The Last Music Podcast
The Last Music Podcast
In Their Own Words: The Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers Story
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Here’s Malcolm Mills with another podcast from The Last Music Company. This one is a stumble down memory lane to London in the early 1970s. It’s the story of those pub-rock pilgrims Chilli Willi and the Red-Hot Peppers and how they emerged from the remains of Mighty Baby after the first Glastonbury Fayre in 1971.
Fifty years after the actual event, we start with a telephone interview Malcolm did with John Coleman who was the co-founder of Revelation Enterprises. This is a vital piece of oral history which finally dispels many of the legends on the subject because Revelation was the label that released the fantastic triple LP set of that festival. The reason the interview is included here is because Revelation followed up the Glastonbury Fayre release with Kings of the Robot Rhythm - the debut album from Chilli Willi and the Red-Hot Peppers, which he also co-produced.
John’s is a genuinely marvellous tale of those times recalled here in great detail. His company defied all the laws of economic gravity to release a couple of records that are of museum-piece quality because of the “no-expense-spared” design of the packaging by Barney Bubbles. Coleman had taken over the responsibility for the performing schedule from Jeff Dexter and was stage manager for that first Fayre putting him at the heart of the event. So this is absolutely essential listening for Glastonbury historians and all music fans…straight from the horse’s mouth!
The next telephone interview you’ll hear after John Coleman is with a guy named Colin Hansford. Chilli Willi was formed very soon after that first Glastonbury when Phil Lithman hooked up again with Martin Stone after returning from San Francisco. Lithman had been in The Residents while he was out there, which is where he earned the nickname of “Snakefinger.” Martin and Phil had originally known each other in various bands where they were close neighbours in the south London blues delta of the early 1960s. That period before Phil went to America and Martin joined Savoy Brown Blues Band is recounted by former bandmate Colin from when they were all in groups like Smiley, Junior’s Blues and Junko Partners.
Stay tuned after that--and for the first and probably only time--you’ll cop the story of the group from three band members in the 2021 zoom interview Malcolm did with them.
Pete Thomas, Paul Riley and Paul Bailey spin a yarn or two about the cast of characters caught up in the vortex of their admirable enterprise and put the story straight (at great length) of how the group transitioned from acoustic duo to a five-piece touring band. They also explain how they had to make a couple of different attempts to produce the material that wound up on Bongos Over Balham.
If a band like the Willis existed today, they would almost certainly be a success, but back then things were different for these guys as you’ll be hearing.
In the space of a couple of years despite playing over four hundred gigs, appearing on radio and TV and releasing two albums, it was all over by 1975.
Some of the sound quality of the interviews isn’t great because nobody was ever in the same room and there was a variety of microphones and telephones used. Nevertheless…it’s an illuminating trip.
The anthology of Chilli Willi and t he Red Hot Peppers recordings - REAL SHARP - released by The Last Music Company is a two CD set with a twenty-four page booklet that’s filled with great photos and images plus Barney Bubbles’ artwork. It covers the recordings the band made for Kings of the Robot Rhythm and Bongos Over Balham plus a few live tracks. The whole set is still available from the usual retailers and if you just want to hear the music all the tracks available digitally.
Brought to you by The Last Music Company, an old school haven for fine music in this mad world.
Come visit us at https://www.lastmusic.co.uk to see what we're up to.
Introduction
SPEAKER_05Hello, I'm Malcolm Miller with another podcast from the Large Music Company. This one is a stumbled down memory lane to London in the early 1970s. It's the story of those pub rock pilgrims, Chili Willy and the Red Hot Peppers, and how they emerged from the remains of Mighty Baby after the first Glastonbury Fair in 1971. Fifty years after the actual event, we start with a telephone interview I did with John Coleman, who was the co-founder of Revelation Enterprises. Now, this is a vital piece of oral history which finally dispels many of the legends on the subject because Revelation was the label that released the fantastic triple L P set of that festival. The reason the interview is here is because Revelation followed up the Glastonbury Fair release with Kings of the Robot Rhythm, the debut album from Chili Willy and the Red Hot Peppers, which he also produced. John's is a genuinely marvellous tale of those times, and it's recalled here in great detail. His company defied all the laws of economic gravity to release a couple of records that are of museum piece quality because of the no expense spared design of the packaging by Barney Bubbles. So this is absolutely essential listening for Glastonbury historians and music fans straight from the horse's mouth. The next interview you'll hear after John Coleman is a guy named Colin Hansford. Chili Willie was formed very soon after that first Glastonbury, when Phil Lithman hooked up again with Martin Stone after he returned from San Francisco. Lithman had been in the residence while he was out there, which is where he earned the nickname of Snake Finger. Martin and Phil had originally known each other in various bands where they were close neighbours in the South London Blues Delta of the early 1960s. That period before Phil went to America and Martin joined the Boy Brown Blues Band is recounted by former bandmate Colin from when they were all in groups like Smiley, Junior's Blues, and Junko Partners. Stay tuned after that, for the first and probably only time you'll cut the story of the group from three band members. Pete Thomas, Paul Riley, and Paul Bailey spin a yarn or two about the cast of characters caught up in the vortex of their admirable enterprise and put the story straight at great lengths of how the group transitioned from an acoustic duo into a five-piece touring band. They also explain how they had to make a couple of different attempts to produce the material that wound up on Bongers over Ballum. If a band like Chili Willy and the Red Hot Peppers existed today, they would have almost certainly been an instant success. But back then things were different for these guys, as you'll be hearing. In the space of a couple of hectic years, despite playing over 400 gigs, appearing on radio and TV and releasing two albums, it was all over for them by 1975. Just before we start, I should explain that the reason for the podcast is to draw your attention to the anthology of Chili Willy and the Red Ot Peppers recordings that I released on The Last Music Company. Real Sharp is a two CD set with a 24-page booklet that's filled with great photos and images, plus Barney Bowles artwork. It covers the recordings that the band made for Kings of the Robot Rhythm and Bongos Over Ballum, plus a few live tracks. The whole set's still available from the usual retailers, and if you just want to hear the music, all the tracks are available digitally, of course. Some of the sound quality on these next interviews isn't great because it was just post-lockdown and nobody was ever in the same room, and there was a variety of microphones and telephones being used. Nevertheless, it's an illuminating trip, so sit tight, off we
Interview with John Coleman of Revelation Enterpises and Glastonbury Fayre, and Friendz
SPEAKER_05go. So here we are in post-lockdown England in November 2021. In the background, you've been hearing Living Out of My Suitcase from that first Chili Willy album. If it hadn't been for the efforts of this next man, there may never have been a Chili Willy and the Red Hot Peppers. It's a remarkable yarn that you're about to hear from the man himself. So please excuse the sound quality of the phone call and welcome John Coleman. Good morning. Yeah, John, so this podcast is about Chili Willy, of course. But please let's take this golden opportunity to give our listeners a chance to hear from you about the record label that bore the rich fruit that was Kings of the Robot Rhythm. Let me start by asking you why was Revelation formed?
SPEAKER_00Well, I organised a performing schedule for the 71 Free Festival because Jeff Dexter bowed out and rang me up at Friends Magazine and said, could I take over? Um and I took over his list of potential artists, which basically consisted of the Who, Pink Floyd, and Soft Machine, I think, none of whom in the event wanted to do it. Uh Pink Floyd wanted £15,000 for a sound check, etc. It was that kind of deal. So I did the performing schedule, chaotically stage managed it. Being a mild-mannered hippie, I wasn't cut out for a stage manager's job. Um, and then afterwards, after I'd recovered, um Hugh Nolan and Barry Everett, who were essentially Radio Geronimo, um, had been down there with their Revox and recorded quite a lot of the stuff that was going on on the stage and elsewhere. And we got together just uh somehow informally, and uh because we knew that the fair had lost a lot of money because it was free and it was bound to lose money, we thought we might try and produce a record to make some money to pay off some of the debts, and that's how it started. Um, and it kind of grew like Topsy from there.
SPEAKER_05Oh, right, okay. So interestingly, you mentioned uh Barry Everett's involvement and Radio Geronimo. Just briefly, again for the benefit of our listeners, do you want to just tell us what Radio Geronimo was?
SPEAKER_00Um it was based in um uh um from an old uh Second World War transmitter in oh, I think it was Monte Carlo or somewhere like that. And uh Ronan O'Reilly and Tony Secunda, um who were kind of hot shot businessmen in uh the music area in those days, had funded a relocation of their previous Radio Geronimo, and they were now transmitting across Europe um until it got life got difficult, and they were in a state of hiatus from that. Um, and it was it was a it was an off-the-wall music radio station like the pirate radios, except Hugh Nolan and Barry Everett's tastes were much more eclectic than the pirate stations, and they'd play anything from um Pharaoh Saunders to Miles Davis to Captain Beefheart. You never knew what you were going to get. But that was one of the one of the things that made it so wonderful. Um, anyway, they'd been down at the festival with their Revox and they'd recorded quite a lot of stuff, some of which was um good enough, with their trusty engineer John Lundston, who sat underneath the stage for basically four days in all kinds of weather, pressing record when he thought it was apt. And so they had they had all these tapes. I had not much to do at that point, and so we decided we set up a record company and try and make some money to pay off the debts of the fair, and that's how that's how it started. Um great, okay.
SPEAKER_05Well, we'll come on to some of the other stuff about that later. I was just interested in how it got formed. So you were at the time you were involved with Friends Magazine, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I was still just at that point, just writing for Friends Magazine. This was just before it turned from Friends, which started off as Friends of Rolling Stone, until Jan Venner threatened to sue us for using the name Rolling Stone. Because we we started off as the English office of Rolling Stone until we all got the fact because we weren't professional enough for our American our American counterparts, which is quite true. It's I I don't blame him. Um, and we started off calling ourselves Friends of Rolling Stone, and then he practically said we became friends, and then after that, um we were friends with an S for a couple of years, and then the young anarchists started to take over the magazine and turn it into Friends with the Zed, and they didn't really want an old hippie like me writing about music for a so I was I was gently given the boot with great sensitivity. I'm not complaining again, they were lovely. Um, and so I was just about on the point of packing up Friends with a Zed when uh Jeff Dexter rang me up and said he'd got this uh offer of putting together a performing schedule for a festival in Somerset. And did I want to take over? Because he said at the time he was too busy, but I think basically, bless his heart, it was it turned into a mammoth task. If you can imagine trying to fill four days essentially with people that you're trying to put a performing schedule around, and they're playing for nothing, not even expenses. And you know, it was just it was a it was pretty much a nightmare for about three months of my life trying to put that bill together. But I managed it in the end, and it chaotically seemed to work. Um, so that's that's how I got involved, and I was just stopping being a music writer by friends at the time, anyway.
SPEAKER_05Well, so did you know Barry uh before when you were with friends, or was it just as a result of the Glastonbury?
SPEAKER_00No, just as a result of Glastonbury. He turned up on my doorstep, he turned up on my doorstep at Queensgate Terrace um uh with uh a cassette tape. Uh, it might have been the first meeting. He turned up with uh uh what turned out to be a uh uh a crucial cassette tape of uh Mighty Baby uh on a little stage, not on the main pyramid stage, on a little stage up the hillside that he and Hugh had recorded in the early hours of the Tuesday Wednesday morning of Mighty Baby playing their version of I think John Coltrane's India. And they they called it a blanket in my moosly, and and uh it was so gorgeous. There was a lot of other stuff on that wasn't gorgeous, but that particular section of of uh of um them playing that that track was just uh just magic. And uh that was kind of the beginning of well, we should get let's start going through all the tapes, and there were a lot, there were about oh, 60 or 70 hours of of quarter-inch tape, right? And that takes some getting through. Um and we spent days and days sitting with uh Q, Barry, and I and John Lunston, the engineer, just listening to quite a lot of unusable, unusable stuff, but some that just leapt leapt out of the leapt out of the speakers and said this needs using. And so that that started the the process. And uh and from that from that point on, when the a lot of the artists said no, that's not good enough, or their management said it's not good enough. The quality was pretty ropey at times. Yeah, and at that point we decided we'd start asking them to give us a piece of music instead of the live stuff, and that's where um a number of contributions started coming in, and then we started approaching other people that hadn't been there, like The Grateful Dead and Pete Townsend. Um, and they some cases mostly willingly and happily and in the most friendly fashion gave us a contribution that we could put together into a what started off as a two-album, two album set, but finished up as a three-album set.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So coming back to the formation of Revelation, other than Barry, who else was involved along the way, John?
SPEAKER_00Oh well, Hugh Nolan was was his his his partner in Geronimo and was around at the beginning when we first formed the company and named it Revelation Enterprises. Um, um, but then he kind of lost his impetus a bit or gained a bit of impetus to go over to Kabul uh uh in Afghanistan on the hippie trail uh with some friends of his and disappeared for uh several months. Uh and then he returned and had to go immediately to the hospital for tropical diseases in Newcross, I believe, uh, because he got hepatitis. So he was out of action for another another um couple of months there. Um and he appeared occasionally and joined us in some of our hilarity, and uh, but mostly he's described on the information sheet for the album set as absent Q, um, which we thought was at least he got a credit, even though he was absent. Um, and then there was um uh Jane, Jane Clout, who was who put some money in, uh, bless her heart. She had a little bit of money, and she was a friend of a friend of a friend and would have been around us while we were thinking about forming the record company. And she put £3,000 or thereabouts into our coffers so that we could carry on doing what we were doing, because we didn't have any money at all at that time. Um, so she basically helped us form the whole thing. 3,000 quid was not big, but quite a large amount of money in 1971. And um it helped us start the wheels in motion. Um then there was um uh Gordon Armsby, bless his heart, who was the distribution coordinator, um, who ferried albums around London in his little big tiny fiat multiplier um and uh organized the Rev Reps, as they were called, in their GPO vans. I think we had three of them at one point, um, who were traveling around the country and just working on commission flogging albums. Um, they didn't make a very good living, I have to say, but they did what they could. Um I mentioned Pat Pat Davis, who who who ran virtually ran the office for us, did all the things like mail order. We did a lot of a lot, we did a few hundred mail order shots from magazines where the Barney's ads were in International Times and Oz and Friends and various others. Um she dealt with mail order along with my partner at the time, Evie, and ran the office and made sure we got a bit of money in the bank when we needed it. And um that's the that's kind of the and of course the other people that unspokenly contributed were the photographers like Paul Miso, whose photograph we used as the Barney used as the album cover, um uh The Pyramid at Night. And um Ron Reed, who's a mad Australian photographer, whose pictures we used in the package as well, they contributed in that the fact that they gave us their their wonderful pictures for nothing. Um uh but really the the core of us was was quite was quite was quite a small bunch.
SPEAKER_05So without any previous experience, how did you cope with the MCPS? I'm just curious to uh know what they made of you and your revelation enterprises.
SPEAKER_00Mildly curious and entertained, I think. There's a man called Brian Blaine, who was their Southeastern district manager, and that they'd been somehow they got they got wind of via Virgin, I think, who when our first copy started to go out, um, that we existed, and uh he rang up and then came around to visit and uh pointed out that it's it wasn't actually proper of us to have instead of putting the legal um uh restrictions around the edge of the record label in the middle of the Glastonbury album, we'd put uh uh the beginning of Desiderata, which is that go placidly amid the noise and haste, etc., that was very popular at the time, has since become a bit of a cliche, but it was a bit, it was newly around then. And uh he said that you can't really do that. And so, but we said, Well, we've done it now. So uh he kind of mildly castigated us for that, and then um told us how much we would need to contribute to the MCPS for each retail selling price, which I think was something like three and three and three-quarter percent of the retail selling price, some bizarre figure like that. Um, and we of course did it. Um, we didn't have any choice. And then, of course, um when we produced Kings of the Robot rhythm, uh Barney and I decided to finish off the legal, do not copy this, etc., etc., with the line, otherwise we'll be after you with a big stick. And uh he came to see us again and said, Look, um, you've got to, you it's it's a legal, it's a legal requirement to put the correct wording around the record label. Um, and we said, Oh, sorry, but we've done it now. And um nobody seemed to notice apart from the MCPS um uh until this day, really. But uh that's that was uh the extent of our dealings with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, and they were all um um very cordial and and polite, even though we were being naughty boys, really. I noticed, by the way, Malcolm, from the root packaging that I recently found, that we were describing ourselves as an as an anti-record company.
SPEAKER_05Well, you mentioned Barney Bubbles there, and of course, his unique art graced all of your projects. So, where did you meet him and what was his involvement?
SPEAKER_00Oh in the early days of Friends magazine, Friends with an S, um, we were at 305 Portobello Road after being chucked out of our posh offices in Hanover Square by Jan Venner, the editor of American Rolling Stone. Because we started off as the English Rolling Stone, but we didn't last very long because they decided that we were a bunch of unprofessional hippies. I was very small, I wasn't really a part of the, I was just reviewing the odd album at that point. Um, but we got thrown out of the offices in Hanover Square and found this place in Portobello Road, 305, uh, which is the center of the magazine for a few years. Um and Barney had a little design company called Teenberger, who were working from 305, 307 underneath us. And when at one point the magazine needed laying out, and in those days, magazines had to be laid out by you had to get everything typeset, and then you had to cut it up and stick it down on boards and do your own paragraphs and pictures and then send it off to the printers, it was a different matter than today, which is you do it all on the computer in five minutes, then it involved several days' work. And Barney started laying out the magazine, which is where I met him, and um we were friends, and uh that's how that's how I first met him. And when when we were doing the the beginnings of revelation, I just rang him up and said, Do you fancy helping us uh design this package? And he he was mad keen, he jumped at the chance, and uh that that's um that's really that's really where his involvement started. Uh the only time I remember Barney asking for an album was when the Victoria and Albert Museum rang him up and said, Could they have a copy of the album set? This is after it had been on sale for several months, for their archives as the as their 20th century um design icons. And Barney rang us up very excited, and we were all terribly pleased and sent them an album set and uh figured it went into their archives. But about 45 years later, when Bill Harkin and Paul Miso and I went to a meeting at the VA about the album set and about uh various other things, we said, Oh, well, we I said, Well, we sent a copy for your archives back in 1972, and they sent off a runner to go to their archive. And of course, no sign of it could be found. They didn't have one there. So either someone took the main chance. Who was working at the VA and thought I'll get myself a free copy of the album, or somebody had nicked it in the meantime, but it certainly wasn't there. Um, but then uh about five, six years ago, they did a fairly major exhibition at the VA called, I believe, with a little help from my friends, about milestones in 60s and 70s media. And uh the the one of the exhibits, uh one of the cases at the end had the Glastonbury album cover in it with a dome, how to construct your own dome leaflet that I put together myself, um sticking out of the top of it um as being a fairly important thing in the milestones of 60s and 70s media. So we I was rather pleased about that, but not terribly pleased about the way they exhibited it. But uh that's another story. At least it was there. It reminds me of also we at the time of probably late 73, we were we were planning what we were called calling a nationwide tour, rather grandly, um called the root, um, which we decided was uh uh an ancient medieval pastime in rural England of celebrating uh spring and music and general misbehaviour.
SPEAKER_05And that's R-O-O-T, right?
SPEAKER_00The root, yes, R-O-O-T, not not as in the root, but it was a play on words. Uh and Barney produced uh uh quite a wonderful package of of um stuff that we'd we decided we would send out to about it must have been 150, 200 um agencies, social secretaries, promoters around the country, which included uh a cassette tape with um Chili Willy and the Global Village Trucking Company, who were a band we were closely involved with, and Steve Miller and Lol Coxill. Low Coxhill, by the way, was the inspiration for Joni Mitchell's famous song for free, because she was in a taxi in the West End going through Leicester Square on a visit to London, and she encountered Lol Coxhill blowing his heart out, busking, and um she wrote the song for free about about that experience. And for years afterwards, Lol, Lowell's comments about um the track were pretty much unrepeatable, but mostly involved why didn't I get any royalties? It would help me eat, he used to say. Um, but anyway, that's Lol Coxhill and Steve Miller were on it as well. And uh there was two tracks by the Global Village Trucking Company and two tracks by Chili Willy on the cassette, and a package that said you know you can pay, we need about £250 a night to break even. Um, and the order of the bands playing will change, and it may include, I think it was Bees Make Honey or Ace or even Brindley Schwartz as well that would come along. And um as I said, they could pay as much as they could afford if as long as they made it enough for us to do it. And there was a little answering card in the in the package as well that they could send back to us saying yes, they were interested, and give us a phone number and we can discuss the details. And then once the package was all ready to go out, um the Global Village Trucking Company discovered the introductory page on it that's that had a Robert Crumb cartoon on it that Barney had nicked basically of a couple engaged in a carnal act rather graphically, the way Robert Crumb tended to do. And the gold with his company were a a community of of uh musicians and wives and children, and there were a large community of people, and a lot of them objected to the cartoon. Having disinterred it fairly recently, I can't say I really blame her, but it was fairly risque to say the least. Um, but it meant that the whole package was then thrown into disarray. We couldn't, we couldn't send it out with that card missing altogether because it was an introduction to the whole thing, the tour and the mythology, card mythology surrounding the roots. Um, so we had to put the whole thing on hold for a while, and it stayed on hold because we couldn't really afford to reproduce the whole package again. Once again, Barney's wonderful packaging, but it wasn't cheap. Um, and it was on card and uh everything, everything went haywire from that point on. We were running out of money, and um uh it it it it didn't get back on the road. Um, and um so we had to work, we had to work but basically blind. Um, but we learned pretty we learned pretty fast. And uh as as soon as as soon as we were able to, we went from talking to a a little tiny pressing plant in New Cross called British Homophone that uh was run by a mad couple of guys called Lesser and Tasha, uh, to realizing that they didn't have the facilities to produce initial uh run of 10,000, which is what we wanted to do. That's so that's 30,000 albums. Um uh they didn't have the capacity to do it. Interestingly enough, British homophone, when we found them somewhere in what was the Yellow Pages, probably in those days, was a place where my grandmother used to work in the 1950s. Um I used to get free top rank records when I was a little very young boy via my grandmother from British Homophone. Anyway, that's that's just a by the way. So Lester and Tasha weren't up for the job, so we went to some company in Haynes in Middlesex, who were the main album producers at the time, whose name I can't remember.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I know that's yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, they they finished up taking it on, and we learned again that you could only use a certain type of ink on your labels, otherwise they didn't stick to the vinyl, and that was a hard lesson to learn. So the first the first pressing run that they did, test pressing run, we had to stop and reprint all of the middle labels because the Barney had specified the wrong kind of ink. Um, and uh little lessons like that were learned fairly quickly. Um and by that time we had the package. And Barney, Barney just, of course, was so full of enthusiasm and uh and and energy for the project the project that that it turned, yeah, like topsy. It just grew and grew and grew until we had this fairly major package with a cutout pyramid, a cutout dome, a booklet, um, an information sheet, a fold-out cover, and three albums. And uh initially our selling price had been set at $3.99 when we were going to do two albums, but when we decided we were gonna do three, nobody nobody bothered to put the price up. So we weren't making a lot of money, Malcolm Matt.
SPEAKER_05I mean, the thing that uh really astonishes me about that record. I mean, I know I started my own record label and put put some stuff out in the 70s, and I know what you mean about how difficult it was learning on the job, but I mean that was 1971, 72, whatever it was. It's an incredible feat to manufacture a three LP set with special packaging. I mean, even the major record companies weren't undertaking anything like that in those days because of the cost department, anything else. So, I mean, it just defies all the economic logic to let Barney Bubbles have control of how things were going to be done.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, but we didn't know any better, you see, and uh and and because we because apart from the negative cost of vinyl pressing and printing, and and the negative cost of the actual paper, we did everything ourselves, everything completely. We took delivery to our assembly. Yeah, we'd moved from my flat in Queensgate Terrace, then up to our office in Camden Town, opposite Compendium Books on Camden High Street. Um, and we were we just took delivery and in this tiny little room, set up trestle tables around the room, brought in our uh girlfriends, friends, wives, um, cats and dogs, and we all stood in a line. There is a photograph somewhere, and we start we had a system, a very rigid system of of cover album one, album two, album three, booklet, cut out pyramid, cut out dome, fold, fold, fold, sleeve, um, then heat heat sealing, and then uh the end of the line would be another box where they went into the box. And we did our first 10,000 copies just like that. It took us um, it took us a couple of weeks. But by that point, as soon as we got a box, we went off and were selling the box.
SPEAKER_02Oh, right, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So we were funding ourselves as we went, um, not terribly well, but that's what we were doing.
SPEAKER_05That's the bit I couldn't quite understand because uh yeah, by the time I got doing it, you know, you had a distributor, and the distributor paid you a couple of months down the line after they'd been paid all the rest of it. But I mean, for you to do it straight from the farm, straight you know, straight straight to the virgin.
SPEAKER_00Richard Branson helped us out. He bought he bought um a couple of hundred and then another couple of hundred. Um uh so Richard Branson and Nick Powell were quite helpful in the beginning because they knew that we needed the money and they paid us straight away. And there was an American distributor, uh um uh Marty Bell, or I think his name was. They they bought a few hundred from us. So over the over the course of the first month, we basically survived on selling the records as we pack as we packaged them. As they left the door, they were they were delivered either to someone that had already bought them or to one of our rev reps in his GPO van who shot off up to Hartleypool or Liverpool or uh Manchester and flogged them to a record shop um straight out the back of the van and uh took his percentage and bought the rest of the money back to us. So we were very much uh hand to mouth in those days. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Brilliant. Well, I mean, it certainly looks like the the whole enterprise had plenty of moral support. Um, so uh you you you said that uh you were unable to use a lot of the live recordings because of quality and uh sort of legal issues, one thing or another. But as a matter of interest, um there's quite a rich cast of characters on the the album itself. So, how did you go about dealing with the the legals on that with artists like The Grateful Dead and I just don't change the old powers act?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, sort of, but once I got a permission, as it were, um everyone was different, Malcolm, every single one. Um Pete Townsend just said Hugh Nolan had met him somewhere and mentioned what we were doing, and he just liked the sound of it. And so I sent him a letter saying, Have you got anything? And he said, Yeah, I've got a track you can have. I went out to Eelpie Island and he opened his front door and stuck his arm out with a box on the end of his arm and then shut the door. Um, but but then I was going out the front gate, he opened the door and waved at me and smiled. So it was a kind of joke. Um David Bowie, I asked David, his management we didn't want his live stuff used. We had a good good live tape of David. Um uh and uh he is his new management main man, which was Tony De Vries, would they were just turning him into Ziggy Star, he was turning himself into Ziggy Stardust, so they didn't want that used. So I went tried studios um while they were recording uh The Man Who Sold the World, I think. Um and they just did the live version of Superman just there while I was sitting in the room with my girlfriend watching them do it. Um, and then they mixed it the next day, and somebody dropped the tape off at uh at my flat the next the day after that. Uh The Grateful Dead took a bit of wrangling, but we we already had contacts with Alan Trist, the man who published their music. Um he went to school with Andrew Carr, who organized the the 71 festival, and so we had an inn with Alan and in San Francisco and Rod Scully, their manager, and they were overdoing Wembley in 72, and they recorded one version of Dark Star, and Jerry Garcia mixed it at Trident, and I went down there and picked the tape up off him, and he wrote Dark Starberry on the box for me. Um, and uh we went away with that. Everyone was different. Um, and uh in order to get the rights to do it, I just I had a form letter that I produced saying that they'd given the music freely for a charity organization, da-da-da-da-da, and they didn't want publishing. Um, and their music was given freely, and that it would be returned to them after we'd used it for the purpose of the album. And in most every case, we did return the tapes to them afterwards, which was a bit of a shame, really.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's the right thing to do, isn't it? That's the thing. I say you build trust with people for other stuff, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, so like I said, everyone was different, so uh there was no hard and fast rule. It was difficult dealing with EMI for the Edgar Broughton band, and a few of the others were a bit of a pain, but mostly everyone just thought we were all mad anyway, so we were kind of harmless, and they would they would just let us get on with it.
SPEAKER_05Great. So my wife Miriam uh went to that first class of 1971, and she had a record shop at the time. So when the album was released, she did buy a few copies, hoping that it was important.
SPEAKER_00I remember quite a lot of the record the record shops that bought from us in the first place. So I probably I probably uh wrote her out invoices and stuff like that myself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, she was uh down in in Stretham, Norbury on the on the border there. Um but the thing is, you know, she she always said that she loved having it in the shop, but it didn't really sell very well, unfortunately. Because it was people didn't really know what it was. I think it was uh, and because it was independent as well, it just looked a bit odd, didn't it? So did did it generally fall short of expectations or what? I mean, is that a silly question?
SPEAKER_00No, no, well, no, we could we we couldn't keep up, really. Really? Yeah, we sold 10,000 of the first run, so and then we had another 10,000 done. So we sold 20,000 of that album, um, which a lot of people don't believe that we did. Yeah, 20,000. That's that's um 60,000 separate chunks of vinyl.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, that's that. I mean, for those days, that was quite uh quite a thing to have achieved from the standing start with no experience.
SPEAKER_00Uh absolutely yes. The big game, of course, Malcolm, is that is that we didn't charge enough money for the damn thing. You know, if we charged twice as much, we still have sold them, um, and we might have actually made some money out of it instead of which we kind of struggled by and we still had a bit of money in the bank, but we still owed Janie Clout 3,000 quid, and we gave um Andrew Carr a thousand pounds to pay off a couple of the debts of the fair, which was a lot of money in those days. Um, and he was very grateful for it. Um, and we still had a bit of money in the bank, and that's kind of when we were starting to look around for other things to do, and um we remembered that piece of uh magical music by Mighty Baby that uh we still had the cassette of and that that that we'd put on, which we'd put on the um on the album um as a blanket in my mooseli, that's what it was called. And uh and Martin turned up at the flat one day with um with his friend Phil Lithman. Um and that was the beginning of our association with the band you know as Chili Willy. Excellent.
SPEAKER_05Well, that's a perfect place to move on to that then, because that was what I was going to ask you next. So Revelation is up and running or up and uh and and doing stuff. So your your first encounter with Martin and Phil after Glass Temporary is where they came around knocking with a new project. So as a matter of interest, um do you know how they started Chile, Willie? What did they what do you recall about them telling you about that between Mighty Baby and that event?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Uh Phil was living in Streatham, I think, with his parents. Um Martin was either sleeping on someone's couch or he stayed at my place at Queensgate Terrace for uh a few months with his girlfriend Francis. Um and I don't I don't I honestly don't know how the two of them got together. Um, I know that Phil had been in San Francisco and had worked with a band called The Residence for a while, and that he had this he had this uh dream about a uh a kind of COD, funny country and western band, and he had Chili Willy in his mind, and he'd met Martin somewhere and discovered that Martin was the most magical guitarist. Um, and the two of them had got together and they'd written, or Phil had written. Um, I think the the way it went was that Phil wrote the song, and Martin will come up with the odd riff here and there. And uh then they they came around and they played us just a couple of songs that they'd done, and um we thought they sounded pretty good. And uh I really admired Martin's guitar playing. I I there was something about that that style of guitar playing that reminded me of a man called Amos Garrett, who played with Maria Melbourne and various other people, and I loved that kind of guitar playing, and um so we were already kind of inclined towards doing something with them. We didn't know what. We were doing something with Steve Miller and Lol Coxill. That's Steve Miller, the English piano player, yeah. Lol Coxill, the multi-instrumentalist saxophone player. We were doing sorry, he was a busker, wasn't he? For years, I think. Yeah, busker, busker and character, extraordinary character. Um uh, and we were doing something with them that they were doing a kind of uh uh extemporaneous um live thing that we were putting on vinyl. We've we we got as far as test pressing that, and then we started working with um um uh Phil and Martin as Chili Willy, and we had another album that we were helping distributed distributing called Maghreb Marrakesh, produced by a man called Ian Adam and his wife Juliet, which was recorded live at a festival in Morocco. Um, so we were beginning to get a kind of roster together of the kind of stuff we wanted to do, which again was like Radio Geronimo, a complete mishmash of rather mind-bogglingly elect eclectic stuff that that you could never really hang a label. And that's the way we wanted to be. That's exactly what we wanted to do. And so Chile really fitted in there. And um uh Martin uh already had what he needed, he had a mandolin and his own guitar, but Phil had a battered old guitar, so we bought him a custom-built guitar from a place in Covent Garden, I recall. Um, and they began to take it quite seriously, and so we looked around for somewhere to start recording because Phil had got by then got about 15 or 20 songs, and um they were beginning to sound like the beginnings of a band.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, it certainly seemed you know, from what I know about it, I do I do record, I do know how Martin and Phil had known each other a lot earlier and been in bands together around South London Blues bands before Phil went away.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, quite having together again is than I do, Malcolm.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, I think that's that's Part of the other podcast that we've got coming up with the other guys. They we've filled in quite a few gaps, uh, pre-Mighty Baby or the rest of it, because um, uh, but anyway, so let's just come back to the recording. So they were really an acoustic duo working out stuff between them, and by the time you decided to record it, they sort of turned themselves into a bit of a uh more of a contemporary band with other instrumentalists in there to fill it out a bit. Um and so was it their idea to add the extra musicians, or was that something that you all thought they would benefit from?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh, first of all, we need we we we decided that we that we'd record them. And above us, above our office in Camberton Town, there was a a wonderful madman called David Vorhouse. Oh, yeah. Who um who was one of the British radiophonic workshop along with Delia Derbyshire, the but the woman that did the Doctor Who theme. Yeah, and uh he had a little studio that he used for making demos and doing his radiophonic stuff. Yeah, he was an eccentric young man. Um he had a large collection of dildos, I seem to remember, that for nobody ever could try. Um that he would that he would uh flourish and exhibit for everyone to see um when you went up there. He was a lovely guy, but for uh a little strange. And anyway, he had a studio about the size of a wardrobe, and we decided that because we got um just the two of them that we could start off doing some demos in there, and doing the demos turned into doing the whole album. And as we as it went along it again, it grew. We got um uh uh Brindle Schwartz uh were kind of friends and associates, and Billy Rankin somehow got his drum kit up the stairs in into the wardrobe, and Joanne Kelly came along to do a backing vocal, and it it it it just slowly grew until um you couldn't move in that studio. The the whole thing turned from being a couple of demos into doing the whole album. And I have to say that David Vorhouse didn't know anything about uh uh the quality of vocals, really, and nor did we, to tell you the truth. We were learning on our feet again, and uh so Barry and I were titular producers, but we didn't really know what we were doing either. The only people that knew what they were doing were the musicians, Martin and Phil, and and the rest of them. We were just busking it, and uh, I I suspect it it it shows shows in the quality of what we produced, but there was a certain energy about it all that just seemed right at the time, and and we loved doing it, and uh uh it it could it could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse too.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, I'm a great believer in yeah capturing recordings uh and stuff, regardless of the sound quality, it's the performance and the energy that is is what you're after, you know. I mean, you listen to those early Robert Johnson recordings, and the and the technique is awful, but what you're listening to is prices, isn't it? And I think you know, just to a large extent, what you managed to get with that chili willy recording, if you hadn't done it, it wouldn't exist. End of story, you know. I mean, it's not like it is these days, you know, cramming all those people into the room. So, how many people were there? What was that? The band was uh Martin and Phil. I know Joanne Kelly and Carol Grimes are on it. Who was in it about Brindley Schwartz?
SPEAKER_00I'm not sure whether Nick came and played bass or not. I can't remember. Somebody played bass on it, and it certainly wasn't Paul because we hadn't we hadn't struck up with Paul Bassman yet. Um, so uh it might have been Nick Lowe, but I couldn't be sure. Um and I doubt that it was Nick Lowe because Nick probably would have made the production values a lot higher than they were if he'd got uh so I doubt that it was Nick Lowe, but someone played bass.
SPEAKER_05I'm just gonna have a while you're talking, I'm gonna have a look on the record and see if you're gonna get anything.
SPEAKER_00See what it says, yeah. Um I could do the same if I unpacked my um my my store of historical memorabilia.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, I I mean I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, it is. I've got it right here, hang on, I'll tell you. I've still got my record stacked up beside me here, so let's have a quick butchers. Chili and the Willy. So Chili Willy was uh Martin of Phil, as we know, and the red hot peppers were Bob Andrews piano, Nick Lowe bass and vocals, Willie Rankin drums, English John Fox bass as well, Barry and Moroccan hand drums. Dave Vaugus was uh on ragtime VC, and uh and Joanne Kelly was on it as well. So, yeah, Nick was on it, and Billy Rankin and Bob Andrews.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think Nick John Fox was probably on it. He was a friend of uh girlfriend of a boyfriend of uh Arabella Churchill's, who was one of the people that got involved in the 71 festival. John Fox was a boyfriend who also played bass. I think he was around for more of the bass playing than Nick Lowe was, but I couldn't sure because I don't I can't see I can't picture Nick in and I got to know Nick quite well subsequently, and I can't picture him in the studio at that time, which is a bit strange, but there you go. Um but then he, if we put he was there, he was there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I was just fascinated to see how many people were crammed into that room because it sounds like it was just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00Even three of us in this in the control room was was pretty sweaty. Yeah, and and the but the I promise you the studio wasn't that much bigger than a wardrobe. How Billy Rankin got his drums in there, I simply don't know because you had to go up virtually a spiral staircase in order to get up to it. It was um it was very small, anyway. Um, that's reflected in the quality of the um the production, really.
SPEAKER_05So um having set the bar very high with the packaging of the Glastonbury Fair album, it was another example of Barney Bubbles having free reign with the art direction and his seemingly scant regard to production costs. As an independent label, what sort of problems did you encounter getting this lot printed after the Glastonbury Fair one? None at all, not at all.
SPEAKER_00But we just uh yeah, we uh he Barney already had the he'd already done quite a lot of uh uh album sleeve work for other people. Um he'd done Brindley Schwartz's first album for fame pushers, which was Edward Moulton and Dave Robinson, and uh he'd done a few other projects as well, uh High Tide, and I can't remember, but he'd done a few and he had contacts already with the the uh printers and the the paper suppliers and all the rest of it. And he just came up with uh an idea for first of all the outer cover, which we loved, um, and then um the inner sleeve with the the lyrics, etc. And then, of course, there had to be an insert of some kind, and uh it wasn't enough unless you had another thing in there, and so he came up with this another cutout and colour me in, and uh we just said yes to it all. And uh the I to in all honesty, Malcolm, I simply do not remember the cost of the packaging, but I suspect that it was fairly high in relation to the uh uh the um the vinyl costs, etc.
SPEAKER_05If you compare it with other major company record releases at the time, yeah, the quality of the cardboard on the sleeve, the detail on the stuff that went inside and everything is uh you know, they're they're expensive things to try and achieve. And uh I still marvel at it today, how different it was.
SPEAKER_00Um I do agree with you. Um, and if you gave Barney the free, I'd worked on several things that we didn't finish with Barney as well over the years. And and uh uh when he was on form, he was uh uh he was a stone cold genius. Um there's there was no one better for detail, for fun, uh for imagination, for eclecticism, everything. Barney was all of those things rolled up into one, um, and is deservedly now, of course, recognized as a really influential designer. And um I'm I'm lucky to have spent time with him. I loved him dearly.
SPEAKER_05Marvellous. So then come back to Revelation at this time. So had you expanded the uh the personnel there to deal with this uh new wave of stuff that you were planning on putting out. Who else was involved by this time?
SPEAKER_00No, still just me and Barry. Um, and at that point, uh things started to get more interesting because clearly we wanted to go on the road. Martin and Phil wanted to go on the road, which meant that uh we couldn't use Brindley Schwartz, and they wanted to first of all uh uh get a bass player or a multi-instrumentalist or both, and that's when they started looking around for other people. And we said, uh, well, look, we've still got a bit of money in the bank. What we were doing basically was was uh spending the the last of the the money that was coming that had come in from the uh Glastonbury album, and so we still had some funds in the bank, and uh so we said, Oh well, we'll fund you, let's try and find you a band, and then you go out on the road and start earning some money too. Um we'd produced the album by that time and were trying to get a deal, and um we were shopping around. Um this went on at the same time as as they were forming, they were searching out personnel, which includes included the the estimable Mr. Bassman and Paul Bailey and eventually Pete Thomas, they found in in Kilburn. I remember sitting in the car in somewhere in Kilburn waiting for them to come back, saying they'd found a drummer, and they found young Pete Thomas, I think was about 18 or 19 years old then. And so that was going on, and we were trying to get them a deal, uh, which was a distribution deal with because we'd already done all the packaging and we got we pressed 5,000 copies of the album and were just hoiking around the complete package, and we went to see Mickey Most and um got turned down uh pretty swiftly, although he admired the packaging, etc. Jonathan King turned us down, so we were lucky there. But various other people turned us down, and uh we just realized that if if we were gonna if there were gonna be an ongoing uh uh project, Chili William the Red Hot Peppers had to be out on the road, and so they gradually got together, as I said, the personnel that made up the band. And um initially I think we were using other bands' PAs or borrowing a PA or hiring a PA. Um, and they started doing pubs, they started doing the Tallyhoe and the Kensington and um Open Anchor, the the pub circuit, and so we're bringing in oh colossal amount of money, £15 a night sometimes.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so so was Revelation was it an agency as well at that point, or was there anything?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we turned it. We took you see around that time. Um Barry Hugh Hugh had disappeared completely again. We'd gone off traveling, and um Barry was getting more interested in doing some. I I'm not quite sure what there was some road management work for maybe Joan Armour trading, I'm not quite sure at the time, but there was some work that he was interested in doing. And uh of course, they we played in Bristol Gardens, where there was a a kind of a kind of uh hippie uh major squat. Bristol Gardens was all squatted houses in um in Maidervale, and uh the the whole street had been squatted by uh by um communards of various uh uh colours and streets.
SPEAKER_05I know it's really hard to believe in 2021, isn't it? I mean, our listeners will just not believe that that part of London was not occupied by people paying rent or owning. It was just spotted the movie, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, those beautiful houses were all occupied by five five floor houses, were all occupied by hippies, the whole lot now, the whole street. And and uh years later, Revelation Staging, which was the the next uh revelation probe, which was in 1975-76, um, which Bill Harkin and I set up. Um we had our office there just at the top of Bristol Gardens, and uh that was a that was a squat as well. But uh there was a lot of squatting going on in those days. Yeah, so Chili Willy probably played there as well, um, probably out in the street for a street, a street party, I would guess. So that's probably where their memories of of playing communes have come from. Um we we played wherever we could. Um the they they played quite a lot, they were doing a lot of gigs. Um uh after about the first few months, they were they were a popular band. And um, and the they did probably more gigs for expenses than I would have liked, but uh a gig was a gig in those days.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so um so Revelation Records didn't release any more records after Chili Willy, did they? I don't think. No, no, I didn't think so, because I know their next record came out on a on a different label, but so you were still involved in in some way sort of promoting and doing the some agency stuff. So um, so tell me how did you get involved? How did Andrew Jakeman get involved with you?
SPEAKER_00Well, Andrew, um I I uh we were still at Queensgate Terrace in in um I was still living at Queensgate Terrace. We'd had an office in Camden Town. Uh we used to get a lot of people in and out of my flat. Um, it was a fairly freewheeling population of people that lived there. And um uh with me as kind of the figure that was there most of the time. And uh a couple of rather strange French women had stayed there for a week or so and had had um had then been given the gentle boot by myself or uh Evie, my partner at the time, uh because they were kind of a little bit off the wall and um a bit strange and spent too much time in the various bedrooms with anyone that was around. And uh they disappeared anyway off the scene. And uh when Evie was probably late, early 73, was about six or seven months pregnant, we got a phone call from um one of these French women saying if we needed a break, they'd got a nice little house down in Cornwall, and why didn't we go down and visit them? And uh Evie at that point had got a sister who was living down there, and we thought, oh well, that would be a good idea. We could do we could do kill two birds with one stone. And Evie drove us. I didn't drive at the time, so Evie drove us down there, and we went to this little village called Camelford and found this place eventually after driving around in circles for uh half an evening, and knocked on the door of this fairly imposing-looking building, and these two French girls were ensconced in there and invited said, 'Come in, it's lovely. You've got your own room upstairs here.' And um uh I looked in the kitchen and we uh settled ourselves in, and they got some beef mints and some spaghetti, and I said, I'll make you some spaghetti bolognese. And I was in the kitchen cooking, and Evie was sitting by the fire crocheting, and these two girls were listening to music, and the door opened, and um uh a young woman walked in, who I subsequently learned was called Sue, and Andrew Jakeman walked in with her, and they both stood there in the doorway with their mouths dropped open, saying, Who the hell are you? Um, and it apparently transpired that these two French women had had squatted, squatted this house that they'd heard of through a friend of a friend that there was no one in, and it belonged to Andrew Jakeman's girlfriend, and they'd come down to visit and found these four people in their sitting in their sitting room by the fire cooking spaghetti bolognese, and uh they'd never seen them before in their lives. Um, and of course we didn't, Evie and I didn't know that they they were squatting there. So it was all a bit embarrassing for a while. But the way things were in those days, people just sort of shrugged in the end and said, Okay, great. Well, all right, we might as well. We've got a we've got a couple of couple of um um boxes of wine here. Let's have a glass of wine and eat some spaghetti bolognaise. And we all sat around chatting, eating spaghetti. Um, and uh at one point it got around to what we did, and uh Andrew said he was working as a roadie for Darrell Way's Wolf, uh, who were a band that came out of Curved Air. Daryl Way used to play for. And uh he said, but he he had ambitions and he wanted to start his own record company. And uh he said, but it had to be a particular kind of record company. He said, Yeah, I want to do a record company like uh Revelation Records. This is all perfectly true, Malcolm. And uh Evie burst out laughing, my my partner, and said, Well, that's that's John's record company, and that's literally how uh Andrew Jakeman and I met um by him saying he wanted to run a record company like the one I happened to be running at the time. Splendid in a squat that none of us knew was a squat. Um and yeah, then Andrew disappeared upstairs with one of the French women and had rather noisy public relations with her for about half an hour. Um while we sat around chatting, and Evie was crocheting, and then he came down again and we played bongos and uh listened to music for a while. Um, and then went to bed that night, and Evie and I got up in the morning and went to visit her sister not far away. Now, interestingly, that place called the Mill at Camelford is where eventually Chili Willy went down as a band when Jake was managing them later and uh did quite a lot of recording and rehearsing. Um, so I assume still Sue still owned it in those days. Um so it it turned out to be a fairly important place in the history of Chili Willy.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, by the time our listeners get to hear part two of this with the other guys, Andrew Jacoban, of course, has morphed into Jake Riviera, and uh and he was instrumental in pulling that whole thing together for the the next album, Von Goes Over Ballon. Mark, that's great, isn't it? That's a good y'all.
SPEAKER_00He turned up a couple of months later, he turned up at a gig they were doing at the Kensington, and by that point I'd bought them a three and a half thousand pound PA um by a company called RDS. Um, who I didn't really know what they needed. I now know what they needed in terms of a PA, but they had a great big, two great big bass pins that were far too bassy and um whacking great big 24-channel mixer uh that nobody knew how to run properly. And uh he turned up, Jake turned up one night at the Kensington, which was basically like a corridor. It was like going in the corridor, the Kensington, and the sound was always pretty bad there anyway. And with this PA that we'd got, it was pretty awful. I remember a guy coming up to me and saying, Are you the manager? And I said, Yeah, and he said, Well, the best band I've ever seen in my life, with the worst sound I've ever heard in my life. Um, and he was quite right. The sound was just we couldn't get it right because they were so comp it was so their music was so eclectic and and complex in so many ways that it was quite difficult to get it right, and we certainly didn't have the right PA for it. And Andrew turned up one night and uh just walked over to me and said, Do you want me to help sort all this all this lot out for you? Um words to that effect. And I said, Oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, come and join in. And uh, so he started working along with the band um as their as their road manager, sound engineer, um factotum, and uh uh gradually asserted his interestingly powerful personality on everyone around. It didn't take him very long.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah. Well, I mean, and and and by then they they they sort of started to happen, didn't they? It was a it was a it became a different band altogether.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, they were very good. They were a great band. They were a great band, without a doubt. Um the the the problems with the sound gradually got sorted out, but never they never got it perfect. Um basically because they were working with a PA that was just not for them. It would have been all right for Motorhead, but it wasn't any good for Chile. That's for sure. Um but Jake did his best and he did very well, and they they began to work a lot more. And I would revelation was running out of money at that point. I was getting to the point where I didn't know where the next week's wages were coming from. We moved to a little uh basement office in Holland Road in in in um uh uh Holland Park that was owned by Mouse, the Roadie's mother, who ran a housing organization. And I didn't know where the next week's wages were coming from. Each week it was it was a matter of juggling. And we'd sold out of all the Glastonbury albums. We were sitting on four and a half thousand uh chili willy albums that we couldn't distribute because we had no means and we couldn't get a record deal to sell them. Um, and I didn't know uh how much longer I could keep going. Um but fortunately Jake was around and keeping the ball rolling in terms of gigs and keeping them on the road. So that we were trickling, trickling by every week uh with with Sheila Mouse's sister running a little agency from the front room of the basement, and she was getting gigs all over the country from Stirling in Scotland to Bermansey to everywhere, all still at a most astonishing rate of £20 a night or something like that. The most they ever got was about £75 for a night, I would have thought, in those days. So it was pretty much of a struggle. Um and uh that point my accountant, who was a man called Peter Parhead, who we'd had from the beginning of Revelation Days, rang me up one day and said, You've got to do something because you're trading insolvent at the moment. You're not you shouldn't really be trading because you don't have really any means of paying off your creditors with the the amount of money that you've got coming in each week. And so at that point, I had to think seriously about what I was gonna do. Um so what in the end I put the company into voluntary liquidation. I didn't have any choice really, um tried to hide all the chili willy albums, but they were discovered by this nosy man from the voluntary receivers who found where they were hidden. He'd seen the invoice and said, Where have all these records gone? And I said, Well, we've given quite a lot away. And he said, Well, you've not given 5,000 away, have you? Uh and they found them in the a friend of mine who was a carpenter. We'd put them in his basement, and they found them there, and um so they got those as part of my. I finished up running out of money completely. I had nothing left at all. No Glass Chambri albums, no money in the bank. Um, the receivers had taken any assets that we got left. So I finished up retiring down to Sussex with my partner Evie and my very small child, Ben Jesse, um, and started signing on in Burgess Hill. And uh that was that was the end of that little stage of my life. Um of Revelation Enterprises Limited. It went on, we went on into Revelation staging and uh various other trips, but that's another story. And and you would have thought someone would have seen the potential in not only the quality of the music, but also the energy of the people involved in producing the packaging and all the rest of it. Um but no one did. All those months we spent trying trying to get a deal, even it was it just still surprises me now that um there wasn't the energy to get that moving into a kind of rolling ball that made some kind of money and sense.
SPEAKER_05If a band like Chili Willy and the Red Hot Peppers uh appeared on the scene today, as radically different and as good as they were back then, yeah, they would be snapped up immediately, and people would be queuing around the block to see them because it was it was a very different group, wasn't it? And there was no such thing as Americana back then or whatever it was. These guys were you know waving the flag for something that they had created themselves. Phil and Martin wrote a lot of that material themselves, and it was it was based on other people's ideas that had gone before, but it was undoubtedly their own, and they were all astonishingly good musicians, too, weren't they?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, great songs, played played wonderfully. Um on a good night, they were just they were just such great fun. Yeah, and um as you said, the songs were of the highest quality. The craftsmanship in Phil's songwriting was really quite remarkable. Um uh it's yeah, it's what turned us on in the first place when we first heard his songs and Martin's guitar playing. Pleasure to talk to you, Martin.
SPEAKER_05Great, all right, and and good luck, and good help.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, sir.
Interview with Colin Hansford on early days of Chilli Willi
SPEAKER_05Colin Hansford was a young guitarist in South London who played in several bands with Martin and Phil at the outset of their careers. Colin now lives in America, and I asked him to record his memories of those days to share it with you all. Here he is talking about Smiley in 1965. Colin.
SPEAKER_09I first met Philip, um, I think it was around 1965. Um I was in a band that we'd called Smiley, and um it was an outgrowth of a school group that we had um in 63 and 64. Um we would rehearse in Alford House uh in Kennington on Avaline Street. It was a youth club, still going apparently. Um the rehearsal room was just egg boxes on the walls and ceilings, and very, very acoustically dead, but it was ideal for us. Um we would rehearse there in exchange to um play the occasional dance that they held. Um, so everybody was kind of uh kind of a winner at that point. Um so we met Philip and I don't remember how we contacted him initially, but he showed up and we needed really a lead guitar player, and uh so he arrived, and I think he came with Martin the first time. Um I think Martin was quietly appalled at how bad we were, and continued to be for some time. Um but Philip was uh was on board and joined us straight away. Um he was funny, the funniest, one of the funniest guys I've ever met. He was a quick learner, um, and over the years it's like, well, all of a sudden he picks up this instrument and picks up that instrument and becomes very proficient in all kinds of different uh instruments. Amazing uh capability. Um and he was really a a leader, he was a front man, and that's just what we needed at the time. Um so we played there um for for for some time, I mean, probably into uh 1966, maybe something like that.
SPEAKER_05In nineteen sixty-six, junior's blues was a springboard for Martin Stone to join South London's Savoy Brown Blues Band. Colin was also in Junior's Blues with Martin and Phil. So here he is again talking about that band.
SPEAKER_09So during 1966, um another little band, an offshoot of Smiley started, um called Junior's Blues. And um there's a lot of references to this all over the internet, and I really don't know quite why, because it didn't last very long, but um it was an interesting um uh backwater if you like. Um it had the standard Smiley folks, but um uh Philip stepped down uh to make room for Martin, and Martin came on board uh and brought his blues side with him, um, as well as a beautiful uh white telecaster. Um it was um it it was a step up because Martin was something special, he had great talent, and he had this beautiful guitar, and we had terrible equipment. Um I played this guitar on a couple of occasions and it was just pure bliss. You know, it actually stayed in tune when you did Ben's, things like that, you know, little luxuries that you like. Um but Martin brought his blues site and we did a few gigs, uh, nothing major, but we did play one at um James Allen Girl School um uh during '66, and um I think the price of admission was three shillings and sixpence. Um but basically it was um Philip uh doing singing duties, um no longer playing lead guitar, Martin coming in playing lead, I was playing rhythm, Steve Royal on drums, and um I forget now who was on bass, um could have been David Witten. Um but an interesting time. Um we were still climbing out of poverty in terms of instruments, and um uh it might uh be a bit geek-like, but um Philip of the day was actually playing a guy tone um that had a couple of humbuckers in it, uh the cheapest guitar, but he made it sound just absolutely incredible. Um we had tiny little amps and eventually got hold of some voxes. Um but uh but Martin brought his uh his uh telly and we had uh uh a a slightly better sound from there on. It didn't last very long, um, but it was an interesting side trip.
SPEAKER_05Colin's final involvement with Phil was in a band called Junko Partners later that year. So here he is again on that subject.
SPEAKER_09During what must have been uh I think early 69, um uh yet another band existed, another offshoot, um, this time called uh Junko Partners. Um it was a much bigger band. Um we played Bobby Blue Bland, Bill Doggett stuff, um, in a similar sort of style to Georgie Fame and Blue Flames. Um it was an interesting bunch of people. Uh Martin was playing league guitar, obviously. We had a West Indian called Lloyd, he played Saks, we had a dentist who played uh tennis sax. Um we had Alan, another West Indian who played uh B3 Hammond. Um the drummer was apparently according to um uh according to Martin uh was actually on Alexis Corner's first album, so I must research who that might have been. I played uh electric piano uh very poorly because it's really not my instrument. Um but the singer was um was named Jeff Murray, and haven't been able to find Jeff, but um his mother apparently worked for the BBC and um in the early sixties uh uh she brought this young man home and he had to sleep on the couch because he had nowhere else to sleep. He was an American, um and turned out he became quite famous, and he was Bob Dylan, so that was interesting. Um we played uh a few gigs, not not overly busy, but uh we played at a club called Zack, and I think that was in the middle of London, maybe Tottenham Court Road, somewhere like that, Charing Cross Road. I had a feeling it was to do with uh Ringo's son, whose name was Zack, so um I don't know, hadn't heard much about it. But we had a good time and it was um big and it was difficult to manage, lots of people, schedules and things. Um and so it didn't last long, and uh Martin left that eventually and apparently joined the Rockhouse band, and then ultimately Mighty Baby and then other projects. Smiley lasted um into the early part of '69, I think it is. Um in April we had a gig at the London College of Printing with um uh supporting Bloodwin Pig, um, and that was a complete disaster. Uh we played there because um our bass player Paul Eckersley was the son of uh Tom Eckersley, who's a very famous or was a very famous poster designer. Um we did gigs there and now and again, but we ended up on the big stage with Bloodwig, who were really not at all nice to us. Um then we f had our last non-gig, which was at the Bromley Court Hotel. Uh my brother-in-law was in the business at the time uh promoting bands, and he had um uh arranged for us to play at Bromley Court, which was a great gig for us to play at. And on the Sunday night for the Monday gig, um our drummer, um Steve Royal, got into it with Philip and um uh decided they weren't gonna play on Monday. So um uh that was the end of uh that was the end of the road for um for us. And um Philip went to the US at that point, I think. And um and I started in a new band called Dwarf uh with Brian Neville and uh Jerry Shepherd and um he was the guy with the star guitar and um another coup couple of guys that we've not been able to contact, um Andy Simmons who played bass, and uh an American guy called Dave Shaffer or Schaefer, and um and that's the story. But um I'm so thrilled to be able to have known uh both Martin and uh and Philip. Um they've uh enriched my view of music and um it's a pleasure to have known them. Uh two very unusual and wonderful people.
SPEAKER_05That was great, Colin. Thanks. Well, I hope you'll all agree that hearing this kind of stuff directly from those involved not only puts it into context, but here in its undiluted form, it's safe from those who seek to rewrite history.
Malcolm Mills reflects on seeing Martin Stone when he was part of the Savoy Brown Blues Band
SPEAKER_05At this point, I suppose somebody ought to say something about Marty's involvement in the Savoy Brown Blues band. So, in the absence of uh anybody from that organisation, or anybody else doing anything, here's my recollection from those days because I went to the Nag's Head in Battersea regularly with my sister Jane and her boyfriend Alan and uh saw Savoy Brown Blues band with Kim and Martin in the very early days of that group, and they were great. Upstairs at the Nag's Head was a tiny little room that bound with the twin guitars of Kim Simmers and Martin Stone, that was a sort of trademark of their act. They were separated from each other by singer Bryce Portius, um, but their styles of playing were really different. With hindsight, you could see that it wasn't gonna last. I mean, the the bearded Caftan wearing Martin Stone's pigeon-toed stance gave the impression that he was in a trance, you know, engrossed in his unique contribution to that sound. I mean it was really special. I also saw them back in John Lee Hooker at a later stage as well. And of course, that first album that they made with him on it when it came out in 1967 was great, but I think he probably left by the time that record came out. Anyway, that was it. I did have the pleasure of seeing them, and believe me, it was worth seeing.
The second phase of Chilli Willi--The Red Hot Peppers--Intro
SPEAKER_05So now that the scene's been set, we move on to the band's second phase. We've heard how the original duo were prolific songwriters, but anyone who saw the band live will tell you that they were also fine exemplars of musical nuggets from across the Atlantic. Their repertoire included gems of Western swing, jazz, rock and roll, RB, soul, country, blues, you name it, it was all influences there. And they brought life to music that was rarely heard anywhere in England in those days, except on the record decks of those in the know. Well, it was certainly a thrilling ride for band and fans alike, and attempting to part the mist of time, I'll be joined by band members Pete Thomas, Paul Bailey, and Paul Riley. And let's just hope that their memory banks can be readily accessed by simply entering the password chili willy. So we started our conversation by talking about what anybody knew about Phil and Martin before these guys got involved, but it didn't really reveal anything that Colin Hansford or John Coleman hadn't previously covered. So we'll be picking up a bit later in that conversation with Paul Riley talking about Mighty Baby. But first, let's listen to Breathe a Little from Bongos Over Ballum. This is a great example of the guys drawing deep on their knowledge of transatlantic repertoire and putting it to excellent songwriting use. Check this out.
Interview with Paul 'Bassman' Riley, Paul 'Diceman' Bailey, and Pete Brown, beginnings
SPEAKER_05Right now, let's pick up that uh Zoom call from 2021 when I was talking to Pete Thomas, Paul Bailey, and Paul Riley about their exploits. Here's Paul Riley talking about Martin and Mighty Baby after Savoy Brown.
SPEAKER_08Martin after Savoy Brown went into uh went in the action, didn't he? Yeah, it was. He he joined the action after Savoy Brown and and then proceeded to turn the action into Mighty Baby via lots of solution and drugs and whatever else he is introduced. Um to uh California San Francisco um engulfing from the resident. And uh I mean that's where he got the finger, isn't it? That's where that came from. Um and uh I don't know I don't know his reasons for becoming a when he did. I don't know, maybe he just wanted to change maybe because he yeah, he was still on good terms with those residents guys and they turned up as Chili Willie wanted to turn up uh Philippi Willie's uh um but anyway he came back and and he rekindled his uh association musical association in London, and I think Chili Willie the idea of Chili Willie was um born quite quickly, and I I think well let's move on now to
SPEAKER_05Um the the the second phase of the band where that it sort of hit the road as a five-piece with all three of you in it, augmented by Will Stalibras occasionally. So let's uh let's kind of start off by asking who joined first out of the three of you and how the rest of you got involved. So who joined first?
SPEAKER_01I think that was me. I used to live in a squat in uh in World's End. And around the corner was another squat where a lot of bands, uh, family um and sum of action and so on were there. At the time, I was playing uh I was playing in a sort of folk band and uh was trying to learn banjo. And uh Martin was uh was very interested in one of the girls in the squat and um came around and heard me pluck um plucking away on the banjo and then said, Look, what you know, why don't you come and join us, come and play with us? I went through some of their old stuff that they um they did on the Kings of the Robot rhythm, and they decided, I mean, it was then decided at that point that they'd start sort of building up the band. And uh, I think Paul came in next, but I'm sure Paul can correct me on that, and it built from there. And uh the revelation offices were then in Shepherd's Bush by that time, I think. Uh is that right, Paul?
SPEAKER_08No, Camden Town.
SPEAKER_01Okay, the only record I the only place I went to I I can recall going to was in in Shepherd's Bush.
SPEAKER_08So no, no, no, come on. Yeah, up to Camden Town to get your paycheck. You must have done, or did you not get any money and it was just police?
SPEAKER_06No, I remember going to Camden Town, right? I mean, not not very often, you know, not much, but but I I remember the place upstairs, and yeah.
SPEAKER_08Well, you must do because you'd have been sleeving up Glastonbury triple albums like mad. You must have done that, yeah. Weren't you ever conscripted to to get when you went up there? It's like, well, you know, here's here's a little bit of bit of money to pay your rent. And by the way, can you sleeve these Glastonbury triples before you go?
SPEAKER_01I remember the Glastonbury triples, but I don't recall sleeving them. I may well have done, but then you know, it was uh it was uh late 60s, early 70s.
SPEAKER_08Well, anyway, I suppose so. If I pick up the story here, I'm next in. Yeah, and I I the way I arrived there was uh via a bloke called Robin Scott, uh who I suppose I might as well mention that right now, who subsequently had a had a career in pop as um uh the act M with a big call pop music. Anyway, he he got a call, he was uh uh Martin Martin knew him because he was uh he was an act on John Curd. John or John Curd, the record, the the gig promoter, band manager, uh um villain, um good bloat though, if you're on the right side of him. Um he uh he had a label called Head Records. Robin Scott had an album on Head Records, as did Mighty Baby. Mighty Baby had played on Robin Scott's record. So that's if if there were no other um uh links, that was the the uh the big one. And um so uh Martin and Phil, I believe, were looking to cast their net. I I I think the reason that they they invited him round, which is which is I'm just about to say that that's how I ended up there. I went round there with him uh on a on their invitation. Um because I believe they were looking for another writer to you know to to I I don't know, give him a little bit of a different uh you know, musical slant. I'm not quite sure. I never really uh figured out what you know what and what and why, but um but anyway, I got to he decided to to uh go and see what they were up to. I was living in a house in Richmond with him at the time and also sort of um playing in his notional group uh that sort of might have existed. Um uh and actually it's the same, I think, notion group that Pete Thomas was. That's how I um the it's through Robin Scott, I I met Pete anyway. Um uh and I I went round uh to Queensgate Terrace where John Coleman uh and Revelation were based, or you know, that was their sort of um well, it was their base. We went round there and and uh met Martin Phil and Paul was there at the time up in up in the flat there, and we just sat on the floor and sort of played stuff. I thought it was fantastic, Robin Robin didn't, and uh I just I'd uh taken the precaution of taking the phone number before I went, and I rang him up the next day and said, I'll tell you what, if you're looking for a bass player, I'm your man. And the next thing after that was it's like, Well, I'll tell you what, haven't don't you how about a drummer then? They were very keen to get a drummer, uh having uh made having had that experience um with uh with the Brinsleys rhythm section, augmenting their stuff on the first album, they were really keen to do to get a band together. John Coleman wasn't so keen because I just thought, yeah, because he he would have thought, hang on a minute, too many mouths to feed. This is getting, you know. And not only that, it's sort of kind of getting bent out of shape in terms of the original concept, presumably, that he'd bought, you know, that uh oh yeah, a couple of couple of guys strumming an acoustic instrument or two, that's no problem. You can stick them in a car and go somewhere. You don't have to have a uh a van full of equipment and people humping it around or any of that, you know. But um uh anyway, to to cut this story short and hand over, I I knew Pete through Robin, and I said, Look, if you want a drummer, this is the guy that you gotta get. In fact, as a matter of fact, it's a bit of a deal breaker. This is the guy you've gotta get, you know. If I if I'm um if I'm to stick around, this is uh because I thought this was a great opportunity to do, you know, to uh to get this thing going, and um, and there it is. And so they went, oh, okay. And I'm not quite sure. Um, and Pete should pick this bit of the story up, what happened next, and how he sort of got the call.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, well, go on then, Pete. Well, I grew up my teenage years in a town called Seaford, which was just down the road from Brighton, and there wasn't much going on musically in Seaford. But when I was about 16, no, maybe a bit older, 17, this guy showed up in Seaford, Robin Scott, because his parents lived there, and I guess he was a bit down on his luck. So Robin Scott showed up in Seaford, and I got to know him somehow, you know. It was like, oh, there's this bloke that plays guitar, writes songs. So somehow I got to know him, and then the next thing that happened was he was living in my parents' back garden in a tent with with his girlfriend Linda, who you know was very nice to have around. You know, I think I think uh so I can't remember how long that lasted, but it sort of lasted for quite a while. And um then my dad set up a tape recorder in our dining room, and I did some, we did some demos, me and Robin Scott. Anyway, that's how I met him, and then I guess he he moved up to London and he was living in Richmond, and somehow you know, I I remember going round to his house there once and meeting Paul, but it's a bit vague, it's a bit you know.
SPEAKER_08Can I step in just for a second? I met you at Noel Brown's house in Norwood with Robin. That's it. You would set your uh Robin brought your drums round with him, and you set up your drums in Noel's kitchen, and we played something or another, and there we are. That's that's that's the missing bit.
SPEAKER_06That's the missing bit. Yeah, so then um, yeah, then so I got to know Paul, and then Paul put in a good word for me with with uh Phil and Martin, and that basically kicked off my career. So big thanks to Paul for that one, you know. That that got the ball rolling. And uh, and then it was it was pretty uh low-key when we started off. I can't remember where I was living. I'd because I ended up living you were in oh, yes, Saltram Crescent, and you used to come round and stay with me, didn't you? I did at DOS in Campinas Garden then the Vagrants, that's right, and I was working at uh Dallas Arbiter warehouse in Perrivale, and I was I'd I'd managed to work my way up from unloading lorries to being in charge of the drum spares department. So my kit now had some quite nice tom-tom legs and things. And uh yeah, that's that's the job I was doing, and I was playing in a band called Ocean with some posh people, one of the Fry family. Um they had one country song, which was why I liked them, you know. I was sort of aspiring to that country rock thing, and but they were nice enough blokes, and the bass player had a how a flat in Saltram Crescent, and I got a room there. Well, first I slept in the kitchen, then I got a room, and then Paul would come and stay sometimes. So that's when it that's how it kicked off. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Right. So so how long so once you all started playing together, did you have an agent or was it was somebody just getting a few gigs? Did it all just start very slowly?
SPEAKER_06There was a yellow, I remember there being a yellow Morris Minor post office van.
SPEAKER_02The JIPO van.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, well they the the the the the answer to your question is no. Oh well, I mean, there wasn't an agent, but the there were the two guys involved in our um uh in looking after us. John Coleman was the the the kind of the main guy because he looked after uh the purse strings, revelation, this that and the other. And we were actually a revelation act, you know. We were we were being um uh bankrolled by by the uh by revelation, but he had a a guy uh uh with him part of the revelation operation called Barry Um Everett. Oh Jesus Christ. Everett Barry. Everett, yeah. Barry, who Barry Everett, who with another guy called Hugh Nolan, had been DJs on this fantastic, uh fantastic radio station broadcasting on uh Radio Monte Carlo's uh transmitter called Radio Geronimo, which was absolutely incredible. I I was a big fan of it before I uh knew, you know, before that this this had been a uh two or three years before beforehand. Anyway, Barry, Barry Everett was he was a sort of schmoozer networker. Um, you know, he was out there and um he'd get it was him, I think, that was looking out for gigs for us. And and as a consequence, we sort of found that we had two things. Actually, I remember the two things that that that were happened to to occupy time. One is that we would play interminable street festivals and benefits. Um oh, and the Kensington. And the Kensington, yeah. Yeah, that's about the only uh uh straight gig that comes to mind straight, you know, of those early days. And uh the other thing he'd do is we we had this sort of a a small circuit of um hippie communes, which we would go and stay on and rehearse when we didn't have anything else to do, which was quite a lot in the early days, and that's actually where we got a lot of that stuff together.
SPEAKER_05All we had to do is chop up a bit of wood, you know, to so were most of the early dates around London, did it all spring out from there, or did you actually sort of travel around a bit more than that?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think we started off in London. I mean, there seemed to be uh, you know, London century to begin with, pubs in London, I mean north-south of the river, but then it started to it started to build. Uh, we went and rehearsed, I've forgotten exactly, somewhere in Wales with a band called the Windfuckers, who was who were uh who were uh sort of had a vegan dog that had rickets. But uh it's a poor thing, poor thing had to eat what everyone else ate, which was uh didn't suit the dog at all. Um but we spent you know, we spent, I think, a week, maybe more than a week, a couple of weeks there, uh just rehearsing and and you know, tightening stuff up. So I think in answer to your question, we it sort of spiraled from London, if you like.
SPEAKER_06That was before that was before I was with the band, the Rickids.
SPEAKER_08Ah, okay. Oh, yes, that's quite right. We we we did. Yeah, yeah, you were, and in fact, that was kind of a deciding. I think that's when I said, Look, this is this is fucking mad. We've got to have a drummer, yeah. And uh, yeah, there you are.
SPEAKER_01Oh, what a shame, Pete. You missed it. You missed an experience there.
SPEAKER_08Did you know did Pete did you never do any of those sort of you know, Velenvach or whatever those there were? No, there were there were about three or four. No, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_06None of them. I know, I think I managed to I managed to I was lucky escape. I was in the canteen at Dallas Arbiter having a sausage sandwich, I think, at that point.
SPEAKER_05Let's place for you, I'll tell you. Hey Pete, just a matter of interest. What year were you at Dallas Arbiter?
SPEAKER_06Well, I suppose it would be 70. It's all a bit vague, you know. When did Chili really was started in 72? Did it?
SPEAKER_08It's 72, and you were you came in 73. So 72, spring of 73, or something.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I I might I might have unloaded some of the vans you loaded up because I was a manager at Drum City in London, innit?
SPEAKER_06You certainly did. You'll have got those Heyman drums out, probably.
SPEAKER_05Yes, I I got plenty of spare parts from my own anyway.
SPEAKER_06So you were I was creaming it off at that one end and you were creaming it off at the other. Perfectly pushed. You want to have your drums. Oh yeah. Well, when did it when did it switch over to being a bit more professional? Um I guess that that wasn't until Jake came in, really, was it?
SPEAKER_08Well, that D. I'm just trying to think it, but it probably wasn't. I'm just trying to think when Sheila and Mouse got involved because there was a definite, it was definitely um, I think Sheila was already involved actually before Jake came. Yes, she was.
SPEAKER_05Yes, she was, and she's actually Paul. Sorry to interrupt you, but for the benefit of the listeners, would do you want to uh expand on who Sheila and Mouse were. Yes.
SPEAKER_08Uh okay, Mouse, right? Okay, there are uh two people that that um come into the picture um next in my memory. One is uh a chap whose name I'm not gonna remember, but uh oh god, I should do I see it every day. But he we knew him as Mouse, Mike O'Brien, is he? Mike O'Brien. Yeah. Mouse and Mouse Mouse was a superstar roadie, and so you know, he was as such, he knew also you know, he had a way into loads of things. In fact, come to think of it, he may have been uh a conduit for a lot of those sort of street parties and support gigs that we got. Um and he was married to a girl called Sheila uh Sheila Walsh at Lasley O'Brien as is that knee Laslett O'Brien or Walsh. I can't, I don't I don't know which way round it is. I mean it there is a remarkable one remarkable thing about uh her is that her mum was the the woman that originally started the Notting Hill Festival, um that that became the carnival, you know, to uh over the years. But anyway, she came, she was sort of brought in to do for us, you know, to sort of look after the um take the uh get on the phone and see where she could get anything for us, arrange stuff for us, um uh get her brother to roadie for us, Kieran Walsh, um who was who was uh our roadie for a very long time, um and uh and Soundman. And she so she started setting up the scene, and she sat actually she was great on the phone, and she was like you know, a bit of a mother hen figure, and uh we were the chicks, so to speak, and um uh things actually started to get a little more organized when she came came on the scene.
SPEAKER_06And I just do well because um Revelation Records moved to Holland Road in Shepherd's Bush, and it was an it was a squat, it was a big basement space, but but it was next door to Sheila's house because Sheila's mum was in charge of um, you know, I think she worked for the council or something, but she was sort of overseeing all these derelict buildings. So the offices were next door to Sheila's house. So I don't know, I don't know which came first, you know, but but then she would be the secretary there, and then that sort of became our our base.
SPEAKER_08Oh, is that how it? Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, and it did, and you and you lived there, didn't you?
SPEAKER_06Well, then after a while, Revelation moved out of there, and me and Judy moved moved in there, yeah. Yeah, which wasn't too bad.
SPEAKER_05But uh Mouse and Sheila, then Paul, you were just sort of saying how they were quite um important as part of the early development of the band, moving from playing in sort of smaller venues to to be more on the scene, as it were.
SPEAKER_08Well, they they would, I believe, that um uh well, certainly that we got gigs certainly through Sheila's efforts, uh those early efforts, she was started to bring in things. And I think because of Mouse being a bit of a you know, a mover and a shape. On his sort of uh you know in other circles, we we land, you know, a little spot here or a little spot there. Um and which you know, which kind of started adding up to uh um uh uh uh uh a bit of a date sheet, and also you know, we began to have a little bit of a profile. Mainly I'd say uh the the profile uh probably through our regular year at the Kensington would be the the uh thing that was most responsible for that, I'd guess. I could I can't remember anything else that was regular at that time that had so much uh uh you know uh uh currency in terms of uh uh you know I'm running out of words here, but yeah, it was important.
SPEAKER_06Was this was when did we start doing dingles?
SPEAKER_08Ah, that good opening, opening of dingles, wasn't it? That was well done. That was 1973 as well. That was a big that was a big god, that was a real big thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It was the opening night, wasn't it? Didn't we do the first first night of the opening of it?
SPEAKER_08Was it really? I don't I don't know.
SPEAKER_01We uh do if you remember, we were invited back for the uh I don't know the 20th uh 20th birthday or whatever or whatever it was.
SPEAKER_08Oh, it was the worst £1,000 I'd ever spent on anything. Yes, Dingles was uh enormous, uh enormously important, enormously important, enormous, uh uh you know, in in in so many ways.
SPEAKER_05I mean, not just to us, but to uh how did that come about as a matter of interest? I remember Dingwall's opening, but how did it come about that you were the act that started? Was that a boss? It was through Boss, wasn't it? Boss Goodman.
SPEAKER_08It was no, it was a guy called H. There was a guy called H that had been a Led Zeppelin roadie, and I believe it was his connection with Mouse that or and andor Barry Farmer andor both, or I don't know, but it was through that channel and through H that we uh that we went in there. You know, you could still smell the paint drying, such as it was that that it was that new, taking a little diversion here. This history of dingles. I don't know whether boss was there immediately, but when he when he turned up, boss ran the kitchen.
SPEAKER_05See, I I'm sort of trying to figure out what happened. So suddenly you're going from just doing a few random gigs here and there to being working every night almost and traveling around the country. So something must have happened to trigger that was it was Sheila.
SPEAKER_06It was Sheila, yeah. I think. Okay, yeah, she's she's a bigger part. Uh you know, Paul's introduced her, but but I I think, and you know, maybe you can check in with her. I mean, I've I'm still in touch with her, yeah. Yeah, I think she sort of took the took the reins for a good few months, you know.
SPEAKER_08She she did, and I I don't know whether to uh you know, I don't know what the cr chronology or where we're at in this, but there's there'll there'll come a point when where suddenly we got a Barry decides that he doesn't want to be a roadie, and they and one day we walk into um John Coleman's flat in uh and we meet Jake, who's our new roadie, and and he he there's something that starts up quite quickly. I I think it's because he really you know he sort of looks around a set here takes an assess assessment of what's going on and who does what and this, that, and the other. But definitely there's some in between him and Sheila in terms of organizing taken by aliens.
SPEAKER_05Sounds like submarines sprung a lake pole.
SPEAKER_01Definitely aliens. Oh, he's gone completely now.
SPEAKER_06There he is, he's back.
SPEAKER_08Can you hear me? We can get so you you went uh for a while there. Yeah, where did I get to? You just said oh right, okay. Yeah, so when Jake turns up, she does a little bit uh put out to be she uh f her feathers are ruffled because she thinks that he oh fuck.
SPEAKER_05Well, he's transmitting. Oh fuck, yeah.
SPEAKER_01He's got the swear filter on in reverse.
SPEAKER_07You hear me? Is that working?
SPEAKER_06No, that's it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, you're back.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, okay. Um, damn is my internet connection, I think. He makes it his business to sort of uh to uh to you know to to really make Sheila feel empowered to go and go ahead and do whatever it was she was doing, but do it a whole lot more, and she does.
SPEAKER_06Well, I I could toss in here, please do. Well, Jake showed up, and I got quite friendly with Jake. I was sort of quite matey with him, and I used to sometimes go in the van with him and Karen just for a laugh, you know. And um, but I can remember a lot of the time in the van, sitting in the front, um, Jake going on and on about what was wrong with everything and uh how he could do it better, and you know, so I probably I probably put in a good word for him. I mean, this is the transition from when he was our roadie to our manager, right? But but uh it probably wasn't that long. I mean, it seemed like a long time because we were doing by that time, we were doing a lot of shows, you know. I mean, there was one year where we did 260 shows or something. Two years, yeah. So we were up and down the motorway all the time. So um that's it really. I mean, that's you know, yeah. Jake was he was funny, you know, and he was a bit of a naughty boy, and it was it was all a good laugh, you know.
SPEAKER_05So so initially he was roadie, and then at what point did he take over as the de facto manager of the great if that ever happened? I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_08Well, he well, what happened was that um this uh uh following on from Pete, uh feet Pete putting in a good word from it. Well, but from my point of view, he didn't have to because it actually was patently obvious that Jake had far more idea about how to get you know how to get things going and and uh you know than than than um trepidatious old old sort of hippie types who uh who were you know God bless them, actually, because if it hadn't been for them, we we wouldn't have done anything. But um uh yeah, I mean it was quite quite obvious. And I uh in the end, it was uh Phil and Martin broke the news to John Coleman. Um you know, they they it was agreed amongst us, and then they went to see him and said, John, it's over, Jake's doing, you know, we want Jake to be the manager. That's how that happened. And um, but um it might if if my feed's still all right, I'll just re restate that uh uh when before he was even our manager and he was came in as our roadie and he was instrumental in wanting to organize something, and Sheila Sheila felt a bit put out momentarily, but they soon they soon uh were getting on real well. And when Jake became manager, that was it. He he gave her as as much uh uh and more uh freedom. Well, she had more to do basically on his on on his watch than she'd had to do before. She's got uh better leads and uh all sorts of things happened. And uh yeah, we did more gigs. Um we actually got paid for. We actually got paid for some of them. Um, you know.
SPEAKER_06We got an agent, we got um well.
SPEAKER_08That was the next thing then. Yeah, yeah, go on.
SPEAKER_06Um what what was his name? It was it was Paul Conroy, Nigel Kerr. And Nigel Kerr. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then and then we started getting, you know, all the clubs up north, like JB's Dudley, and all these funny places, and and we also started getting Mayballs and University gigs, and then and that really filled it out then, you know. I mean, I think we were still doing, we're probably still doing the Kensington and and stuff, but uh yeah, then then it got proper, and we were we were getting £12 a week, which I got 13 because I was driving the band.
SPEAKER_01Did you? Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't want to break that to you now, Peter. You still got your HGV license, Paul.
SPEAKER_08No, I'm just driving the I think at that point gets a bit of petrol with you.
SPEAKER_01I think at that point we had it to a 12-seater and uh you know the like a band bus.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, on on a lighter note, this may uh this may lead us to uh why Paul was christened the dice man because he was driving the band. And uh in the book by Luke Reinhardt, the dice man, um the main character just takes decisions by throwing a dice. And I seem to remember one drive particularly when we were stopped, we were stopped at some red lights, and Paul just took off, like just went straight through the red lights. And somehow this idea that he was just deciding like when to pull away from lights by throwing a dice, you know, like he sort he sort of became the dice man.
SPEAKER_01Well, we survived it, we survived that.
SPEAKER_06No, there were the whole driving thing was quite interesting. I remember once Paul deciding to take a piss out of the uh front side window, and Martin Stone was asleep in the back. Yeah, it was only at twenty only at 30 miles an hour with that little ventilation window was open. But but if you were if you saw an airflow diagram of before transit with the arrows, then I can remember Martin waking up in the back, like fucking hell, baseball!
SPEAKER_08Like all this cloud of oh there was another time when when a very, very, very pissed Jake decided that what he really needed to do was piss out the back doors. Yes. I remember seeing that in the rearview mirror. As we as we were going down the motorway, and if it hadn't been for the fact that I fucking got my hand in his collar before he'd have been face out on that, Jesus Christ, that would have been a squeak.
SPEAKER_01He made a habit of that. I remember in in town, one I think it was probably round about Christmas, very, very cold, just noticing in the rear view mirror the sort of the doors open and steam sort of rising. And the car behind with this whole company is pissing on their bonnet. And the guy, for some reason, although he hadn't reached that far, I've got the windscreen wipers going, but don't manage that.
SPEAKER_06And when Paul was Paul was driving, and and uh he was also in charge of directions. This was before Satanos, maps, or anything else. I remember there was one particularly legendary quest when he rolled down the window and asked this old boy where the city said to us. And this old boy, he's like, straight down there, turn right at a multi-story car park, and that went into legend. Well gender.
SPEAKER_08Oh so where are we? We're we're Sheila, Sheila and Mouse have done us a good turn. We're uh Sheila's cooking up a storm in uh in her kitchen and um getting us loads of gigs. Jake comes in. We uh he's uh he's a um actually there was it just going back to the Jake becoming our manager story. The it's at this point, um uh whilst he's still roadie, that um his kind girlfriend who happens to own a lovely mill down in uh Camelford in Cornwall uh says that it's all right for us to go down there and you know hang out for a week and and just rehearse in the in the cottage down there. Subarba. Sue Barber, yeah. And um, and that's kind of that was I'd I think that's where the the deal was sealed in terms of what was going to happen with you know where where it was decided amongst ourselves that you know this was the way for we you know we we ought to go we ought to go with Jake and get him to uh because it was quite obvious that uh or it's maybe maybe I'm I'm just thinking, well, this is where it occurred to me personally. This was the best idea possible, that he had more idea of anything, you know, he was able to do stuff anyway. There we go. I thought I'd just mention that because obviously this that that uh the mill does crop up a little later, yeah.
SPEAKER_05In uh so so the trip down to the mill, then was that really just to sort of do a a series of rehearsals and just get for a bit or no intention of any recordings at that stage? Yeah, all right, okay. So that was a kind of point where everybody's getting back to get getting the thing really organized into what it's gonna be next, and just sharpening it all up all over the place, I guess. Is that right?
SPEAKER_08Yeah, I'd say that's pretty good, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah,
The making of Bongos Over Balham
SPEAKER_05okay. Well, it might be worth moving on to how after the lack of success of Kings of the Robot Rhythm, somebody managed to get enough interest to to make an a new record at some point, and there were a series of attempts at recording stuff for it. So um who who was behind the original idea to sort of make a new album with the with the five pieces?
SPEAKER_06Jake, probably, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_08Yes, I mean that was that's always uh that's what you want to do, isn't it? I mean, you're you're grifting. I mean, we the way it hang on, I'll just aim this at me. The the um the way it goes is that we you know we we we're building, we're doing lots and lots of gigs. We've made a big profile from that. Jake has up upped our profile a lot because he's a smart cookie when it comes to um understanding the way that the press works and how you can, you know, what buttons to press and where to press them and who to schmooze and who not to bother with, and and all those sorts of things. So we've we've raised quite a bit of dust. And of course, the next next thing that you want to do at this point in time is to go and get yourself a record deal, or it was at that, you know, that's how things work then is that you went and got a record deal, um, uh in the hope that the contract you'd negotiate would actually give you a very stable and financially rewarding base on to which, you know, from which you could work and would finance the recording of your you know, of your records, which you then hope to sell lots of and you know, did ah dah da. So um we had um I'm just trying to think whether whether we had any any anybody any other interest other than the chat that Jake was able to convince us, convinced to take some interest in us was a guy who worked for a company called Mooncrest Jim somebody called I've forgotten his name.
SPEAKER_05I he's he ain't no longer with us, but uh yeah, he was part of uh that Marcel Rhodes business, wasn't he, with Trojan Records and all that BNC yeah, that's absolutely right.
SPEAKER_08Yes, be the B and C holdings we had all the the uh Trojan and whatever.
SPEAKER_06Wasn't it sort of tied in with the charisma people as well?
SPEAKER_08Wasn't it was yes, they had charisma. That that was yes, Stratton Smith was and Colson, Glenn Colson, and all those people. It was it was a sort of a gang, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_06Really?
SPEAKER_08Colson was a publicist, um uh but the charisma artists um were actually as a matter of fact, we we were um because either one or both of uh Nigel um and Paul Paul Conroy and and Nigel um had both been social sex and had both booked us, or or well, it may have, but or one or the other had. I think Conroy definitely had booked us. And when he went when so when they when they started working at or now finding themselves working at Charisma Artists, they actually took us on. We we were we were uh a charisma a charisma artist at before we were ever signed to the record label, before we were ever signed to BNC, for instance. That that that that uh that was the way around that happened. But I mean it was all about trying to get a record deal. That was and um I'm I'm I can't think of anything the the first the first record session, the recording sessions I I can remember, bar one, was um those sessions we did at um Chalk Farm Studios with Vic Keary. Yeah. Um the only thing I remember before that was that one we did that single Friday song. Do you remember doing that? Oh the fuck knows where we did that. I can't remember.
SPEAKER_06And when was Rockfield? That was later.
SPEAKER_08Oh, that was later with Stephen Rocker. That was yeah, that was that was kind of the right of the death.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_08That that thing. But um, but it was uh it was we'd already got um so this would be uh you know, so 73 going into 74, Jake Jake's our manager by this time. Um And he's doing, you know, we're doing lots and lots of gigs. We've done lots of gigs in 73. We've done 200 and whatever. And we're about to do another 200 and whatever in 74. Jake has got us, got the interest of a record company, and the the I think actually has got us the deal. And that's it's because it's Mooncrest that pay for what uh are kind of the demo sessions for the album down at Vit Curie's studio in uh short farm before we actually go and do that album with uh uh you know the album with uh with yeah Bungus over Ballon with uh Ron Nevison. Uh and and of course before we do the uh the uh brightness uh Red Roads uh but anyway, so that it's there isn't really that you know that's what that's really what happens on the back of all the uh uh interest that he's that that that that we've garnered through gigging and Jake and Jake pumping it all up and getting, you know he he he f finally find finds someone that will is interested enough to to sort of put some money on the table and give us a deal, which was BNC Records.
SPEAKER_05Right, okay, so so was that the point at which you got was it Mike Nesmith first of all or Ron Nevison first of all? Because the stuff he did at Morgan Studios, first of all, was Mike Nesmith. Where did that come in?
SPEAKER_08Well, first of all, is all is is the stuff that we did on our own back at um with Vit Mail at um um uh Vic Curie rather at Chalk Farm. Then when it comes to actually doing an album, like like like every record company uh uh uh still running into this thing years later, you know, they want um a producer, they want a name producer because they figure that the addition of a name producer on the credit is gonna glean you another you know X thousand sales, which I always thought was complete bollocks, but and nevertheless. So that's how in the first instance we end up going with um Mike Nesmith.
SPEAKER_01I thought I thought it was the other way around, but uh because we were, I mean, we were we did uh chalk farm and you know on the back of that, didn't we? I mean, where you know, where you met uh John Stewart, and uh that's that's how that sort of thing on the back of the record we met him through the recording, um and uh they also had they had some gigs over here, and uh there's a big gig at chalk farm that zig was zigzag put on, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_06Zigzag party, the Mike Nesmeth connection, yeah.
SPEAKER_08So what so but is there some do you think I got the timeline wrong?
SPEAKER_06Well, we were I was just asking whether we went to the farm first with Ron Neverson, amended Mike Nesmeth.
SPEAKER_08No, it's the other way around.
SPEAKER_06It was the other way around.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, and and and the so so yes, so uh they're again so somebody spotted, presumably Jake spots uh that an opportunity, yeah. Um presumably he's talked this over with Martin and Phil, who think it's a good idea. He sees the fact that Red Rose and Mike Nesmith are doing, you know, zigzag, and that um were we on that as well? Yeah, was that we were and uh and it's like all right, okay. Well, maybe we can roll this as we won't have to pay any nasty air fares because they're already here. We can roll this into one, you know, blah blah blah. Get uh um uh uh B and C will like it because it's a name. In fact, it's two names, two for the price of one. You get Mike Mike Nesmith, a monkey, hooray, and Red Rose, who's got some country credentials, you know, it's not a bad coup, actually. Um, so yeah, so we go and we go for these sessions at Morgan, and to this day, I never I have no fucking idea what happened in the control room. There was a an argument. There was there were words were had in the control room between uh Nesmith, um Phil and Martin, and maybe Jake as well. I have to this date no idea what went on. Anyone else? Do you know Pete?
SPEAKER_06You've got any idea what what uh I um I only remember that there was a Bible involved.
SPEAKER_08Yes, he was a Christian scientist, wasn't he?
SPEAKER_06Yeah. But I don't know whether that was the but knowing Jake, maybe your mother sucks cocks in hell on that Bible. I would I wouldn't be surprised. But they were great sessions. I mean they were. Yeah, they came out so well.
SPEAKER_08They did, they they did. I mean, they they were the nearest thing to to what it was that we actually imagined ourselves to be, yeah, you know, and with Red Rose playing on it as well, just subblumbing. Yeah, yes, that was kind of a bit of a you know that oh that sorts that problem out.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, no, that was the icing on the cake having Red Rose.
SPEAKER_08It was, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I got so I got so waste, goddamn, I got so wasted last night I had to jack off twice to get my hot started smaller. Oh hello, good morning, good morning.
SPEAKER_06Right, so that was first then, and and then and then there was the whole thing about going on that muddy old farm with Ronnie Lane's mobile and the Wellington boots, and well, yeah.
SPEAKER_08I mean, do you remember what happens about we I don't oh I know I know what it was. It was we decided because we'd been down to Sue Baba's place uh at least twice, and we loved it, yeah. And it was we you know, we had a great time down there, and so it's like ah I know what, let's get the Ronnie Lane my mobile and take it down to Sue Baba's cottage, which actually was a monster idea, it was a great idea, yeah. The only thing that wasn't so great was that the small track that led down to uh cottage had a bend in it, and around which the the uh the airstream caravan mobile and the towing vehicle could not pass. No, and so we had to, um how we ended up in that farm is that we had to we had to find a venue fucking quick because we obviously we're on we've rented the mobile. We we spunk the budget because you know there we are, mobile, and also we've got we've we've gone parachuted in comes this bloke who's an engineer, who's who's actually just been engineering the Tommy, the film Tommy Sessions, who's been parachuted in as a producer on our session. So we're Jake's running around like a blue ass fligh. I don't quite know how he found it. I think it was friend of a friend who said, Oh, this bloke, you know, he's got a barney, we'll do it for a few bobs. So we ended up setting up in this barn, um, which would which I suppose would have been there again, might have been okay, although the acoustics are a bit, you know, it's as dead as a fucking door now with all the hay and one thing or another. A bit of wood around, but you know, mainly hay. Um and then Ron Nevison turning up going, What the fuck have I let myself in for here and his Rolls Royce, that's right, yeah, with a colour TV and the World Cup coinciding with Wimbledon.
SPEAKER_06That's right.
SPEAKER_08And he had a all he and all uh apart from the fact he didn't want to go down the nasty, smelly, grubby farm with the nasty, smelly, grubby people that play in this fucking nasty, smelly, grubby music. He wanted to see the football and the tennis, was mainly what he wanted to do, and sort of really hang out in the backseat of his roller rather than do anything else. And uh, and yeah, that that's uh that's that's where we were at making that the well, that's my recollection of yeah, Bongo's over balance sessions.
SPEAKER_01I mean scheduled around uh scheduled around the the sports, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, if whether you got whether the feeling had come down upon you, or you got the inspiration, you could wait until that for you and fucking scored a goal. You know, that was it.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I just remember, I just remember loads of mud. That's my my I can remember getting into that going coming out of the barn and going to listen to a playback. You you had to go through like about sort of six inches of mud, you know, and then there was a step up into that thing, you know, and and so and that's that's just for some reason that's the my biggest memory of it is that sort of squidging like you down there for, Pete, you reckon? I can't remember. I mean, I can only guess, like 10 days or something, was it? A couple of weeks, wasn't it? Yeah, I don't know. I seem to remember there being quite a bit of activity back at the house, back at Sue Barber's house. We we had catering.
SPEAKER_07Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_06Oh yes, we did.
SPEAKER_08Yes, I I I was catered for.
SPEAKER_06Exactly.
SPEAKER_08Oh, Malcolm, you like this one. Paul Broadhurst turned up. Oh yeah, come on, pissed, really pissed. So uh uh one of the one of the toys that Ron Nevison had turned up was with a Polaroid, a new Polaroid camera, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. So all sorts of things going on with this uh Polaroid camera. Um, but uh so anyway, Paul Paul Paul Broadhurst turns up pissed, and everyone goes, he's your fucking mate. Get him, you know, in the other room with him, bollocks. So, anyway, so uh all of a sudden I'm out of here, you know, so I can hear all this fucking spills of laughter, people screeching with fucking laughter. And all of a sudden, Liffman rushes in, takes a photo of Paul Broadhurst, and then moments later comes and hands him the Polaroid, the developing Polaroid picture. And as he's as he's looking at it, he's going, Oh, don't don't look much like me. And there's now there's fucking peels and pills of laughter coming in. So what had happened was that that lithman had dropped his pants, taken a picture of his dick, and swap swap the things over. Anyway, there we are. Sorry, I'll just thought I'd tell you that.
SPEAKER_05Oh, those were the days, yeah. Oh, yeah. So so those recordings that got done with Ron Nevison then, uh coupled with the stuff that Mike Nesmith did. Who had the casting vote on what actually finally materialized on Bongos Over Ballum?
SPEAKER_08Yeah, Phil and Phil and Martin. Yeah, that they had the they they had the uh the casting vote over most things. I mean, none of the stuff we'd have done on our own would have got used because um uh I'm sure that that there was some some in it. I'd be surprised if there wasn't something in uh uh Nevison's contract that said you couldn't screw with his production. Yeah, and they'd probably have to uh uh uh to have got um Nesmith's tracks on the album would have taken a little bit of a fiddle, I'd have thought, but but to have the ones that we done ourselves on there in I don't think anyone would have seen at the time would have seen um the rationale in that. Although I've always I've always thought that a lot of them are better, but you know, that's just my that's just my opinion. And uh uh the someone it would have been crazy to leave uh, for instance, truck driving girl off of with that great Red Rose thing on it, and be mad to have left that or used another version. Maybe that's maybe that's what it was, is that the versions that we we tried doing without the benefit of uh Red Rose and uh Mike Nesmith's production just didn't fucking hack it, and it was stupid not to use the uh you know his versions.
SPEAKER_05Hey Dice Man, as a matter of interest, uh you got any recollections of uh time down on the farm and at the mill down that way?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, a few, but uh and uh what one I do recall is um uh a song that uh Phil wrote called All in a Dream. That's one that went ended up on the record, isn't it? But I remember there was a we wanted a sort of uh the sound of waves breaking on at the beginning of the record. And Jake said, it's all right, no, we'll sort that out, don't worry. So um he went to uh I think it was the Who's uh Sound Library or something. The Who were involved somewhere, you mentioned that as a name.
SPEAKER_08Ron Nevison had been recording it.
SPEAKER_01Ron Nevison was it's from via Ron Nevison, okay. And we ended up with this sample, which he he dubbed at the beginning of this uh uh the track, which when we listened back to it, it sounded like uh a tip chop. And I made a comment to that effect, it was duly sort of shouted down shut the fuck up, dice man. And every time I listen to that, I just think tip chop.
SPEAKER_06It was a couple of couple of sabeloids, and uh it was just something frying.
SPEAKER_01There's nothing to do with steam at all. But anyway, yeah, that's a a recollection.
SPEAKER_08It's actually the speed flying. It's it's it they went that they wanted um uh part of uh Nevison's brief on doing this Tommy soundtrack was going and doing a lot of the the actual you know sound effects from one thing or another, yeah, providing the Foley sort of thing for it, yeah. And um he went and set two Neumann mics up on this island, you know, a small island, and then just waited for the tide to come in. And it was like a really stuck, you know, Atlantic bashing and crashing on the fucking rocks. Of course, it doesn't sound like the the lapping uh uh of uh of the yeah, the the lapping waves on the silver sands of the you know, which is what the effect was meant to be. And it's just like this raging fucking surf that does actually sound it's either like chips frying or white noise, it's uh horrendous.
SPEAKER_06No expense spared now. Not at all.
SPEAKER_05Baritone sax and that sort of stuff. But did you start playing that while you were with Chili Willy, or did were you playing a saxophone before that?
SPEAKER_01No, it's a play. I played clarinet for a while at school, and that was it. So that's the only thing I'd ever ever blown. But then no, we bought I bought a um a cheap old saxophone to start playing it when we were doing all the live stuff, just figured out a few few lines, and then uh I'm not sure it's before or after the recording, but uh I eventually ended up buying a saxophone from um the Sax player in uh Kilburn on the High Roads or John Hill. No, Dave, no, no, not John Earl, no David Davy Payne. Davy Payne. And he sold me this, told me this beaten up old saxophone, which actually I've still I've still got and absolutely adore. I've played it a lot since then, but it was uh it turned out to be a sort of quite early uh Selma Mark VI, which you know at the moment are absolutely very collectible, but uh it you know, and I still use it, so it's uh but yeah, that I I kind of started with with chili willy. I've got a saxophone and we we started doing the sort of uh the Louis Jordan type stuff, so that's how it fitted in there.
SPEAKER_06Great. Okay, speaking of speaking of old instruments, I still play the the same drums, these are the chili willy drums, really, yeah. The old white, yeah. There it is. Tasty still still none better, yeah.
SPEAKER_05And actually, Pete, while you're
Barney Bubbles
SPEAKER_05there, um I was gonna raise the subject of uh the other cast of characters around the band, but seeing that marvelous bass drum head behind you by Barney Bubbles, you know, I mean he was such a key figure in the graphics for the band throughout his whole lifetime. Well, um, did you have anything to do with the input for the bass drum head, or did he just dream it up himself?
SPEAKER_06I think he just dreamed it up himself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um there was there was an album. There was an album by this singer called Mary Kay Place at the time, which I had, which I really liked, which had a similar cover. So that might have cropped up in the conversation. Yeah. Um, Barney Bubbles, I mean, God, it no one will ever touch him. You know, the the personality he brought to all these bands, you know, he gave all these bands just expanded their sort of profile, you know. He made all these bands far more interesting than they actually were. And uh, yeah, he's very sadly missed, you know. Yes, that's incredible.
SPEAKER_08Yes, he in conjunction with Jake, he was it, yeah, those two together were you know, as as continued to happen with uh, of course, those two that partnership went on some way beyond uh chili willy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, do you have do you have a connection with um with Revelation? I said I recall some stickers that we had, so it was it's from Revolution, yes. So it's it's all right, okay. Yeah, yeah. I remember I remember the stickers that we we stuck up everywhere, all over, you know. Yeah, the rabbits. Yeah, the rabbits, that's right.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, that's an interesting part of our career. When Barney Bubbles did these stickers of these little pink rabbits, and Jake, who who really should have been an advertising guy, he he sent us out on the tube with boxes of these stickers, and we had to go up and down the escalators at every station, just sticking them up like every 10 feet, and then get back on the train and then go stick some more up and stick some more up in the next station. It was talking very hands-on campaign, you know.
SPEAKER_08Jake had been, he was he he had a job as an under uh uh uh uh um undertaker copywriter, didn't he? Advertising copywriter.
SPEAKER_06Oh, did he?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, undertaker. Yeah oh boy, yeah. So just coming back to that album then Bong goes over ballon. So, what year was that released in relation to the sort of lifespan of the band? Was that 1974? Yeah, and so that comes out and presumably kind of creates a another ripple, and you start doing bigger gigs and moving on. Uh, any kind of noticeable bigger gigs on the horizon at that time that you recall things that might have changed the direction going you know further upwards?
SPEAKER_06I remember
1974 Promotional Tour
SPEAKER_06doing a big festival in Anglesey, um where which was on the cliffs, and the that that was quite high profile, especially because somebody laced all our drinks with LSD, and then halfway through the show, the Hare Krishna's all appeared on stage and got in a row with. Philly.
SPEAKER_07And then it was the guru.
SPEAKER_06There was a guru came on.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, Guru Miraji.
SPEAKER_06At which point I was tripping. And then all the lights on Anglesey came on in the dark. And in my mind, it was just this necklace had just appeared, like from outer space. Meanwhile, there's all these Hare Krishna guys all jumping around. You know, that's the kind of level that we got to.
SPEAKER_08Interesting. I can't remember when what the actual release date of the record was. I know it because the next the next significant thing actually, well, there was something, presumably, in the run up to the end of 74 happens before we embark on the naughty rhythms tour, right? Which is at the beginning of 75, and which is actually we, you know, I suppose the from what I from what I could remember must be the biggest vehicle that we've that we had to promote that record.
SPEAKER_01We supported T-Rex, if we remember. Remember the T-Rex.
SPEAKER_07How could oh man, how can we forget?
SPEAKER_01That was that was brilliant.
SPEAKER_05The elaborate staging.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_05Who wants to go first on that? So Paul Dice.
SPEAKER_01Can I tell you about that? I mean, I remember turning up the first day when they were trying out all this new equipment that he wanted. I mean, it's it was a comeback tour for for Mark Boland. And they had a and they built this elaborate star that was sort of laid flat on the stage. And the idea was that the lights around the star, I think the whole whole idea was that uh at the beginning uh of the set, he would start strumming the the open court, the the chords for uh Ride a White Swan or something like that, one of his opening songs, and he'd be laying on the uh the star, and the star would gradually uh pneumatically driven up. The lights would flash, he'd jump off and start throwing shapes, and the band would come in and all the rest of it. And he tried this thing out during the during the sort of uh the afternoon, and it had a it was a little bit sort of wobbly, and he started cursing and swearing at the guy, and the guy threw oil all over it and it went down. On the actual night, this thing, this thing, we played, and uh this thing sort of came up, and about the last quarter of an inch, it stuck and it released just enough to pop him off. And he had he had sort of uh you know stack hill boots, and of course, I mean a disaster, you're thrown forward on stack hill boots. So he's basically trying to catch up with his uh his feet are trying to catch up with his nose as he hurdled down the this catwalk. Um he but anyway, that was it was uh it was kind of not a good start for him. He was really upset and I came off cursing and swearing, which he was prone to, and a lot of people. But uh that was the that was the opening night. And that was in uh I think that was in Glasgow, was that right?
SPEAKER_06No, it wasn't Glasgow, it was it was um it was it wasn't foot hall leicester.
SPEAKER_01No, no, that was on the way back. I thought we went up north and then worked our way back. Yeah, that was my recollection.
SPEAKER_06No, because I've been there since I I know where it was. It's because it's got those the dressing rooms have got uh it's like a a loose plastic door in between, right? Because because we were watching from uh from uh um a box, and I was with you, Paul, and and we were watching it, and it and it flicked him off, and then he he he had a you know crisis, and they got him off backstage, and we were like, Oh, come on, let's go and see what happened, you know.
SPEAKER_08Oh, yeah, you know, if you don't mind me saying, I think we're conflating two different things here because what you're describing to me, do you remember there was all of a sudden this kid jumped on stage? Everybody thought it was a girl that had run up to hug him and ran up to him and fucking whacked him right around the ear roll, and he's he's uh oh hello, my internet connection is unstable. The um are we all oh yeah, am I am I okay? My internet connection just went. Am I still with you all? Yeah, this so this kid and and hit him, and and his muscle comes, you know, grabs this guy, throws him out, throws him out of the gig down the stairs, boom. He's and somehow or another, little guy gets back in and does the same thing again up on stage. I don't know, fucking hits him. Quite right. Well, this is well, this is where we go backstage to see what is what was happening, and he's he's he's sobbing, he was sobbing, crying his eyes, he's sobbing, yeah, and they're trying to tell him that it was a girl and not a bloke, yeah. That was up there. This kid this kid looked just like David Bowie. He got a and and the other, and the other might I'm sorry to be uh I know I'm fucking hogging. It was a listen, but the but when we I'm sure it was a De Montfoot Hall, was the first gig of the tour, and we turn up there and we've not seen anything to do with whatever it was they did, you know, with their set. Uh, there's all their gears there, they've got risers all over the place, two drummers, da-da-da-da-da-da. And there are two roadies on stage. Oh, it's quite a high stage, and they put a catwalk out leading off the front of the stage, and there's two guys, and there's this uh five-pointed star riser uh with with its perimeter uh outlined in in um uh you know lights, little recessed lights, and the uh on the on the two prongs of the star facing to into the audience, there are two footrests, and as it turns out, there is uh a pneumatic um lever that is controlled from a bottle of CO2 that is over by the monitor desk, and these two guys are actually just setting this up, and so when we get here, this is what's going on, and so anyway, the one they decide to test it out, and this guy climbs on the thing, you know, lays down on the on the star, and the other guy's got ready get ready with a you know thumb thumb valve on the on the bottle to uh and the idea is that as he releases the gas, the the uh the piston you know pushes the the lid of the riser up so that the the eventually it becomes vertical, and whoever's standing on it will just you know jump down onto the stage. But actually, what happens is the guy says, All right, yeah, okay, and the bloke at the desk presses the button and the fucking thing just goes whap like that, and the chat goes flying off the edge of the stage onto the on that was that's my that's my memory of yeah, we're it's pretty hopeless because I now I think about it because I remember seeing him on the star, and then maybe somebody hit him or something, but he lost his footing and he went off the back of it, and he was like in the bass drum.
SPEAKER_06Oh, that's when it was flat, yeah. It was flat, yeah, yeah. And he went off the back of it, and he was just he was in the bass drum, and then he went backstage, and they were he was crying, and that's all right, and the band carried on, and the band actually the band without him were better. Well, they were they were grooving, yeah.
SPEAKER_08I mean, and yeah, he wanted to get them off, didn't he?
SPEAKER_06Get those guns off stage. Yeah, he was he was sobbing in his dressing room, yeah. And we're all listening at the mall, this folding wall, and he's like, and he stopped crying, and he was like, get those guns off stage.
SPEAKER_08Just as a uh the you know, a footnote to that story, the um of uh my one about the that it was that that provoked um or meant that every night when it was you know it was here he is, here he comes, or quick, let's go and see. We'll wait for it to happen again. It might happen again.
SPEAKER_06We're really lucky. But that was the tour. That was the tour where Paul Dice Man Bailey was was coerced into becoming uh sex symbol. Oh, yeah, that's right. Do you remember you?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, but he can't forget.
SPEAKER_01Man, don't need to be reminded of that. And there was a lot of like, I'm not wearing that fucking dude. Fucking nylon. It was nylon, man.
SPEAKER_06It was horrible, and you had to sing like Lover So Bad or something.
SPEAKER_01Like, we we got no no, that was Phil, that was definitely Phil Son.
SPEAKER_06Well, there was one choo chieboogie or something, wasn't it? There was something soppier than that, I think. Oh, wasn't it? Oh fuck. Might have been posing. No, no, no, no. No, there was you had you you had uh a spotlight, like this is it, you know, like is the girls are gonna go crazy. And they didn't, as it turned out.
SPEAKER_05It's obviously safe to say that the uh the the opening slot on the Mark Bowl and tour didn't exactly have the desired effect on yeah, it was very entertaining.
SPEAKER_01But there's another it's another another recollection actually, which uh uh he I remember him, uh and I think this was de Montfort Hall, but I remember at some point he he would sort of sacrifice his guitar or his uh his amp, he'd do something, you know, one of those sort of sacrificial things that was that was cool at the time. But at this particular gig, he flung his guitar into the audience. He really gave it a sort of a really good throw. And I just remember seeing this uh this guitar skipping off of people's heads, and it was just leaving holes in the audience. It got it got pretty much to the back of the hall and leaving leaving blood and teeth uh in its wake. And um uh the and then Tim the road is piling in to to retrieve this guitar, which is obviously being uh being shredded by uh you know, anyone could grab a bit of it, but uh it was absolute carnage. It was just it was horrible. I mean, but very funny from where we were.
SPEAKER_06And that was before the naughty rhythms, was it was, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yes, yes. That that's that was the that was the that was the promotional gambit, you know. Oh, we're gonna promote your album with this. Uh um we did oh we did.
SPEAKER_05I remember seeing you doing an opening act for Ron Wood at the Kilbin's other girl.
SPEAKER_08That would have been the same, that would have been the same, um, in the same period. Yes, that's right.
SPEAKER_01The uh what were they called the what the uh the new barbarians? New barbarians, that's right.
SPEAKER_08And and the biggest line of coke I've ever seen in my life that stretched with they had they had um they had uh uniform backlight, which was a four four twelve ampeg cabinets with ampeg heads, and they had a guy with hunting horn that had been stalking the stage all day, and I kept thinking, I wonder what he does. And then when it came to when it came to the appropriate moment, I found out he just took the end off the hunting horn, started pouring the cocaine at one end of the amps and walked right across the stage, just pouring out a fucking great line of cocaine. Uh, which and when eventually the uh the the turn came on, Keith Richards was uh uh over my side to the stage, and he sort of looks at his amplifier and goes across it as though he's actually going to alter the tone control and just shoves it. I never seen you know, because you know 1974. I don't think I'd seen any uh sort of serious cocaine action. Um and he just shoved his face in this amplifier, just snorted up the old fucking amps worth of never seen anything like it before, or well, before.
SPEAKER_01Didn't Kieran get some leftovers and then went on uh and that that's what uh I think he took the is that when he crashed the van? I can't remember. In in uh what was it? One of the um I don't know, one of the squares in London. But he ended up that was me. That was earlier on, was it?
SPEAKER_08Oh, right, okay.
SPEAKER_06Oh the hammer van, yeah, where we where we got that where where we got a bit of aeration in the top, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yes, I hit I hit the uh the thing of the cinema.
SPEAKER_06The awning.
SPEAKER_08And yes, that's right. And I had to uh I had to pretend I was Paul Bailey because I didn't have a driving license.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I got away with it.
SPEAKER_06But it was good actually, because we used to sleep in there, and you could you could sort of stick your head out of it, like we, you know, you didn't.
SPEAKER_01Well there's no ventilation at all. It wasn't meant for human beings. We used to go to gigs sitting on you know on the ones. On the RSD base bins.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no.
The Naughty Rhythms Tour
SPEAKER_05So what I want to move on to quickly next is uh the naughty rhythms tour, and whether or not, yeah, before we get into that, and who was on it, whether anybody of you had any foreboding of the fact that it might be coming to the end of the road, or whether it was all great, this is another step up in the right direction, and uh brighter things laid down the road ahead. What's your uh recollections of that? Rick, let's start with a naughty rhythms tour, who was on it.
SPEAKER_06Well, I don't remember any foreboding or anything. I was I was quite excited about it. I love Kokomo and uh and I love Dr. Feel Good. And weren't weren't we on the Feel Goods bus?
SPEAKER_08We we were off uh on and off the Feel Goods bus.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Sometimes we traveled on it and sometimes or were we I don't know we I think we had our it depends on where it was and where we were going. I know I know I remember I remember going to Cornwall in it and Jake being very pissed and having to go and knock this hotel up. And the Lee Brillo and and uh and and Chris Fenneck suddenly came as we were trying to check in with this bloke who was very worried that all these blokes had turned up so late in the day. Suddenly saw this figure being dragged in with his arms around these two other guys, with his feet dragging toes dragging behind him, completely out of his head. And he oh, he'd found the giant jar of marmite on the feel goods bus and decided it was sort of the new brew cream and fixed himself a lovely hairdo. But uh yes, that was uh that was a feel goods bus. But no, it's business as usual, wasn't it? Or or it was more of more of the same. Here we go. Oh, here we go. This sounds like fun, you know. Big old Jake had bigged this fucking idea up, got everybody to cough up. It was and and it was a really big publicity splash. It was um, you know, a smart idea, it was one of the best.
SPEAKER_06Uh well, because Kokomo were managed by O'Rourke, weren't they? It was, yeah, yeah. So there was like a we had a good PA and stuff as well. Yeah, it was yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, they had a very nice bus as well. Very, very nice bus. But um, yeah, that would it was all fine, wasn't it? Really?
SPEAKER_06I mean, the feel good sort of stole the show a bit.
SPEAKER_08They they well, they they they they didn't, they did. I mean, you know, they didn't, they didn't. Um they certainly did in reviews, that's for sure. They, you know, they were getting much better press out of it than we were. And and and in fairness, I mean, you know, with although I just said what I said, they you know, in fairness, they probably got a much uh snappier uh, you know, they were a snappier act than we were toward, and and possibly uh you know, more um ahead of the game in terms of what was about to happen.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And uh how did it go with the uh headlining? Was it the same performance schedule each night, or did you take it?
SPEAKER_01It rotated. It it seemed to rotate. And we had a you know, it we took it in turns to be at the top or the first or the last one's on.
SPEAKER_05And again, for the benefit of the people listening to this, what sort of venues were you playing at with an entourage like that? Because you know, and what was the ticket price? Yeah, there's people an idea of the economics of it back in those days.
SPEAKER_01Uh it's probably all of one and six. 75p.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, I think it was.
SPEAKER_02It was 75.
SPEAKER_0875p. It were they were reasonably you know big gigs. Um, it was it was underwritten by the by three record companies. I think the ticket prices could be could afford to be sort of like on the low side, and that was the idea, really, was to to get not only the the faithful in, you know, because we all each group had an audience, uh, but it was to entice their mates who you know would take a chance on what they said was good or whatever to fill the place up. And it were, I mean, yeah, we didn't they were good houses everywhere we played. I don't remember a shitty shitty house anywhere.
SPEAKER_05What happened at the end of the tour then? More gigs.
SPEAKER_08No, no, because the the the final gig of the naughty rhythms tour, which was at the um uh LCU um in Ga is that what's that next to Tottenham Court Road at the place there? Um was the last gig we ever did.
SPEAKER_06That was the end of it.
SPEAKER_08It was that was the end, it was uh very sad. And for some reason or another, I ended up playing bass with the fielders.
SPEAKER_05So so when you when you say it was the end of it that you come in the last night of a tour and suddenly it just finishes
The End of the Road
SPEAKER_05like that.
SPEAKER_08Well, it it we know we this bit have you got any recollection of this, Pete, about how we actually found out it was going to uh hit the skids?
SPEAKER_06No, no, I d I don't. I was just thinking, I was just thinking to myself, how why did it? I mean, what was it well?
SPEAKER_08How about you, Paul? Do you have you got any memories of of uh right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, I mean my recollection, and I might have got this completely wrong, but the the feeling was that it was it was Jake who who sort of at that point I think he he'd spotted feel goods and thought this is you know this is this the band I want to be with. And there was that and and that was uh I I remember I it was he that told me that you know that was that was it. And then I remember having uh talking to uh Martin and Phil about well, where do we go from here? And it it seemed to be sort of wait and see, and then it just it just fizzled.
SPEAKER_08But I think there's I I I certainly I think I had it spelt out to me by Jake, and I'm just trying to think whether I I you know, I I don't think I was on my own, but I might have been. But I don't think I was, and it it was it was like right, okay. Um I think he's he sort of put it, he said, Well, you know, this is uh this uh you know, you missed your chance here, blah blah blah. They're the ones that are gonna do it. Um not only that, um Martin and Phil have got uh you know, they they've got this irreconcilable. sort of shit going on that uh where Martins found out that Phil's been living off his some sort of indictment or this that and the other which looking back on it I in fact I yeah it wasn't actually long after that I thought I don't know I mean it might that might have been true but I what was what the truth the truth of it was that Jake Jake's interest in in every in doing for us had run its course yeah that's right and and so that was that the next thing was uh which I felt very aggrieved about at the time I'll I'll uh address that in a minute the I felt very aggrieved about it because we were left without anything everything went the our transport went uh the gear went a lot we didn't we couldn't do anything where there was a chance that if we wanted to we could have continued as a band with Phil but without Martin or with Martin but without Phil and neither of those seem to make any sense and especially without any you know anything to do. The next thing is that the uh I see that the the the uh the uh Kurzles are I that our our uh gigging wagon has now become theirs and it's you know and I'm I'm even more aggrieved and and Jake's gone off with the I think the the the the reality of it was that the the to uh wind up the finances of Chili Willy as they were all that stuff needed to be flogged off the pen needed to be paid the account needed the accounts needed to be shut and a deadline needed to be drawn underneath is what actually was the reality of I think of what happened.
SPEAKER_01I remember we got we we got a cut of the van when they sold the van we all got I mean not very much I don't think but we all got something from the sale of the van well anyway we had paid for the PA the PA was still there what happened to that you know I think well I think that was a that was a debt wasn't it that was forever a debt so I mean it was sounds like a a really abrupt halt to everything which is why I started off that little segment by asking you if anybody had any foreboding of it because you know I guess once you're out on a tour like that you know you're you're doing the same thing all the time every night eaten up with the the amusement of it all and suddenly to get the end of it you know it's hard enough getting to the end of a tour anyway and uh deciding what to do next but to suddenly find that it hit the skids must have been extremely difficult to deal with with you know just a flat stop like that.
SPEAKER_08Personally it was for me I I was distraught you know really it was like because I I felt like the rug had been pulled from under my feet for and for you know hang on a minute what what did I do sort of thing what what what happened here? And but and with no there was no way of climbing back aboard anything. There was no way of taking any advantage of of of you know of your investment really of uh in in in what you'd been doing. You couldn't yeah because there wasn't anything to carry on it had been completely kibl there was uh you know I I I still kind of wonder what that uh the the the the the the the uh the uh animosity that suddenly grew up between Martin and Phil was I mean they kept that a a big secret all the way all the way round that tour I mean you know I'd never heard a the and and you'd think well all that time you spend together in a van all those miles you'd have heard something you might have heard some little inkling of yeah you can't you get that fucking off your fucking you know but no not not a bit of it not nothing so I think I'd I'd heard him I mean we sort of knew that Phil was getting that extra money but I don't remember it being a big deal or anything it was just it might have been a bit I think it might have been a bigger deal to Jake than it was to anybody else but uh maybe he felt that he shouldn't have been taking the money out of you know which I I I don't see I couldn't have uh countenanced that as a good idea to actually the bloke because he's happens to have you know been lucky enough to get you know I think it's only fair if you if you if you work in a summon you get well he was yeah I mean he was hardly flying private or anything I mean no absolutely not no it probably meant that he had some better quality pot than uh you know yeah sorry to just go back on that but you didn't really make it clear what that extra bit that he was getting might have been that's uh kind of lost yeah well he had a trust his father died when he was about 12 and and I think there was a trust fund that uh that actually you know that he that he had an income from that that well none of us would have I mean would I have fucking cared very much if I'd if I'd have heard I'd have gone oh well he has he has you know maybe I'll tap him up review I mean these things all right um but uh no didn't know at all okay
After Chilli Willi
SPEAKER_08well look I think uh it's you know that that abrupt halt just went over the edge of the cliff yeah there's nothing much you can add to that I think uh it's probably a good place to draw uh this to a conclusion and say it's kind of worth noting what you each of you did immediately afterwards after the thing just kind of stopped like that so let Paul based start with what you did first just a matter of interest um I went and I I I tried uh I went for an audition with um uh cozy pal who called told me a cunt and told me to fuck off um cheeky cunt as a matter of fact um and then I I was looking um I ran into the people that did um Rafe what's it the guy did the sack solo on Baker Straight and that yeah and and that kid that that kid from Georgia's only 22 that played that fucking slap bass I ran into him and thought oh damn you know and so I thought I'd start looking for a a funk group to see that I could sort of get my funk shops together and I did and that's where I met Bobby Irwin and uh Mark Hills uh and but then I span out of that six months later in um uh ended up in Rugelair with Danny Adler Well I was I I got lucky because when we did the zigzag concert uh the band on after us was this American singer called John Stewart and he showed up with a bass player and then when he got to England they realized that it was a bigger deal.
SPEAKER_06So I think basically just because we were the band on before that I got called from um RCA Records and they said would you sit in on drums with John Stewart? So they sent me his albums and I learned the songs and I did it and then it went it went it was good and then afterwards I in the dressing room he sort of foolishly said to me like if ever you want to come to America just give me a call you know but be me being so young and innocent like when Chili Willy broke up I actually did you know I had his phone call and I I went in the the phone booth in Holland Road with a stack of 10p bits and it I remember it was pouring with rain and I shoved him in and I got dialed this number and I got him and it he just had an argument with his drummer like he was on the rebound with his drummer and I said oh hello you remember me like you said if ever you wanted a drummer to give you a call and he was like and then he just said something like you know how does 200 bucks a week sound or something and I would I was just like I ran into Judy like just you can't fucking believe it like you know what's just happening and um and so he flew us out there I mean I had to pay him back the money but but um he flew us out there so I was out in LA for two years which was amazing you know it was unbelievable. So that was good.
SPEAKER_01Not bad about you Paul yeah I kind of well I probably went about two months without really I mean just sort of uh furning people up I'd spoke to Clive Langer at some point that uh when I I think I'd met him through was it deaf school he used to play with any which we'd seen on the on the circuit and he he was saying look you know do you want to come and join join our band and I'm gonna start a band up but I I live in Liverpool and at the time I was kind of uh you know married got a kid and you know we'd sort of so it seemed Liverpool seemed uh quite a a long a big move for us you know not like Pete where foot loose footloose and fancy free but you know and very mobile it was a bit more difficult for us so I eventually ended up with a uh in flavor of a band called um a guy called uh Steve uh C. Mandela who in a band called uh Bonton Roulet which we sort of do uh New Orleans type stuff but it was Steve's also a very good writer he writes some very good songs we did the circuit same sort of circuit where we started out with um uh with uh uh Julie Willy really I mean the pub circuits and stuff a lot a lot of South London menus but that kind of fills all out but uh you know at the time we had uh we had some uh very good personnel who sort of joined the band and left um uh so yeah that that was really that's kind of what I did and then eventually stopped playing all together and just sort of played semi bro for whoever would uh want to be a saxophone player so that was me great well listen gentlemen thank you very much for your time with us here I think uh it's gonna be a very interesting uh experience for people listening into this eventually and hearing what it's like being on the inside of some of that stuff because yeah that a lot of these a lot of these stories have never been told they never got out and it's such a long time ago now if we hadn't taken the opportunity to get it down here it'd be gone forever maybe so uh I do appreciate you making the effort to check in and dig deep into those memory banks.
SPEAKER_05Um yeah I'm not sure what we'll do about editing it I might just push the stop button and go well there you go that was it a bit like the end of the the naughty rhythms toy that's it button button there you go another one bites the dust stay tuned for more adventures with other rascals so until next time I guess it's goodbye Nashville hello Camden Town
