[Interview]
Hello there this is the bit of the record...
"Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter was the original record that was recorded that became the basis for the record Tattooed Millionaire all those years ago, 1990 or whenever it was. The record was received very favourably, and so some mad fool gave me the opportunity to go back in the studio and do an entire album. In the process, I think somebody from Iron Maiden, it may have been Mr Harris, heard it and said "Oh, I quite fancy that track for Iron Maiden. Quickly, remove that track from the shelves where it's on sale!" It was something to do with Nightmare On Elm Street, the movie, and the track was suppressed and squished so nobody could possibly hear it before the Iron Maiden version came out, which of course went to number one and knocked Cliff Richard off his perch that Christmas which I think deserves some kind of public service medal!"
"Darkness Be My Friend was recorded on the same set of sessions as Tattooed Millionaire. Actually it was the same set of sessions as Ballad Of Mutt which appears somewhat later on this particular record, so I'll talk about those two...now really I suppose is the best thing. They both come under the category of b-sides, that was in the days when vinyl still existed and you needed a track which really bore no relation to anything whatsoever to be on the other side. So Janick and I dreamed up these couple of tracks. Darkness Be My Friend is a very short little thing, two and a half minutes long, and achieved a little bit of c**t status because it was unavailable after the original stock of singles had been bought. And it has Don Airey, who was the keyboard player for Rainbow, he popped in the studio. He's a friend of Chris Tsangerides the producer, and we said do you fancy playing some keyboard type flute type thing on it? Because we didn't know Ian Anderson's phone number so we thought we'd ask Don Airey! And he did a really nice job. It's a keyboard but pretending to be a flute on that one!"
"Wicker Man was recorded on the Accident Of Birth sessions with Roy Z and all of the band. We never actually finished it. It was a bit of a favourite of everybody. We couldn't figure out why we never finished it, we just never did. So by the time it came round to Chemical Wedding, we had a fair few tracks kicking around that we had produced in the intering period. Mainly things that people did in their bedrooms quite honestly, that we repaired and patched up and thought 'Well that's kind of a vibe' and turned it into a track. We decided to mix all of them and in the process thought 'We must finish Wicker Man!' Wicker Man is not the Iron Maiden song by the same name, it predates that song by several years and it was only really when I decided to put the 'Shadow of the wicker man' or whatever it was in the Iron Maiden song that Steve piped up and went 'Ah, that's what we should call the song, let's call it Wickerman!' and I went 'Oh, not again, this takes me back to 1990!' "
"Real World is a continuation of the Wicker Man story really. Again it was a little demo thing that we put together that we decided to turn into a track. I did have a slight problem with the vocal, I recall, because while the track was extremely exciting when Joe Floyd of Silver Cloud copied it onto tape he actually accidentally varispeeded it so we did the demo at one speed, and it sounded great. By the time we actually copied it onto 24-track master it was actually playing about half a tone or something higher, which created a bit of a crisis, which is why I sound like somebody's biting my nuts when I'm singing on it!"
"Acoustic Track...The noise you hear at the end of Acoustic Track is the phone ringing! This is recorded in Roy's bedroom on a little nylon strung guitar through a mike and at the end of it, somebody very indecently decided to call him. And because it was on stereo there was nothing we could do about it. It was a great vibe so I just came up with a little vocal for it and some words and we had a few spare moments in the studio and we put it down. We couldn't think of what to call it so we called it the acoustic track. Not very inventive but, you know..."
"No Way Out was recorded for the Keith Olsen sessions, the infamous (or not infamous if you've never heard of it) so called lost-album. Actually, large parts of it are now what appears to be lost. We're hoping to find them again. There was going to be another track on this album from that album but we can't find the master tapes. The 24-track original we have so if all else fails we'll have to remix some stuff off it at a later date. But No Way Out was a track which was pretty representative of the kind of scary, weirdy, Peter Gabriely type vibe that I was trying to get back then and I think it's actually rather good and it stands up quite well. Not as heavy as some of the other stuff but, you know..."
"Midnight Jam. Now this is what happens when you get a bunch of guys-myself, Adrian and Roy, and we've been in the studio for about five days recording backing tracks and we're fed up of listening to bass and drums so we decide that we're going to find out what happens after the fade. You know, there's the fade and you turn it up at the end and you think 'I'm gonna hear the last little note and see what the singer says right at the end!' but we thought let's continue that thought and come out the other side and we'll make it all up as we go along. So we dim the lights, put all the candles up, have a few beers and waited, and did our best Jim Morrison impressions and came up with the Midnight Jam and it was actually based upon the track Taking The Queen off Accident Of Birth and this is a continuation of Taking The Queen, hence all the lyrics about the Queen is dying and she's got messed up by this nasty chap who failed to kiss her and turn her into a pumpkin, or whatever. I mean it's very uncharitable to my lyrics but that's the jist of it. It's a fairy tale. I'd recommend listening to that when you're very chilled out, this track."
"Man Of Sorrows was recorded, well was written, for a movie. The movie was called The Chemical Wedding. It hasn't been made yet, so we're still fluffing around and flailing around trying to find money to make the thing but way back when, this was going to be the t**le track to the movie. The demo was done in a very gothic style, much more gothic than when we recorded the track for Accident Of Birth. And was actually engineered by a man called Andres Jaquerman whose the sonud engineer who does all the Monty Python stuff and is actually a highly regarded international TV and film sound producer. Janick came in and played guitar on it and the drums unfortunately are a drum machine as you can tell when you're listening to it. But otherwise it's quite an interesting rendition of the track. It just gives it a different vibe and it's a bit more gothic, a bit more over the top. A bit more melodramatic I suppose."
"Ballad Of Mutt is not to be taken particularly seriously. It's a tale of outright mysogyny and is deeply politically incorrect and long may it remain so! But it's not to be taken seriously it's a bit of a laugh, and if you're wondering what the effect is on my voice, as several people have asked, there is no effect. It's just me talking a little bit like this all the time, when I sing, a bit like ZZ Top (doing Ballad Of Mutt singing voice). And people go 'What is that effect?' but it's just you sticking two fingers down your throat!"
"Re-Entry, all very s***ey and cosmicy, with lots of mandolins and jangly guitars and stuff. And it's quite nice. I think when we came to master it we discovered the levels were a bit all over the place and we could really have done a much better job mixing it, but then we did only have one afternoon in which to write, record and mix four songs so it's not really surprising! But it still hangs up, I quite like it."
"I'm In A Band With An Italian Drummer, well that's the same story as Re-Entry. Same sessions, a b-side that we put together. It's actually very funny, I mean...full on Frank Zappa rip-offs! We really did have an Italian drummer and he really did sound like that and that's him talking in Italian at the end. I don't know what he says but it's very very rude, probably. However, I'm sure Italians all over the place will tell me nobody takes offence. Well, I hope they do really!"
"I think we only played this track two or three times and on this particular recording we managed to record it at the same sessions as the Scream For Me Brazil live album. Didn't have time on the CD to put this track on so...here it is!"
"I decided to try and do something to make up for the fact that I couldn't find this lost track off the Keith Olsen sessions, so I dug out from the depths of a cassette that was done some twenty-odd years ago, I think it was done in 1977 perhaps this cassette was recorded. This is the very first thing that I ever recorded at all. I answered an advert in the Melody Maker saying somebody needs a singer to finish a project. I was an impoverished student at the time, I'd never been near a recording studio and I thought "Wow, this is my chance to get me a freebie demo tape and I can go and get myself singing in some more salubrious places" and it turned out I met these two brothers, bass player and drummer, that had recorded the track and one of them was an engineer, and we went in and just did this and all the vocals on it are mine. I mean I'd never done any over dubbing or harmonies or anything so we just spent an evening recording this song, which was called Dracula. It's a very interesting piece of fun really! I thought it might be interesting for people to hear just what the singer's very very first efforts in the studio might be like. Not because I think it's absolutely wonderful or anything but because some of the flaws in it are nice to listen to because it gives other people a chance to listen to their first efforts and go "Cor, blimey! Mine was better than that!" but it's an interesting little thing. I thought people might like it. I was quite surprised, apart from the fact that the cassette promptly disintegrated as soon as we tried to play it and I had to put it back together with sticky tape and screwdrivers, which was a bit of a moment, but's it's actually held up rather well in the mastering process. And, as an aside, the band that played on that, or the bass player and drummer that played on that, we subsequently put a band together. That band became Shots and that was the band I was playing in when Paul Samson came to see me and gave me the job in Samson and so on and so forth as per the biography which you've probably all obtained now from years ago!"
Bye!
Hello there this is the bit of the record...
"Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter was the original record that was recorded that became the basis for the record Tattooed Millionaire all those years ago, 1990 or whenever it was. The record was received very favourably, and so some mad fool gave me the opportunity to go back in the studio and do an entire album. In the process, I think somebody from Iron Maiden, it may have been Mr Harris, heard it and said "Oh, I quite fancy that track for Iron Maiden. Quickly, remove that track from the shelves where it's on sale!" It was something to do with Nightmare On Elm Street, the movie, and the track was suppressed and squished so nobody could possibly hear it before the Iron Maiden version came out, which of course went to number one and knocked Cliff Richard off his perch that Christmas which I think deserves some kind of public service medal!"
"Darkness Be My Friend was recorded on the same set of sessions as Tattooed Millionaire. Actually it was the same set of sessions as Ballad Of Mutt which appears somewhat later on this particular record, so I'll talk about those two...now really I suppose is the best thing. They both come under the category of b-sides, that was in the days when vinyl still existed and you needed a track which really bore no relation to anything whatsoever to be on the other side. So Janick and I dreamed up these couple of tracks. Darkness Be My Friend is a very short little thing, two and a half minutes long, and achieved a little bit of c**t status because it was unavailable after the original stock of singles had been bought. And it has Don Airey, who was the keyboard player for Rainbow, he popped in the studio. He's a friend of Chris Tsangerides the producer, and we said do you fancy playing some keyboard type flute type thing on it? Because we didn't know Ian Anderson's phone number so we thought we'd ask Don Airey! And he did a really nice job. It's a keyboard but pretending to be a flute on that one!"
"Wicker Man was recorded on the Accident Of Birth sessions with Roy Z and all of the band. We never actually finished it. It was a bit of a favourite of everybody. We couldn't figure out why we never finished it, we just never did. So by the time it came round to Chemical Wedding, we had a fair few tracks kicking around that we had produced in the intering period. Mainly things that people did in their bedrooms quite honestly, that we repaired and patched up and thought 'Well that's kind of a vibe' and turned it into a track. We decided to mix all of them and in the process thought 'We must finish Wicker Man!' Wicker Man is not the Iron Maiden song by the same name, it predates that song by several years and it was only really when I decided to put the 'Shadow of the wicker man' or whatever it was in the Iron Maiden song that Steve piped up and went 'Ah, that's what we should call the song, let's call it Wickerman!' and I went 'Oh, not again, this takes me back to 1990!' "
"Real World is a continuation of the Wicker Man story really. Again it was a little demo thing that we put together that we decided to turn into a track. I did have a slight problem with the vocal, I recall, because while the track was extremely exciting when Joe Floyd of Silver Cloud copied it onto tape he actually accidentally varispeeded it so we did the demo at one speed, and it sounded great. By the time we actually copied it onto 24-track master it was actually playing about half a tone or something higher, which created a bit of a crisis, which is why I sound like somebody's biting my nuts when I'm singing on it!"
"Acoustic Track...The noise you hear at the end of Acoustic Track is the phone ringing! This is recorded in Roy's bedroom on a little nylon strung guitar through a mike and at the end of it, somebody very indecently decided to call him. And because it was on stereo there was nothing we could do about it. It was a great vibe so I just came up with a little vocal for it and some words and we had a few spare moments in the studio and we put it down. We couldn't think of what to call it so we called it the acoustic track. Not very inventive but, you know..."
"No Way Out was recorded for the Keith Olsen sessions, the infamous (or not infamous if you've never heard of it) so called lost-album. Actually, large parts of it are now what appears to be lost. We're hoping to find them again. There was going to be another track on this album from that album but we can't find the master tapes. The 24-track original we have so if all else fails we'll have to remix some stuff off it at a later date. But No Way Out was a track which was pretty representative of the kind of scary, weirdy, Peter Gabriely type vibe that I was trying to get back then and I think it's actually rather good and it stands up quite well. Not as heavy as some of the other stuff but, you know..."
"Midnight Jam. Now this is what happens when you get a bunch of guys-myself, Adrian and Roy, and we've been in the studio for about five days recording backing tracks and we're fed up of listening to bass and drums so we decide that we're going to find out what happens after the fade. You know, there's the fade and you turn it up at the end and you think 'I'm gonna hear the last little note and see what the singer says right at the end!' but we thought let's continue that thought and come out the other side and we'll make it all up as we go along. So we dim the lights, put all the candles up, have a few beers and waited, and did our best Jim Morrison impressions and came up with the Midnight Jam and it was actually based upon the track Taking The Queen off Accident Of Birth and this is a continuation of Taking The Queen, hence all the lyrics about the Queen is dying and she's got messed up by this nasty chap who failed to kiss her and turn her into a pumpkin, or whatever. I mean it's very uncharitable to my lyrics but that's the jist of it. It's a fairy tale. I'd recommend listening to that when you're very chilled out, this track."
"Man Of Sorrows was recorded, well was written, for a movie. The movie was called The Chemical Wedding. It hasn't been made yet, so we're still fluffing around and flailing around trying to find money to make the thing but way back when, this was going to be the t**le track to the movie. The demo was done in a very gothic style, much more gothic than when we recorded the track for Accident Of Birth. And was actually engineered by a man called Andres Jaquerman whose the sonud engineer who does all the Monty Python stuff and is actually a highly regarded international TV and film sound producer. Janick came in and played guitar on it and the drums unfortunately are a drum machine as you can tell when you're listening to it. But otherwise it's quite an interesting rendition of the track. It just gives it a different vibe and it's a bit more gothic, a bit more over the top. A bit more melodramatic I suppose."
"Ballad Of Mutt is not to be taken particularly seriously. It's a tale of outright mysogyny and is deeply politically incorrect and long may it remain so! But it's not to be taken seriously it's a bit of a laugh, and if you're wondering what the effect is on my voice, as several people have asked, there is no effect. It's just me talking a little bit like this all the time, when I sing, a bit like ZZ Top (doing Ballad Of Mutt singing voice). And people go 'What is that effect?' but it's just you sticking two fingers down your throat!"
"Re-Entry, all very s***ey and cosmicy, with lots of mandolins and jangly guitars and stuff. And it's quite nice. I think when we came to master it we discovered the levels were a bit all over the place and we could really have done a much better job mixing it, but then we did only have one afternoon in which to write, record and mix four songs so it's not really surprising! But it still hangs up, I quite like it."
"I'm In A Band With An Italian Drummer, well that's the same story as Re-Entry. Same sessions, a b-side that we put together. It's actually very funny, I mean...full on Frank Zappa rip-offs! We really did have an Italian drummer and he really did sound like that and that's him talking in Italian at the end. I don't know what he says but it's very very rude, probably. However, I'm sure Italians all over the place will tell me nobody takes offence. Well, I hope they do really!"
"I think we only played this track two or three times and on this particular recording we managed to record it at the same sessions as the Scream For Me Brazil live album. Didn't have time on the CD to put this track on so...here it is!"
"I decided to try and do something to make up for the fact that I couldn't find this lost track off the Keith Olsen sessions, so I dug out from the depths of a cassette that was done some twenty-odd years ago, I think it was done in 1977 perhaps this cassette was recorded. This is the very first thing that I ever recorded at all. I answered an advert in the Melody Maker saying somebody needs a singer to finish a project. I was an impoverished student at the time, I'd never been near a recording studio and I thought "Wow, this is my chance to get me a freebie demo tape and I can go and get myself singing in some more salubrious places" and it turned out I met these two brothers, bass player and drummer, that had recorded the track and one of them was an engineer, and we went in and just did this and all the vocals on it are mine. I mean I'd never done any over dubbing or harmonies or anything so we just spent an evening recording this song, which was called Dracula. It's a very interesting piece of fun really! I thought it might be interesting for people to hear just what the singer's very very first efforts in the studio might be like. Not because I think it's absolutely wonderful or anything but because some of the flaws in it are nice to listen to because it gives other people a chance to listen to their first efforts and go "Cor, blimey! Mine was better than that!" but it's an interesting little thing. I thought people might like it. I was quite surprised, apart from the fact that the cassette promptly disintegrated as soon as we tried to play it and I had to put it back together with sticky tape and screwdrivers, which was a bit of a moment, but's it's actually held up rather well in the mastering process. And, as an aside, the band that played on that, or the bass player and drummer that played on that, we subsequently put a band together. That band became Shots and that was the band I was playing in when Paul Samson came to see me and gave me the job in Samson and so on and so forth as per the biography which you've probably all obtained now from years ago!"
Bye!