Glenn was one of the first of the few genuine rock stars I ever got to know properly. I had met a lot of "names", but it was always a face to face interview - in and out in minutes - or over the telephone. Glenn and his family stayed with us in the UK twice. I also arranged for him to do a gig, and given its limited scope, it went down a storm.
What was he like? He had simple tastes. When he came over here, often his first port of call was Devon and Somerset, where he would lay in several flagons of Scrumpy. He had a collection of guitars somewhere (I can't remember where) and would visit them, as you do someone in hospital. He would always try and visit Cumbria and Barrow in Furness. For food, he craved fish and chips and pies. I once made the mistake of serving him and his family chilli con carne. A mistake because his wife, Brigitte, is something of an expert at making it. They were very polite about it! More about Brigitte, later.
When I saw him, he was still living in Los Angeles, though he did talk about moving to Hawaii. His only real connection with the UK was a house in Barnes that he bought for £6000 at the height of his Jethro Tull fame. Oddly enough, it had a sitting tenant in it and therefore was not much use as an income stream when the royalties from the Tull albums became little more than pocket money.
Like all people, Glenn was a collection of sometimes conflicting traits. He was open and often generous, thoughtful and really quite modest. And yet he could get into a foul temper
and managed to fall out with most of the other ex-members of Tull (regardless of what they now say in public) He had poor relationships with his sons and four wives are a testimony to his lack of success in marriage. Brigitte was and is a bit of a saint. She understood Glenn and did her best, even when he was sent by the local authorities to anger management classes, after a particularly unpleasant episode.
The big question, the one that everybody asks, is, "Why did you leave Jethro Tull?"
One evening, over a drink (he really did not drink much at all, despite the liking for cider) he told me that it still hurt him after all these years. Glenn learned he was no longer in Jethro Tull whilst waiting to board a plane for home from America. The then manager, Terry Ellis, handed him his ticket. Glen asked where the others were and he was told he was out.
That is how he told it to me. He was grateful to Ellis that a deal was done pretty soon after that to get a band together and record an album. This resulted in the formation of Wild Turkey.
Glenn always found it hard to be pleasant about Ian Anderson. He occasionally copied me in to emails from Anderson, when Jethro Tull was having one of its periodic get-togethers. The fact is, there was no love lost between them and Glenn was justifiably aggrieved when the original members were brought together for a recording, with no chance to rehearse properly. (Glenn said acidly that Ian was more concerned about dyeing his beard)
I have to say that I never got to know Glenn well, but I suspect nobody did. He brooded over Tull for the rest of his life and the subsequent fall from fame (where else but down?) was something that no man is equipped to deal with. He did however, attend fan conventions with a great deal of enthusiasm, and enjoyed doing them. When I put on a gig for him, local musicians and fans were ecstatic. He was a great performer and musician.
Musically, and this is where I came in, Glenn's contribution to Jethro Tull was absolutely pivotal. His mischievous, melodic bass lines gave early Tull a sound that was matchless, and it made a novel and unique transition from pure blues to something wholly other. His favourite Tull album was Benefit. This is where he was able to excel artistically, as far as he was allowed. My personal opinion was and still is, that he was one of the most inventive bass players of all time.
In my attic there are piles of demos, many of them early workings for his last Wild Turkey album. In is kindness, Glenn went to a great deal of trouble to share the process with me and we enjoyed a long and fascinating correspondence over the years. I was aware of his health problems. It is sad that the situation clearly worsened.
Latterly, our correspondence declined. Recently, I thought I would drop him a line, but never did. All I know is, that despite the occasional hiccup over certain things, Glenn would have replied.
There are a couple of surprise albums that came under my radar recently.
The first is Chas and Dave's latest and it is called, "That's What Happens". For those who thought C&D were a cockney sparrer novelty band, think again. This is music from two musicians whose musical integrity and delivery put them in in the category marked enduring" The album is a keeper. There are plenty of reviews elsewhere, so go check them out.
Another Dave - this time, Dave Clemo. Dave has been on the scene since the days of vinyl, and for all I know, wax cylinders. There is a truism, called something like the "10,000 hour rule" which states that it takes about 10,000 hours to become good at anything. I'm pretty certain Dave has done his 10,000 hours. It is the art of making good music without you noticing. Hard Times is not Clemo's first album by any means, but it represents an artist at the top of his game.
To describe the style will limit it, but that is the lot of a reviewer. I can tell you what comes to mind; Van Morrison, Eddie Spaghetti, Lonnie Donegan, The Pretty Things and there are echoes of the Fabs and Johnny Cash. (Dave also does an uncanny cover of the Cash song, Ring of Fire on another album called "Other People's Greatest Hits"). Dave Plays mandolin bass and a selection of other guitars. His son Chris sits in on percussion. The production values are excellent.
Hard Times is the kind of logical artistic progression of an artisan who has listened and learned and synthesised. And by synthesised, I mean artistically, not electronically - this album is cruelty-free, fairly traded and unplugged.
Picking out tracks that I like is not going to do much for another listener, but you can preview them on the various platforms. I would grab the Skiffle gem, I Fought the Battle, Any Road with its easy, mesmeric lick and the the ultra cool Glide, if I could only pick three, but there isn't a duff track in 42 minutes.
Mr Pickwick sat at first taciturn and contemplative, brooding over the
means by which his purpose could be best attained. By degrees his attention
grew more and more attracted by the objects around him; and at last he derived
as much enjoyment from the ride, as if it had been undertaken for the
pleasantest reason in the world.
Great Expectations? Pete Atkin has enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership with Clive James. There is something almost Dickensian about this duo’s
ability to capture quintessentially English mores and picaresque characters.
Not only that, it is an authentic voice that speaks to the heart as well as the
head; at least it does if you are a man of a certain age, living a life of
quiet desperation, perhaps as a session musician, secret drinker or a Mafia
Don. Lest I start making further, perhaps
spurious analogies about Philip Pirrip and Abel Magwitch (I’ll leave you to
decide who’s who) I’ll begin.
It begins, as a lot of music does, with John Peel. At least,
this story begins for me with that champion of things brilliant but
ill-considered. It was an album called Secret Drinker. Peel played it, several
tracks, more than once.
Who were they? A latter-day Flanders and Swann or the
progeny of Tom Lehrer, but gone to the dark side? Tom Waits or Randy Newman?
The lyrics, provided by Clive James were perhaps more along
the lines of poems set to music. Or were they lyrical poems? Pete Atkin could
write in any style from East Coast Soft Rock to a slidy, smoky tuxedo
bourbon-stained jazz style. There were songs of love that could not fail to
resonate with those who love, songs of paranoia for anyone who really does have
people watching and waiting, songs of lament and elegy for the tiny dead of the
concentration camp but also songs of parody and satire, largely about the hand
that momentarily fed them. They were “eclectic” – but more on “eclectic” later.
Their star shone for longer than might have seemed possible in the days when
you had to have a deal and you had to have a hit.
INTERVIEW
PA: With hindsight, I can easily see that we never did fit
in, although at the time (late 60s, early 70s) I think we thought that we might
be able to barge in and occupy an interesting corner. It's hard to remember
now, but in those days the album was only just beginning to be thought of as
something in its own right, something more than a collection of singles and
fillers - thanks mainly to Dylan, even more than the Beatles.
One of the things that Clive and I had in common was a sense that pop songs
could be about pretty much anything at all, certainly more than we were hearing
most of the time - hardly a radical view, even then, but don't forget there was
as yet no Randy Newman, no Tom Waits - and that there was no reason why the
words shouldn't be just as interesting as the music. It may be our downfall
that we have always written songs that needed to be listened to. I don’t think
any of our records work particularly well as something that’s playing in the
background. It’s always been a case of writing music that presents the lyric in
the best possible way and makes the most sense of the lyric. That doesn’t
always mean following the mood of the lyric. Sometimes it means going directly
against it. Early on, in our early days of writing, Clive would hand me a lyric
and say “I think this one is a this or that sort of song.” What it suggested to
me rhythmically was something different, but if the rhythm works for the words
it almost doesn’t matter what the tune and the harmonies do. An early example
of me going against it was The Last Hill that Shows you All the Valleys. He handed
it to me as a kind of lament and I thought, ok but when I started out looking
into how I could work with it rhythmically it became something quite different
– a heavy, R&B rhythm. Clive stopped making those suggestions after that
point and let me get on with it!
The more our writing relationship went on, the more to and
fro we got with it but usually we would start with a lyric and sometimes I
would simply go away and write the tune and that would be that. I might suggest
a repeat of a line or shifting a chorus or asking Clive for a middle eight.
With the later songs there might not be a song at all – the shape of it was too
raggedy, too irregular and then I would look at it and find that actually there
was a song. Sometimes a lyric is a poem rather than a song because of the
grammar and syntax. Or it might be just too personal to Clive and I can’t find
a way into it emotionally. I have to imagine myself singing it.
I was never aware of writing in any particular style. It’s a
bit of a handicap. It’s handy to be able to tell people what it is you do, but
I treat each song on its own merits. That ends up being easy to describe as
“eclectic”, which is often used as a pejorative term.
On the other hand, because of that our stuff was never
trendy at the time. It never fitted in.
RL: Well it was critically acclaimed. Kenny Everett played
it and John Peel played a lot of the songs and recorded sessions with you.
PA: We were on the verge of getting somewhere with it. We
were very economical with recording. I knew early on that I was never going to
command big studio bills. I knew I had to get the album done in four sessions.
RL: So did RCA just lose interest in you?
PA: Well the first albums were done through Essex Music and
they leased them to Phillips and Fontana. Then A King at Nightfall was leased
to RCA and that was enough of a success that they took on the re-issue of the
first two. Then I signed direct to RCA for another three albums.
The Road Of Silk was my first (direct) RCA album and I put
together a band and rehearsed and went on a month-long university tour only to
discover afterwards that they hadn’t pressed enough copies so that they'd all
gone in the first week and we were touring with nothing in the shops (it took
3-4 weeks to re-press LPs, unless you were Jim Reeves or David Bowie). RCA
promised this wouldn't happen again, but exactly the same thing did happen
again with Secret Drinker, the next album. (The re-recording of the single
version of I See The Joker in order to re-promote it was RCA's kind of an
apology.) And so I didn't believe their further protestations, and Clive and I
decided not to give them our next bunch of 'proper' songs, but to record the
jokey things that we'd been accumulating over the years (and which there was a
certain amount of audience demand for, I have to say) as a kind of contractual
fulfillment album. That did give the two of us the chance to tour relatively
cheaply and to cash in a bit on Clive's growing media fame, but in recording
terms and with hindsight it probably wasn't that great an idea.
We had all the songs ready for the next album and the idea
was we would go somewhere else. This was 1976. Punk arrived like a hurricane.
Punk had more of an effect on the record companies than we now remember. We
were still in thrall to the record companies. You had to have a deal. They
didn’t know what to do with anything that wasn’t Punk. Nobody could see what more
they could do with our stuff than had already been done. That was coloured by
the fact that what was happening was something quite different. Punk was a good
thing, not only for the business but for music in general. Stiff put out
material that still stands up today. It was a very much needed, huge infusion
of energy. The rocky bits had become staid and lacking in imagination and safe.
The general feeling was that something needed to happen.
RL: Your back catalogue has since gathered an enormous
amount of interest, with copies of albums on eBay and hundreds of pounds.
PA: It’s frustrating that some of it wasn’t available so I
was really pleased to see Demon records do such a good job on the re-issues but
I can’t be bothered to put huge amounts of energy into keeping it available.
I’m glad that it’s there but much more interested in now.
RL: Do you think we are on the cusp of a very profound
change in the way people hear music?
PA: We’re not on the cusp, we are already there, I think.
Our generation probably covers what will prove to be the only time in history
where music was a primary source of home entertainment. I don’t think people
sit and listen to recorded music anymore, the way they would have done twenty,
thirty or forty years ago. It’s not that
people don’t do it, but people have music on, or they are listening on personal
players, but the days of actually sitting in your living room and putting a
record on as if you are in a concert, are pretty much gone. Music has receded
to be a much smaller part of home entertainment.
RL: Vinyl is the only growth area in audio currently. HMV
have said they are going to stock it again.
PA: I can’t believe that is going to be a major factor
again. For most people, that doesn’t matter very much. At one time the industry
was all about getting better and better quality, from 78s to LPs to CDs; it was
all about increasing the quality. What the MP3 revolution has shown is that
most people don’t care about that. We have reached a peak and we are sliding
down the other side.
RL: Does that mean that performing live has become much more
important?
PA: Performing live continues to be something that is
different from all the other elements. There is still, I am pleased to say, an
appetite for it. People still recognise that there is something special about
it. In the broadest sense it is theatre and it is unique event and that sense
you get of liveness and actuality is something you can never get from a
recording. People respond to that. They don’t necessarily think about it in
those terms, but the big stadium bands – the live gigs, that is where people
make money now. There is no big money to be made from selling CDs. Plenty of
bands give the things away at gigs.
RL: A while ago you did a live gig with Clive James at St
George’s Brandon Hill, Bristol. How did that set the scene for your performance
format of words and music?
PA: Clive and I did a sort of proto-gig there. I was on the
board of trustees due to my BBC connection and managed to persuade them to let
me and Clive do a gig. We’d done a few ad hoc things where I would give Clive a
list of songs and he would introduce them and out of that came the two-man
show. In those days he wasn’t doing any readings or anything. It was the reason
we brought together some musicians and that led to the Midnight Voices album.
It was great playing there with the trio, not the least because of how
liberating it was not to have to sing and play at the same time. When I’m
singing and playing I am neither quite playing as well as I can or singing as
well as I can. It splits your attention. Classical pianists are amazed that
anybody can sing and play at the same time and yet singing and strumming a
guitar is seemingly one of the most natural things in the world.
….
For those who want to know more, this writer suggests
getting “Clive James & Pete Atkin Live in Australia” or indeed “Secret Drinker”
The first has readings from Clive and notes about the songs as part of a live
performance. The second is a studio album. Not a word wasted and never a tune
out of place. James and Atkin have secured their place in the rock legacy.
POSTSCRIPT: Although Clive James was unavailable for comment for health reasons, he has maintained an interest in this article and has linked to it on his own website. Clive, I wish you well; you are and always will be a writer whose phrases I plagiarise with glee.
It is not often I permit myself a comment but I have mulled it over and I will. I became aware of an incident that to me sums up the parlous state of high-end commercial music product.
There is an artist called Lana Del Rey. It is a made-up name. She was probably called Cynthia Mole but hey, Harry Webb and Reg Dwight did it to great advantage but they had the talent to live up to Cliff and Elton. Lana/Cynthia has had a hit single and won several awards already. Her latest album has just been released with a lot of dollars behind it.
The latest news is that a 30-date tour has been cancelled. Why? It is all down to an appearance on Saturday Night Live which, to say the least, did not go down well.
Saturday Night live goes out on a Saturday night and it is, well you guessed it, LIVE. Not a good move for someone who is the essence of a commercial music construct, for Lana's deficiencies were laid bare.
I don't really blame Lana. She is not what her management have made her out to be. She even admits she looks nothing like the image in her videos. All of a sudden the suits are backtracking. There are no longer any big stadium tours planned and Lana herself wants to concentrate on small intimate gigs.
I wish her well. I don't think she realised what the business was going to do to her. To me, the baddie in this is the management, who saw a million bucks plus in the Next Big Thing and failed to understand that at the heart of music is - music.
A player who can bridge the gap between ABBA and King Crimson,via Roxy Music. That is the high-fidelity first-class traveling section; that elite group of artists who will figure in your album collection if you have been buying them for the past four decades or so, He has been in Family, Uriah Heep, Roxy Music, King Crimson, Asia and a lot more. Prog Archives says, with a very reasonable claim to being accurate, There is hardly any other progrock musician with a more impressive curriculum vitae than John Wetton!His solo output, together with a number of significant collaborations, has guaranteed that Mr Wetton is a part of the fabric of our Rock Legacy, as will become clear from what follows. John Wetton has been on a life-journey like that of a spring tide - high highs and low lows. He is coruscating and frank about both, but as with many interviews of this kind it is right to begin with asking about musical influences. In some ways, I found his knowledge of music and favourites surprising, and then again, not really because all musicians who last as long as he has approach music with an open, inquiring mind and a delight in the work of their peers.
JOHN WETTON - INTERVIEW
JW: God Only Knows turned a light on in my head, not only
for the lyrics but sonically it is absolutely beautiful. I could see me
thinking in colour instead of monochrome. The Beach Boys, vocally, are
absolutely fantastic. It seemed to me that all of the good stuff, up until
about 1972, was coming out of Southern California. Obviously there was a lot of
good stuff coming out of this country, with The Beatles, etc., but the
Californian sound was absolutely sublime. Joni Mitchell changed the way I
thought about lyric writing. On Blue, it was the confessional lyrics. Then
there was Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”.
I felt that rock music was completely one dimensional up until then,
with no substance and two chords. The Beatles were fantastic because they wrote
their own songs and played their own instruments and they didn’t have one bloke
stood at the front.
I came from a church music background. My brother is a
church organist still. Everything I heard musically came out of a church. The
Beach Boys were coming at music from a completely different angle. We had
post-war austerity; they still had rationing when I was growing up and it was
grim up North. I never realised, until I got to California, why Paul McCartney
wrote songs like Back Seat of My Car. I heard that on the radio, driving down
the Pacific Coast Highway and I thought, “Ah ha, I get it!” And that was what
you got from The Beach Boys; another world. You can hear classical music and
church music in Brian Wilson’s songs.
I had a choice in the early days. My brother was already
leagues ahead of me in the church music department and I was never going to
catch up. The alternative of rock music did not appeal because there was
nothing there that was going to give me any kind of satisfaction. Then The
Beach Boys, The Beatles and Procul Harem started working for me.
RL: Your last album, Raised in Captivity begs a lot of
questions about your early life.
JW: It concerns absolutely my upbringing – really the first
ten years of my life in the Midlands of post-war Britain. There was no emotion
shown in my house. Everyone was grim and tight-lipped. No one ever mentioned
love and no one was ever touchy-feely. It was like that game, Asteroids where
you are floating around in the same space and only when you collide with
someone is any emotion shown and it’s usually anger. I would then run off and
sit in my corner for a while; go to my room or go for walks and commune with
nature. Looking back on it that was my glimpse of a higher power. I wasn’t
getting anything from my home life. My
grandmother lived just across the street and going into her house was
different. It was a little cottage full of love and she adored me. I dawned on
me that it didn’t have to be like it was at home. Battle Lines was a story of
how I would have liked it to have turned out.
Hold Me Now from Battle Lines (1994)
Here ends another day
My emotions locked away
And my darkness is complete as the midnight sky
You steal my confidence
My smile is my defense
And I turn my face, so you won't see me cry
How can you be so cold, and so out of control?
As you pour salt into my deepest cut of all
My shattered heart, in pieces now
And I'm gazing at the fragments of my life
Hold me now, maybe just pretend I could be someone that
you might have loved before
Hold me now, and let me believe in a kiss that means
nothing to you…
'Cause it means the world to me
I didn’t speak with my mother for 15 years but we are closer
now. At any rate it is considerably better than it was.
(In the early 1970’s George Martin took John under his wing
and presented him with a variety of projects.)
JW: I needed some cash. He kept suggesting things for me to
do, and Larry Norman was one of the albums I worked on, which went on to be the
Number One Christian album of all time (Only Visiting This Planet, 1973). I worked with George for about a year.
RL: You have this belief in a higher power – I can’t think
of anything that exemplifies that more than God Walks with Us.
JW: Absolutely. I was just starting to glimpse that again
when that song was recorded. There is no doubt in my mind that when you pick up
a drink, you un-plug yourself from that. Your drink becomes your higher power.
It seems to do all the tricks to start with; even for years and years it works
and then your best friend turns its back on you. The last two years before I
stopped I was physically addicted to the stuff and it wasn’t working. If I
stopped all Hell would break loose and I was insane, literally round the bend.
RL: When was your point of decision?
JW: I was going to die and I chose life. It was a fairly
simple decision but not an easy one. Giving up was horrendous and I never want
to be in that position again.
RL: Were there relationships that had to be repaired.
JW: Absolutely. One of my main focuses is to try and make
amends and repair relationships with people that I had just pushed out of my
life. Some people don’t want to know but I try and make things better.
RL: Where did you draw your inner strength from?
JW: I ran out of ideas. I had nowhere left to go. It brought
me to my knees before whatever I believed to be the God of my understanding.
RL: Going back, you were thrown out of Asia.
JW: That was 20 years before. Such is the arrogance of the
functioning alcoholic that it was unthinkable that they would want to get rid
of me. The fact is I was a liability. The way it was done was really
unpleasant. Part of believes now that I deserved it but I wouldn’t treat
someone else like that.
RL: It is not as if you had the confidence to change
anything at that point. Your upbringing didn’t provide you with the capacity to
deal with it, did it?
JW: It’s probably why I drank in the first place. The drink
took away my inhibitions and enabled me to do what I could not do. Alcohol was
the piece of the jigsaw that was missing from my life. When it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to, then
I was in trouble.
RL: I don’t want to harp on about it too much..
JW: Well, it’s good to get it out because it possibly only
then that one can understand God Walks With Us and Raised in Captivity. Raised
in Captivity is all about that. In fact the last 6 or 7 albums are in some way about
celebrating what I have now. Phoenix is about creating a new life out of the
ashes of the old.
(John Wetton’s life came into sharp focus once again when he
was deemed to need major heart surgery)
JW: They did the angiogram and the next morning it was done.
A six-hour operation. One side of the hospital looked out over Abbey Road and
the other side over Lord’s cricket ground and I thought that this is a fitting
place for it all to end if it does end. The surgeon came round the night before
and said that I might die and how did I feel about that, and I said “I’m ok
with that”. If I finally meet my creator I’ve got a lot less explaining to do
than I would have done five years ago. When I meet my maker I hope I shall be
meeting an old friend, not saying “Oh my God, I wasn’t expecting this!”
RL: This year you were guesting with Steve Hackett, no responsibility,
you just turn up!
JW: I can’t go wrong. I go on and I sing Firth of Fifth. The
audience are die-hard Genesis fans. Steve and I have history on that song
anyway. It’s preaching to the converted!
RL: You have this incredible dialogue on your website’s
guestbook.
JW: Not that many people know about it. I will talk to
anyone on the guestbook. Some have been there for fifteen years and I sometimes
bump into them. They introduce themselves and I place a name to a face.
Sometimes people come on to the Guest Book and they are drinking too much and
they ask, “How did you get out of that one?” I’ll PM them and try and refer
them to someone.
RL: King Crimson?
JW: Fantastic, it was like going to university. It was
extremely demanding in terms of mental alacrity and actual muscle. We did an
awful lot. We’d play a two-hour set of which about 70% was improvised. You had
to think on your feet. I was surrounded by people who were extremely good
players and I had to hold my own. Robert Fripp is actually a really good friend
now. He comes round for tea and we just talk and talk and talk.
RL: I have heard stories of people who couldn’t cut it with
KC because of the discipline.
JW: Yes, it’s a pretty high bar.
For me, nobody could knock my musical credentials after I came out of that.
RL: Returning to The Beach Boys,
if I may, there are a couple of songs on the latest album which are kind of
drenched in the Beach Boys sound, such as in Goodbye Elsinore and New Star
Rising.
JW: If I get the opportunity I
always put in a little paean to Brian Wilson. There’s one on an Asia Record,
Voice of America – a complete lift in fact, from Good Vibrations. There’s a
vocal chord and it’s so Beach Boys it’s ridiculous! I don’t mind that because I
am just saying, “Thanks, Brian”.
RL: Did you ever meet any of the
Beach Boys?
JW: I met Brian. He was almost
asleep. I was sitting next to him and there was a long boring monologue going
on and by the time I had plucked up the courage to speak to him during the
break, about how much he had influenced
me, I turned around and he was asleep.
RL: And then there is ABBA!
JW: I’m a big fan of Agnetha –
Anna – as she is known to her friends. I did write a song for one of her solo
albums. Geoff (Downes) and I went over to Stockholm to record it. It’s called
We Move As One, on Eyes of a Woman. She’s lovely. Absolutely adorable. Geoff
and I were huge fans of ABBA and we still are. As good as they are they would
have been nothing without her voice. I just melt every time I hear Name of the
Game.
RL: You enjoy Classical Music?
JW: I rarely listen to anything
else. One of the best experiences for me was that I hopped on a plane to
Copenhagen and then on the Helsingor – Helsingborg Ferry. I was on my way to
see Vilde Frang. She is fantastic. We have been waiting for a superstar
violinist for a long time now, and she is the one. Out of that came Goodbye
Elsinore which I began to compose on the Ferry.
Thankfully, John is alive and well and still gigging after all these years. For details about his extensive 2012 diary, please visit and bookmark
Here's a track from Raised in Captivity. John is in remarkably fine voice throughout the album, but here he is sharing the work with Dutch Goth Rocker, Anneke van Giersbergen:
It can sometimes be depressing when interviewing rock stars. Occasionally one gets the impression that they are only interested in themselves. Moreover, they do not listen to other music and they really have no concept of a bigger picture. Not so Nick Beggs. Beggs is articulate, musically literate and passionately interested in sharing his experience. Nick Beggs moved on from the Smash Hits stardom of Kajagoogoo in the 80s to becoming a man whose stage presence and virtuosity you have to have if you are going on the road. His CV is a Who's Who of Rock and Pop aristocracy. Of late Beggs has become a player of the intriguing instrument called the Chapman Stick. He seems to be perpetually on tour with one band or another and is currently working on a prog rock album with such luminaries as Steve Hackett and Thijs Van Leer. His credibility extends to reeling in Robert Fripp to guest on his albums.
INTERVIEW
RL: Looking back on your career of over 30 years, being in
so many bands and the fact that you can articulate it so well, it struck me
that you are the kind of person who could share their experience with those who
are just coming into the music business. Do you feel comfortable with that?
NB: Well actually it’s what I do. It’s part of what I do.
One of the secrets to being in the music industry, most of all of being a
player, is diversity. You cannot make a living from one aspect of the music
industry, not unless you are inordinately successful. I worked out very early on, after being, in
brackets, a “successful pop star” that even after that I had to look at being
something else. Either a session player or a teacher or a lecturer or an
A&R man – I was an A&R man for Phonogram for a period of time. Then I
was a producer and then a writer and all these things. That’s why it looks as
though I have had a very busy career. The diversity is the secret for me.
RL: A guitarist called Ray Fenwick, who also lectures to
college kids said, to paraphrase him, not to go for lead guitar but to play
something else. He told me that he knew cello players who were never out of
work.
NB: He was in the Gillan band and is a very influential
player. I hear what you are saying but try and play as much as you can. Part of
the reason I play the Chapman Stick is because nobody else plays it and if I
had an opportunity to use the Chapman Stick on Top of Pops in the 80’s, in
Kajagoogoo, - you get noticed, as a session player, if not a pop star. I was
trying to create alternative revenue streams and avenues to work within.
RL: There are obvious reasons why people might pick up the
phone and want you to be in the band. One of them is the incredible look!
NB: You are very kind.
RL: Let’s be fair, it upstages some of the people you play
with.
On tour with Kim Wilde
NB: I have never been one to shrink from a challenge and I
think that when people want me in the band it is usually because they want me
to bring something to the stage presence. That’s one of the first things they
consider and if I am lucky they want me to play on the records too.
RL: Going back to the academic side of things, you have a
lot of experience lecturing to young aspiring musicians. What appeals to you
about that?
NB: First of all and to be completely mercenary about it,
there is an income to be generated. A small percentage of my income comes from
teaching, although I have not had any one-on-one students for years because it
is very time consuming. But actually talking to 21 year-olds or teenagers about
their future is quite a responsibility. When I started out I was a very
vulnerable, painfully earnest individual who was dreadfully concerned about how
I was going to make my way in the world. I had fallen on very difficult times.
My parents separated when I was ten and my mother died when I was 17 and I had
a 15 year-old sister who I had to look after. I knew I wanted to be a
professional musician even though I had acquiesced to everybody else’s
directives and taken a degree course at art school. There is a sense that is if
any of the kids are going through adversity, and some of them do, there is an
element of counselling involved. The sense of responsibility is something I
take quite seriously.
RL: Well, let’s face it; there are a lot of casualties. Do
the students just want to be famous?
NB: If they have actually applied to getting themselves into
a position within the college these days they are a lot more thoughtful. The
zeitgeist is “fame” is the vehicle. Well, fame isn’t the vehicle, it is a very
destructive thing without the accompanying capabilities and it is true to say
that a lot of people think they can become famous for being famous. The kids I
talk to at the ACM (Academy of Contemporary Music) and the AMS (Academy of Music and Sound) are more savvy than that.
They know they are there because they have talent or a talent they want to
develop. They are still children – I had massive responsibilities when I was
still a child but I see them at the ACM or the AMS and they have a lot more savvy about
them because they have bothered to enrol and take exams. They are thinking it
through. So I empathise with them.
RL: How do they react to you? Presumably they are not really
aware of Kajagoogoo?
NB: No. Not at all. Most people aren’t really, to be honest.
It’s a bit of an anachronism. But I start off by saying “My name is Nick Beggs
and the reason I am here is because you are where I started and I can tell you
what you can expect and maybe I can give you some advice after 30 years of
doing it.” There are things you must do, things you absolutely must do and if
you don’t do them you are going to be in trouble. First of all, develop and
accounting head-space. You have to work out how much money you are going to be
paying in tax. That’s one of the first things. Working with people you can
trust and getting a good overview and sense of who a person is, judging
characters and trying to work out whether this person is going to rip you off
or whether they are trustworthy. I tell people they have to get a job, outside
of the institution, to work and do anything - I did. I left Art College to
bring up my sister and run a band, but I was a dustman, a rubbish collector. I
could then go on to automatic pilot and earn money whilst conceptualising the
future. So all the time I was collecting rubbish bags from 5am to 12pm I was
thinking about the project I was working on which was the early stages of
Kajagoogoo. So I tell the students they must have a job. First of all your
parents will respect you more for that and then you will learn about the ethos
of working outside the music industry.
RL: Did this early experience of being a dustman etc., set
you up for Kajagoogoo and the attendant stardom?
NB: It’s hard to quantify that but I am sure it did because
I knew what I wanted because I had no choice. In the band we were very unified
in our overall goals. We were singing from the same hymn sheet. I remember we
entered a competition to get a deal with a record label and we won this
competition. It was in a local radio station. Once we realised we won it we
thought, well hang on what have we done? We don’t want this. If we take this it
is going to stop us being taken seriously further down the line. So we turned
it down. Every step of the way we considered what we were doing. In retrospect
Kajagoogoo was a cheesy pop band that had a relatively short shelf life but
when I think about that material we wrote, nearly 30 years ago, it’s still
selling! And it sold nearly 3 million in the first year and it has sold more
than that since. So that material is still paying for five families.
RL: Kajagoogoo is still current...
NB: We had an EP out a little while ago and we did stuff but
there are no plans to do anything right now because I have other plans that are
keeping me quite busy.
RL: Care to elucidate?
NB: I have my own project which I am doing very stealthily
which is quintessentially a progressive rock band.
RL: Well, you were in Iona and I gather Robert Fripp
contributed to it.
NB: Robert Fripp contributed to two of my projects, as a
guest and as he put it, as a “gift”. One of them was Ellis, Beggs and Howard
and the other one was Iona. He played on a few tracks and contributed
soundscapes and came into the studio with us and did some recording.
RL: Iona was quite a departure from Kajagoogoo.
NB: Yes, but so was Ellis, Beggs and Howard. It had to be.
You can’t really repeat yourself. Iona wasn’t my project as such – I was asked
to join the band. They had already done an album. To me it sounded like an
amalgam of Yes and Clannad. It was an amazing hybrid which I loved. I thought
it was important musically so I did three albums with them and I loved the
people.
RL: Let’s return to this project of yours, which sounds a
bit under wraps, so perhaps I can wheedle it out of you!
NB: It’s got a working title of Lifesigns at the minute. I
don’t know if it will stay that, it may do, it may change. It’s basically me
and another guy called John Young who has a very good pedigree as a progressive
keyboard player. He actually plays keyboards in The Strawbs at the moment. He
played for Carl Palmer and was in Asia for a while. He played keyboards for The
Scorpions and is a solo artist. I think his day job is playing keyboards for
Bonnie Tyler! We are neighbours and good friends and John has been trying to
get me to do a project with him for a long time. About two or three years ago
he played me some material that he had come up with and I said it was really
strong and he said do you want to develop it with me and make a band. As time
went on we were file-sharing and I’d do a bit and he’d do a bit and then we
would go in the studio and do some recording. We got Frosty Beedle on board,
the drummer from Cutting Crew and he loved it and said it was some of the best
stuff he had heard in years. So we spent about four days recording Frosty’s
drums on our tunes and he did such a manful job. Then I played it to Steve
Hackett and Steve said he would really like to play on this. Of course I said I
would be honoured. So Steve played some guitar on it and then a good friend
called Jakko Jakszyk .
RL: What is the state of play then?
NB: Thijs Van Leer is going to play some flute on it for us.
He’s going to come over and do some of that. We still have some vocal parts
because John and I are sharing the vocals and there are some additional bits of
tweaking. I don’t know how close we are yet but we’ve got some very strong
rhythm tracks done but it’s the nuance that is waiting to be added which will
make all the difference.
RL: Presumably the Chapman Stick features on it somewhere?
NB: The Chapman Stick has got some very nice features on it.
There is one track that opens with a searing Chapman Stick solo.
RL: What’s your introduction to the Chapman Stick when you
explain it to students?
NB: I say, “If you want to play this instrument it will
change your life.” Because it changed mine, and I say it’s a self-accompanying
stringed, tapping fret board. It’s got ten strings and you hammer on to it with
the tips of your fingers. There is very low action which enables you to get
good articulation on the frets – imagine a piano technique but transposed into
an upright fret board where you are tapping on to the strings. You are
arpeggiating melody and bass lines with separate hands and you can play
counterpoint or lead lines with the right hand.
RL: When did you first hear about it?
NB: About 1977.
RL: It seems as if your original technique lent itself to
it?
NB: I would agree in as much as my percussive technique
involves slapping and because I have always said that the Chapman Stick is a
percussive instrument in the same way that a piano is – you are using something
to hit. But I had to develop a technique for playing the Stick as anyone does.
You have to find your own voice on it. Few Chapman Stick players as there are,
everybody plays it in such a different way because it is such an idiosyncratic
instrument.
RL: It seems versatile.
NB: Mine is retro-fitted with a Midi set-up so when I played
for John Paul Jones I was playing orchestra and Hammond organ and brass
patches.
RL: As an instrument it is at the beginning of its
evolution.
NB: Tony Levin has done a tremendous amount of work in
creating a public understanding of what the instrument does. Having said that I
think it’s going to be mind-blowing what people come up with later on. We are
just about circling the Earth with the Stick and I think we are going to populate
the solar system with it!
John Hackett (born 1955) is the younger brother of Steve (see below). He has not only been lucky enough to be in London at time when creativity and energy made it the centre of the universe, but he has lived and grown up around the best musicians in the business. Even given that, it is perhaps surprising that a classically-trained serious flute player can deliver a rock album that I cannot begin to praise enough.
We talked about John's career, his association with some crucial musicians, and the way to succeed at being both a classical and rock musician at the same time. John Hackett has indeed succeeded. There's a new flute and guitar record out and he tells me that work has started on a new rock album.
John Hackett
JH: It was a very exciting time to grow up. I remember being at
school when Sergeant Pepper came out and it seemed to be the most exciting
thing on the planet. Steve was five
years older than me. He was always listening to lots of blues albums and
guitarists, so I started guitar when I was about 12. There were a lot of
excellent players who at the time were very young – Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck
and people like that. My memories are of
listening to those guitarists and then later on, Hendrix. You could feel an
energy. We lived very close to the King’s Road though it might have been just
as exciting had we lived somewhere else. I look back on it as a very optimistic
time when you thought that everything was possible, both in terms of music and
politics. Now of course you see the world with a perhaps more pragmatic view.
RL: This conveniently leads us into Checking Out of
London. It’s the best album I have heard
all year.
JH: Really? It was
very much a group effort. A very close friend of mine, who I was at school
with, Nick Clabburn, wrote the lyrics for all but one of the songs. They
inspired me. Obviously we are different people and we come at life from
different angles but I found there were things in his lyrics that led me off
down creative paths I didn’t know I
had. I have spent most of my life
playing the flute and a bit of guitar and have done some writing before, but it
was the first time I had attempted a rock album. Nick Magnus did a tremendous
amount of work on the album; a lot of arranging and production work and did a
fantastic job on that and then of course my brother came and played some
stunning guitar solos. Tony Patterson took on some of the lead vocals on the
album and also did some great harmony work. You get inspired by other people. I
envy someone like Nick Magnus, who has tremendous production and keyboard
skills and can produce highly polished professional stuff himself. Also, Nick Clabburn’s lyrics. If it was left
to me I’d probably write lots of drippy love songs.
It’s a direction I would like to explore much more and I do
have another rock album in the pipeline.
RL: Checking Out of London seems to have appeared fully
formed, as if all the influences over the years were ready, just at that
moment, to arrive as an album.
JH: I do have very eclectic tastes. I am from two
backgrounds, the Rock background, in that I started off playing blues guitar,
then growing up with Steve and going to all the Genesis concerts and then
playing in his band. Then there is also the classical side. I studied classical
flute playing and did a music degree.
RL: Presumably you started on a transverse flute and then
went over to the vertical flute?
JH: That was only in recent years. I had a car accident and
after that I found it very painful to play a normal flute. I nearly gave up
because it was just so bad. The vertical flute has been an absolute
life-saver for me because it is just so
much more comfortable.
RL: The flute doesn’t appear on Checking Out of London.
JH: Nick Clabburn thought it would be a good idea not to
include flute. I didn’t take him at his word, in that I did try some flute on
some of the tracks but really it was almost like a different side of my
personality. Generally the flute is a sweet-sounding instrument and on Checking
Out of London, and particularly numbers like Ego and Id, which is much more of
a rock number..
RL: You didn’t go down the Jethro Tull route?
JH: I have done that at other times. With Steve we do a
piece called, “Jazz on a Summer’s Night” where I do do that scat singing
through the flute and there is a little bit on my latest disc, Moonspinner.
RL: The riff on Ego and ID – did that just come to you?
JH: I do sort of thrash around. I’ve got a Telecaster. It’s
incredibly simple; harmonically it’s probably the simplest piece on the whole
album. The other ones have more complex chord changes and more structure and
Ego and Id, in a way is just a bit of a blow.
RL: Moving forward to Whispers. When I heard it it reminded
me of Genesis!
JH: I consciously wrote that in the style of Genesis, there
is no question about it. And it’s got Tony Patterson on it.
RL: I think you are playing them at their own game and
winning!
JH: I don’t know about that. (mutual giggling ensues)
RL: Choosing a favourite on Checking Out of London is like choosing
children but I forced myself, and it was More. That’s got you singing on it?
Track 10 - More
JH: Yes, I sing on that and Tony does the choruses.
RL: It’s a sort of Rock/Reggae/Baroque..
JH: (Laughs) The Reggae, there’s no question about that.
RL: It has all the hallmarks of a Bond Theme to me.
JH: I would be very
pleased if it was. The Reggae feel was there right from the beginning.
But of course, Nick Magnus was able to realise that for me. I gave him my
sketches of it and he did a lot of the arranging to bring it to life. And of
course, coming towards the end of the album I wanted something that was quite
grand, so it does have a big landscape.
RL: How would you react to the “concept album” label?
JH: It’s not a concept album as such but it was written in
one go. From that point of view it does all hang together. If you look at the
lyrics there is a theme of alienation.
The lyrics are quite poetic at times in that it is not always absolutely
obvious what they are about. The title
track is a kind of hidden joke in that I moved out of London some years ago and
I think that was Nick Clabburn having fun with that. The lyrics are quite dark
at times.
RL: Let’s move on to Moonspinner – something completely
different.
JH: The thinking behind it was to do something pretty much
self-sufficient. Checking Out of London was a big project and I wanted to do
something that was easy to produce and something that took the classical style
and the kind of things I was doing with Steve.
Moonspinner has a classical style but also it is an album
with a bit more edge to it, in terms of the rhythm. What I have always loved in
both classical and rock is the virtuoso style – someone like Steve or Jeff
Beck, playing the guitar really well. I have always loved flute concertos –
somebody like Jean-Pierre Rampal, my flute hero when he was alive. What I wanted to do with this album, and in a
sense it is a classical album, I wanted to give it a more rock edge so I used a
bit of scat singing through the flute, which is the signature of someone like
Ian Anderson.
RL: Witchfinder comes to mind.
JH: Certainly, and tracks like Appassionata – they use the
classical technique of double-tonguing but the chord sequence is one we used on
Voyage of the Acolyte. Then it goes into some uneven time signatures. The track
after that, Red Hair – I was trying to push that into a slightly different
area, influenced by a Vivaldi flute concerto using typical Baroque devices.
RL: It brings me back to a question I asked Steve which was
the relationship between classical music of the 19th Century and
symphonic prog. What’s your feeling on that?
JH: There are some tremendous similarities. With bands like
Genesis, what I have always liked about their music is that they don’t always
go for the straight C Major chord. It may have an added 7th or a 9th
in there and that’s what it has in common with the music of people like Satie
or Debussy.
RL: In another interview, you quoted Holst, who said, “Never
compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance.”
You said that you knew exactly what he meant by that. Care to elucidate?
Track 1 - Witchfinder
JH: It’s absolutely true and in fact, Moonspinner is very
much a case of that. Apart from the classical tracks and Thoughts turn
Homeward, it was all written in about three weeks. I’d been busy doing other
stuff and been wanting to do some writing and it was just bursting to come out.
When I finally got the opportunity and cleared the decks and took the phone off
the hook, it came pouring out in virtually one go – or over three weeks, which
is a relatively short space of time I think.
RL: You are doing another rock album?
JH: I am about to start on it. It’s been written for some
time actually – been sat there in the can, but of course it isn’t a can
anymore! Most of the songs I wrote in about 2006 after Checking Out of London
and it never got done. Now it’s a bit like what we were saying; the dam is
about to burst and it’s got to come out. I have already talked to Nick Magnus
about recording it and that will be happening very soon.
RL: Do you have a method of working that you apply every
time?
JH: I am not very good at multi-tasking and dipping in and
out of projects. When I did Checking Out of London we set aside a certain
amount of time and went for it. Generally speaking it has to be done without
too many breaks. I can’t work piecemeal – I can’t hold it in my head. One of the problems I have is that because I
am a flute player, in order to keep your standard of playing up, you have to
practise regularly and it’s quite difficult to switch from playing the flute to
picking up a guitar and then singing. It can be done but I find it difficult.
RL: Is there anything
that popped into your mind while we were talking that we never got
around to?
JH: When we first had a conversation you were talking about
the influence of classical music on
progressive music, and I was looking back at some of the albums I did
with Steve, such as Voyage of the Acolyte, where he was using orchestral
instruments such as the oboe and the cor anglais and cello and of course me on flute. I’m very proud of that work and Steve did
some fantastic work in producing those albums because there are some unusual
combinations of instruments.
