Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is a true legend, Dave Stewart. You
Speaker 1: know him as Half the Rhythmics, you know him as
Speaker 1: a songwriter, you know him as a producer. Day great
Speaker 1: to have you here, Thanks very much. I'm glad we're
Speaker 1: here and inside and not outside. It's pouring with rain
Speaker 1: right now, right. You know, it's funny because when I
Speaker 1: used to hear that song, it never rains in southern California.
Speaker 1: I said, well, you know what, really, you know, I
Speaker 1: thought it was like a joke, but it really never rains.
Speaker 1: But when it rains, it does pour. It's funny watching
Speaker 1: everybody panic here in Los Angeles when it rains, because
Speaker 1: where I'm from it's so sort of rainy and cold.
Speaker 1: But the rain is different. See, the incomes sideways with
Speaker 1: a wind with it. Right. So, when I was little
Speaker 1: walking to school and you have to wear short pants,
Speaker 1: you know, when I got to school, one side of
Speaker 1: my I was always covered in little dots where the
Speaker 1: rain was like, Okay, where exactly did you grow up?
Speaker 1: I grew up in northeast of England, in a place
Speaker 1: called Sunderland, which is was looked at as the poor
Speaker 1: cousin to Newcastle, you know, because for instance, Newcastle was
Speaker 1: you know, a bit of a bigger and named a city,
Speaker 1: and Sundland was a town when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: and you know, we got all so second sort of
Speaker 1: handoff things. So if you went to the vegetable shop,
Speaker 1: the vegetables were all the sort of monkey vegetables are
Speaker 1: a bit bruised because the rest went to London, you know,
Speaker 1: everything was And when I was growing up, of course,
Speaker 1: it was a period when they closed the railways and
Speaker 1: they closed the coal mines so and shipbuilding, which was
Speaker 1: the biggest thing in the town. They closed the shipyards.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if you've seen a thing called
Speaker 1: Billy Elliott. So that's a little bit so about twelve
Speaker 1: miles from where I was. But you know, it's all
Speaker 1: about the minor's strikes and that's all a similar sort
Speaker 1: of scenario or where you've got, I think in my
Speaker 1: town of something like unemployment with men who were used
Speaker 1: to working in the shipyards, in the coal mines or
Speaker 1: whatever and at least bringing home something for their family
Speaker 1: and now they've got all usunemployment and strange tactics you know,
Speaker 1: to calm people down. So a brewery came out with
Speaker 1: a beer that's a penny a pints kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and of course then everybody gets so completely addicted to drinking,
Speaker 1: and then fights and brawls start up. And so when
Speaker 1: I was sort of about thirteen or fourteen, um, it
Speaker 1: was a weird sort of the duality of things happening,
Speaker 1: because you could get the enemy or the melody maker
Speaker 1: from one little newsagent shot up and you're kind of
Speaker 1: reading about some kind of hippie psychedelic movement. Meanwhile Europe
Speaker 1: in the northeast of England, where people are rolling around
Speaker 1: on the ground fighting, you know, just generally miserable and
Speaker 1: like no future. A bit like later on that happened,
Speaker 1: you know, when the sex Pistons came out with pretty
Speaker 1: Vacant and all that stuff. But it was already happening,
Speaker 1: you know. Okay, you know a lot of my listeners
Speaker 1: are American. Not that we don't reach the world. We're
Speaker 1: ignorant in America. We don't know England. How far is
Speaker 1: Sunderland from London? Were roughly really far and how it's
Speaker 1: near the border of Scotland. That was my question. How
Speaker 1: far from Scotland about sixty five miles very close. So
Speaker 1: you would, you know, for those of us who are unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: would you go to Scotland. Oh, yeah, Scotland's a very
Speaker 1: beautiful place, and so is the northeast of England, you know, Northumbria.
Speaker 1: American might have seen it if they watched the History
Speaker 1: Channel where the Vikings came over and slaughtered most of
Speaker 1: the population of my hometown. They started with the monks
Speaker 1: and they landed on Linda's farn, remember remember the yeah
Speaker 1: I knew them, actually a great man, but Linda's fan
Speaker 1: where the monks made very peaceful and the Vikings landed
Speaker 1: there and couldn't understand why they weren't fighting back, so
Speaker 1: they were just chopping everybody up. And so that's the
Speaker 1: first sort of Biking invasion to Britain. Then they realized, oh,
Speaker 1: this is going to be easier. Nobody fights back. Of
Speaker 1: course they didn't realize that we had castles and stuff
Speaker 1: further inland. Um so, but I think, you know, I've
Speaker 1: got Viking blood most people from the northeast, you know,
Speaker 1: where they were just raped and pillage going back. So
Speaker 1: if you do a DNA tests, lots of us have
Speaker 1: like Norwegian, Danish or scan an Avian in the DNA.
Speaker 1: You know, have you done the DNA test? Well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to because I personally think that it's going
Speaker 1: to be used. It could be used later on in
Speaker 1: a very sort of scary way, just the same way
Speaker 1: as everybody's selling data and information about everything your DNA.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they could do the same thing. And also
Speaker 1: when things right rise up, you know, fascist movements, so whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't want to people
Speaker 1: to know their exact genetic history, you know, well I
Speaker 1: don't want to know. I don't want to, you know,
Speaker 1: to find out all these people in my history and
Speaker 1: come tracking me down and there's a lot of stories.
Speaker 1: Unless you do it at a really high level, you
Speaker 1: get inaccurate results anyway. So what did your parents do
Speaker 1: for a living in Sunderland? Well, my father when he
Speaker 1: was his dad was working in the shipyard just for
Speaker 1: the how far asunderland from the water, our Sundland's on
Speaker 1: the water on the Yeah, you see we have the
Speaker 1: river where which has had a large you know, it
Speaker 1: was a large river in the mouth, so they could
Speaker 1: build as big ships as only Japanese and Sunderland that
Speaker 1: were the biggest ship building towns in the world. And
Speaker 1: obviously when something closes down then you don't really hear
Speaker 1: of it. But if you read in the history of it, Okay,
Speaker 1: just to be very clear, Sunderlands, how far from Newcastle
Speaker 1: are about fourteen miles? And why was the ship building
Speaker 1: in Sunderland as opposed to New Newcastle. I think it
Speaker 1: was just the narrowness of the river in Newcastle and
Speaker 1: the width of the river in Sundland. So when they
Speaker 1: launched these giant ships so which were enormous. I remember
Speaker 1: once as a school kid, we got taken to the
Speaker 1: side of the launch, you know, and it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, as a kid, it was just like, well,
Speaker 1: it's like three streets of houses, you know. Um. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's a there was a Japanese chap who worked out
Speaker 1: when they got lost inside a ship that big, big
Speaker 1: wan they're trying to build it, they had to have
Speaker 1: a method of to work out where they were. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I can't remember his name, it's thing us Away
Speaker 1: Ketami or something like that. He Um, he worked out
Speaker 1: a thing and now they call it the fishbone method,
Speaker 1: which is still used in many other. Well, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I went out a really large ship for this event.
Speaker 1: And the little fish in the row and the carpets
Speaker 1: you know which direction you were going exactly. Yeah, But
Speaker 1: he divided it up into bones on a fish so
Speaker 1: that you knew you were in section you know, three B,
Speaker 1: and that's where this rivet had to go into this thing.
Speaker 1: And my dad's father worked in the shipyard and a
Speaker 1: lot of men would go deaf because they had to
Speaker 1: hold the giants or washer and rivet on one side,
Speaker 1: where another guy sort of bashed on the boat on
Speaker 1: the other. So there's ringing in the ears and and
Speaker 1: so my dad didn't really have any shoes until he
Speaker 1: was about nine or ten. He used to play football
Speaker 1: soccer in the street with the pigs bladder from the
Speaker 1: butcher's so they would blow up the pigs bladder and
Speaker 1: then let it dry and then that would become their football.
Speaker 1: And so when he was sixteen, his dad saved for
Speaker 1: about ten years and bought my dad a bicycle, you know,
Speaker 1: on his sixteenth birthday, so he could go and into
Speaker 1: the town and get a job as somebody who delivers
Speaker 1: things on a bicycle. On a first day, he came
Speaker 1: out of this office where he was delivering something. Somebody
Speaker 1: had stolen it. He had to walk all the way
Speaker 1: home in tears. So so my dad then, you know,
Speaker 1: about a year and a half later, was told, well,
Speaker 1: now you have to go and be in the army
Speaker 1: or the air force or whatever, because war broke out
Speaker 1: and he he wanted to be in the air force.
Speaker 1: And then the most bizarre thing happened. A lot of
Speaker 1: these guys said, okay, we are you going to get
Speaker 1: on this ship? And the ship ended up in India, right,
Speaker 1: And it was in India for like four and a
Speaker 1: half years. And what they had they had sort of
Speaker 1: planes there that were sort of hidden as reconnaissance planes, um,
Speaker 1: because the Japanese had started to sort of come into
Speaker 1: the war. And he was so confused because he'd never
Speaker 1: been out of Sunderland and it was suddenly boiling hot
Speaker 1: in Calcutta. And but then years later, there's a lot
Speaker 1: a lot happens when men are grouped together into a
Speaker 1: situation like that. He always flex on it like it
Speaker 1: was the best time with you know, all these guys
Speaker 1: from his hometown mixed with guys from other places. I
Speaker 1: think the ship on the way there held about or
Speaker 1: something that we're all throwing up all over the place
Speaker 1: because it was never been on a ship, and it
Speaker 1: was miles when they got I think when they got
Speaker 1: to Glasgow to chain ships, they thought they were there.
Speaker 1: They'd never been anywhere. Yeah, and so then they were
Speaker 1: really confused when they got put on another ship, and
Speaker 1: then they were like days and days and days and days.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and my mom, she her mother um, brought
Speaker 1: up four girls on her own, running a pub, you know,
Speaker 1: like a bar in the coal mining area of Sunderland
Speaker 1: where all the coal miners would come covered in coal
Speaker 1: and stuff to drink. Yeah, after they came out of
Speaker 1: the mine. But her father, remember this father died when
Speaker 1: she was nine of consumption, which is a little bit
Speaker 1: like I suppose you get with the coronavirus, speeded up
Speaker 1: your long sort of you can't breathe anymore. Basically, was
Speaker 1: he a coal miner, Uh no, I think you might
Speaker 1: have worked at the pit, but I don't think he
Speaker 1: was in mind that I went down. Obviously I never
Speaker 1: got to meet him. But so what happened was, and
Speaker 1: this happened probably in America too, is my mom was
Speaker 1: working as office girl runner kind of person in the town,
Speaker 1: and the guy who ran that company said, all the
Speaker 1: girls here, here's a soldier and an address. You must
Speaker 1: write to them while they're away. Yeah, and be a
Speaker 1: pen pal. So my dad would get a letter like
Speaker 1: once a month in India somehow from this, and he
Speaker 1: called Sadie and of course they fell in love over
Speaker 1: the letters. Right, So immediately he returned and her twin
Speaker 1: sister had been right into another guy, so they had
Speaker 1: a double marriage twins with two soldiers returning. And I
Speaker 1: have to since your mother is a twin, I my
Speaker 1: girlfriend's a twin, right. How close was she with her sister?
Speaker 1: Are ridiculous because they were identical twins, and strange things
Speaker 1: would happen, like evidently when me and my brother came,
Speaker 1: the twin sister would ring up my mom, who was asleep,
Speaker 1: to tell her the milk was boiling over wow, and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. You know, my my girlfriend talked about
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff too. They say, they sure a brain,
Speaker 1: they'll show up wearing the same clothes, and so so
Speaker 1: much so that when I was that was pretty sort
Speaker 1: of kind of a rough place when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: So a number of sort of run ins or sort
Speaker 1: of running away really from kids rough you know, kids
Speaker 1: or wanted to have fights and stuff. At one time,
Speaker 1: this score here on my wrist. Those these kids caught
Speaker 1: hold of me in a field and they were trying
Speaker 1: to sort of cut me up with something. They couldn't
Speaker 1: find anything, and they got a rusty old tiner peas
Speaker 1: and they started like rubbing the lid on my arm
Speaker 1: till it sort of slipped my wrist. Well. Of course,
Speaker 1: I ran into the shop where my mom was working,
Speaker 1: a little newsagent that sold newspapers and snuff and tobacco.
Speaker 1: And the blood was just spurting up all over the
Speaker 1: black and white newspapers, and I thought it was my mom,
Speaker 1: but it was my mom's twin sister, and she she
Speaker 1: was obviously screaming like but they immediately did the right
Speaker 1: thing and tied a sort of teetowl around my arm
Speaker 1: and held it up in the air, and then I
Speaker 1: had to walk down the hill to her children's hospital.
Speaker 1: The way I think guys titched it up with no
Speaker 1: anesthetic or anything. It was just like, oh, come here, son,
Speaker 1: like you. But so yeah, maybe we would often confuse
Speaker 1: my mom and to insist it was bizarre. Okay, So
Speaker 1: they stayed married. They stayed married till my mom, who
Speaker 1: had to work in the pub with her mother from
Speaker 1: the age of eleven, so never really went to school,
Speaker 1: and so she didn't really understand her intelligence to My
Speaker 1: brother went to the grammar school, and he was bringing
Speaker 1: home books and talking to his friends about their homework,
Speaker 1: and she was really interested in this stuff they were
Speaker 1: talking about, and so she saw that they ever seen
Speaker 1: Julia of the Spirits. I haven't seen her, Bama aware
Speaker 1: of it. I've seen a woman under the influence, of course. Okay,
Speaker 1: so can you imagine that sort of housewife in the house.
Speaker 1: My dad's now at work every day and doing night
Speaker 1: schools to try and you know, get a better position,
Speaker 1: and she's starting to lose her mind because so boring
Speaker 1: and everybody is talking about, you know, the price of
Speaker 1: fish and this, and she's kind of got like in
Speaker 1: her head some philosophy and a bit of Shakespeare whatever
Speaker 1: my brother's been studying. And so she thought she was
Speaker 1: going crazy, and so much so that my mom actually
Speaker 1: went to a mental hospital, and I remember cycling to
Speaker 1: see her visit her. It's very distressing because they immediately
Speaker 1: put you on some kind of drug and then they
Speaker 1: started giving her a series of electric shock treatments, which
Speaker 1: lou Reid taught to me about. You know, he had
Speaker 1: electric shock treatments. His parents sort of and sisted he
Speaker 1: get them. Thought he was mad and so um. But
Speaker 1: one day a miraculous thing happened, which is some people
Speaker 1: are just stunning, right. So a guy comes to the hospital,
Speaker 1: a new younger guy to be ahead of it instead,
Speaker 1: I want to see every patient. Taught them for a
Speaker 1: while and listening and at the end of talking to
Speaker 1: my mom and this he said, uh said he, I
Speaker 1: really don't think there's much wrong with you. I think
Speaker 1: you really are really intelligent. And you need to go
Speaker 1: to a night school or something and study and and
Speaker 1: I personally will take you and drive you there twice
Speaker 1: a week. Yeah, and he did, and she then immediately
Speaker 1: started to sort of feel better and absorbed in what
Speaker 1: when this was happening, Well, I was about ten eleven twelve,
Speaker 1: and she went to college past a lot of exams
Speaker 1: and matriculated into Durham University, which is very difficult university
Speaker 1: to get in, and got an honors degree and went
Speaker 1: to London, left my dad and became a teacher. Then
Speaker 1: a headmistress of a school for children with special needs.
Speaker 1: So um, my dad though, he got really depressed and
Speaker 1: he didn't want to leave. But she used to say
Speaker 1: something really great. It was like I didn't have the
Speaker 1: the strength to stay or something like that. It was
Speaker 1: like it was so difficult for her to now not
Speaker 1: continue the journey, you know. And then she met a
Speaker 1: zen Buddhist guy called Julian. It's incredible story and I
Speaker 1: thought would be a brilliant opening to her re sort
Speaker 1: of beautiful story of a love um in a you know,
Speaker 1: some low budget film, but they cically, she met this
Speaker 1: woman that when she arrived in London who was going
Speaker 1: to the same sort of the next step you have
Speaker 1: to take to become teaching at special school. And this
Speaker 1: lady was called Begonia and she had a husband called Julian,
Speaker 1: but they were kind of sleeping in separate bedrooms. But
Speaker 1: she'd heard her talk about this amazing woman called Sadia
Speaker 1: is coming for tea. So Julia he got sort of
Speaker 1: one of those boards that you wear around your neck
Speaker 1: and wrote on it, the ice caps are slowly melting.
Speaker 1: Everybody is in great danger. For more information, ring this
Speaker 1: number just back in like nine eight or something like that,
Speaker 1: and because he read a book by Fred Hoyle called Ice,
Speaker 1: which was predicted exactly what's happening. And so my mom
Speaker 1: was coming down a street in Roustall and Hill in
Speaker 1: Hampstead out of the tube station or what you call
Speaker 1: the subway, and there's this guy with a long, funny
Speaker 1: gray beard and hair sticking out everywhere, ringing a bell
Speaker 1: with his sign. And the reason he was doing that
Speaker 1: is because he had to d visions, so he couldn't
Speaker 1: you know, he had to be make sure that Sadie
Speaker 1: saw the sign. And she stopped him and she said, hey,
Speaker 1: excuse me, there's some mistake here. That's my telephone. And
Speaker 1: he said, Sadie, I've been dying to meet you, right,
Speaker 1: And they basically fell madly in love and ended up
Speaker 1: getting married. And my dad did the most amazing thing.
Speaker 1: He came to London and gave her away like a father,
Speaker 1: would you know? Yeah, So did he ever find somebody new?
Speaker 1: He did later on, but it took him almost to
Speaker 1: that point to so of let go. And so it
Speaker 1: was amazing. And Julian became a very large influence on me,
Speaker 1: being a Sain Buddhist and funny enough when Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: used to come around my house in London Tour East.
Speaker 1: Then I bought my mom a little flat round the
Speaker 1: corner before we would go somewhere else. You go, hey,
Speaker 1: how about we go and see that Julian guy again,
Speaker 1: And we would go there and Julian had no idea
Speaker 1: who he was. And you know, Julian wrote haiku poetry
Speaker 1: that was translated back into Japanese, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty tricky thing to do when you're from Brittany and
Speaker 1: you're writing in English. So you're from France writing in
Speaker 1: English and it's translated into Japanese. But my favorite one
Speaker 1: that he wrote because he never used any food, you know,
Speaker 1: that was brought to that my mom made. He lived
Speaker 1: completely from stuff you found on the street. You know,
Speaker 1: you lived by his words. So he knew the baker's shop.
Speaker 1: He wasn't stupid, so that would put out the bent classant,
Speaker 1: you know, on the morning and night, but it was
Speaker 1: still nice and warm. Then he would see the guy
Speaker 1: who always went to work and put his Sunday and
Speaker 1: the Times newspaper in the bin. They just pulled that
Speaker 1: out and eat the cross on. And he just lived
Speaker 1: like that for it. You know, even when she met him,
Speaker 1: he was doing that, so she was used to it.
Speaker 1: But he wrote this great hyper hiker, was this dunk
Speaker 1: to biscuit? Will it won't it reach my mouth? That's
Speaker 1: how much she was into, like just you know the
Speaker 1: moment when he wrote other great ones like between the
Speaker 1: Slabs of Gone Civilizations the grass grows right. So, but
Speaker 1: yet every now and he would write a fun one.
Speaker 1: You know, did he have a paying job. No, he didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, any paying job. But he didn't actually have
Speaker 1: any money or spend any money. And he didn't you know,
Speaker 1: he he would find everything. I would come around. He
Speaker 1: always called my mom poppet. Right, He's French, and if
Speaker 1: I were, oh, David, David, He's found an electronic chest
Speaker 1: set somebody had thrown away and plugged it in. It's
Speaker 1: having having a wonderful day playing against you know. He
Speaker 1: always had something going on. Okay, and your father did
Speaker 1: what for a living? Well, my father worked for the
Speaker 1: same firm that my mother wrote to him from. So
Speaker 1: this guy was a lovely guy called Allan J. Gray.
Speaker 1: And it was like a firm of accountants that would
Speaker 1: when I say accountants, they would do go into a
Speaker 1: little shop that sold everything from rubber bands to comics,
Speaker 1: and they had to take stock of the whole thing
Speaker 1: and help them work out their tacks and everything, and
Speaker 1: things like guys who would back their lorry into the
Speaker 1: sea and get coal out of the sea. So it
Speaker 1: was nobody's and then but it was covered in salt,
Speaker 1: just all sorts of mad stuff, right, So he worked
Speaker 1: his way up from being the tea boy there because
Speaker 1: when my mom married him, of course, the same guy,
Speaker 1: Allen J. Gray, who owned it, said, well, then we
Speaker 1: come and work in here a bit, and then you
Speaker 1: realize you're smart, so you kind of went up the ladder,
Speaker 1: said night school. A lot of people used to help
Speaker 1: each other outs, just had the war, you know, it
Speaker 1: was like they'd all come back, these soldiers, no jobs, nothing.
Speaker 1: And he worked his way all the way up to
Speaker 1: becoming a partner. Yeah, but a tiny little it wasn't
Speaker 1: even it was in seam Harbor, which is and even smaller,
Speaker 1: tiny little town, not even town or village, just outside
Speaker 1: of Sunderland. But it was a big thing for the
Speaker 1: family because we lived in a house like you know
Speaker 1: when you watch Beatles help you know, the houses are
Speaker 1: just a Coronation Street. Well, that's exactly where we lived,
Speaker 1: and to tell you through it, it was very happy
Speaker 1: little row of streets because the neighbors all had the
Speaker 1: doors open. It didn't matter if I I'd be like
Speaker 1: six or seven, I'd run into a neighbor three up
Speaker 1: for jam and bread. You know, just everybody just was helped.
Speaker 1: You know. The big thing my dad had an allotment
Speaker 1: where he had would grow new potatoes and then once
Speaker 1: every four months or something, the neighbors would all come
Speaker 1: around the house and eat new potatoes with butter and
Speaker 1: mint salt, and that was the big thing of the
Speaker 1: of the week, you know. Okay, so you grew up
Speaker 1: your other brother. Your brother is older. Yeah, my brother's
Speaker 1: five years older than me. And what is he doing
Speaker 1: right now? Well he's retired now. But before that, he
Speaker 1: started off with a bumpy start. He went to Liverpool
Speaker 1: University where he wanted to study law, but he wasn't
Speaker 1: sure what he wanted to do when he chose that.
Speaker 1: The first week there, he was in a fish and
Speaker 1: chip shop where a fight broke out and somebody was
Speaker 1: stabbed and murdered. So because it was a gang, he
Speaker 1: was then told we had to go back to Sundland
Speaker 1: and and he would have protection when he had appear
Speaker 1: in court as a witness. But he couldn't be in
Speaker 1: Liverpool anymore basically, so he was really depressed and he
Speaker 1: went on a job picking tomatoes in Guernsey and things
Speaker 1: like that, and then he eventually ended up going to
Speaker 1: a college in London and studying to be a teacher.
Speaker 1: But he didn't like that either. He was just always
Speaker 1: obsessed with film. I remember even when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: he was like I had acted in his film, you know,
Speaker 1: And there's some funny films my dad has. When my
Speaker 1: brother's got the camera and like my brother's given me
Speaker 1: like a toy cowboy gun. I'm about nine or something
Speaker 1: and he's like giving me my lines and everything, but
Speaker 1: I'm really annoyed. I'm gonna just see me run at
Speaker 1: the camera with the back of hit him on the
Speaker 1: head and the cameras falls over. So okay, so you're
Speaker 1: in Sunderland, you're growing up. Are you the type of
Speaker 1: kid who's popular? Do you have friends? How do you
Speaker 1: do in school? Um? Now I was when I to
Speaker 1: what's called the eleven plus they have a different name
Speaker 1: for here, you know, it's but it's basically when you're
Speaker 1: eleven and you do this exam and it decides where
Speaker 1: you go to and the same as when you would
Speaker 1: do it here for college. However, but you're only eleven
Speaker 1: years old, and my brother had already got into what
Speaker 1: was called Bead Grammar School for boys. Now Bead was
Speaker 1: named after the Venerable Bead, which even though I'm from
Speaker 1: the northeast of you know, Sunderland, like the churches and
Speaker 1: things or a thousand years old, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: so Bead was the first person to sort of like
Speaker 1: right down the official English language, you know. So if
Speaker 1: you go to Durham Cathedral which near there, he can
Speaker 1: see Venerable Beads writings and stuff. So he got into
Speaker 1: this school and it was a grammar school. Now grammar
Speaker 1: school that means your parents pay for it. No, No,
Speaker 1: grammar school is when you've got very good marks on
Speaker 1: your eleven plus so nobody pays for it. That's like
Speaker 1: a private schools. Just and when the Labor government came in,
Speaker 1: they scrapped grammar schools because I said it was unfair
Speaker 1: that you would have some people in a secondary school.
Speaker 1: But the grammar school had the better teachers or whatever. Well,
Speaker 1: what happened when I took my MN plus, I actually,
Speaker 1: even though I actually didn't know what I was doing,
Speaker 1: somehow I got very good marks. That was only about
Speaker 1: three kids chosen to go into a special school in
Speaker 1: durham Um that had you know, kids with you know,
Speaker 1: gifts in certain areas. And but I can't complained like
Speaker 1: mad for my parents to let me go to the
Speaker 1: same school as my brother. So they eventually gave in.
Speaker 1: And because my dad had now become a bit higher
Speaker 1: up in the accountancy firm, he thought, okay, I'll get
Speaker 1: a house where the fence joins that school, and then
Speaker 1: he usually clearly cut the sort of cut secretly on
Speaker 1: a Saturday, this kind of hole in the fence and
Speaker 1: put hinges on it that you couldn't see. So I
Speaker 1: didn't have to go all the way around all the streets.
Speaker 1: I could go out the back garden open the hole
Speaker 1: in the fence. You wanted to go to the grammar
Speaker 1: schools opposed to other school because because my brother went
Speaker 1: there and I was scared to go to Diramote was
Speaker 1: like ten miles away something. And well I made a
Speaker 1: bit of a mistake because like. Then a year later
Speaker 1: they changed the law and there was no grammar schools.
Speaker 1: Everything was called a comprehensive school. And so where we
Speaker 1: lived was right next to a very rough housing estate,
Speaker 1: like a project. And of course so all the kids
Speaker 1: who were that the grammar school just they weren't liked
Speaker 1: by their kids from the projects. And I was particularly
Speaker 1: not like because I was a bit sort of I
Speaker 1: don't know, probably eccentric or whatever. And I would do
Speaker 1: all sorts of things that I thought they might like,
Speaker 1: but there was always the wrong thing, you know what,
Speaker 1: I mean to try and befriend them. And then when
Speaker 1: I look back, and I actually wrote a book called
Speaker 1: The Business Playground where I put one of the things
Speaker 1: I were doing it as kind of the wrong thing
Speaker 1: to do. And I managed to make a sort of
Speaker 1: trick shop machine right that if you had both hands
Speaker 1: held of these two things, I would like wind the
Speaker 1: handle and it it would give them electric shop. Well, obviously
Speaker 1: that's not going to go down well. In my mind,
Speaker 1: I thought they'd enjoy it, but I must go back
Speaker 1: to my mom getting electric shot. I don't know. But
Speaker 1: so I got into you know, very sort of lonely
Speaker 1: kind of position there and The only thing I thought
Speaker 1: I could do is I joined all the sports teams.
Speaker 1: You know, I want to play everything, And so I
Speaker 1: was played soccer like three times on a Saturday for
Speaker 1: three different teams. I did pole vaulting. Sounds odd, but
Speaker 1: I did it and highest you clear, I don't know, Um,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Actually it's about sort of probably twice
Speaker 1: the height of me at the time. But the worst
Speaker 1: part about it was this wasn't like poll vaulting you've
Speaker 1: seen in the Olympics. You know where the pool bends.
Speaker 1: This is like the poll doesn't hardly budge, and it's
Speaker 1: like metal and it hits in the teeth, you know.
Speaker 1: So anyway, you know, during that soccer sort of I
Speaker 1: suppose obsession. I actually had my knee broken really badly,
Speaker 1: has put in hospital, and when surgeon spoke to me
Speaker 1: after the operation, he was really chirpy and he was going, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's be great. You know, you'll be up and walking
Speaker 1: in six months and probably playing football in a year.
Speaker 1: And I was like what And honestly, I I was
Speaker 1: so depressed. I had no idea. Um. I had to
Speaker 1: get my head around that, like what to do for
Speaker 1: six months? Can't walk? And my brother brought in and
Speaker 1: all you know when you go around some of his house,
Speaker 1: and I've got a Spanish guitar, dusty with castanets, and
Speaker 1: nobody's ever played it. My grandma had one of those,
Speaker 1: my grandmother, and he brought it in with about three
Speaker 1: strings on it, and I was like, what am I
Speaker 1: going to do with this? I wasn't even interested in music,
Speaker 1: even though my brother had come home once and seen
Speaker 1: seen the Beatles play at the sound An Empire and
Speaker 1: was trying to explain it. I was just saying, so,
Speaker 1: and did your parents play music in the house. Nope?
Speaker 1: My mom when she ran about this time, my mom,
Speaker 1: you know, had come back from the mental hospital and
Speaker 1: being gone, and she had discovered Ray Charles. But now
Speaker 1: I realized why she kept playing take these Chains from
Speaker 1: my Heart, Set Me Free right, which she played over
Speaker 1: and over again till I was give us a break.
Speaker 1: But but what happened was in the hospital I realized
Speaker 1: I could pick out a chun on one string really easy,
Speaker 1: like a workout at tune. So when I got home,
Speaker 1: my brother had another guitar, but he'd gone off to
Speaker 1: pick tomatoes and then was going to college, and so
Speaker 1: I picked up this other guitar, and the guy around
Speaker 1: the corner to me, his father was in a Japanese
Speaker 1: prison of war camp and he stayed alive by he
Speaker 1: made a guitar out of the floorboards or some wood
Speaker 1: and wires and things to entertain his you know, other guys.
Speaker 1: But I think most of them were tortured to death, right,
Speaker 1: so he was one of the few survivors. And funnily enough,
Speaker 1: his son just told me today's dad was just a
Speaker 1: hundred and one, was still talking and doing talks actually,
Speaker 1: and things like that. But he I realized he played
Speaker 1: this guitar. So I went round his house and he
Speaker 1: was really pleased, like, oh, good, well done. Ka, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll show you how you do a few things. But
Speaker 1: I didn't realize he didn't really play the guitar in
Speaker 1: normal way. He just invented a tuning and was just
Speaker 1: putting his finger across it and growing up and down,
Speaker 1: and he kind of tried to invent quasi Japanese English
Speaker 1: things so the guards wouldn't sort, you know, be too
Speaker 1: tough on him. And so I went away from that thinking, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll try and play that. And then my brother and
Speaker 1: my cousin simultaneously. My brother was now eighteen and he'd
Speaker 1: got into blues music, and my cousin, who I know,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it was our family. But at the
Speaker 1: age of about thirteen, this is in Sunland, where I'm
Speaker 1: trying to talk in a much more sort of like
Speaker 1: an accent that's not too strong, say my normal accent.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't really understand. Can you do it for the
Speaker 1: last a little bit? Sure? What do you want me
Speaker 1: to say? Continue the story with your normal accent? All right?
Speaker 1: Well me cousin Ian who lived in South Sas Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: back to English. Okay, I didn't even actually lived in Southwick,
Speaker 1: but my cousin who lived in a littlaria called Southwick
Speaker 1: with my mom's you know, the son of my mom's
Speaker 1: non twin sister. And she also had a tiny little
Speaker 1: shop that's sold newspapers and the stuff called snuff that
Speaker 1: you put up your nose a bit like coke, money
Speaker 1: legal and and so I don't know why, but about
Speaker 1: the age of twelve thirty and he started speaking with
Speaker 1: a heavy Memphis twang. Right now. He used to get
Speaker 1: beaten up every day for this because in Sunderland, if
Speaker 1: he suddenly got to school and you go, how y'all
Speaker 1: do and the like shut the funk up, like bum
Speaker 1: bum bum, you know. And he he just wouldn't stop,
Speaker 1: like you, just wouldn't stop all the time until he
Speaker 1: got to about seventeen and eighteen and he went to
Speaker 1: Memphis and he lives there still. I hope he's listening, yeah,
Speaker 1: and he actually when I made the film Deep Blues
Speaker 1: in one, you know, I went out filmed R. L.
Speaker 1: Burn Side and all Jessim a Hemphill and all these
Speaker 1: amazing players, um with Robert Palmer doing the narration, who
Speaker 1: wrote the book Deep Blues. And Ian was really helpful
Speaker 1: because most of these people obviously didn't have a telephone,
Speaker 1: well none of them out a telephone, and nobody had
Speaker 1: a particularly easy way to get to their place, which
Speaker 1: was up a dirt track somewhere. And then it was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: when you can meet like the oil man, who was
Speaker 1: this other blues player at this post office at so
Speaker 1: and so, you know, it was like so complicated. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so Ian sent me and my brother a box from Memphis,
Speaker 1: and honestly, when it arrived, it was the first thing
Speaker 1: we really seen from America. It was just an American stamp,
Speaker 1: you know what about six stamps on it, and it
Speaker 1: was so exotic. So we just looked at the box
Speaker 1: for about an hour and then we opened it and
Speaker 1: it was covered in um right very I can't even
Speaker 1: explain because when you're from Sunday and everything is so rough.
Speaker 1: So I had this kind of soft tissue paper. So
Speaker 1: we sort of we're touching that for a bit, and
Speaker 1: then we owned it and there was these Levi corduroy
Speaker 1: jeans in it, and who was like, oh my god, like,
Speaker 1: so I've got these jeans out. But then under that
Speaker 1: he had put Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson King the
Speaker 1: Delta Blues scene like these albums. So I put them
Speaker 1: on and when nobody was in, you know, my leg
Speaker 1: up and I was like it sounded like something from
Speaker 1: out of space, like, but I also sounded like my
Speaker 1: neighbor two doors down who was singing half in Japanese
Speaker 1: and half in English with his guitar to into a
Speaker 1: weird chord. So I started to sort of like play
Speaker 1: blue stuff in this called you know tune, and they
Speaker 1: really I mean our old burnside if he plays jumper
Speaker 1: on the line he's literally just playing e ju Jun
Speaker 1: chunk junk junk Jun didn't play, you know. And and
Speaker 1: even the early blues you know, where they're just a
Speaker 1: one string pulled across and they hit it and barron
Speaker 1: out and then they started using a slide. So I
Speaker 1: got a wine bottle or a beer bottle, and there
Speaker 1: was this guy called stuff and Grossman had a book
Speaker 1: about how to play the bottleneck guitar, which was in
Speaker 1: this music shop in Sunderlin, and you said, okay, you
Speaker 1: put your wine bottle under the tap, you pull a
Speaker 1: string around the neck like so it gets hot, and
Speaker 1: then put under the cool tap, hit it and it
Speaker 1: fell off. You stick it on your finger. My share,
Speaker 1: I wish I brought my guitar and a slide with
Speaker 1: me actually, and you then can actually play this bluesy slide.
Speaker 1: So once I got that going on, I was that
Speaker 1: was it. It was the same obsession as soccer. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to learn every way of playing blues music.
Speaker 1: And then my brother brought the first Bob Dylan album
Speaker 1: and the second Bob Dylan album and then I was
Speaker 1: like reading the words of it. I was like fucking
Speaker 1: he hang on a minute. And then I realized he
Speaker 1: was playing some kind of weird blues stuff, quasi blues,
Speaker 1: with like these amazing lyrics that were dealing with stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, in a different way, because a lot of
Speaker 1: blues music, as you know, was just trying to cope
Speaker 1: with the pain of being in the garden fields and
Speaker 1: slavery and and and then drinking sort of like neat
Speaker 1: alcohol and white lightning and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So that got me really interested in songs. And I
Speaker 1: know it as a whole because I was delayed in
Speaker 1: being interested because I was in the soccer. I kind
Speaker 1: of got into the Beatles when they had already started
Speaker 1: to sort of listen to Bob Dylan themselves, and then
Speaker 1: the Beach Boys are listened to the Beatles and vice first.
Speaker 1: So and I was like suddenly in a an amazing
Speaker 1: library wealth of stuff. I could hardly take it all in,
Speaker 1: so I was trying to learn it all at once.
Speaker 1: And that's why I became, I suppose, so eclectic in
Speaker 1: my musical taste, which I brought into your rhythmics, was
Speaker 1: you know, he suddenly electronic, it's R and B and
Speaker 1: then it's and Annie also who has trained to be
Speaker 1: a classical flute player and harpsichord at the Royal Academy Music.
Speaker 1: Hated it because it was so it was like going
Speaker 1: to school and competitive about you know, how ready is
Speaker 1: your neck from playing the violin, how much to practice
Speaker 1: all stuff. But she had really been obsessed with hearing
Speaker 1: Tamla motown. When you're in Scotland or Sunderland, are saying
Speaker 1: on a Friday night, there might be one place all
Speaker 1: the girls put the handbags in the middle and dance
Speaker 1: around a bit like Northern soul knights, and they play
Speaker 1: Tamla motown music. So our sort of fusion of the
Speaker 1: different worlds that we've learned meant and it could suddenly
Speaker 1: play classical keyboard. Oh, she could sing like a sort
Speaker 1: of Tamla motown soul singer. But I also need then
Speaker 1: had to make that sound, you know. And so and
Speaker 1: of course her stories not too dissimilar to mine. You know.
Speaker 1: In Aberdeen, you know, it was also very tough, hard
Speaker 1: working people who had had a lot taken away from them. So, okay,
Speaker 1: so do you graduate from school? Oh? No, I mean
Speaker 1: I ran away from school in this incredible mad thing happened.
Speaker 1: There was these guys called the furies from Ireland, a
Speaker 1: family of gypsies or of folks singing. And I started
Speaker 1: to go to folk clubs and I'd learned some Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan songs and some blues songs. And I would stand
Speaker 1: there outside and ask if I could play in the
Speaker 1: girl nor Son you know, you kind of come in,
Speaker 1: you know, because I looked about twelve and I was
Speaker 1: about fifteen. And then one guy says, you can come in,
Speaker 1: but you can only play two songs. That's understandable, right, okay,
Speaker 1: So I mean in English, and so I sang, um,
Speaker 1: it's all right, mom, why bleed or something my favorite
Speaker 1: and some blues song and with a bottle, which was
Speaker 1: people were like, I don't think they've seen it right,
Speaker 1: So it was that was kind of my trick to
Speaker 1: get in, and then I became regular at playing there.
Speaker 1: Then I got to see these other people coming through
Speaker 1: and they were like amazing, Bert Yea and David John
Speaker 1: like all these John Fay like okay, the actual people.
Speaker 1: They were the actual people. And then because there was
Speaker 1: folk clubs in London and then he wanted to do
Speaker 1: a tour, you know, and so and so I just
Speaker 1: got completely bonkers about playing the guitar and getting better
Speaker 1: at it. And so once I played at these folk clubs,
Speaker 1: um I started to understand like, Okay, there's the Kinks,
Speaker 1: and he's written a song Walter Loose Sunset, and there's
Speaker 1: this kind of writing in this kind of writing, and
Speaker 1: I just I just was so obsessed with learning everything
Speaker 1: that I would literally my fingers would be almost bleeding
Speaker 1: in the house. I used to put them in there
Speaker 1: vinegar at the end of the night to sort of
Speaker 1: get them tougher so that I could play all day.
Speaker 1: My dad once took me to the doctor because he
Speaker 1: thought one side of my chest was getting sort of
Speaker 1: concave from pressing the guitar against her all the time, right,
Speaker 1: And I just wouldn't be seeing without a guitar around town.
Speaker 1: So I was getting a bit older, I'd run away
Speaker 1: from dropped out of school. I would just go and
Speaker 1: hang out in the guys shop, the one boutique in
Speaker 1: Sunderland called West One, and they would let me sort
Speaker 1: of hide in the back or and I just played
Speaker 1: a guitar and now eventually hitch to London, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was the sort of gradual escape. Okay, then you
Speaker 1: end up making a deal with Rocket Records. What happens
Speaker 1: between running away from home and ending up with Alton
Speaker 1: John's company, right, Well, because I'd start playing guitar and
Speaker 1: got the folk clubs, there was a sort of supply teacher,
Speaker 1: like a temporary teacher, had been to our school just
Speaker 1: before I left, and he played the guitar and so
Speaker 1: he started to show me some real folk like Pentangle
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff um Fairport convention. So we
Speaker 1: started playing together. Then we met two other kids from
Speaker 1: Sunderland and we started to play the four of us
Speaker 1: for acoustic guitars and was like Crosby Steels, Nation and
Speaker 1: young kind of thing. And we sent a tape to
Speaker 1: London and to Lionel Conway, who was stired from the
Speaker 1: other day he was he was running Ireland music for
Speaker 1: Chris Blackwell and he thought was really interesting. And then
Speaker 1: he realized that one of the kids brothers played drums
Speaker 1: for Elton John, and he gave it to him and
Speaker 1: I don't think he could believe it was his really
Speaker 1: younger brother, right, So anyway, this is very funny. Him
Speaker 1: and Mickey grab him from coaches, came around our by
Speaker 1: now we were in a squat in Sunderland. They came
Speaker 1: around to see if we really did could play, and
Speaker 1: so they brought with them from London this weed that
Speaker 1: was like really strong like and we'd all been able
Speaker 1: to buy like pound deals of Moroccan Harsh or something
Speaker 1: like spread amongst like twenty joints for fifty people, and
Speaker 1: they rolled them just straight like that and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I try some of this. So we did, and all
Speaker 1: that happened was we tuned up for two hours in
Speaker 1: front of them, all right, that's all we could do.
Speaker 1: But they didn't seem the mind. They were just like
Speaker 1: smiling and listening and they must have went back and
Speaker 1: said they're good, but I think they don't remember anything
Speaker 1: about it. So we all went out of London and
Speaker 1: the next thing we knew we were signed by Chris
Speaker 1: Blackwell Island Music. And then suddenly about honestly, about three
Speaker 1: weeks later, we were signed to Rocket Records and we
Speaker 1: were told we're going to get this what's called an advance,
Speaker 1: and we're going to go on to studio and make
Speaker 1: an album. And when we went into Rocket Records, it
Speaker 1: was like walking into a very expensive perfumer. You know,
Speaker 1: Elton had now been quite successful and everything was you know,
Speaker 1: he was just giving everybody present. So the little kids
Speaker 1: working on receptions smelt fantastic and everybody had all the
Speaker 1: sofas were like luxurious velvet sofas, and we're from Sundland
Speaker 1: and went, fuck, you know, we've landed in like sort
Speaker 1: of like it's like Pinocchio in the Bad Boys Land,
Speaker 1: you know. So they gave us this money and of
Speaker 1: course we didn't understand anything. We've never had a manager.
Speaker 1: We didn't understand anything at all. So I bought four
Speaker 1: acoustic guitars on Denmark Street in a day, and one
Speaker 1: thousand capsules of mescaline and I think half a pound
Speaker 1: in wake. This is of hash like what you would
Speaker 1: call hasher but yeah, like solid that's in a day, right.
Speaker 1: So we had this rented house in Tottenham and we
Speaker 1: invited our friends down from some of them like hey,
Speaker 1: you know this is happening, you know. So they came
Speaker 1: down and everybody was like hallucinating, and I think I
Speaker 1: brought my girlfriend down, you know, she was only seventeen,
Speaker 1: was a nurse that had had been working at the
Speaker 1: same mental hospital that my mom was, and how we
Speaker 1: ended up getting married and eighteen who whoaa. And so
Speaker 1: when Rocket Records sent somebody around, I think it was
Speaker 1: Stuart Epps or Swepts. He used to call just knocking
Speaker 1: our daughter to see how we were doing with our
Speaker 1: demos for the record. I think he reported back like that,
Speaker 1: you know, we better help do something because there was
Speaker 1: just people lying around or reading the carpet, you know,
Speaker 1: like everything was just nuts. And so they went, oh God,
Speaker 1: if we'd better put some order into this. So they
Speaker 1: got a guy called Ian Matthews for me and Matthew's
Speaker 1: second comfort to go on the studio with us. But
Speaker 1: that day, for some reason, I decided and this is
Speaker 1: because honestly, well I'm talking about going really out there
Speaker 1: on hallucinogenics, not like today is awful mixed up terrible
Speaker 1: drugs that I would advise nobody to take. This was
Speaker 1: like pure you know, ousley lsd on blotting paper and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. That. Um. I don't even know how
Speaker 1: we got to the studio, but I had somehow had
Speaker 1: an upside down paintbrush on and a kilt so it
Speaker 1: looked like a sporn, you know, that paintbrush, and and
Speaker 1: a tamas shanty like a hat, and a whole robe
Speaker 1: with like things and I couldn't play, you know, probably
Speaker 1: or anything. And there was the teacher who was a
Speaker 1: bit older than us. He was the only one that
Speaker 1: could drive and was saying I think he was pulling
Speaker 1: his hair out, and this guy Ian Matthews gave up
Speaker 1: after a day. He's just gonna no chance, right. But
Speaker 1: eventually I think it took us about a year and
Speaker 1: we ended up with Dave Mattis from fair Pubvention drumming.
Speaker 1: In a few we managed to a record, which was
Speaker 1: a miracle, but it it It didn't really, I don't
Speaker 1: think we actually understood that we've made a record or anything.
Speaker 1: And then we went on tour with Dalton supporting him,
Speaker 1: you know, in huge places. Now we've only played in
Speaker 1: a folk club now. The band was called Long Dancer.
Speaker 1: And the reason we were called Long Dancer was a
Speaker 1: mistake anyway, because Ian Hunter from What the Hoople, we
Speaker 1: were all sitting on the floor getting stoned in Ireland
Speaker 1: music because when you went to get your weekly wage
Speaker 1: from this lovely guy I want to say his name,
Speaker 1: had long blonde hair down to halfway down his before
Speaker 1: his waist. He always would ask us to go in
Speaker 1: one by one and then he he would put the
Speaker 1: money there and then there was grass there and like
Speaker 1: Speeder coake there and something else, and like you would say, like,
Speaker 1: so what do you want, Like you want like a
Speaker 1: hundred pounds, so you want fifty pound and some of
Speaker 1: and I remember my and now then wife at the
Speaker 1: time was like, now don't get this, get the h Yeah.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so we would go in this little room
Speaker 1: in Ireland music. Everybody went in there, Ian Hunter, everybody,
Speaker 1: you know, John Martin, click the money. Of course, We're
Speaker 1: going this little room and get completely stoned. And then
Speaker 1: we were trying to think of a band name and
Speaker 1: we were passing a joint around and there was Ian
Speaker 1: Hunter said that was a long dancer, meaning it made
Speaker 1: your lungs burn, and we all went, oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's such a great name. That's it, that's it, and
Speaker 1: he just looked confused. And the next thing when we
Speaker 1: saw him, we had the album and he was falling
Speaker 1: around laughing because we go long dancing anyway. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So you went on the road with yeah, and we
Speaker 1: ended up, you know, in in playing large places in
Speaker 1: England and then cycle stadium things in Italy. Now this
Speaker 1: was very overwhelming for us. I don't remember much about
Speaker 1: it until mostly after the gigs. I remember we had
Speaker 1: to stay in our dress room for ages while the
Speaker 1: mob counted the money out with John John Reid before
Speaker 1: were lawd out. So it was like really annoying because
Speaker 1: like Nigel used to go mad because he was dripping
Speaker 1: in sweat and all this kind of stuff. Anyway, we're
Speaker 1: all on the bus with Elton, you see, it's just
Speaker 1: one bus, and then towards the end of the tour,
Speaker 1: it's a funny thing happened that Now I was in
Speaker 1: Elton's room and there was about thirty people in there,
Speaker 1: all different kinds. Some people looked like there were ballet dancers,
Speaker 1: guys and different characters. It looked like it was like
Speaker 1: a sort of weird movie. And I was just reading
Speaker 1: American comics that Elton had got me because my grandmother
Speaker 1: used to sell them. And he's very sort of generous,
Speaker 1: so like, oh yeah, you let these things here you go,
Speaker 1: And I think it was his favorite thing to do,
Speaker 1: was like give gifts away. So I eventually the party,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was a party of whatever.
Speaker 1: It was the top of the Hilton Hotel in Rome,
Speaker 1: at the time, it looked like it was just sort
Speaker 1: of very strange. So I went in the bathroom when
Speaker 1: I came out with a kind of a towel on
Speaker 1: my head and a towel robe, and I did this
Speaker 1: kind of pirouetting kind of dance. And then I sat
Speaker 1: down again to reading my comics, and this guy said
Speaker 1: to me, Hey, kids, come over here. And he had
Speaker 1: a very strong Italian accent, and he had two of
Speaker 1: the most beautiful girls sitting with him, and and he goes, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm making a movie and that thing you just did
Speaker 1: that it was really interesting. I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: want to be in it, And he told me the
Speaker 1: name of the movie. And so I rang my then
Speaker 1: wife because about nineteen and she's had to answered the
Speaker 1: phone in the hallway of a house, you know, there's
Speaker 1: one phone, and I explained to her, look, I might
Speaker 1: have to stay on a bit longer to be in
Speaker 1: this movie. Called her, and she didn't say anything for
Speaker 1: a while, and then she just said get home anyway.
Speaker 1: Years later was my wife and Nuska i'm married to now.
Speaker 1: When we were first going out, I took her to
Speaker 1: a meal in Hotel cost in Paris, right, But sitting there,
Speaker 1: this guy kept staring at us and and then he
Speaker 1: came over and he said, hey, hey, aren't you that
Speaker 1: kid that was in the room without this and that?
Speaker 1: And I was like, I didn't really remember much about it.
Speaker 1: And my wife when he went away, said, she went
Speaker 1: blind me. You know Roman Polanski, And it was Roman
Speaker 1: Polanski who was in the room at the time, But
Speaker 1: I had no idea. So basically I'm describing a story
Speaker 1: of naivety and it's just like not knowing anything that
Speaker 1: was going to what are you star struck? I wasn't
Speaker 1: struck at all. I was just completely so you're fine,
Speaker 1: and this is Alton, you know, no big deal. I
Speaker 1: was just just I was completely unaware of what was
Speaker 1: going on. The only time I got a shot that's
Speaker 1: when we walked out on the stage at the Cycle Stadium.
Speaker 1: But for some reason, I've ould always been I don't know,
Speaker 1: interested in what's going on. And there was a lot
Speaker 1: going on basically that was interesting. And also you know,
Speaker 1: it was like really stoned and like it was all
Speaker 1: it was all very exciting the time, you know, like
Speaker 1: in music, and but then after that obviously was like
Speaker 1: HiT's sort of harsh reality, completely broke. I didn't know
Speaker 1: how to get a job or do anything apart from
Speaker 1: play the guitar. So this thing had started, and this
Speaker 1: guy up the road told me about it called Camden
Speaker 1: Lock Market, and so I don't know how I managed
Speaker 1: to do this, but I decided I would have sell records,
Speaker 1: vinyl records, because I knew about that. I can unlock market,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know how to get the records to sell.
Speaker 1: Then I met this other guy said well, somebody you'll
Speaker 1: give your records to sell, sailor return and I went
Speaker 1: down there and it was Trojan Records, right old amazing
Speaker 1: reggae records. And so I had all these Trojan records
Speaker 1: and I had a market. Of course, my my stall
Speaker 1: bit came surrounded by huge clouds of smoke. In course,
Speaker 1: Rastafarian London kind of immigrants too. I made great friends
Speaker 1: with and that led me on another musical trail where
Speaker 1: this guy came to the store and he was in
Speaker 1: a bank called Asabisa. And as I always had a
Speaker 1: little guitar behind my store, is that you said you
Speaker 1: should come around my apartment and I went there was
Speaker 1: all Africa and made amazing African food and they were
Speaker 1: playing these rhythms and I was trying to play, and
Speaker 1: then this guy showed me something, so I learned to
Speaker 1: play a little bit this criss cross rhythms on guitar,
Speaker 1: and I was just I was always on this sort
Speaker 1: of musical exploration journey. And and I went from there
Speaker 1: two somehow getting asked if i'd meet this girl who
Speaker 1: had formed a sort of feminist um kind of political
Speaker 1: activist group, theater group, and wanted somebody to work on
Speaker 1: with music, And so I went there and I just
Speaker 1: went bang the day, walked in, fell in love with
Speaker 1: the lead girl called Judith Alderson, and just to start
Speaker 1: for a second part, did it in with lawn Dancer.
Speaker 1: It's sort of imploded because one of the members, I think,
Speaker 1: had a bit of a nervous breakdown when we were
Speaker 1: in Germany and we were meant to launch the record
Speaker 1: and he was we although he's going to jump off
Speaker 1: the roof of the hotel, and it all became very
Speaker 1: traumatic and there was obviously we couldn't really carry on,
Speaker 1: and then we tried to do another album with it.
Speaker 1: A couple of other guys joined the band, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't the same thing. We went all from Sunderer anymore,
Speaker 1: and it was nobody had any sort of heart in it,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of just fizzled out. Okay, Rocket Record said, fine,
Speaker 1: you're done, We're moving on. I don't remember even talking
Speaker 1: about Rocket Records. I just remember the band actually breaking up. Okay,
Speaker 1: So now you go to this theater group, you fall
Speaker 1: in love with this woman. Yeah, And she was an
Speaker 1: extraordinary character and still is actually just still taught by
Speaker 1: her email and she had been through a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: but basically, to cut a long story short, she had
Speaker 1: formed this theater group and she had a little girl
Speaker 1: as well, and I moved in with her and I
Speaker 1: had to tell my of course Sunderland, which didn't go
Speaker 1: down well. But I still taught to her as always
Speaker 1: still friends. So um. Then we went to WOD and
Speaker 1: I realized this was just a very unusual outfit and
Speaker 1: what she was saying and what they were putting across
Speaker 1: the music was it was kind of pre punk, but
Speaker 1: it was kind of punky cabaret, weird theater. And but
Speaker 1: then we had a massive car crash. A friend of
Speaker 1: mine had brought over to help drive a car, and Judith,
Speaker 1: her name was and the little girl was Amy was
Speaker 1: in the seat behind. I was in the front. I
Speaker 1: drove all the way from the sort of docking I
Speaker 1: think in Amsterdam or Rotterdam. We rented a car and
Speaker 1: then we drove all the way to a part of Germany.
Speaker 1: Then my friend took over from Sunderland. He'd never driven
Speaker 1: in Europe, and just pulled the wrong way somehow onto
Speaker 1: the order Barn at night. So those cars coming towards
Speaker 1: us about eighty and I just took a huge line
Speaker 1: of speed when we in the bathroom. So when we
Speaker 1: pulled out the wrong way, I think it was the
Speaker 1: only person for a split millisecond realized, yeah, we've turned
Speaker 1: the wrong way, right. I think I said it out loud,
Speaker 1: But did you know something? Yeah, I is so full
Speaker 1: of amazing sort of connections to your brain and neurons
Speaker 1: or that if your I sees that something terrible is
Speaker 1: going to happen, like an accident, it's immediately shuts down
Speaker 1: loads of the part of the brain, so you don't
Speaker 1: remember it. That's why most people come out of a
Speaker 1: car accident and I don't remember what happened. I just
Speaker 1: remember waking up in hospital. So I have a bit
Speaker 1: of that, but I do remember a few flashes of things.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, it was a terrible accident. It was
Speaker 1: on the front page of the German newspaper, you know,
Speaker 1: and you uh, I mean, honestly, some of the things
Speaker 1: that sort of happened in your life that sort of
Speaker 1: come around again, like the one I said about Roman
Speaker 1: Polanski years later. Incredible because I didn't see the little
Speaker 1: girl Amy for years. You know, she was only about
Speaker 1: three until I was going to the little opening of
Speaker 1: my friends, tiny little restaurant in Camden Town and this
Speaker 1: girl came up with some canopies and she said, oh, listen,
Speaker 1: you won't remember me, but I remember you. And I said,
Speaker 1: oh no, I don't remember by now. I was like
Speaker 1: very lovely nineteen year old girls twenty one or something.
Speaker 1: Said I'm Amy. Remember I went flying out the car
Speaker 1: window in Germany. It's like fuck but m yeah, so
Speaker 1: so Jude and I. We sort of didn't break up.
Speaker 1: Was more was smashed up, you know, the car accident.
Speaker 1: Her leg was, her knee was broken, and like all
Speaker 1: these things happened, and I ended up in crouch End,
Speaker 1: and I used to live in crouch And before with
Speaker 1: my wife. But I've given now given that flat to
Speaker 1: my mother, and um. I was sort of sleeping on
Speaker 1: the floor of my mother's place, and I didn't realize
Speaker 1: I had punctured my lung. I thought I had terrible
Speaker 1: sort of like something wrong when I breathed in, and
Speaker 1: so I was a bit messed up. I went to
Speaker 1: the hospital and they did that awful thing when you
Speaker 1: lung collapses, where you have to be awake while the
Speaker 1: doctor pokes a needle into your chest well, but stops
Speaker 1: before it puncts us the lung and then sucks the
Speaker 1: air at so your lung can reinflate. Not the nicest
Speaker 1: of feelings, but so that sort of temporarily fixed it.
Speaker 1: And one day I was just walking up the road
Speaker 1: and crouching and the guy who used to be in
Speaker 1: the stall next to me at the mark Kid sort
Speaker 1: of knocked on the window of the inside of a
Speaker 1: shop and he was decorating it and he said, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: come in. So I went in. He said, nobody knows this,
Speaker 1: but I'm squatting in this shop and I've got the
Speaker 1: house upstairs, and he's calling the shop Spanish Moon after
Speaker 1: a little foot so and he said, hey, you know
Speaker 1: let's celebrate or something. So we had a bottle of
Speaker 1: Jack Daniels and we had a little glass, and he
Speaker 1: was sitting in the shop window talking about everything that
Speaker 1: had happened to him and to me, and he said,
Speaker 1: you never guess what. I met this girl the other
Speaker 1: day and she is working in this sort of like
Speaker 1: health food restaurant, and but she plays this weird old
Speaker 1: harmonium and sings a kind of a bit like Joni
Speaker 1: Mitchell kind of songs. Do you want to meet it?
Speaker 1: I think you would get away with I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: why not? So we drove up in his car, and
Speaker 1: at the time I think I had sort of like
Speaker 1: spiky turquoise hair and sort of you know, just look
Speaker 1: generally not right for the restaurant. So the manager wouldn't
Speaker 1: let us in. But so I kept sort of breathing
Speaker 1: on the window, and every time I saw the girl
Speaker 1: who I was right now, I love you backwards in
Speaker 1: the steam and all that stuff. And then the manager
Speaker 1: was going up to her obviously like like do you
Speaker 1: know these people? And so when she came out, it
Speaker 1: was Annie. Of course, when she came back, said what
Speaker 1: the hell are you doing? And I'm nearly getting the
Speaker 1: sack here and Paul says, oh, no, you should meet
Speaker 1: my friend Davey plays music too and everything, and we
Speaker 1: started talking. We actually moved in together that day. That
Speaker 1: day that day, yeah, we sort of, well you moved
Speaker 1: into her apartment. This is about six o'clock and he
Speaker 1: and well, she had a tiny room slight of this really,
Speaker 1: with a harmonium in it, in a single bed, and
Speaker 1: we moved in there. And then the next day we
Speaker 1: are she was she ors was a bit a little anxious,
Speaker 1: kind of panic attack, and I said, well, let's go
Speaker 1: and see my mom, right, So we went in a
Speaker 1: double decker bus to Crouch End and my mom was
Speaker 1: torn to her and she's feeling a bit better. And
Speaker 1: then my mom says, but actually I'm going somewhere else
Speaker 1: for a week where you can stay here. So we
Speaker 1: stayed there in my mom's flat, which is in Creach End,
Speaker 1: And then we realized Paul had got all the house
Speaker 1: above the record store. So we went to see Paul
Speaker 1: and said he it's all right if we like live
Speaker 1: upstairs there. He says, well, I'm going to live upstairs
Speaker 1: there as well, but it's got three floors. So we did,
Speaker 1: and this became like a landmark in creat end. We
Speaker 1: just an odd place. It's full of musicians and artists,
Speaker 1: and it was journalists they you know, Julie Burchill and
Speaker 1: all these people. All she would actually come in and
Speaker 1: sell all the records being given to review, and like
Speaker 1: it was just you know, Adamant was at art college
Speaker 1: up the road in Genesis pr Age and Chris and
Speaker 1: so the first track with Annie and I released was
Speaker 1: actually me and her and Chrissie Cozy Fanny t d
Speaker 1: from Robbing Gristle. So we became in world and all
Speaker 1: this I kind of art cred there and we were
Speaker 1: really happy because it was like but we didn't write
Speaker 1: any songs together or separately for the whole time we
Speaker 1: lived there. We just were in another band with Pete
Speaker 1: Combs called the Tourists, and we played all his songs. Okay,
Speaker 1: Pete Tourists had a deal with Virgin Did they have
Speaker 1: that deal before you got in the beginning around? It
Speaker 1: wasn't with Virtune. Maybe it came out through that later
Speaker 1: here or something, but Tourists, we haven't. We signed with
Speaker 1: a tiny label which was a folk label called Transatlantic,
Speaker 1: which was Fairport, conventional and then it was called Logo,
Speaker 1: changed its name and then they sold themselves to our Cia.
Speaker 1: So we ended up being you know, inherited twice and
Speaker 1: we had some kind of success, but it was really
Speaker 1: not from what we wanted. We just lacking about in
Speaker 1: the studio and did a version of I Only Want
Speaker 1: to be with You only speeded up with like ricking
Speaker 1: back a twelve string and you know, the birds meats
Speaker 1: punk kind of thing, and that was a huge hit
Speaker 1: in Britain and Australia and some places. Did you make
Speaker 1: any money? Well, we sold a lot of albums and
Speaker 1: but you know that didn't mean to say you made
Speaker 1: any money. Still, I'm asking you what are you living on?
Speaker 1: We we well we lived together, which saved a lot
Speaker 1: of money when we were on tour and everything. And
Speaker 1: you know we had a little wage through the management
Speaker 1: company who got the money and which is years later
Speaker 1: my dad, you see, who trained to be an accountant.
Speaker 1: They did the best advice ever when Annie and I
Speaker 1: got a contract as rhythmics, and he said that I've
Speaker 1: read the whole bloody thing. He said, it's all gibberish
Speaker 1: and I can't make head and the tail of any
Speaker 1: of it. Apart from I advise you one thing, like
Speaker 1: they give you the money and then you pay the managers. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty smart. Yeah, and so we did. So we
Speaker 1: formed a company called d n A Limited David Annie,
Speaker 1: and the money went there and then we paid people
Speaker 1: from there. Okay, so you're on the road with tours,
Speaker 1: you go through multiple ownerships of the label, but you're
Speaker 1: not doing your original material. Now. We we weren't playing
Speaker 1: me and Annie's songs. We were doing Peter songs. He
Speaker 1: was a great songwriter and we we felt actually that
Speaker 1: we couldn't even try to compete with His songwriting was
Speaker 1: very good. But Pete was you know, very addictive personality
Speaker 1: in every way, and it became worse and worse, you know,
Speaker 1: to heroin and he couldn't get hero and he had
Speaker 1: to drink a bottle of like jin sing whiskey or something.
Speaker 1: It was like really sad seeing it go down, but
Speaker 1: we realized just couldn't carry on. We're in Australia. Pete
Speaker 1: had got lost and you know, you kind of went
Speaker 1: somewhere looking for heroin and oh deed and that to
Speaker 1: manager had to find him and and it was it
Speaker 1: was just obvious that we couldn't carry on. So on
Speaker 1: the way back from Australia on a plane, Annie and
Speaker 1: I was sitting next to each other, and we've been
Speaker 1: through all of this stuff, and on the plane we
Speaker 1: said maybe we should sort of live separately, right, And
Speaker 1: we both just decided it and sort of went to sleep.
Speaker 1: And then when we got there, we think, well, to
Speaker 1: know how we do this because we haven't got any money.
Speaker 1: The reason you want to live separately is, well, we've
Speaker 1: been like three or four years not only living together,
Speaker 1: but being going around and round in the van like
Speaker 1: it was just seven. We thought we'd caught court Nutcle
Speaker 1: had something called folly at which is like when two
Speaker 1: people are together all the time constantly. And when we
Speaker 1: went with the bandit se would just be us two
Speaker 1: was nobody else's company because we liked it. But you
Speaker 1: can become sort of a little bit sort of on
Speaker 1: the outside of society or reality or whatever. You're in
Speaker 1: your own world, right, So we decided to live separately,
Speaker 1: but the romance was going to continue. Well, this is
Speaker 1: when it gets complicated because and he's separately but and
Speaker 1: he then just moved upstairs, right, so they and she
Speaker 1: was upstairs and then that didn't really work, so she said,
Speaker 1: moved to the end of the street. And then this
Speaker 1: went on throughout the eighties. I bought a house when
Speaker 1: we got some money. She bought a house in the
Speaker 1: next street. Because we became rhythmics. See, so we would together,
Speaker 1: stuck together like glue. So even if we were separate,
Speaker 1: as you know, a couple, we were every day together,
Speaker 1: like working on our staff and touring. And how long
Speaker 1: did it maintain a romance? Well, you know, like all
Speaker 1: of those complicated breaking up on and it just sort
Speaker 1: of it was like a sort of slow motion car crash,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, unlike a lot of people
Speaker 1: might have experienced, it was a fast motion rocket taking
Speaker 1: off because as we were slow motion car crash in
Speaker 1: the relationship, we were sort of becoming really successful in factually,
Speaker 1: in fact because of a number of reasons. Some guy
Speaker 1: playing our imported record in Cleveland on the radio, playing
Speaker 1: Sweet Dreams, and because MTV had just started, and I'd
Speaker 1: always been obsessed with filming stuff, and we've made this
Speaker 1: very strange Sweet Dreams video that the record company couldn't understand,
Speaker 1: which i'd, like, you know, obviously took lots of influence
Speaker 1: from French French filmmakers and surrealism and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: We had one up our sleeve, and then we had
Speaker 1: another one up our sleeve and another one up our sleeve.
Speaker 1: So when in the garden, which was an amazing experience
Speaker 1: with Connie Plank, you know, he taught me how to
Speaker 1: ignore everything about recording because I didn't like the sound
Speaker 1: of the other records. Because those days you weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to go to the mixing desk. It was the produce
Speaker 1: of the engineer. You sit at the back and if
Speaker 1: you go near any of the knobs like no, no,
Speaker 1: don't touch that, you know, And Connie Plank taught me
Speaker 1: you are you can do whatever you want, like turn
Speaker 1: that up and make the whole base drum distorted, and
Speaker 1: see what that sounds like, put the microphone down this well,
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. And so that would
Speaker 1: have led me to want to have to record ourselves.
Speaker 1: And when I just made your operation because my lung
Speaker 1: kept collapsing. And he went to Scotland and while she
Speaker 1: was away, I bought first little drum machine, tiny little thing.
Speaker 1: You know, you couldn't actually doing much, You couldn't tell
Speaker 1: it to do certain things that would just if you
Speaker 1: press that button and that button it did that. And
Speaker 1: and a little synthesietic called the Wasp. It was plastic thing.
Speaker 1: And I had a thing called the Porter Studio was
Speaker 1: like a cassette with four tracks, and I I started
Speaker 1: making these tracks that are some of them are half
Speaker 1: of the Sweet Dreams album that we just transferred to
Speaker 1: an eight track and I played some of them down
Speaker 1: the phone to Annie at her parents house and she
Speaker 1: was like, woh god, that's really interesting. And I was
Speaker 1: talking about like we'd make this like electronic music, but
Speaker 1: Annie sang soulfully on top of it as a juxtaposition.
Speaker 1: So we started doing these experiments. But in the in
Speaker 1: the middle of Sweet Dreams, how Money would get so
Speaker 1: depressed or see we are a couple that had broken up,
Speaker 1: but like we're making this music, but what are we doing?
Speaker 1: Had nothing to do with any music that was going on.
Speaker 1: We're all going to die kind of, you know. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: I've been there, yeah and so, and people would come
Speaker 1: and visit us, like I'd become really good friends with
Speaker 1: Claim Burke from Blondie and we were in a picture
Speaker 1: framing factor, which was the top of these stairs, but
Speaker 1: underneath that, we're making that noise like and claim we'd
Speaker 1: come and see us. So Frank confront from Blondie and
Speaker 1: what are you guys doing. We're making a record on
Speaker 1: this like eight rap tape recorder and the eaves of
Speaker 1: the pit you had to bend down the whole time
Speaker 1: because it was just like the very eaves of it
Speaker 1: and an old building that had probably been there three
Speaker 1: hundred years or something. And tell me if I'm wandering
Speaker 1: into sunderland speak, you know, because I'm trying to keep
Speaker 1: a grip on it. But so we explained, you know,
Speaker 1: this is the record. We're making a record, And and
Speaker 1: then when we delivered the record one, how did you
Speaker 1: get a deal? We were we were already signed, you see,
Speaker 1: because when the tourists broke up, we had been signed
Speaker 1: individually as well. But then it was like, but we're
Speaker 1: going to be a duo called Rhythmics, And they thought
Speaker 1: about it for ages and said, okay, well you can
Speaker 1: do an album this very low budget. So we went
Speaker 1: to Connie Plank in Germany and that wasn't very successful.
Speaker 1: So at that point I think they're thinking about dropping us.
Speaker 1: But there was a lovely guy young junior an arsenal
Speaker 1: called Jack Stevens, and he would visit that sneath. That
Speaker 1: was amazing what we're doing. And of course, just before
Speaker 1: we get there, why was it the rhythmics, teld us
Speaker 1: the story rhythmics was because, um, the thing is how
Speaker 1: I explained it to the record company is quite funny.
Speaker 1: But basically we liked the word that EU are at
Speaker 1: the beginning for Europe and rhythm. But there's another thing
Speaker 1: called rhythmic, created Emil Jack del Crows, which is about
Speaker 1: the study of rhythm and music and thought patterns to help.
Speaker 1: It's used often in schools at Rudolph Steiner schools and whatever.
Speaker 1: It just is a way of like understanding, um, your
Speaker 1: body and you know, and so well it's more than actually,
Speaker 1: but we spent another three hours talking about it. But
Speaker 1: I had to go in and tell the record label
Speaker 1: we were going to be called rhythmics, which was a
Speaker 1: difficult tongue twister, and when you looked at it written down,
Speaker 1: it was like, yeah, So I always like to do, like,
Speaker 1: you know, if it's going to be something I'm going
Speaker 1: to explain when I'm pitching a TV company whatever. It's
Speaker 1: always the element of surprise, right, So I remember just
Speaker 1: jumping from a standing position which I practiced onto a desk, right,
Speaker 1: so like just doing one jump and then I said Eurythmics,
Speaker 1: all the one go and it was complete silences. About
Speaker 1: three of the record label left and they said well,
Speaker 1: and one guy said, isn't that like something you have
Speaker 1: to get treated for? And it was like nonspecific eurothritis
Speaker 1: or something and I was like now, and I explained,
Speaker 1: and then we don't know about this, but anyway, we
Speaker 1: got away with it. A Sweet Dreams album came out,
Speaker 1: and then yeah, Sweet Dreams, what's the development story there? Well,
Speaker 1: we were making an album that's quite quirky, using limited,
Speaker 1: very limited equipment. Because I went to the bank manager
Speaker 1: who had been the bank all during the tourists and
Speaker 1: and he was really nervous about this, but I was
Speaker 1: convinced again with my surprise actions using my I ked
Speaker 1: and Haiku mixed together or whatever, that I would be
Speaker 1: able to get him to lend us some money to
Speaker 1: buy the exact amount of equipment that this guy we
Speaker 1: knew called Adam Williams has sort of written out and
Speaker 1: we've got pictures cut out of catalogs. If we needed
Speaker 1: this desk, secondhand, this secondhand Clark Technique reverb, this bell
Speaker 1: noise reduction system, and this one really important thing a
Speaker 1: space echo. Right for the space echo, because we wanted
Speaker 1: to make like dub sounds and all that stuff. We
Speaker 1: had everything written out and the wires came when it
Speaker 1: came the fourth thousand and eight hunderd pounds or something,
Speaker 1: and we could make a record on it. So we
Speaker 1: went there and he sat silent in the bank manager's
Speaker 1: office and I explained, and I put all the pictures
Speaker 1: out and I said, you're seen in the past. We've
Speaker 1: made an album and we had to pay all these people,
Speaker 1: and we couldn't recoup really because the studio was this
Speaker 1: and producing the engineer. But now I'm going to make
Speaker 1: the record. We have the equipment, and if the record
Speaker 1: only sells this amount, we can make another record on it.
Speaker 1: And now it doesn't cost us anything. And he was
Speaker 1: listening the whole time and then he and he says,
Speaker 1: you know what, that's a very good idea, and he
Speaker 1: gave us five thousand pounds. The only problem was when
Speaker 1: we stepped outside the bank, this friend of mine who
Speaker 1: was called Ashley Cohen, who was a situationalist artist, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately his situations art at that moment was he had
Speaker 1: a mini full of cats and he would stop it
Speaker 1: and hand people cats and then take polaroids. Right. He
Speaker 1: had another terrible one needs to do is to pick
Speaker 1: people up at a bus stop and say, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: going your way, and then so I'm just could have
Speaker 1: stopped at my friend's house and then he would take
Speaker 1: them in. Then he would sneak out and leave them there,
Speaker 1: and that was his art form. Well, there's a picture
Speaker 1: of the bank manager with like a cat on his
Speaker 1: head and me and Annie with cats, and I can
Speaker 1: see it about manager's face is like, what did I
Speaker 1: do right? Right? But then afterwards we gave him all
Speaker 1: these gold albums and platinum albums and but yeah, so
Speaker 1: in the picture faming factory. But then we couldn't afford
Speaker 1: the rent anymore. So, um, the guy who owned it
Speaker 1: said you can't be here anymore. And we were sneakily
Speaker 1: borrowing his synthesizers sometimes because he would go up there
Speaker 1: to practice. So then I was, you know, we just
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do. We were about halfway through
Speaker 1: making a record in inverted Commas, and I was walking
Speaker 1: up the street and crow chain and there was a
Speaker 1: huge church and this guy opened the door with gray
Speaker 1: hair and a weird beard. He looked like a wizard
Speaker 1: and he said he you like. He said, are you
Speaker 1: looking for somewhere? I was like yeah, I said, I'm
Speaker 1: looking for somewhere to make a record. He says, come
Speaker 1: in here, and he showed me this sort of room.
Speaker 1: There was the vestry of a church. He said, well,
Speaker 1: what about this room? I said, well, yeah, that would
Speaker 1: be great. I said how much is it? Says no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you can have it. And I was like, this is
Speaker 1: So I went and told Danny and she was like,
Speaker 1: this sounds really weird. So we went there and the
Speaker 1: guy and his partner we're really sweet, but really odd couple.
Speaker 1: I think obviously a gay couple that they've had to hide,
Speaker 1: you know, for years. They were in by then sixties
Speaker 1: or whatever. And in the end they helped Bill there's
Speaker 1: another studio for us upstairs when we got successful, you know,
Speaker 1: by night with their lights that they used to do
Speaker 1: their animated feature films. And then the end he said, look,
Speaker 1: we want to move now to Florida somewhere to retire.
Speaker 1: Do you want to buy office, and in the end
Speaker 1: we bought that church and then had then I bought
Speaker 1: it off any later, and then I had it for years,
Speaker 1: and then I sold it to David Gray, and then
Speaker 1: when he was going to make it possibly flats the
Speaker 1: whole of cretch and was up in arms. But Paul
Speaker 1: Etwith came to the rescue and Paul up within great
Speaker 1: producer has it and been there a few games with
Speaker 1: Paul and it's still the church there where we made
Speaker 1: so much stuff. Okay, so Sweet Dreams, how do you
Speaker 1: write it? This is like me being an interviewed is
Speaker 1: like one of them stories where the narrative gets so
Speaker 1: lost in so many different I'm totally a control of
Speaker 1: the narrative. Are good, okay, but I'm ultimately going here, Okay,
Speaker 1: do it? Yeah, I'm just don't know what. I don't
Speaker 1: know when Sweet Dreams is complete, because I know you've
Speaker 1: probably told the story of how you wrote or whatever.
Speaker 1: Do you know it's going to be a monster here now?
Speaker 1: We have no idea. In fact, the record label in
Speaker 1: um London released I think two or three singles from
Speaker 1: the album before that because they had In fact, they
Speaker 1: said to me at one point, look because I had inkling.
Speaker 1: Annie and I were very excited when we first recorded it,
Speaker 1: and then we were you know, deflated when nobody seemed
Speaker 1: to have ary with us. But I had inkling it
Speaker 1: was something special. But I actually remember being told, look,
Speaker 1: this song has no beginning, middle chorus and whatever. It's
Speaker 1: just and I was kind of thing yourself, well, that's
Speaker 1: kind of what's good, that's exactly. But but it was
Speaker 1: this guy in a radio station in Cleveland got an import.
Speaker 1: He kept playing that there was no action in the UK.
Speaker 1: No action in the UK. I love as the Stranger,
Speaker 1: like barely graced the top seventy five or something. This
Speaker 1: guy kept ringing up our c in New York and saying, look,
Speaker 1: you've got this band called the earth Mix And every
Speaker 1: time I'm playing this song sweet Dreams on this important,
Speaker 1: it's just going bonkers. All the phones are ringing. And
Speaker 1: they kept saying that we don't have a band called
Speaker 1: the Earthquakes, so we don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: And eventually somebody realized he meant Rhythmics, which was signed
Speaker 1: in England, and they hurriedly got that out and sort
Speaker 1: of managed to service radio stations, and so it was
Speaker 1: a very quick rise from that guy playing it to
Speaker 1: sort of going. And at the same time, Sweet Dreams
Speaker 1: was on a video so you could actually deliver a
Speaker 1: video to MTV immediately. And we went to America to
Speaker 1: play live. And by the time I saw you at
Speaker 1: the Palace all right, well, by the time we got
Speaker 1: from New York to l A, it was already gigantic.
Speaker 1: And then we were in a Japanese hotel room. It's
Speaker 1: like a Japanese hotel in San Francisco. I can't remember
Speaker 1: what it was cool anyway, um, I might have imagined
Speaker 1: it's a Japanese hotel. It had a Japanese restaurant in it.
Speaker 1: But somebody the two manager said Annie, you and Dave
Speaker 1: have got to go into one room because the Rector
Speaker 1: label the phone you up. And we sat there and
Speaker 1: the phone rang, and somebody from the label said, I
Speaker 1: just want to let you know you're going to be
Speaker 1: number one right in a minute or something right, And
Speaker 1: we were like jumping around going away, and then we
Speaker 1: looked out the window and where were they were. Everything
Speaker 1: just looked exactly the same. God a great story, and
Speaker 1: we like, what do we do? We just weren't quite
Speaker 1: sure what to do, you know, because we talked about
Speaker 1: a couple that it's not a couple. But now we've
Speaker 1: been through all this stuff and when number one in America,
Speaker 1: we just didn't understand what that meant. We didn't understand
Speaker 1: the normally the size of America. All we knew is
Speaker 1: when we got to the gig right then it had
Speaker 1: come out. There was lines around the block. Was the
Speaker 1: great San Francisco Famous ball Room whatever it's called the
Speaker 1: film more film or yeah, the film are East right
Speaker 1: now the East is in New York, the West. But
Speaker 1: then it was closed and then it was winter something else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: winter Land was there. Now it's the film war again,
Speaker 1: and there's a great American music hall that's there. It
Speaker 1: was a film or and it was one of the
Speaker 1: unbelievable shows. And then we were invited to this club afterwards.
Speaker 1: And it was one of those moments, the first time
Speaker 1: we realized that gay community or the LGBTQ community, or
Speaker 1: the alphabet community or whatever you want to call it
Speaker 1: now had embraced us massively, and that Annie was perceived
Speaker 1: as um as some kind of heroine or hero or
Speaker 1: heroine in this world, which we loved, you know, and
Speaker 1: you know, we started off making the first thing over
Speaker 1: recorded was with christ and Cozy Fanny two t from
Speaker 1: so we're quite aware of this world. A lot of
Speaker 1: our friends were in this world. But we didn't realize
Speaker 1: that in America this has been building up through the radio,
Speaker 1: that the song had been adopted and interpreted in many ways. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we had amazing time at this club till god knows
Speaker 1: when six o'clock in the morning or something, and and
Speaker 1: that was the end of the tour. So it was
Speaker 1: like we ended on this completely massive high. And and
Speaker 1: so you know, I mean from then on it was
Speaker 1: literally six or I think seven or eight albums in
Speaker 1: a row, all in eight years. As you've had the
Speaker 1: massive hit, to what degree do you feel the pressure?
Speaker 1: Internal pressure? How are you going to have a mass
Speaker 1: if you had on the follow up? Well, what happened
Speaker 1: in England was when Sweet James was number one in America,
Speaker 1: it immediately went to number two in Britain because there
Speaker 1: was a record that was stuck at number one, and
Speaker 1: of course the record the least before the single before
Speaker 1: that was a Stranger, came back in the Child at
Speaker 1: number six, and and we had also had that thing
Speaker 1: of touring a lot in the tourists and in touring
Speaker 1: the rhythmics, so we had a show. We weren't just like, oh,
Speaker 1: how we how are we going to do it, which
Speaker 1: happened to a lot of bands at a time, like
Speaker 1: heck at one hundred or all these bands came out
Speaker 1: and got to America and we're like, oh, there was
Speaker 1: no shot, there's no show, right, So when we played
Speaker 1: in England, of course it was like blimy, rhythmics are
Speaker 1: real sort of happening, and there was the Tube and
Speaker 1: all these different TV shows, and so we went in
Speaker 1: the studio. Well to put it, really, we never went
Speaker 1: in a studio. We and it was usually my fault.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, now let's record in a hotel room.
Speaker 1: Now let's record in a sort of youth club in
Speaker 1: the outskirts of Paris, which we did. You know, it
Speaker 1: was always something different because I'm a great believe as
Speaker 1: a producer like Brian Bryan, you know in a way
Speaker 1: that like it's not just to do with like sitting
Speaker 1: there with the engineer in a gray room in a basement,
Speaker 1: you know, it's to do with everything. You know. So
Speaker 1: the same as the thought process, you're writing, or well,
Speaker 1: it might be good to go on the rowing boat,
Speaker 1: or it might be good. You've got to allow the
Speaker 1: stuff in rather than just trying to chase it. So
Speaker 1: your best creative thoughts always happened when you're doing something else. Yes, classically,
Speaker 1: when you're in the shower, or it's the end of
Speaker 1: the night, you watch a little TV read all of
Speaker 1: a sudden SUPs as fire. Yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: for me and Annie, we then had endless amounts of
Speaker 1: you know, unrequated love songs kind of because we lived
Speaker 1: together and now we were forced to get together. But
Speaker 1: we couldn't be together. I mean even the last songs
Speaker 1: we wrote together seventeen again, you know, it says who
Speaker 1: couldn't be together, but couldn't be a part? It's like,
Speaker 1: so that was easy. Um so then we came up
Speaker 1: with here Comes the Rain Again. To what degree did
Speaker 1: you feel internal pressure? Did you feel when you went
Speaker 1: back to record again each time that you could make
Speaker 1: something that the audience in the business would accept? And
Speaker 1: I never personally thought like that because I've always been
Speaker 1: so stupidly positive and confident that things will work at
Speaker 1: so I personally didn't feel that pressure. I was more
Speaker 1: in it in my you know, okay, but then you
Speaker 1: know Tompenny wrote a whole song about it. You know, Uh,
Speaker 1: the record company doesn't hear a single, so would you
Speaker 1: consciously think, you know, I have to create a single. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what happened was, um, I think the record.
Speaker 1: And it was so so shocked and amazing how big
Speaker 1: our record was around the world that they didn't really
Speaker 1: bother us. And because I consciously said, let's record in
Speaker 1: a youth club on the outskirts of Paris, we didn't
Speaker 1: really have many visitors. You know, it was in the
Speaker 1: Russian Quarter and so it wasn't like they were checking
Speaker 1: honest to anything. And we would just say this is
Speaker 1: the single and this is the video that goes with it.
Speaker 1: And we made video albums ages before people made video albums.
Speaker 1: And they just thought we were this eccentric duo that
Speaker 1: they didn't know what was going to happen. But it's
Speaker 1: probably going to be all right. And I remember John Preston,
Speaker 1: who became head of the label one time, and he
Speaker 1: was chairman of the British phonographic industry. He came, you know,
Speaker 1: to meet us and he said, oh, I'm so excited
Speaker 1: to work with you guys. So when are you going
Speaker 1: to do your next album? I said, well, we're going
Speaker 1: to deliver it on me the first and he said,
Speaker 1: oh great, Can I ask some demos? I said, don't
Speaker 1: make demos. I think we're only going in there in
Speaker 1: the studio on April the seventh, and he was like what.
Speaker 1: So we would actually write and record the whole record
Speaker 1: in three weeks from scratch. Um. I think it was
Speaker 1: because I enforced it, because I had in the back
Speaker 1: of my head like necessity as the mother of invention.
Speaker 1: So I'd seen these other bands being mons and months
Speaker 1: in the studio and remixing and adding more things. And
Speaker 1: I limited it to an eight track when one track
Speaker 1: was used for what's called a SINC code. And so
Speaker 1: when I had seven tracks, and I was thinking that
Speaker 1: the early records that the Beatles did on Motown on
Speaker 1: four tracks and two tracks, and so you would make
Speaker 1: bounces right there and then you couldn't go back. So
Speaker 1: and he would do some harmonies we have, you know,
Speaker 1: like four hands on deck or whatever, have them mixed,
Speaker 1: and okay, you move it there at this point and
Speaker 1: bound some all to this one track over here. Hey,
Speaker 1: we've got four more tracks now, and we just made
Speaker 1: our records like that. And then I would sit in
Speaker 1: the mixing room with the engineer who had been working
Speaker 1: with it, and and just get to the end of
Speaker 1: a mix that was it. Hooray. You know, we always
Speaker 1: stopped at seven thirty and drank. We just never went
Speaker 1: past that start. Let's start about noon, okay. So when
Speaker 1: you were still through every album, we did that. Okay,
Speaker 1: April seven, you have any musical ideas before you show up.
Speaker 1: We had the untouched It was the only time we
Speaker 1: had a song. We started looking out of the Grammars
Speaker 1: the what are called the Mayfile Hotel overlooking Central Park.
Speaker 1: We sort of started a tiny tinkly bit of here
Speaker 1: comes the rain again. Okay. And this works for you
Speaker 1: because of the pressure, because now you know, I gotta
Speaker 1: come up with it. It's got to be delivered. The
Speaker 1: internal pressure, well, I think. Okay. So that's a big
Speaker 1: question because it's a lot of things in life. When
Speaker 1: it can be in sport, it can be in music,
Speaker 1: and be anything. Is having a kind of confidence about
Speaker 1: what you're about to do now, in fighting or anything.
Speaker 1: If you if you're slightly doubting it as you're going
Speaker 1: in you kind of going inside ways, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? So h m, we both had a different
Speaker 1: kind of confidence, if you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: don't think I never recorded nanny vocal ever where she
Speaker 1: ever sang one now attitude. And she never showed me
Speaker 1: a lyric that she was writing in her journal but
Speaker 1: or anything that was ever trite or you know, did
Speaker 1: she write those before the April sev to speak? You know?
Speaker 1: What happened was what would happen was she would have
Speaker 1: bits of words in a journal and I would But
Speaker 1: how we liked to work, which she liked to sit
Speaker 1: behind while I was fiddling about making tracks, you know,
Speaker 1: playing something on the airplanes, and then you jump up
Speaker 1: and go, I want to play on that bit and
Speaker 1: play that bit, and then she said keep playing up
Speaker 1: bit over and over again. And she would get bits
Speaker 1: of the lines in her journal. And then sometimes you said,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't think this is any good?
Speaker 1: What do you think? And then I would go, I
Speaker 1: peraeply moved that bit there, that line, and then that
Speaker 1: would fit over this bit here was like a jigsaw puddle.
Speaker 1: And but somehows she'd write like a whole load of
Speaker 1: words that just were like, for instance, sisters are doing
Speaker 1: it for themselves. We'd finished the record and Annie, what then,
Speaker 1: so I've written a poem like a you know, sort
Speaker 1: of a female empowerment home and it was sisters are
Speaker 1: doing it for themselves and didn't change one word. And
Speaker 1: I was like, when we should do like an R
Speaker 1: and B so or in a tiny little room trying
Speaker 1: to not hear the music I was going on in
Speaker 1: the other room, and I just did a little loom
Speaker 1: do do do do do do do a little loom
Speaker 1: do do, And I said, I'll put this track down
Speaker 1: like an old record. Now. I was doing everything that.
Speaker 1: I was picking up boxes and making jam jars with
Speaker 1: pencils and razor blades and shaking them like and at
Speaker 1: the time, I was working with Tom a lot, so
Speaker 1: I was friends with Ben Mont and Mike Campbell and
Speaker 1: I've got to play on it. I don't know where
Speaker 1: Annie went at this point, but we made because I
Speaker 1: remember we're doing an interview two years ago and she
Speaker 1: didn't realized they were playing on it. But that's on
Speaker 1: a record just sounded like this monster track, right, And
Speaker 1: then it was like somebody said, I can't remember, and
Speaker 1: he said it, or somebody in about says, hey, why
Speaker 1: don't you do this as a duet were talking about sisters,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, who could that be with
Speaker 1: Tina Turner this one right one? And I think it
Speaker 1: was Clives might have said, hey, why don't you do
Speaker 1: with a wreath? And Nanny was like and so. But
Speaker 1: we were excited about it. And Tom Petty's engineer, great guy,
Speaker 1: but like we flew with him with the tapes. But
Speaker 1: we got to Detroit and he left him on the plane, right, okay,
Speaker 1: then what so we're sitting waiting for a Wreatha who
Speaker 1: was late anyway, then he was I could see him
Speaker 1: looking all nervously about and he went flying back to
Speaker 1: the airport and a taxi because there were huge, heavy
Speaker 1: tapes or something come often said this must be something.
Speaker 1: We got them back and nothing was said to a
Speaker 1: Wreatha because she arrived and I've made chicken for y'all,
Speaker 1: you know, but at the time an Krishna, so it
Speaker 1: was all like I was like sort of trying to
Speaker 1: sort of delay time while he arrived out with the tapes.
Speaker 1: But one of the most amazing experiences I had in
Speaker 1: a musical sort of emotional sense with somebody else. I
Speaker 1: had hundreds with Annie. But Aretha told me to come
Speaker 1: in this room and it was about the size of
Speaker 1: this which is a very tiny room by the way listeners.
Speaker 1: And it was a piano, right, piano, and she was
Speaker 1: playing about on it, and I think she was trying
Speaker 1: to get to the point of asking me, what's this
Speaker 1: song really about, like, because she saw Annie with a
Speaker 1: cropped hair and the whole thing. She was wondering if
Speaker 1: she was singing a gay anther and but she started
Speaker 1: off just playing a piano and she started singing, and
Speaker 1: she sang the whole of the way we were really,
Speaker 1: you know, the gladdest night and I'm just so funny,
Speaker 1: can't believe it, little boyfriend. Suddenly I'm leaning on the
Speaker 1: piano like, you know, as if normal, and her she
Speaker 1: started crying as she's singing and playing it, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: BLI me. I was just like stunned, you know. And
Speaker 1: she didn't say anything about it's just like wiped a
Speaker 1: tear away and she was like started chatting. And then
Speaker 1: I noticed she had lots of people with her in
Speaker 1: the other room, right. I think she might have been
Speaker 1: singing it to them, and it was onto people. I
Speaker 1: was asking for something here and something there and like anyway,
Speaker 1: then she got round to say and so like this song,
Speaker 1: like she had the lyrics and she said, so, you know,
Speaker 1: ringing on their own bell. So I just what's the
Speaker 1: actually mean? They're like I was saying, no, no, I'm
Speaker 1: making you know, she's She's probably thinking she means like
Speaker 1: you know, and then yeah and uh and I'm completely convinced.
Speaker 1: And then she was looking at Annie and she's probably thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm going to sing a duet with this skinny white
Speaker 1: girl from Scotland. Does she have any idea who? No
Speaker 1: idea who? She's just been said, Clive, this is going
Speaker 1: to be a good idea. And I've got this great
Speaker 1: bat film on VHS shot through the window of them.
Speaker 1: So they're around like Mike, facing each other like this,
Speaker 1: right and aretheis got like her sort of denim jacket
Speaker 1: with studs in it, and she out of a cigarette
Speaker 1: and I didn't smoke or anything. It's like smoke going everywhere,
Speaker 1: and and the song starts, you know, and immediately Annie
Speaker 1: starts singing, searing the pull a jacket and put a cigarette.
Speaker 1: She realized she gained sing right, and she's got raised
Speaker 1: loud voice and he as well, so so then it
Speaker 1: became almost like a dueling competition, right, And then as
Speaker 1: it went all the way through at the end you
Speaker 1: can hear it, you know, the badly blinds equal pay,
Speaker 1: that's what we say, and Annie's answering, and it was
Speaker 1: all just like done in a take like that, and
Speaker 1: no overdubs, nothing, no fixing. Wait, how many takes did
Speaker 1: you do? Mm hmm maybe two? Maybe he kept the
Speaker 1: first one and we did a wreath to say a
Speaker 1: Wreatha said, oh, you got it enough. She was in
Speaker 1: such a good mood afterwards with all these thoughts, were
Speaker 1: laughing and playing it back, and I remember George Clinton
Speaker 1: coming down from somewhere into the room when the rumors
Speaker 1: filling up with people all listening to it, going fucking hell,
Speaker 1: this is like, you know, this is serious, like because
Speaker 1: any track you pushed up of their vocal was amazing.
Speaker 1: But then I push it up, what the hell's that sound?
Speaker 1: And it's like a box full of like razor blades
Speaker 1: and pencils, and and then that goes with the waa
Speaker 1: over he had and all this stuff, and it didn't
Speaker 1: matter what you pushed up, which way you left the faders,
Speaker 1: it still sounded great. Did you ever have any interaction
Speaker 1: with a week after was successful? Yeah, well I didn't
Speaker 1: actually go to the video shoot, and it was shot
Speaker 1: in Detroit, you know, because the wreath it wasn't flying
Speaker 1: back and on. He flew there. But it's quite funny.
Speaker 1: I watch it looks like they're not in the same
Speaker 1: place and that it was put in afterwards. But they
Speaker 1: were actually on the same stage. But like I don't
Speaker 1: know why they did it, like eight ft apart and so.
Speaker 1: But after a giant or had a few things like
Speaker 1: Clive Davis things, she was always very very nice to me.
Speaker 1: And I think I think that actually funny enough got
Speaker 1: a wreathing into a different mode of earning because then
Speaker 1: she made her obum Freeway of Love and a pink
Speaker 1: Cadillac by the way, which goes sisters are doing a
Speaker 1: free day of Loving. It's almost the same backing track,
Speaker 1: you know. And I got into a a different mode
Speaker 1: for a wrethis, so I think she was happy about that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is all happening. You make it money? Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: any and I made money from the Sweet Dreams album onwards,
Speaker 1: because he because of what my dad said, be we
Speaker 1: formed a company called in a limited and we've learned
Speaker 1: from all the tourists and all the stuff before how
Speaker 1: to have a limited company and how to be able
Speaker 1: to pay our tax taxes correctly. Would also be able
Speaker 1: to claim a lot of the things that we cost
Speaker 1: us money, you know. And so we were now a legit,
Speaker 1: you know company, and we had a proper accountants in
Speaker 1: it and everything. And so the money would arrive in
Speaker 1: our Barclay's bank account at the time in the local crush,
Speaker 1: and the guy who lent us to five thousand was
Speaker 1: now seeing five hundred thousand the account and more and
Speaker 1: more and more and more. So um, and we weren't.
Speaker 1: Actually people are running around going crazy. So I remember
Speaker 1: when we had quite a lot of money, I rang
Speaker 1: up my account. I said, you know, do you think
Speaker 1: I could like buy a car? And he said very
Speaker 1: typical English legal type of he said, Stewart, I think
Speaker 1: you have a reason for cautious celebration. I was, I
Speaker 1: hung up, and I was like trying to think how
Speaker 1: you celebrate cautious? So you were not proflab good with
Speaker 1: the money. You you were not blowing it now, but
Speaker 1: later on I did. I'm I'm the worst person in
Speaker 1: the world. I had buy a property when it's really
Speaker 1: high and sell it when the markets crashed. Every time.
Speaker 1: I just just hopeless at keeping it. I'm quite good
Speaker 1: at making it. We can't. Okay, how does it end
Speaker 1: with the rhythmics? Well, I don't know. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: had dinner in the last two weeks about three times
Speaker 1: with any here, and we don't really talk much about you.
Speaker 1: It makes I mean, we played in December at this
Speaker 1: rainforest fund with Springsteen and Sting and some other people,
Speaker 1: and we kind of went on stage and we kind
Speaker 1: of nailed it, you know, so we hadn't played for
Speaker 1: ages and we sort of and then we never talked
Speaker 1: about it afterwardside that we just but you know, I'm
Speaker 1: personally I love touring and playing live. And Annie always
Speaker 1: wasn't that keen on it, partly because the two hours
Speaker 1: of singing those kind of songs pitch perfect and actually
Speaker 1: running around the stage and doing all that. And also
Speaker 1: she know, she's like I am, I'm sixty seven, so
Speaker 1: she's a bit older now. Doesn't really want to go
Speaker 1: flying around changing airports especially nowadays. Um but I actually,
Speaker 1: I mean, of course, everybody now just has a residency
Speaker 1: in Vegas and everybody comes to you nothing. You need
Speaker 1: to do that. But that's what we don't really want,
Speaker 1: the residency in Vegas, don't really. We never made decisions
Speaker 1: about that way, like, well, that's where we'll make loads
Speaker 1: of money, because I think we both like things about life,
Speaker 1: you know, like how we want to live our life.
Speaker 1: And that's why I Alwa was so terribly when the
Speaker 1: markets crashed. I think, I think I'll live in France now,
Speaker 1: you know. But I'm never sort of really worried about,
Speaker 1: oh my god, how am I going to make some money?
Speaker 1: Because I would just easily adapt to not having as
Speaker 1: much money. Okay, you're right, let's go back. How do
Speaker 1: you get involved with Tom Petty? Well? God, how did
Speaker 1: I get involved with Tom Pei? Oh? I remember, I
Speaker 1: don't even know if this is how it started. Ah.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if I was involved with Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: before Tom Petty or I introduced Dylan to the idea
Speaker 1: of having the Heartbreakers as a band, because I think
Speaker 1: that I think I did a conversation with Diller once
Speaker 1: he was saying I never really had a band like
Speaker 1: the band since the band, but I said, there's only one.
Speaker 1: I could think it would be the Heartbreakers, right. But yeah,
Speaker 1: Tom Well say, I'm almost having these crazy ideas about, um,
Speaker 1: it's a film or TV shows whatever, and I've invented
Speaker 1: this thing called Beyond the Groove for British television. Where
Speaker 1: the idea was I'd have all these artists on it,
Speaker 1: but they all had to be live or acting, you know,
Speaker 1: acting parts, right, and it had like a little narrative
Speaker 1: and it was really to show you know, Cadine Lange
Speaker 1: and Tom Pettey and and they're all in and it
Speaker 1: was shown on Channel four. I think it was six
Speaker 1: one hour episodes or something. And I think that was
Speaker 1: might have been the first time I approached him, and
Speaker 1: maybe that was late and know when was don't come around?
Speaker 1: Oh I know why it was, Yeah, because Jimmy Ivan
Speaker 1: rang up while I was in the studio. I'd written
Speaker 1: a song all right, this all goes back to the
Speaker 1: San Francisco and the number one hit like stuff. So
Speaker 1: in l A before that we'd played and Stevin Nicks
Speaker 1: asked me afterwards we sort of hanging around in the
Speaker 1: backstage area and said, hey, I'm having a party at
Speaker 1: my house. Would you like to come. I didn't actually
Speaker 1: notice Stevie Nicks, and I didn't know much about Fleetwood
Speaker 1: Matt because while they were sort of peeking, we were
Speaker 1: like it was like the Clash and the such bistols.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, why not? So she said, well,
Speaker 1: I've got a car right here, and in the car
Speaker 1: was her two backing singers. And I went off with
Speaker 1: her and we got to this house in and it
Speaker 1: must have been in Beverly Hills. Maybe I didn't know
Speaker 1: where I was. Now, back in that time, you got imagining,
Speaker 1: like no cell phones. I'd left my two itinery and
Speaker 1: dressing room. I just gone off with these people. We
Speaker 1: got to the house and go in. It's like this
Speaker 1: massive sort of Gothic type mansion. And in my eyes anyway,
Speaker 1: and then I'm sitting down, it was like no party,
Speaker 1: not even any music on, and I can't find them,
Speaker 1: the three of them, And so they've gone in a
Speaker 1: bathroom cocaine. Well probably yeah, doing what I would call
Speaker 1: marching pad. So so I was really naked. You know,
Speaker 1: we'd flown from somewhere to l a play the show.
Speaker 1: I would like still in the clothes, like you know,
Speaker 1: and I was like this huge place. I went along
Speaker 1: and I found a bedroom that was obviously nobody's, you know,
Speaker 1: it was like a spare room. I just thought, I've
Speaker 1: got a crash out. And in the morning at least
Speaker 1: I had memorized our manager in New York's number office,
Speaker 1: right and I could ring them and ask them where
Speaker 1: are the bands and like. And so I went and
Speaker 1: just crashed out and that. And then at about six
Speaker 1: or just as the light was coming up, I heard
Speaker 1: some noises and it was Stevie as if it was
Speaker 1: like the middle of the day. So of opening these
Speaker 1: different cupboards and going and trying on all these different
Speaker 1: Victorian nightclothes or lacey kind of things, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: so anyway, I don't I don't want to go on
Speaker 1: too much about the rest, but basically we became friends.
Speaker 1: And then I'll cut to the next bit. I wrote
Speaker 1: this song in hotel room, and it was don't come
Speaker 1: around here no more. The chorus, you know, saying don't
Speaker 1: come around here, and when I'm playing a coral sitar guitar, yeah,
Speaker 1: not the verses cora and I had played the whole
Speaker 1: back and chat and the sit our guitar and everything.
Speaker 1: And when I came back to l A had befriended
Speaker 1: Jimmy Ivan and he said, hey, you should live with
Speaker 1: me on the top of Mullholland so I did. And
Speaker 1: then I didn't realize that he was trying to produce
Speaker 1: a Stevie Nick's album. But I also didn't know that
Speaker 1: they've been living together, but now they didn't. So this
Speaker 1: was just learning the sort of the complicated where but
Speaker 1: stuff that was going on. So anyway, I played it
Speaker 1: at Jimmy went, oh god, this is doing a smash
Speaker 1: for Stevie. Um come to the studio. So he gets
Speaker 1: Steve with the studio. She comes, you know, about four
Speaker 1: in the afternoon, and Jimmy goes, this is a smash DV.
Speaker 1: She said, well, she already knew that I had kind
Speaker 1: of written this song for her, but she wasn't saying anything.
Speaker 1: And then we're around she started reciting sort of Shakespeare
Speaker 1: in the mic on the verses. You know, well, it
Speaker 1: might not have been Shakespeare, was Shakespearean language. Jamie keeps saying, Stephen, like, listen,
Speaker 1: it's just just right. You know. The chorus comes in
Speaker 1: and when she sang her voice on the chorus, it
Speaker 1: sounded killer. But the verses will are thou and THEE
Speaker 1: and all this stuff. And so we got around a
Speaker 1: little piano and Jimmy started saying to Stevie, look, can
Speaker 1: you stop doing that in front of my friend David,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's embarrassing. You don't even know. She says,
Speaker 1: what the fun we slept together the other night. That's
Speaker 1: the only bit of that story. And Jimmy was like,
Speaker 1: what he's like looking at me because I hadn't said anything,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know that they had been living. It
Speaker 1: was all just and then I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is terrible, and she went marching off to the
Speaker 1: bathroom him. And then Jimmy sort of calmed down and said,
Speaker 1: I know I'm gonna do. I'm gonna ring up Tom Petty.
Speaker 1: And so Tom Petty arrived at about an hour and
Speaker 1: he introduced me and I said, hey, how are you doing?
Speaker 1: Really did he knew I was? He says in a
Speaker 1: book somewhere that he had said to Jimmy already I
Speaker 1: want to do something different, well about this guy, But
Speaker 1: I don't think you would have, you know, just such
Speaker 1: an obscure choice of person I would be with anyway.
Speaker 1: So he Jimmy plays the song to him and it's
Speaker 1: like always a confusing song for him and the harbor,
Speaker 1: as would Sita, but he had some Jack Daniels and
Speaker 1: I don't think what else we had, But anyway, we
Speaker 1: got on like a house on fire. He said, oh,
Speaker 1: why don't you come back to my garage under the house,
Speaker 1: I've got a studio. So we go there and then
Speaker 1: Jimmy sees what's happening, so his tags along. He goes.
Speaker 1: We all go at the garage and we decided to
Speaker 1: play it with his band. But the band are looking
Speaker 1: a bit sort of annoyed because this is nothing like
Speaker 1: you know, the album, which is about Southern accidents and
Speaker 1: and I you know, I'm from the northeast of English.
Speaker 1: What do I know? All I knew is that I
Speaker 1: love the song Refugee because it was the only song
Speaker 1: that's slightly fitted in the punk era where I'd come
Speaker 1: from in England. You know that he was the only
Speaker 1: band that could play at a festival with the clash
Speaker 1: on it, you know, so um he started to sort
Speaker 1: of you know, you know, calm the band down, like
Speaker 1: you know, and I said, listen, I've got an idea,
Speaker 1: like obviously I've made this on this little fourth track
Speaker 1: port to studio, I carried around with a drum machine
Speaker 1: and a sit on. This doesn't sound anything like you guys,
Speaker 1: I can tell it, but why not at the end
Speaker 1: you come in right as the band, And then I said,
Speaker 1: I had a whole idea about, Hey, it could be
Speaker 1: like the Mad Hat's Tea Party and then you know
Speaker 1: the whole madness of end up being the video. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would end up being a video. And so the
Speaker 1: band came in and then Mike comes into this great
Speaker 1: wah wild guitar solo, and Tom got sort of it
Speaker 1: kind of broke a kind of spell because he had
Speaker 1: gotten really sort of down in the middle of this
Speaker 1: album and it was all getting it was taking a
Speaker 1: long time, and and this all of a sudden, it
Speaker 1: was just this is just not like anything on Earth, right,
Speaker 1: and to this that I'd still be weird, like there's
Speaker 1: this someone a Mad Hat's Tea Party video and drum
Speaker 1: machine and it's the interesting thing was he was cold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we'd done the album with Jimmy and they
Speaker 1: did long after dark. This didn't sound like this and
Speaker 1: this is what reinvigorated his career. Yeah, but you know
Speaker 1: I understood for the Heartbreakers, they were like, what on
Speaker 1: earth is this alien from out of space? But then
Speaker 1: they started playing it live and it started to change
Speaker 1: the whole show. And then Tom started coming out with
Speaker 1: the top hat live and then it started to be
Speaker 1: a different show. And then when they played the end bit,
Speaker 1: they extended it and it became this amazing solo with mine.
Speaker 1: Did you cut the final version his garage that day? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: since you keep bringing them up, how did you be dealing?
Speaker 1: I was in a studio right in Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: there was this Irish kid called Fergil Sharky from the Undertones,
Speaker 1: and the lady receptions at the studio rang through and said,
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan's on the line for Dave Stuart and I
Speaker 1: just went, oh, this is Fergil because we were we're
Speaker 1: always lacking about with each other, and I paid, I
Speaker 1: went yeah, and this voice started speaking and I was like,
Speaker 1: it's definitely not this is definitely Bob Jel and nobody
Speaker 1: can imitate that voice, you know, And he he said,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't really do his Swiss good. I
Speaker 1: was just wondering, like you like movies and I was
Speaker 1: like yeah, she says, yeah, yeah, I like movies. Do
Speaker 1: you want to go get bite to eat? And I
Speaker 1: was like okay. I went to meet him and he said,
Speaker 1: you choose the place. So I was thinking, um, so
Speaker 1: I knew these Thai people who had a restaurant sunset
Speaker 1: called the Tali Side, and I said to them, look,
Speaker 1: you know, can you just get me a look like
Speaker 1: a tiny bit of it to the side, not in
Speaker 1: the window or anything else. So they didn't built the
Speaker 1: whole hedge kind of and they kept bringing out all
Speaker 1: of the dishes instead of one, like you know, four
Speaker 1: different tom car guys and stuff. But he didn't anything
Speaker 1: about that. But we ordered some drinks and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: And then he said and that's was my girlfriend at
Speaker 1: the time. And after that he said, hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to come with me to During the meal, he
Speaker 1: was asking what kind of movies I liked? And you
Speaker 1: know what, you know, what kind of music I listened
Speaker 1: to and all the stuff we've done. Let's go back
Speaker 1: a chapter. You're in Sunderland playing It's all Right by
Speaker 1: your folk guitar. Yeah, you're out to dinner with Bob Dylan,
Speaker 1: what's going through your mind? Well, I think it's a
Speaker 1: bit like the thing when you know, I was explaining
Speaker 1: your eyes realized you're gonna have a car crash, right,
Speaker 1: So I think at the time you don't panic, it's
Speaker 1: just afterwards you go fucking what happened. In fact, you
Speaker 1: might find this funny, but there's a a TV series
Speaker 1: started in Britain and the first episode it's called um
Speaker 1: It's something. It's like something like about a rumor or something,
Speaker 1: but it's basically an actor playing Bob Dylan coming to
Speaker 1: visit me in England. And I won't tell you anymore.
Speaker 1: I'll send you the link. It's very it's hilariously funny
Speaker 1: and brilliantly done, brilliantly acted. But basically, yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of odd because you know, he was very much It
Speaker 1: wasn't really an interrogation. It was more like almost like
Speaker 1: an interview. You wanted to know, like all this stuff.
Speaker 1: But when I started talking about like, you know, blues
Speaker 1: players that I liked and this and that and ones
Speaker 1: that were quite obscure, and he was like, oh, they
Speaker 1: really sort of livened up and he was talking about
Speaker 1: all this stuff and and and then I talked about
Speaker 1: you know, French filmmakers and all sorts of different Italian
Speaker 1: filmmakers and and it's like, yeah, right, well you want
Speaker 1: to come to this place with me? And I said okay,
Speaker 1: So I followed. It was like going miles easterly somewhere
Speaker 1: I don't know where I was, And we pulled up
Speaker 1: at the back of this sort of bumpy car park
Speaker 1: and there's a door and we get to the door
Speaker 1: and he does like knock on the door and I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: where are we and the door arms and this is
Speaker 1: God's own us truth. It's just so like a Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan's song. It's the door ups as as a very
Speaker 1: small person in a wedding dress, Mexican lady, and she
Speaker 1: goes Bobby and I'm like okay. And as we were
Speaker 1: walking and he says, drink out of the bottle, so
Speaker 1: I said okay. So we're going there and we're drinking
Speaker 1: bottles of beer and then it's quite a beautiful other
Speaker 1: woman comes and sits next to us talking and he goes,
Speaker 1: how about we start shooting tomorrow? And I'm like it's
Speaker 1: like two in the morning. I'm like, you mean today?
Speaker 1: He goes, yeah, today this this girl's going to be
Speaker 1: in it, and I'm like, okay, so what's it about?
Speaker 1: And then so we just well, like I was like
Speaker 1: scrambling the next morning and I found okay and shoot
Speaker 1: something in a church right on the corner of like Highland, right,
Speaker 1: and he said, oh yeah, I want to do this
Speaker 1: song called no it's not called tight Connection to My Heart,
Speaker 1: it's called when the Night Comes Falling from the sky, right.
Speaker 1: And then I want to do the snow one called
Speaker 1: Emotionally Yours all in the same day, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: the one's a ballad and ones like this, and so
Speaker 1: I'm thinking he means a video. He keeps calling them
Speaker 1: phil for it because and then they only said I
Speaker 1: hate making videos. So on the one when the Night
Speaker 1: Comes Falling from the skies, literally me and him, and
Speaker 1: I got Clembert on drums and Fergel who was in
Speaker 1: the studio playing tambourine, and the girl who he said,
Speaker 1: we'll be in it like miming you know, when the
Speaker 1: Night comes falling, right, So and just filmed it like
Speaker 1: a performance, but we start off in a bus. I
Speaker 1: made it like how mad it was that nobody knows
Speaker 1: what was happening. I had Steve from Talk and Heads,
Speaker 1: the percussion player, and we go on the bus and
Speaker 1: we go there in emotionally years. He says, now I
Speaker 1: want a girl to play Elizabeth Taylor in this one.
Speaker 1: This is like three in the afternoon, like ah okay.
Speaker 1: So so then he said, yeah, I want to I
Speaker 1: want to have an argument with it in the song
Speaker 1: so you can see it online and it's like, so
Speaker 1: there's just a piano in the middle of the room
Speaker 1: like coming through the window and he sings, you know,
Speaker 1: emotionally ours and then it goes to a bridge section
Speaker 1: and it's outside not far from the church. We walked
Speaker 1: across from around the corner and I just got the
Speaker 1: girls just swinging on a rope like Rember right, and
Speaker 1: he's just sitting at the tree like and they're sort
Speaker 1: of having an argument without speaking, and then she storms
Speaker 1: off down the street. This is all done in like
Speaker 1: like zero time to get ready for it. And so
Speaker 1: after that we became friends and he came to England
Speaker 1: and he messed around in the church. We never Everybody
Speaker 1: kept saying you produced, some ve done and I said no,
Speaker 1: we never did anything apart from just jamming making up
Speaker 1: stuff and being sort of friends really, and then when
Speaker 1: he came to England another time, he said, hey, why
Speaker 1: don't we make another one their films like Tomorrow and okay,
Speaker 1: So I hired a top hat from the BBC. So
Speaker 1: when he came around at twelve o'clock, all I had
Speaker 1: was to eight million meter Sindy cameras and I saw
Speaker 1: a pat so he put the top hat on. We
Speaker 1: went down Camden Lock Market because I knew the area
Speaker 1: and on a house boat and I just decided to
Speaker 1: film see what would happen if I had a long
Speaker 1: lens across the other side of the road and Dylan
Speaker 1: just walked around with the top hat on. And of
Speaker 1: course what happened was Peter looked like the scene it goes.
Speaker 1: It was like whoa, or they would start following and
Speaker 1: it became like the pie Piper. And then I lay
Speaker 1: on the ground and filmed them walking over me like
Speaker 1: the pie Piper. And this we didn't even know we're
Speaker 1: going to do this till he pulled out a trap
Speaker 1: that it recorded. This is the weird thing he had
Speaker 1: forgotten that I got a studio putting his garage from
Speaker 1: up at on the top of you know where he
Speaker 1: lives on just past Blabu. I got a friend of
Speaker 1: mine and I got some equipment and just sort of
Speaker 1: put a studio there for him, which he never ever
Speaker 1: used it, but it was, you know, a multi track
Speaker 1: track soundcraft studio. He could record there, and because he
Speaker 1: was saying he hated the recording process too, as well
Speaker 1: as making videos, and so then he said, ha, I
Speaker 1: used that studio, And I said, and he'd used just
Speaker 1: two tracks on it to record acoustic guitar and voice.
Speaker 1: And there was that whole album Blood in My Eyes,
Speaker 1: and we did that video to Blood in my Eyes,
Speaker 1: just shot on eight millie sydy camera. I had too,
Speaker 1: but like I was trying to get a shot to
Speaker 1: cut away and this my brother in law went past
Speaker 1: for a second. I said, quick shoot with this camera
Speaker 1: out and he goes, why, I said, that's Bob done
Speaker 1: over there. He goes, fuck. He said, okay, so he
Speaker 1: should say, and I'm filming, and then he says, hey,
Speaker 1: I have to give you a camera back because I'm
Speaker 1: getting the tiles from my mom's kitchen. And I'm like, sucking,
Speaker 1: I know, but that's very sort of english. Singly, well,
Speaker 1: I have to go because I'm doing this. But I
Speaker 1: love that video. It turned out great. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: do you maintain contact with him? Well, yeah, so sometimes
Speaker 1: my past messages back because you never know where he is.
Speaker 1: But jeff Rozen, you know, we passed messages back and
Speaker 1: forth fire jeff Rozen. Yeah, and he's always been great
Speaker 1: and like obviously the messages are the things that I
Speaker 1: passed to him. The fact he said, actually the funniest thing,
Speaker 1: the fastest Bob has ever replied to anything. Well, when
Speaker 1: I asked him if you could make some wrought iron
Speaker 1: gates for my house in Jamaica, you know, just like it,
Speaker 1: just like yeah, like you could probably turn down, you know,
Speaker 1: would you like to accept the sortle Nobel prize but
Speaker 1: it'll make the gates? Well I engage. Yeah, okay, because
Speaker 1: I understand why you say, because like him, you know,
Speaker 1: you're doing a lot of metal work, and love's getting
Speaker 1: all broken up old stuff and turning them into things
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. So I understand. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: why is it that you are become friendly with all
Speaker 1: these people? Why do you think that is? Um mm hmm,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to answer
Speaker 1: that question. I mean, they could be varying things. One
Speaker 1: you could say someone so talented, they're tracking them down
Speaker 1: for the out. But even when you listen to you,
Speaker 1: you're a good time. Even when I met you, like
Speaker 1: a year ago, you're very friendly. You you you treat
Speaker 1: everybody like an equal, etcetera. But you know, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like the movie's like you talk about that
Speaker 1: you fit in anywhere. Do you think it's something about
Speaker 1: your personality or people respect your work or what do
Speaker 1: you think that? I think, probably now that I'm older,
Speaker 1: it's because I'm very enthusiastic about stuff and that's very infectious.
Speaker 1: So um, and that I don't particularly want anything from
Speaker 1: the person and love. Successful people are often approached because
Speaker 1: somebody wants something, right, So I'm just really enthusiastic. And
Speaker 1: I suppose having worked with lots of different people and
Speaker 1: it being such a small industry, um, so well would
Speaker 1: get around, Oh this is this kind of personal This
Speaker 1: is an enthusiastic person. You might probably have a you know,
Speaker 1: good session or but I don't even do session. I say,
Speaker 1: I never approach anybody to try and write with anybody.
Speaker 1: I've never said to my publisher, well, why aren't I
Speaker 1: writing a song with them, or I've never said a
Speaker 1: record company, hey, I want to produce this band, not one,
Speaker 1: So it's um that probably two people seems odd because
Speaker 1: I've never thought of anything as a career, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll be a record producer. Now what the record producers do?
Speaker 1: When you make records and then once they're write, you
Speaker 1: look for the next band you're going to make a
Speaker 1: record with and you're being a producer. And I've never thought, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm just a songwriter, so right, I must find somebody
Speaker 1: that writes songs with or write songs. I just actually,
Speaker 1: I'm just doing whatever I want to do. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: switch to yours you deuced? Or we're one of the
Speaker 1: producers on the last Stevie Nicks record, which is on
Speaker 1: the one I produced, the one before and then the
Speaker 1: last one. Yeah, okay, but the last one with secret
Speaker 1: Love and all that other stuff, that's the best album
Speaker 1: since the first one. Okay, especially that title track. I've
Speaker 1: listened to that dozens of times. It's not enough. How
Speaker 1: did you come to work with her again? All right?
Speaker 1: So what happened to us having you know, known Stevie
Speaker 1: jo in the eighties and then lost touch a bit
Speaker 1: and then sometime I can't remember. It might have been
Speaker 1: in the nineties. UM Jimmy said they're going to do
Speaker 1: an HBO. It might have been two thousands, even early
Speaker 1: two thousand's. They want to do a TV show UM
Speaker 1: in partnership with HBO, and would I be the per
Speaker 1: us and that interviews various people for it. So HBO
Speaker 1: made UM a pilot. They want to make a pilot,
Speaker 1: and Jimmy said, oh, why don't we do the pilot
Speaker 1: with Stevie. I said, okay, she wants to do it,
Speaker 1: so then we spoke on the phone. Then we were
Speaker 1: laughing and talking on the phone, and she says, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this will be great. I love to do it. So
Speaker 1: we made that pilot with Stevie, which nobody's ever seen,
Speaker 1: and then we made a real one with you two
Speaker 1: with one oh and edge where actually, if you could
Speaker 1: see it uncut, it's funny because we get absolutely plastered
Speaker 1: because somebody had the bright idea of halfway through the
Speaker 1: interview with an audience in the break, they bring us
Speaker 1: jokes of Margarita. This is like three or four in
Speaker 1: the afternoon, and of course after that the interview goes
Speaker 1: Haywire and lots of things that are probably off, you know,
Speaker 1: like we're cut out, We're really interesting that Bono and
Speaker 1: Edge were talking about. But I think that aired, and
Speaker 1: then I did a one with Ringo where he shows
Speaker 1: how he plays left handed and why you did that
Speaker 1: drum feel like this and all that stuff and and
Speaker 1: so that's how connected. Okay, So what do you think
Speaker 1: about the music business in the Internet age, because certainly
Speaker 1: radically different from it was in the pre Internet era. Well,
Speaker 1: I think what's happened is the barbel is slid completely,
Speaker 1: almost vertically up and down. So the middle class of
Speaker 1: the music business, meaning all the bands that could get
Speaker 1: by by just telling you know a number of albums
Speaker 1: that allowed them to go and play live, I mean
Speaker 1: that kind of disappeared. And all of the artists who
Speaker 1: became enormously successful very quickly, like you know, well quickly comparatively,
Speaker 1: but like the Taylor Swift State hearings and people are
Speaker 1: that are earning as much as the Beatles did in
Speaker 1: their whole career in a very short space of time
Speaker 1: because of all the ways in which they can perform
Speaker 1: now and all of the ways they can put stuffat
Speaker 1: and the brands and everything, so you know all of
Speaker 1: the brand attachments and stuff. So then you've got the
Speaker 1: ones even below the middle class that slid down to
Speaker 1: the young starting out who are getting advised. Like I
Speaker 1: read something the other day, I think it was a
Speaker 1: CD baby put something saying, oh, if you're an independent
Speaker 1: artist wanting to release a single in here's a few
Speaker 1: suggestions of what to do. And it was about nine
Speaker 1: pages long, and I was thinking, like, even for myself,
Speaker 1: who understands just about most things about you know, marketing, Internet, everything,
Speaker 1: I would just be bored after about the third line
Speaker 1: of it and just give up and say, you know them,
Speaker 1: I might as well go back and just start working
Speaker 1: at the shipyards, you know. So um, I think it's
Speaker 1: an absolutely absolute nightmare crisis for artists that's been going
Speaker 1: on for quite a while in certain areas of the
Speaker 1: art form, you know, and not in music definitely, because
Speaker 1: we were the first to go cosse MP three's were
Speaker 1: so smaller download but generally UM writers and journalism and
Speaker 1: in many areas it's just become the barbell is right
Speaker 1: turned vertically instead of horizontally. And I think if I
Speaker 1: was a new artist then starting out now I'd be
Speaker 1: so lost as to where to start. The noise that's
Speaker 1: been generated through all of the people you know, eating
Speaker 1: raw chili and getting millions of views on YouTube and like,
Speaker 1: you know, just all of the things that's happening that people.
Speaker 1: I suppose I would call it like the meat. When
Speaker 1: it changed to being me, we kind of like, hang on,
Speaker 1: I think I could do something and you know, go
Speaker 1: on YouTube and do a makeup tutorial or do this
Speaker 1: or do that. Um, it's confused with the people who
Speaker 1: are actually I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that,
Speaker 1: and there's some great people on their helping addiction and
Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff, but it's jumbled up with people
Speaker 1: who are trying to put out art or music and
Speaker 1: there's no sort of division. So if there was a division,
Speaker 1: they tried to make one, like you know, YouTube for
Speaker 1: artists or Spotify for artists. But all of these things
Speaker 1: they don't realize is because look, when the mob was
Speaker 1: running things, to tell you the truth, it was a
Speaker 1: lot easier because like, at least they like music would
Speaker 1: come down the studio and give you drugs and money.
Speaker 1: But you know you don't get that from Google, right,
Speaker 1: the Google's like not going to pop in the studio,
Speaker 1: go hey, you'll do. And by the way, he's some coke.
Speaker 1: It's like now, it's just like when your money is
Speaker 1: disappearing into you know, some vacuous space and then they
Speaker 1: give in their annual returns of billions and schoollions and
Speaker 1: the tax was all avoided by all these schemes through
Speaker 1: Ireland and or whatever. And I'm just looking at it
Speaker 1: all and you know, um from a perspective of like
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old kid or whatever who's written a
Speaker 1: great song and he lives in Nebraska, and and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking it must just look like sort of like insanity.
Speaker 1: So I my suggestion to any of these kind of
Speaker 1: kids starting at is, look, I think the same thing
Speaker 1: might work is when I was a kid in the
Speaker 1: folk club. As you go and try and find somewhere
Speaker 1: to play, and you sing your songs to that small
Speaker 1: audience of ten, and then maybe he's twenty, and then
Speaker 1: maybe he's fifty. And forget about thinking that you've got
Speaker 1: like ninety six friends on Instagram or whatever. Just like
Speaker 1: go in your local town and then go to the
Speaker 1: town next door and the town next door. Somehow, Now
Speaker 1: that I'm creating some things that I think might help
Speaker 1: because there's so many ridiculous problems to play. You know,
Speaker 1: you used to actually get even when I played in
Speaker 1: a folk club, they would give me fifty pence some
Speaker 1: free beer. Now they're so, yeah, you can play here. No, no,
Speaker 1: we don't pay you, you can just you're allowed to
Speaker 1: play here. And so every we're all on the line. Musicians,
Speaker 1: young upcoming musicians and guys have been doing it for ages,
Speaker 1: but now they can't sell any records and the streaming
Speaker 1: is very low income. All of those people, all of
Speaker 1: the the ways in which they would make a living
Speaker 1: has been kind of stripped away now with the we're
Speaker 1: talking here while there's been the outbreak of coronavirus. So
Speaker 1: some people are going, well, we don't sell records, but
Speaker 1: we can play live now all the concerts are council. Now.
Speaker 1: I was meant to be playing from today actually at
Speaker 1: the Grammy Museum, just to talk in a performance and
Speaker 1: like so I had my drama fly from Philadelphia, not
Speaker 1: from Cleveland. Surrey and Judith Hill who was going to
Speaker 1: we all rehearsed yesterday and there was guitar tics and
Speaker 1: roadies and you know the amount of people you have
Speaker 1: to do something and then we're not doing it. Now
Speaker 1: put that on a scale times a million all around
Speaker 1: the world, whether you're a group in India or Thailand,
Speaker 1: or France or Italy or it's just that's been stripped
Speaker 1: away too, so nobody knows. When you know, the world's
Speaker 1: given the all clear, which I don't imagine a siren
Speaker 1: going off soon going everybody can come. So but I mean,
Speaker 1: you know this, the same problem has happened to car
Speaker 1: workers in the car industry or stuff all over the world.
Speaker 1: I think the one thing that people as a misconception
Speaker 1: about artists is I'm talking about you know, musical artists,
Speaker 1: is that soon as they put a single out or
Speaker 1: an EP or a video, people think they're making an income.
Speaker 1: Now they're not. It probably borrowed the money off their
Speaker 1: anti or their dad and they're probably isn't their dad's
Speaker 1: car and like to try and get to a gig,
Speaker 1: and if the dad has a car, I mean it's
Speaker 1: like it's it's just not easy and it's getting more
Speaker 1: and more tangled and complicating that it's just because all
Speaker 1: the corporations gobbled each other up. It started I'll tell
Speaker 1: you the beginning for me when I realized this is
Speaker 1: the beginning at the end. And it was the middle
Speaker 1: of the eighties and the head of the record label
Speaker 1: changed and a guy came in from Hurts rent a
Speaker 1: car to run our c A Records, and my manager
Speaker 1: was Gary Kerr first, who managed to talking B fifty two.
Speaker 1: You know it was, yeah, it was like kind of
Speaker 1: semi gangster, but but it great taste in music, the
Speaker 1: B fifty twos, talking heads, the Rabones, rhythmics. And he
Speaker 1: just said, I just can't talk to him. You're just
Speaker 1: like freaking out there. Just can't talk to the guy
Speaker 1: about music because he didn't understand and know anything. And
Speaker 1: I was going in to deliver an album called Be
Speaker 1: Yourself Tonight and he didn't want to go in there.
Speaker 1: Gary was like, I just give up, and so I said,
Speaker 1: I want to go and meet him and give the album.
Speaker 1: So he was a huge Colombian guy, and he and
Speaker 1: shook my hand nearly broke my fingers and he said
Speaker 1: Stewart loved the album, just like Ghostbusters, and I was like,
Speaker 1: like Ghostbusters, it's like what anyway? I thought, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is just the weirdest thing. And then you know, the
Speaker 1: whole murder case where his son's murder him and his wife.
Speaker 1: And then I'll find out through various people who been
Speaker 1: involved in all of those stories, like, oh, yeah, that's why.
Speaker 1: Because Tom Petty was confused why we were selling massive
Speaker 1: amount of albums around the world and the medium amount
Speaker 1: in America, but selling out everywhere, cover of rollings to
Speaker 1: everything you can imagined. And it was because he was
Speaker 1: printing them in Colombia and selling them through the Peacher's
Speaker 1: chain or something and putting it in the soft porn
Speaker 1: industry and laundering it through a talcompared to company and like,
Speaker 1: and I was kind of right when I walked in
Speaker 1: and thought this is the beginning of the end. It
Speaker 1: was actually when he said he had an idea, and
Speaker 1: it was we were going to be the CD was
Speaker 1: going to be on the top of a giant sized
Speaker 1: drink from a Hamburger chain, like pressed into the top,
Speaker 1: and I was like, I'm not sure about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so it's just went pretty much downhill from there.
Speaker 1: When the Internet happened among these people that sort of
Speaker 1: early on kind of new things were coming, and I
Speaker 1: had friends who were like Internet sort of obsessed geeks
Speaker 1: in the the nineties, you know, and so when it
Speaker 1: was by the time it was two thousand and two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, and I could see what was going
Speaker 1: to happen. I actually I organized a meeting. This is crazy,
Speaker 1: but I think a quote in my book by the chairman, know,
Speaker 1: the board of Deutsche Bank, a guy called Michael Philip,
Speaker 1: who said, you know, I organized a meeting, and at
Speaker 1: that meeting turned up was like, you know, lou Reid
Speaker 1: Stevie Wonder, Dr Dre's guy. I can't remember anyway, you know,
Speaker 1: George Olivia Harrison, I can imagine all around one table
Speaker 1: and I did as this talk about the internet and
Speaker 1: how we have to sort of somehow take control over something.
Speaker 1: And he put a quote in my book he said,
Speaker 1: there's two talk for hours about the future of digital
Speaker 1: digitalization and the incident he says at a banker. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what the hell he was talking about. He said.
Speaker 1: Five years later we all found out. But it was
Speaker 1: like I could just see what was going to happen.
Speaker 1: And I had created this thing called fab you know,
Speaker 1: the first startist bank. Like this has to be some
Speaker 1: kind of bank vault, not literally for money for stuff,
Speaker 1: otherwise it's just going to be all over the place, right,
Speaker 1: and and you have no control over any taste. Right.
Speaker 1: So we make a video of sweet Dreams, and that's
Speaker 1: a video that was on the TV and you could
Speaker 1: see it, and we had control over the look and
Speaker 1: feel of it. Now you can type sweet dreams in
Speaker 1: Google and there will be hundreds of videos come up,
Speaker 1: and it's be anything from the dance girls dancing in
Speaker 1: a Betha to it to all sorts of of unimaginable things,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's like you have to almost just
Speaker 1: go well, okay, Like but imagine if you're a painter
Speaker 1: and just allowed like a hundred people coming out. I
Speaker 1: think I'll change that paint over that and that should
Speaker 1: be dark brand, you know, not red. What the hell
Speaker 1: are you doing? Like Picasso? You know? Okay, So today
Speaker 1: Spotify Top fifty is mostly hip hop. What's your view
Speaker 1: on hip hop? Uh? Well, funny enough, I love loads
Speaker 1: of I've always been very eclectic, so I love loads
Speaker 1: of hip hop music. I love lots of rap music,
Speaker 1: but obviously I'm drawn towards the ones that have kind
Speaker 1: of interesting lyrics to me, because I I do like
Speaker 1: loads of the beats that they create in hip hop
Speaker 1: music and all the all the transitional beats. I mean,
Speaker 1: I always was crazy about reggae music from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and I love lots of different Afro rhythms and King
Speaker 1: Sunnia Day and so when hip hop started experimenting and
Speaker 1: now you know trip hop and you know, all the
Speaker 1: different kinds of beats, I like it, but I'm not
Speaker 1: too keen on. You know, the tracks that just keep
Speaker 1: repeating the same misogynistic stuff are more keen on. Um.
Speaker 1: You know when they're saying something you know and which
Speaker 1: you know. There was some great n w A and
Speaker 1: when all that first came out, it was a very
Speaker 1: exciting moment in time, a bit like punk music coming out. Um.
Speaker 1: But again, what's happened is there's such an easy way
Speaker 1: to upload everything. So there's an avalanche of people making
Speaker 1: stuff in their bedroom on their laptop and then just
Speaker 1: putting it out everywhere YouTube, saying claud wherever you want,
Speaker 1: there's this stuff. So it's it's a labyrinth. You know.
Speaker 1: I've got four kids, all mad about music. Three of
Speaker 1: them are musicians, and you know they they have been
Speaker 1: basically exposed to this since they were bought right, so
Speaker 1: they can like with through all sorts of stuff and
Speaker 1: eliminate all this stuff. And but they still are overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: They'll say they're overwhelmed by everything. They're overwhelmed by the news,
Speaker 1: by the amount of bombardment of things coming at them
Speaker 1: in music, and and they actually struggle, like now what
Speaker 1: to do? They just want to do the real thing
Speaker 1: and be the real thing. Listen, as bad as it
Speaker 1: is for them, it's for the customer. You're completely overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: and uh, let's go. So in the time you have
Speaker 1: left here on the plane, what's the dream? Well, everything
Speaker 1: I'm doing really music is the intel inside of it.
Speaker 1: So I'm actually trying to create stuff with other people
Speaker 1: that helps the balance of that. Barbella was talking about
Speaker 1: tips lightly that way again, Um, I don't want to
Speaker 1: give away too much of the stuff I'm doing, but
Speaker 1: like it's to do with them ideas that changed the way.
Speaker 1: Oh just get to be able to play live. That
Speaker 1: doesn't cost them so much to do it, but they
Speaker 1: can still travel around, although that just changed in the
Speaker 1: last the last three days, you know. But it's usually
Speaker 1: to do with songs and what songs, the power of songs,
Speaker 1: what songs can do, how songs can help our music
Speaker 1: and help in various situations and things to do with
Speaker 1: um political social, political situations. But I only like to
Speaker 1: use things that I understand, which goes back to music
Speaker 1: as the intel inside. So you know, Um, for instance,
Speaker 1: not long ago, there was a film called A Private
Speaker 1: War and about Marie Colvin and you know journalists in France,
Speaker 1: and and a friend of mine and Just Stones actually
Speaker 1: is portrayed in the film. He was the guy who
Speaker 1: was with her and worked with her and everything. And
Speaker 1: he wrote the words to a song called take Good
Speaker 1: Care and we recorded and we gave it to Amnesty.
Speaker 1: And then it's just doing stuff in music all the time.
Speaker 1: Like I used to work with anit Erotic in trying
Speaker 1: to get Herman Wallace freed from the Angle of three
Speaker 1: in prison, which eventually he did get freed, but he'd
Speaker 1: already had cancer at that point. But you've been thirty
Speaker 1: years in solitary confinement. Um the stuff I did, you know,
Speaker 1: years ago, creating Nelson Mandela's four six four, and then
Speaker 1: he used music as the way to get it a
Speaker 1: bit of attention. But I like doing this stuff beforehand.
Speaker 1: That's preparing it so that it doesn't fizzle out like
Speaker 1: a firework, you know. Um, And I just continue doing
Speaker 1: that stuff. I mean, I love writing songs, I must admit,
Speaker 1: and I actually have gone back to I didn't tell
Speaker 1: you one bit at the beginning. But like my dad's
Speaker 1: I give him a lot of credit from blowing my
Speaker 1: mind with music when I was about four or five,
Speaker 1: because he had a tiny little workshop and in it
Speaker 1: he built these little wooden speakers. He got to speak
Speaker 1: assent from Germany, Grundy, he must have written away to them,
Speaker 1: and he built these lovely oak cabinets, and then he
Speaker 1: had made it himself, like all this record deck and
Speaker 1: put it inside this wooden thing. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: the hell it was. He just wouldn't let me in
Speaker 1: the workshow because the last time I was in there,
Speaker 1: I put the drill on the cat by the stake,
Speaker 1: and the cat was spinning around and round when he
Speaker 1: came in but not knowing what I was doing. But
Speaker 1: about eight o'clock in the morning one morning, when I
Speaker 1: was about five, this whole little Coronation Street type house
Speaker 1: just exploded with music. Because my dad had bought every
Speaker 1: Rogers and Hammerstein album and then he just put it on,
Speaker 1: and I think it was the King and I or
Speaker 1: something like that. And I'd never heard music loud and
Speaker 1: with such amazing quality, and so I had forgotten this
Speaker 1: for years, and then it I remembered why am I
Speaker 1: was singing like bits of flower drums, song and sounds
Speaker 1: specific and the King and I, And then I remember
Speaker 1: that's what it was. Every morning you would sing along
Speaker 1: with him and put them on. You know, we all
Speaker 1: that's our error. We all grew up with it. James
Speaker 1: Taylor has a new album. The last track is you
Speaker 1: know Sorry with a fringe on top. It's like our roots. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: this has been wonderful, Dave. You know you're loquacious and
Speaker 1: very insightful. We could talk forever, but we're gonna go
Speaker 1: back into the rain. Great to have you here, Thanks
Speaker 1: for doing it. I just stole the title. If you're
Speaker 1: right there, Back into the rain absolutely till next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob left set