The Ingoes returned to London in
1966, where Giorgio Gomelsky, no longer involved with
The Yardbirds, revealed his new plans for the band. They were to
be ensconced in a communal house in Fulham where they would
write and rehearse for six months, eventually emerging with a
new identity (Blossom Toes, a name thought up by someone
at Gomelsky's Paragon agency) and with enough material
written to record an album. Drummer Colin Martin left the
band at this point and was replaced by one Kevin Westlake. After a
period of total disorganisation (the band were to enjoy
their new-found freedom to the full) the four of them - Brian
Godding on rhythm guitar and vocals, Jim Cregan on guitar, Brian
Belshaw on bass and vocals and Kevin Westlake on
drums - started to craft a style and a collection of songs of
their own, with Godding in particular emerging as a very fine
songwriter in the quirky English tradition of Ray Davies and others
of that ilk. They soon had enough material for an album, and
went into the studios to demo the tracks which were eventually
appear as their first LP, `We Are Ever So Clean'
(Marmalade, 1967).
Gomelsky at this point decided,
probably as a result of being heavily influenced by The
Beatles' `Sgt. Pepper' which had just been released, to lavish
orchestral arrangements on most of the songs - some of the
tracks indeed weren't to feature Blossom Toes at all, aside from
coming in to add vocals to the music being
performed by the orchestra and
session musicians (this wasn't an unusual turn of events at the time,
as witnessed in our Kaleidoscope interview of a couple of
issues ago.) Having said all that the results aren't as bad as
they might have been, and the album remains a real highlight of
1967 English psychedelic pop with a particular gem in `Look At Me
I'm You' - one of the songs which does feature the band;
others include `I'll Be Late For Tea', `Telegram Tuesday', `What
On Earth', `Frozen Dog' and `I Will Bring You This And That'.
Having been buried for several
months writing and recording, the Blossom Toes didn't actually
play any gigs until the `Love-In' held at the Alexandria Palace
in July 1967, where they played a foreshortened set due to
the fact that the majority of the material from their album,
as heavily orchestrated as it was, was virtually unplayable
live. They then disappeared off to Sweden, where they played a
three-week residency at Stockholm's leading psychedelic club,
The Merry Hassan. Here they abandoned all hope of
performing their established material, and
progressed - as far as I'm concerned that's the right word - onto
playing almost freeform noise with a heavy dose of
Beefheartian influence chucked into the chemical stew.
A bootleg exists of one of their shows there which reveal the
band to have been experimenting freely; the material is almost
unrecognisably theirs, with the exception of `Listen To The
Silence' which was to turn up on their second album.
Their return to England was marked by another change in
drummers: this time Kevin Westlake was replaced by Poli Palmer, a
veteran of the Midlands scene (and a future member of Family,
as regular Terrascope readers will by now have realised) who
was not only a drummer but brought to the band his talents with
the flute, Mellotron, vibes and other assorted percussion.
The new line-up started writing material that could actually be
performed, although their first attempt to record was a
dismal failure - a cover of Dylan's `I'll Be Your Baby Tonight'
(the reasons for which were down to Gomelsky's misguided attempts
for stardom once again.) Their next single,
`Postcard'/'Everyone's Leaving Me Now', was a much more
successful outing though, and it bode well for the long-promised
second LP.
Poli left the band shortly after the
single was released however, and was replaced by Barry Reeves
(late of a band called Ferris Wheel) and it was
this final ingredient which finally brought the Blossom Toes to
the boil. Godding moved up to lead guitar, and it was with this
twin lead-guitar front of Godding and Cregan that the band
went into the studios in 1968 to record their new album - the
fabulous `If Only For A Moment' (released on Marmalade again,
in 1969). No orchestras this time, just four musicians in
total command of their material. `Peace Loving Man' is the
real standout - a dynamic, acid-drenched guitar workout written
by Godding and sung by Belshaw (and with Poli Palmer on drums;
it was in fact the last thing Palmer recorded with the band.
Reeves overdubbed congas afterwards) - but others, like `Listen
To The Silence' and `Kiss Of Confusion' are of equal standing. A
stunning album, and one which should have brought them the
success they so richly deserved.
Things weren't to be however, and
despite major successes on the Continent the Blossom Toes - or
at least, the two Brians - decided to call it a day in December
1969. They had simply had enough.
Godding and Westlake formed what was
effectively a new Blossom Toes out of the ashes of a
film-recording project later in 1970. Calling themselves BB
Blunder, they recorded one album (of the same title) which is for
me the real highlight of the whole Blossom Toes oeuvre; more
`progressive' in keeping with the times, it nevertheless captures
their songwriting and playing at its very best. There was however
to be one footnote to the Blossom Toes as a band. They appear
together as such on one track of Julie Driscoll's excellent solo
album `1969' (released on Polydor in, surprisingly enough,
1970). The connections between the Blossom Toes and the Brian
Auger/Julie Driscoll circle go back some way - they had all
appeared at the `Love In' at the Ally Pally in
1967 for example - and it's from that angle which we are approaching
the following interview with Brian Godding, for reasons which
will become clear when you reach the credits.
Brian Godding himself is still
probably most widely known (aside from his Blossom Toes
involvement) for his collaborations on sister-in-law
Julie Driscoll's (now Tippetts) albums and the fact that he has been Mike
Westbrook's lead guitarist of choice for the last twenty-odd years.
He's still going strong, gigging and recording with his own
jazz-flecked band, Full Monte, who are well worth checking out
if you get the chance. A genuinely gifted guitarist, he is
also very modest about his talents and speaks eloquently and
enthusiastically about still getting a real buzz from
composing and playing music - all of which will become apparent, I
hope, from the interview which follows.
PT: Can you remember what first
got you into playing the guitar?
BG: Yeah, I can actually. George
Formby, when I was a kid. I didn't start by playing the guitar, I
actually started by playing the ukulele. I can remember that
more vividly than a lot of stuff that's happened more recently. I
was fascinated with that noise Formby used to make on the banjo.
I think he was quite a heavy-duty guy, actually, a bit like
Norman Wisdom. He was great when you were a kid, but as you
get into these people you find they can be quite tyrannical.
So you picked up the ukulele...
Yeah, basically. My dad used to work
for the GPO, he got an old earphone from a telephone and stuck it
in the little hole in my ukulele, believe it or not, and he
actually wired it up - so I had an electric uke when I was about
six! I doubt that anybody else had electric guitars then, but
you could plug this electric uke in the back of the old valve
radio. I used to sit there strumming away.
And guitar influences?
It's got to be the Shadows and
the Beatles. That's what drove me into wanting to play that
particular instrument. I just became attracted to it through their
music. I still think they sound great, in fact. Unlike a lot
of their contemporaries who sound dated now, I can still listen
to the Beatles and wonder how the hell they did it,
especially with the recording techniques at the time. They were
pretty special and fortunately they remain so.
So when did you start to play
guitar with other people? Were you in a school band?
No. I didn't actually start playing
guitar till I was about sixteen. I was working when I got my
first guitar. I was doing an apprenticeship at a scientific
instrument making firm in Highbury, North London and Brian
Belshaw was working there. We just kind of drifted into playing.
There was another guy there called Alan Kensley who was playing
the guitar and he used to bring it in and I just eventually ended
up getting one and joining in with them, so I didn't actually
start playing the guitar until I was quite old - sixteen or so.
But as soon as I got involved, it all happened quite
quickly. I think there was about four months
between my picking up a guitar and leaving my apprenticeship. I
absconded to Soho and was living in a place that belonged to
Brian Belshaw's uncle's business. We were just basically kipping
on the floor of this greengrocery shop. It was great - it's
great fun when you're that age.
Was that The Ingoes?
It was, or at least it became The Ingoes.
In fact it was called The Gravediggers to start with and we used to
do Screaming Lord Sutch tunes like `Jack The Ripper'.
Brian Belshaw's got this really gruff voice and used to do a
really good impersonation of Sutch.
Who else was in The Ingoes apart
Brian and yourself?
We needed a lead guitar, because I
was rhythm guitarist, so we got a guy called Eddie Lynch in and
we spent quite a lot of time working with him. Then we had a
drummer called Colin Martin, who's now working as
a radio producer. I don't remember where we met the guys
but when the band solidified it stayed together with that
line-up for a year, quite a long time in those days (1965).
How did you first connect up
with Giorgio Gomelsky?
We weren't playing blues music as
such but we were interested in it, so we kept pestering
Giorgio because he was running the Crawdaddy clubs at the time.
We used to go and see these bands like The Yardbirds, what
have you, and we'd pester him to try and get some work.
Anyway, eventually he took us under his wing and promptly sent us
off to France where we lived for a year or so in Paris and
that's basically where we improved and became a band.
Your equivalent of the Star Club!
Basically, yeah - except the French
have got a lifestyle which is not like the German
or the English. We made a lot of
friends out there, people whom I still consider to
be good friends even twenty years later. Quite a few
people looked after us very well. So that's how we met Giorgio, it
was through his clubs. We ended up working at the Crawdaddy
clubs quite a lot, supporting bands like The Yardbirds, The
T-Bones. It was a good time.
Did Gomelsky try and record any
of your early stuff? I know he dragged people like
The Yardbirds and Sonny Boy Williamson into the studio on
occasions.
We weren't considered to be a very
viable proposition then, just a prospect. He
thought "one day these boys might be doing
something". But we did back Sonny Boy. Sweet old sod, he used
to come over here, totally alcoholic, and we used to do
all these London suburbs with him. We'd just go down and play
twelve-bars and he'd get up and wail away on his mouth-organ. It
was interesting. It was interesting to see a guy who knew
exactly what he was going to do and it didn't make the slightest bit
of difference what we did at all! (Much laughter)
So you paid your dues for a while
and then you became Blossom Toes.
It was Giorgio's marketing bunch in
his office at Paragon who came up with that idea. They decided that
The Ingoes wasn't a good name, so they came up with Blossom Toes
and we went along with it because it meant that we could get in
the studio and make an album. The name seemed very unimportant
at the time; the impor
tant thing was the getting into the
studio, so basically we went along with much of what was thrown
our way. That first album was our songs but the actual recording
was out of our hands. If you know the record you'll know there's
a lot of orchestra on it. At the time we didn't want to do
that for two reasons: one, we would rather just have played the
songs ourselves because that's how we wrote them and
rehearsed them and two, we had to go in and
perform with the orchestral musicians or string quartet or whatever
- because of union rules and the fact that we only had 4-track
machines. It all had to be done live, no overdubs, and it
was quite intimidating for us lot.
Where was `We Are Ever So Clean'
recorded?
That was done at the Chappell Studio
down in Bond Street. It was a good studio. John Timperley was the
engineer. He was a very, very good engineer. He was the
saving grace, really, of the whole thing. He in fact pulled the
album together. Giorgio was having a pretty bad time because of
drink and if we'd had a lesser engineer that record may not
have got made or it may not have got put out or it may have been
bloody awful - which I don't think it is. It's not particularly
representative of us at the time but I don't think it's a bad record.
Was it a conscious departure from
the group's sound?
Yes, from the management's point of
view. The idea was to chuck us onto the Beatles bandwagon,
presumably. They were a company who wanted to exist and survive, so
they wanted bands that were successful.
There was obviously a potential within the band to be sort
of poppy, which we didn't particularly want to be, but then we
didn't particularly not want to be. We didn't really know what
it meant! If The Beatles were `poppy' then I suppose we would
all have been quite happy to be that sort of band at the time.
Like all bands, we got slung from pillar to post; they wanted to
market us this way, market us that way. They
didn't actually understand that the bottom line of it is four guys
who actually just want to play. The rest of it is just a pose,
you know.
I think your enjoyment of the
playing still comes through on the record. It still sounds
inventive and quirky and humorous.
Yeah, I don't think it's a bad record
at all. To me it definitely sounds dated, you know, more so
than the second. The second has group connotations.
It was Giorgio's idea to put in
all those wacky little intros, was it?
Yeah, probably him and Jim, probably
between the two of them and Kevin. There was a lot of humour in the
band. People like Jim and Kevin were both quite humorous in their
own ways. I wasn't around when that was done. I didn't even know
they were going to do that.
In the end you didn't include much of
`We Are Ever So Clean' in your stage show?
That's right. We couldn't play it
like it was recorded, with all that orchestration, I mean
we couldn't have touted an orchestra round
with us, so we just said forget it. I
actually think they're fantastic people, classical
musicians. I think they're completely misunderstood. People
see classical musicians as very staid, scholastic people but in
my experience I've found them to be almost psychopathic - I
mean, talk about drinking! It's probably because of the strictness
of what they do, but anyway when they've finished doing
whatever it is they do they go absolutely
apeshit. I really enjoy their company! They're
very open-minded people, and very talented. Without them there
is no music, just a lot of stuff written on paper. I think
they're misunderstood people.
But you wouldn't have taken a
bunch of them to Stockholm with you, for instance!
On one of our little sorties to
Sweden? When we went out there the band was in a terrible state.
Everybody was taking LSD and stoned and things. We went out to
Sweden to do these gigs and quite honestly we didn't have any
tunes. It was as simple as that. We just improvised and it was
a shambles. That bootleg recording of us that's around is
a terrible indictment of what we were like at the time,
quite frankly. We went out to Sweden with twenty half tunes or
quarter tunes or just titles or chord sequences with no words
and that's what you're getting on that live record - plus the
fact that everybody is completely out of their crust.
What about your cover of
Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"?
It was crap! I'd put
it in a league with Hermann's Hermits.
It was a joke. We were a quirky sort of English band and
trying to do cover versions of Bob Dylan was really stupid in
retrospect. We were good at what we did, but not good enough to go
round covering people's material like that.
When did you start recording the
material for the second album, which I think I prefer to
the first?
Me too. I think it's a better record in
as much as it represents the band and what people were feeling
like at the time. There was quite a lot of thought went into that
second record from our point of view, rather than from some
arranger's point of view or some engineer's point
of view. It was very much what the band wanted to do at the time
so, for better or worse, that to me is the more important record.
Kevin was long gone by then.
Yeah. It was a shame in fact, because
Kevin was an immensely creative geezer and it's a pity he wasn't
still in the band when we were functioning like that.
You enjoyed making that second
album, by all accounts.
Yeah. It was good fun to make. We had
more control by then. Certain lines had to be drawn when you
were working with Giorgio. By the time we were doing `If Only For
A Moment' we'd come to some pretty clear understandings
with that whole situation, with Paragon and Marmalade and Giorgio
in particular in that we weren't really interested in making
another album unless we could make it the way we wanted to - which
is what we did. Julie (Driscoll) came
down and did a few things with us. It was much more of an open
situation. We felt that we came out with a band record,
basically. We'd contributed to the production as well as
the music and we were happy that we could go on stage and play
all those tunes. That's what Blossom Toes did until the day it
packed in, was went out and basically played that album.
I didn't realise that Julie
Driscoll contributed to "If Only For A Moment
". She's not credited.
I think she sang on `Hobby Horse's
Head' and it was certainly at a Blossom Toes recording session
that she hit Giorgio with her handbag, very hard on the head.
Several times!
Do you remember playing support
to Jefferson Airplane at the Roundhouse in 1968?
I don't, actually. I used to go home
after our sets at the Roundhouse because I lived just down the road!
I remember supporting Captain Beefheart in Cannes. That
was bloody good fun. They came over and they didn't have any
equipment so they borrowed all ours. Talk about out of their heads!
I didn't believe anybody could be that stoned and still
be alive! Kevin used to love their stuff but I was never that keen
on it myself, to be quite honest. I hate slightly out of
tune guitars, I really can't abide them. I'm not talking about
cacophony or discord, I don't mind that, it's just things that
are quarter tones and eighth tones out of tune. I don't like it.
Is it true that you
played on Brian Auger/Julie Driscoll's
`This Wheel's On Fire'?
I didn't really play on it - I just put
a bit of mellotron on at the end. That was done while they were
mixing. Brian wasn't there. He didn't seem to mind. But it
was nothing. I wasn't sitting there playing with them - I
wouldn't even attempt to play a keyboard with
Brian Auger around!
Did you play on anything else
that the Trinity did?
No. We were never really around at
the same time. Because they were touring pretty constantly
at that time, we didn't see an awful lot of them, but having
said that I got on very well with Brian. The whole band were
extremely nice people. In fact, when The Blosses split up
Brian was so cut up he actually gave us £200 (which was a lot
of money in those days) to go away for two weeks to think
about what we were doing. He didn't think we
should split up.
Why did Blossom Toes fold?
Belshaw and I left. We just got fed up
with it, to put it in a nutshell. We'd been a band for quite a
long time as The Ingoes and Blossom Toes and I just wanted to get
off the road, to get out of it. We rolled our Volkswagen van on
the way home from a gig in Bristol one night in December '69 and
that put the band off the road for a couple of weeks, during
which time I just decided that I'd had enough.
There was rumour at one time,
after Julie left Brian and the Trinity, that she was
going to join up with
Blossom Toes.
Well, she was interested in what we
were doing, so she used to come down - and when the Blosses split
up as well, it was the natural thing to think about doing
things amongst ourselves. She wanted to do more
English-type stuff rather than all the things she'd been doing,
and obviously the idea of Julie singing with us, or some
combination of us, was great. We thought she was a
great singer. We did some things together. She sang quite a lot
on the BB Blunder record.
You backed her on the "1969 "
recording as well.
During the "69" thing the Blosses were
still more or less together, but in name only. It was understood
that we'd never be going back out on the road again.
So you folded Blossom Toes and
eventually resurfaced as BB Blunder. How did that come
about? What were your intentions ?
Brian and Kevin and I were quite happy
to work together again. Basically, what we started off doing
was some film music. Whether it got used for the film or not,
I can't remember now - but that's how we started making the
album... and we just stayed in the studio! There must have been
a bit of money around at the time (laughs). The Stones put some
cash up for Sahara Music. We did actually spend quite a lot of time
in the studio, not necessarily doing anything productive,
just buggering about....
You laid down enough material for
the album. Were you pleased with the results?
Personally, it's my favourite record
out of the three. It's the most contemporary - I mean it's got all
the ideas there which I still use today in terms of the
guitar. On those sessions, that's where I started to play the
guitar properly.
Is that the one you're
pictured playing inside the BB Blunder gatefold?
Yes, that's the one, the Fender
Telecaster. Being left-handed I didn't have much choice when it came
to guitars. A Gibson would have been nice, but I got this
left-handed Telecaster, the only one in London in 1967! Giorgio
bought it, I should say. The management put up
the money. He thought it was a very good guitar to get because
Steve Cropper had one! So anyway, the first night I got it I
took it home, I took it to bits, stripped all the paint off it,
(this was a brand new guitar, mind), got my dad's soldering
iron and carved all these designs on the front of the wood. Then
I got some button polish and polished it up. I took it back to
the office the next day, because we were rehearsing, and
Giorgio went apeshit! I couldn't understand it, because it
looked so much better than shiny yellow. I was intending to
just polish the wood until I found what a crappy piece of wood it
was, so I carved and decorated it. I played that guitar, or
versions of it, for years. It got really hacked about. At one point
I put Gibson pick-ups on it. But essentially a guitar always
sounds like itself, no matter what the pick-ups because of the
resonance of it, the density of the wood, the scaling, the
camber of the neck - it al
ways retains its particular nuance
or sound. A few years later a friend went to the States and I
said, as a joke, "pick up a Gibson for me
when you're in New York" - and he did! I
thought it was bloody good of him. I've still got the old
Telecaster, though. (At this point said guitar was
duly produced for inspection.)
My god, it's looking just a bit
different now!
Yeah, I've had it rebuilt. It's still
the old 1966 Telecaster neck, but now I've got a guitar
synthesizer built into it.
Tell us about the back cover shot
on the BB Blunder album - what's the significance of
the Blossom Toes album sleeve in the rubbish bag?
That was shot in 1971 when they had that
big dustmen's strike and there was rubbish everywhere. You
couldn't actually go anywhere in London to take
pictures without finding a pile of rubbish behind you - so
we thought we might as well make use of it. The
photographer turned up at the studio while we were drinking cups of
tea, so we all walked out into Kensington Church Street. I took my
tea with me and Kevin picked up a copy of "We Are Ever So Clean".
He turned round and shoved it in one of the rubbish bags.
It was completely spontaneous.
It wasn't a heavy-handed statement
or anything then?
No, a light-handed one! (Much laughter.)
Did you gig much as BB Blunder?
I've heard a couple of radio shows you did.
Yeah, we did quite a lot actually,
universities, stuff like that with Family and King Crimson. We
were LOUD. We had all this equipment, stacks of speakers across
the back of the stage. We decided that we were going to be the
loudest band in the world! We were certainly the loudest band in
this country - and it was horrible!!! In the end, the roadies
refused to put all the gear up on stage. They said "no way -
you're going to kill people!" I've got tapes of the band from
that period, but it's so loud it's completely
distorted, unlistenable!
For how long was BB Blunder
actively endangering the nation's ears?
I can't remember, to be honest. Sahara
ran out of money.
What about Reg King's involvement?
Towards the end of Blunder's existence
as a band, Reg King joined us as a singer. I'd decided that in
order to play the guitar the way I wanted to play it, I didn't want
to be bothered with singing, particularly. Little did we
know that he was just on the turn. He was about to go completely
round the bend! As soon as we went out on the road, he started
disappearing from gigs. He'd be found wandering round
Wolverhampton, oblivious to where he was or anything.
Did Alan King play with BB Blunder
for a while as well?
Bam Bam. Yeah, he did. We sort of
expanded, got two guitars and a piano and Reg -
and then it all folded!
A lot of these activities seemed
to intermesh. You all played on Andrew
Leigh's "Magician" album, and most
of Mighty Baby backed Gary Farr.
It was like a record company thing. We
just ended up playing with each other. No great plot, it's just
the way it was.
How did you make the transition from
ear-splitting rock to playing in what was essentially a
jazz group - I'm thinking of Solid Gold Cadillac?
Well, I've been working with jazz
musicians over the past ten years or so, but quite honestly
I've never had a great interest in traditional jazz as such - and
I don't play with jazz guys when they play that sort of
music. The attractive thing about playing with jazz musicians is
that there is more chance to improvise; it can be more
expressive. I'm not saying it necessarily is. It's
very staid and traditional in lots of ways and rock music is in
fact a lot more progressive than jazz is to my mind. There's
much more openness within rock to new things than there is in
jazz. Jazz is still very, very traditional - even at the
improvised end of it people still give you funny looks if you tune
up with guitar synthesizers.
They think it's a heresy!
Yeah. There's plenty of that going
down, which is a shame, because the whole idea of it is to be
artistic - and to be artistic you have to invent things,
otherwise you're just mimicking what's already
been done. The point is though that when Julie met Keith, all of
a sudden there was this sort of jazz thing - plus I'd been totally
mesmerised by John McLaughlin's
record ("Extrapolation"), so playing jazz
rather than listening to it started from meeting Keith. Then
Roger Sutton, who'd been involved with Brian Auger, was
playing alongside Gary Boyle in Mike Westbrook's band. When Gary
left, I got a `phone call from Roger saying
"do you want to come and play in the band I'm in called Solid
Gold Cadillac?" I didn't even know who Mike Westbrook was at
the time! I went down and played with them and I really enjoyed it,
so I thought "yeah, I'll have some of
that." I'd had an offer to join Procul Harum
but I felt I'd had enough of rock bands for a time and I'd give it
a go with the jazz nutters! All these guys could improvise at
the drop of a hat and they were good, you know. Joining them
seemed like a progression, and so it was, from both a musical and
an artistic point of view.
What's the main difference
between playing guitar in a rock band and a jazz outfit?
Well, from my point of view there isn't a
lot at all - it was just an extension of what I'd already done. I'm
not that interested in jazz guitar playing. I just like the
idea of being able to express yourself on an instrument. It
doesn't interest me personally, as a guitar player, to follow
any jazz tradition. I'm not saying I don't like it - if
Barney Kessell came on, or somebody like that, I'd listen and
think "yeah, that's okay"; but it doesn't do
anything to me. Whereas when I listen to Jeff Beck when he's
playing well, that really moves me. It's just a personal thing. It
lifts the hairs up at the back of my
neck! Jazz guitar playing doesn't do that for me and never has.
Therefore I wouldn't class myself as somebody who went from rock
guitar playing to jazz guitar playing. I'm basically a rock
guitar player who plays with jazz musicians.
Is that any different from just
jamming?
Well, there's more to it than that.
When working with Westbrook I've always been
given an awful lot of room within his music to make my own way,
so that's how it's worked. Basically, I guess he likes the
way I play or interpret his music (or he wouldn't keep
calling me up). I don't see any big transition from rock to jazz
- just an extension of what I've always done. The same is
actually true of improvised music. I find playing with certain
musicians in an improvised way is a further extension of the
whole thing. All you're doing really is you're making sounds
and you're co-ordinating them to try and have an effect on the
people you're playing with or the people who are listening. I
play for pleasure now - in as much as if I don't enjoy it, I'm not
going to do it.
After working on Keith
Tippett's Centipede project, you recorded with Mike Westbrook
on "Citadel Room 314" and then as Solid Gold Cadillac.
Yeah. We cut "Brain Damage". That's
a great record. It's really quirky stuff, you know. Some of it
sounds like really duff pop!
Then there were contributions to
Julie Driscoll's "Sunset Glow" album and to
some Magma sessions.
The Magma thing was Giorgio again.
He called me up and said "You must come to France." He
managed Magma, they needed a guitar player, so I went over and ended
up staying a couple of months to play on the record but I
never joined the band. Christian Vauder was their drummer
and front-man. They wanted me to join, but it didn't happen.
They were a pretty heavy-duty group. I would have liked to
work with them on a permanent basis, but they were in France and
I didn't seem to have the time to commute.
And Mirage? You lent your services
to the recording of "Now You See It" in 1977.
Mirage was an English outfit with
George Khan on saxes and Dave Sheen on drums. That was where I
first worked with Dave. Some good times.
Then you spent quite a lot of time
working with Kevin Coyne and recorded "Bursting
Bubbles", "Pointing The Finger" and
"Sanity Stomp".
Yeah, we made a few records together,
co-wrote a few tunes. I really enjoyed that. It was a
completely drunk, loony time.
I understand Kevin spends most of
his time in Germany these days. Could you happily
live and work on the continent?
Well, there's not so much freedom
anywhere as there was ten years ago and there's
chaos in Europe at the moment. I toured Yugoslavia with
Eric Burdon a couple of years back and we had no idea that this
could happen. It's unbeliev
able. I can't comprehend it. I've been
to a lot of those places and I just can't correlate the two things.
If you're not playing a lot at
the moment, are you writing new things?
Well, I've never written. I compose.
Writing is another process. What I do is more like painting. I do
it all the time. I'm always fiddling round with ideas, which
is how I work anyway. But from a performing point of view, at
the moment I'm involved in improvising. Right now I'm working with
a trumpet player and that's all improvisation, but I would
consider it to be composition as well. If you do it with the
right attitude then you're composing instantaneously, which I
think is really enjoyable. In Europe, improvised music stands for
something other than just music. It's got political
undertones. How people play and who they play with represents some
sort of political stance. It's got heavy-duty connotations which
I personally don't enjoy. To me, music or art are there to
try and transcend all that bullshit - not to get bogged down in it.
I notice you're using a
synthesizer...
I think they're useful and becoming
more and more useful. They're becoming a creative tool now.
I don't have a lot of time for
sampling.
Sampling, yeah. It's a pain in the
arse. But having said that, if you can get some decent samples you
can use the sound and start mucking around with that sound, take
it from basics to work with. Pop music itself is based on a few chord sequences
and bar lengths and keys. Most rock and roll is in E or A - like
the complete works of AC/DC is in the key of A! They use other
chords, but they're all in the same key. Whereas
folk music uses C, G and D. You don't get a lot of Cs in rock and
roll, not as tonics. You get a lot of jazz in B flat, especially
stuff like saxophones, because that's where they're most
happy playing. That's why they hate playing with rock and roll
guitar players (laughs).
How did the deal for "Slaughter
On Shaftesbury Avenue" come about?
It's just a lot of stuff that got
recorded. GLS was an offshoot from Mirage. When Mirage went
its sweet way, Dave Sheen and I still wanted to work together.
We needed a bass player and Dave had met Steve Lamb up in the
Lake District. So we checked him out, discovered he was a
fantastic bass player, and that's how GLS was formed. A lot of
the life of GLS was in fact working with Kevin Coyne. That wasn't
intentional, but it was OK. The GLS stuff on "Shaftesbury
Avenue" is from an album we recorded at Alvic
Studios. I'd like to get the rest of the GLS tapes released
one day. Then there's Other Routes. That has Dave Barry who I used
to work with along with Mike Westbrook. He liked GLS, so he
put together Other Routes which is him, me plus Steve and we did
some recording. So there were all these tapes accumulating and
not being used over a period of time. John Platt suggested I
get in touch with Reckless Records who were looking to put
out some albums of British guitar music. So I
sent off tapes of GLS, Other Routes and
Full Monte and they said "Why don't we put a record together
using bits of it all, seeing that it spans such an amount of time,
rather than just putting out a GLS record that is
7 years old." So I said okay, and that's what the record is, a
compilation of things that I was involved in over that period.
But, you know, there are guys who are a million times better
guitar players than me who have had extremely hard times - like
Allan Holdsworth. He had to go to America to be taken
seriously. There's nobody around in this country
(promoters especially) who has any taste! It's all hit and miss.
Take somebody like Keith Tippett. He's not exactly having an
easy time. He's doing this, that and the other, but there's times
when he's not doing anything at all. There's no continuity to
anything over here. Mike Westbrook has got an OBE for his
contribution to British Jazz Music, yet can he get a fucking gig for
his own big band? No chance! And if the bands don't get
the work, people just drift off, like Other Routes.
Bring back Giorgio Gomelsky!
God, yeah. That's the trouble, you
see. There are no Giorgio's around. Whatever you say about Giorgio,
he was a man who was interested and he put himself into it.
He was the only person who was interested in the creative side
of it all.
Finally, can you let us have an
update on your activities with Full Monte?
We gig occasionally, round London and
at clubs and festivals.
We're also doing a mini-tour at the
end of this year [1993]. We've done some DAT recording and
produced a cassette which we sell at gigs. That tape was actually
the first time we played together. We decided that rather than go
to a rehearsal we would go down to Tony's recording studio
and have a play, which is what we did. It's a kind of
getting-to-know-you tape. I'd never played with Marcio Mattos
until we started recording that stuff. It's just totally improvised.
We just plugged in and said "Go!"
Postscript - the mini-tour did
happen (funded by the Arts Council) and took Full Monte to
Sheffield, Leeds, London, Swindon and Exeter at
the tail end of 1993. The gigs were recorded for a possible live
release in 1994.
Written and directed by Steve
Rowland, produced by Phil McMullen (c) Ptolemaic Terrascope.
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