Edwin Starr - War...
What's the first record
you want to talk about, that made you?
Well, this one, I suppose...
The Beatles Twist and Shout EP...
that was one of the very first records,
it might be the first record I bought,
with my own pocket money, when I was a kid.
I bought it
from the washing machine
shop in Oldham.
It wasn't a record shop.
What they used to be was like
Radio Rentals or something
where you rented your TV from,
and washing machine and radiograms.
And they used to have
the top 20 in little pegboard
sort of partitions and stuff.
So that was that.
And that was good.
John Lennon's vocal on
Twist and Shout is fantastic.
It's a real slice of rock and roll.
What impact did that
have on the young Glen then?
When you heard that,
what did it do to you?
Oh, I thought I'd immediately
start the Sex Pistols...
We're going back to the early sixties now.
I remember paraffin heaters
I remember
icicles on the inside of the windows.
I remember having a tin bath.
But that was a fantastic time
musically, that's
when all the bands, you know,
like the Kinks and the Who
the Yardbirds and Small Faces
and the Stones came through.
And then there was a fantastic
TV show called Ready Steady Go,
which I don't think has ever been bettered.
Dusty Springfield was on it
a lot, and she got hip
and kind of
discovered Tamla Motown and soul
and Stax music.
You know, you'd see
playing live, you'd see
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
and Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.
It was fantastic. What's not to like?
All those songs they wrote,
I mean,
it was a good yardstick for me.
They're all kind of like mini operas.
You know, all the songs that were hits
that were a bit hipper stuff,
you know, as well
as being a perfect slice of three minute pop
they was all about something,
you know, they weren't
all: bring down a government or blah, but
you know, you could really
nail what the topic
of the song was about and that's important
in song writing,
you know, is to be clear
and concise and sum it up
in three minutes.
That's what I always try to do.
Whether I succeed or not is another matter.
But I have written a few.
So I think that's
where it kind of comes from.
Certainly one of the best
gigs that I ever saw
was the tour for this.
And his band was
Hunt and Tony Sales
as the rhythm section...
I think it was Scott Thurston on guitar
and David Bowie playing the piano
with a pot plant on it and a pint of beer.
That was great.
Well, it was his
not come back tour
but it was the new Iggy kind of thing.
He was playing in London but they did a
warm up gig at Friars in Aylesbury.
Nearly all of the punks in town
went out to that.
I drove there, in my little sports car
with my girlfriend at the time,
with the bass player
from the Heartbreakers, Billy Rath.
He spent all the time trying to chat up my girlfriend
in my car.
But the gig was great.
To see Bowie playing piano
when he didn't have to,
but wanted to, was kind of cool
You know when you're
15 or 16, and you start going to
discotheques we used to have
then, there was a chain of places
in London called the Bird's Nest
and there was the Chelsea Bird's Nest,
there was the Fulham
Bird's Nest in North End Road.
The girls used to drink
Pernod and blackcurrant.
And the blokes used to drink snakebite
with a shot of blackcurrant on top.
Everyone had these black glasses.
Glasses - not glasses.
But, you know, drink glasses and
the ultra violet light
would make them
look a bit funny too.
And then you have a couple of them,
and you're a little bit squiffy, at that age.
And I always found at the top end of my hearing
went a bit
And the only thing I could really hear
was the bassline.
And that's when all the Tamla Motown
stuff was going on, you know,
Especially stuff like
the Temptations, you know,
Psychedelic Shack,
Ball of Confusion
And I'd pick up on that. That's what I liked.
Edwin Starr - War.
There's lots of little things
that add up to what you're doing.
It was one of the
very first albums I bought
myself and I bought it
because, see the cover
it's like a kind of a facsimile
of an old 78 record.
Look, it's
even got real stitching down it.
Then I actually ended up playing
with the Faces.
So that was my all-time favourite band
and I was in them for a bit.
And I got paid for it!
And what was that like?
So for them to have been so big for you
when you were younger
and then to find yourself on stage,
I think it was a boon... for them.
You know,
I learned to play
along with Ronnie Lane's bass parts
but what got me
the gig was I became friends with Ian McLagan
the keyboard player
and he actually played with my band,
the Rich Kids, and did a tour with us.
And I said,
'Look, if you're going to reform your band
'which you're thinking of doing,
'you know that I know that you know,
'that I'm the right bloke for the job.
'so put a word in for us.'
And he did.
As things evolve,
he said, 'Glen
'are you sure you're up for this?'
I said, 'I learned to play along with these songs.'
I said, 'I know these songs backwards...'
He went, 'Oh great.'
I said, 'it's just forwards I struggle with.'
He laughed. And that got me the gig more than anything.