Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
It's okay to meet your heroes, It's okay to dream, It's okay to let life float you to where you should be. In twenty twenty one, Quest Love asked me to do a one on one interview with Elvis Costello at Electric Lady Studios for Questlove Supreme. At first I said no, just kidding. I jumped at the opportunity, but I wanted Questlove there for part of it, just to see what two of the greatest musicologists and music historians of our time would discuss. I wasn't disappointed, and you
won't be either. It's hard to keep up, but it's worth it, and it's hilarious listening to me try to. They're both legends, they're both brilliant. Enjoy Part one this week and Part two next week. This was originally aired in April twenty twenty two. Whew, I can't believe this happened.
That's all rights alone, and he can give you tonight.
By you know, I don't even know the bloody words in direction like it was trying to lift this person up.
So maybe it's a little gramatic guy.
I just wanted to get your attention.
It looks like you're no good.
Okay.
The reason I mentioned Elvis Hostels because the record I just called that because I can't call it from jackfre New City.
The reason I mentioned el this Hostel.
Everyday book the way it was written, which is kind of much more so a strummy already down with all this.
What a great first line in the history of first lines of rock and roll songs.
Huh.
I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused. Sometimes you can't read the newspaper without keeping that in mind.
But he says, well, that's fine, but you never said what the pad's poison closed means. So that's what you have to say. I mean in this hang Out with Elvis educational part of Right with Bae McCarty incident hang Out with Elvis, he's very logical, so.
He goes, you know, this is.
What you gotta do that with Elvis.
There's gonna be music in it, and I'm gonna cut it in.
El got everything everything everything, Yeah, you know, various album throughout.
The interesting things that they probably want clear like the roots running over a high fidelity by themselves at thirty rock. You know, before that first performance.
Oh, let's have that. Yeah, that'd be good. Can we get that?
Yeah?
Yeah, sure, do we do that? And did we do that? And we did that on the show? Yet we did that on the show?
Happy Yeah? It was the first first song I know?
Is that the same one with the Chelsea? And then the second time it was like Stations of the.
Cross and someone else?
Yeah, and John exactly hey man belated Happy Birthday. I try to play a happy birthright. I couldn't play for ship. Don't know if I don't know how to play the piano.
Still feel h m hmm, I still feel good? H No, I said, they said the song. Mm hm, that's great.
M hm.
Hm is that the easy Yeah? I'm a I'm a mm hmmmmm m h. I'm gonna do a slight preface. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first quest Love Supreme that has been done in person since the March sixteenth, twenty twenty pandemic. How strange that we don't have a supreme vow call Candy home. It should also be noted that this was recorded on January It's to Day's day,
twenty fifth. Okay, so the day of this recording is January twenty fifth, and the reason why I feel compelled to acknowledge the date is because we are also recording inside of Electric Lady Studios on this the twenty second anniversary of the seminal album that kind of you know, brought me to the studio in the first place.
Which is Voodoo by DiAngelo.
So I was rather apropos that Sugar Steve and I, oh, by the way, Boston.
Edited, I'm editing this, so don't worry about anything. I'm gonna chop it up, not shopping, sit up.
Yeah, unpaid, Bill Fontigelo and Laia are not with us right now, so it's right now, it's just me and Steve. The last time we did this was with with Herb Alpert right at this very studio. So for me, what's very important about this particular episode, and this is again me trying to improve as a human. This is all
about going out of your comfort zone. So I'm here as a third will, or as a referee, or as training wills, because I really it's my dream for Sugars Steve to really bring out his voice and quest of supreme episodes because you know, half the time we hog up all the the moments and he only gets like one comet in and you know that, like Steve really has in my opinion, Like I mean, he's like all he has so much music knowledge that he has yet to share with you people, unless you follow the Sugar
network like of all of us. He has his own fan clubs simply for his music knowledge. So that should tell you something. But for me, I thought, what what's the best way to throw Sugar Steve in the and the long away to jump into the river. And he's really uncomfortable right now, is I mean? Long guard?
I told you I'm editing.
You're not editing at all. Yo, I'm sorry you're not.
I'm like you. I'm a little uncomfortable with compliments. But and and and see we're at a crossroads here. We're not, Yes, we are.
This is the fact. Look, Steve, we this is the very this is where we are.
We're literally at the cross We're in the we're in the center of studio A. Yes, I get it, at like the X the middle of the X point.
Similar to Samuel Jackson and Paul Fixon. You're not talking yourself out of this ship. I'm not trying to all I'm saying is that you know, there comes a time where we have to.
Like, how long do you have to stay tonight? Because I'm here.
All listen, listen. My whole point is this, My whole point is this. The way that you're acting right now is exactly how I was acting when David Dinerstein and Robert Fevalent had told me that it's my destiny to direct the documentary. And I'm like, dude, I'm a first time driver, Like.
All right, I got it. I gotta just jump in here.
No, no, this is this is a special quest love Supreme. Yes, it's my dream to watch Steve talk to his musical hero.
I've thought about this. This is essentially as if you got to interview Prince. I know, you know, like that's essentially where that makes sense to people.
I feel like I'm the guy in the threesome that isn't needed.
So wow, no, well see here's the that's the relief, here's here's the problem. And you say you're trying to become a better person, So just accept accept this. As much as I'm thrilled to be interviewing you know, my number one musical hero here, Yes, you're very much a part of the story that I want to tell tonight. Yeah, I'll be here, but and I need you here to
tell the story. Not just the story of the last ten years since we've met him, let's say, but a certain theme that I want to get to that you both have in comments. So it's like you're trying to like say, you're training wheels, but you're you're the musical encyclopedia. I'm here with two of the acknowledged global music encyclopedias, and you're telling and you're telling people that I have musical knowledge about something.
Let's just do this. This is three friends talking. But eventually I'm gonna get up from the seat and go to Studio B. It's going to be just like two thousands. It's voodoo all over again. It's voodoo all over again. I got kimber waiting next door. Kimber Lee's is next door.
So okay, you got two rooms tonight.
Yeah, I got two rooms. However, it's my dream to see you top the Jimmy Jam episode. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very special in person live at Electric Lady Studios. You're just cracking up over here with our good friend Elvis Costello. Thank you all right, so and now for the intro.
Right now, now, the now, the real intro, because like whatever that was, okay.
Did I mention that I have day hell for later on?
I mean I really would love to just continue with what he was saying, because like this, dude, right here, wait, look, this is not okay. Well no, I think people need to hear this, okay, just like you thought they needed to hear what you just said.
Yes, okay.
One of the reasons why he agreed to do Wise Up Ghosts he wanted to give me this gift of doing an album with you. Isn't that crazy?
Well, I'm saying him give you gifts like that before I was there. I was there on your birthday.
Though, right, and you've given me gifts to you anyway, Let's let's start. Welcome to Quest Love Supreme. My name is Sugar Steve.
I swear to God, Steve. If you cut out what just started the show your fire, fire, fire fire.
I'm gonna put an echo on that fire.
Go ahead.
So with thirty something studio albums, dozens of other compilations and live releases, box sets and EPs, endless singles and B sides, with a substantial autobiography and a forty five year career, playing countless live concerts and appearing in media as diverse as singing on a commercial jingle with his father, guest hosting that David Letterman show, Austin Powers movies, and
his own influential interview show Spectacle. If you haven't been properly introduced to him by now, I certainly can't do it in a mere few minutes get it. But because Elvis's career has had such a deep connection in the lives of his fans, there is a kind of magic to it all, and with any kind of magic, one of the main attractions is to try to figure out how the magician is doing it. So here is a very brief look at his background story and a quick
summation of his discography. Born Declan mcmanuson London to a musical family, his dad was a professional trumpet player and singer, first in popular big bands and then on his own. His mom worked in a record shop whose customers relied on her to have the coolest singles and albums from the United States. Elvis moved from London to Liverpool and
then back again before launching his career in London. From an early age, Elvis played guitar and by the early seventies formed a guitar duo with one of his friends.
Alan Mays.
Thank You I knew that He.
Worked a few non music related jobs, and then in nineteen seventy six was signed to Stiff Records, an independent record label in London. At the time, Elvis was performing as DP Costello. Stiff founder and Elvis manager at the time,
Jake Riviera, suggested using the name Elvis. His first four albums, nineteen seventy seven's Miam Is True, nineteen seventy Eights, This Year's Model, nineteen seventy nine's Armed Forces, and nineteen eighties Get Happy came with such a variety of intense pleasures, the poetic and existential lyrics, the melodies which made you play the records over and over, a lot of energy,
a lot of sound. And that's something else that only musicians who inspire the most fanatic audiences have the ability to turn all their fans into advocates of the artist, ready to lecture you about meanings and understandings only they
and the artist may explain to you. After his debut, the attraction became his recording and touring band for almost ten years, and each player in that band, Steve Naive, Pete Thomas, and Bruce Thomas, had a skill set which elevated the whole until they sounded like an unstoppable machine cranking out literate pop which was both political and romantic.
As he broadened the sounds and styles of the music he used on his second great group of records, nineteen eighty one's Trust, nineteen eighty one's Almost Blue, and his Jeff Emerick produced Imperial Bedroom from nineteen eighty two, Elvis displayed a degree of growth that didn't seem possible because the first few albums were already so advanced. With nineteen eighty three's Punched the Clock. In nineteen eighty four's Goodbye Cruel World, Elvis switched producers, if not sounds and styles
from his earlier albums. Although critiqued harshly by some, including Elvis himself, these albums and certainly the songs not only hold up today mostly.
But wait from what it's in. How uncomfortable are you right now? But he knows, he knows.
It's a regurgitation of facts, but it's got some heart.
Yeah, it has hard Okay, you're boy like man.
I know you're so poetic, But those albums Punch Clock and Goodbye Cruel World can now be seen to have charted a course for the rest of his career, a willful musical curiosity and ambition which sees him changing genres and collaborators with an energy and facility that can inspire all who witness it, Like Live Aid nineteen eighty five, All You Need Is Love, King of America and Blood and Chocolate, both albums from nineteen eighty six hold a popular place in the hearts of diehard Elvis fans, not
only because they are incredible sets of song cycles telling compelling stories, but because they mark the point most of us who love Elvis gave up trying to figure him out. That freed us up for the guilt free enjoyment of Elvis's next pop breakthrough, the single Veronica and the album Spike Is nineteen eighty nine, which marked a change in record companies and a high profile deal with Warner Brothers.
Spike encompassed still greater musical territory and in general and inclusiveness, which made room for contributors as varied as James Burton, Mark Reebot, Paul McCartney and Alan Toussant, to name just a few, all in service of an album which hooked
a new generation of fans. Mighty Like a Rose nineteen ninety one continued where Spike left off with even more sophisticated arrangements and production, and from nineteen ninety one on, Elvis's discography has been a hopscotch game of going wherever his fans think he won't be spiking his catalog with classics of what can only be called the genre of Elvis Costello writing for string quartets The Juliet Letters in
nineteen ninety three. Numerous quote unquote returned to form albums over the years, like nineteen ninety four's Brutal Youth, then nineteen ninety six is All This Useless Beauty and Kojack Variety and album of covers in nineteen ninety five, the stunning collaboration with Burt Backrack from nineteen ninety eight title Painted from Memory two thousand and twos, When I Was Cruel for the Stars, an album with opera singer and Sophie von Hotter two thousand threes, Marvelous Piano vocal Album
North two thousand four as the delivery Man with the Impostors, Shout out to David Farreger and oh yeah. Elvis released a symphony that year as well, il sogno Al Music.
It went to number one on the classical charts. Humanitarian and artistic efforts came together on the River in Reverse, a full LP from two thousand and six with Alan Tussana to bring attention to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, an overlooked gem called Momofuku in two thousand and eight with the Impostors two thousand and nine and ten bring two more t Bone Burnette productions, Secret Profane and Sugarcane and National Ransom. Well, that's a lot of albums.
I'm lying down though.
And was it over at that point? Perhaps until and I was told this by Diana Crawl, until Elvis Costello's creative fire and undernourished musical life force was reignited. Oh we had come on when he met Sugar. Steve Man questlove.
With that silence. That's a direct quote from Diana Hau. No. Oh wow, God bless Diana Crawl. Can we start out, No, it's almost, it's almost.
This is where wise up Ghost happens. Recorded in twenty twelve and released in twenty thirteen. Elvis in Quest along with the Roots got together to create Wise Up Ghosts, and we'll obviously spend some time talking about that tonight. But to get current with Elvis's discography after Wise Up Ghosts came Grammy Award winning Look Now from twenty eighteen, the first of four albums co produced with the most wonderful producer and engineer Sebastian Chris. So that's look Now, Hey, Clockface,
Spanish Model, and the album that just came out. Yet another great Elvis album here in twenty twenty two, the boy named if is What just dropped QS listeners from Electric Lady along with Questlove. As he said, this is a very special pisode of Questions of Supreme. Please welcome music Icon Elvis Costello.
This is the longest, like that was seventeen minutes. That's awesome. I'm really proud of you, Steve that I'm beaming like I'm your dad or.
Something, and I am too.
Now this is really Steve is wait, I don't even want to say that, like Steve only likes the background because I don't know. To me, like Steve and I would always talk about like having our own radio show when we were like working back in Philly, And this, to me sounds this is like the equivalent of his radio shows that he used to he used to host on his own cassettes when he was like twelve and thirteen years.
I've interviewed you before, way back.
When I was Yes, so to see this moment happen. How are you today?
I'm doing great. This is exactly what I knew what happened here.
Sorry, No, I love it. Are you kidding?
You're just I just I mean when you dubbed the little little bit Talian organ behind as well, it's kind of just sounded like my obituy, like you just have to have the boys, and then when you got to bring the choir in right you know. No, I appreciate it, no, because it's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. When I said, it makes me go like did I do that?
You did a lot?
It's too damn much.
Yes, you did.
That's why I tried to just sum up the past.
Yeah, well let's start or whatever you want to talk about it. Yeah, I know we're going to nerd out on your career, but I just want to ask one question that's sort of out of the realm of anything that was just said in the last eighteen minutes. What did you do today? What did I do today? Yeah? What times you wake up?
Turn to six?
How is it like? How does your day start?
Like?
What do you do?
It's mostly shaken, like a couple of fifteen year olds out of bed, different amounts of persuasion.
So usually still dead.
Oh yeah, yeah, they got to get on the school bus, so five to seven, so that's you know, so you take a kid school, No, I take them down of the door and they get on the bus.
Oh okay, yeah. Do you do your kids know you're Elvis Costella? Like, do they get it or you're just more dead? Oh?
No, they get that something that's been happening because they came and watched the TV show the other night and they know what I'm doing.
Okay, so they hear me.
I mean, the thing is, the last two years, nobody's been able to get away from anybody, you know. I mean, even if they know they've been on the road with both of us since they were six months old, they remember it from when they were four. But when I said, hey, this summer we might go on the road with mom. That'd be great. You know, they're good at traveling.
And they're fifteen. They were born in.
Two thousand and six, Yeah, December two thousand and six, so they are you know, they'd be sixteen extra samber, so they not long had a birthday.
And they're great lads.
And you know, I have in the amount I've traveled in my life, and we all have traveled, I wouldn't have I wouldn't have traded anything about these last two years except the fear of friends and my family and yeah, you know far away either you're concerned about them and you responding to an emergency or something. But in terms of the time we had the four of us, that's unbeatable, you know. And they got used to like, why is
Dad out in the garden shouting into that microphone? That's because I was making a record.
You know.
I worked out how to do it, and we all had to work out how to do it. I learned to play the electric violin. That was a worrying sound.
You know, are they musically inclined? Like? Are they that they got music within them?
And one of them is you know, one of them told me that, you know, he said I'm I'm piano this year. And I said, well, do you already read music right now? Because you played trombone for a year in jazz band. He said, I wasn't reading. I had memorized it, so you know, oh okay. So there's there's some of mom and the summer Dad and it. You know, I can't read by a can. I can write it now and I can, you know, but I can't read it back.
So what's their epic to nes? Like where your dad is Elvis Costill in your mom's.
Dying and crawl like, I don't know. My dad's a dentist.
Listen, if you got to school, if you got to if you told my sisters like I was, they just had such a complete conviction that I could sing when I was a little boy because my dad was on the radio every week.
They were convinced.
And that was fine when it was fine, the drumming out of class, maybe sing for who were the priest or whoever came to the school. But when you're ten, you hate that. You know, that's the worst. So my parents never maybe do it. So my dad being so never occurred to me. I was going to do it until I was I was, I don't know, seventeen.
So can you sing though, because there was singing around you and you sang from an early age.
Or why that?
I don't know. I really don't know. I mean I can only remember music playing. I mean I can remember I can remember being idle wi with this. This is Recopli called a decad Kali, and I had this big red on on on light on the front of it, like one of those ones with a grill, you know, like a honeycomb on the front, with a record player, like with a lid on it.
And I just.
Remember that looking at that, like looking at any toy on the ground, you know. So I must have only been crawling around and I can remember it.
I'm not imagining it.
I've got pictures, you know, where it was in the place we lived. So I guess my mother must have been playing that a lot back then.
Let's say, when your father was in his prime, singers had to Actually.
Yeah, he's a way better singer than I. I mean, he had what really good voice, but he was also good mimic. So the funny thing about my dad was he sang in a kind of The band was modeled on Glenn Miller. It was the same kind of music sweet Bound. Really it wasn't a jazz group. He'd been a bebop trumpet player in bulking Head at the time where.
He was born.
Came to London to try and make a living in jazz, like a lot of jazz musicians, found that difficult. When my mother and him got married and then I came along, he took a job that was better paying, which was singing, because he could sing, and so he had to sing whatever was in the hip raide. You didn't get to choose and to sing whatever was in the charts. Now, that was fine in the fifties for somebody just singing
a ballad. I got pictures of my dad are as big bow ties like Frank sin Archie used to wear in the forties.
You know.
Everybody just followed the trends, and he wanted to play like different people. When he was playing, he wanted to play like Dizzy. Then he want to play like Clifford Brown.
You know.
And then then he got in this dance band that used to just play what was in the charts. Well, what was in the charts by nineteen sixty three sixty four was a huge range of music that wasn't really designed for a sixteen piece sweet man to play, but they did it nonetheless because that was how music filtered through to us. We didn't have twelve hour day, let alone twenty four hour day pop radio. Just that's why we had pirate radio because that was a revolution that
brought like the continuous pop music to English listeners. My dad was part of a process that preceded that, which was interpreting those songs. So he would have to sing a song like it wouldn't matter whether it was the latest song by Tom Jones or the latest song by the Who, or the latest song by the four Tops or the Searchers. You know, he had to do all those songs so crazy, I know, but I mean they didn't get he didn't get any choice. It's whatever was in it.
Break. So you're saying that there was somewhat a big band scene over there, but was there really a jazz like a hard bop jazz scene over there.
Yeah, I mean there's musicians that he that he wanted to were some of his friends when they first came from Liverpool, were the people that founded the modern jazz scene. You know, he tried to get the gig with Ronnie Scott. Everybody wanted that gig. Ronnie formed the club. The other musicians of that Joe.
Ronnie Scott was an actual person because.
Yeah know, Ronie Scott was a tennis saxophone player then founded the club and he was like one of the people that led the way. And there's one or two musicians. Another great Tanner play called Tubby Hayes came to New York and was accepted.
Obviously, some English.
Musicians made it into the American scene, but there were so many great musicians here. Marrimount Partland that the piano players, She's from England, so you know there's people like that that came over, that came and they wanted to play with the great people on fifty second Street. But that was it was difficult enough to get in the door in London because this music wasn't that popular and popular music was. You could turn the radio on when I was a kid and it sounded like it was nineteen
thirty five. I mean the music was still like little kind of string group playing the melody of something, but it wouldn't be anything like the record. So there was a there was so little music.
And that was known as mainstream radio then that.
Yeah, we only had one channel playing music on the BBC. We just had the light program.
So what I know is Northern Soul, like when did that breakout?
Norton Soul was kind of like that was really a club thing that happened late sixties, I think through mid to late sixties. The thing that happened all simultaneously was the Pirate Radio happened, and that changed the fact that we could get the pop music played by the original artists not interpreted in these slightly square ways, and the
TV shows that played pop music got hippa. Like one week, Ready Steadygo, the Friday Night for show just had the Motown review on, and like just blew everybody's minds because suddenly all these people with like style and you know, coordinated moves and everything. You've got to think before that. It's four lumpy lads in beetlesuits and their hair brush forward for twenty minutes before the show. You know, they just thought to do that, and they're doing I don't know,
Fortune Teller or something by Aunt Hussan. Next thing, you've got David ruffin Oh Love and Gay.
You know, it was a bit of a mind blower.
Obviously you could hear the bands, you can hear the musicians who they were listening to. They copied everything off records and records. Took about six weeks to get to England.
I just met this weekend. I was in LA and one of the main cameramen from Ready Steady Go oh Yeah, happened to come to an event of mine. So it's kind of where in the last month and a half, well, I've been talking to the Shindig people air quotes talking That's all I can see now. I can't tell you the context, but I've been learning a lot about how the pop scene got developed over in the UK. And you know, I'm learning these things.
Totally different, totally different timeline, totally different availability. It wasn't commercial for one thing, so they didn't have that driving it. You know, it didn't have the same thing driving it. We had commercial television. We had two only two channels. When I when say, at the time the Beatles started, there were only two TV channels BBC one BBC two hel BBC and ITV so BBC and one commercial channel. Okay, so they both had pop shows, but they were kind
of square and they were based on different things. And then then they started BBC two and they would have jazz programs and that was kind of amazing actually, because they'd get really good people on them. You'd see Errol Gahan or he'd see Escapedis and there's a lot of footage and the BBC went very good at keeping it, so I don't know how much they they went over a lot of things. So things I saw as a kidnapped memories.
Of I learned that they would they were they would.
Wipe the tapes, you know. But I mean, you know, if you saw something like Hendrix when he he was on the Lulu Show and he and the Weak Cream broke up and he just played at Sun Sorrow of
Your Love. He said, we're going to stop playing this rubbish, which was Hey Joe, which was his hit, and that was I saw that love and it just blew my mind, and it was like, hey, television just went out of control, you know, because you remember this is at a time when when on the radio, when I was a kid, they used to make the news reader put on a dinner jacket to read the news on the radio. They had to wait, they had to be formally dressed to
read the news. I don't ask me why. Maybe it made of them.
To think that I was saying this, this is the BB Yeah they were.
Yeah, So it was a whole completely different world. And when you know, you can imagine Hard Day's Night was a film where the group talking in their ordinary voices, not like they were in show business, but they seemed like they just were lads from Liverpool. And the American hop movies were mostly Elvis Presley and they were just involving Elvis as a truck driver, Elvis as a racing driver, Elvis as a helicopter pilot, what Elvis on a surfboard, you know, Like I.
Gotta tell you, I saw Jailhouse Rock for the first time this Sunday. That's a good movie. Well they okay. So in context, Quentin Tarantino has a what we would call a grindhouse in la It's called the New Beverly and basically, Quentin Tarantino purchased this place because he wanted to recreate what movie theaters were like back in the
seventies when he was a kid. So it's only thirty five millimeter or sixteen millimeter print, and it's weird things like you know, a kung fu flick, science fiction film, an old Western or an old classic or Italian new or whatever, and he graciously transferred my movie Summer of Soul to thirty five millimeter and was done in double features. So on Sunday, the double feature was Elvis's Jailhouse Rock
in Summer of Soul. So I saw Jailhouse. I've seen that scene before, but I've never watched Jailhouse Rock, and it just hit me that I I think, with the exception of is there a film called Blue Hawaii or Blue Yeah, I think that's the only Elvis film that I've seen, and now I want to watch them all because well, just for the format, the format of this film is like, there's any excuse two make what videos
basically like to you know? All right, Well, we're also going to rabbit holes out of it, So let's go back to you were taking us to. This is your beginning.
It's nearly impossible for me to stay to pick up the guitar when I was thirteen without referring to the fact that I know because I've read you know, your book, so I know that we have this one and we talked about it before we have this one.
You know.
So key similarity despite all the different experiences is the example of your father playing music weekend.
We got whatever it.
Is is very different and it gives you the sense of it being both magical and you get an idea of the Monday. And remember really going in with my dad to the radio studio when they were on, when I was on the school holiday, I'd go with him in the morning and to be a bunch of people reading the paper and I think still smoking in the theater. I remember them as having cigarettes. Maybe they didn't, but
they were definitely just reading the paper. And then the conductor would come, the band leader and then bring it to attention.
They rehearse. Then a group would come in and rehearse, and that group would.
Be somebody from the charts, so it'd be the Hollies or Engelbern, Humperdink or whoever was on the show singing a couple of songs. Inevitably, if that's your perspective of it, it changes. It just me and a kid waiting for your favorite record to come on the radio, or your favorite record to come on. The couple of TV shows a week that played the music. You liked the fact that my dad was in the front room learning the songs that I loved, Like the first record I ever
owned was Please Please Meet. He gave it to me because I asked him for it, but it was advanced copy that he was learning off a piece of sheet music so he could sing it on the radio that week the Beatles, so he was second hit.
Okay, I see.
So he's singing please Please Me in the front room. And then my folks split up not long after that, so then he would just give me the records. He'd come around and give me a stack of singles.
I was going to ask, what was the first record that you remember buying with your own money.
Fame at Last was an e ep by Georgie Fame and it was pretty cool because it had one song by Lambert Andricks and ross one by mos Awson, but it was a it was a Willie Dixon song, one song that was by Lou Jordan and one song by Ray Charles that there was that's who he was covering. So that was a pretty good education for four songs. A twenty one year old organ player from Lancashire. They
were napped for a nine year old kid. That was a lot of information to get all on one record because he was he was no no, no was way after that was a later one. It was a point in no return. It was a it was a golflin king song. It was it was sixties like wow, it was later later, Yeah, okay.
And Georgie did.
G McDaniels and like a Sander Maria, and he had like he was Hippie. Knew Eddie Jefferson, and he knew a lot of music that the other organ players didn't know, like Stevie Winwood, the New R and B R, all those guys all knew all the great R and B singers.
But Georgie was unusual and did he He.
Sang like like mosaices and he sang like a cross between John Hendricks and Moses, and he saying, you know, you see me, welcome to this man. He had that kind of dead panwez you know, goddamn Like he could sing like he could sing John Hendrick's music just great. Yeah, he could sing like things like he could sing like down for the Count and Little Darling and those things, the Neil Hefty things. He could sing, the basy things he sang with a big band. He was a really great musician.
Fort For our listeners out there, if you can peep, it's a later John Hendrick song, but there's a okay, So if you're familiar with I've talked about this on the show before. The idea of vocal lise, vocal ease is where jazz lyricists would put words to jazz songs
that never had lyrics before. And so John Hendrix does this really amazing version of Miles Davis's Freddy Freeloader, and he does it with al Jio, George Benson, and Bobby mcfaerrin, and basically the four of them, with their very unusual jazzy voices, verbatim recreate all the solos or Miles's original Freddy freeload with the lyrics, which is the hardest thing
to do. I mean, they notated each like I've played the original and their version simultaneously, and they followed every lick of those solos and put lyrics to it and a narrative to a story about a guy loves alcohol. But anyway, I digress. If you're into John Hendricks, that is definitely.
Well that That was the song on not EPI that they did, which was lined by Hendricks and Ross. Course, Sonny Ross also another Scottish import to the jaz saying, you know.
Whoa I did not know that? Yeh she thought she was American.
No, she won Americans, she was I think Scottish.
Yeah, fuck this, yeah, I mean seriously, like you just invented your a new podcast. Like the two of you fucks could talk the fucking ever and it's all great. But the problems there's like ten references every five seconds. So it's like for people trying to figure out what the heck what we're talking about, they have to you know, you can turn a podcast down to to like half speed or like.
You know, I do that. Actually, I mean, all right, you guys are ridiculous. Honestly, it's ridiculous.
No take over, Steve, forgive me.
I know that Elvis wants to talk a little bit about Summer of Saw.
I do I know that you that you saw Smer soldiers. I mean, I have to thank you for morelos that you know some of us al had to come out when it came, when when it was shot, it would have had a corrective I think for the way people sort of regarded is it. And I mean I remember going to see Woodstock, and that was our first glimpse of a festival.
You know, I was living in the north of England.
You know, it rains all the time, like constantly, it seems like for years, it seemed in those days. And we just thought, Wow, that's gonna be great. One of these days, We'll have one of these festivals and everybody, all the girls that take the clothes off and were all slide around the mudin and all the great you see, summer sold. It was kind of for one thing, it was in the city, right so right right there, you kind of had whole families. You didn't have this one generation of people working.
Wait time out, I got to ask you a question. So you're telling me that in nineteen sixty nine, yeah, reading aston Bery, they hadn't happened. Oh wait, So I'm under the impression that America was lead to the table. No, no, and that Europe had been throwing festivals all day.
They were showing festivals where they used to kind of like hit each other on the head with a bladder on a stick, you know, or like jump around the maypole and stuff back in the medieval times. But they didn't have like rock festivals. No, they didn't. I mean they had gatherings.
So when did festival cultures start?
And I think Glastonbury is the first one? Is seventy or seventy one? Wait what yeah, I mean one of the big festivals that every remembers was Bath in seventy. Yeah, but it was a pretty small festival. And then we didn't really have any big gathering, like, like nothing on the scale of Woodstock. I mean maybe in Europe they had them. I don't remember hearing about them though. I
didn't wasn't paying that much attention. But we saw so we saw the film Woodstock, right, And then I was talking to some people the other day about I went to the biggest festival in seventy two. I was already playing then in Liverpool and I remember did a gig on the Friday night and I came out and it was raining, like they said, cats and dogs, you know, just like looks like a load of needles dancing on
the on the on the pavement. And it never occurred to me that would be slightly damp in the field. I was going to outside thirty miles away and then got on a train the next morning with just a blanket and boots, no sleeping bag, no tent, and I didn't even think about it. I just I'll just sleep under the stars, like and it was like, you know, it was like a way back from the lines in
the First World War. When I got there, it was like you had to wade through feet of mud and it was miserable and cold, and I and they were selling these giant like messenger bags, human sized messenger bags, and that's the only thing that stopped us from all getting hypothermia. And then listened to Captain beef Hard at about three o'clock in the morning and the next day The Grateful Dead played for four hours. You know, it was like and that was glamour, you know, that was the
baddest glamoro. And I had trench foot when I came home. You know, it was like it was it was nothing like we imagined. So seeing summer soul and seeing a festival happening inner city, right, Okay, it's over weekends, so it's like it's a collection of festivals really, but with
the whole thousand. Yeah, But I mean, the thing that's so great is the fact that you've got those interviews with the little kids that were there, that were witnesses to this stuff, and there's a whole corrective to like what that all of those people meant a part from the fact that they had the jazz and the gospel people, and then you know, all the little vignettes like Mehalea Jackson handing the mic to mad this, you know, I mean parts of it that just I don't know whether
I'm reading into this, but like having said sixty five or something when the Motown review came over, and the fact that you were, you know, in the same way as people say are you beatles or stones? Are you as we said, Temmy's or tops? You know, you can't like them both, you know, right, really because I like them both.
You know that.
So David Ruffin when he comes out and he's he's like the kind of returning prints, you know, and then he's sort of fragile. You know, it was a curious look because when he comes out and then his act kind of looks slightly stiff because he's used to playing much more he's not. He's also used to four people being yeah because it's right after he left, right, so
it's like yeah, yeah. And then guess what, you know, the band that everybody's shocked by is fift to mention to completely kill, and they're kind of seen as kind of square, and then when you see him, they're not square at all. They're looking great, but everything's great. And then you get the Vinish vision from the future. You get like the visitation from the future with Sly, and I mean we just if that at all. I mean Sly at Woodstock, it's so far an advance of everything
else on the bill. I mean, it's so far the best thing on It's the best music, even Jimmy. It's like by the end of it, it's like there's nobody there watching him. The big moment is Sly. But if people had seen that in the context of all of it, can you imagine how different things would have been the Stevie wanted to right before he makes talking book, you know, like that's exactly what the hell it's all these things, you know.
That's literally like that's why I made it, because I meant the time when it was offered to me, Prince's autobiography was out and he was talking about like being an eleven year old watching Santana do this guitar solo and he's like, that's what I want to do when I get older, and like I'm really he was discouraged from doing music because his dad was like, he'll never be as good as me. So already that chip on the shoulder, I got to be better than my dad.
Thing happened, and his dad wasn't the nurturing type. But his dad takes him to the seawoodstock and through Santana's set, Prince is like, that's what I want to do. And so for me, you know, luckily I got there because well again epigenetics, like my parents, coming into that situation in the world where your parents are musically inclined, you
can't help but reach this destination. But I just wondered the hundreds of millions of people that who could have been affected by this, And again to hear you say it, because in my mind, I'm thinking that America got a festival idea from over in Europe. But I don't think so.
No, I think it was a spontaneous I mean, there's you know, when you will look at jazzon the summer's day, you know, and you see that and you see Chuck Berry come out and you watch the band behind him like it's an all star band behind him, and they're really a band that designed to back Little Armstrong, you know they and they're just looking is Jack t God? And they played trombone with Little som Strong just looking at Chuck Berry like what thing is he doing here?
Because I guess that guitar sounds like twelve times louder than anything, and really it's not that loud. But but the difference is in the music is so great and that's but that looks pretty, that's pretty kind of still like an it's not really like a festival. It's like an open air show. It's still like a garden part. It's a bunch of people up in Newport, like, looking at this, it's great that we got it. Newport Folk
vessels the same. You get a bunch of bohemians and then you get Bob Dylan comes out and it's totally like a revolution. But I don't think there's anything in England that's there's a Cambridge Folk Festival and things like that. I don't remember there being anything that we could go to like that.
Well, this shows me that Woodstock the movie is the legend that's set people's thoughts about festivals and people's thoughts about hippies and people's tharts about America and people's thoughts about those acts that plead.
So, yeah, we saw all those movies, you know, we saw an Easy Rider with all that, with all the music, with Hendrix in and Steppenwolf, you know, and that seemed like whatever the movie was about, whatever it represented, those movies were things that people or have you seen that because it was it was an X because there was naked people in it and drugs, so those things don't
The country was pretty buttoned up. People think it's like, oh, it's all happening, that's swinging sixties and all that, But that's all just happening on the films that the that they made pop films in the fifties, like on the Elvis Model. They put the star of the day in the movie, made up some daft thing. What's this one about? Oh, he's he's got a race horse? Okay, well, this one's about a race horse, this guy's got a chip shop, whatever it is. You know, they make up some story
right and stick a couple of songs in it. Then then it all changes again. So the idea of a bunch of people getting together and putting music on and I mean, I mean, what's the name of the guys that the mc gar Yeah, God is like you could make a whole you know. I said to Jeff Jones that, you know, I went to the Get Back premiere in London and I sat next one away from Glen Johns.
Well you went to the Get Back premiere? How long was the movie?
It was like one hundred minute cut with a with an introduction Peter Jackson on one of the days of the eighteenth day.
Have you seen us yet?
This is where I got to cut you guys off. There's no and you talk about that documentary the next hour. Let me, I've decided this ship.
Let me just say this one thing though, because it attains the quest. I mean, I think there was an actual article in the New York Times about Glenn john Sen that he was kind of like had it with people ringing him up, going what about your clothes and get back? Because Glen is wearing like the greatest outfits. He's the most stylish man in the movie. Likewise, you could have had a Summer of Soul line of clothing from the.
MC's got the greatest cussion.
No matter who's on the stage, He's He's like he's got an outfit almost as good and nearly always like right for their style too. It's like he dressed he knew, Okay, I'm going to come out and I'm going to introduce I'm going to be right for that, you know. It's like he's given a lot of thought to it. One no, he changed for every act. Was that was fantastic?
So do you want to ask your first question?
So that was the introduction his first hour of whatever. But I did see Get Back. It's freaking mesmerizing. Obviously, if you're a Beatles fan, there's so much and.
Even if you're not, actually I think if it, I think, yeah, sir, if you just like people, you know, if you just like people.
Yeah, But if you're a Beatles fan, it's like.
All right.
For me, I think this is where the story begins with regards to the two of you. It's the year two thousand, and it's right after Voodoo had come out in nineteen ninety nine. But for me, the story starts with a Vanity Fair article more of a list addictionary that came out that Elvis put out in Vanity Fair in the year two thousand. It was essentially his five hundred favorite albums or most recommended album something along those lines, and five hundred.
Records ant to haven if you died.
I think, yeah, like that. It was very ominous that article. That article started my friendship with Lisa Robbins because I was like, I want to do that. I could do that, you know, so we sort of Yeah.
I don't know how I came across it, but my first subscribe.
I'm going to I'm gonna tell you how he came across. No. Literally, it was a big deal that Vanity Fair did a music issue was just unheard of at the time, and I remember I think I brought ten copies of that. Okay, I'm gonna tell you how how that article and that specific issue saved Annie Leebwoitz's life. Are you ready for this? And it's a voodoo connection. So my publicist gives me
a call. We get the roots, get word that we're going to be one of the subjects in the music issue and at Annie Leewoods is going to shoot us, which is the highest honor at the time, Like there's a photographer that's going to shoot you, has to be Annie. So of course I'm I'm the point person for the Roots or whatever. And you know, I talked to her on the phone and she's in Paris right now and she's shooting maybe three or four artists that like she's
traveling Europe like getting them and whatnot. So this is mid two thousand. We're on tour with DeAngelo. I also think that the first leg of the Voodoo Tour is done. We're about to start rehearsals for the second leg of the Voodoo Tour. And all I remember was okay, So we had maybe two or three weeks off of which I scheduled time with Anny Leewoods to do this shot
with the Roots, and something happens on DiAngelo's end. Could be anything, right, No, no, but yeah, it was you know, like we missed the deadline or missed whatever it was, whatever the set date was supposed to be. We had to kick the can to the next week, and then the next week and then and then when we kicked it the third time, I told Alan Leeds and the guys like, look, I got a photo shoot with Anny
Leewoods in Philadelphia. I can't do that day. But it was like our only date to rehearse, like, you know, it was one of the things where D'Angelo happened. So what winds up happening is I don't want to lose this shot, and I hit my publisher something. We hit her up and we're just apologizing profusely, and she's like, look, look it's cool, we can handle it. Matter of fact. I'll tell you what this This will give me a week to I think Most Death was coming to Paris.
She's like, it gives me a chance to shoot him and do other two other artists, and then I'll hop on the plane and come back, and then we could do you on this particular day, which was great. So we have that settled turns out and this and this is where D'Angelo isms saved her life. Had we kept that original arrangement, any Leewards would have been on that last Concord flight that crashed and killed all the passengers. Wow. So in the week that she decided to stay for
Most Death, she avoided being on that flight. You know, Thank God for that. So yeah, it's crazy. And the epilogue is that I told di'angelo what happened and he says, who's Anny Leewood? And I was like, dude, she's the most epic photographer of all time. Dude like, and he's like, and he pulls out a Jet magazine that he's on the front cover of. Right, this is what I'm about.
Right, Well, now I know how I found the article because it was you.
Yeah, I was on that tour. I had ten of those. But yeah, I think, yeah, I had ten of those issues because it was a big deal.
I still have it because I used to use it. I was like, this is the ultimate record store tool to have.
Absolutely, I purchased many an album off that list.
So on that list was Voodoo. That's the first time that I knew that you, Elvis, knew about him quest and about t'angelo and I'd heard that record. So how did that? How did Voodoo get on your radar? How did you get your hands on it?
I have no idea. I don't remember anybody.
I think.
I just you know, like anything, you something filled us through and then you listen to it and it's great. Maybe I read about it somewhere.
Well, maybe the video.
I lived up on hill in Ireland and still in those days, I didn't see any I didn't have any cable television.
The story that I've always gotten from people, there's always a younger person, someone's life. That's sort of like, I think this is an album that's going to resonate with you, because this feels like an era that you loved, And if you're if you're a fan of Stevie Wonder, if you're a fan of if you're a fan of that sort of pure soul, then there's no way this record didn't hit your radar.
I think it's probably that recognition, but that's kind of also common to a bunch of other records that are probably for one thing, I had no idea you were going to ask me. I would probably be surprised by some of the records that are and aren't on that list, because you could have asked me.
Three days later and I would have got a different five hundred. Do you know so?
I mean I remember thinking that almost The only thing I really calculated was I didn't feel obliged to put records on that I knew a lot of other people really held in high regard, Like there's no records by the Doors because I can't stand the doors.
Why can't you Door?
I know I knew that about him, but I don't I can't figure out why.
I just never spoke to me. It just never did. I don't know why I can. I like a lot of them. I don't like it.
I don't know.
It's sort of like it's kind of cool that you don't like to do it.
Yeah.
No, And people always think I would because of the organ and you know and everything. But I just and I think they're all sure. They're all refined players in their own way. And when I break on through to the other side. I like that one record that's the only record by the Doors. I like the Fame. No, my friend played on it. It's like, you know, Jerry Chef played on that. He was in my band. But no, no, at led Zeppelin, there's no led Zeppelin records on that.
I literally never owned one. Really, there's no Pink Floyd records because I only to own two Pink Floyd discs and they're both singles, c Emily Play and Arma Lane. I've never even listened to Dark side of the Word. I have no idea what the Wall sounds like.
Is there any homegrown act that you dug homegrown? Well, I mean just from I mean from England?
Yeah, who the peoples? So you forgot the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Small Faces for me was the next group after the Beatles. It was like, not the Stones, it was the Small Faces, really, Tin Soldier, you know, all or nothing, all of those records. Yeah, but the Kinks, the Kinks, absolutely, the Kinks only.
Up to a certain period.
Tell this man please.
In the same thing. It's really selective. It's anything about musical choices. Like I say, it would have been a different five hundred of been You could probably pull one up there. What's with that record? I go, I don't even remember saying that should have been on the list. I would still put Voodoo on there now, but I don't know what else is on there that was surprise and I don't.
Know that was such a relation.
I think what I said is right.
Though I think it's right, I think it speaks to some continuity. And you see, this is the part of the thing that comes from our inability to hear everything. Is the things that we did hear in England really went deep. So nobody said have you when you asked me about Northern Soul like two hours ago. You know, that's an organic kind of movement to kind of dance to records that nobody else had. Like there's a particular kind of beat. A lot of the Northern Soul records
are not from Detroit, they're from Chicago. There are a lot of Chicago things, so because they I don't know why it was, but maybe that slightly different sound motown or as we didn't even call it motown.
We called it Tamla.
You say you've got the new if you got the new Tamla record, right, we said, what do you listen to? I listened to Tamla and it's Tamla. And all we had were these singles, or we had compilations Motown Chartbusters compilations Volume three particular is a particularly good one, you know, and What is Soul which was was an Atlantic Records compilation of it, and Tighten Up two which is which is a regular rosteatic compilation. Those you can have a party with those. And we didn't have a lot of
other records because the radio. Yeah, but that was pretty good. You could play those round and round, and I think that's it made you really kind of like go behind a painted smile.
You know. This whole herd of mine heard.
It through the great those records, but we didn't know the gladys Knight version who heard it through the Great Vine. Necessarily we knew the Marvin version, so all these records there were, and then people got into the more esoteric thing, and then they started dancing at the week and Casino and this kind of slightly looser beat that they had on those Chicago records, Major Lance and these kind of Curse Mayfield produced records. They're not like the Curtis seventies records.
These are things that sound like they're imitating Motown, are not quite getting it right even yeah, they're not on the same level of musicianship as the Motown rhythm section. But people, for whatever reason, it was a particular kind of bpm. It was a particular kind of rhythm way faster, faster, and it and this crazy dancing, the and the crazy clothes. You've seen the you've surely seen the documentary about Lord
and Sold. You know, it's a whole thing, and it's totally based in the North and it's nothing to do and the suburbs where I lived, we were rock steady, motown or tabla you know these that. And then I went to Liverpool in nineteen seventy and they asked me what kind of music you like? I said, I like Otis Renning and Lee Dorsey and you like soul music, I said, yeah, and tabla that's for that's for Divvis.
They would say Divvy's means like yes, it's like like idiots like that music really like because it was I.
Don't know why they.
Were into kind of pink Floyd and and like all this prog rock and heavy rock. And so I ended up liking The Grateful Dead because nobody would nobody to go with me on that because so, well.
What's it. You don't you're not a big prog rock guy, but you like the Dead.
The Dead are not a prog rock Well, in nineteen seventy seventy, wait.
We're gonna go down a whole other Robberts. I honestly thought I was just going to say one thing and the ease out of here, But now you stuck me. And I do this with almost every guest. Guest the house with your entire record collection is on fire. Yeah, you can only say five records, and they can't be greatest hits or box sets? All right?
Can they be forty fives or LPs LP?
I mean more records?
He might want is please please meet forty five?
You know well, I don't mean the sentimental saving but what five albums, non greatest hits, non live unless it's a special live record like Volume three of James Brown at the can't.
Be a compilation record, though, can't be a compilation record.
It can't be a compilation That's not fair though, Okay, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
No, I'm just saying some artists like you don't know their albums because I'm just trying.
To figure out, like, what what is the what is the canon of original albums? Yeah?
But you I think if you really had a chance and you knew where they lived.
How could you ask him this question?
If you knew though, if you knew that your house was on fine, you're going to lose everything. You'd you'd pull the rarest records that you knew you couldn't replace. You wouldn't Like it's a difficult question because I would definitely. I still have my original Mono Revolver two part of all right, I picked that one rare.
Five the rarest albums that you own? Yeah, and five of the seminal okay, Mono Revolver No, okay, but all right, what five of the rarest albums you own? What are they?
I don't know that. I don't really know that I have rare records in the same way as you do. I mean I think at this time, Revolver a mono Revolver definitely Okay, sound Venture sound Venture by Georgie means a lot to me. Okay, not so easy to get uh from later on?
I what's the most expensive record you shelled out for?
I actually probably a seventy eight You know some of the D eight's come in like four or five hundred.
Are you you have a seventy eighths collection? Because that's a whole rabbit hole.
That's a whole rabbit hole. Yeah, So should I accept those because people all the time, well no, not real records don't go into that world, dude. I mean, I'm not really interested in seventy eighths, But you know, like old great grandmothers are passing away, the nieces and nephews are like your quest. I don't know what to do this, but it's an endless way, know you, I should take it. I'll tell you why.
Because acoustic records acoustic records before there was electrical recording. Think about it, You're like literally staring into the horn of the Victrola and you're you can go right through that little hole into the room they're playing.
It's coming.
It's one generation away, isn't it. It's one generation closer than electrical recording.
Wow.
All right, so the answers, yes, I should accept it.
I'm strong on an electrical recording, absolutely.
But his collections are pretty He's got a collection of collections, are right.
I'm sure.
I know.
I've seen that he's got a storage room for his storage rooms.
Yes, yeah, So what you don't know the most expensive.
I never in a way of collecting records. It's always been about what's in the groove. It's never been about the catalog number, or the funny label, or this is a different sleeve. I never cared about any of that stuff. The other reason is because when I first came to America after the first trip, I you know, the handle fell off my suitcase on the way home because it was so full of records I'd bought in second hand stores. I used to come with an empty suitcase, no one,
I'd fill it up. And the whole joy of it was like, Oh, here's a whole album by Bobby blue Blant, here's a whole album by the Luvin Brothers. You know, I had maybe one track on a compilation all those here's a whole team one Walker record.
You know you were a complition guy.
Well, no, that's what we That's how we got to know about stuff because of getting the Motown records or stacks and Atlantic collections. I didn't have a whole record of William Bell until it came to America. Then you could you could find them everywhere. You could find like Great records, whatever it was. You know, it's weird Detroit Spinners as we called them, you know, right, you could. I had singles on the Spinners, but then you could just go buy.
Albums of them, you know, So you know it's weird now, Philip Wynd, you know, yes, you know it's weird. Now. I am collecting and paying top dollar for UK acts that would cover American stuff. Like I'm going through a kitchen phage now where I'm big into cover songs. So there will be again like party records, the idea of doing a compilation with just straight up hits that you could put on at a party and let play all the way through, and then put on side to and
let play all the way. So there would be these bands from like from Liverpool, pans from Brighton, especially in Brighton there's one group with the name Brighton in it but they're not known, but it's like they're cheap imitation of James Brown's I got the feeling or whatever was hitting at that time, like science will delivery.
And what what what kind of period of time is this sixty.
Six to seventy six? It would be like the k Tell of whatever, shout out to k Tel where did they come from? Hey? Before? I mean, this is this is the thing. I know.
This sounds like I'm bringing my dad in this all the time, but this is what he did.
That's what I'm saying. He did it in the early sixties.
I mean you, I don't know whether you know this, but the beginning of pirate radio, there was the guy Ryan O'Reilly. Everybody knows about that name is Irish guy who's found of Radio Caroline. His partner was an Australian guy who had the other pirate radio ship was which was anchored in the in the estuary of the Thames, broadcast into London. Now, this guy had a crazy scheme
and this is true. He thought that he could cover records make him cheaply at nine in the morning in downtime, and the record the song was because he'd come out of publishing. He believed that he could have those records taught the original versions, so those are the super kitch versions because they are no phino copies, and he thought he could get away without paying anything but publishing.
I guarantee he's saying this is genius.
It was like, okay, of course it failed, and that the plan failed, you know, because people so through it.
Okay, So in Portland, Oregon, Yeah, there's a writer who wrote the Encyclopedia of Kitsch Records or whatever. He sold me. It's like the most I've ever paid for a record collection. But even the stories like wait, you guys, you know this not the original stuff, right, these like cheap imitations or whatever. But for me, the same drum break intro for Superstition of Stevie, it's just as valuable if another drummer did it, like it's still a drum break is a drummer.
Plus, there warn't that many musicians in England plan on these records. So when my dad would go and sing on these records, it was the guitar player would be Vic Flick, the same guy that played the James Bond thing. It would be that it would it would be the same guy that would be playing on the legit session. Anyway, they did these things and they paid them cash and they sold them at the supermarket. They sold them at the gas station or the petrol stations, we called them,
and they were they were forty five EPs. These were before the albums that you'd probably know from the you know, they were later called Top of the Pops because that was the name of the BBC weekly show. This a whole subculture of music. We used to get them even when we were on the road. First we'd get our records done in Sweden where they wouldn't know any of the words. They just make up a bunch of nonsense words to my lyrics. It's half Swedish, half English.
Wait for the record.
What is your dad's name, Ross McManus, And that's the that's his. He had a bunch of names because he was a different person on every track. Dude, Okay, you'd never find him.
So I have seven thousand pieces of just a bunch of bands from Europe covering American funk songs and American soul songs and rock songs or whatever.
But also the other thing quess is that there was five There was five or six weeks between an American release. So no matter how fast they got that the publisher got that song over. What was going to happen first was sheet music travel faster than records.
So if you had Billy J.
Kramer or somebody, some good looking guy out of Liverpool, he could get a cover of a but new Bert backrack song before the American version could come out. Quite often you'd see two songs on the charts, the same song done by you know, the the English cover version, which and then there'd be a ghost record, as you might say that the ones we're talking about, So there'd
be that version playing on a pirate radio station. There'd be the local English group like Silla Black singing anyone who had a heart and Warwick hates her for having done that, really still was going on about it. Now after next time you see the on Silla Black and see what, No, she's still matter. So and then of course what would happen was the version would come out, the American version. People would notice it was a little slick or maybe the broc list was better. Certainly the
standard of production I think generally was better. It's sound of arrangement. There's a big difference in the sound of an English horn section of American horn section, different tombra. I could tell you two bars whether it's an American or English record from if there's brass on it.
You know, well, I'm gonna blow your mind now because now the inferior covers is what would attract a hip hop producer today, like the trash here and the more off notes they play.
Yeah, this is right over all, I've got one for you right before we go back to Steve's agenda here because.
You got to go.
Do you know the label Habibi Funk I've heard of it, Yes, Yeah, it's they do all they do companies get the compilation. Yeah, Number seven in the series cast a Blanker's Shuffle. Okay, it's a note for note cover of Bob and Nol Harlem shovel. Yeah, and the guy goes to the first phrase of it, you know, the lid, except he goes up past the note down under the note because he's hearing microtones, you know, he's hearing like like Arabic music. Inflection.
You got to hear it.
It's it's crazy. First time you hear it, you think, oh, that's just out of tune. Then he does it the second time he realized that's the way he sings. He's and other than that, sounds like they got a you know, a real to real tape recorder and put the microphone against the wall of an apartment that was playing the record next door. That's what the fidelity sounds like. But it's killer, damn ya, you really know your music, That's
what it sounds like. My memory of the Harlem Shoffle is going to a works dance at a chocolate factory when I was about fifteen, and all the girls lining up, all the girls. It was somebody a cousin of some word there and I got to go to this works dance and they all lined up, all these all these girls at work there and did the dance that they thought.
Was the whole no idea what it was.
It was like, you know, they just gone it there when that record came on, and that record didn't sound in that place reverberating. It wasn't played through a very good system. It sounded no more you know, polished than that right exactly, but the spirit of it and all of all of these records, because half of them are like mishearings of records that you know, they sound like dyking the Blazers is what this sounds like.
You know. Oh Jesus Christ, don't even give me to start there. All right, I'll be right there. But Steve, this is now officially your show.
Okay's He brings up a topic that I that I wanted to bring up anyway about what's now become known. I think in general as flipping something. Somebody will hear a song in old songs, a producer, let's say, and we'll say I'm gonna flip that, which means essentially, I'm going to take that, chop it up, sample it, or even not sample it physically, but take the idea or the vibe by energy.
I mean, you know, obviously when we started is like we had about three I don't think there was any ability to sample it. There was, I wasn't aware of it, and music didn't take the same advantage of it. People might have copied choruses, I guess they would have had to lose a generation to do that. An analog.
No, No, I'm not.
No, no, I'm talking about we would in terms of hearing figures within songs, you know, Like that's why I never had to write anything down early on because you're going, it's the rhythm from this song with the guitar part from that.
We want no change.
So you get what I'm saying now.
It's not different to sampling, except we were just playing it.
It's not different, and that's kind of what.
I'm That's why when Somon begame dominant, it didn't necessarily sort of seem to me like some people had their instruments reacted to it like it was some kind of cheating. I said, this is everything we've been doing all along. It's the degree of imagination that you bring to the to the new version of it, the flipped version, as you say, is whether it's.
Any good at all.
I mean, that's the difference between being Jeff Lynn and somebody you know, like from Manchester. Like I won't to say the name you know, but you know what I'm talking.
About, and you sometimes, I believe, reveal these types of things your inspirations for certain songs in concert in the middle of you might.
Quote something you know that's obviously underneath the song that you play it, or I think it's also the way you get the particular notes in a vocal. If you're not, like you alluded to, the kind of not having a melodious or particularly beautiful voice, it helps to think like another sing of phrases, so that you know you do something with your own.
Are you still doing that these days?
Oh yeah, totally.
Yeah.
Sometimes odd words will come out of my mouth actually sound mom entirely like somebody else for one word, but it's not really important to the understanding of the song, so I never underline it. If somebody comments on it, then if they notice it, then it was because it was there. But it's not important to the telling of the story that people reckon. I'm not doing it to be recognized. It might have been like, how would such and such a single approach that line?
Well, there's a I guess, innumerable ways of approaching what we're talking about. You hear a baseline that you admire and so you inverted or you use well, but didn't.
We get into this when we did?
When we when we first started, when I first came on the show, and we were I was playing with the roots, and you know, when we listen back now to the sample that you made, and we're getting a little ahead of ourselves into wise up ghosts. But say, the sample for my new haunt is Quest Play, and it is derived from Quest Play and Chelsea, which is Pete Thomas playing fire by Mitch Mitchell, well by Hendrix,
but it's specifically the firepart that he's referencing. So that's like a that's like, you know, a flip of a flip of a flip correct four times.
And I don't know if you're counting this as one of your flips. But the sound is actually a sample of you and the Roots playing live on the stage. Yeah, so it's a sample of you guys.
Yeah, that's what I mean. No, I mean, but but it's being quoted twice over, you know, because Quest is rationalizing it to his style of play based on Pete's part, which is based on Mitch's part. So that's that's that's why, you know, people are a surprise that I didn't take exception about, you know, the pump it up quote on the Olivia Rodriga record. But that would be just ludicrous because it's like it's common language really, you know, if it had been a whole melody or a whole lyric
that was just stolen. That that would be obvious and you would take exception. But I think it's amount of language in songs and beads particularly, that's that's common.
That's folk music, right, I mean, that's that's how it happens. I'm certainly not trying to get into that discussion of whether this is right to do or to do or anything like that, but just to acknowledge that, you know,
motes are probably sampled from chopin or whatever. Okay, that figures you fing out, But anyway, the real comparison I want to get you guys to talk about is how you've been doing that since the beginning, you know, and he's been doing that, and you're both doing essentially the same thing but with different techniques and different technologies.
Definitely, Yeah, I mean one of the things that I think that we've talked about, you and I have talked about and we experienced over the you know, I was still making the previous record I've made before we worked together was recorded analog and and edited digitally.
Most of the records part of that were recorded analogue.
Since then, the distance between the two mediums is closed because nearly all of the outboard plugins that people designed to work in digital recording today are in it. Our imitations of analog, the warmth of analog equipment, valve equipment, and and you know, sort of very carefully modulated recreations
of spaces and all of these things. All these libraries of plates you can download in an attempt to bring something less brittle to this very facile way of recording of digital, which of course is amazing if you don't want to bother to play more than two bars and music in succession, because you could go on forever, you know, you could, you could have every two bars have a slightly different sort of resonance. If you could be bothered to do it, you could. You could, you could process.
You could just play a two bar loop and and and you know, paste it sequentially and make it sound like the most incredibly.
Organic sounding track.
Now if you wanted to do that, or you could just fucking play it.
You know, digital is like a photograph of something where you like sort of immediately lose a generation just right off the bat.
There is something to that, for sure, but I actually come into piece with it because it is much more and I certainly couldn't have made the latest record unless we had.
Or wise Up Ghosts for that matter.
Wise Up Ghosts and as we you know, from the one first time we played the music in the room, the music changed shape the minute. Even though you know, we were all the same people that had played those parts for the most part. The minute we actually just played those numbers in a room, the music completely changed shape.
It stopped being quite as.
Angular and became greasier and like you know, flowed in a different, totally different way, just because it was happening simultaneously.
It's a totally different.
Not a collage, you know.
Yeah, And I wasn't involved at that point.
I didn't want to say.
But before we get to wise Up goes more in depth. You know, you're on Quest of Supreme and the audience here are as fanatic about Quest as I am about you. So can you tell the audience what it was like the first time you played live with Quest and the Roots when you came onto Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in December of two thousand and nine and you did high Fidelity and Chelsea.
Well, I think the high Fidelity was a particularly interesting thing because it was the decision, which I don't think was mine, was it?
No, it was mine.
That was your idea.
You you had heard the which was then a bootleg. You'd heard the bootleg. We were since legitimized it and released it in the Aufuls's box set, But it was an arrangement that we had not issued. I don't think was it available.
That it was available for Rhino.
Well maybe we hadn't released it, but we hadn't remixed it as well. We hadn't done We hadn't because we hadn't gone back to the So what you you were referencing was a board tape, and so we put the board tape on that Rhino thing, and then in twenty twenty we actually went back to the multi tracks. We got the multi track and remixed the whole Wow.
That's sebass ended that wow.
So that's why the version that's in Unfuls is a little bit more kind of bodied to it. But that was that was this. I mean, when we did that record in Hillsham Wistloud Studios in nineteen eighty, it was supposed to be some sort of take on all the music that we were talking about earlier, the stuff that was kind of like that wasn't made in England. It was all the stuff that filtered through. There's much about R and B as we kind of knew as we call it R and B and soul, that's the words
we use for it. Those words have different meanings now they have different associations. But when I said, you know, you know, like nowadays and say you're talking about fifties R and B, you're talking about early sixties like Halean Woolf or Slim Harper, you're talking about you know, these these different kind of feels. And then the music that we identified we saw as distinct. It was a sudden
soul or soul that was on the Atlantic label. We saw something different than Tamla, which was obviously had a more poppy The way the voices were and the way things were arranged, and the way that, you know, the the orchestration, the different kind of other instruments that would pop up in them, they seem to have more in common with a lot of pop records that were being
made by the mid sixties. And you know, in these definitions of what we heard, it was the just just the fact that the Atlantic records, for the most part, had horns and a rhythm section with maybe piano and organ, whereas the Motown or Tamela records from the mid sixties had a lot of vocal group like often the Temptations, even the six and on other people's records, but really kind of like very very well arranged vocal parts and strings, and they were played by jazz musicians. You can tell
they're played by jazz musicians. They're kind of light, feel incredible, you know, James jameson to hold that whole kind of funk brother's band. It's a very different sound to something like Musclesholls or the you know stuff made up on forty eighth Street Atlantic, you know, and they're all the bands in England that copied the cues from these records
were trying very hard to play that. So we grew up hearing, as I said, twice over those things and sometimes then turned up a little bit like the small Faces. Gradually brought volume to bear on that picture. You know, you could tell which records different English singers were listening to, but they didn't necessarily sound like Faithful Colors. I gradually got looser and then by the time we got making records,
it was completely different. We had a lot of stuff to draw from when we went to do that record in Holland that we had already had pretty much all the hit records that we were likely to have in England. We'd had from Get Happy, you mean well up to Get Happy, we had a couple of hits off that everything we made was a hit. From late seventy seven to eighty there was everything was a top thirty to top five record, every single So that was a good run,
you know. That was like what established us in England. At the same time we were barely getting on the radio in America, so the things are kind of out of joint, you know. So when we got in to do that record, we had arrangements that were still carried
some of our ideas from the previous year. And the big influence on the Armed Forces record were European signing records like ABBA and funnily enough, the Bowie records, you know, specifically low in Heroes, but also stationed the station and station the station was what we were aiming at when we did the slow, high fidelity that's brain you know stuff. No, that's before Brian, you know, that's the I don't know who produced that record, I don't know, I don't know.
I never really checked who produced it, but it was, you know it it had a sort of a funk bass, you know, it had a funk bassis to it. But then David Bower's kind of vocal and it had like the Nina Simone the song associated with Nina Simone, Wild is the wind on that record and at TVC one five and the beginning of that kind of you know, European influenced funk that it didn't. So we were trying to we were enamored of that, all that music, and we're trying to play.
Like a machine.
But we didn't have the guitars, we didn't have the sustained guitars, we didn't have the layers of synth, we didn't have the layers of production that he did. You know, we were just a four piece band. So the live arrangement of that was a sort of feeble attempt to play like station to station. And all that happened was when we got in the studio, I said we better pick up the tempo because the song is getting away, you know.
So the live recording was prior to the recording the.
Studio that was in the summer.
That was in the summer of seventy nine, so we were yeah, well a strange.
I mean, maybe you weren't satisfied with with that arrangement, but that arrangement does have so much hard to it.
It has a lot of freedom to the to the where the vocal lies. Yeah, because you can dance around the beat a lot more because it's much slower, and you can sing the melody. I mean, if you here's the thing is that high fidelity song at that tempo is similar territory to You'll Never Be a Man. It's both influenced by the Spinners. You know, they're like the
Spinner's tunes, you know some things, you know. You know, so Philip Winn was like one of my you know, the people the voices in the head kind of thing I could never sing, like wow, but it shapes the way you phrase melody. Allison is based on Philip Winn, you know. So it's based on Ghetto Child, you know that. I know it sounds crazy to say that.
It doesn't tracks my tears or tears of clown or something like that.
Well I would quote those on the end of it, but but it's it's really laughing just a little. And the spinners that are much more the the staccato way that the figure, that part of the Allison, you know, comes from the spinners, or the Detroit Spinners as we knew them, right.
I guess my point and we got to it, which was that this this arrangement had some real funk to it, some hump to it. It sounded to me like questlove.
That's why that was exactly I mean, when he dropped into it, it was like, oh, now it's home because now he understands that thing and that and it's more resolute,
and we've got like a bigger band, you know. It's it's got the sounds and had horns, got horns, and you've got Coke who can has got you know, I I just had i'd have any effects in those days, I'm like God, instead of effects was travelop I don't think I had even a distortion that might have had a distortion pedal by the time we got to seventy nine or some sort of lyft because I never played solos, so it was like the guitar straight in and maybe
just a tramlo pedal. Later on, I used to play with a rolling space Echo, you know, and then later on an Ecoplex an Acoplex so what Watkins copycat? You know. But I didn't really get into processing pedals so much later twenty years ago. Really, I didn't play with any really until then.
So so you come onto the show apparently not to promote anything at that appearance, because there's no even that way.
Yeah, I don't know how that even came about.
It was it?
It could have had.
I think you were either supporting Fallon or you want to play with the roots or something.
I think it was just that, or it's what year is it again?
This was end of two thousand and nine, December of two thousand and nine.
It could have been something. Do it spectful? That's around then as well. Yeah, give maybe you were a couch guest too. I can't remember.
I can't remember now, you know.
I just remember two thousand and nine is around the time of that Secret Friends Sugarcane and being in Nashville and Momofuku. I was making those records all at the same time, you know. If it had been in the days of Twitter and I remember when we were making What Was Up Ghost? I remember one time we were waiting for Quest to come from something that he was at and we were checking his feed to find out where he was. So, you know, and if that had
been the case, it would have been like that. There was a period where I was doing like a lot of different things. When we did the Spectacle show. That required a lot of balancing of getting all these people, you know, like anything like any television show, getting the guests to be there, and then rehearsing for it and the different musicians that played on each one. But I could be coming from Nash having made Zigrafine was made in three days, so you know, we just went It
was a three day session. It wasn't an album. There were three record dates as in the old Star because it was acoustic music. You know, I'd been in.
So were you thinking EP or something for that now?
I was thinking I was thinking something. But I was thinking, we'll get these songs in the time, because look who is playing on it.
Wow, I got the beggest greatest.
You know, that's like an all star band to beat the band, you know that those players. I had nothing at all to do it with Bluegrass. I mean half the songs we recorded there I wrote for an opera, you know, half the songs we can't on that record were written for an opera that I wrote that I did for
Copenhagen about Hans Chris and Anderson. So it was a kind of wild lot of harmony for players who played a mandolin to play, you know, they all were like they never had anything to do with bluegrass, so it was just acoustic acoustically rendered.
It was like chamber of music, you know.
So all those different experiences there, I think playing with the band again in this in a studio on television was pretty much unprecedented. The previous band I'd played with on television that wasn't my own group in some.
One way or another.
Would it be in Letterman's band or something.
I never played with Lettermans band ever. No, No, never played with them. I always played with on my own.
Well, on Spectacle you must have played with I.
Played with other mans on that. But prior to that, the other experiences for the return to SNL. When I went back, I played with the house ban of SNL, and Paul may have been in that band then. I don't think you think he'd already left and the Beasties. But when the beastis backed me and whenever he did on the twenty fifth anniversary show.
But the Roots known as one of the greatest live acts that there is on the planet for the last thirty years something like that, and so you know, to feel that energy behind you on that version of high fidelity, yeah, I guess you felt like you made the right decision to come on the show hopefully totally.
Yeah, totally. I mean it's like it.
Was like a realization and we would have never gone back to that version in that arrangement.
You know.
I did it occasionally after that, and I think the band Impostus did learn it and we did it occasionally that way or started like that and then cut into tempo.
That version is what's known as a banger, yeah, because it bangs, yeah, like you know, no question.
And then here in Chelsea that's a different thing again, you know, because that's.
That was I think a mistake on my why. I mean, obviously we got a whole new song out of it, and you know, we were referencing not only the original, but there's a like a there's another demo version of it with a like a distorted organ.
Oh yeah, that's the earlier version. Yeah, slightly slow.
Slower and bit reggae and you know, like and we used to come in. You know, bear in mind they used to make us re record for television, so when the record was a hit in England, you would get you would get these three hour sessions and most bands couldn't play their records, so they were glad to just switch the tape while they weren't looking. They'd switch it for a copy of the record and give the BBC essentially just a dove at the record and then say they'd cut it.
You know.
So there was this whole subterfuge where you had to go into the studio for three hours.
It was intended to protect the.
Jobs and the union members that had played on records in the sixties, and by the time we got to everybody playing on their own records, which was most everybody that was on these shows, there was a whole game going on where all the studio time went to waste.
So of course, because we could play, we would come in and play the live arrangement, which maybe faster or had a different break, and then get pissed off with us because we they got their camera cues from the record, and then it would be different when we turned up at the studio. We just used to fuck with them, you know, Ray, But it was just something to keep it from getting stale, because the.
Whole thing is like.
The one thing about American television from the get go. And the very first time I was ever on TV in Americas, he did play live. I was never heard on the BBC until Live eight. Every single performance on the BBC I was lip syncing. So my first ever performance is in front of seventy thousand people.
With one guitar.
Good chart on the BBC, I did okay, but I played on the other side, on the commercial side. My debut was on was just with one guitar as well, on a sort of early evening, Sharon Manchester and I did one or two performances with the band and then the.
Shout out to wave away flag while we're here sorry and the attractions played only one time a session where we played more than one song on the BBC in eighty six when Blood and.
Chocolate was out, and then we didn't play again until the nineties. There was no live at all, and even now you don't. The other night I was on TV in England, I sang up a track which is just carry out it's not real because the music doesn't go with you anyway. You have to kind of just sing over it. It doesn't sound very good.
No, I'm not a fan of that.
No, it doesn't feel very alive.
And Aretha Franklin came on The Tonight Show or Leaking Now with Jimmy Fallon a long time ago. She sang to a track and I was like, come on, you know, you got the roots here and for one and even you know.
Just that does seem like a missed opportunity, but a little bit.
She was great obviously, but you know.
Yeah, no, but you still want to you know, And I mean by the same token, there's a clip of her like dragging a BBC band through Don't play that song from about sixty eight where she's just killing on the piano. She's playing piano and you hear like how one player that really knows how it goes can influence even a band of musicians that probably wouldn't ever have played anything like that before. So well, sometimes that was a really great thing when you have that.
Sure. Yeah, with regards to Chelsea, the reason why, I just I thought it was going to be perfect for the Roots, and they played it just too similar, I think, to the original, and it didn't. I was trying to get the reggae aspect into I was trying to mash those two versions up the original, and they.
Should have played it even a little slower.
It would have been interesting, because then that would have been.
A different field.
So the second time you came on, you were promoting National Ransom.
Oh yeah, that's the one I really have a clear memory of. Really right, the other one, I think it's also intimidating when you go in and it's a whole bunch of new guys and you don't know.
What they made of it.
And I'm not bringing in a hit song or a song that's even on the radio or anything I'm playing. But even the first time, I'm bringing in like a here's a version.
That we didn't record in the studio.
This is something I just did in a field in Holland, well twenty five years ago. This is a good idea, I fellas you know, I think we know. But I think I knew right away that the curiosity coming from you and coming from everything that I knew about the band and than you'd already done, was this was this was okay, This was really good. In fact, it was actually what it's about. And I think a little bit
like you're talking about the festival band. You know, they used to put festival bands together that have like all stars played together on jazz festivals. Particularly harder to do with rock and roll bands or any other kind of music because they're not equipped to do it, you know, to get off their own script.
But they but they but to do this.
It seems like really in the spirit of being on TV where you'd get like really unusual combinations like being Crosby House. Here Feliciano and the Supremes. Now check that one out on YouTube. You know, there is actually a clip of them going through about ninety not ninety, about twenty five songs in about four minutes medley on those
crazy Medalis. It changes every three lines, you know. I know they make you nervous, but it's in the same spirit of the way they used to jam people together that should have never been seen and occasion that there'd be magic, there would be on TV there would be some risk involved as well.
So on November fifth, twenty ten, promoting National Ransom, playing Stations of the Cross and Black and White World with the Roots tell us.
What happened that day?
Well, first thing, the first thing I remember is that I was playing World as I don't usually play piano for one thing, not leading the band, but I really wanted to play.
I wanted to play the.
Field of that song simply on the World's that sort of get it locked in From where I was sitting.
I knew the rhythm would be great.
I felt like there was something going on with the bassline that had been played on a double bass by Dennis Crouch, so I was really interested.
To hear I play it.
Shout out to Mark Kelley, who specifically asked me to mention his name on this pot bet.
And then it's it's kind of like it was always supposed to be a really ominous song. It was a very dark song. It is a very dark song. Then I remember we were walking I don't know, in the hallway and quest said this thing about I think you've been in here right with with D'Angelo and it had gone really late, that's what he told me. Or it'd been working or something, you'd been on a session anyway, you know, this was for some other thing.
I don't know what it was.
And then he said, and now we're learning these inner Mountain Flame songs and what the hell for me? You know, that's so difficult, it said because John mcgoughlin is here as I was sitting in with us, so I said, well, can he play on my song?
And the next thing we're in what I think of?
I mean, I am always I don't know where are you still in that little room or you've got bigger since COVID never had to give you a bigger rule?
Where do you think we are?
I imagine you're still in that little room. The tartis so the tartist I'm sure has been described at length on this show, but I mean, from my perspective, it is incredible that I'm sure it was just the tech covered where they used to keep like spanners and whatever it was before it was your studio. It is amazing that so many people can function and breathe in there.
You know, we can't function or breathe, but go ahead.
Yeah, But so that I think is part of the magic of playing. In preparation for playing on the show is to be in that room in close proximity, because you there's no avoiding it. Even though Cress has got his booth horn sections in the back lounge. The rest of the mad is in this narrow thing behind your board. I mean, it is an amazing And then you add John mcgoughlin playing five hundred thousand notes.
You know, every time I pointed.
At him because it was simply a vamp on one chord in between the verses, so we just let him fly and as everybody knows, and he was so good natured about it. I mean, I have no idea whether he had ever heard my name before that day, but he went into it so openly right, and it was it created a different kind of tension, if any. It was like a moment of lightness him playing all those crazy But.
You've played a lot of those tribute shows and fundraising shows where everybody comes on that end of.
This, Yeah, but they not always that well, you know, it's rare.
I've been in a number of very old bands over the years. You know.
I was once on the stage in a club for a birthday show. I was cut through where I ended up on stage with James Burton and Jerry Garcia playing behind me. You know, that was pretty weird, wonderful, you know, and all playing the wrong guitar. But but for to have that kind of lock on that on this ominous groove and this kind of hump that that that Quest found in it in the in the beat, which ended up being like another piece for us. That was great.
I mean that John was playing on it too, was wonderful. And Black and White World was a song that wanted to go like that. Now that's a song that Quest have played with us on me already. Had he had he played it with us then there or did he play No.
Shortly after this appearance he came and played with us. He came to the Beacon or something and played Black and White World on stage with you.
Part of the wheel show, Yeah, part of the spinning song.
Right, right, but you just called it it wasn't chosen on the wheel.
Yeah, yeah he did.
We often cheated in that way when we got in the later and we want some song we wanted to play, you know.
Yeah.
He actually ends up singing that night because he was pushed off the drums store, right.
It wasn't best pleased.
I was like, why isn't Pete Thomas universally known as one of the greatest British or whatever drummers.
Met Any drummers from have you met any other drummers. Yeah, there's a lot of really maniacal like.
Really that's one in particular, But.
I mean there are there are some that really are going to tell you all about their own brilliance. There's a lot of them that are not as good as they that.
He doesn't need to speak about himself.
But why is it?
Why hasn't I think it's been part of that that he hasn't been broadcasting it, and partly, you know, big mouth, he has been kind of taking up all the airspace up in front of him for forty five years. I absolutely say straight out now I just have I'll tell anybody that wants to listen, now, Charlie Wats has gone. He's number one. He's the number one rock and roll drummer playing today. Wow, I'll say that right out. That's
all kinds of other kind of music. But as a rock and roll drummer, there's nobody close.
And be honest, he's playing now as good as he played then.
I think he might actually be playing better now than that. And he would say, I think he would admit the fact. Like the one thing about going a Spanish model, you know the record we did where we re recorded all the vocals in Spanish with guest artists to over the attraction's original parts. A lot of those artists are very much used to the you know, the conveniences of modern recording technique. Two of them, in particular, click track, an
auto tune. There's none other on that. Obviously we didn't have access to that. Neither of those things were really
part of our scene. So that was a lot for some of those younger artists who used to knowing what the tempo was and they've always got that click going keeping them in time, and they said, well, what's the tempo and we're going well in the first vers is that people want me to say this, but our records do speed up a lot, and well they slow down sometimes and as they're supposed to, and then certainly there's no autitude on them, you know, so thank god.
Yeah, Yeah, the Roots and Elvis Costello with John McLachlin. You can look it up. Yeah, November fifth, twenty ten on Fallon and Black and White World, which again had that high fidelity arrangement hump that I'm talking about.
Yeah, that was that.
Always had it, that was always had it that when we arrange it like that it went a different way originally that song, Yeah, it was completely different song. It was an acoustic folk song. Sounded like a Gray Davis song.
Which version you like better.
As a story piece of storytelling? The first version is is that's called number two, right, that's a better. That's a better for telling the story of the song. That's better as a piece of music. I liked the version that we played that night, but that was sort of like I remember as being in you know, that was a lot of drinking involved in that happy record. So there were these episodes where we just get frustrated and all be sort of squabbling and there saying, oh fuck it,
let's just do that. Play it like Little Feet. That was actually what it was like. That was us trying to play like Little Feet. And if you sort of can hear some of their wilder stuff, not particularly sailing Shoes kind of record, you can sort of get that that that Pete is kind of referencing Richie Heywood. It
was this great drummer that played with that group. People don't much know that their their music now so much, but then there were they were a band that you know, we all admired, and so that was in our references along with all the other things.
You know, we're talking about drummers, but but let's get back to guitarists like John McLaughlin And you mentioned Jerry Garcia. So can you just tell us what it was like to know him and to play with him on stage a couple of times.
I only played with him one time. I spent a little time with them. I did an interview for a magazine about.
I'm only asked because I know you're a fan as well.
Yeah, well, I just think it was there was a period where I really did really love the records really from I never really did like the long improvisational things as much. That didn't fascinate me as much. I liked the sound of some of their records that are kind of strange, kind of folk baroque, kind of psychedelic stuff. And I really love the stuff that's very you can
hear in so called Americana records. Now all these things that echo the Dead from seventy to about seventy four, but specifically American Beauty and the record that preceded it, wor Commen's Dead. They just have really good songs. They did this really good good like maybe twenty songs that were really unbeatable, and I saw them play a couple of times at that time and they were terrific, and I just didn't when they went off into the other thing.
I could think of other music that extend I did like that that held my interest Moble, but I could see why people liked it, it just wasn't my thing.
I guess the next thing chronologically as far as leading up to Wysup Ghost is when you graciously cut vocals for the Swindles project. For the Squeeze Covers record, you and the Roots did a version of someone Else's Heart, and that was certainly fun and the first time I got to do that, but I felt it more like that record was a bit of a proving ground for a larger project with the Roots, Like.
I didn't know that was in your mind at the time, but for me it was like.
It's more looking back on it, it was really like I loved.
It because I produced the original version obviously in East Side Story, and I quit when I was ahead as a producer, right, So I mean I had three hit albums and succession as a producer of other people's records, and I wasn't credited as a co producer on my early records. I mean, Nick would say from Enforces onwards, I had a fairly strong input on the way things went and sounded and final mixes, but I was never credited.
I deliberately didn't credit myself on Imperial Bedroom, even though I was the co producer effectively of that record, because I gave so much of the responsibility for the way the record actually sounded to Jeff Emory. But the music, the musical input, and the musical arrangement of the record, everything that you would call production now was my idea. You know, weeks in the studio on my own, just me and Jeff. Half of the Recession was just me
and him. So when I got to do some of my own production eighty eighty one and eighty five, it was only usually with either with friends or bands that
I thought somebody else would fuck up. So that's how I came to do The Specials, which was a band that had a very vivid sound live and a genius kind of arranger, Jerry Dammers, and I just needed to protect his vision, as I understood it, from any frailties that I could detect in the actual playing and they didn't have many because they were really very balanced in most cases, and the same was true of The Poes,
which was the last record I produced. The band obviously a genius songwriter and a mixed bag of instrumentalists, so sometimes I'd have to step in and maybe bring a kind of steadying thing somewhere in the instrumental you know, ensemble, But the rest of the time I just tried to catch it while it was going on. Squeeze is entirely different because you've got like incredible facile in the American sense,
in the sense that Glenn has tremendous musical facility. Glenn Hilborough as a composer, as a singer, as a very very underrated guitar player, but he's like the Pete Thomas of the guitar you know, you really you never see his name quoted as great guitar players. Glenn should easily be in that bag. Great melodic you know, the signatures melodies of his solos, it's like George Harrison, they're like
like hooks and themselves. He's not just string bending kind of fancy, you know, dazzling kind of playing the other way can do that too, and incredible lyricist in Christofford and the two voices in this octave kind of relationship, and in that bad of course they had they had Paul character as well. He'd replaced Charles Hallan, the original keyboard player. And then I knew that was the secret weapon. So that's how we made Tempted, which was the big hit.
And that was my ideas to do it like that, to sort of take it and like as if it were an Algreen song and put the kind of like little single line kind of clickerty click clin of rhythm guitar that runs through it. It's not playing a backbeat, don't that's me playing that, you know, not singing background vocals, singing background vocals. I mean I listened to background vocals another kind of ludicrous. And I was kind of doing all of the Temptations parts.
You know, I'm doing but coffee in bed too.
Yeah, I'm doing the bass voice as well as the false htto. But but but we didn't know anybody we could get to do that, so we're just doing it in imitation of records that we loved, you know, and they and it seemed to just work to break it up like that. To divide it up, make it more of a group composition.
You know, is the reason you haven't self produced more of your records because getting a producer is it's just another opportunity to collaborate with another great music mind. Well I haven't, or do you have some like disaffinity for it or no?
I mean, I think there's a couple of records that are definitely I have to take more responsibility for than others. I mean, but I mean, you co produce a lot
of record I co produced, you know. I mean, there's no doubt I didn't have anything to do with the sound of King of America, but that's I'm credited as a co producer on that because I had, you know, this sort of like brotherlike partnership with Temabnett from the MINUTEIME met him, and there was a lot of things that I wanted to try and do on that record, which changed because we were going to acoustic instruments for
the most part. In the first part of it. It was supposed to be half acoustic half electric, and really because the success rate at the first sessions, which were with the Hollywood based musicians, you know, the many of whom had played that they mean ex Wrecking Crew kind of and seventies here of Jim Caltoner and people like that. When the attractions arrived at the sessions, was nothing for
them to play. There was nothing, don't know songs left Sude Lights, which was a really great one, but there was a tense session. It was a tense session that added to go down ver well because they still saw it as a as a you know, unified band.
I'd want to be on that record too.
I don't know that they particularly wanted to play the other songs. I don't think there was much feeling for those other songs where.
I was headed.
But we did make one more record, which again was where we gave it the control to Nick Lowe. I had a little bit more put in terms of processing things that I maybe had done earlier. But it was Nick's decision to say that's an old Bird, which is a pretty great record. That's a Nick low idea to cut between the two keys and have this sort of Strawberry Feels Forever incident where it just sort of goes
into phasing and comes out in another key. These are things you'd assume I had kind of picked up from Jeff Emertt, but that was all next idea. So it was like, so you know, he was capable of getting into there wasn't always in the bash it down kind of thing. He could also hone ideas. I also produced him around that time as well, which was the only time I ever produced Nick.
A lot of artists may not want some other fucking genius in the room and keep their album. I wanted to be the way that I have it in my mind and somebody.
Else I think you I mean certainly with Debon, I think it was the It was his advocacy for the simple storytelling.
You know.
I had this idea that you that I wanted to write with the that I liked about Hank Williams songs. Even though I was never going to be a country singer. I think had already proved that by going to Nashville and cutting.
A whole record.
It's a great record.
No I liked that record, but I mean it was I had to accept that that Billy Cheryl didn't really know why it was those singing those songs, and he just brought where he could recognize the ability to try and make a hit. He did what he did, which was put the you know, make those sweetening devices which he developed over the hits with George Shows and Charlie Rich which was the whole reason I wanted to work with him. With the benefit of hindsight, I can think
of maybe three or four other producers. I might have got to the heart of what I liked about those songs a little easier, but I wasn't that my most kind of reasonable or disciplined at that time. There was a lot of drinking going on on that record, as well as Nine Day, But you know, like tear really that we were on in Nashville. You know that that was a miracle that any record.
Came out of it.
Frankly, there's some video of that, right, Yeah, there is a documentary, but it's pretty it's pretty sodden at.
Times, you know. Yeah, and kind of modeling.
So just to continue on the timeline, someone Else's Heart is where we left off. And then you came on for what we were calling Springsteen Week on the fount That's where.
I'm thinking about fire, That's right, that's right.
Brilliant diskies just with Quest and James poyser as an arrangement, just a drums, piano, vocal thing.
Yeah, because I had done it as a pretty much I'd done it as a solo, and I cut it with just a rhythm section with Pete or Well.
It was on the extra extras.
Yeah, it was actually was a demo I cut for for George Jones. I had done it a really weird assignment where I'd been asked to interview him for Interview magazine, which is even stranger. George Jones an interview magazine doesn't really go. You know, we were on either end of
a line from wherever he lived outside of Nashville. I think I had some villa somewhere he lived, and I don't know where he lived in any way, he was in America, and I was kind of talking to him from Dublin, and it was I was asking him why he had never looked like Willie Nelson had done to kind of a broader world of songs, because I really had these same songwriters that gave him tunes over the years, and truthfully, many of them were unworthy of his voice.
And so I started naming songs that I thought he could sing, and he had not heard of any of them. I mean, there were songs by songwriters he'd never considered and sort of I said, well, maybe you know, I could send you some of those. And I was trying to basically get a gig producing him, and.
He didn't quite take the bait, so I thought, well he didn't.
He didn't ask me to do this, but I'm going to go in on my own dime.
And you had worked with him long before.
I had recorded with him in nineteen seventy nine on Try, and have been on TV with him Stranger interim and sung with him on a television show a couple of times. So I didn't know him, and I just went for my own amusement as much as anything to go in.
And I did, I think ten songs in one day, just recorded them like me, Pete Thomas, and the bass player that Pete used to play with before the Attractions, a guy called Paul Riley, who'd been the engineer at Nicklaus Studio Amperor and had been my first choice for the attractions. He'd been he'd turned me down, a guy called Paul Riley, and I had actually asked him to be in a band before we had the Attractions. What did he play bass?
Yeah?
And he didn't want to do it. So now Paul is a great bass pay and he played in a group called Rugulator, which was a great group.
And he ended up being a valuable.
Engineer at Nicklas Studio, which was a little home studio which had been own by Tony Vasconti. Tony Vasconti had downed that building and had a little studio where he'd mixed a bunch of things, sparks and diamond dogs and things, and then Nick did a bunch of things in there.
I cut with Johnny Cash.
There, So there was like it was a tiny.
You wouldn't even know it was there. It was a little bit like the Tardis, you know.
It was like you'd be walking along you would never guess it was a studio inside that building, you know, it didn't look like it looked like a house.
So is like the whole bonus disc of Kojak Variety, like all those demos, like you're going to make ever lunch?
Yeah, yeah, You're gonna make me lonesome. I don't know what I put out in the end. How long has this been going on? George Gershman song. I always heard that as a country song. I thought that could be done. Drig shows could sing the hell out of that.
So on March first, twenty twelve, you came on and played brilliant disguise in this totally weird arrangement. I guess it's a very spare, very sparse yes, yeah and also fire Bruce Springsteen's song as made famous by the Pointer Sisters and yeah.
And that's where you added two yeah too hot.
Which I'd cut with the specials, which was righttles.
He said again.
You see, that's the thing is so we that I don't know that so much that people I don't know whether they realized that the kind of second kind of like the way a lot of musicians really know a lot of R and B references. You had all these kind of bands that were really kind of blues fanatics
in the early sixties. By the late sixties, you had people who like that are my age and a little bit older younger than me, who had totally heard reggae in a way that I just don't think it was part of American music in quite the same way.
You know.
It's just like Jimmy Cliff and then Bob Marley and a few other one off hits. But we had a lot of it, you know, we had a lot of records, sort of blue beat records, and if they weren't actually in the charts, they were like the sort of secret music like that we were talking about Northern soul, that kind of reggae that from scad through rockstady through reggae
before Male and Whalers. It was like we all knew these vocal groups that sounded sort of like the impressions that were all sort of like influenced by that close harmony groups sometimes doing covers. You know, people, I think the question and I had this talk about this before. Don't don't dun, Dun dum, don't.
Don't go don't dun.
Everybody says that's I'll take you there, but it's not. It's from a reggae record that they were covering, you know. So it's like this cross talk between all these musics, you know.
So I think this is kind of that point where you said that famous line standing in the Tartist, which was like, hey, uh, we've recorded half of Get Happy already, you know, uh, or remixed or whatever recorded Get Happy, Maybe we should make a record. And that's when me and Quest looked at each other, you know, and.
I see that's not you see that's you. That's the victors. The victors get to write the history.
Now.
My memory is as I was walking off from the set that that second or third time, I don't know which time it was, and Quest saying to me, you know you we're going to.
Make a record.
So I don't know which which of those remarks happened first. Both things could have happened. Maybe I said that because he said that. It's true the other way around. Why's up Ghosts?
Which you know connects with this conversation that I want to have if if he ever comes back, is you know the ultimate example, do you have to pee? Tune in next week to see if Elvis needs to pee. This has been part one of our Questlove Supreme interview with Elvis Costello. Check out part two when I squirmed some more as this music monster lets loose and jumps the skinny on wise up ghost his collab with the Roots.
My name is Sugar Steve, I Love my job. Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.