscapes carrying "a bible and a gun" in search of redemption. It’s a magnificent ending.

Zooropa will refresh the set that U2 take on this year's stadium dates, and if the Achtung Baby experience is any guide, the stage shows will add dimensions to the new songs' resonance. In the short term it will sit as Achtung Baby's baby, but one day it will stand as a valid and valued episode of this band's impressive evolution.

10cc: Legends in their Lunchtime

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Kevin Godley and Graham Gouldman were one half of 10cc, that perennially inventive British band of the 1970s. This is a longer version of an interview that appeared in The Word of March 2007.

Friends for 50 years, the two gents in a London restaurant murmur to one another in a quaintly respectful way. “Have you read the menu, Mr G?” “Yes I have, Mr G. I’m leaning towards the Vegetarian Feast. And you?” Kevin Godley and Graham Gouldman were once half of 10cc, but each has done much more besides. Even before 10cc, for instance, Graham Gouldman wrote 1960s pop hits for The Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits and, best of all, The Hollies’ Bus Stop.

With Lol Creme and Eric Stewart, the four emerged as 10cc, and in 1972 went mega. They were a bit anonymous as rock stars, but proved to be true pop wizards. In that decade of man-perms and Hawaiian shirts, they bestrode the charts with witty, hook-laden gems such as Donna, Life Is A Minestrone, I’m Not In Love, I’m Mandy, Fly Me and Dreadlock Holiday. All wonderful. (Well, apart from Dreadlock Holiday, maybe.)

The artier half, Godley and Creme, seceded in 1976 to make solo hits such as Wedding Bells and Cry, the latter a showcase for the duo’s new skills in video; in the ’80s they were hired as directors by everyone from The Police (Every Breath You Take) to Frankie Goes to Hollywood (Two Tribes). Stewart and Gouldman carried on as 10cc, successfully for a time, before the final separation. These days, especially since The Feeling, the group are viewed by trendsters in the same favourable light as ELO, Wings and Queen – clever confectioners of pure, pre-punk fun. And, delightfully, the author of Bus Stop now has a bus pass. “You have to be a certain age,” Graham Gouldman explains. “And resident of a London Borough. So if David Bowie insists on living in New York, then I’m afraid he’s missing out.”

Trading as “GG06”, Godley and Gouldman have just recorded some fine new tracks, available for download from their website. And Gouldman is touring this month with a new line-up of 10cc. Both men, meanwhile, are promoting a double CD compilation, 10cc: Greatest Hits And More. But where, in all this, are their former <em>compadres</em> Lol Creme and Eric Stewart? Relations seem a little strained, unfortunately, and the other two are avoiding 10cc projects. Then again, as one of our Mr Gs observes: “I don’t think they send any of the cheques back, do they?”

********

You two go back a long way, don’t you?

Graham Gouldman: I remember Kevin in the playground at primary school, making these drawings of knights in armour.

Kevin Godley: I graduated to nudes when I got to grammar school. There were lots of bullies, and I would sell them the drawings for sixpence each. Only I didn’t quite know what to draw “down there”… My first musical experience was being evicted from a class for banging along to an Elvis track. We were always messing around with music. My Dad had a music instrument shop. But it didn’t really kick in until I got to art college, with people like Adrian Henri around.

Did you play together on the Manchester beat scene?

KG: Yes. We had a band called The Mockingbirds. Top Of The Pops used to come from Manchester and we’d do the warm-ups, like the guy who goes on before a stand-up comic to get the audience in the mood.

GG: The Yardbirds were on one week, doing For Your Love, which I’d written, so it was a bit strange playing in the warm-up band. My manager’s idea, in his glorious naivety, had been to get this song to The Beatles. I said, But The Beatles actually write their own songs. Then a publisher friend said to him, “You can forget about The Beatles, however The Yardbirds are looking for material.” And out of that came my career, came me sitting here. I didn’t know how dramatic that was, cos I was still living in Manchester, a no-bullshit place, and I just carried on my own merry way, but out of that came a relationship with The Yardbirds.

One song that I’d written for The Hollies, Bus Stop – we were supporting them at Stoke Town Hall, they’d already done Look Through Any Window, and they asked me if I had any songs. So I borrowed Tony Hicks’ guitar and went into the toilet with him and Graham Nash – this doesn’t sound very good does it? – I played it and they said it was great. They recorded it within three weeks and it was out three weeks later. There were no videos in those days to delay everything.

KG: I was at art college, trying to think of ways of avoiding growing up. I wrote a song called I Am Beside Myself and I brought it round to you, and your Dad started dissecting the lyric. I’d just started listening to Bob Dylan and figured he was just writing any old shit that came into his head, so I did exactly the same, and God bless him, Graham’s Dad dissected the meaning of this lyric and found meaning where there was none. Like a true Dylanologist. [To Graham] You were already established as a professional songwriter, with your name on record labels.

GG: Yes, but I don’t know how many people actually took any notice of that.

KG: The chicks did.

GG: Can’t say I did badly but I don’t think people were that aware of it. The songwriter was just a backroom boy. I remember once walking down Oxford Road and someone started whistling one of my songs and I thought that was pretty cool, and I suddenly realised the power of it, I felt like going up to him. But years later it was embarrassing, I was staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York and outside was a band playing For Your Love. I knew it was just a coincidence, but I went up and said I just wanted you to know I actually wrote that song. “Oh yeah?” Nothing. I must have been expecting him go “Hey man, that's fantastic! Come and meet the guys!” So I’ve never done that again…. I’ve been in quite a few bands and loved playing, but I expected I would just be someone who wrote songs…

My Dad used to help me with lyrics; he should have been a professional writer but he wasn’t interested. Writing a song about No Milk Today was his idea, which I though was dreadful until he explained it to me, what the bottle symbolised.

KG: He added depth to your banality.

GG: Thank you, nicely put. The phrase Art For Art’s sake, he used.

Did 10cc form through you all being based at Strawberry Studios in Stockport?

GG: That was definitely a catalyst. If Strawberry hadn’t existed I doubt whether 10cc would have come together. We did two albums there with Neil Sedaka. Then we did an album with this guy called Ramases. He thought he was the reincarnation of Ramases II, but in fact he was a central heating salesman from Sheffield.

Three of you became Hotlegs, for a time, didn’t you?

GG: We were travelling round somewhere and Lol had started chanting this thing, “I’m a Neanderthal Man,” and a while later we were testing some equipment and I started playing drums as Lol sat with an acoustic guitar singing this chant. A music executive called Dick Leahy was checking out the studios and he heard it and said “That’s a hit!” But before or after that version we wiped it, someone unfamiliar with the technology hit the red button, so we had to do it again. Which wasn’t that difficult.

KG: I’ve recently discovered a video we did, on You Tube, the three of us in this studio, with scantily-clad girls doing Hot Gossip moves, while we just look like a bunch of knobs in a studio. But it was a big hit, got to Number 2.

You were signed up by Jonathan King, who named you 10cc. Is it just an urban myth that 10cc means 1cc more than the average male “emission”?

GG: His story was that he had a dream. He saw a sign outside the Hammersmith Odeon that said “10cc: The best band in the world.” And then the other thing came in, which was much quicker to explain. And that’s become the most popular version.

Were you, in effect, two duos working together? Godley/Creme and Gouldman/Stewart?

GG: There was that, although there were times when we swapped places. I always felt that whoever had written or produced a song, we were working as one. All for one and one for all. And not above criticising each other, either. It was almost like an American corporate thing: What did you do for 10cc today? Every day you must do something.

KG: And there was a healthy competition between the two factions. [To Gouldman] Although our songs were always better than yours, of course.

GG: Well, we let you think that. Whoever presented the song, no-one ever rejected it. You weren’t allowed to say, I hate it, it’s just crap. We respected the fact it had been written at all, and we adopted the song as our own. Until later on, anyway.

Yes. Why did Godley & Creme leave 10cc?

KG: We’d invented this device, the Gizmo [<em>a mechanical attachment to the guitar neck, producing cut-price orchestral effects</em>], and we thought, This is a world-beating item, we’ve got to see what it can do. So we booked three weeks in the studio and really enjoyed a much freer mode of expression. Because at that stage with 10cc, we’d managed to quantify what we were and it had taken some of the spirit away. So Lol and I threw ourselves back into experimentation and thought, This is much more fun than 10cc. It all came to a head when we went to the studio to hear People In Love, which Graham and Eric had written. And our hearts sank. We thought it was bland crap. And that was the first time we didn’t like something.

GG: What we should have done was said, You go and do your thing for a while and Eric and I will do something else, and we’ll reconvene when we’re ready.

KG: That would have been a much more grown-up way. But it was either, You’re in or you’re out. So we left. And we had a fantastic time.

GG: Well, so long as you enjoyed yourselves…

KG: But of course it was a commercial bomb. It died. The Gizmo and Consequences, the triple-album we made with it. We put a lot of time and effort into it and it was probably our major folly. But everyone deserves a folly. It was the last big concept album, too, because somewhere in the middle of the recording the Sex Pistols exploded. Something deep in my heart said we were doomed, but we couldn’t stop, there was too much money invested in us. We carried on and tried to sell it, but it was too late. We had a huge party in Amsterdam, all our friends came, we had a fantastic night. The End…

Yet, for a while at least, 10cc survived the split and had more hits?

GG: When Kevin and Lol left, Eric and I knew we wanted to continue working together. Eric had sung quite a few of the hits, and we’d written some, so it was a business decision as well. We had another three years of everything going great, but then Eric had a road accident in ’79 and we had to take a year off, and when we came back everything had changed. It was flogging a dead horse, but we carried on. We were eternally optimistic, when we should have been more realistic. We went into Phonogram to play them our new album, and I had a bad feeling as we were playing it, and then the guy said, “OK, now have a listen to this.” He played us the new Dire Straits. It sounded great, and I thought, We’re absolutely fucked.

Meanwhile Godley & Creme really took off, didn’t they?

KG: We were in recovery after Consequences died but we recorded the next album and gradually became involved in making videos. Steve Strange was the first to ask us, with Fade To Grey, and it was a hit and it was quite influential in that New Romantic era. Then someone else would come to us and someone else, because we were musicians... So we were doing he two things side by side. We thought, This is great, music and pictures, the two things we do quite well with our art school background. The early videos weren’t that expensive, Girls On Film only cost about 19 grand, although I suppose that’s a lot of money. But the video era was like punk, another tectonic shift; different kinds of band were becoming successful, for a different reason. And we were lucky enough to be part of that.

Is the time ripe for a re-discovery of 10cc?

KG: I’ve got great memories of 10cc. Also, we mean a bit more now than we used to. I’m not sure why, maybe because various bands are name-checking us. So there’s a sense that we are worth more than people used to think. It annoyed the fuck out of me when people used to name-check bands from the ’70s and it was Queen, Bowie, T.Rex, Roxy Music…

GG: Yes, we were like, [Waving to be noticed] Hello-oh?

KG: It was annoying, because I think we did pretty good work. But I know why it’s the case. The people I’m talking about took care of the visual side of the business and we didn’t. Even punk had a powerful visual element. But everything goes full circle and people are maybe discovering us now.

Perhaps your story lacked drama, too? No deaths or anything.

KG: Yes. No-one went into rehab, no-one committed suicide, there were no scandals, no drugs – well, no public drugs. There wasn’t a great deal doing on in terms of mythology, or iconography. It was just music. That’s a good point.

GG: Hmm. Could we start again and maybe do all that?

KG: Yes! But just that. No music this time.

Godley/Gouldman’s new songs are available from their website GG06.co.uk

Madonna: the 1994 Interview

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

This was done as a cover story for Q Magazine, December 1994. I think I began by asking her to recite any piece of poetry she knew by heart …

“Mmm. Now. Yeah. Let me see if I remember ...

'My love is a glorious, something, of song
A fabulous... extemporanea.
And love is a thing that can never go wrong ...
And I am the Queen of Romania.'

"Ha! Ha! Oh I do love Dorothy Parker's poems. They're so bitter. And so true ... "

Her version of the words is not far wrong. [“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania.”] But she is not the Queen of Romania. She is perhaps the world's most famous woman, and her name is spelt on a golden necklace that rests upon her chest. "Madonna" it announces, dangling over what the French would term her "décolletage", meaning that her outfit is very low-cut. And she flaunts a cleavage like the barmaids all had when beer was tuppence a pint.

Madonna looks both older and younger than she does in the photos and the videos: a little more lined and possibly tired, but also less mature and grand. Her manner is quite teenaged, not femme fatale. She seems up for mischief, and yet quite conscious of her power. At the same time, her very frankness is almost innocent. These combinations are odd, and they give her the air of a prematurely wise child. Her current style is 1930s Hollywood meets early 1970s flash: Jean Harlow and Angie Bowie. She is not bewitching, but is certainly beautiful. She wears the nose stud that so troubled Norman Mailer in a recent interview. If you saw her in the street, you'd think: she looks like a girl who looks a bit like Madonna.

She is receiving visitors in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, always favoured by Americans of means – and a place that Ernest Hemingway saw fit to get pissed in – here in the Place Vendôme, in Paris. A gaggle of fans is standing outside the revolving doors. The room is down a dark, narrow corridor. Halfway along there sits an athletic young black man: he tenses at your approach, relaxes when you're cleared. In the ante-room is a stack of PR photos in case you want one autographed, and copies of Madonna's US press biography. (It begins, "We have been here before – on the cusp of discovery, the crux of delight, the crucible where true artistry and mass appeal entwine." It ends, five pages later, with "We know her. We love her. And we will follow her anywhere." You're right. It's a load of bollocks.)

The common observation that writers make after meeting Madonna is that she is small. But actually, she isn't tiny. So why this sense of dislocation?

It's partly because she is not so steely and Amazonian as the pictures suggest – in fact, she seems rather delicate. But mostly it's her global fame and reputation. It's like the proverbial butterfly wing that displaces a little air in Peking, and triggers tidal waves the other side of the world. Madonna speaks and she causes explosions in outer space. All that, from this little person here?

And there is one more puzzle, which we will shortly investigate. Why is she wearing Betty Boo's clothes?

****************

Just before the interview, Madonna puts something on the coffee table which she says will "inspire" her. It is a signed publicity photo of Tom Jones. So it happens that my opening moments of small-talk with Madonna are – at her instigation – on the subject of women removing their knickers.

Composure unravelling, just a touch, I remind her I've been asked to concentrate on her music.

"Oh, excellent," she beams; then sighs, mock tragically, "I so rarely talk about music."

Mostly, of course, your press concerns the way you're plotting the downfall of Western civilisation.

"Exactly," she nods, solemnly. "It's all my fault."

So then there's some polite chat about her new album Bedtime Stories, which is the reason for this interview. A track I like especially is a smokey soul ballad called Forbidden Love. She is interested to hear this, and asks if I noticed the line that she whispers in the backing track. Yes, I respond confidently. In fact I'd meant to ask her about it: "Protection is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

"No!" She seems hurt. "1 say rejection. Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac ...”

I groan inwardly at the gaffe.

" ... which is not an original thought," she goes on, now leaning forward, confidingly. "I believe it's Proust. But it's so true, wouldn't you say?"

Do I think that rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac? I swiftly improvise some evasive, subject-changing answer.

"Well!" is all she'll say. "I don't know why you like the song, then!"

Anyway . . . all these softer songs; the mellower feel of the album, does that arise from your – um - private life?

"I've been in an incredibly reflective state of mind. I've done a lot of soul-searching, and I just felt in a romantic mood when I was writing it, so that's what I wrote about."

Two of the less romantic songs are Survival and Human Nature, each a direct response to your detractors.

"They're very specific. The other songs could be about anybody, but in these two it's quite obvious that I'm addressing the public. And they're basically saying the same thing: Hey, get offa my back; don't hang all of your hang-ups on me."

Madonna commends her record for its "woven-together" quality, despite her method of using various co-writers and producers. These, in the main, are US R&B figures, including Babyface, Dave Hall and Dallas Austin, but also Britain's Nellee Hooper. The most unlikely collaborator, though, is without doubt the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, whose lines Madonna quotes on the track Sanctuary: “Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow…”

Well, what music spoke to Madonna as a child? Was it Motown?

“That’s what was always on the radio, that’s what my friends were listening to. Other things influenced me too. I was always listening to classical music at my ballet lessons. Mozart and Chopin, Vivaldi, Bach, so I knew that. And there was what my father always listened to which was Tony Bennett, Henry Mancini, Harry Belafonte…”

Q: Did you not hate that stuff on principle, as a daughter ought?

“No, I loved it.”

Q: What about The Beatles?

“They were there, but I was more eager about The Supremes. I was really into girl groups. But I had older brothers playing them, so I’d say they were a subliminal influence on me.”

Q: What was the first record you bought?

“Young Girl by Gary Puckett & The Union Gap.”

Q: In the Civil War uniforms! Their follow-up was Lady Will-Power, which was almost the same song.

[She sings it:] “Lady, willpower… it’s now or never!”

Q: Your first concert?

“I think it was David Bowie. And he blew my mind. Ziggy Stardust in Detroit. What he did on stage was so inspiring, because he was so theatrical.”

Q: Was that significant? The cliché about him was that he always changed identities…

“I’ve heard that. I respect him as an artist, aside from his music. He really played with ideas, and iconography and imagery, and his work was very provocative. He’s a brilliant man. And a gentleman, too.”

Q: Who did you see in the clubs when you arrived in New York? Debbie Harry?

“I never saw her perform live with Blondie, I wish I had. One group I saw around that time who blew me away was Kraftwerk, they were amazing. I saw John Lydon too, with Public Image, the one time I’ve been to a concert where I thought I was going to get crushed in the mob. Mm, who else did I see?

Q: Chrissie Hynde?

“Yeah! I saw her play in Central Park: she was amazing. The only woman I’d seen in performance where I thought, ‘Yeah, she’s got balls, she’s awesome!”

Q: Did you think, There’s a woman there, I can do it too?

“No, I knew that I could do it: she didn’t give me licence to think to think that I could do it. But it gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in a man’s world.”

Q: Did punk affect you?

“No.”

Q: Can I throw more names at you? Just say what you think.

“Yeah! Sure.”

Q: Bob Dylan.

“I used to listen to that one record, Lay Lady Lay, in my brother’s bedroom in the basement of our house. I’d lie on the bed and play that song and cry all the time. I was going through adolescence, I had hormones raging through my body. Don’t ask me why I was crying, it’s not a sad song. But that’s the only record of his that I really listened to.”

Q: Morrissey?

“I’m more aware of Morrissey in his sexual politics than his music. I’ve listened to some of his records, though not on a regular basis. But I think he’s a brilliant lyricist.”

Q: PJ Harvey?

“I know who she is. I don’t know her music.”

Q: The Grateful Dead?

“Yuk!”

Q: Pink Floyd?

“Nnn. Pink Floyd… That just sounds like music for men. I can’t relate to it. It’s very male.”

Q: Elvis Presley?

“He’s God. I feel like I’m talking to my analyst now. I’ll throw a word out and you’ll tell me what you think of.”

Q: Early or late Elvis?

"Well, early of course."

Q: George Michael?

"An incredible songwriter."

Q: There's a faint parallel between you, in that when you made those first bright, poppy dance singles, he was doing likewise in Wham!, but since then ...

"Yes, and I'm sure he's about as comfortable singing songs that he did with Wham! as I am singing Material Girl at this point. [Which is, her voice implies, not at all.] Some things you just can't go back to."

Q: Has country music ever meant anything to you?

"No. I'm sure if I sat down and listened to it, I'd get into it more. [She talks about her sister marrying the modern country artist Joe Henry, who's introduced her to more of that music.] Growing up, I always thought of it as music for rednecks. I don't think that's necessarily true, I'm just ignorant about it. Patsy Cline I love, but I think her stuff is more pop-oriented."

Q: Would you ever do an Unplugged-style album?

"It's an appealing idea to do something with a small ensemble of instruments, sitting on a stool and all that. It's just that it seems like everyone's doing it, and I hate to do what everyone's doing. I'll probably do it when it's not fashionable."

Q: What is the biggest disappointment of your musical career?

"The fact that my Erotica album was overlooked because of the whole thing with the Sex book. It just got lost in all that. I think there's some brilliant songs on it and people didn't give it a chance. That disappointed me, but I'm not disappointed in the record itself."

Q: Of which record, apart from the new one, are you proudest?

"I would have to say the favourite record that I've made is the soundtrack to Dick Tracy. I love every one of those songs."

Q: I take it that's based on your judgement, and not the world's reaction to it?

"My judgement is never based on the world's reaction."

************************

In claiming to scorn the world’s reaction, she does not lie: she plans to do more acting. Though she prefers the theatre, Madonna reports that her upcoming projects may include a two-week stint with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. But just now it's the musical Madonna who is busiest, and she expects to tour again next year. Indeed, of her two careers, it's music that pleases her best: "As a songwriter it's a much truer expression of my soul, without anyone else coming in to dilute it. As an actress I can act my little heart out, but very often 50 per cent of what you do ends up on the cutting room floor, and the film’s editing can change your performance greatly. But it’s a challenge.”

Q: You've stuck with the acting career, despite ...

"Well, I know there are many people who think I have no acting career. It's very difficult. Because I'm a huge 'celebrity', quote-unquote, I have a lot of baggage dragging behind me, and it's hard for people to disassociate the media portrayal of me when they're watching the film. Very often people either can't believe it's me playing a character, or, for instance in Body Of Evidence, I think people actually thought that was me, because it came out at the time of my Sex book, So it's hard for people to separate, and I have the extra challenge of finding the role that will rise above all of that"

Q: Why do so many musical stars go into films? It so often goes wrong.

"Well, it's a great art form. And once you start making videos, writing narrative stories, filming them... you just think, Might as well make a movie. It's a natural progression. It holds an allure, but it's not an easy business."

Q: And the traffic goes the other way, doesn't it? Hollywood people always seem to want to be rock'n'rollers.

"Absolutely. It goes more that way. Even athletes have a fantasy about being a rock star."

Q: And the number of actors who’ve become successful musicians is ...

"Even smaller. Yes, well. Hmmm. [She smirks, as if thinking pleasant thoughts.] Of course, it's more difficult because an actor spends so much time disappearing into his character, and a musician is so much about exaggerating who you are."

Q: Why are you always working?

"Life is short. My idea is that if I want to do something, I do it. People portray me as this workaholic but I'm having a really good time, and it's a privilege to be able to do it. So I do."

**********************

Madonna now has her own label, Maverick, within the Warners set-up. She speaks with pride about her acts, Candlebox and Me'Shell NdegeOcello – "She'll be around for a long time," Madonna asserts – and although she concedes that other signings have not prospered, she says that there are more on the way. The A&R work can be wearying: "There's not a lot of originality out there." And she reveals her label has gone after the veteran black hardcore band Bad Brains. That much is surprising. Her next statement is astonishing.

“I would like to sign Betty Boo,” she says, describing the young London pop-rapper as “fabulous”. “In fact I’m wearing this [a slinksome leopard-skin thing, draped about her shoulders] that she gave me. I loved her first record. I think her second record was horribly ignored. [After the first flurry of chart singles, notably Doin’ The Do, Ms Boo was dropped by Warners.] But she’s really talented. I met with her in New York and she’s looking for a deal. She’s brilliant. Hopefully, it’ll work out.”

*********************

The point of Madonna is to cheer us up. Not unlike Betty Boo, but on a vaster scale. Yet in America she is discussed to a phenomenal extent. She seems caught in that nation’s psychic crossfire; enacting its fantasies, but also representing its innermost anxieties. Eminent authors and top academics debate her endlessly. (To read even a fraction of it can be tiring: the only known antidote is her greatest hits collection, The Immaculate Collection, which offers sweet relief and a smart reminder of all that’s truly important about her.) She’s even deeper in disgrace since she went on a US talk show and used language which, by all accounts, would induce heart attacks in polite parlour rooms, and draw concerned glances on the fo’c’sle of a whaling ship.

She is used to notoriety by now, and to poor notices for her movie appearances. But even Madonna was shocked by the bashing given to her 1992 book Sex (metal-bound; much nudeness and rudity; Madge and chums in immoral frolics; one-star review in Q). Many claimed that Madonna, the arch media-manipulator etc, had at last been wrong-footed. This was a new development. Previously, things didn’t happen to Madonna – she happened to them.

Now she faced condemnation from the moral fundamentalists and ridicule from elsewhere. Even though the book sold well – and newspapers that rubbished it were careful to re-print as many pictures as they could – its hyping left a poor after-taste. In all, it probably did nothing for her career.

It certainly did little for the idea that sex deserves privacy. She is for openness, believing it the opposite of ignorance; and, if ignorance begets bigotry and guilt, so openness will bring happier times for all.

There is a thicket of thorny problems inside all this. You don’t need to be a religious zealot to wonder if it’s all quite right; the beliefs that she offends are often deeply held, and some of the sceptics are actually rather thoughtful. Is she up to the job she’s taken on, or would she echo the poignant cry of Kenneth Williams, as he played the dying Julius Caesar: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

Q: For someone who is, basically, just an entertainer, you’ve become a battleground for debates about all kinds of things.

"Yes. Sexual politics; feminist politics ...”

Q: What fame is supposed to be ...

"Yeah. Well I think because I dealt with so many of those issues in my work, whether it be in Truth Or Dare [her 1991 "rockumentary", released in Britain under the inferior title In Bed With Madonna] where I showed the inner workings of the life of a celebrity, and these are things that people always cover up ... And sex, I talked about my sexual fantasies with different videos and songs. I talked about asserting your power, using everything you had, being feminine, if not feminist, being a sexual creature. My whole idea about empowering yourself is to use whatever strengths you have. To be in a man's world successfully you don't have to be like a man or dress like a man, or think like a man.

"All of these ideas went so against the grain of what you are allowed to talk about in public if you're a popular entertainer. All of a sudden it opened up the discussion, the people that were on my side, and the Moral Majority that was against me, then everyone started reviewing those opinions in the media. And it's still going strong. But I see my influences everywhere. And I'm amused by it." She laughs.

Q: Being said to cause enormous changes in society is a big gig to land on anyone, but ...

"Yeah, I'll say!"

Q: But, to whatever extent, do you think you’ve done any good?

[Quite matter-of-factly.] "Absolutely. It's always good to provoke ... a discussion, and get people to think. You cannot be an inspiration to people or a role model unless you have a point of view.”

Q: Is it good or healthy to make sex such an open subject of discussion?

"Yes, absolutely. Most of our sexually delinquent behaviour is a direct result of sex being such a taboo subject, such an unspeakable thing. People keep everything inside; they're afraid to say what they feel or what they need. Something's gotta give. It's not healthy not to say what you prefer, who you are, what you desire. To live with that kind of shame has a very negative effect on people. And on society."

Q: But so many of the things that people find sexy are to do with repression. Bondage images… It’s like, considered in the abstract, a nun seems a sexier thing than a sex therapist.

"Absolutely."

Q: But the one symbolises repression of sexuality, the other is all for bringing it out in the open. How do you get around that?

"How you get around it is, that's the hypocrisy of it all. People are naturally attracted and intrigued by the forbidden. It's human nature."

Q: But if the forbidden is no longer forbidden, if taboos are lifted, and everything is spoken about openly ...

"Yeah but speaking about it doesn't … I disagree. That’s like saying, Oh, do you feel you’ve revealed too much about yourself? And I always say, Don’t confuse physical nudity with what’s inside of my soul; they’re two different things. And talking about sexuality, provoking discussions about it, getting people to feel comfortable about discussing their sexual preference, does not mean that you’ve got to take every sexual taboo and rip it open, and put it out there, talk about it. That’s not what I mean.

“What I mean to say is, if you find a nun sexy, that’s all right. I don’t mean to say, Get the nun to take her clothes off, you see what she looks like and there’s nothing sexy about it, so OK, get over it. That’s not what I’m saying.

Q: But could it be that the more sex is talked about, the less interesting it becomes?

“I disagree with that. I think the more you feel comfortable about your sexual fantasies – not that you have to go out and say it, say who it is or stand on top of a building naked – the more you don’t feel that you’re a freak and bad and evil… To have sexual fantasies, to think a nun is sexy, to wanna be tied up, there’s nothing wrong with it. All I’m saying is that it’s healthy. You shouldn’t feel a sense of shame about it.”

Q: You know the accusation that sex is always an easy marketing tool. In any walk of life, including records and magazines, it helps to sell things.

“Well, it is. But I have a message. So… One does what one has to do to get attention. And in a way it’s almost like, to me that was the innuendo of it all. I called my book Sex because it was a very provocative title and I knew people would buy it because of that. And I knew people would want to buy it and look at the pictures and yet they denounced it at the same time, so I thought, that’s a statement of our society in itself. People want to know about it, but if you ask them about it, they’ll say it’s bad. To me, I was trying to make a point with it all.

Q: In a recent interview you said you were being punished for the public stance you’d taken.

“I only said it once and the writer of the magazine printed it 200 times in the article and made it seem as though I’d repeated myself over and over. She said to me, Do you think, in fact, you are being punished? And I said, Yes. So now it’s like every time I open up a magazine: [pretends to weep piteously] I’ve been punished! Boo-hoo. Get out the violins.

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself. But I do actually feel that it’s true. After I put the Sex book out, because what I was dealing with was such a taboo, and because pop stars aren’t supposed to have a point of view… You’re supposed to stay popular and do things that are popular, that’s what the word means. Once you cross that line there’s a lot of fury to reckon with. And I think that because everybody did buy the book in spite of the fury that it caused, I think people made up their minds that they weren’t going to be duped, and they punished me by… Every review of the movie or the album was really a review of the book. It was transparent: they weren’t even talking about the songs or the music. OK, I thought, I get what’s happening here. It was a shame, but I understand it.

Q: Do you regret that book?

“Not in the least.”

*********************

The interview time is almost over. Beyond the balcony, shadows are lengthening on the Place Vendôme. Madonna remembers Paris as “one of my start-off points”. She lived here for a while in 1979, working in a Revue with the disco singer Patrick “Born To Be Alive” Hernandez. Then she ditched her dance career to try life in a New York band, The Breakfast Club.

She says she loves the place. But right now, as fans stand vigil in the square down below, her isolation seems unenviable. It’s one of those unusual moments when a star’s life seems less, not larger, than one’s own. Having an hour to kill before this interview, I’d wandered Paris in the brilliant Autumn sunshine, entirely at ease, and enjoyed it immensely. How much is that worth? I’d want millions to of dollars to give it up.

Q: Have you been out today?

“No. Oh, I’ve been out on my balcony. I had the fabulous privilege of going out on my balcony.

Q: What’s the score if you do want to go out?

“The score is I’m trampled. I have got to [sighs, recites:] get in my car, be with my bodyguards, they’ll chase us where we go, be there when we get out. The problem when I go to Europe to promote something is, everyone knows I’m here. It’s impossible to get out and be incognito. So I can’t really enjoy the city unless I can come here when I’m not doing something. I mean, I have been going out, don’t get me wrong. I just go out with… a thousand of my closest Parisian friends!”

There’s something eerie about the patient crowd outside. Madonna suggests they may be here for other people as well: it’s Fashion Week and there are supermodels in the hotel. But even so…

Q: You must get a strange view of fans, if the ones who are most visible to you are the kind who stand around outside of people’s houses. They’re hardly typical, but they must give you a weird impression.

“The ones who stand out front of my place in New York are the ones I’ve been seeing for years and years and years.. I think, My God, don’t they have anything better to do? If there’s one message I’ve tried to get across in my music, it is to do something with your life. Believe in your dreams. You know what I mean? Express yourself. But they’re not listening, they’re just following me around.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m flattered that I have fans. It means a lot to me that they’re there and they want my autograph. That kind of energy, you do get a kick out of it. But seeing the same faces over and over for years gets a bit psychotic. They cross the line where it’s not about admiration any more, it’s about obsession. And obsession is never really about you, it’s about them.”

Well, I venture breezily, it’s getting on now. Perhaps they’ll go home for their dinner soon.

She doesn’t smile. “I doubt it,” she says.

Simon Napier-Bell: Nine Pearls of Wisdom

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Simon Napier-Bell is one of rock's most legendary managers – not only for the acts he was involved with, but for the people he knew, the scenes he observed, and the wicked wit he used to skewer them all. This interview was done for The Word, July 2006

On a Sunday morning in Kensington, Simon Napier-Bell sits in a big fat armchair and states his position. “I never argue with anyone about the death penalty, their politics, their football team or God. They are the four things that nobody ever changes their minds on, so it’s a waste of time.” He leans forward. “But I’ll take that further. If anyone believes in God, I won’t argue with them about anything. Because they’ve got a defective mind to start with.”

Our man today is both an unapologetic gay and one of London’s wittiest talkers. Barring the flash of atheist fundamentalism he is relaxed and genial, both erudite and gossipy – exactly as you’d hope from the author of those three splendid books. In order, there was You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, a memoir of the Swinging Sixties, named after a hit he co-wrote for Dusty Springfield. There was Black Vinyl White Powder, a history of the music business with special reference to drugs. And more recently, I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch, an eye-widening account of his time co-managing Wham!.

From The Yardbirds and Marc Bolan to Wham! and Japan, Napier-Bell used his years in pop management to scrutinise the follies of fame. (“What did I learn from Marc Bolan? A couple of sexual perversions, but we won’t go into that.”) Above all he has learned to enjoy the ride, and emerged a world-class bon viveur. In London briefly (he lives mainly in Thailand with his boyfriend), Simon is happily anticipating “one of those Sunday lunches that threatens to put you back to bed at 5pm.” There will be no drugs involved, only the tipple he considers to be Man’s finest achievement: “Wine. People I know who’ve been through every drug, you see them at 40 or 50, they’ve given it all up and come back to wine. It cements people, creates conversation, defuses aggression. Ever since he found wine Man has been pottering around, disappointed that there’s nothing better to discover.”

********

“IF YOU WANT GOOD SERVICE, TIP THE WAITER BEFORE YOUR MEAL.”

“But make sure he’s not about to go off duty. If I go to a restaurant and I want to impress friends, I go to the head waiter and ask him who’ll be serving us. I call him over and say, Here’s ten pounds, please serve us nicely. He will presume that he’s going to get another tip at the end so he will serve you exquisitely. But you don’t have to do that. You’ve made a deal up front. Business is better than gifts. If you want something off someone, don’t suggest that they ‘might’ do well if they look after you. Make a deal, not a promise. At the end of the American Wham! tour our backing band had been magnificent. It seemed a good idea to give them a tip, to thank them in some way. So my co-manager Jazz Summers went to see George about this tip and George said, Give them a T-shirt each. Jazz didn’t think that was a very good idea but George was adamant, so Jazz had to go and tell the band they were getting a T-shirt each. He ended up in hospital with a busted nose. The band would have been better to have put up front in their contract: If it’s a successful tour, this is what we want. They would have got it. And Jazz wouldn’t have got a busted nose.”

“NEVER SPEND ANY TIME ON DECISIONS.”

“I’ve always lived on the basis that everything that goes wrong is my fault, and if it goes right, it was luck. It leaves life very relaxed and easy. Most pop stars I’ve worked with, of course, have completely the opposite attitude. Everything that goes right is because they’re a genius and everything that goes wrong is because they have a fuckwit manager. So never worry about decisions. They’ll come to you in a split second and if they don’t, they’re not gonna come.”

“THERE IS NO PURE ART NOWADAYS.”

“There is absolutely no outlet now for purity in art: books won’t get published, pictures will not get hung in galleries. And that is rather good. You have to create something that will have a market. Artists have to understand commerce as never before. The music is not enough: it’s the album, in its sleeve, with its marketing campaign, that is being sold. I don’t say it’s not an art, but the art is a combination of marketing and performance. Artists have to pull out of their arrogant isolation and find ways of connecting with society beyond just the art. Artists are not happy when their art doesn’t sell. George Michael went to war with Sony saying ‘I am a pure artist, I don’t want to promote the record or do videos.’ Well, if you’re an artist go sing in the garden, or for your mother in the kitchen. Why do you want to sell records if you’re just an artist? Being an artist is a cry for help. All artists are very insecure people. They are desperate to get noticed, they are not artists to sit in isolation. They are looking for an audience. They are forced to be commercial, which makes their art, I think, all the better.”

“ARTISTS ARE ALL THE SAME PERSON.”

“They all have the same story. When I first saw Eric Clapton I thought, He isn’t an artist, he’s just a musician. In John Mayall’s band he played with his back to the audience because he was so shy. But as he evolved I saw he was an artist and when you look into his background, he had the missing father, the abusive childhood. They always have an abusive childhood, at least in terms of emotional deprivation, so they have this desperation to succeed, to get love and attention. All the others just drop out, because it’s horrible to be a star. It’s nice to get a good table in a restaurant, but then to have somebody come up to you every 30 seconds throughout the meal, is a nightmare. Yet stars will put up with that. They’re usually charming with new people, but when they’ve taken everything from someone, they have no further use for them. It’s no use getting upset or angry with them. They are what they are. There is a certain psychological damage that runs through every one of them. I guarantee that if you look through their childhoods you’ll find it. What else makes you so desperate to get this applause? So desperate you’ll lead a lousy life?”

“MANAGEMENT ISN’T A LOVE AFFAIR.”

“It isn’t about sticking with somebody through thick and thin. It’s about finding something that is manageable and will bring you rewards for managing it. You’re not there to make bands happy. You’re there to make them successful.”

“GAY SUB-CULTURE SHAPED BRITISH POP”

“Gay managers bridged the gap between record companies and artists. The companies were run by ex-public schoolboys who didn’t know how to deal with this new generation of stroppy, working-class artists. Then along came these managers who were mostly also public school; they could talk beautifully to the record companies yet spent their evenings going to see rough, stroppy kids. They got the trust of both sides, exemplified at first by Larry Parnes. And exactly as he came along National Service finished; prior to that there were no groups. Suddenly groups could stay together, rehearse and become real groups, and they wanted managers. Along came these gay entrepreneurs, and the result five years later was that the biggest groups in the world all had gay managers. And the artists enjoyed it, they found the gay world more interesting than having some middle-aged car salesman telling you what to do. But also in those days the only outlet apart from tiny clubs was variety bills, weekends on the pier, including a juggler, a comedian, a Number 1 pop star. We had Val Doonican on with The Yardbirds. And this taught the artists theatre, professionalism, how to dress up. And as theatre is luvvy-luvvy land, it gave the artists even more tolerance of gay culture. This is why Robbie Williams is so good, he’s a great theatre artist who could have played the London Palladium straight after a juggling act.”

“DRUGS ARE BEHIND EVERYTHING IN POP MUSIC.”

“Without amphetamines we would have stuck with big band music. But there was huge surge of amphetamines on the market when governments released their armies’ pill cache left over from the war. And rock was only country and blues speeded up. Then acid came along and suddenly a single that was three minutes long seemed to last for only half a second; you were floating around and anything less than an album wasn’t worth putting on. Well, an album cost much more than a single, so that re-financed the whole industry. Marijuana had a similar effect. But the next generation of teenagers, five years on, didn’t want that, they wanted to charge around on speed or coke, which brought about that very energetic glam-rock which soon turned into punk. It stopped in the late ’70s when there was a huge flood of cheap heroin from Iran and Iraq, and from that came the Blitz crowd, and that went on until ecstasy which completely changed music again. The difference today is that kids are incredibly knowledgeable and will do all the different drugs on different days of the week.”

“THE SECRET OF SELLING IS NEVER ASK THE PERSON TO SAY YES OR NO.”

“It’s something I learned when I was 18, going from door to door selling magazine subscriptions. The ploy is that so long as you don’t ask them to say Yes or No, you’ll still be there. So I’ve used that all my life: you involve someone in the proposition, and talk at length, slowly bringing them around until they end up putting it to you. This was how I sold Wham! to China. I went 18 times, had lunch with all these ministers and never asked if Wham! could play. I just kept talking around the subject in general terms until I saw a glimmer in their eyes and then I’d get more specific. And finally, at the last meeting, it was ‘You know, if Wham! were to play at the Workers’ Stadium, April 27 would be a marvellous date.’ Next thing they’re sending a telex telling me that Wham! are playing on April 27. And I’ve extended this to artists, who are impossible. They will never do what managers tell them. The only way is to put the idea in their heads as a discussion topic. It’s never any good asking them if they’ll do something, you’ll always get the wrong answer.”

“PEOPLE WILL NOT SEE WHAT THEY DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE.”

“I’ve witnessed this many times. I was about 21 and I met a guy in a gay pub; someone else agreed to lend us his flat, so we went back there, stripped completely naked and were having rampant sex on the floor. Suddenly the door opened. The person who had lent us the flat turned up with the boss of his company, and the boss’s wife. He’d completely forgotten he’d lent us the flat. And to say his boss was horrified… he was beyond anything I can explain. Anyway, the person I was with grabbed his clothes and ran out of the house. I grabbed my clothes, put them on in the next room, then came back in and sat down. I introduced myself and talked about his business, about politics and classical music. And half an hour later this boss did not believe what he’s seen. He’d literally taught himself to believe that I’d come to the flat along with everyone else.”

More about Simon Napier-Bell at www.simonnapierbell.com

Is Toby Young A Balding Bug-Eyed Opportunist?

Tue, 7 Jul 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Toby Young is the journalist who has written two very funny memoirs, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People (which became a film in 2008) and The Sound Of No Hands Clapping. For The Word’s issue of October 2006 I went to meet Toby in his West London office. The brief, for that magazine's "Word To The Wise" slot, was to present the subject's opinions in a string of aphorisms.

The first thing you see in Toby Young’s small office is a large poster of… Toby Young. The apparent solipsism would not surprise his enemies, who are legion. On the opposite wall hangs a dartboard bearing the boat-race of one such enemy, Martin Amis. But this, after all, is the West London lair of a journalist whose first stab at authorship was a book entitled How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. From one critic it drew the immortal review: “Toby Young is a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach-ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane. And I speak as a friend.”
Strangely, such verdicts are meat and drink to this 43-year-old Londoner. Since graduating from Oxford with his friend (and subsequent editor at The Spectator) Boris Johnson, he has launched the ill-fated Modern Review, been a frequently fired newspaper columnist, an unpopular theatre critic and a much-reviled playwright. But he is best known for the 2001 celebration of his conspicuously unsuccessful career at Vanity Fair magazine: How To Lose Friends, etc is a very funny memoir of his brief stint amid the careerist snobs and frigid offence-takers of glamorous New York – a period in which he became, said one observer, “an ever-present icon of defeat.”
The sequel is called The Sound Of No Hands Clapping: it recounts, with equally toe-curling relish, his humiliating rejection by Hollywood. Where the first book began with a life-changing invitation to join the ultra-prestigious Vanity Fair, then declined to the stage where our right-sized hero was road-testing sex toys for lad mags (on himself), the second sees him fall from promising Brit screenwriter to the man whose phone calls are spurned by the lowliest of the lowly. He finds eventual redemption through a nice English girl and two lovely children. But each book catalogues a string of professional and romantic disasters that would annihilate men of thinner skin.
“I now find myself in the paradoxical position of being a professional failure,” he says, in the deadpan, staccato voice of the writing trade – of people who are always stopping in mid-sentence to decide the exact word. “Mild success would be more damaging to my career than another catastrophic failure. It’s a topsy-turvy sort of career to have. The minute I begin to do quite well, I won’t be able to pay the mortgage. I have to continue to screw up to make a living.”
So where does a likely young man go in search of his next great fuck-up?
“At the moment I’m fantasising about writing, producing and directing a film, in which I might possibly star. That could be a colossal failure on an even bigger scale than I’ve experienced so far.”

************

“FAILURE IS A TEST OF CHARACTER”
“I think failure is much more likely than success to lead to wisdom. The conventional view is that failures are terribly bitter and that it distorts their whole perception of the world and their place in it; they think of themselves as more sinned against than sinning. But I think the opposite is the case, that people who are very successful see the world through rose-tinted spectacles and are much likely to end up with a distorted picture. People who succeed generally credit themselves with their own well-deserved success, which probably isn’t 100 per cent true. They play down the impact of luck and play up their own hard work and ability. Whereas people who fail, particularly men, simply see it as bad luck. And that’s often true. I think failure enriches you. You’re more likely to be a humane, compassionate person than if you succeed. Most successful people go through this developmental arc in which they come to realise, by the end of their lives, that money and fame and status aren’t the be-all and end-all of existence. The good thing about being a failure is you realise this straight away.”

“AMERICANS RESPECT SUCCESS, THE BRITISH TAKE THE PISS”
“I think at the heart of American society is what Plato would call a Noble Lie, a salutary myth. Which is that America is the land of opportunity and that anyone who is willing to put in the hours can succeed. And the corollary is that people who fail simply haven’t tried hard enough. Both failure and success are thought to be well-deserved, and as a result the Americans respect successful people and loathe and detest failures. Almost the opposite myth prevails in Britain, which is that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That your life chances are entirely dictated by the circumstances of your birth and no amount of hard work will overcome that. People here think that successful people, the ruling class, are just members of the lucky sperm club. I think we’re generally suspicious of successful people. It’s the ‘tall poppy syndrome’. And, not being terribly successful, I have a lot of time for the tall poppy syndrome. Think how much more insufferable Posh and Becks would be if, in addition to having all that fame and money, they were universally respected.”

“SCANDAL IS THE REVENGE OF THE MOB”
“The people who voraciously consume tabloid gossip have a great deal in common with the old ladies who used to bring their knitting down to the guillotine and watch aristocrats have their heads lopped off in the French Revolution. One of the reasons the public enjoy seeing celebrities brought down isn’t merely because it satisfies their sadistic cravings; it’s because it makes them feel that they are the real repository of the kudos the celebrity enjoys, that without the public’s approval, they can’t continue to lead the successful lives they’ve been leading. Most celebrities depend on popularity to open a movie, sell a record or garner ratings for a TV show. They depend upon being liked. Often times they seem to forget that and imagine that they’re gods walking among us, who are just entitled to these extraordinary perks. So it’s a salutary reminder when they get embroiled in a scandal and they’re not nearly so likeable, that their power is only held on trust and can be taken away at any time. And that makes ordinary people feel powerful.”

“IT’S BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST, BUT THE SAME DOES NOT GO FOR FAME”
“I recently saw a once-famous pop star talking about how hard it was, just waiting for a bus. People were so cruel, they would point and laugh and jostle him. People think there is a correlation between fame and status and that’s why they crave fame. But it’s not actually true, because some people are famous has-beens who don’t have any status. Certain types of fame have the opposite effect. You can be famous for being forgotten about, which is paradoxical. The Simon Dee syndrome.”

“LIMOUSINE LIBERALS SHOULD READ TOM WOLFE”
“I think in New York there is a connection between status and paying lip service to certain liberal ideas, and nine times out of ten the reason prominent New Yorkers espouse liberal values is to advertise their membership of the elite. It’s also a way of making themselves look a little less shallow, that they care about the wider society, that they’re not just interested in getting a higher visibility booth at the Four Seasons Restaurant. It’s true of Hollywood too. The thing that baffles me about contemporary limousine liberals is that they can carry on as if Tom Wolfe had never coined the phrase ‘radical chic’, in that marvellous essay about attending the benefit for the Black Panthers at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s apartment. He absolutely skewered that whole class.”

“JOURNALISM IS LIKE DROPPING STONES DOWN A WELL – AND NOT EVEN HEARING A PLOP”
“Being a successful columnist produces no real long-term career satisfaction. All journalism, no matter how prominently displayed in the paper, is completely forgotten the next day. You never get a sense of cumulative achievement. You never get that job satisfaction you imagine architects get, when they step back to look at the finished building and think ‘A-ha, a monument! In 100 years’ time people will know that I walked the earth!’ What’s the journalistic equivalent to that? There isn’t one.”

“STUDY THE LOCAL CULTURE”
“About six months after I arrived at Vanity Fair I discovered that my office workmate had a birthday coming up, so I thought it would be amusing to hire a stripper-gram. I persuaded the fashion director of the magazine to let me use this large room, the fashion department, to stage this event. The stripper arrived in the building, head-to-toe in stone-washed denim, and I lured my friend to the fashion department on some spurious pretext and the stripper began strutting her stuff. She’d brought along a boogie box and was playing Michael Jackson’s Beat It as she was performing her striptease; she’d got down to her leopard-skin kickers and was waving her breasts in my colleague’s face when there was a knock at the door. I killed the music, and it was the editor’s three-year-old daughter: ‘Can I see the fashion department?’ Everyone held their breath. ‘Not now, sweetie. Can you come back in ten minutes?’ She toddled off, we closed the door, put the music back on, the stripper started again. Five minutes later there was another knock on the door and this time it was three little girls. It turned out that in my wisdom I had arranged for a stripper-gram to come to the Vanity Fair office on something called Take Our Daughters To Work Day, which was a national institution I knew nothing about, whereby these hard working women bring their daughters to see what Mommy does all day. And of course the only place little girls wanted to see was the fashion department. So there I was stuck in this room with this stripper from central casting and an army of little girls accompanied by their hatchet-faced Moms, waiting outside the door. We smuggled her out and I swore everyone to secrecy but within 24 hours I was known throughout the building as ‘that English chump who hired the stripper-gram on Take Our Daughters To Work Day’.”

“NEW YORK WOMEN ARE PURITANS”
“I don’t think English women will ever be as po-faced or prudish as their American counterparts. In many ways New York women of marriageable age have a 19th century world view: it’s taboo to sleep with anyone on the first date. You have to go through this elaborate courtship ritual to get to first base. Unless they think you’re some random guy who’s only in town for one night. In fact when I went out on the pull with my mates we would always pretend that we had a plane to catch back to London at 6am. They would be very surprised when they saw us at the Gucci party the following week. Encountering a sexual culture so different from ours meant that I had to go back to the drawing board. None of my tried-and-tested techniques, such as pouring vodka down a woman’s throat until she was on the verge of passing out, cut any ice in New York. People talk about the incredible sexual opportunities awaiting Londoners in New York. They say it’s like being a movie star if you have an English accent. I really didn’t find this to be the case. When New York women hear an English accent they think, ‘Low income, small apartment, alcohol problem.’ And nine times out of ten they’re absolutely right.”

“THE PRAM IN THE HALL IS NOT THE ENEMY OF GOOD ART”
“I know that Cyril Connolly said it was, but different writers respond in different ways. The arc my character follows in The Sound Of No Hands Clapping is in thinking, initially, that having children and being married is an impediment to success as a writer. That the time you feel obliged to spend with your wife and children encroaches on the time you should be spending writing a book or a screenplay. But at the end of the book I change my mind about that and realise that without the order and stability of family life, I wouldn’t be able to write anything at all. I’d just be a hopeless drunk. And far from being an impediment to my career, without my wife I wouldn’t have a career.”

“PARENTHOOD IS LIKE A 12-STEP PROGRAMME”
“You simply can’t stay out ’til 4 o’clock in the morning drinking and taking drugs if you know that your daughter’s two-year-old face is going to be pressed up against yours at 6 am, demanding to play hide-and-seek.”

Meeting Springsteen

Thu, 14 May 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The Word asked some writers to describe their meetings with Bruce Springsteen. So I gave them this account of my own backstage encounter. It appeared in the November 2007 issue.

I met Springsteen backstage after a concert he played in Chicago, in 1995. He'd just released the downbeat album The Ghost Of Tom Joad and his solo tour was just as stark. He said to the audience: 'These songs were written in conditions of silence, so that's how they're best heard... Don't make me do what I had to do in LA, get down in the audience, confiscate those cellular phones and speak harshly to some supermodels.'

Tom Joad was inspired by Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath; Springsteen likens the Mexican immigrants of modern times to dustbowl refugees of the 1930s. It's a serious record and Bruce wanted his concerts to reflect that. Fans who took photos were told to crush their Instamatics under their heels. As the evening wore on Springsteen created the atmosphere he wanted. In the quietest songs his voice was no more than amplified breath. The hall was full of a silence more dramatic than a roaring stadium.

When it's over I get a tap on the shoulder. Bruce would like to say hello. And now somebody is leading me through the backstage maze to a small dressing room. Out of a strip-lit corridor I'm suddenly adjusting to darkness and a scene like some Caravaggio painting, perhaps The Supper At Emmaus. There in the gloom is bearded Bruce with a few disciples seated around. I mean, Motley Crüe it isn't. He gets up and welcomes me, a stocky chap in working-man's shirt with sleeves rolled up. He keeps eye-contact and has a firm handshake. He asks after London and pads across to his fridge to fetch us the first of several Budweisers. I decide I like this guy already.

I take a seat with the others; it could almost be a prayer meeting. I slowly realise they represent local activist groups, reporting back to Bruce on causes he's become involved with - union disputes, food-banks and homeless shelters. All very Tom Joad, in a way. Like the show tonight, it's hushed and somewhat solemn, punctuated by Springsteen's self-deprecating wisecracks. And they're always followed by his trademark noise, a wheezy, rasping chuckle that makes his neck disappear while his shoulders shake. I'm reminded of that cartoon dog, Mutley, in The Wacky Races.

Then I ask about his new songs. He talks in a slow, deliberate way - the way of a man who's thought deeply about a thing but doesn't want to sound too glib - touching on 'the mystery of human hope' and 'the way a man's soul might respond to beauty'. He admits Tom Joad is the most austere thing he's ever done. He was troubled by the bleakness of its stories; every character is hard-pressed by circumstance or challenged by hard moral choices; he wanted 'a miracle' to light their way out. Then he found it in the song called Galveston Bay, about a man who pulls back from the act of murder he seems destined to commit. Springsteen leans forward, hunched with concentration. 'And that was it. I found it. That was my miracle...'

We all nod earnestly. Then the neck disappears and the shoulders shake again: 'Heughh heughh heughh!'

Mott The Hoople: Young Dudes, Old Feuds

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Mott The Hoople have announced reunion shows for later in 2009. To write this account of their career I did separate interviews with all members of the original hit line-up: Ian Hunter, Mick Ralphs, Pete Overend Watts, Buffin and Verden Allen. The piece was first run in Mojo, November 1998.

The story's turning point is David Bowie's gift of his song All The Young Dudes. So I've now added some quotes from my 2002 interview with Bowie himself.

'Rightly or wrongly we never looked for money. And by God we never got it...'

They say that it's a mighty long way down rock'n'roll. One winter's day in 1974, Pete Watts was learning just how far down it can be. Better known to his fans as Overend Watts, of the even more strangely-named Mott The Hoople, the bass guitarist was depressed. He sat in his two-bedroomed flat, in Ealing, digesting the bitter news that his band had just broken up. Now, like repo men in reverse, roadies were lumbering up the stairs, cramming his tiny abode with massive amplifiers. They hauled in a wardrobe trunk full of stage clothes. There were guitar cases, guitar strings and, as he recalls, 'a million tins of silver hairspray.'

He glanced about him with a heavy heart, dwarfed by the unwanted trappings of a glam rock supergroup who were suddenly no more. The roadies unloaded the last of his gear, and bid him their soft farewells.

Alone, he looked around him and thought, 'Where am I going to put it all? What do I do now?'

But Overend Watts had not yet touched the bottom. A founder member of one of Britain's classic rock acts, he'd soldiered with them through five Top 20 singles, seven acclaimed LPs and scores of frenzied live shows. Mott The Hoople had generated a huge amount of money - little of which ever found its way to Mott The Hoople. The Inland Revenue gave Watts the most poignant souvenir of his time as pop star: a tax demand for £85,000. The bill was eventually argued down to £15,000. But that was enough to make the bassman give up music. 'I decided, 'I've been a mug long enough. I've played in groups for 15 years, and this is what's happened, I've ended up with a bill.' And I was lucky I'd got it down to £15,000. If I'd stuck around for another 10 years, who knows? I might have owed another 300 grand.'

Today Pete Watts runs a successful business, and he can afford a rueful chuckle at the irony of it all. But where did it go wrong? What had happened to the glory that was Mott The Hoople? And how the hell did he get a name like Overend in the first place?

Mott are remembered with affection. All The Young Dudes, their glorious first hit, was a landmark record of the '70s, a glam anthem that single-handedly defined the post-Woodstock generation of teenagers. With his shades and corkscrew curls, the singer Ian Hunter looked like the Rock Star From Central Casting. When punk rock came along, it claimed descent from hip American acts such as The Velvet Underground or Iggy & The Stooges - but the real Godfathers to the Pistols and The Clash were laddish rock acts like The Faces, Thin Lizzy and, perhaps most of all, Mott The Hoople. Their flash and swagger, their tough, melodic crunch, is deep in the racial memory of British pop. If Oasis resemble anyone, then it's not The Beatles, but Mott The Hoople in their pomp. And who, in their right mind, does not confess a fondness for Honaloochie Boogie?

Actually, Mott The Hoople had their share of lucky breaks. The biggest were meeting Island's legendary svengali Guy Stevens, and teaming up with David Bowie. As we'll discover, both breaks came about through Pete Watts' unsuccessful efforts to leave the band. Fate had a way of coming to Mott The Hoople's rescue at the very moments when all hope had fled. But on that melancholy day in late '74, as bass-stacks blotted out the daylight in Overend Watts's place, there was to be no rescue. Nobody came to roll away the stone. This time, there would be no resurrection.

II.

Mott the Hoople were born one sunny morning in Herefordshire. At school there, Pete Watts made friends with a young drummer called Terence Dale Griffin, nicknamed Buffin. The pair would play in various bands, meet a local singer called Stan Tippins, and a guitarist named Mick Ralphs. Through shifting line-ups, and with the addition of a Welsh-born organist called Terence Verden Allen, they would coalesce by 1968 into a five-piece outfit with the fashionably deep name of Silence.

But life was eerily quiet for Silence. Discouraged, Pete Watts took a day trip down to London to audition for the Island producer/A&R man Guy Stevens, who wanted a bass player for Free. (Andy Fraser and Paul Rodgers had temporarily been sacked from the volatile band, leaving Paul Kossoff and Simon Kirke.) Mick Ralphs came along to keep Watts company. Although the Free position was not to be, Guy Stevens took a liking to the Hereford boys and asked them to keep in touch. Ralphs came down to Island again, this time with a Silence demo tape: 'I went to their office in Oxford Street and sat there and waited, and in the end I got so frustrated I burst into Guy Stevens' office: 'Listen!' I said, 'I've driven all the way down from Hereford and I'm pissed off that no-one takes any notice. You better listen to this tape.' And he says, 'I like it! I like your attitude!'

A Silence audition was duly arranged. Verden Allen: 'I remember carting the Hammond upstairs and Guy said, 'Anyone who carts that bloody big thing up the stairs deserves a record deal!' They were complaining like hell across the road about the noise, and that turned Guy on, he was leaping up and down, going 'Yeah!' Sadly for Stan Tippins, Guy Stevens liked the group but recommended they find a new singer. Ralphs: 'So it was a very tough choice, but it was up to us to tell Stan. He said 'Fine, go ahead, you should.' We promised we'd do something for him in the future and ended up using him as a tour manager. But it was a heart-rending thing, and he showed an admirable attitude.' Buffin: 'Guy didn't fancy it, and I don't think Stan did, either. He was a '60s type of singer, tall and handsome, with perfect pitch. But he was starting to thin on top, and didn't have the image of that 'progressive' area we were in.'

So an ad was placed in the Melody Maker. Buffin: 'These auditions were a farce. We'd had in four or five people, all hopeless. One bloke goes, 'It cost me 10 pence to get here on the bus, you ought to refund me that.' It was that bad. Meanwhile Ian turns up. He looked atrocious. He had these horrible open-toed sandals, possibly with grey socks on. But he sat at the piano and played and I thought 'Shit, there is something about this guy's voice.'

Watts: 'The auditions were frighteningly awful. The first bloke looked like Les Dawson, with thick pebble glasses, his face was about an inch from the keyboards. We sat there despondently until about eight or nine at night and then Ian turned up. He looked grim, with short horrible curly ginger hair. He was very nervous but there was something about him. Afterwards he stood up and said, 'I've got this idea for a symphony. Can I borrow your bass?' He played this horrible bass line and we were all thinking, 'Oh God, how awful.' After he left we sat down and none of us were very impressed. But Guy said, 'Maybe if we get that last bloke in for a week or two, just to show Island you've got a complete group.' We reluctantly agreed.'

The new recruit was Ian Hunter Patterson, from Shrewsbury. Older than the others, he was a veteran of British beat groups in Hamburg, had recently backed Billy Fury and almost joined Jimmy Page's New Yardbirds. Now on the point of abandoning music, he lived in North London with his wife and children. He recalls: 'Guy loved the Rolling Stones and he loved Bob Dylan, and so did I. I sung a bit that way, quite naturally.'

Watts: 'So Ian was in the group, but he didn't have anything to do with the rest of us. But for him it was 15 quid a week to help him keep his family.'

Allen: 'As Guy said once, Ian's heaviness from being in London, and our lightness, the country feel, worked together just right.'

Hunter: 'I don't think it was as romantic as that. I think the verdict was, We can't find anyone else so let's try him for a few weeks. I hung on by a hair, because at one time or another they all wanted to get rid of me. They were extremely strange. Guy had got them in a basement flat in Lower Sloane Street and I went down there, this was the biggest day of my life. The drummer came up the stairs as I was walking in and just totally ignored me. Nobody would speak to me. It turned out they had a happy friendship with Stan Tippins, the original singer, and I think they were missing him. Yet Stan was the only one who would speak to me.'

Buffin: 'It's bollocks. Ian is the professional outsider. What gets him through life is the idea that he's fighting off these terrible people who want to keep him out.'

Rehearsals were held at the Pied Bull in Islington. Meanwhile the manic Stevens (fresh from a drug-related stretch in prison; his tale is told in MOJO 9) was furiously inventing new names for the group, and for its members. 'Mott The Hoople' was a favourite novel of his, by the cultish US author Willard Manus.

Hunter: 'Guy wouldn't let us have the name Mott The Hoople at first. He'd told us it was the name of a book he'd found in jail, and he'd given it to one of the guys in there, a heroin addict. And the guy had died. So now Guy said it was bad to call anybody by that name, it had bad connotations. But we hustled him, we'd never heard something so totally different.' Ralphs: 'I never read the book, but he said it was in keeping with the band: anti-social.'

At Stevens' behest, Ian Hunter Patterson dropped his last name; Terence Verden Allen dropped his first name; Terence Dale Griffin reverted to Buffin. Then Guy turned his eye on Pete Watts: 'He says to me, 'Pete Watts, hmm, sounds a bit boring. Got a middle name?' So I go [shyly], 'Well, Overend.' He goes 'Overend? Overend! Yes! Not for he, the turgid bass riffs!' He was so excited, and I'd always tried to hide the name at school. It's quite a surprise Mick Ralphs wasn't called anything else. But then, his middle name was Geoffrey, you see...'

III.

Thanks to a dynamic live act, and the impressive first albums Mott The Hoople (1969) and Mad Shadows (1970), Stevens' boys became firm favourites of the UK hairy circuit. By the third LP, however, the group was tiring of its mercurial overseer. As Mick Ralphs recalls: 'Guy had done us in, he was overwhelming. He'd taken it to extremes and we were all a bit shellshocked. We foolishly said we'd do an album on our own and ended up doing Wild Life, which is pretty tame. So we went back to Guy and said 'OK, we give in' and it was like plugging in the electricity again. We just roared. Brain Capers was probably, for me, the best album we did.'

Allen: 'Brain Capers was a crazy session, there was a lot of destruction. I remember in the foyer at Island they had big framed photos of, like, Blodwyn Pig, Traffic, Quintessence - so they got done in. The only one we didn't touch was Traffic, cos we had too much respect for them. I remember Chris Blackwell of Island came into the studio and said, 'Had a good night, lads?' Even the clock got ripped off the wall. But we had to pay for it in the end.'

Crushingly for all concerned, even Brain Capers failed to make Mott a lucrative act, despite their loyal following. Island's patience was wearing thin. The ultimate heartbreak occurred on a dismal tour of Switzerland, when the group decided to disband - an event commemorated in their epic The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople. Buffin: 'We'd been having rows with Island because they were saying, 'You've got to cut back on the lighting and PA, you're not making a profit.' So there was bad feeling. Then they sent us on this nebulous string of dates in Switzerland. We did one night at this horrible converted gas holder, and I don't know, somebody played a wrong note, there was a push and a shove, nothing very much, but a bit of snarling, followed by 'There's better things to do in life than play fucking gigs in places like this.'

'So it was decided, that's it. 'Oh, we'll flounce off and not be a group any more.' For some reason we had the next day free, and went to see a John Wayne film and it was all very friendly. It was like the great albatross had been removed from our necks.'

Hunter: 'We wound up in the middle of Switzerland and thought, 'Why bother?' None of us did drugs but somebody gave Buff a block of something, so we all dug into that and had a great time on the train coming back. And that was the end of that.'

Allen: 'I remember driving in London almost in tears, thinking 'How can we pack up after all this work? We haven't had any success.'

Before they could split, though, they were committed to a final UK tour, The Rock'n'Roll Circus, with music hall trouper Max Wall. Hunter: 'Nobody was looking forward to the tour. And I was ambivalent because what else was I was going to do? I'm going back to the factory. It was slowly dawning on us that if we're not Mott the Hoople, then what are we? We haven't had a hit record. We're nothing.'

IV.

Enter David Bowie, whose gift of All The Young Dudes would dramatically revive Mott The Hoople's fortunes. But it's worth remembering that Bowie was not a superstar at this point - if anything, Mott were the better known act. Though Hunky Dory had been well reviewed, Ol' Odd Eyes was largely seen as a one-hit wonder who'd struck lucky with Space Oddity a few years earlier. (The career-changing Ziggy Stardust had not yet been released.) In March, 1972, he was still a songwriter pitching his songs to other artists, hence Peter Noone's version of Oh! You Pretty Things. As a producer, he also lent his energies to Lou Reed (Transformer) and Iggy Pop (Raw Power), boosting their sunken reputations in the process.

Though they'd never met, Pete Overend Watts had seen the Spiders play live, and was a fan of Bowie's records. Prior to Mott's ill-fated Swiss trip, a box had arrived for them at Island Studios, containing a demo of Bowie's new composition, Suffragette City...

Watts: 'He'd scrawled on the box, 'This might be of some use to you, would you like to cover it?' Anyway we played it and didn't think it was quite right. So after we got back from Switzerland I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs, thinking, 'I've got a box here with David Bowie's phone number on it. I wonder if he needs a bass player?' So I just called him on the off chance and said, 'Thanks very much for the tape, we won't be needing it because we've split up.' And he sounded genuinely upset, he said, 'You can't split up. Hold on, I've got a great manager.' I said, 'The other problem is we haven't managed to get a hit single.' We were on the phone for an hour at least. He called me back about two hours later and said he'd spoken to Tony DeFries, his manager at MainMan, who would try to get us out of the position we were in. He said 'Also, I've written a song for you since we spoke, which could be great.'

'So we arranged to meet the following Sunday. He came round with his wife Angie in a beaten up old Jag, and we met Tony DeFries for afternoon tea. Bowie played me this song, All The Young Dudes, on his acoustic guitar. He hadn't got all the words but the song just blew me away, especially when he hit the chorus. Then DeFries was saying he'd get us away from Island. I thought, 'My God, I don't believe this! Wait until I tell the others.' When I got back I had to phone round them all and say, 'Look, you know we've just split up? Well, I've just had an incredible afternoon.' And, not wishing to mention any names, a lot of the guys in the band had never even heard of David Bowie.

'But they went along with it because of my enthusiasm. David came along to one of our dates, at Guildford, where he met the rest of the guys. And it made that tour very enjoyable, knowing there was a future after all. Bowie had said to me the first afternoon we met, 'In the '70s you are going to be enormous, and I am going to be enormous.' It was like he knew already. And it made me feel great, because I thought we were buggered.'

Buffin: 'Ian had been in the NME saying we were looking for songs and Suffragette City had turned up. I don't think it's true that Bowie wrote All The Young Dudes for Mott: the song was there and he wasn't happy with it, so he offered it to us. We couldn't believe it. In the office at Regent Street he's strumming it on his guitar and I'm thinking, 'He wants to give us that!? He must be crazy!' We broke our necks to say YES! You couldn't fail to see it was a great song.'

Hunter: 'David just came out the woodwork, I'd never met him. He wasn't very big at the time. but Pete was saying he's a great songwriter, he might have a hit for us. We knew that soon we would stop selling out, because without a record the audience would fall off. We also knew that the radio were dead against us. So not only did we need to have a record, we needed to have a classic. We met him in an office in Regent Street and he sat on the floor with an acoustic guitar and played Dudes. And I just thought, 'What the fuck is he giving this away for?' We went down to Olympic Studios in Barnes. It was a high, because we knew we were singing a hit.'

Buffin: 'He said that Drive-In Saturday would be our next single but then he changed his mind. But it was great that we now had to come up with something from within the group. That would have been going to the well just once too often.' Allen: 'In a way it was a disappointment that the initial hit didn't come from the group. I remember going to get a pizza with David Bowie while we were doing the album at Trident. And his record Starman was on the jukebox while we were waiting, and he said 'Yours will be on there soon.' I said, 'Yeah, great, but for some reason I'm not as excited as I would have been if it had come from the band'. And he said, 'I know what you mean.'

[A few years later I had the opportunity to ask Bowie what he remembered of this period. 'I think if they were doing OK at the time,' he told me, 'I don't think they would have wanted to link up with me, because they were quite macho, one of the early laddish bands. But things weren't good, and I literally wrote that within an hour or so of reading an article in one of the music rags that their break-up was imminent. I thought they were a fair little band, and I almost thought, This will be an interesting thing to do, let's see if I can write this song and keep them together. It sounds terribly immodest now but you go through that when you're young: How can I do everything? By Friday! So I wrote this thing and thought, There, that should sort them out. Maybe I got my then management to phone up their people: David Bowie's written you this song. And it worked! I was flabbergasted. And then I wrote them Drive In Saturday, but by that time I think they thought Oh, we don't need that wimpy glam-rocker any more. They wanted to do their own stuff. But Drive In Saturday was written as a follow-up for them. But they didn't want it. I think they would have done it great.' ]

Signing the band to his MainMan organisation, Tony DeFries negotiated a new deal for them at CBS. Buffin: 'People had to get over the shock of Mott The Hoople, the losers, having a hit. There were wonderful letters in the music press: 'So, Mott The Hoople have sold out to David Bowie and CBS. Well that's me finished with them. Signed, Disgusted of Oxford.' People took those things so seriously. Then it was the sin of sins, to be successful.'

The single and the Bowie-produced album of All The Young Dudes would rocket Mott to the spangled firmament of glam rock. They were scarcely camp, however, and regarded the fey frolics of glitterpop with stolid Herefordshire scepticism. Only Pete Watts had a natural dandy streak: 'My early taste had been for flared loons. I'd had a suede, long-fringed bag, a few grandad vests, very high bouffant hair. When I had a pair of platform boots made, the group couldn't believe it: they said 'You can't be serious.' I proudly sported them to a gig in Oxford...' Ralphs: 'Pete was the image one, who was always getting us to wear wild clothes. I think he invented the stack boots later adopted by Slade and everyone. Some years ago my wife had a clear out and, unbeknownst to me, got rid of these platform boots in multicoloured leather, to some thrift shop. A couple of months later I saw this drunk in Reading, tottering down the street in them, with his raincoat on.'

Buffin: 'I think people like Bolan and Slade picked up on what Watts was doing and took it to an extreme. Bolan only started doing his electric stuff after he saw us at the Roundhouse. But glam rock wasn't us. The worst thing was we got these stage clothes made in '74, after Ian had seen this ice show at Wembley. He found out who the designer was, and what we got this was this very nice gay man who made us these awful clothes, at huge expense. He made me this thing with cascading coloured ribbons which looked like a parrot outfit. And he said 'I've got all this make-up for you boys,' with a wad of mink, Max Factor make-up brushes, which cost a fortune. All for these hoary old bastards in Mott The Hoople. I took them home and my girlfriend thought it was Christmas.'

Famous at last, they toured America as stars. Being older, newly married, and rather given to introspection, Ian Hunter abstained from most temptations of the road. He spent his spare time penning a now-celebrated book, Diary Of A Rock'n'Roll Star: 'I'd been married to my first wife for around eight years, then I'd been on my own, then I met Trudy and we did that tour. And tours are boring, they really are, if you're not going to put your little pecker around. So I had all this time on my hands. I've always had a lousy memory, so I thought if I wrote a diary at least I'd remember this tour, then it just sort of developed. It's historical now. It'll always trickle through as new bands come up. It's a text book, innit?'

Buffin: 'Americans thought we were totally deranged drug addicts. But drink was the worst excess, drugs didn't really come into it. They always thought there was some strange sexual connotation in 'Overend', too. But it's just a family name, from the Lake District.'

Bowie's career had also gone into overdrive, and he lost contact with Mott. Ian Hunter stepped into the breach by writing a string of Top 20 hits: Honaloochie Boogie, All The Way From Memphis ('Well it's a mighty long way down rock'n'roll'), Roll Away The Stone and The Golden age Of Rock'n'Roll: 'We knew we had to stand on our own two feet. The story was, 'Oh yeah, Mott are all right if David's with them, but the minute David's not with them, they're back to what they were before.' So that was really bothering me, because I had this feeling it was me that was going to have to write the hits.'

But if there's one thing harder to survive than failure, then it's success. With Mott's belated breakthrough came the eruption of band tensions. Organist Verden Allen was the first to walk out: 'I'd started writing and coming in with fresh ideas, and I don't think it was going down too well. And I felt that I should do a bit of singing now. But we'd reached the point where it was important that everything was right, and I couldn't see a way that I was going to progress. We went to the States to do a third tour and when we came back everyone was a bit tired. We were playing down in here in South Wales and I remember in the changing-room after, everyone was discussing what to do - by this time David had taken off, and Tony DeFries was too busy to do anything for us - so nobody knew which way to go.

'So for some reason I said, 'Best if I leave the band and you sort it out amongst yourselves.' I said it just like that. It's ridiculous, after all that work. I should have just kept quiet.'

Mick Ralphs, who'd once been the band's other main songwriter, was the next departure, leaving to form Bad Company with Paul Rodgers of Free: 'It had become my little job: Ian would write the song and I had to come up with these little hooks, like on Honaloochie Boogie and Roll Away The Stone. He got into writing in a structured way, like Bowie. But it took away from the spirit of Mott. We became commercially successful but lost something in the transition. It's a double-edged sword: you want success but when you've got it, you think, 'This isn't really us.' It became Ian's point over my point. And that's when I started looking around elsewhere. It's hard to explain why I should leave, it's totally illogical, but I'd just lost the feel for it. It's like you can have a wonderful girlfriend, but one day you start looking around.'

Hunter: 'I think they felt the Mott The Hoople they knew was disappearing and a new Mott The Hoople was emerging. It was me that started writing the hits, it was me that started getting my picture in the papers. But I don't think I was acting any different. They were beginning to feel pushed out, but it was by circumstance. I wanted to keep the band as it was. When Ralphs left it was a major blow. To me it was the end of the band when Mick Ralphs left, without a doubt.'

Buffin: 'It was logical to have a spokesman and Hunter was the obvious one. His hair was down to here now, he'd got used to wearing the shades, he'd stopped trying to take them off at last. The shades were what made him strong. Once you see Ian's eyes he's mortal, but with the shades on he's to be feared. But he used to go on without them and we'd have terrible rows: 'Ian, you've got to wear those shades. You look like Mick Abrahams [of Blodwyn Pig].' 'No I don't!' 'Yes you do!'

Watts: 'It all happened wrong for Mott at that time. Whereas groups like Fleetwood Mac, when somebody leaves they happen to get somebody brilliant in, it gets better and better. With us it didn't. We could have gone on and got better, but we didn't get the right people in.'

Ralphs was hurriedly replaced with ex-Spooky Tooth guitarist Luther Grosvenor. As if his real name weren't wild enough, he was re-named Ariel Bender. Keyboards were played for a short time by Mick Bolton and Blue Weaver, and finally by the flamboyant Morgan Fisher. While Ariel Bender was liked by his colleagues, and proved popular on US live dates, his style never gelled with Mott's , and he left to form Widowmaker. Meanwhile a new single, Foxy Foxy, had sold disappointingly, and the band discussed taking a break.

Buffin: 'Mott The Hoople was a touring band and an albums band but suddenly we were expected to come out with a hit single every two months. There was a panic after Foxy Foxy wasn't a hit. But I thought, 'Why? We aren't a singles band.' But then I thought, 'If the worst comes to the worst, Foxy Foxy will be Mott The Hoople's last single. It would be terrible if that bloody thing was the last single.' But Ian wasn't interested, so I plotted with Morgan and Watts. I said 'What if I tell Ian I've written this great song as Mott's last single?' They said, 'Have you got a great song?' I said 'No, but we'll all say it is. Then Ian will crack and we'll get something good out of it.'

'So we went in and did a day's recording. Ian sat there thinking 'What the fuck is happening?' He seemed perplexed. We played it back and were all enthusiastic, totally phoney. And Hunter disappears. We thought, 'Ah! We've finally got him worried.' After half an hour he shambles in and says, 'I've got a bit of something, do you want to have a listen?' So we banged it down and the ploy had worked!'

The song, Saturday Gigs, was a nostalgic elegy for Mott, in which Hunter hymned their career in epic terms. In his own mind, he says now, he'd already left the band: 'We were all so tired.' Before the final mix of Saturday Gigs, however, a new idea presented itself. Instead of folding the band for a while, why not recruit Mick Ronson as the new guitarist? Currently struggling to launch a solo career after his time with Bowie, Ronson agreed to join Mott The Hoople. But despite his fine guitar work on Saturday Gigs, and the band's conviction they had made a classic, the single was another flop. Gloom deepened on a European tour. While Hunter and Ronson bonded quickly - Ronson had found the frontman that he lacked since leaving Bowie; Hunter had found the foil he'd been missing since Mick Ralphs - the old schoolfriends Buffin and Watts felt themselves excluded.

Watts: 'When we knew Mick Ronson was going to join us, we all thought this was going to be amazing. On paper it was the best thing that could happen. But it didn't happen. We never seemed to have a conversation with him. He didn't seem to want to talk. I don't know if he was shy or what. With Mott we were very down to earth, I ate beans on toast. But I'd go to Mick Ronson's flat and there were 50 hangers-on with green hair and make-up, mixing Banana Daquiris in the kitchen. It was weird, and quite decadent, and I didn't feel at ease at all.'

Buffin: 'I never had any meaningful conversation with him. There are bizarre claims that we hated him, but the fact was we just couldn't make contact. On tour with Ronno, we couldn't afford to eat in the hotels we were staying at. Ronno and Ian were eating in the restaurants and Ronno had his MainMan card to pay with. The not eating together was a very divisive thing. It was hateful tour. It was like being the backing band, when the whole idea of Mott The Hoople was that it was the five people.'

Hunter: 'Mick still had DeFries for a manager, who we no longer spoke to. We'd do gigs, there'd be an RCA limo for Mick. I didn't care, to be honest, because I liked Mick and I was willing to put up with all the crap. But it got to the point where me and Mick would be sitting over at one end of the room and the others would be sitting up the other end. It was a great shame. The rest of the band were just looking at it as a day-to-day pain in the ass, while I was looking at it from an overview. I found it frustrating, I was supposed to write the songs, I was supposed to keep these people together, but it was fucking impossible. I was a nervous wreck.'

In late '74, Hunter cracked. Buffin: 'The next thing we heard was that Ian had collapsed with nervous exhaustion. On 12 December he rang up and said, 'I've left.' I said, 'Don't we need to talk about this?' He said, 'No, nothing to talk about, I've left.' It came as a tiny shock.' Watts: 'It wasn't totally unexpected because things hadn't been going right in Europe. But I thought, 'Oh my God, I don't believe it.' Things were fraught in Europe but I thought we'd iron out the difficulties. But I never got to talk to Ian because I don't think he phoned me. It was a horrible feeling, because you just think, 'That's it, it's over. What do I do now?'

The ballad of Mott The Hoople had ended.

VI.

Pete Overend Watts retreated to his two-bedroomed flat in Ealing, where Mott's road crew came to return his equipment. With Buffin and Morgan Fisher, he found a new singer and guitarist and they battled on as Mott - no Hoople - releasing two albums for CBS. In 1976, Mott regrouped as British Lions, fronted by John Fiddler from Medicine Head, and survived another three years. Buffin and Watts then became a production team, whose credits include Is Vic There? by Department S. Under the name Dale Griffin, Buffin went on to produce several hundred sessions for Radio 1, including Nirvana and The Smiths. His latest project has been to oversee All The Young Dudes: The Anthology, a 3CD box set of the band's career.

Pete Watts now runs his own department store in Hereford, specialising in music, antiques and clothing. After leaving Mott in 1973, Verden Allen formed a band called The Cheeks, with Hereford musicians Martin Chambers and James Honeyman Scott. (The latter pair would soon join up with another local boy, Pete Farndon, to complete Chrissie Hynde's band The Pretenders.) Allen then returned to South Wales where he still plays regularly: a recent album, Long Time No See, is being reissued. Morgan Fisher now lives in Japan. Mick Ralphs, meanwhile, remains with Bad Company.

Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson began collaborating on each other's albums: Once Bitten Twice Shy, from Hunter's solo debut, became a sizeable hit in 1975. Mick Ronson (whose story is told in MOJO 47) died of cancer in 1993. Hunter now lives in Connecticut, and his solo career continues: 'I think Mott hit their time. It's like, if you can't play that well, and you play with a great amount of desperation, you're a punk band. So we were a punk band, years before punk came in. You just do what you do, and if it happens to click then you're away. But we were lucky in meeting David. He showed us a whole other thing.'

Campbell Devine is the author of a new biography of Mott (Mott, All The Young Dudes: Red Oak Press/Cherry Red Books), and helped compile the new box set: 'They were not the greatest musicians in the world, but it all coalesced into something very special. They were great innovators, from the way that Pete dressed, and the custom guitars, to the way that Ian's songs always carried a message: his foresight pre-dated punk and in Crash Street Kidds he posted warning of social unrest six years before the riots in Brixton and Toxteth. And Marionette, the mini-opera he did was another major precursor, because 18 months later Queen did the same concept in Bohemian Rhapsody. They never got the credit.

'The other thing that nobody knows is that they were talking about an interpretive album of cover versions in early '71, way before David Bowie did Pin-Ups or Bryan Ferry did These Foolish Things. It's just difficult to believe that a group with that foresight didn't reap greater rewards.'

Buffin: 'There was so much adrenalin flowing in the early days, but not ambition. Rightly or wrongly we never looked for money. And by God we never got it. I don't know how much money we made but we certainly didn't get a fair share of it. As long as you had enough for guitar strings or jeans, that was all that mattered...'

George Harrison's All Things Must Pass

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

George' s masterwork, for most of us, is the triple-album All Things Must Pass. This account of its making was written for a MOJO special in 2004.

'By the time of his passing in 2001, the totality of Harrison's achievements was more widely recognised. This sprawling, spirited collection is the finest way to remember its maker.'

Its title announces the impermanence of all things - of life, love and mop-topped pop bands. So it's a little ironic that All Things Must Pass will probably stand as George Harrison's most enduring monument. Within its spacious acres are several of the most beautiful songs he would ever compose. His first album since leaving The Beatles, it offered dramatic proof of the Quiet One's creative liberation. In fact, for a few, heady months, it actually seemed as if George Harrison might become the most successful ex-Beatle of them all.

Nobody in November, 1970, could have mistaken the title's significance: the group had formally split six months before and this was Harrison's handful of earth upon the Beatle coffin. As if to cement the association of ideas, the wry cover picture has George in solitary splendour, surrounded by a quartet of gnomes. But there are signs on the record that George already realised there was actually no such thing as 'an ex-Beatle'. However much it pained him, he was doomed to remain a Fab for the rest of his days.

The title track was not new: George had tried to interest The Beatles in it almost two years earlier. But as the album took shape, the lyrics to All Things Must Pass would accrue new layers of relevance. Recording was paused for a while when his mother died; then he learned that his wife Pattie was falling for his best friend Eric Clapton. But even those events were secondary to the song's original, spiritual theme about the essential unimportance of material existence.

Fortuitously this triple long-player arrived in British shops in time for the Christmas market - back in 1970 its five pound price tag put All Things Must Pass firmly in the luxury bracket. In the new year it was boosted by its showcase single, My Sweet Lord, whose Number 1 showing outranked anything achieved to date by Lennon or McCartney.

A beguiling blend of black American gospel and Eastern mantra, this song was George's heartfelt call upon the Lord to become manifest in his life. Lyrically it was a bold step to take, but My Sweet Lord's hypnotic chug would conquer all. Like a few other tracks on All Things Must Pass, it also introduced the swooping slide guitar that became Harrison's most distinctive style. (A rockabilly picker by background, George lacked the improvising fluency that had made guitar-heroes of his blues-based peers. But in the slide guitar he found the ideal vehicle for his melodic gift and, perhaps, an echo of his beloved sitar.)

Though he had made two instrumental albums while he was in The Beatles, All Things Must Pass was George's first collection of songs. Several had been written during his spell in the group, where his contributions were routinely sidelined by the senior partners John and Paul. Not for nothing would Harrison come to dub himself the Dark Horse, for the album was a revelation of hidden talents. By appointing Phil Spector his producer, he underlined his estrangement from McCartney, who had famously opposed the maverick American maestro's involvement in Let It Be. And by rehearsing his solo emergence with stars such as Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, George asserted his new status as an independent player in the global rock elite.

George was new to leadership at this point, but among the gangs assembling in the London studios were many familiar faces. Ringo Starr and Beatle confederates Klaus Voormann and Billy Preston were key players; so were the much-touted Apple signings Badfinger. Prestigious guests included Gary Brooker and Dave Mason (plus, on congas, a then-unknown Phil Collins). The sound was elegantly bulked out by Eric Clapton and the musicians he and George had met on the Delaney & Bonnie tour - a group who would coalesce in the course of these sessions to become Derek & The Dominos. In line with Spector's modus operandi, the record's expansive sound was obtained by using musicians in massed ranks. At certain points - Wah Wah and Let It Down being examples - the material is probably too slight to carry the colossal weight of Spector's production. Mostly, though, the effect was joyous, as if the songs were bursting with the exuberance of George's first flush of freedom.

From his friendship with Dylan came a charming co-write called I'd Have You Any Time, and the gift of Bob's new composition If Not For You. George's own song, Behind That Locked Door, was itself in the country vein of Nashville Skyline. Among the album's masterworks, Beware Of Darkness was characteristically spiritual, while the Hey Jude coda of Isn't It A Pity was evidence of the dead man's grip of Beatle history on George's imagination. So was the affectionate nod to Fab fans in Apple Scuffs, whilst the inspiration for Wah Wah was a latterday Beatle row. Another number, The Art Of Dying, dated back to 1966.

Happily, Harrison lived long enough to oversee the 30th anniversary CD edition of All Things Must Pass. He added some alternative versions and an unheard track, though this was arguably an album in need of paring down, not filling out: the second version of Isn't It A Pity and the third LP of superstar jam sessions always did seem superfluous. But in this he betrayed the same failing as the solo Lennon and McCartney, neither of whom were the greatest editors of their own material.

Despite the instant success of All Things Must Pass, its reputation suffered in later years. Within three months of its release, My Sweet Lord was legally ruled to be in 'unconscious plagiarism' of The Chiffons' 1963 hit He's So Fine. It was a humiliating setback for the fledgling superstar attempting to emerge from John and Paul's shadow. The patchy quality of George's later albums, and their general lack of outstanding singles, led in Britain at least to a state of benign neglect. By the time of his own passing in 2001, however, the totality of Harrison's achievements was more widely recognised. And this sprawling, spirited collection is the finest way to remember its maker.

Buy the CD at Amazon.co.uk

Buy the CD at Amazon.com