Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. Ladies and Gentlemen.
Speaker 1: What's up, Ladies and gentlemen? Fuck it, man, let's just
Speaker 1: let's just start talking. Go no, I'll say that this
Speaker 1: is another episode. I remember who I am. My name
Speaker 1: is quest Love.
Speaker 2: This is Quest Love Supreme. We have the Supreme team
Speaker 2: with us Sugar Steve.
Speaker 1: On paid Bill. Why yeah, you look a little different today. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, just don't say nothing. Don't say nothing the song. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't do theme songs on the zoom.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, So, ladies and gentlemen, this is a special
Speaker 2: Quest Love Supreme. This conversation, in my opinion, is probably
Speaker 2: six to seven years overdue.
Speaker 1: I first met our guest of the show maybe like.
Speaker 2: Two months after his memoir set The Boy Free was released,
Speaker 2: and I distinctly remember my guitarists in the Roots, Captain
Speaker 2: Kirk Douglas A say hello, Captain Kirk there, what's up?
Speaker 2: He had asked me if I read the book at
Speaker 2: the time, and at that time I didn't, and with
Speaker 2: great intensity, you know, Kirk was like, dude, you gotta
Speaker 2: get him on the show.
Speaker 1: Like he's tailor made for a nerd.
Speaker 2: Haven like Quest Love Supreme, And I remember my response
Speaker 2: to Kirk was, wait, you listened to Quest Love Supreme?
Speaker 2: And actually he was right because around the pandemic when
Speaker 2: I went on my book reading rabbit Hole, I'll say
Speaker 2: that his book was probably one of the few non
Speaker 2: self help books I used to escape whatever it was
Speaker 2: that twenty twenty was. And Kurt couldn't have been more right.
Speaker 2: The musicianship of our Guest has kind of been the
Speaker 2: sonic lighthouse or north star to many guitarist or songwriter.
Speaker 2: You'll be pressed to find any band at least worth
Speaker 2: their grain of salt that has been formed that at
Speaker 2: least you know, doesn't name check our Guest as a
Speaker 2: major influence on their creativity. Of course, he has most
Speaker 2: notably co founded The Smiths, but he has played and
Speaker 2: collaborated with such luminaries as of course Modest Mouse. I
Speaker 2: have so many questions about you and Portland like my
Speaker 2: all time favorite self right, the Pretenders, of course the Cribs,
Speaker 2: his supergroup with Bernard Summer and Pet Shop Boys.
Speaker 1: Neil Tennant has worked with Beck, Crowded.
Speaker 2: House, the Avalanches, even the The I Love Saying the
Speaker 2: and of course.
Speaker 1: Bragg Billy Bragg, Billy Bragg.
Speaker 2: And of course also just work with Don Zimmer and
Speaker 2: Pharrell and the uh the scoring of inception. I will say,
Speaker 2: like his his haunting, our pageo kind of guitar texture
Speaker 2: pretty much is defined a generation, and we're giving the
Speaker 2: honor to have a musician talk a musician rant.
Speaker 1: If you will, with the rift.
Speaker 3: Yeah he's gone now he wait too long.
Speaker 1: Intro was too long. He was like, fuck it, I'm
Speaker 1: out my guitar collection. He's back. All right, We're good, No,
Speaker 1: for real, we're We're.
Speaker 2: Happy to nerd out with iconic songwriter, author, guitarist, producer
Speaker 2: Johnny mar The quest left supreme.
Speaker 4: Thank you, it was so nice. Thank you very much,
Speaker 4: really great to see you again.
Speaker 1: Thank you What are you doing man?
Speaker 4: Great?
Speaker 1: Were you speaking to us? Now? Where is this?
Speaker 4: Thank you for all that quest love. That was lovely
Speaker 4: to hear all all those friends of mine being mentioned.
Speaker 4: I'm in the studio that's in my house. I have
Speaker 4: kind of a big main studio I've had for a
Speaker 4: number of years. And then the funny thing. I don't
Speaker 4: know whether you guys to relate to this as musicians,
Speaker 4: but I did this thing where after years of having
Speaker 4: a pretty comprehensive home studio. When I moved out and
Speaker 4: I moved into this kind of old factory building in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, I ran around to everybody saying, I've seen
Speaker 4: the light. Get out of your house in the morning,
Speaker 4: drive to work, go and do your day's work. Drive home.
Speaker 4: Don't you know, get out of the house, don't we'll
Speaker 4: have a home studio. Well, now I have two studios.
Speaker 4: I have one in the house and I have one
Speaker 4: in a separate building. But this room was kind of
Speaker 4: modeled on one of the rooms that I was working
Speaker 4: with when I work with Hans In. I just had
Speaker 4: a spare room in the househouse isn't particularly big, but
Speaker 4: with technology being the way is these days, you can
Speaker 4: have a pretty decent mixing room. So I spend all
Speaker 4: the time that I'm supposed to be at home with
Speaker 4: the family a sort of spending this room.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I always wondered about that because I'm currently
Speaker 2: you know, I waited three decades to do my first
Speaker 2: real purchase. If you will, I guess the only idiom
Speaker 2: I can use is I'm debating on whether or not
Speaker 2: I should ship where I eat, and I know the
Speaker 2: home studio is sort of a factor in many a
Speaker 2: creative's live but part of me is also has the
Speaker 2: option to put the studio outside of the house, so
Speaker 2: that way, my house is my house and my studio
Speaker 2: is my studio.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think the rule of thumb really is if
Speaker 4: I don't know now, I like the discipline of getting
Speaker 4: out and got work and there are a fewer distractions.
Speaker 4: This might sound obvious, but I think if you've got
Speaker 4: the choice of having your main proper workplace away from
Speaker 4: the house, I think that's better for the work I do.
Speaker 4: If you can do that, if you're fortunate enough, because
Speaker 4: I think it gives you that kind of window of
Speaker 4: time when you want to because look, we're all human,
Speaker 4: as inspired as we may be, you know, I know
Speaker 4: sometimes you get into these crazy deadlines and twelve hour,
Speaker 4: fourteen hour whatever days. I've in that window of time
Speaker 4: when your subconsciousness is saying I need to make these
Speaker 4: decisions now because I'm going to get in the car
Speaker 4: and drive home at nine o'clock, nine pm or whatever
Speaker 4: it is, and try and be like a human being.
Speaker 4: I think that's good for the work.
Speaker 2: All right, I'm pandering it. It's not silence. I keep
Speaker 2: forgetting this a podcast, So I have to.
Speaker 1: The sound of thinking. It's the sound of thinking. I'm like, hmmm,
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just I think I have a concern and a
Speaker 2: fear that if I put my studio on the scene
Speaker 2: place that I live. Then you know, I have boundary
Speaker 2: issues when it comes to personal life versus work, and
Speaker 2: I kind of enjoy this thing where they're far apart.
Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know.
Speaker 4: That's what I'm that is what I'm saying. I think
Speaker 4: it's better to work away from your house. Yeah, as
Speaker 4: a real as a rule of thumb, but I think
Speaker 4: that thing. Don't mean to be presumptuous, but that thing
Speaker 4: of what you you know, your term boundary issues. Has
Speaker 4: just been a musician, been a musician of a certain type.
Speaker 4: I've been very fortunate in my personal life in that
Speaker 4: my family. I've been with my wife since we were kids,
Speaker 4: and you know, my family and the way they just
Speaker 4: kind of get on board. They wouldn't have it any
Speaker 4: other way.
Speaker 1: Sometimeline. Yeah, they got.
Speaker 4: To just in case they might be listening to this.
Speaker 4: I mean, you mentioned Portland earlier, but that's a good example.
Speaker 4: When I when I joined that was a whole surprising
Speaker 4: episode and the way that went down. But that was
Speaker 4: me following a musical hunch and when Isaac brought from
Speaker 4: the band inviting me over there, and you know, I
Speaker 4: did what I did. I did the grown up version
Speaker 4: of what I did when I was a teenager, which
Speaker 4: was falling with a bunch of people who were strangers.
Speaker 4: But it sort of felt like there's got nothing to
Speaker 4: do with the fact that they were a big band
Speaker 4: and I was known that managers weren't involved or any
Speaker 4: of that. I was studying a room with a bunch
Speaker 4: of strangers three thousand miles away, and we found myself
Speaker 4: making music that felt really good that I couldn't identify
Speaker 4: the one band. You know, It's like when you're a musician,
Speaker 4: you can hear you can hear bands, and you can
Speaker 4: hear their influences. You know, you can hear a certain
Speaker 4: band and you go, you go, Okay, well, the singer's
Speaker 4: doing Tom York or she's doing Shaka Khan, or the
Speaker 4: bass players doing Flea or why you know whatever. You
Speaker 4: can hear these influences and it's all good. But with
Speaker 4: Modest Mouse, I had no idea where they were coming from,
Speaker 4: and I got the invitation from Isaac and it was
Speaker 4: enigmatic and kind of a funny kind of invitation, and
Speaker 4: I said, okay, well we'll go. I'll go over there
Speaker 4: as an experiment for ten days and it was a
Speaker 4: whole of the story. But it went really gangbusters straight
Speaker 4: out the gate when we started writing, and it was
Speaker 4: inspired and I've got enough about me and know when
Speaker 4: it's really happening. But to get back to the point,
Speaker 4: I found myself just really loving what we were doing musically.
Speaker 4: I've had no idea what to call this music or
Speaker 4: any frame of reference. It just made me feel good
Speaker 4: in the way that when you're fifteen you kind of go,
Speaker 4: I don't know what it is we're doing, but it
Speaker 4: feels good. It really was like that. But my family
Speaker 4: were getting off on my enthusiasm. You know. My wife
Speaker 4: was like, well, Johnny's buzzing. He's calling me from Portland
Speaker 4: and you know, he's digging the place, and I'm hearing
Speaker 4: about all this music they're making. And I was sending over.
Speaker 4: My son was a fan of the band, and they
Speaker 4: heard my enthusiasm and they were kind of like, Okay,
Speaker 4: this is what we're doing for now. Then, so my
Speaker 4: life sort of, I guess because the people that I'm
Speaker 4: involved with and because it's my living. You know this,
Speaker 4: when we get back to this idea work life boundaries,
Speaker 4: I try to live, you know, as an older person
Speaker 4: a little bit more humanely now and you know, not
Speaker 4: be too crazy. I mean, you know, not be too
Speaker 4: sleep deprived. But everything we do is led by the
Speaker 4: music and what I'm doing really by by what Dad
Speaker 4: is doing and he's doing. So I'm very, very fortunate
Speaker 4: that I don't really the work life balance thing. Work
Speaker 4: is my life.
Speaker 2: So since you brought it up so to hear you
Speaker 2: explain it, you were just to do a limited maybe
Speaker 2: a week and a little bit a week and a
Speaker 2: half of work with Modest Mouse, and you liked it
Speaker 2: so much you became a permanent couch guest in there
Speaker 2: proverbial a matter of work all house and join the band.
Speaker 4: An easier way to answer that question is that it
Speaker 4: was so intense by the time we'd written nineteen tracks
Speaker 4: and gone to Mississippi, made an album and we've become
Speaker 4: like this tight gang, it just would have been too
Speaker 4: weird to quit. There was a brotherhood, you know, you
Speaker 4: go through this project so a ten days turned into
Speaker 4: months because I knew it was happening. I was like, well,
Speaker 4: this is a really interesting collection of people. The guys
Speaker 4: in the band and the people around the band were
Speaker 4: making a really good noise. We all like each other
Speaker 4: straight off, and this brotherhood happened. And this is What's
Speaker 4: happened in a few bands that I've been in that
Speaker 4: there was exactly the same. And from the outside it
Speaker 4: may look like I you know, I've I've joined the band,
Speaker 4: I've quitted band. But I'm more of a serial joiner
Speaker 4: than I am a serial quitter because those projects, when
Speaker 4: you get involved with people in your an album, you
Speaker 4: get so invested and you talk about it so much,
Speaker 4: and you're on the phone talking about the tracks, and
Speaker 4: you're getting together and you're caring about it so much.
Speaker 4: By the time we finished recording The Modest Mouse album,
Speaker 4: I was still a guy from England, but it just
Speaker 4: would have been too weird to bail. I just wanted
Speaker 4: to see it through and I cared about the songs.
Speaker 4: I cared about the guys, I cared about about the record,
Speaker 4: and I cared about how it was going to go.
Speaker 2: When I was in you guys started in Mississippi and
Speaker 2: then you ended up in Portland or.
Speaker 4: No, we got started in Portland, and it was it
Speaker 4: got off to such a good start from the very
Speaker 4: first night with writing songs and jamming, which is something
Speaker 4: I don't really do with a lot of people. I
Speaker 4: always make it made a conscious decision when I was
Speaker 4: maybe fifteen in nineteen seventy nine. Jamming for me was
Speaker 4: standing in a really damp cellar with a bunch of
Speaker 4: dudes who would smoke too much trash stuck on the
Speaker 4: one chord and like for like twenty five minutes. That
Speaker 4: helped my songwriting because I then sort of said, Okay,
Speaker 4: note to self, when you come to practice tomorrow, bring
Speaker 4: a couple of riffs, or bring some chord changes, or
Speaker 4: bring a direction. And then that sort of fell on
Speaker 4: me then too, and it helped me out as a songwriter.
Speaker 4: Was I mean, I love writing songs, but it was
Speaker 4: kind of a bit of a practical thing too. So
Speaker 4: I can jam with people, but as I said, in
Speaker 4: my career, haven't really been called on to do that
Speaker 4: too much. But in modest Mouse, where it's collective, like
Speaker 4: six people happened to be six guys in that band
Speaker 4: with really different influences. Each member of the band would
Speaker 4: thought they were doing and thought the band was something
Speaker 4: different and so inspired.
Speaker 2: And that's a good thing because in my mind that's
Speaker 2: like my worst nightmare because you mentioned that if the
Speaker 2: bass player thinks that, Okay, I'm Larry Graham or Flee
Speaker 2: and I don't speak guitar language, and I know that
Speaker 2: your your texture and your tone is like probably like
Speaker 2: the most respected in the game. So I you know,
Speaker 2: that's kind of why I wanted Kirk to be on
Speaker 2: this episode, because you know, I I didn't even know
Speaker 2: it to your book that gretch made guitars, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean.
Speaker 4: Quest That is such a drummist thing to say.
Speaker 2: Are you saying Gretz was a guitar first before it
Speaker 2: is a drum Pretty sure it was.
Speaker 1: I think it's where I'm finding that out.
Speaker 4: That's really funny. Hey. Also, yeah, I hate to break
Speaker 4: it to you, but Zilchin made Banjos.
Speaker 1: I'm joking episode over, that's.
Speaker 5: Pretty cheap, Yabahavi speed both.
Speaker 2: I assume that if you're in the room that you're
Speaker 2: kind of the the alpha only because you know the
Speaker 2: band that you're you're most loved in your journey. Yeah,
Speaker 2: sort of never used like you were anti Well I
Speaker 2: don't know if you guys were anti synthesizer or whatever,
Speaker 2: but a lot of the weight fell on you as
Speaker 2: far as melodic and texture and tone.
Speaker 1: Do you often feel as though you have to be the.
Speaker 2: Alpha in terms of like determining where the melody goes
Speaker 2: or the musical direction.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting to use that term. Well, as you'll know,
Speaker 4: the chemistry of bands is both musical and personal, and
Speaker 4: i'd almost say, particularly in high pressure situations or bands
Speaker 4: a were big, maybe the personal chemistry is maybe even
Speaker 4: as important as the musical chemistry. So my role in
Speaker 4: all the bands have been in has usually been the
Speaker 4: same and in a way I think, on the one hand,
Speaker 4: alpha is an interesting way describing it, but my role
Speaker 4: is to let the singers think that they're off about
Speaker 4: really I'm running it.
Speaker 1: Real leaders are Jedi mind triggers, listen.
Speaker 4: I learned that from all the women in my life
Speaker 4: very early on.
Speaker 1: Where they make you feel like you're the leader.
Speaker 4: And I saw it with all the older women in
Speaker 4: my life, these great, absolutely great women, and the guys
Speaker 4: knew it. By that, I mean I have a very
Speaker 4: I really care a lot. I mean, I don't try
Speaker 4: to train myself as a saint, but I bring a
Speaker 4: lot of enthusiasm, enthusiasm to it and a lot of
Speaker 4: energy to it, and you know, and I really do
Speaker 4: give a shit. And obviously The Smiths is the most
Speaker 4: notable because I formed that band, and you know, we've
Speaker 4: gone on to be very well, well loved and everything,
Speaker 4: which is obviously amazing. But I'm happy with my role
Speaker 4: in all the bands that I have been in, which
Speaker 4: is in a way, is that the great enabler if
Speaker 4: I can be. And I have such respect for the
Speaker 4: craft and the talent of the front men and women
Speaker 4: that I've been involved because I learned so much from
Speaker 4: being in the Pretenders with Chrissy Hind. It was a
Speaker 4: short stint between eighty eight and ninety one, but I
Speaker 4: learned so much about front in a band from Chrissy.
Speaker 4: But the singers that I've worked with, you know, also
Speaker 4: I grew up in the time in the mid seventies.
Speaker 4: I was getting a lot of my ideas together about
Speaker 4: what a guitarist was. And you learned so much from
Speaker 4: there was an archetype, if you like. I mean, I
Speaker 4: know in the States there's the archetype to say, Joe
Speaker 4: Perry and Steven Tyler, or there's you know over here
Speaker 4: there's like maybe Jimmy Page or and Robert plant in
Speaker 4: the rock vibe. Right, It's the same the world over
Speaker 4: with guitarists, you know, without getting too cliched, a lot
Speaker 4: of musicians are a type. It suits. A lot of
Speaker 4: the bass players I know are very similar. A lot
Speaker 4: of the drummers I know have quite similar personalities. They
Speaker 4: go crazy if they've got nothing to do. You know,
Speaker 4: if you give a guitar player, like a you know,
Speaker 4: a couple of days off with a movie camera, suddenly
Speaker 4: he's making his arty movie, you know. So I was
Speaker 4: very typical of that, and I just worked very well
Speaker 4: with certain kind of singers, obviously Morrissey being one, Matt Johnson,
Speaker 4: Isaac Brock. I mean, there must be something in it
Speaker 4: because I've done it with so many of them, and
Speaker 4: I learned so much about them. But I was so serious.
Speaker 4: I took it. I took the business of my apprenticeship
Speaker 4: trying to form a rock band or be in little bands.
Speaker 4: When I was a kid fourteen fifteen, sixteen seventeen, I mean,
Speaker 4: I left school, I left high school early to be
Speaker 4: in a band with adults when I was fifteen. I
Speaker 4: took it so seriously that a lot of the lessons
Speaker 4: I was trying to learn when I was a teenager
Speaker 4: proved to be correct. You know, a lot of stuff
Speaker 4: that I said that I was learning before this, myths,
Speaker 4: you know, I was studying, like, serve the song, the
Speaker 4: sing is the most important thing. Lock in as a
Speaker 4: rhythm player with the drummer, and make the bass player
Speaker 4: fit in, don't sit on top. These are all things
Speaker 4: that served me. I was right to study that stuff,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about that. Can you recall
Speaker 1: from me what your very first musical memory was?
Speaker 4: I can, yeah, it was. So. My parents were very
Speaker 4: young when I was born, at seventeen. My mother was seventeen,
Speaker 4: I think eighteen maybe, and they came over from Ireland
Speaker 4: in the early sixties, and they are absolute music freaks,
Speaker 4: record freaks. They were teenage record freaks from Ireland and
Speaker 4: they loved rock and roll music. And my mother comes
Speaker 4: from a family of fourteen and nearly all of them
Speaker 4: moved over to the city for work, to Manchester. So
Speaker 4: I was around a lot of very passionate, highly spirited,
Speaker 4: hard living, you know, young music freaks. Well, certainly my
Speaker 4: earliest musical memory is watching my mother and my dad's
Speaker 4: sister play a forty five like fifteen times over and
Speaker 4: over again, and luckily for me, I had guitar on it.
Speaker 4: It was the Everly Brothers record. But watching these two
Speaker 4: young women stand at a record player and just play
Speaker 4: it with this joy and I was sat on the
Speaker 4: floor with his joy and then play it again and
Speaker 4: then again. And then I kind of grew up with that.
Speaker 4: And my mother and father are still still around now.
Speaker 4: If I go around to the house now, I have
Speaker 4: to build in an extra forty minutes because I know
Speaker 4: my mother's going to be showing me these songwriters on
Speaker 4: YouTube that she's really into. So I grew up in
Speaker 4: I grew up around that kind of musical obsession.
Speaker 1: Really, what did your record collection like?
Speaker 4: Oh? It was pretty good, you know. So. The thing
Speaker 4: is the great thing about the household record collection was
Speaker 4: that my friends, who were from more same middle class
Speaker 4: English families, they had kind of books. I realized this
Speaker 4: when I put out my You mentioned Myles guitars before,
Speaker 4: I remember that I had got my friend's houses and
Speaker 4: then they would have these the Great Big Book of
Speaker 4: Mercedes and English country gardens and architecture. Well, in my
Speaker 4: house we had records. So my parents were into They
Speaker 4: were into a lot of country music. They're into like
Speaker 4: people like George Jones, a lot of the Nashville thing.
Speaker 4: But then there was the pop music, like bands like
Speaker 4: the British bands like the Hollies, and they liked they
Speaker 4: liked Elvis Presley and that was a real Irish thing,
Speaker 4: you know, from the country, So there was a lot
Speaker 4: of that kind of It was all American except for
Speaker 4: some of the pop music that was coming out of Manchester.
Speaker 4: So it was all about buying records, which was a
Speaker 4: real working class thing, and then I got into buying
Speaker 4: forty five's when in the UK what we call glam
Speaker 4: rock is a little different from what the Americans are
Speaker 4: called glam rock. That's kind of hair metal and the
Speaker 4: la scene. But in the UK it was all the
Speaker 4: early ce Rex yeah, exactly, t Rex Bowie, Sparks, not
Speaker 4: the whop all of that.
Speaker 5: Why was Manchester such a hot bed? I just got
Speaker 5: back from there two days ago and it's a very
Speaker 5: funny and interesting city. But why was Manchester such a nexus?
Speaker 4: Well, the Industrial Revolution happened here in the eighteen nineties
Speaker 4: and that made it a very industrial city. So you
Speaker 4: had lots of industrial buildings and mills and factories. So
Speaker 4: you can compare Manchester to two places or three places
Speaker 4: in the United States, Seattle, because of the climber and
Speaker 4: the size of it, and the fact that there's been
Speaker 4: a couple of music movements.
Speaker 1: Out of there.
Speaker 4: But it's very like Detroit. It feels like Detroit. It's
Speaker 4: very blue collar or was, and a lot of people.
Speaker 4: So because of the Industrial Revolution, loads of people of
Speaker 4: all different ethnicities and nationalities came here for work. So
Speaker 4: there's a massive immigrants scene. There's a huge Jewish community,
Speaker 4: there's a Caribbean community, there's an Asian community, a lot
Speaker 4: of people came from India, a ton of Irish people,
Speaker 4: which makes it have that kind of Chicago Boston vibe
Speaker 4: as well. So all of these people had their own entertainment.
Speaker 4: So in the sixties, Manchester had more clubs per capita
Speaker 4: than any other city in Europe. So there was comedians,
Speaker 4: there was bands, there was the beat movement, and it
Speaker 4: was a place that all the bands, you know in
Speaker 4: the swinging sixties, well, you know, you had everyone You've
Speaker 4: got Cream and Jimmy Hendrix and Brian Auger and whoever.
Speaker 4: And before that the jazz scene and the blues scene.
Speaker 4: It was the second place everybody came after London because
Speaker 4: there was so many different It was so diverse and
Speaker 4: working class. So you know, Sunn Terry and Brandon McGee
Speaker 4: came in the early sixties and that was a game changer.
Speaker 4: And the famous footage of sister Rosetta Tharps standing on
Speaker 4: the train station that and in Manchester and then the
Speaker 4: Blue Yeah, and then the Blues boom, and it goes
Speaker 4: way back before Oasis even.
Speaker 1: For you.
Speaker 2: And I guess you can also ask this or not
Speaker 2: ask this, Kirk, but answer this because in my mind
Speaker 2: I was told that, you know, the lead guitarist is
Speaker 2: sort of a singular string thing and rhythm guitarist is
Speaker 2: more about the rhythm and chord wise. But were you
Speaker 2: at your essence consider yourself in terms of your guitar work,
Speaker 2: And also wanted to know, like in early Smith shows
Speaker 2: before you added a second guitarist, like how would you
Speaker 2: figure out the vision of labor inside yourself because obviously,
Speaker 2: like a lot of your work, you have to overdub
Speaker 2: chords on top of chords and parts on top of parts.
Speaker 4: So okay, yeah, it's a good question. Well, I for
Speaker 4: the lo longest time because I was I grew up
Speaker 4: primarily in the seventies, so I was eighteen, I was nineteen.
Speaker 4: I think when I formed the Smiths, I was eighty two,
Speaker 4: So you know, I think of myself as a seventies kid,
Speaker 4: you know. So I learned to play guitar by playing
Speaker 4: along with forty five's like the old way, and my
Speaker 4: little brother, who was nine years younger when he was
Speaker 4: a toddler, his job was to put his finger on
Speaker 4: the record to slow it down, which he loved that.
Speaker 4: So I learned play from records, and of course I
Speaker 4: had pals who were in bands, and I was in bands,
Speaker 4: and then I went through that phase work we all did,
Speaker 4: where we're all listening out for guitar solos and we're
Speaker 4: listening to rock music and all of that. But why
Speaker 4: I mention this too, because this is why, for the
Speaker 4: longest time I thought myself as a pop guitar player,
Speaker 4: because the pop music for me meant he's real, banging,
Speaker 4: great breath died quite quirky, eccentric, forty five's. Of course
Speaker 4: I love all kinds of music, but that was my
Speaker 4: introduction to it. And I still the way those records
Speaker 4: were put together and that the guitars were on those
Speaker 4: records by the Suite and on Roxy Music, they're unexpected
Speaker 4: and they're kind of hooky, and they're dazzling and they're
Speaker 4: really exciting. So I always harnessed that, and in a sense,
Speaker 4: quite often the studio I still do, especially when I'm
Speaker 4: listening to playback and I'm wondering what I'm going to
Speaker 4: do with overdubs, I think that's my job, hooks and
Speaker 4: preferably something a little unexpected. So it's not about playing
Speaker 4: amazing scales or solos or anything like that. It's making these,
Speaker 4: like in my way forty fives. So then when I
Speaker 4: came to start being able to put my own bands together,
Speaker 4: say fifteen sixteen, and certainly write my own songs. So
Speaker 4: this was the late seventies, a new wave was starting
Speaker 4: to happen. I realized that quite a lot of other
Speaker 4: guitar my friends, who some of them were great, great
Speaker 4: guitar players, A few of them they would listen to.
Speaker 4: Whoever it was, Jimmy Page or Bert janch or you
Speaker 4: know whoever in my case now Rogers. But they were
Speaker 4: listening to this and they'd want to play like that,
Speaker 4: whereas I wanted to play like the whole record. I
Speaker 4: would play the whole record, so the whole big picture.
Speaker 4: So I kind of approached the guitar. I didn't go,
Speaker 4: this is what a guitar does. I kind of went,
Speaker 4: what does this record need, We'll do it on the guitar.
Speaker 4: That's why there's all like high lifey riffs.
Speaker 1: High life like afridin Feeler.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, like Armi Man's like a really you know,
Speaker 4: like that was pointed out to me, but I wasn't
Speaker 4: doing that because I was trying to. Later on, I
Speaker 4: got really into King Sunny a Day and people like that,
Speaker 4: But that was only because people told me I sounded
Speaker 4: like that. But if you listen to all the overdubs
Speaker 4: that were being done, the overdubs that were being done,
Speaker 4: that was me sort of trying to go, oh, well,
Speaker 4: that would be a string part, or that would be
Speaker 4: a piano part, or that would be So that was
Speaker 4: stuff that I learned off these glam rock records that
Speaker 4: I try to do on the guitar. So I'm very
Speaker 4: lucky that accidentally. You know, I can talk about this
Speaker 4: now like fifty years later, because you know, I've had
Speaker 4: plenty of time to think about it and you start
Speaker 4: to know yourself better. But at the time I was
Speaker 4: just that was the way I learned to play, trying
Speaker 4: to play like a forty five, trying to do everything,
Speaker 4: not just being in my lane. So I would hear
Speaker 4: these melodies backing up the vocal or intros and stuff
Speaker 4: like that, and I would just go, how do I
Speaker 4: do that on the guitar because we didn't have a
Speaker 4: keyboard player, so that was my approach. And then because
Speaker 4: it worked, I guess now that I'm older, if I
Speaker 4: do sessions with people, really that's what people want me
Speaker 4: to do. You know, it's one thing being at a
Speaker 4: describe it. That doesn't make it say you can automatically
Speaker 4: do it. But for quite a number of years in
Speaker 4: my thirties and forties, I think maybe I was trying
Speaker 4: to kick against that a little bit or do something
Speaker 4: different to that. But then when I got old old,
Speaker 4: I went, you know, what's kind of cool to have
Speaker 4: a thing that people know you for. I'm all right
Speaker 4: with that now, and if people you know, if I
Speaker 4: get invited to play on someone's track, I think I
Speaker 4: know kind of what they want me to bring really,
Speaker 4: and it's not like they just want me to play,
Speaker 4: oh you know, make it sound like what difference does
Speaker 4: it make? Or make it sound like this German Man,
Speaker 4: but they do want something that you notice, maybe.
Speaker 2: You're almost first out the gate on most of the
Speaker 2: songs that you're on between your groups and your production like,
Speaker 2: so I would imagine that even in concert, like the
Speaker 2: second you hit a chord, it's almost like an immediate
Speaker 2: explosion of you know what I mean. So, yeah, when
Speaker 2: you're working with the artists and they're enlisting you, does
Speaker 2: it ever get awkward in terms of them getting you
Speaker 2: to be so derivative of a sound that.
Speaker 4: I think because everyone I've worked with almost by none
Speaker 4: I've been a fan of. So there've been someone, let's
Speaker 4: you know, someone who is really cool. Oh, I think
Speaker 4: he's dead cool Beck or Billie Eilish or Matt Johnson.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've done a lot of sessions, but generally,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean there's been a few different times
Speaker 4: when things have happeneding for different reasons, you know, I've
Speaker 4: happened to be in the studio with someone or whatever,
Speaker 4: and I don't really know them. But generally, when I've
Speaker 4: been invited to play with people, I guess the answer.
Speaker 4: You know what. Question of the answer is, I can't.
Speaker 4: I think they're kind of too cool to say that.
Speaker 4: But now I'm older, I kind of go. I want
Speaker 4: to deliver what they what they want. I think the
Speaker 4: main thing, though, is like when I was talking earlier
Speaker 4: about some of the lessons that I learned as a kid,
Speaker 4: this thing of being appropriate to the song. I know
Speaker 4: with you guys as musicians you go well obviously, but actually,
Speaker 4: in guitar culture in the in nineteen seventy six, thirteen
Speaker 4: year old guys didn't give a shit about being appropriate
Speaker 4: to the song. A thirteen year old year old guitar
Speaker 4: players did not give too shits about the song. It
Speaker 4: was like, how quick when do I get to be
Speaker 4: loud and as fast as I can possibly be? So
Speaker 4: when I came across that from reading a couple of musicians,
Speaker 4: I was like, huh, okay. So when I do sessions now,
Speaker 4: I think I'm trying to find the balance now of
Speaker 4: being there and delivering something that is noticeable, because sometimes
Speaker 4: in the past. Maybe twenty years ago, I got too shy,
Speaker 4: maybe my ego got too small even or maybe I
Speaker 4: was insecure or paranoid, or in the last twenty years
Speaker 4: or twenty years ago, maybe in my thirties or something.
Speaker 4: I did plenty of stuff where I was just playing
Speaker 4: too down. I was just being too look. So when
Speaker 4: I did Inception, I'd worked a one movie before in
Speaker 4: the late eighties, Dennis Hopper movie called Colors, which was
Speaker 4: amazing with her behind. I didn't score it. I played
Speaker 4: on it, Okay, yeah, with Charlie Drayton.
Speaker 1: Ya.
Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah, that was the first movie thing that I did,
Speaker 4: which was amazing, and because I really loved the movie,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah. But anyway, you've done that. But Inception
Speaker 4: was the first real big movie that I was working on.
Speaker 4: And get back to the point, I think Ann Zimmers
Speaker 4: said to me, after a couple of days, you've been
Speaker 4: too reverential to the score. We need it to be more.
Speaker 4: You play a bit more out, be a little bit
Speaker 4: more ego, if you like. And I was being a
Speaker 4: little bit too careful. That's what I mean that. So
Speaker 4: these days now I've tried to think the most recent Yeah,
Speaker 4: so The most recent I think record that came out
Speaker 4: was what I did on Noel Gallagher's last album, which
Speaker 4: is a great album. I love playing with no because
Speaker 4: Nole is forward thinking and it kind of answers your
Speaker 4: question really because he wants me to do my thing
Speaker 4: and be recognizable, but also he knows I will also
Speaker 4: want to do something. I don't want to just be
Speaker 4: a throwback to forty years ago. But on his record,
Speaker 4: I delivered something which really stands out. I'm not saying
Speaker 4: it's amazing. I'm just saying it jumps out from the track.
Speaker 4: It doesn't sound like another one of his band members.
Speaker 4: So these days I'm kind of more comfortable in my
Speaker 4: own skin, really.
Speaker 2: And I'm glad you brought that up because I get
Speaker 2: this a lot whenever I'm playing with someone that I
Speaker 2: feel really doesn't look under the hood to see what
Speaker 2: it is that I'm known for, because I'm known for
Speaker 2: underplane like I'm known for. I'm not saying hiding in
Speaker 2: plain sight, but you know, for what drummers are doing now,
Speaker 2: which is basically look mino hands.
Speaker 1: All over the place.
Speaker 2: They'll usually say like now, man, have fun with it,
Speaker 2: and I know part of them is missing factor, and
Speaker 2: I'm trying to tell them like, I'm not known for
Speaker 2: I'm known for the pocket. So yeah, I mean, obviously,
Speaker 2: if Hans hires you, then he knows your work and
Speaker 2: knows that your chord structures your tone. Yeah, that that
Speaker 2: is what really makes you you, and that you've not
Speaker 2: been you know, eruption level fireworks when you know, how
Speaker 2: do you handle it or do you just rise to
Speaker 2: the occasion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I I you know, I rose to the occasion,
Speaker 4: I think, And essentially I think, do you know what
Speaker 4: I think? That says more about Hans than it does
Speaker 4: about me. He's just a really, really nice guy. And
Speaker 4: he kind of gave me that direction where he realized that, look,
Speaker 4: you know, this is Johnny's first big movie, and he's
Speaker 4: been too polite once he gave me that permission off
Speaker 4: a when And then there was a couple of other
Speaker 4: movies where like on this the Spider Man movie, we
Speaker 4: were working on the music for that for a couple
Speaker 4: of weeks, and I mean a lot a bunch of
Speaker 4: us all doing different stuff, and I just came up
Speaker 4: with a riff that unlocked the whole thing. I didn't
Speaker 4: know it, it was just it was a Wednesday, and
Speaker 4: we were all trying to come up with stuff, and
Speaker 4: I thought lots of music was being made, but that
Speaker 4: was because of what he told me to do an inception,
Speaker 4: which was be you and turn up, be you and
Speaker 4: be loud. But still, if we come back to it's
Speaker 4: interesting what you were saying about your approach, I'd call
Speaker 4: that just being tasteful. And there does come a point
Speaker 4: where you kind of go, hey, look, I can do
Speaker 4: all of this. Joe Boat your stuff. While I'm on
Speaker 4: the subject, So guitar culture is changing. It's always changing
Speaker 4: and always evolving. I love guitar technology and I love
Speaker 4: new guitar players, but TikTok and I don't know whether
Speaker 4: it's the same for drums, but TikTok and Instagram is
Speaker 4: really changing a big part of guitar culture. And you've
Speaker 4: got these like amazing children sat in their bedrooms just
Speaker 4: being crazy, absolutely amazing, and it's kind of mind blowing
Speaker 4: without sounding like some old git about it. Though. I
Speaker 4: do wonder if the trick is to sit in a
Speaker 4: room with three other people playing and make it sound
Speaker 4: like music, and because that is just such a solo activity,
Speaker 4: playing as flash as you like, I like stuff that
Speaker 4: sounds like a group. There's a place for that, and
Speaker 4: I applaud it. But my I get I don't know
Speaker 4: whether the values is too much of a pompous way
Speaker 4: of saying it, but I have my I do have
Speaker 4: my values, and a lot of my values were as
Speaker 4: all of us, it kind of baked into you when
Speaker 4: you're starting out. I got to play some in my
Speaker 4: life now where I want to keep evolving and I'm working,
Speaker 4: you know, thinking about my next record, and you crossed
Speaker 4: your fingers that you've got to be inspired. And it's
Speaker 4: always quite a big journey. And as I've said, you know,
Speaker 4: my family get involved. It's a big deal. But I
Speaker 4: don't repeat myself. But I kind of like the values
Speaker 4: that I've got, you know. I like the way my
Speaker 4: band sound. We have a very and I think that's
Speaker 4: something that comes with age. It's not about success, it's
Speaker 4: about doing it for a long time. You go. You know,
Speaker 4: I don't I don't know. I want to evolve, but
Speaker 4: I don't really know whether I want to. I don't
Speaker 4: need to be TikTok, you know, I just don't. It'd
Speaker 4: be nice to be on there and all that, but yeah, well,
Speaker 4: thank you, But I think a lot of it is
Speaker 4: to do with your own personal taste and maybe you
Speaker 4: can call that values or it's just what you're into you,
Speaker 4: you know. But luckily for me with what I do,
Speaker 4: I said before that I used to describe myself as
Speaker 4: a pop musician in the smid stays and electronic and
Speaker 4: I've played a lot with pet Shop Boys and they
Speaker 4: like that. I'm a guitarist who likes pop music. But
Speaker 4: I have to say, in the last sort of ten years,
Speaker 4: in this genrefied world, that you can't escape genres. I
Speaker 4: now even I can hear that pop definitely sounds like
Speaker 4: something else. Now pop really does sound like a certain thing,
Speaker 4: So I have to then if I have to put
Speaker 4: a label on it, I'm going to go the easy
Speaker 4: route and say what I do is I'm a rock musician. Well,
Speaker 4: I'm okay with I used to be okay with being
Speaker 4: a pop musician because I liked the eccentricity of all
Speaker 4: those records that I grew up trying to play.
Speaker 6: Full Disclosure when You're the Guitar Player article came out,
Speaker 6: I believe it was in nineteen eighty nine. The black
Speaker 6: and white cover that was kind of a bible for me, and.
Speaker 1: Uh, what was in it that spoke to you?
Speaker 3: Kirk a lot of.
Speaker 6: The influences that I didn't know what he was talking about.
Speaker 6: But then it was also coincided with the time that
Speaker 6: I started to rummage through my parents' record collection. So
Speaker 6: when I saw you mentioning things like Fat Back Band,
Speaker 6: when I saw you mentioning things like Bahannan, when I,
Speaker 6: you know, talking about Chic, I remember thinking at the time,
Speaker 6: I'm seventeen years old at the time, thinking like that
Speaker 6: don't sound like some and then I'm realizing certain things
Speaker 6: like you know, jump out, you know. First time I
Speaker 6: heard King Sonny a day like mentioned was in that
Speaker 6: article and highlight realized like, what the hell's highlight guitar?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 6: And then I started to hear all of that in
Speaker 6: the Smith's music, like in This Charming Man and everything,
Speaker 6: and just how it's all coming from trying to replicate
Speaker 6: multiple instruments. But it seems like it's all from the
Speaker 6: Smith's days, well, your collaborative days with all the different projects,
Speaker 6: and then with your solo stuff. It seems like you've
Speaker 6: just created like a nice bed of influences to draw from.
Speaker 6: So to say, I'm a rock musician. I guess for
Speaker 6: simplify things, but it's so all over the map.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks Kirk, Yeah, I think you're right. It does
Speaker 4: feel a little reductive. I think maybe of it it's
Speaker 4: because of what pop now is. I have to just
Speaker 4: oh my and go pop now, as we know, it
Speaker 4: is a different if you talk to a twenty two
Speaker 4: year old person, it's it's not what I'm talking about,
Speaker 4: but that article you talk you talked about it's interesting
Speaker 4: because you know, I mean me and you we played together.
Speaker 4: You got up and played with us in Brooklyn that time.
Speaker 4: Is so cool and and but I know we know
Speaker 4: each other. Like whatever was that now more than thirty
Speaker 4: years ago to talk to another guitarist that I know
Speaker 4: about that article, because I got so much shit for
Speaker 4: that article in the United States.
Speaker 7: Really, oh man, why yeah?
Speaker 6: It was so great though, because you tell it was well.
Speaker 4: No, it's so nice. So now thirty years later to
Speaker 4: hear that it landed because well, for those very things
Speaker 4: that I was talking about, Like, there are a lot
Speaker 4: of rock guitar plays, well, I guess you call them
Speaker 4: shredders now, but back then there was a whole load
Speaker 4: of people who a lot of the guitar playing community
Speaker 4: in America at that time, may possibly in Europe as well.
Speaker 4: I guess we're very conservative. They didn't like what I
Speaker 4: was saying. No, total, I'm curious.
Speaker 6: There's an There was an in Vay Molmstein comment and
Speaker 6: oh yeah, I think people like in Bay Molmstein should
Speaker 6: be forgotten as soon as possible.
Speaker 4: That was a quote, Oh look, I just okay, total
Speaker 4: disclaimer that well no, no disclaimer, that is a sound
Speaker 4: that someone uh, just being a little rude.
Speaker 1: What's incredible.
Speaker 6: No, but what's incredible is looking back exactly. But I'm
Speaker 6: seventeen then, so I guess you're twenty Seven's what's amazing.
Speaker 6: You're reading an article like this and like, this is
Speaker 6: a grown man talking.
Speaker 4: That's in my mind.
Speaker 6: And then it's like, but it's a twenty seven year
Speaker 6: old and now being the age that I'm at now, Yeah,
Speaker 6: that was a kid in that article, and it was
Speaker 6: an attitude that needed to be heard at the time,
Speaker 6: with the type of guitar playing that around was so
Speaker 6: yu big with us, it needed to be said.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, I think I was, well, what it was,
Speaker 4: I was I knew it was going to be a
Speaker 4: big story, and I think I was. I was, as
Speaker 4: we say in Manchester, I was on one right, you know,
Speaker 4: I was kind of on I ad an attitude. I
Speaker 4: didn't walk around with loads of attitude, but I had
Speaker 4: an attitude in that moment because I was maybe a
Speaker 4: little bit too bluntly talking about what I was opposed to,
Speaker 4: and I was trying to make a point. Hey it worked.
Speaker 4: I think people people got my point, and I think
Speaker 4: I think I was called the anti hero. Then, you know,
Speaker 4: it's an interesting thing. Look, hey, the guitarists are not.
Speaker 4: It was amazing when this when the Smiths arrived in
Speaker 4: the United States, we arrived at eighty five tour and
Speaker 4: so were the tour was sold out. We'd been known
Speaker 4: and doing pretty well. We were a big enough band
Speaker 4: in the UK and getting kind of well known in
Speaker 4: the States. So we weren't we haven't busted into the
Speaker 4: charts or anything, but we were. You know, we're playing
Speaker 4: the Fox Theater in Detroit, I remember, and we're playing
Speaker 4: the Arragon in Chicago. So we were playing at maybe
Speaker 4: two and a half thousand and three thousand people, and
Speaker 4: then on the West Coast some bigger crowds and stuff.
Speaker 4: So we arrived with an audience. It's kind of interesting
Speaker 4: because our audience they were kind of like get us,
Speaker 4: and there was all these kids who were like they
Speaker 4: were given us this thing. Wow, you've liberated. I didn't
Speaker 4: know what a jock was until that tour of nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty five, and then when I was meeting fans and
Speaker 4: they were like, yeah, we hate the jocks too, We're
Speaker 4: really anti jock. You guys really pissed the jocks off.
Speaker 4: And I was like, what's it, jock? But I'd say
Speaker 4: there was a movement of bands. It wasn't just a Smith.
Speaker 4: I think depeche Mode did that, and The Cure did that,
Speaker 4: New Order Echo and the Bunny Man. So we were
Speaker 4: part of this wave of British boys mostly who and
Speaker 4: it was cool.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: I look back on that now and I think, oh,
Speaker 4: that was so sweet. You know. I liked playing too.
Speaker 4: I like playing to those kids because I was a
Speaker 4: kid myself. I was twenty one or something, so it
Speaker 4: was all new to me. I couldn't obviously, I'm going
Speaker 4: to say what all British musicians have been saying since
Speaker 4: the fifties. I couldn't wait to get to America. Wow,
Speaker 4: and then that we had these people who wanted to
Speaker 4: look like us, and then kids wanting may who were
Speaker 4: trying to play guitar like me, and stuff that blew
Speaker 4: my mind. But I was very nervous being a guitar
Speaker 4: player because I have a huge part of it. I
Speaker 4: used to get so nervous before shows because I did
Speaker 4: because of the guitar culture. I thought, these people America
Speaker 4: is not going to get me. This is coming back
Speaker 4: to I'm remembering the mindset when I did that article,
Speaker 4: because they asked me to do that article you're talking
Speaker 4: about beyond the cover of the first it was the
Speaker 4: last one of the decade or the first one, and
Speaker 4: I was like, I don't know whether guitar playing America
Speaker 4: understands me.
Speaker 1: What was the makeup of the audience? Do you remember?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was well in America, it was. It was
Speaker 4: kind of more mixed than you would imagine.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm so glad you said that, and still is
Speaker 2: the sport, right, So I found out. You know, people
Speaker 2: that listen to the show, of course know my worship
Speaker 2: of the production work of Jade Dillar. And when I
Speaker 2: first started working with Jay Diller, like around ninety seven.
Speaker 2: I was really amazed at how like.
Speaker 1: A big part of my.
Speaker 2: Expansive musical vocabulary, you know, I mean it was prevalent
Speaker 2: in the household because you know, I grew up with
Speaker 2: a sister that listened to rock and alt music and
Speaker 2: all that stuff, and you know, my dad liked yat rock,
Speaker 2: and so I got everything out of my two.
Speaker 1: Parents and my sister.
Speaker 2: I realized that in Detroit there's a black radio station
Speaker 2: that had a show by a DJ called the Electric
Speaker 2: Fine Mojo, and the Electrifying Mojo was open format to
Speaker 2: the bone, like if it had a texture that touched him,
Speaker 2: he would play it, you know. And again, Funkadelic's from Detroit,
Speaker 2: so they would sometimes do straight up rock shit, and
Speaker 2: you know, it wasn't like now where it's just like
Speaker 2: it has to be funk or rap.
Speaker 1: Or you know, he could play whatever.
Speaker 2: And they were trying to explain to me one day,
Speaker 2: they were singing, Ah, I forget which album of yours
Speaker 2: Dylan was trying to sample.
Speaker 4: Maybe it Meet his Murder. Maybe that was a big
Speaker 4: album in America.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was Charming Man or whatever
Speaker 2: whatever it was. He had it and I was like, Yo,
Speaker 2: what do you know about this shit? And he hit me.
Speaker 1: To the fact.
Speaker 2: And later I got tapes where I would listen to,
Speaker 2: you know, someone would record four hours of the Mojo Show,
Speaker 2: and for the life of me, I couldn't get how
Speaker 2: some of the most gangster ass motherfuckers from like Detroit
Speaker 2: when suddenly if you were put on you Guys or
Speaker 2: depeche Mode or New Order, yeah, like they would just
Speaker 2: go creat and start singing it like off the top.
Speaker 2: And I was wondering, like, how did Mojo DJing in
Speaker 2: the Midwest, if you will, sort of affect that. So
Speaker 2: I always wanted to know what the concerts look like
Speaker 2: because it.
Speaker 4: Was really cool. So it's eighty five, and frankly I
Speaker 4: was surprised. It was great, But then there was so
Speaker 4: much about America that I was learning about. It was
Speaker 4: so good. And I mean, you know, us being musicians
Speaker 4: from from England, we were just like, we're gonna go
Speaker 4: to a motown. We're gonna go to a motown, you know.
Speaker 4: But and then the Fox was it was a oh yeah,
Speaker 4: and you know all those places were but he's a
Speaker 4: mixed crowd and and that stayed right the way to
Speaker 4: this day. To this day being sampled. It's amazing. And yeah,
Speaker 4: and the audience, I mean my own audience as well,
Speaker 4: it's it's pretty it's pretty cool. But you know this,
Speaker 4: we come from a city that it's a whole different
Speaker 4: sub I guess, well, maybe it's related. But in eighty
Speaker 4: one eighty two Manchester had this really strong relationship with
Speaker 4: New York and the electro scene. And really we have
Speaker 4: to thank Factory Records and therefore New Order for that
Speaker 4: whole thing, certain ratio, and these were all my pals
Speaker 4: and I hadn't had a record deal yet and I
Speaker 4: was born in the Smiths but everybody, everybody knew everybody else.
Speaker 4: And you know, the first ever Smiths show in America
Speaker 4: was a dancetyria.
Speaker 1: WHOA what was like it?
Speaker 4: Well, we were jet lagged in like you know, no manager,
Speaker 4: and you know it was it was New Year's Eve,
Speaker 4: got from eighty three going in eighty four, and it
Speaker 4: was we couldn't believe it. We were in Dwan to Teteryia.
Speaker 4: So because we were from Manchester. So on the face
Speaker 4: of it, people from the outside world they're like, well,
Speaker 4: the Smiths are this chirpy, quirky in very very very English.
Speaker 4: But because of the Manchester experience, we you know, Downceteria.
Speaker 4: We were buzzing that we were at Downceeteria, and the
Speaker 4: myth goes people say, this is true, but I should
Speaker 4: know this, but that Madonna because she worked there, that
Speaker 4: she opened for like a twenty minute set. I know,
Speaker 4: it's spending a couple of books and it may actually
Speaker 4: be right, But that was that was crazy that that
Speaker 4: that happened. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the very first time I heard of you
Speaker 2: guys was courtesy of Factory Records, but not in the
Speaker 2: way that you think. So I know Factory Records because
Speaker 2: around like eighty nine to ninety kind of when a
Speaker 2: second wave of hip hop is starting, some independent record
Speaker 2: labels got wise to the fact that you know, of
Speaker 2: the old records that were sampling and whatnot to come
Speaker 2: up with compilations, and so of course they were just
Speaker 2: instead of you having a rummage through shit at the
Speaker 2: Salvation Army, you know, and find doubles, you could just
Speaker 2: buy a compilation and have it all on there. But
Speaker 2: then Factory Records would take it even further and not
Speaker 2: even just put the song on there. They would just
Speaker 2: put the brake on there. So they would they would
Speaker 2: just look like sixteen bars of a reticular break do
Speaker 2: that for five minutes.
Speaker 1: And that's how like.
Speaker 2: At least three or four of your songs were on
Speaker 2: those like I think his name is Simon Harris, but
Speaker 2: it was on Factory Records. Yeah, and I always wanted
Speaker 2: to know, like, were you guys that all ever connected
Speaker 2: with or even a where.
Speaker 4: Well I did hear about that at the time, and
Speaker 4: we just thought. I still to this stage, I thought, wow,
Speaker 4: that's really cool. Again. That's that's another example of music.
Speaker 4: Does that, doesn't it because in some ways culturally you go, well,
Speaker 4: you know, our countries are so different, but that's Manchester
Speaker 4: is so like Chicago in that in that instant, you know,
Speaker 4: like S nine hundred was it was it S nine
Speaker 4: under the thing and the NPCs and stuff. I mean
Speaker 4: everybody the first nine yeah, yeah, you know, everybody was
Speaker 4: everybody was making music with those with those things. I
Speaker 4: mean it was the center of Manchester, as in eighty
Speaker 4: well eighty seven, but definitely eighty eight was the center
Speaker 4: of house music in Europe. It wasn't Berlin, and it
Speaker 4: wasn't and it wasn't London. Everyone knows it was Manchester.
Speaker 4: So it is brilliant that you have those kind of
Speaker 4: you have those connections that music can do that you know,
Speaker 4: it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, you mean like your dad liking
Speaker 4: yacht rock. You know, everything's fair game. But I think
Speaker 4: a lot about that to do just plainlist, to do
Speaker 4: with our age and where we are in If your
Speaker 4: musician a certain age now, it tastes should be eclectic
Speaker 4: because we grew up with like fifty years of all
Speaker 4: kinds of people doing really interesting things. And if you're
Speaker 4: just someone who likes music, you're like a hook in
Speaker 4: this song, you like a groove in that song, you
Speaker 4: like the way that person sings. It's all fair game
Speaker 4: and the way the technology has served us all. I
Speaker 4: think it's a really beautiful thing. You know, it's an
Speaker 4: Zim has got this great story about meet and for
Speaker 4: l writing on Spider Man. He always says, I mean
Speaker 4: he was watching the guy who wrote Happy writing a
Speaker 4: song with the guy who wrote Heaven Knows how miserable.
Speaker 4: Now that's a good story, right, nice, it's a good story.
Speaker 4: But but it's that kind of proves my point really,
Speaker 4: like everything's a mix up now in pop, which is
Speaker 4: kind of amazing. You take something like Billie Eilish with
Speaker 4: Billy a few years ago on that Bond film and
Speaker 4: her and finished a great examples of modern musicians. You know,
Speaker 4: So I feel how great I look at I've got
Speaker 4: the best guitar gig of all time, playing with all
Speaker 4: these different kind of did people from different genres of music.
Speaker 4: It's just great.
Speaker 2: Okay, So you're in a room right now with Lord
Speaker 2: knows how many actses are behind you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but few.
Speaker 2: But you can only play one at a time. Maybe
Speaker 2: you could play two first of all, And I'll ask.
Speaker 2: And I always scream on Kirk about this as well.
Speaker 2: I feel as though any legendary guitarist that at least
Speaker 2: has clocked in double digits in years into a notable career,
Speaker 2: I feel as though you should keep. And this is
Speaker 2: where Kirk disagrees with me. I feel as though you
Speaker 2: should keep your first ten years of guitar for history sake.
Speaker 2: But yet, you know, Kirk, I don't know if you
Speaker 2: know the story, but how old were you when Vernon
Speaker 2: Reed gave you his guitar?
Speaker 6: That's for my twenty fourth birthday?
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, I thought it was like me and
Speaker 2: Joe Green Coke commercial, like you were like eight, and
Speaker 2: he's like, here.
Speaker 6: Kid, I mean I was a young twenty four, you're
Speaker 6: kind of I was green.
Speaker 1: At thirty bro.
Speaker 4: Guitar, right, but.
Speaker 1: I gave that guitar to someone else.
Speaker 6: I think Johnny understands this.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 6: In one sense, it's spreading good energy. And in the
Speaker 6: other sense, it's like when you know there's such a
Speaker 6: thing as having enough to share and recognize him when
Speaker 6: you have enough to share. And I think Vernon felt
Speaker 6: that way. I got to a part where like, I
Speaker 6: have enough to share, I want to pass on good mojo,
Speaker 6: to keep using the term, and and I think Johnny
Speaker 6: can take the rest.
Speaker 4: Well, Cris, Look, guitar players are just nicer than drummers, man,
Speaker 4: But a guitar.
Speaker 1: Am I to believe? I heard that.
Speaker 2: I don't know if this is a guitar that is
Speaker 2: on wonder Wall whatever, that's your guitar that yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is? Yeah, I mean wonder Wall is that
Speaker 4: that's a third one. But by that I think I
Speaker 4: sold him that. By then I was sick of giving
Speaker 4: him guitars. I think it's that's that's the way he
Speaker 4: got it.
Speaker 1: How do you start your friendship with no.
Speaker 4: My brother's I said earlier. He is nine years younger
Speaker 4: than me. He's a really low key very He's a quiet,
Speaker 4: cool guy, really cool. And one day he said to me,
Speaker 4: he would have been about nineteen. There was when were
Speaker 4: I was in electronic He said, there's a mate of mind.
Speaker 4: He's got a band together and he's cool. He's a
Speaker 4: pretty cool guy. Now, my brother at seventeen eighteen, he
Speaker 4: was always getting guys usually say to him, will you
Speaker 4: give this? Give this D to your to your Johnny,
Speaker 4: give this that. Because my brother was out in town a.
Speaker 1: Lot, give this, use your A and R C D
Speaker 1: ref and he would just.
Speaker 4: Be I never even got to hear about it. So,
Speaker 4: because he's so low key, the fact that he said
Speaker 4: this guy is pretty cool, I should have listened harder. Really.
Speaker 4: But what happened was when I made a record with
Speaker 4: the Other called Dusk, which I still is one of
Speaker 4: my favorite things I've ever done. And Nol, who my
Speaker 4: brother had seen around town. Noel was coming out of
Speaker 4: a record store with Dusk, and my brother Ian said, Hey,
Speaker 4: what you got there? And and Noel said, I it's
Speaker 4: this new other album. And my brother, who Noel had
Speaker 4: known for a while, said, oh, yeah, my brother's on
Speaker 4: that record. And Noel was like, what what do you
Speaker 4: mean your brother's on this record? What do you mean?
Speaker 4: He said, he's playing guitar on it. So and then
Speaker 4: no was like, hang on a minute, what's your what's
Speaker 4: your last name? And he said, oh, mom, Ian Mars. Anyway,
Speaker 4: that's how that's how that came about. And that's kind
Speaker 4: of a long story. I won't go we're going to
Speaker 4: be here all night. But my brother gave me the
Speaker 4: tape of an early Oasis demo and then the next thing,
Speaker 4: I saw Noel in the in the rain in Manchester
Speaker 4: one day and I gave him a ride in the
Speaker 4: car and we went and talked and I just really
Speaker 4: liked him. And the thing is I went to see
Speaker 4: his band. The story really short. I went to see
Speaker 4: his band a few days later, and I swear there
Speaker 4: was eleven people there max and the show was just
Speaker 4: for my benefit. They were on it like seven this
Speaker 4: is no this is in Manchester. It's way before that,
Speaker 4: okay anyway, he so I went and watched him. He
Speaker 4: did like five five songs. But then when he called
Speaker 4: me the next day asked me what I thought I'd
Speaker 4: made a point of saying, well, look in between numbers,
Speaker 4: you take a long time tuning up. His guitar was
Speaker 4: so shitty he kept going out of chin. I only
Speaker 4: said that because he asked me, do you have any advice?
Speaker 4: And I said, well, you know, you really could do
Speaker 4: with a backup guitar, And quite rightly, he said to me, well,
Speaker 4: that's okay for you to say, mister indie rock star.
Speaker 4: I'm on the doll I'm on the benefits. So I
Speaker 4: was like, oh shit, okay, yeah, good point. And I
Speaker 4: thought he needed a guitar, and I can't give him
Speaker 4: a crappy one. So I gave him a guitar that
Speaker 4: I did a lot of smith stuff on. That was
Speaker 4: I did panic on and a whole bunch of stuff,
Speaker 4: and it blew his mind.
Speaker 1: You gave him my last bar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I gave him that that I got from the.
Speaker 3: Who Oh God.
Speaker 5: Flex small Flag.
Speaker 4: That's a good one. I don't regret it for a second.
Speaker 4: But the thing is, though at the time, no one
Speaker 4: knew he was going to go on to be who
Speaker 4: he is. You know, he was just a kid. He
Speaker 4: also came from We've got a lot in common. He
Speaker 4: comes from our Irish family. It was just an easy,
Speaker 4: it was really easy thing for me to do, and
Speaker 4: I wanted I wanted to help him out, and and
Speaker 4: then off they went, and their rise was really quick,
Speaker 4: and so they then got in my office. I introduced
Speaker 4: him to my manager and all of that was great.
Speaker 4: He and my manager just really hit it off and
Speaker 4: they've been really tight. They've been together for thirty odd
Speaker 4: years throughout the whole journey, and me and Noel are
Speaker 4: closer than ever early thirty years later. But and you know,
Speaker 4: he's done plenty of good stuff for other people too
Speaker 4: that is less well known. I guess. So's it all
Speaker 4: kind of comes you know, what goes around comes around,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 5: Johny, I got a question, have you ever been asked
Speaker 5: to play on an African record?
Speaker 4: Or?
Speaker 5: Is that something interesting? Giving the Sunny Hour Day references
Speaker 5: and all that stuff in the way you play.
Speaker 4: I played live with I'm doing Marry Him, and that
Speaker 4: was really interesting. That was someone who had did jam with.
Speaker 4: They invited me to come and play with him. I thought,
Speaker 4: oh man, this is going to be amazing. So the
Speaker 4: answer is no, not in the way, not in the
Speaker 4: way you mention it. No, I haven't I got very
Speaker 4: because when after this Charming Man came out a lot
Speaker 4: of people were writing that the guitars were very high life,
Speaker 4: and as Kurk mentioned, I had no I didn't know
Speaker 4: what high life was now in the UK, in the
Speaker 4: sort of underground station everyone knows, you guys don't know
Speaker 4: about John Peel. He was such a seminal guy.
Speaker 1: That's the guy that breaks you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was. He used to play low loads of
Speaker 4: underground music on and outlying music, but on on BBC.
Speaker 4: So he was a brave guy and he broke a
Speaker 4: lot of bands. And I think you two started out
Speaker 4: on his show, and and and the Smiths, and there's
Speaker 4: a lot a lot of bands that I've got, you know,
Speaker 4: John Peel to thank now. He used to play. That
Speaker 4: was when I first started hearing high life after that,
Speaker 4: so it started to become it was a thing, but
Speaker 4: I didn't know about it in the in the UK,
Speaker 4: in the underground. But I just played the way I played,
Speaker 4: As I said, I was just looking for melodies and
Speaker 4: I had a kind of unusual way of playing. I think,
Speaker 4: playing that real clean sound m h. And I mean
Speaker 4: if you want to know about that as well, that
Speaker 4: was It's funny how these things come about. But I
Speaker 4: was almost forced into a clean sound, which really suited me.
Speaker 4: It was great because of the way fashions music fashions go,
Speaker 4: so because of punk rock and the sex pistols playing
Speaker 4: this very overdriven, let's say, like a Ramones kind of
Speaker 4: sound in the In the US it was short, sharp,
Speaker 4: very distorted like that, because that had happened after punk
Speaker 4: everyone was looking for their own thing. You might, you
Speaker 4: guys might find this interesting in Manchester because we're young.
Speaker 4: You know, quite often young people define themselves by what
Speaker 4: they're not. So if you're kind of hip in Manchester
Speaker 4: or but probably anywhere in the UK and maybe the States,
Speaker 4: not too much the States, but seventy nine eighty eighty one.
Speaker 4: For guitar players, there was a whole lot of thou
Speaker 4: shalt not so it was thou shalt not play pentatonic
Speaker 4: blues licks, thou shalt not sound like Freebird, thou shalt
Speaker 4: not sound like and it gave us. So there was
Speaker 4: a lot of As a guitar player, you know, you
Speaker 4: want to be modern and you want to be contemporary
Speaker 4: and cutting edge. So in my case, for me, my
Speaker 4: took this stuff very seriously, like distortion was out, a
Speaker 4: lot of effects were out, except for Charlie Burchill from
Speaker 4: Simple Minds. He did it well. A guy from Killing
Speaker 4: Joke did it well. But there was a whole bunch
Speaker 4: of guitar players, and in my case, what all I
Speaker 4: was left with was clean, no effects, and I was
Speaker 4: the one guy playing melody in the band, and the
Speaker 4: Factory Records guys all went towards funk, so a certain ratio.
Speaker 4: You hear it in New Orders Records. So obviously now
Speaker 4: Rogers was real Big Nile's thing, because if you've got
Speaker 4: no distortion and no sustain when you play guitar coord
Speaker 4: it disappears real quick unless you're going in the game thing,
Speaker 4: unless you're playing a lot of funk. Now, I mean
Speaker 4: this was very deliberate on my part. There was a
Speaker 4: few bands who were doing that very well, who were
Speaker 4: on the John Peel Show, and I was able to
Speaker 4: do something else. I was able to play very melodic,
Speaker 4: and I was able to play our pedgios, and I
Speaker 4: wanted my own thing. So bands like you hear it
Speaker 4: in Orange Juice and some of the What Postcard records
Speaker 4: where they've got this anemic very low fi approach with
Speaker 4: James Brown Beats because it had to be non rock,
Speaker 4: that's the thing, non rock, non rock, so funk was
Speaker 4: kind of a thing, but still it had to be
Speaker 4: lo fi. I think in the US the closest to
Speaker 4: it would have been ESG, you know. So it's this
Speaker 4: minimalist lo fi almost amateurish cool thing, and so the
Speaker 4: guitar version of that, and no one was doing what
Speaker 4: I was doing. So my point being that I was
Speaker 4: left with a few sort of very only a few
Speaker 4: things left that I could do. And I think that's
Speaker 4: a really good thing for art. I think if you've
Speaker 4: got just a few options, particularly in this day and age,
Speaker 4: when you can sit in front of a laptop and
Speaker 4: you can just pull down loops orchestras, choirs, anything you want,
Speaker 4: any kind of plugins. But then may as a guitar
Speaker 4: player I was. I was left with just a very
Speaker 4: very narrow set of options. So it made me play
Speaker 4: in a very hyperactive way. And that's where this high
Speaker 4: life ye kind of king Sonia day thin comes from.
Speaker 4: Because I didn't have a whole load of echo hanging
Speaker 4: around or a load of distortion, and I was very melodic,
Speaker 4: so I was kind of just really getting busy.
Speaker 1: Was it ever a temptation to go there?
Speaker 2: And I understand what you're saying, because you know, we
Speaker 2: started off busking, so I always played like a two
Speaker 2: piece set, a three piece set, and then of course
Speaker 2: the second we got our record deal, I fucked around
Speaker 2: and got a Neil Pert set, which my manager was like, nah, dude,
Speaker 2: like no, right, go back to your kick, your snare,
Speaker 2: your high and mess.
Speaker 4: It like that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I learned my lessons.
Speaker 2: But were you ever tempted to like go out and
Speaker 2: five pedal effect wars in?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Oh no, I do that, but I try
Speaker 4: and do it to make to make it sound like
Speaker 4: my records, like I'm really into the technology. In the eighties,
Speaker 4: no one was more diametrically opposed to my approach than
Speaker 4: Eddie van Halen. There's no doubt about it. If you
Speaker 4: go what's the most extreme opposite to what I was doing,
Speaker 4: I guess is Eddie van Halen. And I saw Edie
Speaker 4: van Halen, and I watched this guy smile for two
Speaker 4: hours while he was playing and look like it was
Speaker 4: the greatest thing in the world. And I was like,
Speaker 4: he's all right, And then I met him. What a
Speaker 4: beautiful guy. Was absolutely beautiful guy, but no one needs
Speaker 4: me to be in that area. And it was just
Speaker 4: it's kind of a funny thing, and you know, I
Speaker 4: had forgotten that. I almost wish that I'd remembered that
Speaker 4: when when I wrote my book. But I think knowing
Speaker 4: what you were about well but still hoping to surprise
Speaker 4: yourself is where I'm at. But I love technology. I'm
Speaker 4: my pedals crazy and but I've got it down now,
Speaker 4: and I think it's a whole other thing. But I
Speaker 4: think the technology is finally now. Maybe it was a
Speaker 4: number of years ago, but finally actually caught up with
Speaker 4: the musicians. If I'm not careful, I can spend too
Speaker 4: much of my time pressing buttons. I love programming pedals.
Speaker 4: I love it because it's I say it's programming. I
Speaker 4: say it is producing with my feet. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I'm so happy you included your pedal board in uh
Speaker 6: Mars guitars.
Speaker 1: But I did notice.
Speaker 6: Maybe I missed it, but I was looking for what
Speaker 6: you were using, and maybe you just omitted it because
Speaker 6: it's just simply unsex No, just it's just the rack
Speaker 6: units that you were using in the late eighties, like
Speaker 6: you had, you were using a rack amunted boogie. You
Speaker 6: had like a mess a boogie, power ramp, messu preamps
Speaker 6: and rack effects and yeah, but you didn't include that
Speaker 6: in the book. And it was it just do you
Speaker 6: not have them anymore? Or just it's just there. They
Speaker 6: don't look as beautiful as a fender.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: It was just an asthetic decision. I thought that if
Speaker 4: I'd done that, it would have tipped the book slightly
Speaker 4: too much into the realm of this book. Is is
Speaker 4: four Musicians? Because right, the balance with that book was
Speaker 4: I wanted it to be Yes, four Musicians, but I
Speaker 4: thought it would be a neat trick to pull off
Speaker 4: if people who weren't musicians had it next to zen
Speaker 4: gardens in their house. I want for that book, if
Speaker 4: I'm being honest, to be a little bit like the
Speaker 4: Trojan Horse. That's the book I'm trying to That's my
Speaker 4: way of getting guitars into people's houses who would not
Speaker 4: normally have a guitar book.
Speaker 6: Yes, and and Ra units are only sexy to guitar
Speaker 6: players of a certain vintage and to really no one
Speaker 6: else at all. Correct, while I'm in here, I just
Speaker 6: I wanted to ask, we got the pleasure of playing
Speaker 6: with Nil Rogers at the Roots Picnic in New York
Speaker 6: a few years back, and he mentioned your son, Nile
Speaker 6: that plays ye mentioned you know how great he was
Speaker 6: at guitar, you know, hearing your story about your you
Speaker 6: with your parents and just the effect of seeing you know,
Speaker 6: your playing the record over and over and just music
Speaker 6: made in spaces. I'm getting the feeling that there wasn't
Speaker 6: much of a feeling of what's that noise that Johnny's
Speaker 6: listening to? Like your parents were listening to the noise
Speaker 6: of the day, it seems as well. And wondering what
Speaker 6: the dynamic was with Nile growing up. Was he ever
Speaker 6: into music that you were saying, oh that's shite or
Speaker 6: was it a similar dynamic that you had with your
Speaker 6: parents or.
Speaker 4: That's an interesting question. Yeah. The thing is, well, now
Speaker 4: has made a few albums. Now he's made he made
Speaker 4: an album with his band, Man Made, which I mean,
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I get it. I think he's
Speaker 4: really I think he's really good. He's made a few
Speaker 4: solo records and now he's got a new band called
Speaker 4: Share And but because he put these records out, he
Speaker 4: was he'd done interviews, and he knows he's going to
Speaker 4: be asked about me some less polite or call or
Speaker 4: consider it rather interviewers are gonna ask him about me
Speaker 4: right out the gate. And he's a smart guy, but
Speaker 4: he's you know, he's okay, he can handle it. There
Speaker 4: was one time I was doing something and a podcast
Speaker 4: came on and he was on it, and I was
Speaker 4: hearing him being interviewed, and I was like, oh, I
Speaker 4: don't know whether I want to hear him talking about
Speaker 4: his childhood. What am I going to hear? And he's
Speaker 4: a funny guy, So it was weird. It was it
Speaker 4: felt a little like eaves dropping. It was I shouldn't really,
Speaker 4: I don't go out of my way to avoid it,
Speaker 4: but I was a little like, I don't I want
Speaker 4: to listen to the being in if you don't want
Speaker 4: him to do his thing. But in the interview they
Speaker 4: asked him about growing up in the house. Now. The
Speaker 4: thing is, he said, well, straight away, the people that
Speaker 4: because our house was a recording studio, it wasn't like
Speaker 4: we had a studio in the house. The house was
Speaker 4: a studio that we lived in really, so there was
Speaker 4: ants in the rooms and they were miked up for
Speaker 4: certain rooms. Sounded good because I had a big studio
Speaker 4: in the outbuilding outside, so there's a lot of musicians around.
Speaker 4: So he grew up with his sister in that environment.
Speaker 4: And his answer was that the thing that growing up
Speaker 4: in his house with me as his father, that the
Speaker 4: first thing he saw was that my famous friends, whether
Speaker 4: in Radiohead or New Order or whatever, that he saw
Speaker 4: a serious work ethic, not just from me and his mother,
Speaker 4: but everyone. He saw that successful people really work hard,
Speaker 4: which was nice, but then said it was unusual being
Speaker 4: in a house where where when he was playing a
Speaker 4: record he had to explain exactly why he was listening
Speaker 4: to it. And and I said to his sister, I went,
Speaker 4: he's got easy exaggerate. Is that right? Is that a thing?
Speaker 4: She was like, oh yeah, it was like so I
Speaker 4: was like, well, really, I used to go in there
Speaker 4: and he'd be like listening to Pink or Ave Levine.
Speaker 4: I've got what said she listened? Tell me why I
Speaker 4: know you're six. I know he's six, but tell me
Speaker 4: exactly why he's turned me onto a lot of music
Speaker 4: and vice versa. And yeah, So it was a similar
Speaker 4: dynamic to my household. It was this thing of I
Speaker 4: guess it's just like all of us. Really, it's learned behavior.
Speaker 4: I think of, Okay, you've got to be musical anyway,
Speaker 4: because his sister isn't in a band. She can sing
Speaker 4: like great, but she chosen not to be in bands.
Speaker 4: And he is a talented musician. But it's that thing
Speaker 4: of loving music. And I guess he saw how it
Speaker 4: can be your living, how you can take it seriously,
Speaker 4: how you can take it almost too seriously. I guess
Speaker 4: I say this quite a lot with the Irish thing
Speaker 4: as well. But in my house, seriously, when I was
Speaker 4: going to music was really was like a religion in
Speaker 4: my house. And I get and it's it's kind of
Speaker 4: like that in Ah. It's probably been like that for
Speaker 4: my kids. But they turned out okay, so it's all right.
Speaker 4: But so you know, it's an interesting thing. Well, he's
Speaker 4: named after Nol Rogers and he's happy about that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and know Nile's happy about it. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I'm of course a big Smith's fan, and a lot
Speaker 8: of the things you worked on, but particularly the Billy
Speaker 8: Bragg stuff. I'm a big, big fan of that record
Speaker 8: in particular. It's just one record that you worked on
Speaker 8: with him the Taxman record or was it more than that?
Speaker 4: No, No, I did one called Don't Try This at
Speaker 4: Home as well. In fact, recently, it's got a psychedelic
Speaker 4: track on that. Check out Cindy of a thousand Lives.
Speaker 4: You will not believe it's Billy Bragg. It's this real
Speaker 4: psychedelic shu gaizy. Yes, a good one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and sexuality. You co wrote the single on that
Speaker 8: one as well, right, Yeah, I did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I produced that and wrote it with him. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I guess my question is because I do like to
Speaker 8: turn the question of supreme audience onto artists, they may
Speaker 8: not beoper familiar with Billy Bragg being one of them.
Speaker 3: So what was what was that experience?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 8: Was there some story where you guys were toring together
Speaker 8: prior to working together?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well the thing with us and Billy and me
Speaker 4: and Billy still so Billy was a real contemporary as in.
Speaker 4: I say that because so many years later now, not
Speaker 4: everybody's still around for whatever reason. Some dropped out, some
Speaker 4: just out with us anymore, et cetera. And Billy's still
Speaker 4: out doing his thing, which is so good, and he's
Speaker 4: doing it doing it well. So I'm really pleased for him.
Speaker 4: He came out and for the Smiths on our US tour,
Speaker 4: that tour I was talking about earlier in eighty five,
Speaker 4: and he was such a great opener because it was
Speaker 4: just him and his guitar, and he would he was
Speaker 4: so fearless, he would.
Speaker 1: Back then.
Speaker 4: It was all about, you know, politically, it was all
Speaker 4: about Reaganomics, and over here we had our version of it,
Speaker 4: and he he would engage the audience with with stuff
Speaker 4: that was kind of was political but also funny and
Speaker 4: thought provoking. So quite often when you go on stage,
Speaker 4: you know, after some people, you know that the opening act,
Speaker 4: it's a hard gig for some opening acts because the
Speaker 4: audience aren't really listening. But he really engaged the audience
Speaker 4: as an opening act. But he had but no one
Speaker 4: had heard based on Drumson, and we went on. We
Speaker 4: sounded really huge. But what was great was he got
Speaker 4: the audience kind of antsy in a way. He was
Speaker 4: funny and he was thought provoking, and they'd never seen
Speaker 4: anyone like him, So Billy's whole thing. Back then, he
Speaker 4: used to say, when he sings a song, he wants
Speaker 4: to sound like all of the clash, which was kind
Speaker 4: of what he did. He used to really go for it,
Speaker 4: so when you would come on, we definitely felt like
Speaker 4: he'd built a vibe. So we got to be pals,
Speaker 4: and I played on the Talking with the Taxman about
Speaker 4: Poetry album, did a couple of songs with him on that,
Speaker 4: and then we just stayed to be friends and we
Speaker 4: wrote Sexuality together, and then I became like he's kind
Speaker 4: of producer during that period, and he came to my
Speaker 4: studio and did a few songs there for the album
Speaker 4: called Don't Try This at Home. He's someone who'll feels
Speaker 4: as stayed as a kindred spirit really politically, ideologically, I think.
Speaker 4: And it's nice when the good guys stay as the
Speaker 4: good guys, you know, it's really good, very heartening to see.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a great artist.
Speaker 8: Also somebody that I don't believe you've ever worked with them,
Speaker 8: And I could be wrong, but I'm going down this
Speaker 8: Nicolo rabbit hole because I'm about to interview Nikolo for
Speaker 8: this podcast for the same for QLs, and I heard
Speaker 8: one in some interview that you're a fan of his,
Speaker 8: and I was just wondering where you caught onto that scene.
Speaker 4: Well, all musicians certainly of a certain age all regard
Speaker 4: Nick low as a great man and a great musician.
Speaker 4: And when I said earlier, when I was talking to
Speaker 4: the quest of about I left school at fifteen to
Speaker 4: be in a band with adults. That was to go
Speaker 4: to Nick Love's house and make demos for Elvis Costello's manager.
Speaker 4: That was the first recording studio I was ever in,
Speaker 4: and I was I think maybe he was even fourteen.
Speaker 3: So this is Jake Rivieira.
Speaker 4: Yeah, j Riviera called me one day when I came
Speaker 4: home from school. I was still in my school uniform,
Speaker 4: and I thought it was I thought it was one
Speaker 4: of my piles playing a prank. And one of my
Speaker 4: other piles had sent in a tape of my band
Speaker 4: to Jake Riviera.
Speaker 3: And he liked it and for Stiff Records.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, nothing came of it, but it was a
Speaker 4: big experience for me because I'd never been in a
Speaker 4: recording studio and I was in Nick Lowe's house and
Speaker 4: Nick low while we were there, Nick Lowe came back
Speaker 4: from an American tour while and I didn't meet him,
Speaker 4: but I saw him. I saw his cowboy boots wobbling
Speaker 4: up the stairs up to his bedroom honestly, very very unsteadily,
Speaker 4: and then heard a crash and then no one saw
Speaker 4: him for a few days. But I then worked with
Speaker 4: him because of this story. When I was in The Pretenders,
Speaker 4: Christy who was a very generous person because behind her
Speaker 4: first single was produced by Nick Low, the first Protect single,
Speaker 4: and because you knew I was a fan of Nick Low,
Speaker 4: when we went in the studio to do the only
Speaker 4: recording that I did with The Pretenders, we got Nick
Speaker 4: Low to produce it. So I eventually got to work
Speaker 4: with Nick Low on a couple of songs great man,
Speaker 4: Oh cool, So let's stop your sobbing You're on that?
Speaker 3: Or that's the one.
Speaker 4: That's the one Nick Low produced that came out when
Speaker 4: I was a kid. But we did one for this
Speaker 4: movie Night in sixty nine where we did the Stooges song,
Speaker 4: we did Windows of the World but Bacarrack song, and
Speaker 4: we did nighteteen sixty nine bad Stooges, and we did
Speaker 4: it in one take, and Nick was like, hey, listen,
Speaker 4: I know my reputation is that I just say one take,
Speaker 4: but really the first take was the take, and we
Speaker 4: did it about four times and then it was right,
Speaker 4: one take, But Yeah, it was cool.
Speaker 3: Awesome, thanks for sharing that.
Speaker 1: This for me is like a dream.
Speaker 6: I could just sit here like all day. There's many
Speaker 6: more questions I have, but I feel really lucky that
Speaker 6: I could save this for when we meet again, Johnny.
Speaker 6: But absolutely, yeah, always a pleasure to be continued.
Speaker 4: Oh absolutely, What is.
Speaker 6: That amp next to those books up there? There's like
Speaker 6: it looks like a little like a plexi.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a it's one of those little Freedman plexis.
Speaker 4: It's it's well, it's called a it's just called a plexi.
Speaker 4: It's a mini plexi.
Speaker 1: You have a Freedman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've got a couple of Freedman's. Yeah I didn't know. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know whether that's made, but I think that's
Speaker 4: made by Freedman. But it's called a plexi. What I
Speaker 4: did that? You know that thing where a few years
Speaker 4: ago one of my friends said to me, listen, and
Speaker 4: you've got to get this. You're not going to believe it.
Speaker 4: It's like actually fifteen fifteen what Yeah, it's so so
Speaker 4: good man.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like you say, the technology, the way that you
Speaker 6: can dial things up so easily, whether it's getting things
Speaker 6: that sound grade in a small you know, less wattage,
Speaker 6: so you get more tone at lower volumes. It's really
Speaker 6: to our advance these days. It's in a way that
Speaker 6: it wasn't prior.
Speaker 4: Oh do you know about this? I know we can
Speaker 4: go on forever this, but do you know about these synergies,
Speaker 4: these little this company synergy they make They just so
Speaker 4: this is like this is this is it the kemper
Speaker 4: or no, above the above the kemper? You have this
Speaker 4: one you thing and then these modules pull out and
Speaker 4: there's a Bogner now Freedman aerplexi offender, and they're doing
Speaker 4: it all in conjunction with the they're doing it with
Speaker 4: the companies. So it start like they're ripping the companies
Speaker 4: offer anything right right?
Speaker 6: Oh man?
Speaker 4: And they sounded so good for at home. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, Hey, John, I just want to say that you
Speaker 2: know this, this has been six years in the making,
Speaker 2: and first of all, when when we played with you,
Speaker 2: we couldn't believe it, but you were just it was
Speaker 2: a dream to play with you. And finally like we
Speaker 2: get to have this conversation six years down the line, Kurr,
Speaker 2: thank you for making sure that we kept this appointment
Speaker 2: and that we saw this through and uh, we just
Speaker 2: want to thank you for being on on on this
Speaker 2: platform and and and and talking to us, just talking shot.
Speaker 4: It's fantastic. Thank you for inviting me. It's so good
Speaker 4: to see you guys again. It's been too long and
Speaker 4: I hope it's not as long again. And you know,
Speaker 4: every every time I see you, so it's it's it's
Speaker 4: always a joice great like I recognize a musicians, you know.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you well on behalf of Captain Kirk Douglas,
Speaker 2: our special guest and uh, Sir Steve and unpaid Bill
Speaker 2: and the entire Q and Lust family. This is a
Speaker 2: Quest Love and we'll see on the next program.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Quest Love Supreme. Posted by
Speaker 1: a Mere Quest Love.
Speaker 7: Thompson, Are you Saying Clear? Fante Sugar, Steve Mandel, Unpaid
Speaker 7: Bill Sherman. Executive producers are Amir quest Love, Thompson, Seean
Speaker 7: Che and Brian Calvin. Produced by Britney, Benjamin Cousin, Jake Paine,
Speaker 7: Elaiah Saint Clair, edited by Alex Convoy. Produced by iHeart
Speaker 7: by Noel Brown.
Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
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