Kevin Godley

of video work here in the late nineties. Earlier in late nineties with you too, and I was going backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards a lot with my wife, and we fell in love with the place it is, at least back then. It was so radically different to living outside London that we fell in love with it. Everything is quiet here, you can get to meet interesting people in the art world much easier than you could

in London. Um, and we were looking to move house anyway, and we thought, why not, let's give it a shot. So here we are and we haven't regretted it for one second. And how long have you been there? And you can go a little bit deeper into the differences. Gosh,

I think we've been here for about fourteen years. The difference, I guess is London is a very busy city, always has been, and if you want to make a meeting with somebody, you call up their pa and they say, well, you know, someone star has a window for twenty minutes next Thursday. Here you're bumping to someone who knows his uncle and you can meet him in the pub next Saturday night. It's it's much more. It's much less formal here. Everybody is so much more accessible here. And is there

work there like there is in London? There is For me, it's no different. I mean that the main difference between working here and in London has changed so vastly over the years because a lot of what a lot of what I can do is done remotely anyway. If there's a shoot to be done in London, for instance, then I travel to London and I have a production team

there that I use. Obviously I haven't been able to do that for a little while, but I also have a production team here, and if I'm lucky enough, the artist will come here and we can shoot here. So it's it's been really been really good. In other words, I have a lovely, gentle and quiet lifestyle, but I can move to wherever is appropriate for when I have to be somewhere. What's been keeping you busy recently, Kevin? Recently?

Oh gosh, you've been in the last two or three years or so, Yes, because you know and how you've been affected by COVID. Well, I haven't really been affected by COVID, which is the strangest to say. I mean, both myself and my wife haven't had COVID. We know a few people who have, but we live a very quiet life and I do most of my work from

home anyway. UM but probably one of the main things that I did in twenty twenty, I released my first solo album, which was recorded here, called Muscle Memory, which was an exciting thing for me to do. I never made a solo album before UM and that was that was a big thrill. That was a big thrill. I got extremely well reviewed, which was which was a buzz. I also co wrote and directed a pilot episode for

a historical drama podcast about Irish music. UM. I started experimenting with a system I called corrupted files, which is for want of a better term, accidental artwork that's derived from my video work, and started exploring n f T

and physical options for both UM. Also in one I joined a new games company called Athena Athena Worlds, which is led by UM extremely well known gaming programmer called Jane Whittaker who did Alien Versus Predator, and also a senior producer from Candy Crush called Emily Amslet anyone in the gaming industry will know who they are immusically, and they're driven by UM new revolutionary tech which hopefully will revolutionize the games industry. And I'm a non exact director

and creative consultant for a Sena. I've also recently joined a fascinating company called Group of Few Moans, which is very very contemporary company. They are a community of industry leading strategists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers, creative directors, researchers, accession. We're like a herd of cattle, although we're not cattle.

We're all very very clever and very smart. But the idea is that any any group of these people can be selected for any particular project that comes in UM to create the perfect group to deliver high quality outcomes from different for a range of different kind of clients. We work remotely, and I've never been involved in anything like this before I am. Towards the end of last year, I was I was frustrated in that there are so many things that I do and I have a finger

in so many different creative pies. I was looking for either a person or an organization to kind of represent all the different aspects of my career. And this group of people got in touch with me via a guy who I've met before a number of years ago. Love the guy called Rob Noble who invited me to become part of group of humans. And it is. It is a great It's a great bunch of people, a great bunch of people. I can't tell you what we're doing because we're all under N D A S. But it's

it's a real buzz. It's it allows me to explore the more commercial side of what I'm capable of doing. Okay, before we leave Dublin, I have to address the situation with Ironland, which is divided in Brexit. What's your whole take on Brexit and how it should work out? Fucking nightmare. I never understood the point of it. Ever. I mean, I don't know, it's crazy. I'm not a very politically minded person, but I kind of don't see the wind of it. It's it's divisive on a very day to

day level. If you order anything online. Um, we used to be able to get loads of stuff that we can no longer get now from from the UK. Um, and you have to pay extra tax when it comes into the country. It takes twice as long. I mean, that's the immediate effect of it, and it's just boring. I don't get it. Okay, let's go back a few years. How did you ultimately get into video directing? Sort of

by accident, like most things in my life. Um, as you know, we were we were in a band, quite successful band, and when lor Creom and I left the band, we were still making records, but we weren't a touring band, so we never appeared anywhere live. We never did any shows.

But we had a record coming out on a single that was called an Englishman in New York, not to be confused with the song of the same name by Sting, and we kind of figured that the only way we could promote it would be to make a little film of us performing it in some way. And we didn't think for one minute that the record company would go for the idea, because back then there was no video

industry as such, there was no MTV. But we came up with a sort of cock eyed storyboard and went to meet somebody at the label and lo and behold. I said, yes, you can make it, but you can't direct it because you you don't know a camera from a camel. So we'll have to get a proper guy into do that, which which they did, and joined the process of making the film. A couple of lightbulbs went

off over our heads. It was an extraordinary experience. We were ex art students, as you probably, and suddenly we were involved in something that we instinctively felt we could contribute to. We could do this, we thought, and much to the director's annoyance, through the editing process, we started to stick our oar in and suggest things and and and say, well, what happens if you press this button and you go no, no, And we pressed a button

and something interesting would happen that nobody expected. In other words, we kind of took over, which must have been a pain for the director. For the proper director, but we knew that this was a very exciting thing to be

involved with. So we put we were performing, which took up most of the day, and we were listening and we were watching and we were learning, and that was the first thing we kind of did um and we got a lot of credit for it because the finished result made the hit, made the record a hit, not in the UK, but all over Europe. Would you remember the budget and you remember where it was exhibited and people became aware of it. It was shown a lot in Europe, all over Europe and it was a hit

record in Europe. I can't remember the budget, but it can't have been a lot of money. There wasn't a lot of money around in those days for these things. So what I actually happened from there is a guy called Steve Strange who was just signed to our label Polydor with his band called Visage. Is the same Steve

Strange who recently passed Yes unfortunately, Yes. We used to from the clubs in London and he wanted us to direct his first video for his first single for Visage, which was called Fay to Grow and which is a lovely compliment. I think you have to argue the point somewhat with the low but we got to do it. The budget for that I distinctly remember as being five thousand pounds two and a half thousand, of which went to the makeup artist. But that was our first professional

gigs as as video directors. And the rest is this history. Okay, Well, as I say, you're let's go a little slower into the rest. So you make that video. You did one for your own act. It was very successful. What happened with this video, Well, it did the trick um. It proved the point that a good film or a good video or whatever they used to call it in those days,

could make a difference. And it was a hit in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Scandinavia and France, in Germany, but didn't do a damn thing in England, which was such a shame. But it taught us a hell of a lot. It's it flipped the switch for us because we'd left the band and we were making records and I think subconsciously we were looking for something else that we could get our teeth into and this came along. It's just the right time. Now we're in the history of MTV. Does

this happen quite early We're talking the early eighties. Um, And I think we made an Englishman in New York before MTV became a reality anywhere. Um. I think MTV launched. Was it in nineteen August? First one? Okay, so we were relatively close. We were relatively close, I thinking Englishmen in New York those towards the end of the seventies. But visage. I guess what I'm asking here is, did you see MTV on the horizon when it happened? Did

it change your vision? Did it queed a lot of opportunity? Totally? We didn't see it coming, and then we heard about it. We heard about it launching in America first, which it did, of course, and we started to get some interesting commissions um from America. Probably the most significant one was for Herbie Hancock Rocket UM. And things began to change radically from that point, not just for us, but for the

whole music industry. From our perspective and from all the other directors and producers that were working in this new medium, it suddenly meant that there was a global art gallery where all their work could be seen. There had been nothing like this before ever. So the other thing that

I think was hugely influential. Was that a lot of the more christially acclaimed and influential films on MTV We're coming out of the UK and the stylistic elements of those films made an impact on everything that was made from that point on. And a lot of a lot of bands, a lot of American bands particularly, were a little bit uncomfortable with this. They were purists, they were musicians. Man, we don't want to make films, We don't want to

tell stories, we just want to play. There was there was a little bit of resistance to that initially, uh, but things gradually began to change. They began to accept it and take it on board and really use it well. It took a little time though for it to sink in. Let's talk about Rocket, So how did you that's a legendary video. How did you come up with the concept? And ultimately this became your main work? So at what

point did it become luquidi? What were the budget? Rocket was an interesting one again, just a series of lucky accidents. I was watching a TV news program, local TV news program UM and they were showing a piece about a sculptor and artist called Jim whit Ing. And his work, which were these strange hydraulic robots, and it was probably

about a five minute piece. And as soon as it started on the TV, I I dived at the video recorder and taped what I could of it because I found it absolutely fascinating and something was it was wonderful about it, incredible um. But before then the rocket track had landed on our desk asking us to come up with an idea for it. So when I saw this and took the video tape over to Lowell's place, we

we realized that rocket sounded like this looked okay. There was there was no doubt in our minds about that. And and back then things were relatively free. There was no marketing department, there was no there was no real awareness of the power of video. These were just films that were made and nobody really knew if it hadn't make any difference or not to the success of a record.

So how it worked was you sent a track to a director whose work you liked and asked them to make a film and gave them a little bit of money to do it. You were never asked to compete with other directors or sending a written treatment. You maybe have a conversation or two, but we were allowed to do pretty much what the hell we liked, and we had enough faith in the idea to actually set it

up and go for it. We had Herbie fly over a day and we filmed him separately because we knew we'd be putting him into the finished film in a TV monitor. But nobody, including us to a degree, understood at that stage what the Finnish film would look like. We were we were just busking, but we were busking with confidence. It was really only when we hit the edit suite with all this vast amount of material, and I'd say vast because back then you couldn't play the

material backwards. You had to you had to retransfer all the films of video backwards, all the footage. You couldn't hit a button and it would go backwards. So we had an enormous amount of footage and I think the edit was probably about an eighteen to twenty edit, solid in an edit suite, very smoky edit suite um And when we finished it, we looked at it and we looked at each other and we said, they're gonna fucking kill us, because I mean, from our perspective, it was extraordinary. Um,

but there's been nothing like that shown anywhere before. And so we we were, you know, we thought, you know, fuck it, let's send it to them and and and and see what happens. And predictably, it was like, don't they They didn't quite understand what they were watching, if that makes any sense. UM, But they didn't know they had something. What they didn't know and what we didn't know is that that's something I was going to turn out to be something significant in kicking the medium forward.

And we want a lot of awards at the first MTV show for that one particular video. It was and it taught us that you know, believe in your instincts. You know what you're doing. Even though you don't know that you know what you're doing, you do know something that they don't know. So just keep doing this because you're good at it. Let's go back a couple of years. Tell me the story of the making of the video

for Duran Duran's Girls and Film. They're they're a very clove a bunch of guys still are and as is their management. They were very savvy and um in wanting to break America. They we're keeping an eye on what was going on in the clubs as well as what was going on in TV. And what was going on in the clubs was that they were playing these new fangled video things in the clubs, and some of them were kind of uncensored because there were no there's no

censorship in the clubs. The rauncher they was, the more daring they were, the weirder they were, the more they get played. And so as part of the brief for Girls on Film, we were told to create a version that was to be played in clubs, primarily in clubs, so they were kind of kind of coming out America from underneath, not from in front. So that's what we did.

It just so happened that that and and and the TV Cup was a little time, as you know, but the full version was kind of probably wouldn't get made today. There's very sexy, very raunchy, very daring for its time, and the words started to spread, as that sometimes happens, and it was all part of this this growth, this strange upheaval that was going on in the music business. People were getting excited about the power of the music video and it became a thing. Had you end up

working with the Police. Um. We we used to record in the same studio, strangely enough, near Well where Luell lived at the time, in a place called Leatherhead, which sounds like a heavy metal man. UM a little studio UM called Sorry Sound, which was run by a guy who was producing the Police at the time, and they were working there and we just kind of meat every now and again we finished a session, they start a session.

And when we came into our first album as Godly and Cream, Nigel Nigel Grave was the guy I'm talking about. He played us the stuff he'd been recording with the Police and it kind of made our hair sound upon it and just three people playing and singing, whereas we were messing around with all sorts of peculiar sounds and and since and goodness what Um, there were these three guys that were that were that had it that magic stuff that everybody wants to find. And that's kind of

where we met them. And at this point we we this was prior to us getting into music video really um. But when they when they had made it big and they wanted to change their style on film, they called us. UM. They were doing hugely well all over the world and in America, and the album that Every Breath You Take was on. They wanted to present it in a more sophisticated way, more interesting way, and they asked us if we'd be interested in making a film for it, and

of course we were. The interesting thing is that we were all They were thinking along a certain line and we were thinking along certain lines, but we never really got together to talk about it until we flew over to la to meet them at the record label, and all our ideas kind of coalesced. The idea of doing it in black and white, the idea of holding on things for an enormous amount of time as opposed to cutting every second, which most videos did at the time,

was exactly where they wanted to go. Something that was subtle, something that was delicate, something that was powerful. Um. It was an extraordinary, uplifting experience for us, a huge kick up the ladder. There were a number of of shoots around about that time, and there was Herbie, there was Every Breath You Take. In fact, we did two more for the Police on the same album. But that was a big kick in the bomb for us up the ladder.

That made us, for want of a badder description video starts not something we were aiming to be, but it made us significant in the medium, and how did the change your life and career made us feel good? The budgets got a little bit bigger, and it gave us a little bit more wait in terms of presenting ideas to people. I think the industry was starting to understand, at least the marketing people within the industry, We're beginning to understand the power of a music video and how

it could actually help a single become a hit. And therefore, when they came to us that they knew if they were coming to us, we weren't going to do what they told us to do, and we were trusted to a degree to deliver them something that was original, that was different, but had a quality that was going to help the record be a success. And we used to push that home. That was that was the buzz for us. In a sense, it wasn't It wasn't about the success.

It was about being allowed to try something that we would dearly like to see on the screen and sort of, shall we say, eight times out of ten it did the job. How did you feel when you'd make a successful video? Frodact and then they would end up working with somebody else for the next video. It didn't happen that often, at least not initially, particularly in the police's case. We we did every breath and we did the following

to videos. But I think what was happening the industry as an industry was was maturing and more people we're coming into the industry. More directors were realizing that you know, as well as the commercials that they did, as well as the films that they did, this was an area where they could be free or a little freer than everything else, and they could try some bizarre ideas out that they may not be able to try in some

of the other area areas of their work. So I wouldn't say it was becoming crowded, but it was becoming populated with a lot of different kinds of directors and so there was more choice for people. And also, don't forget at the time, because labels and management people were now understanding the power of the music video. They were thinking, Okay, well this is a great song. Who can we go to?

Does this guy that does this team? There's godling cream, there's so and so on the so and so and they had a number of show reels to look at, and they could then choose who they would like to make their film. And they could also go to more than one set of individuals and say, listen, guys, this is how much money. We have come up with an idea for this, and we will choose the winner to make the film. It was becoming exactly what you would

expect a successful industry to become. So you made these videos with law How do you split up the responsibilities? What did he do? What did you do? We kind of both did everything, which was kind of messy sometimes, but it was I think everything we did in music video we approached pretty much the same way as we would if we were making a record or if we were writing a song. There was no the lines were blurred between the two of us um and it worked

for a time, it worked really, really well. Um. It was only later towards the end of our relationship where we we both had different kinds of ideas that we wanted to do that it became a little bit of a problem. But the initial push, the initial few years during THEES was was extremely productive and extremely joyful. It was we had a blast. I have to tell you it was an absolute blast. When it ended with Lal was an un bad terms. Do you have any contact

with him today? Not really. We've we've kind of we've grown apart, you know. It's it's I think I've been working longer without Lal than I was working with Law. It's so long ago. Um, we've drawn apart. I mean, all the members of the original band have kind of grown apart. It's funny, I think. You know, when you're young and you're a band and you're starting off together,

there's a gang mentality. It's it's it's you against the world, and the most important thing in your lives is the band, the success of the band, and the quality of the music that you make, and that's all. That's all that counts. But gradually, as you grow into yourself, as you cannot come older, and you make new friends and you have new experiences, you developer, you develop as a person. And you know, that's what happened between me and Law. We

became different people with different tastes, and it happens. Okay, let's go back to the beginning. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Manchester, outside Manchester, Um, I was a quiet lonely kid, didn't have many friends. The only thing that I could do well and enjoy doing was was drawing pencil sketching, and I used to do that whenever I could. I used to take a sketchbook, compencil and jump over the wall into Heaton Park, which was directly opposite to where we lived, and spend an afternoon

sitting on a bench drawing um. And I think it was it was during that period that occasionally people would would wander over and have a look at what I was doing and say, that's really good, that's really really good, well done, congratulations, that's fantastic work. And in a bizarre way, that was my first audience. I suddenly I understood that people liked something that I was doing, and although they weren't applauding, they were saying nice things. So that was

that was hugely significant to me. And what did your parents do for a living? And how many kids in the family just me um. My father had a number of shops in the center of Manchester. He was a shopkeeper and he sold He sold radios, tape recorders, records, camera equipment. He also sold telescopes and he also sold musical instruments all in different shops and camping equipment. Strangely enough, um so that the weird thing is, you know, he wanted me to go into the family business, of course,

and I hated it. I used to help out at the shops on a Saturday behind the till, you know, try and demonstrate things. I was hopeless at that and you know, but looking back was really strange to me is even though I didn't want to go into the family business, all the things that he sold other than camping equipment areas that I ended up investigating and became becoming part of in my growd up careers, cameras, tape recorders, television,

musical instruments. It's the strangest thing. What was it like being in the UK when the Beatles hit and all those means, and some of them were from Liverpool, not that far from me and Chester. What was the experience through your eyes? It was it was like being part of something important. I think that if you were a teenager before the Beatles came along, that I you were sort of playing a musical instrument or in any kind

of band, nobody really took you very seriously. Um It only seemed to become significant once the Beatles have made an impact, and it then it was there was some strange cultural upheaval that took place. I remember leaping, you know, leaping a good few years forward. I remember I've been home for a weekend and I got a train back to to our college and Sergeant Pepper had just come out.

And I walked into the Art College and every single department of the Art College had stopped work, and each department was playing a different track from the album, and the tutors weren't teaching anybody. They were pouring over the gayfold album sleeve. Everybody was marveling at this wonder that had come out of nowhere, and that was huge for me. It just changed everything. Um. You can imagine walking into this building and hearing all these tracks at the same time.

It's like Revolution number nine coming out of the windows. Um. But that made a huge difference. And I was in the band while I was Art college, and we were doing gigs pretty much every every old turn at night. I get picked up at the end of a working day at college and go off in a van and do a gig, come back late at night, and then go to college the next day. So suddenly it's just being in a band. Wasn't just a buzz. It was a possible thing that could become something significant should you

want it to be. So, so, how did you start playing musical instrument? Like many kids that era, people wanted to play music. Music was a big outlet then, before the Beatles, before anything, every wanted to play. Everybody wanted to play a guitar or something or other. I think it was like skateboards or video games or now. It was the thing. And it wasn't necessarily because you could

make a career out of it. It was, you know, because it made you feel, made you look cool, you could meet girls, made you feel something, and it made you feel like you were doing something that was about you, and it was about your generation. Where it would go nobody really knew, but it was a way of stamping your identity on something. And I took up a guitar first. I had a half in the club fifty six dring

guitar sy semi solid body, and I was terrible. I joined a group called Groups seventeen and played bass on a six string guitar very badly, and we used to do covers of a bank called the shadows who have used to back Cliff Richard in the UK. And we used to play things like old people's homes and private parties and whatever we could get. But there was we were terrible, but there was something amazing about the experience.

And I I shifted to drums because um, my next door neighbor, my next door neighbors family were quite wealthy, had bought his name was Jeff, had brought him a drum set and sorry Jeff, but but he couldn't play it. And um, and I just I wanted to try playing his drums. And it took me ages to get him to allow me to sit down behind the kid. And I I had that sort of independent suspension thing that

you need to play drums, you know. And I could sort of do the simple and do this now and the base drum and the high heart and hit things and reasonable ways. And that was incredible. It's something clicked and said, Wow, you didn't have to pose dancing and trying to play a guitar at the front of the band. You can sit back and be the engine room. And and then I remembered something that happened when I was

a child, probably about nine or ten years old. We used to have music lessons at school, and a music lesson consisted of a teacher coming in and putting a record on a record deck and asking you to listen to it, and they disappear for half an hour and you should come back and you'd have to talk about it and so whether you thought it was only good or not. And there were you know, a little oper writers in classical music, and you know, to a kid

who's nine, in turns a bit boring. But one day she put on an Elvis track and I started hammering away on the school desk. And I have no idea why, and I have no idea where the hell that came from. But I was banging the school. That's like I would have drunk it. And I was thrown out the class and made to stand in the corridor for about half an hour. It was a punishment for the thing that i'd eventually did through me um. But I love playing

the drums. That's how it began. Now you're in a band in art school, how do you end up becoming professional and starting to make records? Well that the band I was in our college was called the mocking Birds, and the mocking Birds had Graham Goldman as their leader. Graham was already rosively successful as a songwriter about that, and I was the drawer of the mocking Birds, and we actually recorded some of the tracks that went on to be big hits with other bands. We never had

a hit. It was. It was really very, very strange. But it wasn't like I'd set out to be a professional musician. It was always something that was traveling parallel through what I was doing in order to become something professionally, and that at the time was being a graphic designer

at our college. I was studying to be a professional graphic designer, but it was not in any way, shape or form as much upon as traveling around in the vam playing drums and bat and we'd spend when I say we asked myself in long Cream, we'd spend our weekends writing songs, recording them on to track tape recorder

and dreaming about becoming a band. And I guess it kind of matured when Eric Stewart, who had now become the leader of a band called the mind Lenders, decided he wanted to set up a professional recording studio in Manchester, which at the time and looking back, was a ludicrous idea because the center of the recording industry in the UK is in London, but he wanted to do this in Manchester. He raises the money, found the building and they built a recording studio, small place, but with a

good room, good control room. And because we moved into similar circles, we were asked to be myself in law. We were asked to be the two guys who came in that would allow him to test the equipment. And you know, I would sit there and hammer and wait at the drums. They multitracked the drums and I was sort of sit opposite me on the floor strumming away on something. And before we knew it, you know, during this testing period we've recorded something that sounded quite interesting.

It turned out to be this thing called neanderthal Man um that we had to record again because once we've gone home during one of the test dates, someone white the date that we've been recording up and we had to start from scratch. But we learned something and we recorded this thing called Neanderthal Man that was a number two hit record in the UK. And it was like, you know, it just came out of just doing it as opposed to planning to do it, and usually that's

the best way. And so how did it ultimately become tense? To you see, Hot Lights didn't last very long. We made an album, We did it all, but we made the fatal arab of not understanding how the business works. Nean litle Man was a very strange piece of music, if it even qualifies for being a piece of music. But the album, and it's interesting this because the album was like, Okay, we're going to make an album, and

this is going to be real music. But of course, if if you're young and you're starting and you're making music, it's it's almost inevitable that you're going to be trying to sound like the people that you admire. And we would be subconsciously or consciously to a degree, trying to sound like the Beatles, or the Beach Boys, or Simon and Garfuncle, all the people that we admired. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with neanderthal Man. And so

the album, although it was quite interesting, failed miserably. So we stopped and essentially Graham joined us at that point, as I recall, and we became producers and we became the house band at Strawberry Studios. We kind of forgot about being a group and we became the people who produced other people um and played as a band for other people. And we did that for a few years, doing a lot of interesting and mad stuff, anything from football clubs too football teams to ventraliquus and and god

knows what. I think the best thing we did was an album by a strange couple called Rama Sys that was called Space Hymns. It's it's a cult album, and that taught taught us the hell of a lot. And then we did we produced and became the house bound for two albums by Neil Sadaka that were recorded at Strawberry Studios. And it was joined those sessions that Neil said to us, you know, you guys are great. You

should form a group. We've been, you know, we've been sort of lost in production runser so long that the idea had not appealed, and suddenly it became obvious that perhaps we should, and so we did. And so then how did you record the songs on the first album? And where those the only songs who record a hundred and end up with those? No, we never worked like that at all. We worked. I don't know. I think a lot of bands at the time worked in a very sort of practical way, but a very linear way.

They would they'd write a bunch of songs, and they would lay the backing tracks down for all the songs, and then they would do the vocals for all the songs, and then they would do the overdubs for all the songs, and then they would start playing with it, mixing it the song and so forth. We didn't work like that.

We we we started a song and we would finish it, and during the making of the track recording, we would make decisions about how the finished thing should sound, and we would finish that track, and then we would move on to the next track and again take it from A to Z and the next one from A to Z. I don't think many people weren't like that back in those days. But the first tense C album was done

very very quickly. We had a couple of hits I think at that point at least one Donna, and we were being pressured to come up with something relatively quickly, and we had I think we had about three weeks to record, to write and record everything, so we just went in the studio and just did it without a great deal of planning and without a great deal of thought, and thank goodness, we did it that way because everything

was Everything was done instinctively, intuitively. There was no none of this, well, we want this to sound like the Beatles, we want this to sound like this. We just did it. We wrote it, we recorded it. We didn't even think about it. And what occurred during the making of that album was a sudden realization that we don't sound like

anybody else. We did have an individuality and an approach that didn't seem to be like anybody else at all, and that was because we were free enough to to do the whole goal, through the whole process, without referencing anybody. Do you remember what songs were cut first for that album? Well, I think the one that was a hit. I don't

know if it was out yet. It was probably Rubber Bullets, which was quite an uptem person Okay, So rubber Bullets, you know, sounded almost like a Parity Beach Boys song. How did you guys come up with that sound in that song? Well, it's a lot of strange things going on in there. I mean that there's a lot of guitar work is is recorded with the tape being played the half speed, so it finishes up being double speed,

and lots of things like that. You know, it's crazy, did it's insane, And so at that particular time, we we we had nothing to lose, We'd had a hit, We had nothing to do is we didn't know that that was going to be another record, another track, another single, So we were just trying stuff that sounded interesting because we could. If you remember, we're not down south in the middle of London where the label can pop by in ten minutes and check everything is sort of going smoothly.

We were up north, you know, a couple of hundred miles away, so no one was going to drop into check. So we were pretty much our own man. So we were experimenting to which agree with everything, and the stuff we were writing was kind of bizarre. But the way each of us worked, our taste buds seemed to balance each other extremely well. Long and I were the art experimenters, and Graham and Eric with the classic songwriters for one of a better description of the two teams, and the

two balanced extremely well. And that's I don't know, that was the sound that was the approach that we had a we had a great time doing. It was very horrid, but the album was really interesting. The album is great, but it has a very distinct sense of humor. Where do you think that came from. You think that came from everybody being Jewish or you know, and having that irreverence. Well,

we weren't Jewish. We were Jewish, you know, we were kind of okay, like everybody from our generator jewish raised that way. As far as a little guy in the sky, I'm not sure. Well, we were, I mean three of us were. Um, I think it was because it was just naturally who we were, and we kind of we weren't really we didn't buy into that thing where you know, you can't have humor recourse. That's just not cool man. You know, we kind of didn't buy into that. But

we were more it was more than humor. It was satire. I think to a degree we were We were more like journalists some satirists. So we were straightforward songwriters. I think everything that we wrote that had an element of humor about it was kind of poking fun at something that was going on at the time. I think, Um, now, we didn't we weren't embarrassed about it at all. And how did you decide who's saying which song? We didn't

we we we had a bizarre audition system. Once the backing track had been recorded, each one of us were going through the live room, stand in front of the mic an attempt to sing the song, and the others would hold up score cards, you know, and if you did it well, you could carry on, and if you failed miserably, they'd hold up a sign that said next, and then you'd come and the next guy, we're going, Graham would try it and if he was good, you know, he got a few minutes to try it. If he wasn't,

next and so on and so forth. And it was very democratic. Really meant that the person who sang the song was the person who could sing the song the best. Okay. But even so, if you go back to that first album, you know it starts with a fan fear and it has ell this type stuff and do up type stuff. I mean, it was really wild retro with a wink.

And was that very conscious? I guess it must have been, because you know, if your form us into a track and you know what you're doing, if you're embarrassed by you start again. So I think, you know, like any any situation like that, you each member of the band is trying to impress all the other members of the band, and we're all trying to have a good time making this stuff, and we were trying to get an album done,

so anything that we came up with we committed to tape. Luckily, most of the stuff that we committed to tape turned out quite well. We never did that thing where we'd write a hundred songs and record fifty arms and then choose the best twelve. We just wrote until we felt we had something interesting and recorded it. So there wasn't any There was never any fat. It was all. It was all slim down and it was all sinews, and it was all the stuff that we ended up with

on the finished albums. And what was your role in the songwriting? I was a songwriter. I didn't I didn't have a role, even though I don't play an instrument. You know that the traditional way of writing in those

days is you sit with somebody. In my case, mostly long he would be playing the guitar or a keyboard and we'd play and I'd sing, and at some point something would happen, a certain phrase would match with a certain set of chords that that felt like something, and then you would take that a bit further, and you play around, and then you go now, and then you start again. You did you kind of developed develop an

instinct as to what what serves the song best. There's the point in any song if it's good, and you're always looking for the key. The key could be anything. It could be a hook, it could be a phrase, it could be the way a certain melody fits with a cord. It could even be a pause. But it tells you something about where that song has to go. And we're always looking for that. I think every songwriter is always looking for that. And it just you know,

it was none of it felt precious to us. There was no sense of, oh, we better get this right. There was none of that because it was all such such, such a great time and such. We could have been Postman, but we weren't. We were lucky enough to be in a band. Okay, so you work with law on videos, you work with the three others intense se C and now you're working along own. What is the difference between working in collaboration and working alone? Um, well, there's nobody

else there to start with. Obviously you or should I say,

I have found it. Well, probably the best example of working alone for me, and probably the most fundamentally satisfying saying I've done on my own was the project that I did for the BBC um and this was in gosh, this sign this, this was rather about that, or maybe a little bit later maybe I was asked by the BBC to come up with an idea four to celebrate two weeks of environmental concerned broadcasting on BBC two, and I have no idea where they came to me, but

but but um. They originally wanted to put on a kind of live aid concert, and I I thought that was a terrible idea because live aide was such a huge phenomenon and so hugely successful. There was no way you could better that. There was no way you could duplicate that. So I had an alternative idea which I presented to them, which was which was called One World,

One Voice. And the idea was, instead of having all these musicians in one place and filming them, we would start to assemble a piece of music in a part of the world, film it being made and take an audio and sound crew around the world to different cities, adding different musicians in those cities to this piece of music, so that piece of music would grow in scale and in length as we traveled. And I presented this to a group of broadcasters in Europe and they thought it

was great. So we then had to make it happen. And if you consider the things that could possibly go around and the lack of technology that would allow us to do that the way we would do it today in the late nineties eighties, it's astonishing that we actually got it done. But we did. The music producer who was who was key to this working at all, um Oh rupert Heim, who I'm sad to say past a couple of years ago. Um, but but what amne? What a what a great sense of enabling all these musicians

to colless, to coalescing to one incredible piece of music. Um. And it was my job to filming taking place and my job to edit it. And that you know, I look back on a lot of the stuff I've done, and so much of it as used effects and techniques and this that mean that was pure, That was us filming stuff and using our imaginations with very little equipment. You know, minimal stuff, traveling, grabbing stuff while it was happening, and I look back as that being one of the

things I'm most proud of. Another thing that I did was I was involved in UM the formation of an environmental pressure group called ARC, and I was involved, Chrissy High and Matthew Freud McCartney's were involved to a degree. A lot of interesting people were involved. And I made a film of a wonderful lady called French the UK Communion playing the part of Mother Earth. And again that was something that was done for love, it wasn't done

for money. UM. So there's a lot of stuff that I was kind of doing around about this period that brought things out of me that I didn't know that I could do, and began to form my own set of taste pots and musically, I guess that really started to come out when I recorded my solo album Muscle Memory. Uh. The interesting thing being about that album in terms of collaboration, UM, I put an as scout Um on a channel called Pledge Music, asking people to send me pieces of music

that they thought that I could turn into songs. Okay, and I thought maybe I get a out twenty fifty or something. I got two d and eighty six pieces of music to choose from, which staggered me and it took a long time to go through them. But I ended up choosing twelve of these pieces of music and then writing melodies and lyrics for and once again that was that was a huge change for me. Again, it told me that I could do something that up to that point I never knew that I could because I

was collaborating with people. It's just that they weren't there in the room and asking me to make them coffee. Right, So you work with Jonathan King. What's your experience with Jonathan King. Jonathan King was amazing. He was that. He was the guy that signed Fancy six. He was great. I mean he put our first two albums and allowed us to do what the hell we like pretty much. He had a very very very very succinct and commercial brain. He knew wish with the singles and he was great.

He came up with the name of the band Um. He came down to hear I think must have been Donna, the first recording UM from London, and he told us that he had a dream the night before where he was standing outside the Hammersmith Audion and up in lights above the venue, it's appearing tonight for one night only, tensee C. And he said, that's that's who you guys are. We didn't have a name, you know, we were just still these production guys, and that's where that's where the

name came from. Not that other story, which you probably know. So that other story has no truth to it whatsoever, none whatsoever. It's probably better after dinner conversation. I'm supposed to before dinner conversation. But but it's simply not true. And even if it was, it's pretty bad show for

four guys. So literally, the dream just said tense C. Yeah, appearing for one night only tonight, Tennessee C. It's interesting that when we started to talk tour, when we started to tour America, we taured in the South and nobody understood what it meant, and we ended up in some venues being billed as the Tennessee Boys. Okay, I'm the second album. My favorite song is one that you're heavily involved with somewhere in Hollywood. Can you tell me about

the com position and recording of that track. We were getting a bit more ambitious than the kind of songs that we like to write, and we wanted to write something that was longer, and we wanted to write something that didn't stick to the verse chorus, first chorus, middle eight fade um format, and we loll had the piano part and I started singing, and it took a while to write um and it felt like we'd moved forward

to notch with that particular song. I'm I re recorded it recently, well, not that recently, probably about five or six years ago. I made a film of it for Graham Goldman and too, who tours his version of TENSC. But it's one of my favorite songs, one of the best songs I think we ever wrote for Tennessee C. I don't know. It just felt like something a great

lead forward, if you like, in terms of our songwriting skills. Well, it was epic and it had a heaviness, but it also had humorous lyrics, like a dog up in Beverly Hills. It's crazy, yeah, and there's a sort there is a tap dancing section in the middle which is me banging shoes on the floor and all sorts of things like that. Yeah, Well it was but it was a joy. It was a difficult song to sing live, I should say. Now, supposedly on the next album you switched to Mercury and

the original soundtrack I'm Not in Love. Supposedly you we had a lot of influence in the sound and the recording of that. Can you give me your perspective? Yeah, interestingly I'm Not in Love. We'd already recorded that song towards the beginning of the whole recording, the whole group of recording sessions for the album, and we've recorded it as a kind of cheesy Boston over and it just

didn't work. It was like it was it was crap, and we knew it was crap, but we knew that the song had something, but we did not know how it should be done. So we kind of parked it. We put it on a shelf and carried on recording the other songs, and eventually we came back to it, and you know, we were sat around discussing how we should approach it, and I said, excuse me, out of desperation, probably more than anything else, why don't we do it

all in voices? The whole thing in voices, like a tsunami of voices, A little bit like the sound that was in a lot of two thousand and one splace obviously, that kind of haunting, haunting vocus you know. Word, is that that was your idea? Is that true? Yeah? The technique wasn't necessarily my idea, but that the vision for it, the audio vision for it, was my idea. We don't have to figure out how we would do it, um.

And what we were after was this sound that you know, if you're sing a note, you have to stop and breathe, and you don't want to hear that. So Loll came up with the idea of doing it as a set of complex loops um. And so we start to work

doing this, and it took quite a while. We had to make a loop with all of us singing, multi tracked, mix it down, create a loop for every note of every recording the song, and then we had to transfer this onto the multi track tape record and then we would play the loops back using the faders on the recording console the way you would use the keys on

a keyboard. And that was that was the technique. No one had done that before, and we'd already recorded a backing track for it, so and we never thought we'd end up using the backing track, but it all just began to fall together the way things do sometimes if you're lucky in a series of recording sessions, everything you had makes everything better, and this was just that. And again, like when we are um Rocket for Herbie Hancock, were listened back to what we've done, we thought. We didn't

think they're going to fucking kill this time. We thought this is this is, this is very very good. But it's six minutes long. They're never going to play it. And so when we presented it to the label Low and Behold, they said, yeah, it's fabulous, but we're going to release Life as a Ministroli instead. And to this

day I'm piste off because they released Bohemian Rhapsody. I don't think it was the same label, but whoever queen were Weirds had the balls to release something as daring as Bohemian Rhapsody, which again was the landmark in recording and stayed a number one for god knows how many millennia. So they should have had the balls to put this out first, but they didn't. But nevertheless, one it did come out, it was huge. What exactly was the gizmo?

The gizmo. That's going back in time, um before tense Se existed, probably around about Hot Legs Beonderful man time. While we were doing the album, we wanted some string parts and some more chestral parts on some of the songs. And you know, there weren't money string players in Manchester at the time. There was the Halle Orchestra, who were very grand and very you know, sort of pop songs. We don't do that sort of thing, and they were

expensive and they worked very strange hours. And therefore, and we didn't particularly like the sound of the malatrum. We wanted proper string sounds. So we thought, okay, a guitar is a string instrument. Is there a way of playing strings to get a sustain a bowing sound, to sustain bowing sound from this instrument instead of hiring a bunch of string players in an arranger, And so we messed around.

We remember it was Lowe's fendless transit Custer and the first experiment was to to get an electric drill and put a robot eraser on the end of the drill and hold it against the strings. And it made an infernal racket. But for maybe about two seconds it said to us that this this might work. It sort of weren't you know it was going to be and there was something that that that that told us that this

would work. We found our way to the engineering department of the College Courage of Science and Technology, I think, and a couple of guys who were prepared to build us a prototype based on this idea that might actually work. UM. Guy's name was John McConnell, lovely guy, and I forget the other guys now, I'm sorry about that. And they did. They built as the prototype that was used on any recordings that the gizmo featured on UM, including all of

consequences UM. But at a certain point we were told that or he was. It was suggested to us that this becose it could become a commercial item. It could become an effect like an effects pedal that one could sell on the open market. So we went to America to meet somebody at a company called Music Tronics who

actually produced the gizmo. Unfortunately, it the materials that were used to create the constant bowing sound weren't good enough UM for it to work consistently, and it would It was affected by waz by by temperature, by how it had been transported from one place to the other, and also not insignificantly by the fact you have to screw it to your guitar body. And it came out on the market just at the time when chute synthesizers were also coming out on the market and they were much

more alloy. So the gizmo was The gizmo was like something Da Vinci might have actually created um and it didn't actually sell. It's become a bit of a cult. A number of different artists used it on their recordings, including Paul McCartney, including Susie and the Bandshoes, numerous people,

but it never became a commercially successful device. Over the last maybe five years, a company in the States that started to produce them again in small quantities, so it might have its day again at some point that from the next year year it was said that you left Tennessee c To make an album with the gizmo. What really happened there and why did you leave Tennsee C. And had you end up making a triple album? Well, it wasn't initially, it wasn't meant to be a triple album. Initially.

Initially the idea was we we'd invented this thing, and we didn't really get to use it an experiment with it and test its potential within the context of tennessee Ce. So we thought, you know, I think we know, we had a break from recording and touring, and we thought, well, let's book some time at Strawberry. Let's book ourselves enough for three weeks and see what we think and do,

which is exactly what we did. And we had such a a great time doing that and making the kind of music that we hadn't even attempted to make before that we wanted to continue to do that. So the idea was our initial idea was okay, guys, that we're doing something that you know, we really think it's interesting and worthwhile. Just give us a little bit more time and we'll make our single album um and we'll put it out and then we'll come back, you know, to

the group, and we'll carry on. But that we we were on a roll by the Intensity she was on a roll. And there, you know, we had a road crew, we had responsibilities. We we had to put a intensity c album out and and unfortunately it was one of those situations where it was we had to do one thing or the other We weren't really given a choice. Two,

we weren't allowed to do it. Essentially, we weren't mature enough as a group of people to understand that, you know, in order to to grow as individuals as well as as a unit, we had to grow individually as well musically and then bring that back to the table for the bigger picture. That wasn't going to happen in this context. So, you know, we we we have numerous meetings about it, and we we were given an ultimatum, you know, we we have to do a tense C album instead, let's

do let's let's do that. And uh so we paused and Eric and Graham had written a particular song. I forget which song it was. I don't know if it was The Things We Do for Love, but it was. It was a ballad like that, and we all sampled in studio and you know, with a view to listening to to what was what have been written and to think about starting a Tennesseec album. They played as a song and Lol and I looked at each other and we thought, oh god, we don't want to do this anymore.

And and that was it. It was as simple as that. We just we found access to a way of working. There was thrilling us and really that's what TENSEEC we're all about. For the first three years or so, it was all about the thrill of doing it, not the success. The thrill of the four of us in the studio making music was what it was about, and that somehow got diluted. But we found it again and we wanted to continue doing that. Yes, and then Tennessee c which

sounds different now. You can definitely hear the difference between the post You and Law albums sound different, and one can argue the albums are not as good, but their gigantic kits on that record. So how did you feel being on the outside of that. We didn't have a problem. Not we was thinking that ceased to become about hits. Um. It was never really about hits. I think the fact that Tennessee See had hits was a bonus. You know, we made stuff that we wanted to make and a

hell of a lot of people like them. Wow, you know it's not the like um. But now we were were in a different frame of mind. We were we were artists. If you go back to that era, royalty rates were low, there were four people in the band. But the money can be in publishing. But there were multiple writers. Do you get any money from those songs? Have you sold the rights? What's the status of that?

You're going You're going back a long way. We didn't even say think about money in those Well you know whether the money is coming into your account or not. Oh yeah, the money was coming into our account. But usually a song was written by two people, three people at most. There were never any songs tends to see songs particularly that we're written by four as far as I recall. So even though the royalty rate was small,

it was you know, it kept us alive. I don't think we ever got really rich of it, but it kept us alive. Yeah, but how about today in are you still getting royalties? But there's a whole new element of the music business, as we well know, with people are Hypnosis and Sony and goodness who else who have created a new system whereby us, shall we say more mature artists can earn money sooner rather than later in drives and drabs. So yeah, that is that is very helpful.

So did you make a deal with Hypnosis or one of it? To compare address I did, and did you go with hypnosis? Yeah? So hypnosis. So essentially they say you get it. I know, Mark said, you get a teen percent pay out whatever. So the money you got from Merk you live another twenty years, well invested. That money can cure you, or you gotta work for a living. I gotta work for them. And Jesus, I'm not Neil Young, I'm not Bob Dylan. I you know, let's just say it took the edge of and so it this lay date.

What keeps you creating? I love it. That's what I do. I I wake up in the mornings and if I'm lucky, I've got an idea in my heading and it could be for a film. I've written two films to screenplays over the last few years, one with another guy. I'm one on my own, and one of my big things is to make these these two movies. Direct these two movies. I've also joined a group of humans. As I said,

I've also joined the scene of the game company. I'm constantly, excuse me, pushing myself to keep working, not just to earn money, but because I love pushing myself into areas where I think I can do good work. I enjoy doing good work. Um. So there are a number of projects on the horizon, on number of self initiated projects that things that I would really like to do, um,

that I'm pushing to get done. Two of which of these two film scripts, so unfortunately we were we were really close to going into pre production before COVID hit for one of the films, and that's sort of been on the back back burnus and I'm I'm sort of pushing to try and get that to the fore again. Um. The other is a low budget film about media in the twenty one century, which is a bit hardcore. So I'm trying to get that off the ground. But it's

up here. It's up here that counts. It's it's keeping busy up there. You know, it's so easy not to let me just ask. You make an album like Muscle Memory, you put a lot of time, but the music business has changed and it's much harder to be heard than it was before. Does that make it harder to do it? Or just as long as you can get your idea down, you're happy. Yes. The latter. For me, it was about

just getting the idea. It was about proving it, proving it to myself proving that I could actually do it and actually do something that wasn't just twenty minutes of fluff. It was you know, it had a little bit of weight to it. The lyrics were good, the tunes were good, the exercise was good. The whole process was was elevating for me. Um. I still had the mystery the match. Okay, so you still have things in the pipeline. But at this point, if you look back, what are you most

proud of across the whole lifetime? Absolutely give me too, to Jesus, well, the album is one. Most of the memories one one world, One Voice is another that's too. Um, the first tand CC album maybe a three, and a number of different music videos if I can have a four, which is you know, I did a number of videos

for you too, which I am very proud of. But possibly Rocket is the one that stands out head and shoulders above the other because of what I was saying before, because it was so bizarre and nobody knew what the it was and it did a huge amount a number of different levels. Okay, you mentioned that you that you would like to do a movie about media. So you grew up in an analyze world. We live in a digital internet world. You've seen both. What do you think

about where we are today? It's complex, it's fascinating. Um, I don't know. I've had I disliked the idea of technology for technology's sake, and the thing I accepted and I use it um because it can give me things that analog could never give me. But then again there's

a certain foolishness to it. And probably the best example of that is the original version of the video that we did for our Godlian Crimson Crime, for instance, was was edited in an analog function and the mixes going from one face to the other took place using what they used to call paddles, which was handheld stick that you moved from the top to the bottom and you could actually feel physically the mix taking place. That doesn't

happen anymore. It's done by a lot of number crunching and you watch if it's not right, the numbers are crunched again. But there is now two things that has happened, one being the fact that one can lose a physical contact with the material you're playing with, and that applies

to music as well. You know, you could be using the drum sample instead of playing the drums, which is fine, but there's a gap appearing between the result and the performance and the actual process of making something it um and the time it takes. I mean to use video editing as an example. The time it takes to do an edit of a music video has expanded. It usually takes me, say, at least three days to do something in digital mode that I used to be able to

do in one. And that is because if you're editing digitally you can defer making final decisions for a long time. You can try a shot here, you can extend it, you can move it backwards, forward, slow it down, speed it up at color, remove color. You don't have to make a decision, whereas in the analog world a video, a video editing, you had to decide where you want things to be. You have to think, you have to use your instincts and you have to use your mind.

Um And you did, and it still worked. What you've gained digitalist quality and the potential for trying lots of alternatives. But it does take longer, so you win and you lose. But the bottom line is this is the world that we live in. So I have chosen too to use an American expression, to embrace it and take it as far as I can and use it to its best advantage. Well, Kevin, thanks so much for spending your time with us today and giving us insight into your long career. Really interesting,

so thanks so much, pleasure and enjoyed it. Until next time. This is Barbie Offsets