Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It's okay to meet your heroes, It's okay to dream,
Speaker 2: It's okay to let life float you to where you
Speaker 2: should be. In twenty twenty one, Quest Love asked me
Speaker 2: to do a one on one interview with Elvis Costello
Speaker 2: at Electric Lady Studios for Questlove Supreme. At first I
Speaker 2: said no, just kidding. I jumped at the opportunity, but
Speaker 2: I wanted Questlove there for part of it, just to
Speaker 2: see what two of the greatest musicologists and music historians
Speaker 2: of our time would discuss. I wasn't disappointed, and you
Speaker 2: won't be either. It's hard to keep up, but it's
Speaker 2: worth it, and it's hilarious listening to me try to.
Speaker 2: They're both legends, they're both brilliant. Enjoy Part one this
Speaker 2: week and Part two next week. This was originally aired
Speaker 2: in April twenty twenty two. Whew, I can't believe this happened.
Speaker 3: That's all rights alone, and he can give you tonight.
Speaker 4: By you know, I don't even know the bloody words
Speaker 4: in direction like it was trying to lift this person up.
Speaker 3: So maybe it's a little gramatic guy.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to get your attention.
Speaker 4: It looks like you're no good.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: The reason I mentioned Elvis Hostels because the record I
Speaker 2: just called that because I can't call it from jackfre
Speaker 2: New City.
Speaker 4: The reason I mentioned el this Hostel.
Speaker 3: Everyday book the way it was written, which is kind
Speaker 3: of much more so a strummy already down with all this.
Speaker 2: What a great first line in the history of first
Speaker 2: lines of rock and roll songs.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 2: I used to be disgusted, but now I try to
Speaker 2: be amused. Sometimes you can't read the newspaper without keeping
Speaker 2: that in mind.
Speaker 4: But he says, well, that's fine, but you never said
Speaker 4: what the pad's poison closed means. So that's what you
Speaker 4: have to say. I mean in this hang Out with
Speaker 4: Elvis educational part of Right with Bae McCarty incident hang
Speaker 4: Out with Elvis, he's very logical, so.
Speaker 3: He goes, you know, this is.
Speaker 4: What you gotta do that with Elvis.
Speaker 2: There's gonna be music in it, and I'm gonna cut
Speaker 2: it in.
Speaker 3: El got everything everything everything, Yeah, you know, various album throughout.
Speaker 2: The interesting things that they probably want clear like the
Speaker 2: roots running over a high fidelity by themselves at thirty rock.
Speaker 2: You know, before that first performance.
Speaker 4: Oh, let's have that. Yeah, that'd be good. Can we
Speaker 4: get that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, do we do that? And did we do that?
Speaker 4: And we did that on the show? Yet we did
Speaker 4: that on the show?
Speaker 2: Happy Yeah? It was the first first song I know?
Speaker 4: Is that the same one with the Chelsea? And then
Speaker 4: the second time it was like Stations of the.
Speaker 3: Cross and someone else?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and John exactly hey man belated Happy Birthday. I
Speaker 4: try to play a happy birthright. I couldn't play for ship.
Speaker 4: Don't know if I don't know how to play the piano.
Speaker 3: Still feel h m hmm, I still feel good? H No,
Speaker 3: I said, they said the song. Mm hm, that's great.
Speaker 4: M hm.
Speaker 3: Hm is that the easy Yeah? I'm a I'm a
Speaker 3: mm hmmmmm m h. I'm gonna do a slight preface.
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first quest Love Supreme
Speaker 3: that has been done in person since the March sixteenth,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty pandemic. How strange that we don't have a
Speaker 3: supreme vow call Candy home. It should also be noted
Speaker 3: that this was recorded on January It's to Day's day,
Speaker 3: twenty fifth. Okay, so the day of this recording is
Speaker 3: January twenty fifth, and the reason why I feel compelled
Speaker 3: to acknowledge the date is because we are also recording
Speaker 3: inside of Electric Lady Studios on this the twenty second
Speaker 3: anniversary of the seminal album that kind of you know,
Speaker 3: brought me to the studio in the first place.
Speaker 4: Which is Voodoo by DiAngelo.
Speaker 3: So I was rather apropos that Sugar Steve and I, oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, Boston.
Speaker 2: Edited, I'm editing this, so don't worry about anything. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna chop it up, not shopping, sit up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unpaid, Bill Fontigelo and Laia are not with us
Speaker 3: right now, so it's right now, it's just me and Steve.
Speaker 3: The last time we did this was with with Herb
Speaker 3: Alpert right at this very studio. So for me, what's
Speaker 3: very important about this particular episode, and this is again
Speaker 3: me trying to improve as a human. This is all
Speaker 3: about going out of your comfort zone. So I'm here
Speaker 3: as a third will, or as a referee, or as
Speaker 3: training wills, because I really it's my dream for Sugars
Speaker 3: Steve to really bring out his voice and quest of
Speaker 3: supreme episodes because you know, half the time we hog
Speaker 3: up all the the moments and he only gets like
Speaker 3: one comet in and you know that, like Steve really
Speaker 3: has in my opinion, Like I mean, he's like all
Speaker 3: he has so much music knowledge that he has yet
Speaker 3: to share with you people, unless you follow the Sugar
Speaker 3: network like of all of us. He has his own
Speaker 3: fan clubs simply for his music knowledge. So that should
Speaker 3: tell you something. But for me, I thought, what what's
Speaker 3: the best way to throw Sugar Steve in the and
Speaker 3: the long away to jump into the river. And he's
Speaker 3: really uncomfortable right now, is I mean? Long guard?
Speaker 2: I told you I'm editing.
Speaker 3: You're not editing at all. Yo, I'm sorry you're not.
Speaker 2: I'm like you. I'm a little uncomfortable with compliments. But
Speaker 2: and and and see we're at a crossroads here. We're not, Yes,
Speaker 2: we are.
Speaker 3: This is the fact. Look, Steve, we this is the
Speaker 3: very this is where we are.
Speaker 2: We're literally at the cross We're in the we're in
Speaker 2: the center of studio A. Yes, I get it, at
Speaker 2: like the X the middle of the X point.
Speaker 3: Similar to Samuel Jackson and Paul Fixon. You're not talking
Speaker 3: yourself out of this ship. I'm not trying to all
Speaker 3: I'm saying is that you know, there comes a time
Speaker 3: where we have to.
Speaker 2: Like, how long do you have to stay tonight? Because
Speaker 2: I'm here.
Speaker 3: All listen, listen. My whole point is this, My whole
Speaker 3: point is this. The way that you're acting right now
Speaker 3: is exactly how I was acting when David Dinerstein and
Speaker 3: Robert Fevalent had told me that it's my destiny to
Speaker 3: direct the documentary. And I'm like, dude, I'm a first
Speaker 3: time driver, Like.
Speaker 2: All right, I got it. I gotta just jump in here.
Speaker 3: No, no, this is this is a special quest love Supreme. Yes,
Speaker 3: it's my dream to watch Steve talk to his musical hero.
Speaker 2: I've thought about this. This is essentially as if you
Speaker 2: got to interview Prince. I know, you know, like that's
Speaker 2: essentially where that makes sense to people.
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm the guy in the threesome that
Speaker 3: isn't needed.
Speaker 2: So wow, no, well see here's the that's the relief,
Speaker 2: here's here's the problem. And you say you're trying to
Speaker 2: become a better person, So just accept accept this. As
Speaker 2: much as I'm thrilled to be interviewing you know, my
Speaker 2: number one musical hero here, Yes, you're very much a
Speaker 2: part of the story that I want to tell tonight. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'll be here, but and I need you here to
Speaker 2: tell the story. Not just the story of the last
Speaker 2: ten years since we've met him, let's say, but a
Speaker 2: certain theme that I want to get to that you
Speaker 2: both have in comments. So it's like you're trying to
Speaker 2: like say, you're training wheels, but you're you're the musical encyclopedia.
Speaker 2: I'm here with two of the acknowledged global music encyclopedias,
Speaker 2: and you're telling and you're telling people that I have
Speaker 2: musical knowledge about something.
Speaker 3: Let's just do this. This is three friends talking. But
Speaker 3: eventually I'm gonna get up from the seat and go
Speaker 3: to Studio B. It's going to be just like two thousands.
Speaker 3: It's voodoo all over again. It's voodoo all over again.
Speaker 3: I got kimber waiting next door. Kimber Lee's is next door.
Speaker 2: So okay, you got two rooms tonight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got two rooms. However, it's my dream to
Speaker 3: see you top the Jimmy Jam episode. So, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 3: this is a very special in person live at Electric
Speaker 3: Lady Studios. You're just cracking up over here with our
Speaker 3: good friend Elvis Costello. Thank you all right, so and
Speaker 3: now for the intro.
Speaker 2: Right now, now, the now, the real intro, because like
Speaker 2: whatever that was, okay.
Speaker 4: Did I mention that I have day hell for later on?
Speaker 2: I mean I really would love to just continue with
Speaker 2: what he was saying, because like this, dude, right here, wait, look,
Speaker 2: this is not okay. Well no, I think people need
Speaker 2: to hear this, okay, just like you thought they needed
Speaker 2: to hear what you just said.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons why he agreed to do Wise
Speaker 2: Up Ghosts he wanted to give me this gift of
Speaker 2: doing an album with you. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 4: Well, I'm saying him give you gifts like that before
Speaker 4: I was there. I was there on your birthday.
Speaker 2: Though, right, and you've given me gifts to you anyway,
Speaker 2: Let's let's start. Welcome to Quest Love Supreme. My name
Speaker 2: is Sugar Steve.
Speaker 3: I swear to God, Steve. If you cut out what
Speaker 3: just started the show your fire, fire, fire fire.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put an echo on that fire.
Speaker 3: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: So with thirty something studio albums, dozens of other compilations
Speaker 2: and live releases, box sets and EPs, endless singles and
Speaker 2: B sides, with a substantial autobiography and a forty five
Speaker 2: year career, playing countless live concerts and appearing in media
Speaker 2: as diverse as singing on a commercial jingle with his father,
Speaker 2: guest hosting that David Letterman show, Austin Powers movies, and
Speaker 2: his own influential interview show Spectacle. If you haven't been
Speaker 2: properly introduced to him by now, I certainly can't do
Speaker 2: it in a mere few minutes get it. But because
Speaker 2: Elvis's career has had such a deep connection in the
Speaker 2: lives of his fans, there is a kind of magic
Speaker 2: to it all, and with any kind of magic, one
Speaker 2: of the main attractions is to try to figure out
Speaker 2: how the magician is doing it. So here is a
Speaker 2: very brief look at his background story and a quick
Speaker 2: summation of his discography. Born Declan mcmanuson London to a
Speaker 2: musical family, his dad was a professional trumpet player and singer,
Speaker 2: first in popular big bands and then on his own.
Speaker 2: His mom worked in a record shop whose customers relied
Speaker 2: on her to have the coolest singles and albums from
Speaker 2: the United States. Elvis moved from London to Liverpool and
Speaker 2: then back again before launching his career in London. From
Speaker 2: an early age, Elvis played guitar and by the early
Speaker 2: seventies formed a guitar duo with one of his friends.
Speaker 4: Alan Mays.
Speaker 3: Thank You I knew that He.
Speaker 2: Worked a few non music related jobs, and then in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six was signed to Stiff Records, an independent
Speaker 2: record label in London. At the time, Elvis was performing
Speaker 2: as DP Costello. Stiff founder and Elvis manager at the time,
Speaker 2: Jake Riviera, suggested using the name Elvis. His first four albums,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy seven's Miam Is True, nineteen seventy Eights, This
Speaker 2: Year's Model, nineteen seventy nine's Armed Forces, and nineteen eighties
Speaker 2: Get Happy came with such a variety of intense pleasures,
Speaker 2: the poetic and existential lyrics, the melodies which made you
Speaker 2: play the records over and over, a lot of energy,
Speaker 2: a lot of sound. And that's something else that only
Speaker 2: musicians who inspire the most fanatic audiences have the ability
Speaker 2: to turn all their fans into advocates of the artist,
Speaker 2: ready to lecture you about meanings and understandings only they
Speaker 2: and the artist may explain to you. After his debut,
Speaker 2: the attraction became his recording and touring band for almost
Speaker 2: ten years, and each player in that band, Steve Naive,
Speaker 2: Pete Thomas, and Bruce Thomas, had a skill set which
Speaker 2: elevated the whole until they sounded like an unstoppable machine
Speaker 2: cranking out literate pop which was both political and romantic.
Speaker 2: As he broadened the sounds and styles of the music
Speaker 2: he used on his second great group of records, nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty one's Trust, nineteen eighty one's Almost Blue, and his
Speaker 2: Jeff Emerick produced Imperial Bedroom from nineteen eighty two, Elvis
Speaker 2: displayed a degree of growth that didn't seem possible because
Speaker 2: the first few albums were already so advanced. With nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty three's Punched the Clock. In nineteen eighty four's Goodbye
Speaker 2: Cruel World, Elvis switched producers, if not sounds and styles
Speaker 2: from his earlier albums. Although critiqued harshly by some, including
Speaker 2: Elvis himself, these albums and certainly the songs not only
Speaker 2: hold up today mostly.
Speaker 3: But wait from what it's in. How uncomfortable are you
Speaker 3: right now? But he knows, he knows.
Speaker 2: It's a regurgitation of facts, but it's got some heart.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has hard Okay, you're boy like man.
Speaker 2: I know you're so poetic, But those albums Punch Clock
Speaker 2: and Goodbye Cruel World can now be seen to have
Speaker 2: charted a course for the rest of his career, a
Speaker 2: willful musical curiosity and ambition which sees him changing genres
Speaker 2: and collaborators with an energy and facility that can inspire
Speaker 2: all who witness it, Like Live Aid nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 2: All You Need Is Love, King of America and Blood
Speaker 2: and Chocolate, both albums from nineteen eighty six hold a
Speaker 2: popular place in the hearts of diehard Elvis fans, not
Speaker 2: only because they are incredible sets of song cycles telling
Speaker 2: compelling stories, but because they mark the point most of
Speaker 2: us who love Elvis gave up trying to figure him out.
Speaker 2: That freed us up for the guilt free enjoyment of
Speaker 2: Elvis's next pop breakthrough, the single Veronica and the album
Speaker 2: Spike Is nineteen eighty nine, which marked a change in
Speaker 2: record companies and a high profile deal with Warner Brothers.
Speaker 2: Spike encompassed still greater musical territory and in general and inclusiveness,
Speaker 2: which made room for contributors as varied as James Burton,
Speaker 2: Mark Reebot, Paul McCartney and Alan Toussant, to name just
Speaker 2: a few, all in service of an album which hooked
Speaker 2: a new generation of fans. Mighty Like a Rose nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one continued where Spike left off with even more
Speaker 2: sophisticated arrangements and production, and from nineteen ninety one on,
Speaker 2: Elvis's discography has been a hopscotch game of going wherever
Speaker 2: his fans think he won't be spiking his catalog with
Speaker 2: classics of what can only be called the genre of
Speaker 2: Elvis Costello writing for string quartets The Juliet Letters in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety three. Numerous quote unquote returned to form albums
Speaker 2: over the years, like nineteen ninety four's Brutal Youth, then
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six is All This Useless Beauty and Kojack
Speaker 2: Variety and album of covers in nineteen ninety five, the
Speaker 2: stunning collaboration with Burt Backrack from nineteen ninety eight title
Speaker 2: Painted from Memory two thousand and twos, When I Was
Speaker 2: Cruel for the Stars, an album with opera singer and
Speaker 2: Sophie von Hotter two thousand threes, Marvelous Piano vocal Album
Speaker 2: North two thousand four as the delivery Man with the Impostors,
Speaker 2: Shout out to David Farreger and oh yeah. Elvis released
Speaker 2: a symphony that year as well, il sogno Al Music.
Speaker 2: It went to number one on the classical charts. Humanitarian
Speaker 2: and artistic efforts came together on the River in Reverse,
Speaker 2: a full LP from two thousand and six with Alan
Speaker 2: Tussana to bring attention to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina,
Speaker 2: an overlooked gem called Momofuku in two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: with the Impostors two thousand and nine and ten bring
Speaker 2: two more t Bone Burnette productions, Secret Profane and Sugarcane
Speaker 2: and National Ransom. Well, that's a lot of albums.
Speaker 3: I'm lying down though.
Speaker 2: And was it over at that point? Perhaps until and
Speaker 2: I was told this by Diana Crawl, until Elvis Costello's
Speaker 2: creative fire and undernourished musical life force was reignited. Oh
Speaker 2: we had come on when he met Sugar. Steve Man questlove.
Speaker 3: With that silence. That's a direct quote from Diana Hau. No.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, God bless Diana Crawl. Can we start out, No,
Speaker 3: it's almost, it's almost.
Speaker 2: This is where wise up Ghost happens. Recorded in twenty
Speaker 2: twelve and released in twenty thirteen. Elvis in Quest along
Speaker 2: with the Roots got together to create Wise Up Ghosts,
Speaker 2: and we'll obviously spend some time talking about that tonight.
Speaker 2: But to get current with Elvis's discography after Wise Up
Speaker 2: Ghosts came Grammy Award winning Look Now from twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: the first of four albums co produced with the most
Speaker 2: wonderful producer and engineer Sebastian Chris. So that's look Now, Hey, Clockface,
Speaker 2: Spanish Model, and the album that just came out. Yet
Speaker 2: another great Elvis album here in twenty twenty two, the
Speaker 2: boy named if is What just dropped QS listeners from
Speaker 2: Electric Lady along with Questlove. As he said, this is
Speaker 2: a very special pisode of Questions of Supreme. Please welcome
Speaker 2: music Icon Elvis Costello.
Speaker 3: This is the longest, like that was seventeen minutes. That's awesome.
Speaker 3: I'm really proud of you, Steve that I'm beaming like
Speaker 3: I'm your dad or.
Speaker 4: Something, and I am too.
Speaker 3: Now this is really Steve is wait, I don't even
Speaker 3: want to say that, like Steve only likes the background
Speaker 3: because I don't know. To me, like Steve and I
Speaker 3: would always talk about like having our own radio show
Speaker 3: when we were like working back in Philly, And this,
Speaker 3: to me sounds this is like the equivalent of his
Speaker 3: radio shows that he used to he used to host
Speaker 3: on his own cassettes when he was like twelve and
Speaker 3: thirteen years.
Speaker 2: I've interviewed you before, way back.
Speaker 3: When I was Yes, so to see this moment happen.
Speaker 3: How are you today?
Speaker 4: I'm doing great. This is exactly what I knew what
Speaker 4: happened here.
Speaker 3: Sorry, No, I love it. Are you kidding?
Speaker 4: You're just I just I mean when you dubbed the
Speaker 4: little little bit Talian organ behind as well, it's kind
Speaker 4: of just sounded like my obituy, like you just have
Speaker 4: to have the boys, and then when you got to
Speaker 4: bring the choir in right you know. No, I appreciate it, no,
Speaker 4: because it's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. When
Speaker 4: I said, it makes me go like did I do that?
Speaker 3: You did a lot?
Speaker 2: It's too damn much.
Speaker 3: Yes, you did.
Speaker 2: That's why I tried to just sum up the past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well let's start or whatever you want to talk
Speaker 3: about it. Yeah, I know we're going to nerd out
Speaker 3: on your career, but I just want to ask one
Speaker 3: question that's sort of out of the realm of anything
Speaker 3: that was just said in the last eighteen minutes. What
Speaker 3: did you do today? What did I do today? Yeah?
Speaker 3: What times you wake up?
Speaker 4: Turn to six?
Speaker 3: How is it like? How does your day start?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: What do you do?
Speaker 4: It's mostly shaken, like a couple of fifteen year olds
Speaker 4: out of bed, different amounts of persuasion.
Speaker 3: So usually still dead.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, they got to get on the school bus,
Speaker 4: so five to seven, so that's you know, so you
Speaker 4: take a kid school, No, I take them down of
Speaker 4: the door and they get on the bus.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah. Do you do your kids know you're
Speaker 3: Elvis Costella? Like, do they get it or you're just
Speaker 3: more dead? Oh?
Speaker 4: No, they get that something that's been happening because they
Speaker 4: came and watched the TV show the other night and
Speaker 4: they know what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: Okay, so they hear me.
Speaker 4: I mean, the thing is, the last two years, nobody's
Speaker 4: been able to get away from anybody, you know. I mean,
Speaker 4: even if they know they've been on the road with
Speaker 4: both of us since they were six months old, they
Speaker 4: remember it from when they were four. But when I said, hey,
Speaker 4: this summer we might go on the road with mom.
Speaker 4: That'd be great. You know, they're good at traveling.
Speaker 3: And they're fifteen. They were born in.
Speaker 4: Two thousand and six, Yeah, December two thousand and six,
Speaker 4: so they are you know, they'd be sixteen extra samber,
Speaker 4: so they not long had a birthday.
Speaker 3: And they're great lads.
Speaker 4: And you know, I have in the amount I've traveled
Speaker 4: in my life, and we all have traveled, I wouldn't
Speaker 4: have I wouldn't have traded anything about these last two
Speaker 4: years except the fear of friends and my family and yeah,
Speaker 4: you know far away either you're concerned about them and
Speaker 4: you responding to an emergency or something. But in terms
Speaker 4: of the time we had the four of us, that's unbeatable,
Speaker 4: you know. And they got used to like, why is
Speaker 4: Dad out in the garden shouting into that microphone? That's
Speaker 4: because I was making a record.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I worked out how to do it, and we all
Speaker 4: had to work out how to do it. I learned
Speaker 4: to play the electric violin. That was a worrying sound.
Speaker 3: You know, are they musically inclined? Like? Are they that
Speaker 3: they got music within them?
Speaker 4: And one of them is you know, one of them
Speaker 4: told me that, you know, he said I'm I'm piano
Speaker 4: this year. And I said, well, do you already read
Speaker 4: music right now? Because you played trombone for a year
Speaker 4: in jazz band. He said, I wasn't reading. I had
Speaker 4: memorized it, so you know, oh okay. So there's there's
Speaker 4: some of mom and the summer Dad and it. You know,
Speaker 4: I can't read by a can. I can write it
Speaker 4: now and I can, you know, but I can't read
Speaker 4: it back.
Speaker 3: So what's their epic to nes? Like where your dad
Speaker 3: is Elvis Costill in your mom's.
Speaker 2: Dying and crawl like, I don't know. My dad's a dentist.
Speaker 4: Listen, if you got to school, if you got to
Speaker 4: if you told my sisters like I was, they just
Speaker 4: had such a complete conviction that I could sing when
Speaker 4: I was a little boy because my dad was on
Speaker 4: the radio every week.
Speaker 3: They were convinced.
Speaker 4: And that was fine when it was fine, the drumming
Speaker 4: out of class, maybe sing for who were the priest
Speaker 4: or whoever came to the school. But when you're ten,
Speaker 4: you hate that. You know, that's the worst. So my
Speaker 4: parents never maybe do it. So my dad being so
Speaker 4: never occurred to me. I was going to do it
Speaker 4: until I was I was, I don't know, seventeen.
Speaker 2: So can you sing though, because there was singing around
Speaker 2: you and you sang from an early age.
Speaker 3: Or why that?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I really don't know. I mean I
Speaker 4: can only remember music playing. I mean I can remember
Speaker 4: I can remember being idle wi with this. This is
Speaker 4: Recopli called a decad Kali, and I had this big
Speaker 4: red on on on light on the front of it,
Speaker 4: like one of those ones with a grill, you know,
Speaker 4: like a honeycomb on the front, with a record player,
Speaker 4: like with a lid on it.
Speaker 3: And I just.
Speaker 4: Remember that looking at that, like looking at any toy
Speaker 4: on the ground, you know. So I must have only
Speaker 4: been crawling around and I can remember it.
Speaker 3: I'm not imagining it.
Speaker 4: I've got pictures, you know, where it was in the
Speaker 4: place we lived. So I guess my mother must have
Speaker 4: been playing that a lot back then.
Speaker 2: Let's say, when your father was in his prime, singers
Speaker 2: had to Actually.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's a way better singer than I. I mean,
Speaker 4: he had what really good voice, but he was also
Speaker 4: good mimic. So the funny thing about my dad was
Speaker 4: he sang in a kind of The band was modeled
Speaker 4: on Glenn Miller. It was the same kind of music
Speaker 4: sweet Bound. Really it wasn't a jazz group. He'd been
Speaker 4: a bebop trumpet player in bulking Head at the time where.
Speaker 3: He was born.
Speaker 4: Came to London to try and make a living in jazz,
Speaker 4: like a lot of jazz musicians, found that difficult. When
Speaker 4: my mother and him got married and then I came along,
Speaker 4: he took a job that was better paying, which was singing,
Speaker 4: because he could sing, and so he had to sing
Speaker 4: whatever was in the hip raide. You didn't get to
Speaker 4: choose and to sing whatever was in the charts. Now,
Speaker 4: that was fine in the fifties for somebody just singing
Speaker 4: a ballad. I got pictures of my dad are as
Speaker 4: big bow ties like Frank sin Archie used to wear
Speaker 4: in the forties.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Everybody just followed the trends, and he wanted to play
Speaker 4: like different people. When he was playing, he wanted to
Speaker 4: play like Dizzy. Then he want to play like Clifford Brown.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: And then then he got in this dance band that
Speaker 4: used to just play what was in the charts. Well,
Speaker 4: what was in the charts by nineteen sixty three sixty
Speaker 4: four was a huge range of music that wasn't really
Speaker 4: designed for a sixteen piece sweet man to play, but
Speaker 4: they did it nonetheless because that was how music filtered
Speaker 4: through to us. We didn't have twelve hour day, let
Speaker 4: alone twenty four hour day pop radio. Just that's why
Speaker 4: we had pirate radio because that was a revolution that
Speaker 4: brought like the continuous pop music to English listeners. My
Speaker 4: dad was part of a process that preceded that, which
Speaker 4: was interpreting those songs. So he would have to sing
Speaker 4: a song like it wouldn't matter whether it was the
Speaker 4: latest song by Tom Jones or the latest song by
Speaker 4: the Who, or the latest song by the four Tops
Speaker 4: or the Searchers. You know, he had to do all
Speaker 4: those songs so crazy, I know, but I mean they
Speaker 4: didn't get he didn't get any choice. It's whatever was
Speaker 4: in it.
Speaker 3: Break. So you're saying that there was somewhat a big
Speaker 3: band scene over there, but was there really a jazz
Speaker 3: like a hard bop jazz scene over there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there's musicians that he that he wanted
Speaker 4: to were some of his friends when they first came
Speaker 4: from Liverpool, were the people that founded the modern jazz scene.
Speaker 4: You know, he tried to get the gig with Ronnie Scott.
Speaker 4: Everybody wanted that gig. Ronnie formed the club. The other
Speaker 4: musicians of that Joe.
Speaker 3: Ronnie Scott was an actual person because.
Speaker 4: Yeah know, Ronie Scott was a tennis saxophone player then
Speaker 4: founded the club and he was like one of the
Speaker 4: people that led the way. And there's one or two musicians.
Speaker 4: Another great Tanner play called Tubby Hayes came to New
Speaker 4: York and was accepted.
Speaker 3: Obviously, some English.
Speaker 4: Musicians made it into the American scene, but there were
Speaker 4: so many great musicians here. Marrimount Partland that the piano players,
Speaker 4: She's from England, so you know there's people like that
Speaker 4: that came over, that came and they wanted to play
Speaker 4: with the great people on fifty second Street. But that
Speaker 4: was it was difficult enough to get in the door
Speaker 4: in London because this music wasn't that popular and popular
Speaker 4: music was. You could turn the radio on when I
Speaker 4: was a kid and it sounded like it was nineteen
Speaker 4: thirty five. I mean the music was still like little
Speaker 4: kind of string group playing the melody of something, but
Speaker 4: it wouldn't be anything like the record. So there was
Speaker 4: a there was so little music.
Speaker 3: And that was known as mainstream radio then that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we only had one channel playing music on the BBC.
Speaker 4: We just had the light program.
Speaker 3: So what I know is Northern Soul, like when did
Speaker 3: that breakout?
Speaker 4: Norton Soul was kind of like that was really a
Speaker 4: club thing that happened late sixties, I think through mid
Speaker 4: to late sixties. The thing that happened all simultaneously was
Speaker 4: the Pirate Radio happened, and that changed the fact that
Speaker 4: we could get the pop music played by the original
Speaker 4: artists not interpreted in these slightly square ways, and the
Speaker 4: TV shows that played pop music got hippa. Like one week,
Speaker 4: Ready Steadygo, the Friday Night for show just had the
Speaker 4: Motown review on, and like just blew everybody's minds because
Speaker 4: suddenly all these people with like style and you know,
Speaker 4: coordinated moves and everything. You've got to think before that.
Speaker 4: It's four lumpy lads in beetlesuits and their hair brush
Speaker 4: forward for twenty minutes before the show. You know, they
Speaker 4: just thought to do that, and they're doing I don't know,
Speaker 4: Fortune Teller or something by Aunt Hussan. Next thing, you've
Speaker 4: got David ruffin Oh Love and Gay.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a bit of a mind blower.
Speaker 4: Obviously you could hear the bands, you can hear the
Speaker 4: musicians who they were listening to. They copied everything off
Speaker 4: records and records. Took about six weeks to get to England.
Speaker 3: I just met this weekend. I was in LA and
Speaker 3: one of the main cameramen from Ready Steady Go oh Yeah,
Speaker 3: happened to come to an event of mine. So it's
Speaker 3: kind of where in the last month and a half, well,
Speaker 3: I've been talking to the Shindig people air quotes talking
Speaker 3: That's all I can see now. I can't tell you
Speaker 3: the context, but I've been learning a lot about how
Speaker 3: the pop scene got developed over in the UK. And
Speaker 3: you know, I'm learning these things.
Speaker 4: Totally different, totally different timeline, totally different availability. It wasn't
Speaker 4: commercial for one thing, so they didn't have that driving it.
Speaker 4: You know, it didn't have the same thing driving it.
Speaker 4: We had commercial television. We had two only two channels.
Speaker 4: When I when say, at the time the Beatles started,
Speaker 4: there were only two TV channels BBC one BBC two
Speaker 4: hel BBC and ITV so BBC and one commercial channel. Okay,
Speaker 4: so they both had pop shows, but they were kind
Speaker 4: of square and they were based on different things. And
Speaker 4: then then they started BBC two and they would have
Speaker 4: jazz programs and that was kind of amazing actually, because
Speaker 4: they'd get really good people on them. You'd see Errol
Speaker 4: Gahan or he'd see Escapedis and there's a lot of
Speaker 4: footage and the BBC went very good at keeping it,
Speaker 4: so I don't know how much they they went over
Speaker 4: a lot of things. So things I saw as a
Speaker 4: kidnapped memories.
Speaker 3: Of I learned that they would they were they would.
Speaker 4: Wipe the tapes, you know. But I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: if you saw something like Hendrix when he he was
Speaker 4: on the Lulu Show and he and the Weak Cream
Speaker 4: broke up and he just played at Sun Sorrow of
Speaker 4: Your Love. He said, we're going to stop playing this rubbish,
Speaker 4: which was Hey Joe, which was his hit, and that
Speaker 4: was I saw that love and it just blew my mind,
Speaker 4: and it was like, hey, television just went out of control,
Speaker 4: you know, because you remember this is at a time
Speaker 4: when when on the radio, when I was a kid,
Speaker 4: they used to make the news reader put on a
Speaker 4: dinner jacket to read the news on the radio. They
Speaker 4: had to wait, they had to be formally dressed to
Speaker 4: read the news. I don't ask me why. Maybe it
Speaker 4: made of them.
Speaker 3: To think that I was saying this, this is the
Speaker 3: BB Yeah they were.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it was a whole completely different world. And
Speaker 4: when you know, you can imagine Hard Day's Night was
Speaker 4: a film where the group talking in their ordinary voices,
Speaker 4: not like they were in show business, but they seemed
Speaker 4: like they just were lads from Liverpool. And the American
Speaker 4: hop movies were mostly Elvis Presley and they were just
Speaker 4: involving Elvis as a truck driver, Elvis as a racing driver,
Speaker 4: Elvis as a helicopter pilot, what Elvis on a surfboard,
Speaker 4: you know, Like I.
Speaker 3: Gotta tell you, I saw Jailhouse Rock for the first
Speaker 3: time this Sunday. That's a good movie. Well they okay.
Speaker 3: So in context, Quentin Tarantino has a what we would
Speaker 3: call a grindhouse in la It's called the New Beverly
Speaker 3: and basically, Quentin Tarantino purchased this place because he wanted
Speaker 3: to recreate what movie theaters were like back in the
Speaker 3: seventies when he was a kid. So it's only thirty
Speaker 3: five millimeter or sixteen millimeter print, and it's weird things
Speaker 3: like you know, a kung fu flick, science fiction film,
Speaker 3: an old Western or an old classic or Italian new
Speaker 3: or whatever, and he graciously transferred my movie Summer of
Speaker 3: Soul to thirty five millimeter and was done in double features.
Speaker 3: So on Sunday, the double feature was Elvis's Jailhouse Rock
Speaker 3: in Summer of Soul. So I saw Jailhouse. I've seen
Speaker 3: that scene before, but I've never watched Jailhouse Rock, and
Speaker 3: it just hit me that I I think, with the
Speaker 3: exception of is there a film called Blue Hawaii or
Speaker 3: Blue Yeah, I think that's the only Elvis film that
Speaker 3: I've seen, and now I want to watch them all
Speaker 3: because well, just for the format, the format of this
Speaker 3: film is like, there's any excuse two make what videos
Speaker 3: basically like to you know? All right, Well, we're also
Speaker 3: going to rabbit holes out of it, So let's go
Speaker 3: back to you were taking us to. This is your beginning.
Speaker 4: It's nearly impossible for me to stay to pick up
Speaker 4: the guitar when I was thirteen without referring to the
Speaker 4: fact that I know because I've read you know, your book,
Speaker 4: so I know that we have this one and we
Speaker 4: talked about it before we have this one.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: So key similarity despite all the different experiences is the
Speaker 4: example of your father playing music weekend.
Speaker 3: We got whatever it.
Speaker 4: Is is very different and it gives you the sense
Speaker 4: of it being both magical and you get an idea
Speaker 4: of the Monday. And remember really going in with my
Speaker 4: dad to the radio studio when they were on, when
Speaker 4: I was on the school holiday, I'd go with him
Speaker 4: in the morning and to be a bunch of people
Speaker 4: reading the paper and I think still smoking in the theater.
Speaker 4: I remember them as having cigarettes. Maybe they didn't, but
Speaker 4: they were definitely just reading the paper. And then the
Speaker 4: conductor would come, the band leader and then bring it
Speaker 4: to attention.
Speaker 3: They rehearse. Then a group would come in and rehearse,
Speaker 3: and that group would.
Speaker 4: Be somebody from the charts, so it'd be the Hollies
Speaker 4: or Engelbern, Humperdink or whoever was on the show singing
Speaker 4: a couple of songs. Inevitably, if that's your perspective of it,
Speaker 4: it changes. It just me and a kid waiting for
Speaker 4: your favorite record to come on the radio, or your
Speaker 4: favorite record to come on. The couple of TV shows
Speaker 4: a week that played the music. You liked the fact
Speaker 4: that my dad was in the front room learning the
Speaker 4: songs that I loved, Like the first record I ever
Speaker 4: owned was Please Please Meet. He gave it to me
Speaker 4: because I asked him for it, but it was advanced
Speaker 4: copy that he was learning off a piece of sheet
Speaker 4: music so he could sing it on the radio that
Speaker 4: week the Beatles, so he was second hit.
Speaker 3: Okay, I see.
Speaker 4: So he's singing please Please Me in the front room.
Speaker 4: And then my folks split up not long after that,
Speaker 4: so then he would just give me the records. He'd
Speaker 4: come around and give me a stack of singles.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask, what was the first record
Speaker 3: that you remember buying with your own money.
Speaker 4: Fame at Last was an e ep by Georgie Fame
Speaker 4: and it was pretty cool because it had one song
Speaker 4: by Lambert Andricks and ross one by mos Awson, but
Speaker 4: it was a it was a Willie Dixon song, one
Speaker 4: song that was by Lou Jordan and one song by
Speaker 4: Ray Charles that there was that's who he was covering.
Speaker 4: So that was a pretty good education for four songs.
Speaker 4: A twenty one year old organ player from Lancashire. They
Speaker 4: were napped for a nine year old kid. That was
Speaker 4: a lot of information to get all on one record
Speaker 4: because he was he was no no, no was way
Speaker 4: after that was a later one. It was a point
Speaker 4: in no return. It was a it was a golflin
Speaker 4: king song. It was it was sixties like wow, it
Speaker 4: was later later, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: And Georgie did.
Speaker 4: G McDaniels and like a Sander Maria, and he had
Speaker 4: like he was Hippie. Knew Eddie Jefferson, and he knew
Speaker 4: a lot of music that the other organ players didn't know,
Speaker 4: like Stevie Winwood, the New R and B R, all
Speaker 4: those guys all knew all the great R and B singers.
Speaker 3: But Georgie was unusual and did he He.
Speaker 4: Sang like like mosaices and he sang like a cross
Speaker 4: between John Hendricks and Moses, and he saying, you know,
Speaker 4: you see me, welcome to this man. He had that
Speaker 4: kind of dead panwez you know, goddamn Like he could
Speaker 4: sing like he could sing John Hendrick's music just great. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he could sing like things like he could sing like
Speaker 4: down for the Count and Little Darling and those things,
Speaker 4: the Neil Hefty things. He could sing, the basy things
Speaker 4: he sang with a big band. He was a really
Speaker 4: great musician.
Speaker 3: Fort For our listeners out there, if you can peep,
Speaker 3: it's a later John Hendrick song, but there's a okay,
Speaker 3: So if you're familiar with I've talked about this on
Speaker 3: the show before. The idea of vocal lise, vocal ease
Speaker 3: is where jazz lyricists would put words to jazz songs
Speaker 3: that never had lyrics before. And so John Hendrix does
Speaker 3: this really amazing version of Miles Davis's Freddy Freeloader, and
Speaker 3: he does it with al Jio, George Benson, and Bobby mcfaerrin,
Speaker 3: and basically the four of them, with their very unusual
Speaker 3: jazzy voices, verbatim recreate all the solos or Miles's original
Speaker 3: Freddy freeload with the lyrics, which is the hardest thing
Speaker 3: to do. I mean, they notated each like I've played
Speaker 3: the original and their version simultaneously, and they followed every
Speaker 3: lick of those solos and put lyrics to it and
Speaker 3: a narrative to a story about a guy loves alcohol.
Speaker 3: But anyway, I digress. If you're into John Hendricks, that
Speaker 3: is definitely.
Speaker 4: Well that That was the song on not EPI that
Speaker 4: they did, which was lined by Hendricks and Ross. Course,
Speaker 4: Sonny Ross also another Scottish import to the jaz saying,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: Whoa I did not know that? Yeh she thought she
Speaker 3: was American.
Speaker 4: No, she won Americans, she was I think Scottish.
Speaker 5: Yeah, fuck this, yeah, I mean seriously, like you just
Speaker 5: invented your a new podcast. Like the two of you
Speaker 5: fucks could talk the fucking ever and it's all great.
Speaker 5: But the problems there's like ten references every five seconds.
Speaker 5: So it's like for people trying to figure out what
Speaker 5: the heck what we're talking about, they have to you know,
Speaker 5: you can turn a podcast down to to like half
Speaker 5: speed or like.
Speaker 2: You know, I do that. Actually, I mean, all right,
Speaker 2: you guys are ridiculous. Honestly, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 3: No take over, Steve, forgive me.
Speaker 2: I know that Elvis wants to talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about Summer of Saw.
Speaker 4: I do I know that you that you saw Smer soldiers.
Speaker 4: I mean, I have to thank you for morelos that
Speaker 4: you know some of us al had to come out
Speaker 4: when it came, when when it was shot, it would
Speaker 4: have had a corrective I think for the way people
Speaker 4: sort of regarded is it. And I mean I remember
Speaker 4: going to see Woodstock, and that was our first glimpse
Speaker 4: of a festival.
Speaker 3: You know, I was living in the north of England.
Speaker 4: You know, it rains all the time, like constantly, it
Speaker 4: seems like for years, it seemed in those days. And
Speaker 4: we just thought, Wow, that's gonna be great. One of
Speaker 4: these days, We'll have one of these festivals and everybody,
Speaker 4: all the girls that take the clothes off and were
Speaker 4: all slide around the mudin and all the great you see,
Speaker 4: summer sold. It was kind of for one thing, it
Speaker 4: was in the city, right so right right there, you
Speaker 4: kind of had whole families. You didn't have this one
Speaker 4: generation of people working.
Speaker 3: Wait time out, I got to ask you a question.
Speaker 3: So you're telling me that in nineteen sixty nine, yeah,
Speaker 3: reading aston Bery, they hadn't happened. Oh wait, So I'm
Speaker 3: under the impression that America was lead to the table. No, no,
Speaker 3: and that Europe had been throwing festivals all day.
Speaker 4: They were showing festivals where they used to kind of
Speaker 4: like hit each other on the head with a bladder
Speaker 4: on a stick, you know, or like jump around the
Speaker 4: maypole and stuff back in the medieval times. But they
Speaker 4: didn't have like rock festivals. No, they didn't. I mean
Speaker 4: they had gatherings.
Speaker 3: So when did festival cultures start?
Speaker 4: And I think Glastonbury is the first one? Is seventy
Speaker 4: or seventy one? Wait what yeah, I mean one of
Speaker 4: the big festivals that every remembers was Bath in seventy. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but it was a pretty small festival. And then we
Speaker 4: didn't really have any big gathering, like, like nothing on
Speaker 4: the scale of Woodstock. I mean maybe in Europe they
Speaker 4: had them. I don't remember hearing about them though. I
Speaker 4: didn't wasn't paying that much attention. But we saw so
Speaker 4: we saw the film Woodstock, right, And then I was
Speaker 4: talking to some people the other day about I went
Speaker 4: to the biggest festival in seventy two. I was already
Speaker 4: playing then in Liverpool and I remember did a gig
Speaker 4: on the Friday night and I came out and it
Speaker 4: was raining, like they said, cats and dogs, you know,
Speaker 4: just like looks like a load of needles dancing on
Speaker 4: the on the on the pavement. And it never occurred
Speaker 4: to me that would be slightly damp in the field.
Speaker 4: I was going to outside thirty miles away and then
Speaker 4: got on a train the next morning with just a
Speaker 4: blanket and boots, no sleeping bag, no tent, and I
Speaker 4: didn't even think about it. I just I'll just sleep
Speaker 4: under the stars, like and it was like, you know,
Speaker 4: it was like a way back from the lines in
Speaker 4: the First World War. When I got there, it was
Speaker 4: like you had to wade through feet of mud and
Speaker 4: it was miserable and cold, and I and they were
Speaker 4: selling these giant like messenger bags, human sized messenger bags,
Speaker 4: and that's the only thing that stopped us from all
Speaker 4: getting hypothermia. And then listened to Captain beef Hard at about
Speaker 4: three o'clock in the morning and the next day The
Speaker 4: Grateful Dead played for four hours. You know, it was
Speaker 4: like and that was glamour, you know, that was the
Speaker 4: baddest glamoro. And I had trench foot when I came home.
Speaker 4: You know, it was like it was it was nothing
Speaker 4: like we imagined. So seeing summer soul and seeing a
Speaker 4: festival happening inner city, right, Okay, it's over weekends, so
Speaker 4: it's like it's a collection of festivals really, but with
Speaker 4: the whole thousand. Yeah, But I mean, the thing that's
Speaker 4: so great is the fact that you've got those interviews
Speaker 4: with the little kids that were there, that were witnesses
Speaker 4: to this stuff, and there's a whole corrective to like
Speaker 4: what that all of those people meant a part from
Speaker 4: the fact that they had the jazz and the gospel people,
Speaker 4: and then you know, all the little vignettes like Mehalea
Speaker 4: Jackson handing the mic to mad this, you know, I
Speaker 4: mean parts of it that just I don't know whether
Speaker 4: I'm reading into this, but like having said sixty five
Speaker 4: or something when the Motown review came over, and the
Speaker 4: fact that you were, you know, in the same way
Speaker 4: as people say are you beatles or stones? Are you
Speaker 4: as we said, Temmy's or tops? You know, you can't
Speaker 4: like them both, you know, right, really because I like
Speaker 4: them both.
Speaker 3: You know that.
Speaker 4: So David Ruffin when he comes out and he's he's
Speaker 4: like the kind of returning prints, you know, and then
Speaker 4: he's sort of fragile. You know, it was a curious
Speaker 4: look because when he comes out and then his act
Speaker 4: kind of looks slightly stiff because he's used to playing
Speaker 4: much more he's not. He's also used to four people
Speaker 4: being yeah because it's right after he left, right, so
Speaker 4: it's like yeah, yeah. And then guess what, you know,
Speaker 4: the band that everybody's shocked by is fift to mention
Speaker 4: to completely kill, and they're kind of seen as kind
Speaker 4: of square, and then when you see him, they're not
Speaker 4: square at all. They're looking great, but everything's great. And
Speaker 4: then you get the Vinish vision from the future. You
Speaker 4: get like the visitation from the future with Sly, and
Speaker 4: I mean we just if that at all. I mean
Speaker 4: Sly at Woodstock, it's so far an advance of everything
Speaker 4: else on the bill. I mean, it's so far the
Speaker 4: best thing on It's the best music, even Jimmy. It's
Speaker 4: like by the end of it, it's like there's nobody
Speaker 4: there watching him. The big moment is Sly. But if
Speaker 4: people had seen that in the context of all of it,
Speaker 4: can you imagine how different things would have been the
Speaker 4: Stevie wanted to right before he makes talking book, you know,
Speaker 4: like that's exactly what the hell it's all these things,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: That's literally like that's why I made it, because I
Speaker 3: meant the time when it was offered to me, Prince's
Speaker 3: autobiography was out and he was talking about like being
Speaker 3: an eleven year old watching Santana do this guitar solo
Speaker 3: and he's like, that's what I want to do when
Speaker 3: I get older, and like I'm really he was discouraged
Speaker 3: from doing music because his dad was like, he'll never
Speaker 3: be as good as me. So already that chip on
Speaker 3: the shoulder, I got to be better than my dad.
Speaker 3: Thing happened, and his dad wasn't the nurturing type. But
Speaker 3: his dad takes him to the seawoodstock and through Santana's set,
Speaker 3: Prince is like, that's what I want to do. And
Speaker 3: so for me, you know, luckily I got there because
Speaker 3: well again epigenetics, like my parents, coming into that situation
Speaker 3: in the world where your parents are musically inclined, you
Speaker 3: can't help but reach this destination. But I just wondered
Speaker 3: the hundreds of millions of people that who could have
Speaker 3: been affected by this, And again to hear you say it,
Speaker 3: because in my mind, I'm thinking that America got a
Speaker 3: festival idea from over in Europe. But I don't think so.
Speaker 4: No, I think it was a spontaneous I mean, there's
Speaker 4: you know, when you will look at jazzon the summer's day,
Speaker 4: you know, and you see that and you see Chuck
Speaker 4: Berry come out and you watch the band behind him
Speaker 4: like it's an all star band behind him, and they're
Speaker 4: really a band that designed to back Little Armstrong, you
Speaker 4: know they and they're just looking is Jack t God?
Speaker 4: And they played trombone with Little som Strong just looking
Speaker 4: at Chuck Berry like what thing is he doing here?
Speaker 4: Because I guess that guitar sounds like twelve times louder
Speaker 4: than anything, and really it's not that loud. But but
Speaker 4: the difference is in the music is so great and
Speaker 4: that's but that looks pretty, that's pretty kind of still
Speaker 4: like an it's not really like a festival. It's like
Speaker 4: an open air show. It's still like a garden part.
Speaker 4: It's a bunch of people up in Newport, like, looking
Speaker 4: at this, it's great that we got it. Newport Folk
Speaker 4: vessels the same. You get a bunch of bohemians and
Speaker 4: then you get Bob Dylan comes out and it's totally
Speaker 4: like a revolution. But I don't think there's anything in
Speaker 4: England that's there's a Cambridge Folk Festival and things like that.
Speaker 4: I don't remember there being anything that we could go
Speaker 4: to like that.
Speaker 3: Well, this shows me that Woodstock the movie is the
Speaker 3: legend that's set people's thoughts about festivals and people's thoughts
Speaker 3: about hippies and people's tharts about America and people's thoughts
Speaker 3: about those acts that plead.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, we saw all those movies, you know, we
Speaker 4: saw an Easy Rider with all that, with all the music,
Speaker 4: with Hendrix in and Steppenwolf, you know, and that seemed
Speaker 4: like whatever the movie was about, whatever it represented, those
Speaker 4: movies were things that people or have you seen that
Speaker 4: because it was it was an X because there was
Speaker 4: naked people in it and drugs, so those things don't
Speaker 4: The country was pretty buttoned up. People think it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: it's all happening, that's swinging sixties and all that, But
Speaker 4: that's all just happening on the films that the that
Speaker 4: they made pop films in the fifties, like on the
Speaker 4: Elvis Model. They put the star of the day in
Speaker 4: the movie, made up some daft thing. What's this one about? Oh,
Speaker 4: he's he's got a race horse? Okay, well, this one's
Speaker 4: about a race horse, this guy's got a chip shop,
Speaker 4: whatever it is. You know, they make up some story
Speaker 4: right and stick a couple of songs in it. Then
Speaker 4: then it all changes again. So the idea of a
Speaker 4: bunch of people getting together and putting music on and
Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, what's the name of the guys
Speaker 4: that the mc gar Yeah, God is like you could
Speaker 4: make a whole you know. I said to Jeff Jones that,
Speaker 4: you know, I went to the Get Back premiere in
Speaker 4: London and I sat next one away from Glen Johns.
Speaker 3: Well you went to the Get Back premiere? How long
Speaker 3: was the movie?
Speaker 4: It was like one hundred minute cut with a with
Speaker 4: an introduction Peter Jackson on one of the days of
Speaker 4: the eighteenth day.
Speaker 3: Have you seen us yet?
Speaker 2: This is where I got to cut you guys off.
Speaker 2: There's no and you talk about that documentary the next hour.
Speaker 2: Let me, I've decided this ship.
Speaker 4: Let me just say this one thing though, because it
Speaker 4: attains the quest. I mean, I think there was an
Speaker 4: actual article in the New York Times about Glenn john
Speaker 4: Sen that he was kind of like had it with
Speaker 4: people ringing him up, going what about your clothes and
Speaker 4: get back? Because Glen is wearing like the greatest outfits.
Speaker 4: He's the most stylish man in the movie. Likewise, you
Speaker 4: could have had a Summer of Soul line of clothing
Speaker 4: from the.
Speaker 3: MC's got the greatest cussion.
Speaker 4: No matter who's on the stage, He's He's like he's
Speaker 4: got an outfit almost as good and nearly always like
Speaker 4: right for their style too. It's like he dressed he knew, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm going to come out and I'm going to introduce
Speaker 4: I'm going to be right for that, you know. It's
Speaker 4: like he's given a lot of thought to it. One no,
Speaker 4: he changed for every act. Was that was fantastic?
Speaker 3: So do you want to ask your first question?
Speaker 2: So that was the introduction his first hour of whatever.
Speaker 2: But I did see Get Back. It's freaking mesmerizing. Obviously,
Speaker 2: if you're a Beatles fan, there's so much and.
Speaker 4: Even if you're not, actually I think if it, I think, yeah, sir,
Speaker 4: if you just like people, you know, if you just
Speaker 4: like people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But if you're a Beatles fan, it's like.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: For me, I think this is where the story begins
Speaker 2: with regards to the two of you. It's the year
Speaker 2: two thousand, and it's right after Voodoo had come out
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety nine. But for me, the story starts
Speaker 2: with a Vanity Fair article more of a list addictionary
Speaker 2: that came out that Elvis put out in Vanity Fair
Speaker 2: in the year two thousand. It was essentially his five
Speaker 2: hundred favorite albums or most recommended album something along those lines,
Speaker 2: and five hundred.
Speaker 4: Records ant to haven if you died.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, like that. It was very ominous that article.
Speaker 3: That article started my friendship with Lisa Robbins because I
Speaker 3: was like, I want to do that. I could do that,
Speaker 3: you know, so we sort of Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know how I came across it, but my
Speaker 2: first subscribe.
Speaker 3: I'm going to I'm gonna tell you how he came across. No. Literally,
Speaker 3: it was a big deal that Vanity Fair did a
Speaker 3: music issue was just unheard of at the time, and
Speaker 3: I remember I think I brought ten copies of that. Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna tell you how how that article and that
Speaker 3: specific issue saved Annie Leebwoitz's life. Are you ready for this?
Speaker 3: And it's a voodoo connection. So my publicist gives me
Speaker 3: a call. We get the roots, get word that we're
Speaker 3: going to be one of the subjects in the music
Speaker 3: issue and at Annie Leewoods is going to shoot us,
Speaker 3: which is the highest honor at the time, Like there's
Speaker 3: a photographer that's going to shoot you, has to be Annie.
Speaker 3: So of course I'm I'm the point person for the
Speaker 3: Roots or whatever. And you know, I talked to her
Speaker 3: on the phone and she's in Paris right now and
Speaker 3: she's shooting maybe three or four artists that like she's
Speaker 3: traveling Europe like getting them and whatnot. So this is
Speaker 3: mid two thousand. We're on tour with DeAngelo. I also
Speaker 3: think that the first leg of the Voodoo Tour is done.
Speaker 3: We're about to start rehearsals for the second leg of
Speaker 3: the Voodoo Tour. And all I remember was okay, So
Speaker 3: we had maybe two or three weeks off of which
Speaker 3: I scheduled time with Anny Leewoods to do this shot
Speaker 3: with the Roots, and something happens on DiAngelo's end. Could
Speaker 3: be anything, right, No, no, but yeah, it was you know,
Speaker 3: like we missed the deadline or missed whatever it was,
Speaker 3: whatever the set date was supposed to be. We had
Speaker 3: to kick the can to the next week, and then
Speaker 3: the next week and then and then when we kicked
Speaker 3: it the third time, I told Alan Leeds and the
Speaker 3: guys like, look, I got a photo shoot with Anny
Speaker 3: Leewoods in Philadelphia. I can't do that day. But it
Speaker 3: was like our only date to rehearse, like, you know,
Speaker 3: it was one of the things where D'Angelo happened. So
Speaker 3: what winds up happening is I don't want to lose
Speaker 3: this shot, and I hit my publisher something. We hit
Speaker 3: her up and we're just apologizing profusely, and she's like, look,
Speaker 3: look it's cool, we can handle it. Matter of fact.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what this This will give me a
Speaker 3: week to I think Most Death was coming to Paris.
Speaker 3: She's like, it gives me a chance to shoot him
Speaker 3: and do other two other artists, and then I'll hop
Speaker 3: on the plane and come back, and then we could
Speaker 3: do you on this particular day, which was great. So
Speaker 3: we have that settled turns out and this and this
Speaker 3: is where D'Angelo isms saved her life. Had we kept
Speaker 3: that original arrangement, any Leewards would have been on that
Speaker 3: last Concord flight that crashed and killed all the passengers. Wow.
Speaker 3: So in the week that she decided to stay for
Speaker 3: Most Death, she avoided being on that flight. You know,
Speaker 3: Thank God for that. So yeah, it's crazy. And the
Speaker 3: epilogue is that I told di'angelo what happened and he says,
Speaker 3: who's Anny Leewood? And I was like, dude, she's the
Speaker 3: most epic photographer of all time. Dude like, and he's like,
Speaker 3: and he pulls out a Jet magazine that he's on
Speaker 3: the front cover of. Right, this is what I'm about.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, now I know how I found the article
Speaker 2: because it was you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was on that tour. I had ten of those.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think, yeah, I had ten of those
Speaker 3: issues because it was a big deal.
Speaker 2: I still have it because I used to use it.
Speaker 2: I was like, this is the ultimate record store tool
Speaker 2: to have.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I purchased many an album off that list.
Speaker 2: So on that list was Voodoo. That's the first time
Speaker 2: that I knew that you, Elvis, knew about him quest
Speaker 2: and about t'angelo and I'd heard that record. So how
Speaker 2: did that? How did Voodoo get on your radar? How
Speaker 2: did you get your hands on it?
Speaker 4: I have no idea. I don't remember anybody.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 4: I just you know, like anything, you something filled us
Speaker 4: through and then you listen to it and it's great.
Speaker 4: Maybe I read about it somewhere.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe the video.
Speaker 4: I lived up on hill in Ireland and still in
Speaker 4: those days, I didn't see any I didn't have any
Speaker 4: cable television.
Speaker 3: The story that I've always gotten from people, there's always
Speaker 3: a younger person, someone's life. That's sort of like, I
Speaker 3: think this is an album that's going to resonate with you,
Speaker 3: because this feels like an era that you loved, And
Speaker 3: if you're if you're a fan of Stevie Wonder, if
Speaker 3: you're a fan of if you're a fan of that
Speaker 3: sort of pure soul, then there's no way this record
Speaker 3: didn't hit your radar.
Speaker 4: I think it's probably that recognition, but that's kind of
Speaker 4: also common to a bunch of other records that are
Speaker 4: probably for one thing, I had no idea you were
Speaker 4: going to ask me. I would probably be surprised by
Speaker 4: some of the records that are and aren't on that list,
Speaker 4: because you could have asked me.
Speaker 3: Three days later and I would have got a different
Speaker 3: five hundred. Do you know so?
Speaker 4: I mean I remember thinking that almost The only thing
Speaker 4: I really calculated was I didn't feel obliged to put
Speaker 4: records on that I knew a lot of other people
Speaker 4: really held in high regard, Like there's no records by
Speaker 4: the Doors because I can't stand the doors.
Speaker 3: Why can't you Door?
Speaker 2: I know I knew that about him, but I don't
Speaker 2: I can't figure out why.
Speaker 4: I just never spoke to me. It just never did.
Speaker 4: I don't know why I can. I like a lot
Speaker 4: of them. I don't like it.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like it's kind of cool that you
Speaker 2: don't like to do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, And people always think I would because of the
Speaker 4: organ and you know and everything. But I just and
Speaker 4: I think they're all sure. They're all refined players in
Speaker 4: their own way. And when I break on through to
Speaker 4: the other side. I like that one record that's the
Speaker 4: only record by the Doors. I like the Fame. No,
Speaker 4: my friend played on it. It's like, you know, Jerry
Speaker 4: Chef played on that. He was in my band. But no, no,
Speaker 4: at led Zeppelin, there's no led Zeppelin records on that.
Speaker 4: I literally never owned one. Really, there's no Pink Floyd
Speaker 4: records because I only to own two Pink Floyd discs
Speaker 4: and they're both singles, c Emily Play and Arma Lane.
Speaker 4: I've never even listened to Dark side of the Word.
Speaker 4: I have no idea what the Wall sounds like.
Speaker 3: Is there any homegrown act that you dug homegrown? Well,
Speaker 3: I mean just from I mean from England?
Speaker 4: Yeah, who the peoples? So you forgot the Kinks, the
Speaker 4: Small Faces, the Small Faces for me was the next
Speaker 4: group after the Beatles. It was like, not the Stones,
Speaker 4: it was the Small Faces, really, Tin Soldier, you know,
Speaker 4: all or nothing, all of those records. Yeah, but the Kinks,
Speaker 4: the Kinks, absolutely, the Kinks only.
Speaker 3: Up to a certain period.
Speaker 2: Tell this man please.
Speaker 4: In the same thing. It's really selective. It's anything about
Speaker 4: musical choices. Like I say, it would have been a
Speaker 4: different five hundred of been You could probably pull one
Speaker 4: up there. What's with that record? I go, I don't
Speaker 4: even remember saying that should have been on the list.
Speaker 4: I would still put Voodoo on there now, but I
Speaker 4: don't know what else is on there that was surprise
Speaker 4: and I don't.
Speaker 2: Know that was such a relation.
Speaker 3: I think what I said is right.
Speaker 4: Though I think it's right, I think it speaks to
Speaker 4: some continuity. And you see, this is the part of
Speaker 4: the thing that comes from our inability to hear everything.
Speaker 4: Is the things that we did hear in England really
Speaker 4: went deep. So nobody said have you when you asked
Speaker 4: me about Northern Soul like two hours ago. You know,
Speaker 4: that's an organic kind of movement to kind of dance
Speaker 4: to records that nobody else had. Like there's a particular
Speaker 4: kind of beat. A lot of the Northern Soul records
Speaker 4: are not from Detroit, they're from Chicago. There are a
Speaker 4: lot of Chicago things, so because they I don't know
Speaker 4: why it was, but maybe that slightly different sound motown
Speaker 4: or as we didn't even call it motown.
Speaker 3: We called it Tamla.
Speaker 4: You say you've got the new if you got the
Speaker 4: new Tamla record, right, we said, what do you listen to?
Speaker 4: I listened to Tamla and it's Tamla. And all we
Speaker 4: had were these singles, or we had compilations Motown Chartbusters
Speaker 4: compilations Volume three particular is a particularly good one, you know,
Speaker 4: and What is Soul which was was an Atlantic Records
Speaker 4: compilation of it, and Tighten Up two which is which
Speaker 4: is a regular rosteatic compilation. Those you can have a
Speaker 4: party with those. And we didn't have a lot of
Speaker 4: other records because the radio. Yeah, but that was pretty good.
Speaker 4: You could play those round and round, and I think
Speaker 4: that's it made you really kind of like go behind
Speaker 4: a painted smile.
Speaker 3: You know. This whole herd of mine heard.
Speaker 4: It through the great those records, but we didn't know
Speaker 4: the gladys Knight version who heard it through the Great Vine.
Speaker 4: Necessarily we knew the Marvin version, so all these records
Speaker 4: there were, and then people got into the more esoteric thing,
Speaker 4: and then they started dancing at the week and Casino
Speaker 4: and this kind of slightly looser beat that they had
Speaker 4: on those Chicago records, Major Lance and these kind of
Speaker 4: Curse Mayfield produced records. They're not like the Curtis seventies records.
Speaker 4: These are things that sound like they're imitating Motown, are
Speaker 4: not quite getting it right even yeah, they're not on
Speaker 4: the same level of musicianship as the Motown rhythm section.
Speaker 4: But people, for whatever reason, it was a particular kind
Speaker 4: of bpm. It was a particular kind of rhythm way faster, faster,
Speaker 4: and it and this crazy dancing, the and the crazy clothes.
Speaker 4: You've seen the you've surely seen the documentary about Lord
Speaker 4: and Sold. You know, it's a whole thing, and it's
Speaker 4: totally based in the North and it's nothing to do
Speaker 4: and the suburbs where I lived, we were rock steady,
Speaker 4: motown or tabla you know these that. And then I
Speaker 4: went to Liverpool in nineteen seventy and they asked me
Speaker 4: what kind of music you like? I said, I like
Speaker 4: Otis Renning and Lee Dorsey and you like soul music,
Speaker 4: I said, yeah, and tabla that's for that's for Divvis.
Speaker 4: They would say Divvy's means like yes, it's like like
Speaker 4: idiots like that music really like because it was I.
Speaker 3: Don't know why they.
Speaker 4: Were into kind of pink Floyd and and like all
Speaker 4: this prog rock and heavy rock. And so I ended
Speaker 4: up liking The Grateful Dead because nobody would nobody to
Speaker 4: go with me on that because so, well.
Speaker 3: What's it. You don't you're not a big prog rock guy,
Speaker 3: but you like the Dead.
Speaker 4: The Dead are not a prog rock Well, in nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy seventy, wait.
Speaker 3: We're gonna go down a whole other Robberts. I honestly
Speaker 3: thought I was just going to say one thing and
Speaker 3: the ease out of here, But now you stuck me.
Speaker 3: And I do this with almost every guest. Guest the
Speaker 3: house with your entire record collection is on fire. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you can only say five records, and they can't be
Speaker 3: greatest hits or box sets? All right?
Speaker 2: Can they be forty fives or LPs LP?
Speaker 3: I mean more records?
Speaker 2: He might want is please please meet forty five?
Speaker 3: You know well, I don't mean the sentimental saving but
Speaker 3: what five albums, non greatest hits, non live unless it's
Speaker 3: a special live record like Volume three of James Brown
Speaker 3: at the can't.
Speaker 4: Be a compilation record, though, can't be a compilation record.
Speaker 3: It can't be a compilation That's not fair though, Okay,
Speaker 3: go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 2: No, I'm just saying some artists like you don't know
Speaker 2: their albums because I'm just trying.
Speaker 3: To figure out, like, what what is the what is
Speaker 3: the canon of original albums? Yeah?
Speaker 4: But you I think if you really had a chance
Speaker 4: and you knew where they lived.
Speaker 3: How could you ask him this question?
Speaker 4: If you knew though, if you knew that your house
Speaker 4: was on fine, you're going to lose everything. You'd you'd
Speaker 4: pull the rarest records that you knew you couldn't replace.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't Like it's a difficult question because I would definitely.
Speaker 4: I still have my original Mono Revolver two part of
Speaker 4: all right, I picked that one rare.
Speaker 3: Five the rarest albums that you own? Yeah, and five
Speaker 3: of the seminal okay, Mono Revolver No, okay, but all right,
Speaker 3: what five of the rarest albums you own? What are they?
Speaker 4: I don't know that. I don't really know that I
Speaker 4: have rare records in the same way as you do.
Speaker 4: I mean I think at this time, Revolver a mono
Speaker 4: Revolver definitely Okay, sound Venture sound Venture by Georgie means
Speaker 4: a lot to me. Okay, not so easy to get
Speaker 4: uh from later on?
Speaker 3: I what's the most expensive record you shelled out for?
Speaker 4: I actually probably a seventy eight You know some of
Speaker 4: the D eight's come in like four or five hundred.
Speaker 2: Are you you have a seventy eighths collection? Because that's
Speaker 2: a whole rabbit hole.
Speaker 3: That's a whole rabbit hole. Yeah, So should I accept
Speaker 3: those because people all the time, well no, not real
Speaker 3: records don't go into that world, dude. I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: not really interested in seventy eighths, But you know, like
Speaker 3: old great grandmothers are passing away, the nieces and nephews
Speaker 3: are like your quest. I don't know what to do this,
Speaker 3: but it's an endless way, know you, I should take it.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you why.
Speaker 4: Because acoustic records acoustic records before there was electrical recording.
Speaker 4: Think about it, You're like literally staring into the horn
Speaker 4: of the Victrola and you're you can go right through
Speaker 4: that little hole into the room they're playing.
Speaker 3: It's coming.
Speaker 4: It's one generation away, isn't it. It's one generation closer
Speaker 4: than electrical recording.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: All right, so the answers, yes, I should accept it.
Speaker 4: I'm strong on an electrical recording, absolutely.
Speaker 2: But his collections are pretty He's got a collection of collections,
Speaker 2: are right.
Speaker 3: I'm sure.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 2: I've seen that he's got a storage room for his
Speaker 2: storage rooms.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, So what you don't know the most expensive.
Speaker 4: I never in a way of collecting records. It's always
Speaker 4: been about what's in the groove. It's never been about
Speaker 4: the catalog number, or the funny label, or this is
Speaker 4: a different sleeve. I never cared about any of that stuff.
Speaker 4: The other reason is because when I first came to
Speaker 4: America after the first trip, I you know, the handle
Speaker 4: fell off my suitcase on the way home because it
Speaker 4: was so full of records I'd bought in second hand stores.
Speaker 4: I used to come with an empty suitcase, no one,
Speaker 4: I'd fill it up. And the whole joy of it
Speaker 4: was like, Oh, here's a whole album by Bobby blue Blant,
Speaker 4: here's a whole album by the Luvin Brothers. You know,
Speaker 4: I had maybe one track on a compilation all those
Speaker 4: here's a whole team one Walker record.
Speaker 3: You know you were a complition guy.
Speaker 4: Well, no, that's what we That's how we got to
Speaker 4: know about stuff because of getting the Motown records or
Speaker 4: stacks and Atlantic collections. I didn't have a whole record
Speaker 4: of William Bell until it came to America. Then you
Speaker 4: could you could find them everywhere. You could find like
Speaker 4: Great records, whatever it was. You know, it's weird Detroit
Speaker 4: Spinners as we called them, you know, right, you could.
Speaker 4: I had singles on the Spinners, but then you could
Speaker 4: just go buy.
Speaker 3: Albums of them, you know, So you know it's weird now,
Speaker 3: Philip Wynd, you know, yes, you know it's weird. Now.
Speaker 3: I am collecting and paying top dollar for UK acts
Speaker 3: that would cover American stuff. Like I'm going through a
Speaker 3: kitchen phage now where I'm big into cover songs. So
Speaker 3: there will be again like party records, the idea of
Speaker 3: doing a compilation with just straight up hits that you
Speaker 3: could put on at a party and let play all
Speaker 3: the way through, and then put on side to and
Speaker 3: let play all the way. So there would be these
Speaker 3: bands from like from Liverpool, pans from Brighton, especially in
Speaker 3: Brighton there's one group with the name Brighton in it
Speaker 3: but they're not known, but it's like they're cheap imitation
Speaker 3: of James Brown's I got the feeling or whatever was
Speaker 3: hitting at that time, like science will delivery.
Speaker 4: And what what what kind of period of time is
Speaker 4: this sixty.
Speaker 3: Six to seventy six? It would be like the k
Speaker 3: Tell of whatever, shout out to k Tel where did
Speaker 3: they come from? Hey? Before? I mean, this is this
Speaker 3: is the thing. I know.
Speaker 4: This sounds like I'm bringing my dad in this all
Speaker 4: the time, but this is what he did.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm saying. He did it in the early sixties.
Speaker 4: I mean you, I don't know whether you know this,
Speaker 4: but the beginning of pirate radio, there was the guy
Speaker 4: Ryan O'Reilly. Everybody knows about that name is Irish guy
Speaker 4: who's found of Radio Caroline. His partner was an Australian
Speaker 4: guy who had the other pirate radio ship was which
Speaker 4: was anchored in the in the estuary of the Thames,
Speaker 4: broadcast into London. Now, this guy had a crazy scheme
Speaker 4: and this is true. He thought that he could cover
Speaker 4: records make him cheaply at nine in the morning in downtime,
Speaker 4: and the record the song was because he'd come out
Speaker 4: of publishing. He believed that he could have those records
Speaker 4: taught the original versions, so those are the super kitch
Speaker 4: versions because they are no phino copies, and he thought
Speaker 4: he could get away without paying anything but publishing.
Speaker 3: I guarantee he's saying this is genius.
Speaker 4: It was like, okay, of course it failed, and that
Speaker 4: the plan failed, you know, because people so through it.
Speaker 3: Okay, So in Portland, Oregon, Yeah, there's a writer who
Speaker 3: wrote the Encyclopedia of Kitsch Records or whatever. He sold me.
Speaker 3: It's like the most I've ever paid for a record collection.
Speaker 3: But even the stories like wait, you guys, you know
Speaker 3: this not the original stuff, right, these like cheap imitations
Speaker 3: or whatever. But for me, the same drum break intro
Speaker 3: for Superstition of Stevie, it's just as valuable if another
Speaker 3: drummer did it, like it's still a drum break is
Speaker 3: a drummer.
Speaker 4: Plus, there warn't that many musicians in England plan on
Speaker 4: these records. So when my dad would go and sing
Speaker 4: on these records, it was the guitar player would be
Speaker 4: Vic Flick, the same guy that played the James Bond thing.
Speaker 4: It would be that it would it would be the
Speaker 4: same guy that would be playing on the legit session. Anyway,
Speaker 4: they did these things and they paid them cash and
Speaker 4: they sold them at the supermarket. They sold them at
Speaker 4: the gas station or the petrol stations, we called them,
Speaker 4: and they were they were forty five EPs. These were
Speaker 4: before the albums that you'd probably know from the you know,
Speaker 4: they were later called Top of the Pops because that
Speaker 4: was the name of the BBC weekly show. This a
Speaker 4: whole subculture of music. We used to get them even
Speaker 4: when we were on the road. First we'd get our
Speaker 4: records done in Sweden where they wouldn't know any of
Speaker 4: the words. They just make up a bunch of nonsense
Speaker 4: words to my lyrics. It's half Swedish, half English.
Speaker 3: Wait for the record.
Speaker 4: What is your dad's name, Ross McManus, And that's the
Speaker 4: that's his. He had a bunch of names because he
Speaker 4: was a different person on every track. Dude, Okay, you'd
Speaker 4: never find him.
Speaker 3: So I have seven thousand pieces of just a bunch
Speaker 3: of bands from Europe covering American funk songs and American
Speaker 3: soul songs and rock songs or whatever.
Speaker 4: But also the other thing quess is that there was
Speaker 4: five There was five or six weeks between an American release.
Speaker 4: So no matter how fast they got that the publisher
Speaker 4: got that song over. What was going to happen first
Speaker 4: was sheet music travel faster than records.
Speaker 3: So if you had Billy J.
Speaker 4: Kramer or somebody, some good looking guy out of Liverpool,
Speaker 4: he could get a cover of a but new Bert
Speaker 4: backrack song before the American version could come out. Quite
Speaker 4: often you'd see two songs on the charts, the same
Speaker 4: song done by you know, the the English cover version,
Speaker 4: which and then there'd be a ghost record, as you
Speaker 4: might say that the ones we're talking about, So there'd
Speaker 4: be that version playing on a pirate radio station. There'd
Speaker 4: be the local English group like Silla Black singing anyone
Speaker 4: who had a heart and Warwick hates her for having
Speaker 4: done that, really still was going on about it. Now
Speaker 4: after next time you see the on Silla Black and
Speaker 4: see what, No, she's still matter. So and then of
Speaker 4: course what would happen was the version would come out,
Speaker 4: the American version. People would notice it was a little
Speaker 4: slick or maybe the broc list was better. Certainly the
Speaker 4: standard of production I think generally was better. It's sound
Speaker 4: of arrangement. There's a big difference in the sound of
Speaker 4: an English horn section of American horn section, different tombra.
Speaker 4: I could tell you two bars whether it's an American
Speaker 4: or English record from if there's brass on it.
Speaker 3: You know, well, I'm gonna blow your mind now because
Speaker 3: now the inferior covers is what would attract a hip
Speaker 3: hop producer today, like the trash here and the more
Speaker 3: off notes they play.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is right over all, I've got one for
Speaker 4: you right before we go back to Steve's agenda here because.
Speaker 3: You got to go.
Speaker 4: Do you know the label Habibi Funk I've heard of it, Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's they do all they do companies get the compilation. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Number seven in the series cast a Blanker's Shuffle. Okay,
Speaker 4: it's a note for note cover of Bob and Nol
Speaker 4: Harlem shovel. Yeah, and the guy goes to the first
Speaker 4: phrase of it, you know, the lid, except he goes
Speaker 4: up past the note down under the note because he's
Speaker 4: hearing microtones, you know, he's hearing like like Arabic music. Inflection.
Speaker 3: You got to hear it.
Speaker 4: It's it's crazy. First time you hear it, you think, oh,
Speaker 4: that's just out of tune. Then he does it the
Speaker 4: second time he realized that's the way he sings. He's
Speaker 4: and other than that, sounds like they got a you know,
Speaker 4: a real to real tape recorder and put the microphone
Speaker 4: against the wall of an apartment that was playing the
Speaker 4: record next door. That's what the fidelity sounds like. But
Speaker 4: it's killer, damn ya, you really know your music, That's
Speaker 4: what it sounds like. My memory of the Harlem Shoffle
Speaker 4: is going to a works dance at a chocolate factory
Speaker 4: when I was about fifteen, and all the girls lining up,
Speaker 4: all the girls. It was somebody a cousin of some
Speaker 4: word there and I got to go to this works
Speaker 4: dance and they all lined up, all these all these
Speaker 4: girls at work there and did the dance that they thought.
Speaker 3: Was the whole no idea what it was.
Speaker 4: It was like, you know, they just gone it there
Speaker 4: when that record came on, and that record didn't sound
Speaker 4: in that place reverberating. It wasn't played through a very
Speaker 4: good system. It sounded no more you know, polished than
Speaker 4: that right exactly, but the spirit of it and all
Speaker 4: of all of these records, because half of them are
Speaker 4: like mishearings of records that you know, they sound like
Speaker 4: dyking the Blazers is what this sounds like.
Speaker 3: You know. Oh Jesus Christ, don't even give me to
Speaker 3: start there. All right, I'll be right there. But Steve,
Speaker 3: this is now officially your show.
Speaker 2: Okay's He brings up a topic that I that I
Speaker 2: wanted to bring up anyway about what's now become known.
Speaker 2: I think in general as flipping something. Somebody will hear
Speaker 2: a song in old songs, a producer, let's say, and
Speaker 2: we'll say I'm gonna flip that, which means essentially, I'm
Speaker 2: going to take that, chop it up, sample it, or
Speaker 2: even not sample it physically, but take the idea or
Speaker 2: the vibe by energy.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, obviously when we started is like
Speaker 4: we had about three I don't think there was any
Speaker 4: ability to sample it. There was, I wasn't aware of it,
Speaker 4: and music didn't take the same advantage of it. People
Speaker 4: might have copied choruses, I guess they would have had
Speaker 4: to lose a generation to do that. An analog.
Speaker 3: No, No, I'm not.
Speaker 4: No, no, I'm talking about we would in terms of
Speaker 4: hearing figures within songs, you know, Like that's why I
Speaker 4: never had to write anything down early on because you're going,
Speaker 4: it's the rhythm from this song with the guitar part
Speaker 4: from that.
Speaker 3: We want no change.
Speaker 2: So you get what I'm saying now.
Speaker 4: It's not different to sampling, except we were just playing it.
Speaker 2: It's not different, and that's kind of what.
Speaker 4: I'm That's why when Somon begame dominant, it didn't necessarily
Speaker 4: sort of seem to me like some people had their
Speaker 4: instruments reacted to it like it was some kind of cheating.
Speaker 4: I said, this is everything we've been doing all along.
Speaker 4: It's the degree of imagination that you bring to the
Speaker 4: to the new version of it, the flipped version, as
Speaker 4: you say, is whether it's.
Speaker 3: Any good at all.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's the difference between being Jeff Lynn and
Speaker 4: somebody you know, like from Manchester. Like I won't to
Speaker 4: say the name you know, but you know what I'm talking.
Speaker 2: About, and you sometimes, I believe, reveal these types of
Speaker 2: things your inspirations for certain songs in concert in the
Speaker 2: middle of you might.
Speaker 4: Quote something you know that's obviously underneath the song that
Speaker 4: you play it, or I think it's also the way
Speaker 4: you get the particular notes in a vocal. If you're not,
Speaker 4: like you alluded to, the kind of not having a
Speaker 4: melodious or particularly beautiful voice, it helps to think like
Speaker 4: another sing of phrases, so that you know you do
Speaker 4: something with your own.
Speaker 3: Are you still doing that these days?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Sometimes odd words will come out of my mouth actually
Speaker 4: sound mom entirely like somebody else for one word, but
Speaker 4: it's not really important to the understanding of the song,
Speaker 4: so I never underline it. If somebody comments on it,
Speaker 4: then if they notice it, then it was because it
Speaker 4: was there. But it's not important to the telling of
Speaker 4: the story that people reckon. I'm not doing it to
Speaker 4: be recognized. It might have been like, how would such
Speaker 4: and such a single approach that line?
Speaker 2: Well, there's a I guess, innumerable ways of approaching what
Speaker 2: we're talking about. You hear a baseline that you admire
Speaker 2: and so you inverted or you use well, but didn't.
Speaker 3: We get into this when we did?
Speaker 4: When we when we first started, when I first came
Speaker 4: on the show, and we were I was playing with
Speaker 4: the roots, and you know, when we listen back now
Speaker 4: to the sample that you made, and we're getting a
Speaker 4: little ahead of ourselves into wise up ghosts. But say,
Speaker 4: the sample for my new haunt is Quest Play, and
Speaker 4: it is derived from Quest Play and Chelsea, which is
Speaker 4: Pete Thomas playing fire by Mitch Mitchell, well by Hendrix,
Speaker 4: but it's specifically the firepart that he's referencing. So that's
Speaker 4: like a that's like, you know, a flip of a
Speaker 4: flip of a flip correct four times.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if you're counting this as one
Speaker 2: of your flips. But the sound is actually a sample
Speaker 2: of you and the Roots playing live on the stage. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so it's a sample of you guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I mean. No, I mean, but but
Speaker 4: it's being quoted twice over, you know, because Quest is
Speaker 4: rationalizing it to his style of play based on Pete's part,
Speaker 4: which is based on Mitch's part. So that's that's that's why,
Speaker 4: you know, people are a surprise that I didn't take
Speaker 4: exception about, you know, the pump it up quote on
Speaker 4: the Olivia Rodriga record. But that would be just ludicrous
Speaker 4: because it's like it's common language really, you know, if
Speaker 4: it had been a whole melody or a whole lyric
Speaker 4: that was just stolen. That that would be obvious and
Speaker 4: you would take exception. But I think it's amount of
Speaker 4: language in songs and beads particularly, that's that's common.
Speaker 2: That's folk music, right, I mean, that's that's how it happens.
Speaker 2: I'm certainly not trying to get into that discussion of
Speaker 2: whether this is right to do or to do or
Speaker 2: anything like that, but just to acknowledge that, you know,
Speaker 2: motes are probably sampled from chopin or whatever. Okay, that
Speaker 2: figures you fing out, But anyway, the real comparison I
Speaker 2: want to get you guys to talk about is how
Speaker 2: you've been doing that since the beginning, you know, and
Speaker 2: he's been doing that, and you're both doing essentially the
Speaker 2: same thing but with different techniques and different technologies.
Speaker 4: Definitely, Yeah, I mean one of the things that I
Speaker 4: think that we've talked about, you and I have talked
Speaker 4: about and we experienced over the you know, I was
Speaker 4: still making the previous record I've made before we worked
Speaker 4: together was recorded analog and and edited digitally.
Speaker 3: Most of the records part of that were recorded analogue.
Speaker 4: Since then, the distance between the two mediums is closed
Speaker 4: because nearly all of the outboard plugins that people designed
Speaker 4: to work in digital recording today are in it. Our
Speaker 4: imitations of analog, the warmth of analog equipment, valve equipment,
Speaker 4: and and you know, sort of very carefully modulated recreations
Speaker 4: of spaces and all of these things. All these libraries
Speaker 4: of plates you can download in an attempt to bring
Speaker 4: something less brittle to this very facile way of recording
Speaker 4: of digital, which of course is amazing if you don't
Speaker 4: want to bother to play more than two bars and
Speaker 4: music in succession, because you could go on forever, you know,
Speaker 4: you could, you could have every two bars have a
Speaker 4: slightly different sort of resonance. If you could be bothered
Speaker 4: to do it, you could. You could, you could process.
Speaker 4: You could just play a two bar loop and and
Speaker 4: and you know, paste it sequentially and make it sound
Speaker 4: like the most incredibly.
Speaker 3: Organic sounding track.
Speaker 4: Now if you wanted to do that, or you could
Speaker 4: just fucking play it.
Speaker 2: You know, digital is like a photograph of something where
Speaker 2: you like sort of immediately lose a generation just right
Speaker 2: off the bat.
Speaker 4: There is something to that, for sure, but I actually
Speaker 4: come into piece with it because it is much more
Speaker 4: and I certainly couldn't have made the latest record unless
Speaker 4: we had.
Speaker 2: Or wise Up Ghosts for that matter.
Speaker 4: Wise Up Ghosts and as we you know, from the
Speaker 4: one first time we played the music in the room,
Speaker 4: the music changed shape the minute. Even though you know,
Speaker 4: we were all the same people that had played those
Speaker 4: parts for the most part. The minute we actually just
Speaker 4: played those numbers in a room, the music completely changed shape.
Speaker 3: It stopped being quite as.
Speaker 4: Angular and became greasier and like you know, flowed in
Speaker 4: a different, totally different way, just because it was happening simultaneously.
Speaker 3: It's a totally different.
Speaker 4: Not a collage, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I wasn't involved at that point.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to say.
Speaker 2: But before we get to wise Up goes more in depth.
Speaker 2: You know, you're on Quest of Supreme and the audience
Speaker 2: here are as fanatic about Quest as I am about you.
Speaker 2: So can you tell the audience what it was like
Speaker 2: the first time you played live with Quest and the
Speaker 2: Roots when you came onto Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Speaker 2: in December of two thousand and nine and you did
Speaker 2: high Fidelity and Chelsea.
Speaker 4: Well, I think the high Fidelity was a particularly interesting
Speaker 4: thing because it was the decision, which I don't think
Speaker 4: was mine, was it?
Speaker 2: No, it was mine.
Speaker 3: That was your idea.
Speaker 4: You you had heard the which was then a bootleg.
Speaker 4: You'd heard the bootleg. We were since legitimized it and
Speaker 4: released it in the Aufuls's box set, But it was
Speaker 4: an arrangement that we had not issued. I don't think
Speaker 4: was it available.
Speaker 3: That it was available for Rhino.
Speaker 4: Well maybe we hadn't released it, but we hadn't remixed
Speaker 4: it as well. We hadn't done We hadn't because we
Speaker 4: hadn't gone back to the So what you you were
Speaker 4: referencing was a board tape, and so we put the
Speaker 4: board tape on that Rhino thing, and then in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty we actually went back to the multi tracks. We
Speaker 4: got the multi track and remixed the whole Wow.
Speaker 3: That's sebass ended that wow.
Speaker 4: So that's why the version that's in Unfuls is a
Speaker 4: little bit more kind of bodied to it. But that
Speaker 4: was that was this. I mean, when we did that
Speaker 4: record in Hillsham Wistloud Studios in nineteen eighty, it was
Speaker 4: supposed to be some sort of take on all the
Speaker 4: music that we were talking about earlier, the stuff that
Speaker 4: was kind of like that wasn't made in England. It
Speaker 4: was all the stuff that filtered through. There's much about
Speaker 4: R and B as we kind of knew as we
Speaker 4: call it R and B and soul, that's the words
Speaker 4: we use for it. Those words have different meanings now
Speaker 4: they have different associations. But when I said, you know,
Speaker 4: you know, like nowadays and say you're talking about fifties
Speaker 4: R and B, you're talking about early sixties like Halean
Speaker 4: Woolf or Slim Harper, you're talking about you know, these
Speaker 4: these different kind of feels. And then the music that
Speaker 4: we identified we saw as distinct. It was a sudden
Speaker 4: soul or soul that was on the Atlantic label. We
Speaker 4: saw something different than Tamla, which was obviously had a
Speaker 4: more poppy The way the voices were and the way
Speaker 4: things were arranged, and the way that, you know, the
Speaker 4: the orchestration, the different kind of other instruments that would
Speaker 4: pop up in them, they seem to have more in
Speaker 4: common with a lot of pop records that were being
Speaker 4: made by the mid sixties. And you know, in these
Speaker 4: definitions of what we heard, it was the just just
Speaker 4: the fact that the Atlantic records, for the most part,
Speaker 4: had horns and a rhythm section with maybe piano and organ,
Speaker 4: whereas the Motown or Tamela records from the mid sixties
Speaker 4: had a lot of vocal group like often the Temptations,
Speaker 4: even the six and on other people's records, but really
Speaker 4: kind of like very very well arranged vocal parts and strings,
Speaker 4: and they were played by jazz musicians. You can tell
Speaker 4: they're played by jazz musicians. They're kind of light, feel incredible,
Speaker 4: you know, James jameson to hold that whole kind of
Speaker 4: funk brother's band. It's a very different sound to something
Speaker 4: like Musclesholls or the you know stuff made up on
Speaker 4: forty eighth Street Atlantic, you know, and they're all the
Speaker 4: bands in England that copied the cues from these records
Speaker 4: were trying very hard to play that. So we grew
Speaker 4: up hearing, as I said, twice over those things and
Speaker 4: sometimes then turned up a little bit like the small Faces.
Speaker 4: Gradually brought volume to bear on that picture. You know,
Speaker 4: you could tell which records different English singers were listening to,
Speaker 4: but they didn't necessarily sound like Faithful Colors. I gradually
Speaker 4: got looser and then by the time we got making records,
Speaker 4: it was completely different. We had a lot of stuff
Speaker 4: to draw from when we went to do that record
Speaker 4: in Holland that we had already had pretty much all
Speaker 4: the hit records that we were likely to have in England.
Speaker 4: We'd had from Get Happy, you mean well up to
Speaker 4: Get Happy, we had a couple of hits off that
Speaker 4: everything we made was a hit. From late seventy seven
Speaker 4: to eighty there was everything was a top thirty to
Speaker 4: top five record, every single So that was a good run,
Speaker 4: you know. That was like what established us in England.
Speaker 4: At the same time we were barely getting on the
Speaker 4: radio in America, so the things are kind of out
Speaker 4: of joint, you know. So when we got in to
Speaker 4: do that record, we had arrangements that were still carried
Speaker 4: some of our ideas from the previous year. And the
Speaker 4: big influence on the Armed Forces record were European signing
Speaker 4: records like ABBA and funnily enough, the Bowie records, you know,
Speaker 4: specifically low in Heroes, but also stationed the station and
Speaker 4: station the station was what we were aiming at when
Speaker 4: we did the slow, high fidelity that's brain you know stuff. No,
Speaker 4: that's before Brian, you know, that's the I don't know
Speaker 4: who produced that record, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I never really checked who produced it, but it was,
Speaker 4: you know it it had a sort of a funk bass,
Speaker 4: you know, it had a funk bassis to it. But
Speaker 4: then David Bower's kind of vocal and it had like
Speaker 4: the Nina Simone the song associated with Nina Simone, Wild
Speaker 4: is the wind on that record and at TVC one
Speaker 4: five and the beginning of that kind of you know,
Speaker 4: European influenced funk that it didn't. So we were trying
Speaker 4: to we were enamored of that, all that music, and
Speaker 4: we're trying to play.
Speaker 3: Like a machine.
Speaker 4: But we didn't have the guitars, we didn't have the
Speaker 4: sustained guitars, we didn't have the layers of synth, we
Speaker 4: didn't have the layers of production that he did. You know,
Speaker 4: we were just a four piece band. So the live
Speaker 4: arrangement of that was a sort of feeble attempt to
Speaker 4: play like station to station. And all that happened was
Speaker 4: when we got in the studio, I said we better
Speaker 4: pick up the tempo because the song is getting away,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: So the live recording was prior to the recording the.
Speaker 3: Studio that was in the summer.
Speaker 4: That was in the summer of seventy nine, so we
Speaker 4: were yeah, well a strange.
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe you weren't satisfied with with that arrangement,
Speaker 2: but that arrangement does have so much hard to it.
Speaker 4: It has a lot of freedom to the to the
Speaker 4: where the vocal lies. Yeah, because you can dance around
Speaker 4: the beat a lot more because it's much slower, and
Speaker 4: you can sing the melody. I mean, if you here's
Speaker 4: the thing is that high fidelity song at that tempo
Speaker 4: is similar territory to You'll Never Be a Man. It's
Speaker 4: both influenced by the Spinners. You know, they're like the
Speaker 4: Spinner's tunes, you know some things, you know. You know,
Speaker 4: so Philip Winn was like one of my you know,
Speaker 4: the people the voices in the head kind of thing
Speaker 4: I could never sing, like wow, but it shapes the
Speaker 4: way you phrase melody. Allison is based on Philip Winn,
Speaker 4: you know. So it's based on Ghetto Child, you know that.
Speaker 4: I know it sounds crazy to say that.
Speaker 2: It doesn't tracks my tears or tears of clown or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 4: Well I would quote those on the end of it,
Speaker 4: but but it's it's really laughing just a little. And
Speaker 4: the spinners that are much more the the staccato way
Speaker 4: that the figure, that part of the Allison, you know,
Speaker 4: comes from the spinners, or the Detroit Spinners as we
Speaker 4: knew them, right.
Speaker 2: I guess my point and we got to it, which
Speaker 2: was that this this arrangement had some real funk to it,
Speaker 2: some hump to it. It sounded to me like questlove.
Speaker 4: That's why that was exactly I mean, when he dropped
Speaker 4: into it, it was like, oh, now it's home because
Speaker 4: now he understands that thing and that and it's more resolute,
Speaker 4: and we've got like a bigger band, you know. It's
Speaker 4: it's got the sounds and had horns, got horns, and
Speaker 4: you've got Coke who can has got you know, I
Speaker 4: I just had i'd have any effects in those days,
Speaker 4: I'm like God, instead of effects was travelop I don't
Speaker 4: think I had even a distortion that might have had
Speaker 4: a distortion pedal by the time we got to seventy
Speaker 4: nine or some sort of lyft because I never played solos,
Speaker 4: so it was like the guitar straight in and maybe
Speaker 4: just a tramlo pedal. Later on, I used to play
Speaker 4: with a rolling space Echo, you know, and then later
Speaker 4: on an Ecoplex an Acoplex so what Watkins copycat? You know.
Speaker 4: But I didn't really get into processing pedals so much
Speaker 4: later twenty years ago. Really, I didn't play with any
Speaker 4: really until then.
Speaker 2: So so you come onto the show apparently not to
Speaker 2: promote anything at that appearance, because there's no even that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know how that even came about.
Speaker 4: It was it?
Speaker 3: It could have had.
Speaker 2: I think you were either supporting Fallon or you want
Speaker 2: to play with the roots or something.
Speaker 4: I think it was just that, or it's what year
Speaker 4: is it again?
Speaker 2: This was end of two thousand and nine, December of
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine.
Speaker 4: It could have been something. Do it spectful? That's around
Speaker 4: then as well. Yeah, give maybe you were a couch
Speaker 4: guest too. I can't remember.
Speaker 3: I can't remember now, you know.
Speaker 4: I just remember two thousand and nine is around the
Speaker 4: time of that Secret Friends Sugarcane and being in Nashville
Speaker 4: and Momofuku. I was making those records all at the
Speaker 4: same time, you know. If it had been in the
Speaker 4: days of Twitter and I remember when we were making
Speaker 4: What Was Up Ghost? I remember one time we were
Speaker 4: waiting for Quest to come from something that he was
Speaker 4: at and we were checking his feed to find out
Speaker 4: where he was. So, you know, and if that had
Speaker 4: been the case, it would have been like that. There
Speaker 4: was a period where I was doing like a lot
Speaker 4: of different things. When we did the Spectacle show. That
Speaker 4: required a lot of balancing of getting all these people,
Speaker 4: you know, like anything like any television show, getting the
Speaker 4: guests to be there, and then rehearsing for it and
Speaker 4: the different musicians that played on each one. But I
Speaker 4: could be coming from Nash having made Zigrafine was made
Speaker 4: in three days, so you know, we just went It
Speaker 4: was a three day session. It wasn't an album. There
Speaker 4: were three record dates as in the old Star because
Speaker 4: it was acoustic music. You know, I'd been in.
Speaker 2: So were you thinking EP or something for that now?
Speaker 4: I was thinking I was thinking something. But I was thinking,
Speaker 4: we'll get these songs in the time, because look who
Speaker 4: is playing on it.
Speaker 3: Wow, I got the beggest greatest.
Speaker 4: You know, that's like an all star band to beat
Speaker 4: the band, you know that those players. I had nothing
Speaker 4: at all to do it with Bluegrass. I mean half the
Speaker 4: songs we recorded there I wrote for an opera, you know,
Speaker 4: half the songs we can't on that record were written
Speaker 4: for an opera that I wrote that I did for
Speaker 4: Copenhagen about Hans Chris and Anderson. So it was a
Speaker 4: kind of wild lot of harmony for players who played
Speaker 4: a mandolin to play, you know, they all were like
Speaker 4: they never had anything to do with bluegrass, so it
Speaker 4: was just acoustic acoustically rendered.
Speaker 3: It was like chamber of music, you know.
Speaker 4: So all those different experiences there, I think playing with
Speaker 4: the band again in this in a studio on television
Speaker 4: was pretty much unprecedented. The previous band I'd played with
Speaker 4: on television that wasn't my own group in some.
Speaker 3: One way or another.
Speaker 2: Would it be in Letterman's band or something.
Speaker 4: I never played with Lettermans band ever. No, No, never
Speaker 4: played with them. I always played with on my own.
Speaker 2: Well, on Spectacle you must have played with I.
Speaker 4: Played with other mans on that. But prior to that,
Speaker 4: the other experiences for the return to SNL. When I
Speaker 4: went back, I played with the house ban of SNL,
Speaker 4: and Paul may have been in that band then. I
Speaker 4: don't think you think he'd already left and the Beasties.
Speaker 4: But when the beastis backed me and whenever he did
Speaker 4: on the twenty fifth anniversary show.
Speaker 2: But the Roots known as one of the greatest live
Speaker 2: acts that there is on the planet for the last
Speaker 2: thirty years something like that, and so you know, to
Speaker 2: feel that energy behind you on that version of high fidelity, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess you felt like you made the right decision
Speaker 2: to come on the show hopefully totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I mean it's like it.
Speaker 4: Was like a realization and we would have never gone
Speaker 4: back to that version in that arrangement.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I did it occasionally after that, and I think the
Speaker 4: band Impostus did learn it and we did it occasionally
Speaker 4: that way or started like that and then cut into tempo.
Speaker 2: That version is what's known as a banger, yeah, because
Speaker 2: it bangs, yeah, like you know, no question.
Speaker 4: And then here in Chelsea that's a different thing again,
Speaker 4: you know, because that's.
Speaker 2: That was I think a mistake on my why. I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously we got a whole new song out of it,
Speaker 2: and you know, we were referencing not only the original,
Speaker 2: but there's a like a there's another demo version of
Speaker 2: it with a like a distorted organ.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's the earlier version. Yeah, slightly slow.
Speaker 4: Slower and bit reggae and you know, like and we
Speaker 4: used to come in. You know, bear in mind they
Speaker 4: used to make us re record for television, so when
Speaker 4: the record was a hit in England, you would get
Speaker 4: you would get these three hour sessions and most bands
Speaker 4: couldn't play their records, so they were glad to just
Speaker 4: switch the tape while they weren't looking. They'd switch it
Speaker 4: for a copy of the record and give the BBC
Speaker 4: essentially just a dove at the record and then say
Speaker 4: they'd cut it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: So there was this whole subterfuge where you had to
Speaker 4: go into the studio for three hours.
Speaker 3: It was intended to protect the.
Speaker 4: Jobs and the union members that had played on records
Speaker 4: in the sixties, and by the time we got to
Speaker 4: everybody playing on their own records, which was most everybody
Speaker 4: that was on these shows, there was a whole game
Speaker 4: going on where all the studio time went to waste.
Speaker 4: So of course, because we could play, we would come
Speaker 4: in and play the live arrangement, which maybe faster or
Speaker 4: had a different break, and then get pissed off with
Speaker 4: us because we they got their camera cues from the record,
Speaker 4: and then it would be different when we turned up
Speaker 4: at the studio. We just used to fuck with them,
Speaker 4: you know, Ray, But it was just something to keep
Speaker 4: it from getting stale, because the.
Speaker 3: Whole thing is like.
Speaker 4: The one thing about American television from the get go.
Speaker 4: And the very first time I was ever on TV
Speaker 4: in Americas, he did play live. I was never heard
Speaker 4: on the BBC until Live eight. Every single performance on
Speaker 4: the BBC I was lip syncing. So my first ever
Speaker 4: performance is in front of seventy thousand people.
Speaker 3: With one guitar.
Speaker 4: Good chart on the BBC, I did okay, but I
Speaker 4: played on the other side, on the commercial side. My
Speaker 4: debut was on was just with one guitar as well,
Speaker 4: on a sort of early evening, Sharon Manchester and I
Speaker 4: did one or two performances with the band and then the.
Speaker 6: Shout out to wave away flag while we're here sorry
Speaker 6: and the attractions played only one time a session where
Speaker 6: we played more than one song on the BBC in
Speaker 6: eighty six when Blood and.
Speaker 4: Chocolate was out, and then we didn't play again until
Speaker 4: the nineties. There was no live at all, and even
Speaker 4: now you don't. The other night I was on TV
Speaker 4: in England, I sang up a track which is just
Speaker 4: carry out it's not real because the music doesn't go
Speaker 4: with you anyway. You have to kind of just sing
Speaker 4: over it. It doesn't sound very good.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not a fan of that.
Speaker 4: No, it doesn't feel very alive.
Speaker 2: And Aretha Franklin came on The Tonight Show or Leaking
Speaker 2: Now with Jimmy Fallon a long time ago. She sang
Speaker 2: to a track and I was like, come on, you know,
Speaker 2: you got the roots here and for one and even
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: Just that does seem like a missed opportunity, but a
Speaker 4: little bit.
Speaker 2: She was great obviously, but you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, but you still want to you know, And
Speaker 4: I mean by the same token, there's a clip of
Speaker 4: her like dragging a BBC band through Don't play that
Speaker 4: song from about sixty eight where she's just killing on
Speaker 4: the piano. She's playing piano and you hear like how
Speaker 4: one player that really knows how it goes can influence
Speaker 4: even a band of musicians that probably wouldn't ever have
Speaker 4: played anything like that before. So well, sometimes that was
Speaker 4: a really great thing when you have that.
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, with regards to Chelsea, the reason why, I
Speaker 2: just I thought it was going to be perfect for
Speaker 2: the Roots, and they played it just too similar, I think,
Speaker 2: to the original, and it didn't. I was trying to
Speaker 2: get the reggae aspect into I was trying to mash
Speaker 2: those two versions up the original, and they.
Speaker 4: Should have played it even a little slower.
Speaker 3: It would have been interesting, because then that would have been.
Speaker 4: A different field.
Speaker 2: So the second time you came on, you were promoting
Speaker 2: National Ransom.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's the one I really have a clear
Speaker 4: memory of. Really right, the other one, I think it's
Speaker 4: also intimidating when you go in and it's a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of new guys and you don't know.
Speaker 3: What they made of it.
Speaker 4: And I'm not bringing in a hit song or a
Speaker 4: song that's even on the radio or anything I'm playing.
Speaker 4: But even the first time, I'm bringing in like a
Speaker 4: here's a version.
Speaker 3: That we didn't record in the studio.
Speaker 4: This is something I just did in a field in Holland,
Speaker 4: well twenty five years ago. This is a good idea,
Speaker 4: I fellas you know, I think we know. But I
Speaker 4: think I knew right away that the curiosity coming from
Speaker 4: you and coming from everything that I knew about the
Speaker 4: band and than you'd already done, was this was this
Speaker 4: was okay, This was really good. In fact, it was
Speaker 4: actually what it's about. And I think a little bit
Speaker 4: like you're talking about the festival band. You know, they
Speaker 4: used to put festival bands together that have like all
Speaker 4: stars played together on jazz festivals. Particularly harder to do
Speaker 4: with rock and roll bands or any other kind of
Speaker 4: music because they're not equipped to do it, you know,
Speaker 4: to get off their own script.
Speaker 3: But they but they but to do this.
Speaker 4: It seems like really in the spirit of being on
Speaker 4: TV where you'd get like really unusual combinations like being
Speaker 4: Crosby House. Here Feliciano and the Supremes. Now check that
Speaker 4: one out on YouTube. You know, there is actually a
Speaker 4: clip of them going through about ninety not ninety, about
Speaker 4: twenty five songs in about four minutes medley on those
Speaker 4: crazy Medalis. It changes every three lines, you know. I
Speaker 4: know they make you nervous, but it's in the same
Speaker 4: spirit of the way they used to jam people together
Speaker 4: that should have never been seen and occasion that there'd
Speaker 4: be magic, there would be on TV there would be
Speaker 4: some risk involved as well.
Speaker 2: So on November fifth, twenty ten, promoting National Ransom, playing
Speaker 2: Stations of the Cross and Black and White World with
Speaker 2: the Roots tell us.
Speaker 3: What happened that day?
Speaker 4: Well, first thing, the first thing I remember is that
Speaker 4: I was playing World as I don't usually play piano
Speaker 4: for one thing, not leading the band, but I really
Speaker 4: wanted to play.
Speaker 3: I wanted to play the.
Speaker 4: Field of that song simply on the World's that sort
Speaker 4: of get it locked in From where I was sitting.
Speaker 3: I knew the rhythm would be great.
Speaker 4: I felt like there was something going on with the
Speaker 4: bassline that had been played on a double bass by
Speaker 4: Dennis Crouch, so I was really interested.
Speaker 3: To hear I play it.
Speaker 2: Shout out to Mark Kelley, who specifically asked me to
Speaker 2: mention his name on this pot bet.
Speaker 4: And then it's it's kind of like it was always
Speaker 4: supposed to be a really ominous song. It was a
Speaker 4: very dark song. It is a very dark song. Then
Speaker 4: I remember we were walking I don't know, in the
Speaker 4: hallway and quest said this thing about I think you've
Speaker 4: been in here right with with D'Angelo and it had
Speaker 4: gone really late, that's what he told me. Or it'd
Speaker 4: been working or something, you'd been on a session anyway,
Speaker 4: you know, this was for some other thing.
Speaker 3: I don't know what it was.
Speaker 4: And then he said, and now we're learning these inner
Speaker 4: Mountain Flame songs and what the hell for me? You know,
Speaker 4: that's so difficult, it said because John mcgoughlin is here
Speaker 4: as I was sitting in with us, so I said, well,
Speaker 4: can he play on my song?
Speaker 3: And the next thing we're in what I think of?
Speaker 4: I mean, I am always I don't know where are
Speaker 4: you still in that little room or you've got bigger
Speaker 4: since COVID never had to give you a bigger rule?
Speaker 3: Where do you think we are?
Speaker 4: I imagine you're still in that little room. The tartis
Speaker 4: so the tartist I'm sure has been described at length
Speaker 4: on this show, but I mean, from my perspective, it
Speaker 4: is incredible that I'm sure it was just the tech
Speaker 4: covered where they used to keep like spanners and whatever
Speaker 4: it was before it was your studio. It is amazing
Speaker 4: that so many people can function and breathe in there.
Speaker 2: You know, we can't function or breathe, but go ahead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But so that I think is part of the
Speaker 4: magic of playing. In preparation for playing on the show
Speaker 4: is to be in that room in close proximity, because
Speaker 4: you there's no avoiding it. Even though Cress has got
Speaker 4: his booth horn sections in the back lounge. The rest
Speaker 4: of the mad is in this narrow thing behind your board.
Speaker 4: I mean, it is an amazing And then you add
Speaker 4: John mcgoughlin playing five hundred thousand notes.
Speaker 3: You know, every time I pointed.
Speaker 4: At him because it was simply a vamp on one
Speaker 4: chord in between the verses, so we just let him
Speaker 4: fly and as everybody knows, and he was so good
Speaker 4: natured about it. I mean, I have no idea whether
Speaker 4: he had ever heard my name before that day, but
Speaker 4: he went into it so openly right, and it was
Speaker 4: it created a different kind of tension, if any. It
Speaker 4: was like a moment of lightness him playing all those
Speaker 4: crazy But.
Speaker 2: You've played a lot of those tribute shows and fundraising
Speaker 2: shows where everybody comes on that end of.
Speaker 4: This, Yeah, but they not always that well, you know,
Speaker 4: it's rare.
Speaker 3: I've been in a number of very old bands over
Speaker 3: the years. You know.
Speaker 4: I was once on the stage in a club for
Speaker 4: a birthday show. I was cut through where I ended
Speaker 4: up on stage with James Burton and Jerry Garcia playing
Speaker 4: behind me. You know, that was pretty weird, wonderful, you know,
Speaker 4: and all playing the wrong guitar. But but for to
Speaker 4: have that kind of lock on that on this ominous
Speaker 4: groove and this kind of hump that that that Quest
Speaker 4: found in it in the in the beat, which ended
Speaker 4: up being like another piece for us. That was great.
Speaker 4: I mean that John was playing on it too, was wonderful.
Speaker 4: And Black and White World was a song that wanted
Speaker 4: to go like that. Now that's a song that Quest
Speaker 4: have played with us on me already. Had he had
Speaker 4: he played it with us then there or did he
Speaker 4: play No.
Speaker 2: Shortly after this appearance he came and played with us.
Speaker 2: He came to the Beacon or something and played Black
Speaker 2: and White World on stage with you.
Speaker 3: Part of the wheel show, Yeah, part of the spinning song.
Speaker 2: Right, right, but you just called it it wasn't chosen
Speaker 2: on the wheel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah he did.
Speaker 4: We often cheated in that way when we got in
Speaker 4: the later and we want some song we wanted to play,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He actually ends up singing that night because he was
Speaker 4: pushed off the drums store, right.
Speaker 3: It wasn't best pleased.
Speaker 2: I was like, why isn't Pete Thomas universally known as
Speaker 2: one of the greatest British or whatever drummers.
Speaker 4: Met Any drummers from have you met any other drummers. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of really maniacal like.
Speaker 2: Really that's one in particular, But.
Speaker 4: I mean there are there are some that really are
Speaker 4: going to tell you all about their own brilliance. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of them that are not as good as
Speaker 4: they that.
Speaker 2: He doesn't need to speak about himself.
Speaker 3: But why is it?
Speaker 4: Why hasn't I think it's been part of that that
Speaker 4: he hasn't been broadcasting it, and partly, you know, big mouth,
Speaker 4: he has been kind of taking up all the airspace
Speaker 4: up in front of him for forty five years. I
Speaker 4: absolutely say straight out now I just have I'll tell
Speaker 4: anybody that wants to listen, now, Charlie Wats has gone.
Speaker 4: He's number one. He's the number one rock and roll
Speaker 4: drummer playing today. Wow, I'll say that right out. That's
Speaker 4: all kinds of other kind of music. But as a
Speaker 4: rock and roll drummer, there's nobody close.
Speaker 2: And be honest, he's playing now as good as he
Speaker 2: played then.
Speaker 4: I think he might actually be playing better now than that.
Speaker 4: And he would say, I think he would admit the fact.
Speaker 4: Like the one thing about going a Spanish model, you
Speaker 4: know the record we did where we re recorded all
Speaker 4: the vocals in Spanish with guest artists to over the
Speaker 4: attraction's original parts. A lot of those artists are very
Speaker 4: much used to the you know, the conveniences of modern
Speaker 4: recording technique. Two of them, in particular, click track, an
Speaker 4: auto tune. There's none other on that. Obviously we didn't
Speaker 4: have access to that. Neither of those things were really
Speaker 4: part of our scene. So that was a lot for
Speaker 4: some of those younger artists who used to knowing what
Speaker 4: the tempo was and they've always got that click going
Speaker 4: keeping them in time, and they said, well, what's the
Speaker 4: tempo and we're going well in the first vers is
Speaker 4: that people want me to say this, but our records
Speaker 4: do speed up a lot, and well they slow down
Speaker 4: sometimes and as they're supposed to, and then certainly there's
Speaker 4: no autitude on them, you know, so thank god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, the Roots and Elvis Costello with John McLachlin.
Speaker 2: You can look it up. Yeah, November fifth, twenty ten
Speaker 2: on Fallon and Black and White World, which again had
Speaker 2: that high fidelity arrangement hump that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was that.
Speaker 4: Always had it, that was always had it that when
Speaker 4: we arrange it like that it went a different way
Speaker 4: originally that song, Yeah, it was completely different song. It
Speaker 4: was an acoustic folk song. Sounded like a Gray Davis song.
Speaker 2: Which version you like better.
Speaker 4: As a story piece of storytelling? The first version is
Speaker 4: is that's called number two, right, that's a better. That's
Speaker 4: a better for telling the story of the song. That's
Speaker 4: better as a piece of music. I liked the version
Speaker 4: that we played that night, but that was sort of
Speaker 4: like I remember as being in you know, that was
Speaker 4: a lot of drinking involved in that happy record. So
Speaker 4: there were these episodes where we just get frustrated and
Speaker 4: all be sort of squabbling and there saying, oh fuck it,
Speaker 4: let's just do that. Play it like Little Feet. That
Speaker 4: was actually what it was like. That was us trying
Speaker 4: to play like Little Feet. And if you sort of
Speaker 4: can hear some of their wilder stuff, not particularly sailing
Speaker 4: Shoes kind of record, you can sort of get that
Speaker 4: that that Pete is kind of referencing Richie Heywood. It
Speaker 4: was this great drummer that played with that group. People
Speaker 4: don't much know that their their music now so much,
Speaker 4: but then there were they were a band that you know,
Speaker 4: we all admired, and so that was in our references
Speaker 4: along with all the other things.
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about drummers, but but let's get
Speaker 2: back to guitarists like John McLaughlin And you mentioned Jerry Garcia.
Speaker 2: So can you just tell us what it was like
Speaker 2: to know him and to play with him on stage
Speaker 2: a couple of times.
Speaker 4: I only played with him one time. I spent a
Speaker 4: little time with them. I did an interview for a
Speaker 4: magazine about.
Speaker 2: I'm only asked because I know you're a fan as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I just think it was there was a
Speaker 4: period where I really did really love the records really
Speaker 4: from I never really did like the long improvisational things
Speaker 4: as much. That didn't fascinate me as much. I liked
Speaker 4: the sound of some of their records that are kind
Speaker 4: of strange, kind of folk baroque, kind of psychedelic stuff.
Speaker 4: And I really love the stuff that's very you can
Speaker 4: hear in so called Americana records. Now all these things
Speaker 4: that echo the Dead from seventy to about seventy four,
Speaker 4: but specifically American Beauty and the record that preceded it,
Speaker 4: wor Commen's Dead. They just have really good songs. They
Speaker 4: did this really good good like maybe twenty songs that
Speaker 4: were really unbeatable, and I saw them play a couple
Speaker 4: of times at that time and they were terrific, and
Speaker 4: I just didn't when they went off into the other thing.
Speaker 4: I could think of other music that extend I did
Speaker 4: like that that held my interest Moble, but I could
Speaker 4: see why people liked it, it just wasn't my thing.
Speaker 2: I guess the next thing chronologically as far as leading
Speaker 2: up to Wysup Ghost is when you graciously cut vocals
Speaker 2: for the Swindles project. For the Squeeze Covers record, you
Speaker 2: and the Roots did a version of someone Else's Heart,
Speaker 2: and that was certainly fun and the first time I
Speaker 2: got to do that, but I felt it more like
Speaker 2: that record was a bit of a proving ground for
Speaker 2: a larger project with the Roots, Like.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that was in your mind at the time,
Speaker 4: but for me it was like.
Speaker 2: It's more looking back on it, it was really like
Speaker 2: I loved.
Speaker 4: It because I produced the original version obviously in East
Speaker 4: Side Story, and I quit when I was ahead as
Speaker 4: a producer, right, So I mean I had three hit
Speaker 4: albums and succession as a producer of other people's records,
Speaker 4: and I wasn't credited as a co producer on my
Speaker 4: early records. I mean, Nick would say from Enforces onwards,
Speaker 4: I had a fairly strong input on the way things
Speaker 4: went and sounded and final mixes, but I was never credited.
Speaker 4: I deliberately didn't credit myself on Imperial Bedroom, even though
Speaker 4: I was the co producer effectively of that record, because
Speaker 4: I gave so much of the responsibility for the way
Speaker 4: the record actually sounded to Jeff Emory. But the music,
Speaker 4: the musical input, and the musical arrangement of the record,
Speaker 4: everything that you would call production now was my idea.
Speaker 4: You know, weeks in the studio on my own, just
Speaker 4: me and Jeff. Half of the Recession was just me
Speaker 4: and him. So when I got to do some of
Speaker 4: my own production eighty eighty one and eighty five, it
Speaker 4: was only usually with either with friends or bands that
Speaker 4: I thought somebody else would fuck up. So that's how
Speaker 4: I came to do The Specials, which was a band
Speaker 4: that had a very vivid sound live and a genius
Speaker 4: kind of arranger, Jerry Dammers, and I just needed to
Speaker 4: protect his vision, as I understood it, from any frailties
Speaker 4: that I could detect in the actual playing and they
Speaker 4: didn't have many because they were really very balanced in
Speaker 4: most cases, and the same was true of The Poes,
Speaker 4: which was the last record I produced. The band obviously
Speaker 4: a genius songwriter and a mixed bag of instrumentalists, so
Speaker 4: sometimes I'd have to step in and maybe bring a
Speaker 4: kind of steadying thing somewhere in the instrumental you know, ensemble,
Speaker 4: But the rest of the time I just tried to
Speaker 4: catch it while it was going on. Squeeze is entirely
Speaker 4: different because you've got like incredible facile in the American sense,
Speaker 4: in the sense that Glenn has tremendous musical facility. Glenn
Speaker 4: Hilborough as a composer, as a singer, as a very
Speaker 4: very underrated guitar player, but he's like the Pete Thomas
Speaker 4: of the guitar you know, you really you never see
Speaker 4: his name quoted as great guitar players. Glenn should easily
Speaker 4: be in that bag. Great melodic you know, the signatures
Speaker 4: melodies of his solos, it's like George Harrison, they're like
Speaker 4: like hooks and themselves. He's not just string bending kind
Speaker 4: of fancy, you know, dazzling kind of playing the other
Speaker 4: way can do that too, and incredible lyricist in Christofford
Speaker 4: and the two voices in this octave kind of relationship,
Speaker 4: and in that bad of course they had they had
Speaker 4: Paul character as well. He'd replaced Charles Hallan, the original
Speaker 4: keyboard player. And then I knew that was the secret weapon.
Speaker 4: So that's how we made Tempted, which was the big hit.
Speaker 4: And that was my ideas to do it like that,
Speaker 4: to sort of take it and like as if it
Speaker 4: were an Algreen song and put the kind of like
Speaker 4: little single line kind of clickerty click clin of rhythm
Speaker 4: guitar that runs through it. It's not playing a backbeat,
Speaker 4: don't that's me playing that, you know, not singing background vocals,
Speaker 4: singing background vocals. I mean I listened to background vocals
Speaker 4: another kind of ludicrous. And I was kind of doing
Speaker 4: all of the Temptations parts.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm doing but coffee in bed too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm doing the bass voice as well as the
Speaker 4: false htto. But but but we didn't know anybody we
Speaker 4: could get to do that, so we're just doing it
Speaker 4: in imitation of records that we loved, you know, and
Speaker 4: they and it seemed to just work to break it
Speaker 4: up like that. To divide it up, make it more
Speaker 4: of a group composition.
Speaker 2: You know, is the reason you haven't self produced more
Speaker 2: of your records because getting a producer is it's just
Speaker 2: another opportunity to collaborate with another great music mind. Well
Speaker 2: I haven't, or do you have some like disaffinity for
Speaker 2: it or no?
Speaker 4: I mean, I think there's a couple of records that
Speaker 4: are definitely I have to take more responsibility for than others.
Speaker 4: I mean, but I mean, you co produce a lot
Speaker 4: of record I co produced, you know. I mean, there's
Speaker 4: no doubt I didn't have anything to do with the
Speaker 4: sound of King of America, but that's I'm credited as
Speaker 4: a co producer on that because I had, you know,
Speaker 4: this sort of like brotherlike partnership with Temabnett from the
Speaker 4: MINUTEIME met him, and there was a lot of things
Speaker 4: that I wanted to try and do on that record,
Speaker 4: which changed because we were going to acoustic instruments for
Speaker 4: the most part. In the first part of it. It
Speaker 4: was supposed to be half acoustic half electric, and really
Speaker 4: because the success rate at the first sessions, which were
Speaker 4: with the Hollywood based musicians, you know, the many of
Speaker 4: whom had played that they mean ex Wrecking Crew kind
Speaker 4: of and seventies here of Jim Caltoner and people like that.
Speaker 4: When the attractions arrived at the sessions, was nothing for
Speaker 4: them to play. There was nothing, don't know songs left
Speaker 4: Sude Lights, which was a really great one, but there
Speaker 4: was a tense session. It was a tense session that
Speaker 4: added to go down ver well because they still saw
Speaker 4: it as a as a you know, unified band.
Speaker 3: I'd want to be on that record too.
Speaker 4: I don't know that they particularly wanted to play the
Speaker 4: other songs. I don't think there was much feeling for
Speaker 4: those other songs where.
Speaker 3: I was headed.
Speaker 4: But we did make one more record, which again was
Speaker 4: where we gave it the control to Nick Lowe. I
Speaker 4: had a little bit more put in terms of processing
Speaker 4: things that I maybe had done earlier. But it was
Speaker 4: Nick's decision to say that's an old Bird, which is
Speaker 4: a pretty great record. That's a Nick low idea to
Speaker 4: cut between the two keys and have this sort of
Speaker 4: Strawberry Feels Forever incident where it just sort of goes
Speaker 4: into phasing and comes out in another key. These are
Speaker 4: things you'd assume I had kind of picked up from
Speaker 4: Jeff Emertt, but that was all next idea. So it
Speaker 4: was like, so you know, he was capable of getting
Speaker 4: into there wasn't always in the bash it down kind
Speaker 4: of thing. He could also hone ideas. I also produced
Speaker 4: him around that time as well, which was the only
Speaker 4: time I ever produced Nick.
Speaker 2: A lot of artists may not want some other fucking
Speaker 2: genius in the room and keep their album. I wanted
Speaker 2: to be the way that I have it in my
Speaker 2: mind and somebody.
Speaker 4: Else I think you I mean certainly with Debon, I
Speaker 4: think it was the It was his advocacy for the
Speaker 4: simple storytelling.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I had this idea that you that I wanted to
Speaker 4: write with the that I liked about Hank Williams songs.
Speaker 4: Even though I was never going to be a country singer.
Speaker 4: I think had already proved that by going to Nashville
Speaker 4: and cutting.
Speaker 3: A whole record.
Speaker 2: It's a great record.
Speaker 4: No I liked that record, but I mean it was
Speaker 4: I had to accept that that Billy Cheryl didn't really
Speaker 4: know why it was those singing those songs, and he
Speaker 4: just brought where he could recognize the ability to try
Speaker 4: and make a hit. He did what he did, which
Speaker 4: was put the you know, make those sweetening devices which
Speaker 4: he developed over the hits with George Shows and Charlie
Speaker 4: Rich which was the whole reason I wanted to work
Speaker 4: with him. With the benefit of hindsight, I can think
Speaker 4: of maybe three or four other producers. I might have
Speaker 4: got to the heart of what I liked about those
Speaker 4: songs a little easier, but I wasn't that my most
Speaker 4: kind of reasonable or disciplined at that time. There was
Speaker 4: a lot of drinking going on on that record, as
Speaker 4: well as Nine Day, But you know, like tear really
Speaker 4: that we were on in Nashville. You know that that
Speaker 4: was a miracle that any record.
Speaker 3: Came out of it.
Speaker 2: Frankly, there's some video of that, right, Yeah, there is
Speaker 2: a documentary, but it's pretty it's pretty sodden at.
Speaker 4: Times, you know. Yeah, and kind of modeling.
Speaker 2: So just to continue on the timeline, someone Else's Heart
Speaker 2: is where we left off. And then you came on
Speaker 2: for what we were calling Springsteen Week on the fount
Speaker 2: That's where.
Speaker 4: I'm thinking about fire, That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: Brilliant diskies just with Quest and James poyser as an arrangement,
Speaker 2: just a drums, piano, vocal thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because I had done it as a pretty much
Speaker 4: I'd done it as a solo, and I cut it
Speaker 4: with just a rhythm section with Pete or Well.
Speaker 3: It was on the extra extras.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was actually was a demo I cut for
Speaker 4: for George Jones. I had done it a really weird
Speaker 4: assignment where I'd been asked to interview him for Interview magazine,
Speaker 4: which is even stranger. George Jones an interview magazine doesn't
Speaker 4: really go. You know, we were on either end of
Speaker 4: a line from wherever he lived outside of Nashville. I
Speaker 4: think I had some villa somewhere he lived, and I
Speaker 4: don't know where he lived in any way, he was
Speaker 4: in America, and I was kind of talking to him
Speaker 4: from Dublin, and it was I was asking him why
Speaker 4: he had never looked like Willie Nelson had done to
Speaker 4: kind of a broader world of songs, because I really
Speaker 4: had these same songwriters that gave him tunes over the years,
Speaker 4: and truthfully, many of them were unworthy of his voice.
Speaker 4: And so I started naming songs that I thought he
Speaker 4: could sing, and he had not heard of any of them.
Speaker 4: I mean, there were songs by songwriters he'd never considered
Speaker 4: and sort of I said, well, maybe you know, I
Speaker 4: could send you some of those. And I was trying
Speaker 4: to basically get a gig producing him, and.
Speaker 3: He didn't quite take the bait, so I thought, well
Speaker 3: he didn't.
Speaker 4: He didn't ask me to do this, but I'm going
Speaker 4: to go in on my own dime.
Speaker 2: And you had worked with him long before.
Speaker 4: I had recorded with him in nineteen seventy nine on Try,
Speaker 4: and have been on TV with him Stranger interim and
Speaker 4: sung with him on a television show a couple of times.
Speaker 4: So I didn't know him, and I just went for
Speaker 4: my own amusement as much as anything to go in.
Speaker 4: And I did, I think ten songs in one day,
Speaker 4: just recorded them like me, Pete Thomas, and the bass
Speaker 4: player that Pete used to play with before the Attractions,
Speaker 4: a guy called Paul Riley, who'd been the engineer at
Speaker 4: Nicklaus Studio Amperor and had been my first choice for
Speaker 4: the attractions. He'd been he'd turned me down, a guy
Speaker 4: called Paul Riley, and I had actually asked him to
Speaker 4: be in a band before we had the Attractions. What
Speaker 4: did he play bass?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: And he didn't want to do it. So now Paul
Speaker 4: is a great bass pay and he played in a
Speaker 4: group called Rugulator, which was a great group.
Speaker 3: And he ended up being a valuable.
Speaker 4: Engineer at Nicklas Studio, which was a little home studio
Speaker 4: which had been own by Tony Vasconti. Tony Vasconti had
Speaker 4: downed that building and had a little studio where he'd
Speaker 4: mixed a bunch of things, sparks and diamond dogs and things,
Speaker 4: and then Nick did a bunch of things in there.
Speaker 3: I cut with Johnny Cash.
Speaker 4: There, So there was like it was a tiny.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't even know it was there. It was a
Speaker 3: little bit like the Tardis, you know.
Speaker 4: It was like you'd be walking along you would never
Speaker 4: guess it was a studio inside that building, you know,
Speaker 4: it didn't look like it looked like a house.
Speaker 2: So is like the whole bonus disc of Kojak Variety,
Speaker 2: like all those demos, like you're going to make ever lunch?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, You're gonna make me lonesome. I don't know
Speaker 4: what I put out in the end. How long has
Speaker 4: this been going on? George Gershman song. I always heard
Speaker 4: that as a country song. I thought that could be done.
Speaker 4: Drig shows could sing the hell out of that.
Speaker 2: So on March first, twenty twelve, you came on and
Speaker 2: played brilliant disguise in this totally weird arrangement. I guess
Speaker 2: it's a very spare, very sparse yes, yeah and also
Speaker 2: fire Bruce Springsteen's song as made famous by the Pointer
Speaker 2: Sisters and yeah.
Speaker 3: And that's where you added two yeah too hot.
Speaker 4: Which I'd cut with the specials, which was righttles.
Speaker 3: He said again.
Speaker 4: You see, that's the thing is so we that I
Speaker 4: don't know that so much that people I don't know
Speaker 4: whether they realized that the kind of second kind of
Speaker 4: like the way a lot of musicians really know a
Speaker 4: lot of R and B references. You had all these
Speaker 4: kind of bands that were really kind of blues fanatics
Speaker 4: in the early sixties. By the late sixties, you had
Speaker 4: people who like that are my age and a little
Speaker 4: bit older younger than me, who had totally heard reggae
Speaker 4: in a way that I just don't think it was
Speaker 4: part of American music in quite the same way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: It's just like Jimmy Cliff and then Bob Marley and
Speaker 4: a few other one off hits. But we had a
Speaker 4: lot of it, you know, we had a lot of records,
Speaker 4: sort of blue beat records, and if they weren't actually
Speaker 4: in the charts, they were like the sort of secret
Speaker 4: music like that we were talking about Northern soul, that
Speaker 4: kind of reggae that from scad through rockstady through reggae
Speaker 4: before Male and Whalers. It was like we all knew
Speaker 4: these vocal groups that sounded sort of like the impressions
Speaker 4: that were all sort of like influenced by that close
Speaker 4: harmony groups sometimes doing covers. You know, people, I think
Speaker 4: the question and I had this talk about this before.
Speaker 4: Don't don't dun, Dun dum, don't.
Speaker 3: Don't go don't dun.
Speaker 4: Everybody says that's I'll take you there, but it's not.
Speaker 4: It's from a reggae record that they were covering, you know.
Speaker 4: So it's like this cross talk between all these musics,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: So I think this is kind of that point where
Speaker 2: you said that famous line standing in the Tartist, which
Speaker 2: was like, hey, uh, we've recorded half of Get Happy already,
Speaker 2: you know, uh, or remixed or whatever recorded Get Happy,
Speaker 2: Maybe we should make a record. And that's when me
Speaker 2: and Quest looked at each other, you know, and.
Speaker 4: I see that's not you see that's you. That's the victors.
Speaker 4: The victors get to write the history.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: My memory is as I was walking off from the
Speaker 4: set that that second or third time, I don't know
Speaker 4: which time it was, and Quest saying to me, you
Speaker 4: know you we're going to.
Speaker 3: Make a record.
Speaker 4: So I don't know which which of those remarks happened first.
Speaker 4: Both things could have happened. Maybe I said that because
Speaker 4: he said that. It's true the other way around. Why's
Speaker 4: up Ghosts?
Speaker 2: Which you know connects with this conversation that I want
Speaker 2: to have if if he ever comes back, is you
Speaker 2: know the ultimate example, do you have to pee? Tune
Speaker 2: in next week to see if Elvis needs to pee.
Speaker 2: This has been part one of our Questlove Supreme interview
Speaker 2: with Elvis Costello. Check out part two when I squirmed
Speaker 2: some more as this music monster lets loose and jumps
Speaker 2: the skinny on wise up ghost his collab with the Roots.
Speaker 1: My name is Sugar Steve, I Love my job. Questlove
Speaker 1: Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from
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