The whole concept of ‘year zero’ was absolutely necessary in 1976 even if it was complete bullshit. In musical terms, there had to be a line-drawn to create a schism between a past that had generally become stale and a new generation that hoped to reinvigorate the whole scene. But at the same time, there had been bands and individuals bubbling beneath the mainstream who were possessed by that essential vitality and creativity that makes real music innovative. It was nonsense to even try and suggest that all the people who formed Punk bands in 1976-77 were not listening to any bands prior to then. Among the homegrown talent that provided important stepping stones for Punk Rock were Eddie & The Hot Rods, Dr Feelgood, Heavy Metal Kids and the Doctors of Madness.
Formed in 1974, Doctors of Madness have been cited as the missing link between Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, a claim that would be difficult to refute. They had an attitude and sound that upset the comfortable norm of the Seventies rock mainstream and while they had no problem with seeking success, they weren’t going to water-down their ideas to achieve it. They also infused their songs with an underground sensibility and a grasp of reality distilled from writers and artists such as Burroughs, Ginsberg and Warhol. They would not be producing music that you could just hear in the background, this was something that demanded your attention and involvement.
Unfortunately, despite playing a major role in the its’ build-up, Doctors of Madness were also somewhat derailed by Punk Rock. They didn’t fit the template that the music press expected, despite being popular amongst many of the actual bands (The Damned, The Adverts, The Skids… Malcolm McLaren even deemed them one of the few appropriate bands for the Sex Pistols to support…) and as such were sidelined even though their three albums showed real progress and confidence. They eventually split-up in 1978.
However, far from disappearing, vocalist and guitarist Richard Strange continued with a most remarkable career. His first ‘solo’ project was ‘The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange’, a performance piece that eventually became an album on Virgin Records in 1981, and also established the influencial club, Cabaret Futura. Following from this, he began an acting career that has seen him working with the likes on Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton, as well as parts in theatre as diverse as ‘Hamlet’ and the Tom Waits / William Burroughs collaboration ‘The Black Rider’. He also directed the 2014 celebration of William Burroughs’ centenary ‘Language is a Virus from Outer Space’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which as well as including the premiere of a Cantata co-written with Gavin Bryars featured an exclusive reunion by Doctors of Madness.
Following other occasional outings with differing line-ups, Richard has more recently established a new, permanent line-up of the band including himself, original member Urban Blitz and two Japanese musicians, Susumu and Mackii. To celebrate the release of the ‘Perfect Past’ boxset on Cherry Red records, the band announced a one-off gig in London which subsequently snow-balled into a successful tour. Having see the excellent show at The Lexington, I got in touch with Richard and arranged an interview which took place in Soho.
Formed in 1974, Doctors of Madness have been cited as the missing link between Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, a claim that would be difficult to refute. They had an attitude and sound that upset the comfortable norm of the Seventies rock mainstream and while they had no problem with seeking success, they weren’t going to water-down their ideas to achieve it. They also infused their songs with an underground sensibility and a grasp of reality distilled from writers and artists such as Burroughs, Ginsberg and Warhol. They would not be producing music that you could just hear in the background, this was something that demanded your attention and involvement.
Unfortunately, despite playing a major role in the its’ build-up, Doctors of Madness were also somewhat derailed by Punk Rock. They didn’t fit the template that the music press expected, despite being popular amongst many of the actual bands (The Damned, The Adverts, The Skids… Malcolm McLaren even deemed them one of the few appropriate bands for the Sex Pistols to support…) and as such were sidelined even though their three albums showed real progress and confidence. They eventually split-up in 1978.
However, far from disappearing, vocalist and guitarist Richard Strange continued with a most remarkable career. His first ‘solo’ project was ‘The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange’, a performance piece that eventually became an album on Virgin Records in 1981, and also established the influencial club, Cabaret Futura. Following from this, he began an acting career that has seen him working with the likes on Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton, as well as parts in theatre as diverse as ‘Hamlet’ and the Tom Waits / William Burroughs collaboration ‘The Black Rider’. He also directed the 2014 celebration of William Burroughs’ centenary ‘Language is a Virus from Outer Space’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which as well as including the premiere of a Cantata co-written with Gavin Bryars featured an exclusive reunion by Doctors of Madness.
Following other occasional outings with differing line-ups, Richard has more recently established a new, permanent line-up of the band including himself, original member Urban Blitz and two Japanese musicians, Susumu and Mackii. To celebrate the release of the ‘Perfect Past’ boxset on Cherry Red records, the band announced a one-off gig in London which subsequently snow-balled into a successful tour. Having see the excellent show at The Lexington, I got in touch with Richard and arranged an interview which took place in Soho.
To begin with, I asked if he had been involved with any other bands or music before Doctors of Madness ?
‘No, that really was my introduction to playing music. The thing is, I was and probably still remain, a pretty inept musician. I was never going to get invited to join anyone else’s band so, in the end, I had to start my own one ! But I think I got into music through lyrics rather than the tunes. I loved Bob Dylan, I loved the Velvet Underground and I read everything I could find by William Burroughs. I loved David Bowie, although I think that was more his lyrics rather than his music. I was coming more from an Art School direction so I loved a lot of things about music that weren’t necessarily the music itself. I liked the references and it was those that attracted me to certain bands. Anyway, at one point I was supposed to be going to Norwich University but my father wouldn’t agree to it, so I thought, what was the most offensive thing I could do to spite him, and I decided to get a guitar ! As things turned out, I ended up having a gap-year even though I wouldn’t be going to University at the end of it, so I bought a guitar and went off to Copenhagen. I slowly picked-up some tunes and stumbled through some chords until, three years later, I started to work with a couple of other musicians. It was more or less a folkie kind of thing, because I’d always loved the English Folk scene, people like Roy Harper, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny. Again, it was more to do with the lyrics and the passion of it. And quite often, the politics of it. It’s one of the things people don’t understand about the Folk scene back then, that it involved a great deal of Protest songs and was actually quite radical.’
What was your initial impetus behind forming a band rather than playing solo ?
‘I suppose it came from reading William Burroughs’ early books, things like ‘Naked Lunch’, ‘Sort Machine’, ‘Nova Express’ and ‘The Wild Boys’… It was his whole idea of a dystopian world. I started reading those books when I was still pretty young and I actually hitchhiked to Paris with one of my friends to buy them,
as they were still effectively banned in London. We had to go the Shakespeare & Co bookshop to pick up things by Ginsberg, Alex Trocchi, Ronnie Laing, Gregory Corso, Henry Miller… We’d return home with these books and it almost felt as if we were carrying contraband. You’d be carrying a couple of hidden packets of fags for your parents, but you’d also have these books that had been published by Grove Press or Olympia Press, so they became really prized possessions. At the same time that my mate Joe Gilbert and I were both into these books, we were both also into Contemporary Art. We loved Rauschenberg and Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon. We were just soaking up everything and it just so happened that music was the medium that I latched onto. I was never a visual artist but I loved the power of words and I loved great songwriting, so it was that which kicked me into doing something. I think by the time I started to form the Doctors of Madness, I had already seen Bowie and Roxy Music, so I knew that I wanted to do something that was theatrical but also something abrasive, an antidote or a reaction to the Prog-rock stuff, which didn’t interest me at all. I mean, my own musical virtuosity was still at zero, so I had to decide what I could do. I realised that if I could find a way to deliver the songs, I could also find a way to make it an event. Taking Burroughs’ ideas, the almost sc-fi approach and the caricature-like characters, it all became a part of what we were doing, from things like re-naming ourselves and having blue hair through to the stance we took and the subject-matter. It gradually coalesced, but it was uneasy at first because, like any artist, we were trying things out and there were certainly a few things that didn’t work.’
‘No, that really was my introduction to playing music. The thing is, I was and probably still remain, a pretty inept musician. I was never going to get invited to join anyone else’s band so, in the end, I had to start my own one ! But I think I got into music through lyrics rather than the tunes. I loved Bob Dylan, I loved the Velvet Underground and I read everything I could find by William Burroughs. I loved David Bowie, although I think that was more his lyrics rather than his music. I was coming more from an Art School direction so I loved a lot of things about music that weren’t necessarily the music itself. I liked the references and it was those that attracted me to certain bands. Anyway, at one point I was supposed to be going to Norwich University but my father wouldn’t agree to it, so I thought, what was the most offensive thing I could do to spite him, and I decided to get a guitar ! As things turned out, I ended up having a gap-year even though I wouldn’t be going to University at the end of it, so I bought a guitar and went off to Copenhagen. I slowly picked-up some tunes and stumbled through some chords until, three years later, I started to work with a couple of other musicians. It was more or less a folkie kind of thing, because I’d always loved the English Folk scene, people like Roy Harper, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny. Again, it was more to do with the lyrics and the passion of it. And quite often, the politics of it. It’s one of the things people don’t understand about the Folk scene back then, that it involved a great deal of Protest songs and was actually quite radical.’
What was your initial impetus behind forming a band rather than playing solo ?
‘I suppose it came from reading William Burroughs’ early books, things like ‘Naked Lunch’, ‘Sort Machine’, ‘Nova Express’ and ‘The Wild Boys’… It was his whole idea of a dystopian world. I started reading those books when I was still pretty young and I actually hitchhiked to Paris with one of my friends to buy them,
as they were still effectively banned in London. We had to go the Shakespeare & Co bookshop to pick up things by Ginsberg, Alex Trocchi, Ronnie Laing, Gregory Corso, Henry Miller… We’d return home with these books and it almost felt as if we were carrying contraband. You’d be carrying a couple of hidden packets of fags for your parents, but you’d also have these books that had been published by Grove Press or Olympia Press, so they became really prized possessions. At the same time that my mate Joe Gilbert and I were both into these books, we were both also into Contemporary Art. We loved Rauschenberg and Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon. We were just soaking up everything and it just so happened that music was the medium that I latched onto. I was never a visual artist but I loved the power of words and I loved great songwriting, so it was that which kicked me into doing something. I think by the time I started to form the Doctors of Madness, I had already seen Bowie and Roxy Music, so I knew that I wanted to do something that was theatrical but also something abrasive, an antidote or a reaction to the Prog-rock stuff, which didn’t interest me at all. I mean, my own musical virtuosity was still at zero, so I had to decide what I could do. I realised that if I could find a way to deliver the songs, I could also find a way to make it an event. Taking Burroughs’ ideas, the almost sc-fi approach and the caricature-like characters, it all became a part of what we were doing, from things like re-naming ourselves and having blue hair through to the stance we took and the subject-matter. It gradually coalesced, but it was uneasy at first because, like any artist, we were trying things out and there were certainly a few things that didn’t work.’
Burroughs’ ideas have been embraced by a wide range of musicians over the years. What do you think makes his work so attractive for musicians ?
‘I think there’s a humour in his work, as well as his rather dark take on humanity. There’s also something very clever in his stance as a kind of pundit and an iconoclastic futurologist. I think he saw a lot of things that were coming. His ideas about control, about drugs, about the nature of power systems and enhanced reality. That’s what I got from it, even though I was never someone who was into the more far-fetched kinds of Sci-fi, you know, rocket ships and all of that. But Burroughs’ take on things was almost like an enhanced version of the present rather than the future. There always seemed to be a logic to it and I got that. I also enjoyed his characters. In fact, Dr Benway was probably the original idea behind ‘Doctors of Madness’, you know, that total antithesis of anything that you’d want or expect from a medical man… a shyster drug-addict who massages his patients’ heart with a toilet-plunger ! Burroughs just seemed to be a good role model…and I bet no-one has ever called Burroughs a ‘good role model’ before ! But he was for someone who wanted to create music that was visual and was populated with caricatures in exaggerated proportions. A lot of the characters that I referred to in my songs were all very Burroughsian. I think he was also very prescient in many ways, without setting himself up as a futurologist. I think he was just a great observer of human behaviour. Obviously, some of the observations were channeled through drugs, but also through a great and very sharp intelligence, so his strike-rate when it came to predicting the future was a lot better than most.
How did you find the other members for the band ?
‘Well, I had been at school with Pete, our drummer. The bass player, Stoner, actually lived just down the road from me. He was always a bit of a muso, so I never thought he’d join a band with me because I was still so rudimentary and totally uninterested in musical complexity. I just wanted something that was straight-up… But Pete and I already gone through two or three other bass players who didn’t work-out when Stoner said, one day, Why don’t I have a go ? I wasn’t expecting this but when he did join, it bought a lot of musicality to what we were doing and he could also sing very nice back-up vocals. So we now had a really good trio and started looking for another guitarist. We tried-out a few people, including Ray Majors from Mott The Hoople and Victor Unitt from the Edgar Broughton Band. We also tried out a couple of synth players, but nothing was really working for us until we saw a Melody Maker advert by Urban Blitz, ‘Violinist / Guitarist Seeks Band’. We invited him along to a rehearsal at this cellar we used in Brixton. He played his violin through all of these pedals and I immediately decided, this is the kind of racket I like ! He could play the quasi-classical stuff, but he also enjoyed making a racket which was what I really wanted.’
‘I think there’s a humour in his work, as well as his rather dark take on humanity. There’s also something very clever in his stance as a kind of pundit and an iconoclastic futurologist. I think he saw a lot of things that were coming. His ideas about control, about drugs, about the nature of power systems and enhanced reality. That’s what I got from it, even though I was never someone who was into the more far-fetched kinds of Sci-fi, you know, rocket ships and all of that. But Burroughs’ take on things was almost like an enhanced version of the present rather than the future. There always seemed to be a logic to it and I got that. I also enjoyed his characters. In fact, Dr Benway was probably the original idea behind ‘Doctors of Madness’, you know, that total antithesis of anything that you’d want or expect from a medical man… a shyster drug-addict who massages his patients’ heart with a toilet-plunger ! Burroughs just seemed to be a good role model…and I bet no-one has ever called Burroughs a ‘good role model’ before ! But he was for someone who wanted to create music that was visual and was populated with caricatures in exaggerated proportions. A lot of the characters that I referred to in my songs were all very Burroughsian. I think he was also very prescient in many ways, without setting himself up as a futurologist. I think he was just a great observer of human behaviour. Obviously, some of the observations were channeled through drugs, but also through a great and very sharp intelligence, so his strike-rate when it came to predicting the future was a lot better than most.
How did you find the other members for the band ?
‘Well, I had been at school with Pete, our drummer. The bass player, Stoner, actually lived just down the road from me. He was always a bit of a muso, so I never thought he’d join a band with me because I was still so rudimentary and totally uninterested in musical complexity. I just wanted something that was straight-up… But Pete and I already gone through two or three other bass players who didn’t work-out when Stoner said, one day, Why don’t I have a go ? I wasn’t expecting this but when he did join, it bought a lot of musicality to what we were doing and he could also sing very nice back-up vocals. So we now had a really good trio and started looking for another guitarist. We tried-out a few people, including Ray Majors from Mott The Hoople and Victor Unitt from the Edgar Broughton Band. We also tried out a couple of synth players, but nothing was really working for us until we saw a Melody Maker advert by Urban Blitz, ‘Violinist / Guitarist Seeks Band’. We invited him along to a rehearsal at this cellar we used in Brixton. He played his violin through all of these pedals and I immediately decided, this is the kind of racket I like ! He could play the quasi-classical stuff, but he also enjoyed making a racket which was what I really wanted.’
Did the other members of the band bring different influences to what you were doing ?
‘Urban did, certainly. He was Classically trained but he also listened to quite a lot of Jazz, people like Stephane Grappelli and Jean-Luc Ponty, so the idea of electronic violins and what they good be used for wasn’t strange to him. He’d actually built his own instruments as well, something called the Baritone Violectra, which was a weird sort of skeletal violin shape, but its’ pitch was slightly lower than a viola and by putting it through various effects pedals, he could get a whole different tone-palette from it. We all encouraged that. When we actually started gigging, no-one was using a violin in a band, although I think Roxy Music had dabbled with a violin at one point. The only other credible person that had used violin was probably John Cale in the Velvet Underground but I think violins always seemed to have Classical connotations, whereas guitars were more of the accepted rock instrument. People always assumed that if you were playing violin, then you must have been Classically trained and that you were bringing some sort of musical theory to the band. Certainly, that was the case with John Cale, who had been studying composition with La Monte Young at the time when he first met Lou Reed. But in a way, it was that smashing together of different influences and different intentions that creates something original. I mean, think of the make-up of the Velvet Underground… You had a German fashion model, an English Literature student, a drummer who had never played drums before and a Welsh guy who was in New York studying Classical composition. From the outside, you’d think, how could they possibly put something good together ? But thank God, they did !’
You all used assumed names in the band, which can now be seen as a kind of precursor to what many of the early Punk bands did. Was there any particular reason for that ?
‘I think, if anything, it was an idea I took from a Brian Aldiss novel. One of the characters was called ‘Kid Death’, who I think was the anti-hero of the story. I just thought it sounded good, especially as, at the time, everyone seemed to have names like Cliff Richard or Mick Jagger… I also thought it was interesting for all of us, and not just one person, to have aliases. I don’t think anyone had done that before, or at least I can’t think of anyone else. So we came up with Urban Blitz, Kid Strange, Pete DiLemma and Stoner. Then we adopted things like the blue hair, weird contact lenses which would look quite unsettling, ripped t-shirts and zip-up jeans, badges and stuff. We were a rag-bag really, we looked as if we’d got dressed in the dark. But there was a really interesting quote that I saw about the recent David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, that ‘music has to look the way it sounds and sound the way it looks.’ In retrospect I think we did and if you listen to any of the albums we made, I think they sound as if they were made by a band that looked pretty much the way we did. And I think that’s still the same now, even though we have two new members. The music we play together reflects the way we look now. I mean, consider if Bruce Springsteen had looked like Prince and Prince had looked like Bruce Springsteen. I’m sure they would never have been able to make their music and even if they had, it would never have worked in the same way. Bruce Springsteen needs his denim shirt and jeans, just the same way that Michael Jackson needed his sequined glove. That’s the magic of it… Lady Gaga needs to look like Lady Gaga ! Ziggy Stardust needed to look like Ziggy Stardust because that’s how the record sounded. It was alien, it was discomforting, it had a sense of perverse sexuality and it was just right. It was all tied together in the lyrics, the look and the vibe of the shows. No-one had ever seen anything like it because there was nothing else like Bowie before that time. In his case, I think it was because he was such a consummate jackdaw of styles and was also always looking outside of music. I’ve always thought that you should do that and not just be self-referential, because music about music is inevitably boring. But music about film, or about dance, or politics or Contemporary Art - that’s interesting ! And that was Bowie in a nutshell. Whether he was referencing Jacques Brel or Andy Warhol or the films of Fellini or the novels of Kafka… He just sucked it all in and adapted it into his own work.’
‘Urban did, certainly. He was Classically trained but he also listened to quite a lot of Jazz, people like Stephane Grappelli and Jean-Luc Ponty, so the idea of electronic violins and what they good be used for wasn’t strange to him. He’d actually built his own instruments as well, something called the Baritone Violectra, which was a weird sort of skeletal violin shape, but its’ pitch was slightly lower than a viola and by putting it through various effects pedals, he could get a whole different tone-palette from it. We all encouraged that. When we actually started gigging, no-one was using a violin in a band, although I think Roxy Music had dabbled with a violin at one point. The only other credible person that had used violin was probably John Cale in the Velvet Underground but I think violins always seemed to have Classical connotations, whereas guitars were more of the accepted rock instrument. People always assumed that if you were playing violin, then you must have been Classically trained and that you were bringing some sort of musical theory to the band. Certainly, that was the case with John Cale, who had been studying composition with La Monte Young at the time when he first met Lou Reed. But in a way, it was that smashing together of different influences and different intentions that creates something original. I mean, think of the make-up of the Velvet Underground… You had a German fashion model, an English Literature student, a drummer who had never played drums before and a Welsh guy who was in New York studying Classical composition. From the outside, you’d think, how could they possibly put something good together ? But thank God, they did !’
You all used assumed names in the band, which can now be seen as a kind of precursor to what many of the early Punk bands did. Was there any particular reason for that ?
‘I think, if anything, it was an idea I took from a Brian Aldiss novel. One of the characters was called ‘Kid Death’, who I think was the anti-hero of the story. I just thought it sounded good, especially as, at the time, everyone seemed to have names like Cliff Richard or Mick Jagger… I also thought it was interesting for all of us, and not just one person, to have aliases. I don’t think anyone had done that before, or at least I can’t think of anyone else. So we came up with Urban Blitz, Kid Strange, Pete DiLemma and Stoner. Then we adopted things like the blue hair, weird contact lenses which would look quite unsettling, ripped t-shirts and zip-up jeans, badges and stuff. We were a rag-bag really, we looked as if we’d got dressed in the dark. But there was a really interesting quote that I saw about the recent David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, that ‘music has to look the way it sounds and sound the way it looks.’ In retrospect I think we did and if you listen to any of the albums we made, I think they sound as if they were made by a band that looked pretty much the way we did. And I think that’s still the same now, even though we have two new members. The music we play together reflects the way we look now. I mean, consider if Bruce Springsteen had looked like Prince and Prince had looked like Bruce Springsteen. I’m sure they would never have been able to make their music and even if they had, it would never have worked in the same way. Bruce Springsteen needs his denim shirt and jeans, just the same way that Michael Jackson needed his sequined glove. That’s the magic of it… Lady Gaga needs to look like Lady Gaga ! Ziggy Stardust needed to look like Ziggy Stardust because that’s how the record sounded. It was alien, it was discomforting, it had a sense of perverse sexuality and it was just right. It was all tied together in the lyrics, the look and the vibe of the shows. No-one had ever seen anything like it because there was nothing else like Bowie before that time. In his case, I think it was because he was such a consummate jackdaw of styles and was also always looking outside of music. I’ve always thought that you should do that and not just be self-referential, because music about music is inevitably boring. But music about film, or about dance, or politics or Contemporary Art - that’s interesting ! And that was Bowie in a nutshell. Whether he was referencing Jacques Brel or Andy Warhol or the films of Fellini or the novels of Kafka… He just sucked it all in and adapted it into his own work.’
Had you been playing live a lot before you were offered a record deal ?
‘We had that perennial problem that every new band encounters. How do you get gigs when no-one knows you and how do people get to know you if you aren’t playing gigs ? So I did what I’ve pretty much done all of my life and took it in my own hands to set-up our own gigs. My girlfriend at the time was at Twickenham Art College and she told me that there was a pub near the college called the Cabbage Patch which had a function room above the bar. It was hardly ever used, so I asked the landlord if we could play there for four consecutive Saturdays ? He asked what sort of music we played, so I lied and told him cover versions or something… But I also told him, rather grandly, that we’d probably have fifty people in there each night, although I really didn’t know if we could, but he agreed to let us use it. This was obviously a long time before the internet and social media, so we had to hand-out flyers, put posters up, make telephone calls and maybe even got the details in Time Out or Melody Maker, so it was totally self-promoted. I think the first night, maybe twenty people came, but the next weekend there was fifty and the following week, there was a hundred. By and the final weekend, it was absolutely rammed ! It was a really extraordinary show, because we’d been having a lot of frustration about not having a manager, not having good equipment, not having a van, all those kind of things, but everything coalesced for that one hour we were onstage and it was great. Afterwards, two people who were in the audience came backstage to see us. The first one was Jonathan King, of all people. I only knew who he was because he had managed Genesis, who I hated, so when he offered to manage us I told him to fuck off ! As it turns out, his connections with Genesis would probably have been the least of our worries… But just as the rest of the band started remonstrating and saying I must be crazy to turn him down, there was another knock at the door and it turned out to be this guy called Bryan Morrison. He’d originally been at St Martins Art School but had gone on to manage The Pretty Things and published bands like Pink Floyd and T.Rex. He’d actually retired by then and was running a gallery, but he was bored with it and wanted to get back into the music business. Someone had seen us the previous week and told him that he should see us. So he said, if we were serious about it, we should come to his office on Monday and we could talk about a deal. We went along to his office in Mayfair, which had all of these Gold discs on the wall, he gave us champagne and we promptly signed all of the documents. I think we signed away something like 130% of our earnings in perpetuity(!!) but from that Monday, we were suddenly a professional band.
‘We had that perennial problem that every new band encounters. How do you get gigs when no-one knows you and how do people get to know you if you aren’t playing gigs ? So I did what I’ve pretty much done all of my life and took it in my own hands to set-up our own gigs. My girlfriend at the time was at Twickenham Art College and she told me that there was a pub near the college called the Cabbage Patch which had a function room above the bar. It was hardly ever used, so I asked the landlord if we could play there for four consecutive Saturdays ? He asked what sort of music we played, so I lied and told him cover versions or something… But I also told him, rather grandly, that we’d probably have fifty people in there each night, although I really didn’t know if we could, but he agreed to let us use it. This was obviously a long time before the internet and social media, so we had to hand-out flyers, put posters up, make telephone calls and maybe even got the details in Time Out or Melody Maker, so it was totally self-promoted. I think the first night, maybe twenty people came, but the next weekend there was fifty and the following week, there was a hundred. By and the final weekend, it was absolutely rammed ! It was a really extraordinary show, because we’d been having a lot of frustration about not having a manager, not having good equipment, not having a van, all those kind of things, but everything coalesced for that one hour we were onstage and it was great. Afterwards, two people who were in the audience came backstage to see us. The first one was Jonathan King, of all people. I only knew who he was because he had managed Genesis, who I hated, so when he offered to manage us I told him to fuck off ! As it turns out, his connections with Genesis would probably have been the least of our worries… But just as the rest of the band started remonstrating and saying I must be crazy to turn him down, there was another knock at the door and it turned out to be this guy called Bryan Morrison. He’d originally been at St Martins Art School but had gone on to manage The Pretty Things and published bands like Pink Floyd and T.Rex. He’d actually retired by then and was running a gallery, but he was bored with it and wanted to get back into the music business. Someone had seen us the previous week and told him that he should see us. So he said, if we were serious about it, we should come to his office on Monday and we could talk about a deal. We went along to his office in Mayfair, which had all of these Gold discs on the wall, he gave us champagne and we promptly signed all of the documents. I think we signed away something like 130% of our earnings in perpetuity(!!) but from that Monday, we were suddenly a professional band.
His first decision was that he was going to put us into a rehearsal room for the next six or eight weeks and we would do six days a week there, 12 hour days, working on our writing, our arrangements and production ideas. We did that and at the end of the six weeks he started to bring-in CEO’s from all of the big record companies, as he was already very-well connected. Eventually, Polydor offered him the best money for a three-album deal and we went into a studio almost straight away. We were still playing gigs as well and were given the support slot on a tour with Be Bop Deluxe, who were EMI’s great white hope at the time. We played some pretty big gigs with them and totally polarised the audience. Some people absolutely hated us with an all-consuming passion, while others thought we were the best thing they’d ever seen. Straight after that, our first album, ‘Late Night Movies, All Night Brainstorms’ came out and inevitably got mixed reviews. When we made it, we more or less went in, played it live and then patched it up. But I remember we came up with this phrase, ‘cathedrals of sound’. We wanted to make these huge, cinemagraphic soundtracks, if you like. Sometimes, they’d have a lot of space in them, other times they’d be so dense that it would sound like a juggernaut going down the street. We’d have a mix between the three minute thrash of ‘Waiting’ or ‘B-Movie Bedtime’, through to the rather elaborate, multi-movement tracks like ‘Mainlines’. We tried to involve a lot of texture, a lot of mood, a lot of space and a lot of drama. I suppose we were borrowing from Prog Rock in some ways, but never trying to achieve what Prog Rock had become. We were more interested in using the long songs as a large canvas rather than trying to reduce everything to a miniature, which is what Punk Rock attempted. We decided to make the most of the violin and the bass player, and because those songs more or less called for a soundtrack to support them, we really indulged ourselves.’
When you consider that it was such a short space of time between when you first started playing live and when you recorded the album, do you think you managed to achieve what you wanted from it ?
‘I do, even though we were still incredibly naïve at the time. If you were to ask me now if there were things I’d change about it, of course there are. I think it sounds a little bit thin at times, which was down to our inexperience rather than anything else, although I think that happens with lots of bands when they first go into a studio. But I always liked repetition and I think that really works well at the end of ‘Mainlines’, where it almost becomes a mantra. I really liked that and there was hardly anyone else doing that kind of stuff. And I like the fact that people have told me, even quite recently, that they were never able to listen to just one track but had to listen to the whole album in sequence from beginning to end, because it worked more like a movie where you had to watch the whole thing. It was certainly compiled like that. It wasn’t necessarily a continuous text, but it certainly implied a narrative. There was a journey from start to finish which it would take you on.’
When you consider that it was such a short space of time between when you first started playing live and when you recorded the album, do you think you managed to achieve what you wanted from it ?
‘I do, even though we were still incredibly naïve at the time. If you were to ask me now if there were things I’d change about it, of course there are. I think it sounds a little bit thin at times, which was down to our inexperience rather than anything else, although I think that happens with lots of bands when they first go into a studio. But I always liked repetition and I think that really works well at the end of ‘Mainlines’, where it almost becomes a mantra. I really liked that and there was hardly anyone else doing that kind of stuff. And I like the fact that people have told me, even quite recently, that they were never able to listen to just one track but had to listen to the whole album in sequence from beginning to end, because it worked more like a movie where you had to watch the whole thing. It was certainly compiled like that. It wasn’t necessarily a continuous text, but it certainly implied a narrative. There was a journey from start to finish which it would take you on.’
Did you feel at the time that Polydor were willing to let you develop as a band, even though you didn’t have instant chart success ?
‘At first, yes, but basically what happened was that we came straight off the Be Bop Deluxe tour, the album was released and we went back out on our own tour. This was still in early 1976 and we were getting crowds of 600 or 800 people wherever we went. We played a lot of the provincial towns in the North-East, North West, down in the West country and in the Midlands. There was a really solid circuit of places to play back then, either local clubs or at Universities and Colleges. The Students Union places were always incredibly fertile to play, because they tended to sell cheaper tickets and also had cheap bars. So we were starting to do really well, which was when I got a call from our agent, Martin Hopewell, saying he was getting pestered by a guy in London who had a band and they wanted to play some gigs with us outside of London. He told me they were called the Sex Pistols and warned me that they already had a bit of a bad reputation, but I had already heard about them and they’d sounded like fun, so we agreed that they could play with us at a gig in Middlesborough. I mean, what could possibly go wrong ? On the day of the gig we arrived at the venue and they were already there, trying to be obnoxious to everyone, just as you’d expect. They continued being pests as we did our soundcheck and then, when it was their turn, they asked if we could borrow our equipment ? Well, we’d already heard that if they didn’t just nick your gear they’d bust it, so we were a bit reluctant but ended up lending them a couple of things. Anyway, they did their soundcheck and it just seemed to be a godawful racket, but it was also one of those gigs where they finished their soundcheck, five minutes later the doors opened and ten minutes later, they were back onstage to play. I was watching them from the side of the stage and once I saw the reaction they created, I just realised, it’s all over for us ! You know, we’d just released our first album and thought we had it all planned out. By the way things had been going, we thought that by the time we released our third album, we were going to be on the same level as Pink Floyd and the Stones. But watching the Sex Pistols that night I just thought, it’s all over. It was as if someone had moved the goalposts. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but a generation in pop music terms is only about two or three years… If you have brothers or sisters that are two or three years older than you, then there’s a fair chance that you’ll be listening to similar types of music. But if they’re four or five years older, forget it ! Because we had come out of the fag-end of Prog and Glam, I suppose, it was also time for a reaction to all of that, which proved to be an almost willful rejection of virtuosity, a rejection of the usual album format, and the idea of putting on a show. Punk was a return to two chords and a third only if you must. ‘The third chord is jazz’, as Lou Reed once said. It was a return to the two minute pop song, or at the very least, a two and a half minute thrash, which was more or less everything that we weren’t doing. Except that we had already adopted names like ‘Kid Strange’, we already had blue hair, and we already had songs about urban paranoia…’
‘At first, yes, but basically what happened was that we came straight off the Be Bop Deluxe tour, the album was released and we went back out on our own tour. This was still in early 1976 and we were getting crowds of 600 or 800 people wherever we went. We played a lot of the provincial towns in the North-East, North West, down in the West country and in the Midlands. There was a really solid circuit of places to play back then, either local clubs or at Universities and Colleges. The Students Union places were always incredibly fertile to play, because they tended to sell cheaper tickets and also had cheap bars. So we were starting to do really well, which was when I got a call from our agent, Martin Hopewell, saying he was getting pestered by a guy in London who had a band and they wanted to play some gigs with us outside of London. He told me they were called the Sex Pistols and warned me that they already had a bit of a bad reputation, but I had already heard about them and they’d sounded like fun, so we agreed that they could play with us at a gig in Middlesborough. I mean, what could possibly go wrong ? On the day of the gig we arrived at the venue and they were already there, trying to be obnoxious to everyone, just as you’d expect. They continued being pests as we did our soundcheck and then, when it was their turn, they asked if we could borrow our equipment ? Well, we’d already heard that if they didn’t just nick your gear they’d bust it, so we were a bit reluctant but ended up lending them a couple of things. Anyway, they did their soundcheck and it just seemed to be a godawful racket, but it was also one of those gigs where they finished their soundcheck, five minutes later the doors opened and ten minutes later, they were back onstage to play. I was watching them from the side of the stage and once I saw the reaction they created, I just realised, it’s all over for us ! You know, we’d just released our first album and thought we had it all planned out. By the way things had been going, we thought that by the time we released our third album, we were going to be on the same level as Pink Floyd and the Stones. But watching the Sex Pistols that night I just thought, it’s all over. It was as if someone had moved the goalposts. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but a generation in pop music terms is only about two or three years… If you have brothers or sisters that are two or three years older than you, then there’s a fair chance that you’ll be listening to similar types of music. But if they’re four or five years older, forget it ! Because we had come out of the fag-end of Prog and Glam, I suppose, it was also time for a reaction to all of that, which proved to be an almost willful rejection of virtuosity, a rejection of the usual album format, and the idea of putting on a show. Punk was a return to two chords and a third only if you must. ‘The third chord is jazz’, as Lou Reed once said. It was a return to the two minute pop song, or at the very least, a two and a half minute thrash, which was more or less everything that we weren’t doing. Except that we had already adopted names like ‘Kid Strange’, we already had blue hair, and we already had songs about urban paranoia…’
You once said that your songs were about ‘urban decay, neurosis and corruption…’ which also described the vast majority of early Punk lyrics…
‘Exactly ! That’s what we were about… there was barely a love song in any of it. And at the same time, a lot of the people who were in the early Punk bands were happy to say that they were fans of us... People like Dave Vanian, TV Smith, Pauline from Penetration, Joy Division, The Skids and Simple Minds, all the way through to Julian Cope and Spiritualised. These were all people who came out of the original Punk thing but then went on to do something different with it, which I always thought was the point of it. But because of that slight age difference, the music press considered us to be a bit tainted.’
But even though the Punk movement may have derailed your original plans, you still continued to play live and record the second album…
‘I think by that time, we’d either recorded ‘Figments of Emancipation’ or had already started work on it and we were still contracted to make a third album which Bryan Morrison was bloody-well certain we were going to make because it meant we’d get another advance. The second album was made at Abbey Road with John Leckie and was a much-more sure-footed album in a lot of ways. Songs like ‘Suicide City’, ‘Marie And Joe’ and ‘Perfect Past’ were all a lot more confident. John knew the Abbey Road studios inside-out and I already knew him from when he had worked with Roy Harper, so we were happy to be working together. When it came out, it was a lot more accomplished and a lot more polished than the first album. It was a lot more sophisticated, I suppose, using the latest studio techniques and a lot of overdubs. But it came out just as Punk Rock was starting to explode and suddenly, for the record companies, it was the only game in town. In a very short space of time, Polydor had signed The Jam, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Sham 69, so when ‘Figments’ came out, we were being treated like a bad smell every time we walked into the Polydor offices. There were one or two people who still supported us, like Chris Bohn, who eventually went on to be the editor of The Wire. He was always into the weirder stuff, he loved Krautrock and was also into Burroughs, so he got what we were trying to do. He was fighting in our corner but the rest of them had moved on and just wanted to hang out with Siouxsie & The Banshees or The Cure. By the time we started work on ‘Sons of Survival’, we already sensed that it was over for us and didn’t really know what we were going to do next. I was 26 years old and hadn’t had any training for anything else. I’d had a moderate career as a musician but nowhere near the kind of success that you could live-on once the band ended. We still made the third album and it came out but then Urban Blitz decided to leave the band. I think he just saw the writing on the wall while we were making it. We had a brief period of nonsense with Dave Vanian, which was great fun, but we were all over the shop. None of us had ever set-out with a career plan, so we were all clutching at straws… we’d only ever been rock musicians and suddenly it looked as if we weren’t even going to have that anymore.’
‘Exactly ! That’s what we were about… there was barely a love song in any of it. And at the same time, a lot of the people who were in the early Punk bands were happy to say that they were fans of us... People like Dave Vanian, TV Smith, Pauline from Penetration, Joy Division, The Skids and Simple Minds, all the way through to Julian Cope and Spiritualised. These were all people who came out of the original Punk thing but then went on to do something different with it, which I always thought was the point of it. But because of that slight age difference, the music press considered us to be a bit tainted.’
But even though the Punk movement may have derailed your original plans, you still continued to play live and record the second album…
‘I think by that time, we’d either recorded ‘Figments of Emancipation’ or had already started work on it and we were still contracted to make a third album which Bryan Morrison was bloody-well certain we were going to make because it meant we’d get another advance. The second album was made at Abbey Road with John Leckie and was a much-more sure-footed album in a lot of ways. Songs like ‘Suicide City’, ‘Marie And Joe’ and ‘Perfect Past’ were all a lot more confident. John knew the Abbey Road studios inside-out and I already knew him from when he had worked with Roy Harper, so we were happy to be working together. When it came out, it was a lot more accomplished and a lot more polished than the first album. It was a lot more sophisticated, I suppose, using the latest studio techniques and a lot of overdubs. But it came out just as Punk Rock was starting to explode and suddenly, for the record companies, it was the only game in town. In a very short space of time, Polydor had signed The Jam, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Sham 69, so when ‘Figments’ came out, we were being treated like a bad smell every time we walked into the Polydor offices. There were one or two people who still supported us, like Chris Bohn, who eventually went on to be the editor of The Wire. He was always into the weirder stuff, he loved Krautrock and was also into Burroughs, so he got what we were trying to do. He was fighting in our corner but the rest of them had moved on and just wanted to hang out with Siouxsie & The Banshees or The Cure. By the time we started work on ‘Sons of Survival’, we already sensed that it was over for us and didn’t really know what we were going to do next. I was 26 years old and hadn’t had any training for anything else. I’d had a moderate career as a musician but nowhere near the kind of success that you could live-on once the band ended. We still made the third album and it came out but then Urban Blitz decided to leave the band. I think he just saw the writing on the wall while we were making it. We had a brief period of nonsense with Dave Vanian, which was great fun, but we were all over the shop. None of us had ever set-out with a career plan, so we were all clutching at straws… we’d only ever been rock musicians and suddenly it looked as if we weren’t even going to have that anymore.’
Dave Vanian had already been a Doctors of Madness fan even before he’d joined The Damned…
‘Oh yeah, I’d already known him for a few years. I think he was living in Hemel Hempstead at the time and we used to play a lot of gigs in that area when we started out, places like St Albans and Aylesbury. So he used to come along to a lot of them and we’d always see him in the front row. We eventually got chatting and I used to go to see The Damned when they started playing. When he got married, he asked me to be his Best Man and I did that. In fact, I even joined The Damned for about one day, when he had disappeared and they got in touch with me and asked if I could step-in. But one day with the rest of them was more than enough ! Anyway, he had got up onstage and sang with us on a few occasions, while Urban was still with us and we were a functioning, ambitious band. He would come up for the encore and sing a couple of songs, which was always great. When Urban left us, we had to decide how we could see out the tour dates and I knew that The Damned had just broken up so Dave was available. But the idea of adding another vocalist was so ridiculous, really, because the one thing we didn’t need was another vocalist bellowing along with me. But we went ahead and did a few dates together… As I said, we already had a tour set-up and I think he did most of the dates with us, but I don’t think it was ever going to go any further than that. We recorded one song called ‘Don’t Panic England’, which I’d written with TV Smith, and Dave sang the lead on it. It wasn’t released at the time but the recording is on the new boxset. I don’t think it’s brilliant but it isn’t awful, it’s just okay. I don’t think the recording was up to the potential of the song itself, but by that point, we were in freefall and we really didn’t have a clue what we were doing.’
You co-wrote several songs with TV Smith, the best known being ‘Back From The Dead’ which was recorded by both The Adverts and Doctors of Madness. Was ‘Don’t Panic England’ the only other thing that you worked on together ?
‘No, there was actually a whole album that we wrote together which sadly never came out, although I still have the demos for it. We recorded about eight or nine songs at my house over a period of about two years, in about 1978-79, I think. No drums, just two guitars and two voices… We’d started writing together when Doctors of Madness were beginning to fall apart, and I think the same thing was beginning to happen with The Adverts, so we did this as a kind of side project. It was just something for us to do and I think the songs were really good, even though the recordings were pretty terrible. I’m a big fan of Tim’s music so it was great to play with him. He’s the real deal, he’s got his own style, he’s an engaging performer and he has a real integrity.’
‘Oh yeah, I’d already known him for a few years. I think he was living in Hemel Hempstead at the time and we used to play a lot of gigs in that area when we started out, places like St Albans and Aylesbury. So he used to come along to a lot of them and we’d always see him in the front row. We eventually got chatting and I used to go to see The Damned when they started playing. When he got married, he asked me to be his Best Man and I did that. In fact, I even joined The Damned for about one day, when he had disappeared and they got in touch with me and asked if I could step-in. But one day with the rest of them was more than enough ! Anyway, he had got up onstage and sang with us on a few occasions, while Urban was still with us and we were a functioning, ambitious band. He would come up for the encore and sing a couple of songs, which was always great. When Urban left us, we had to decide how we could see out the tour dates and I knew that The Damned had just broken up so Dave was available. But the idea of adding another vocalist was so ridiculous, really, because the one thing we didn’t need was another vocalist bellowing along with me. But we went ahead and did a few dates together… As I said, we already had a tour set-up and I think he did most of the dates with us, but I don’t think it was ever going to go any further than that. We recorded one song called ‘Don’t Panic England’, which I’d written with TV Smith, and Dave sang the lead on it. It wasn’t released at the time but the recording is on the new boxset. I don’t think it’s brilliant but it isn’t awful, it’s just okay. I don’t think the recording was up to the potential of the song itself, but by that point, we were in freefall and we really didn’t have a clue what we were doing.’
You co-wrote several songs with TV Smith, the best known being ‘Back From The Dead’ which was recorded by both The Adverts and Doctors of Madness. Was ‘Don’t Panic England’ the only other thing that you worked on together ?
‘No, there was actually a whole album that we wrote together which sadly never came out, although I still have the demos for it. We recorded about eight or nine songs at my house over a period of about two years, in about 1978-79, I think. No drums, just two guitars and two voices… We’d started writing together when Doctors of Madness were beginning to fall apart, and I think the same thing was beginning to happen with The Adverts, so we did this as a kind of side project. It was just something for us to do and I think the songs were really good, even though the recordings were pretty terrible. I’m a big fan of Tim’s music so it was great to play with him. He’s the real deal, he’s got his own style, he’s an engaging performer and he has a real integrity.’
Do you think Doctors of Madness came to a natural end after ‘Sons of Survival’ ?
‘After we played a final set of gigs, the band broke-up. That being said, I still think there are some really good songs on that record, things like ‘Triple Vision’, ‘Sons of Survival’ and ‘Back From The Dead’, but it felt like a valedictory record. It was like a farewell, which made it ironic that it was called ‘Sons of Survival’. But it was also a political album, slightly embittered and also slightly confused.’
Did you already have any plans for what you wanted to do next, or did it take you a while before you moved on ?
‘I had to think, what was I going to do now ? I had to reflect and decide, what am I good at ? What are my strengths and weaknesses ? I realised that I was good at conceptualizing projects, so after a while I started writing an album that was a sort of political fantasy, called ‘The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange’. I projected it into an imaginary near-future, where Europe had become a federation and there was now a President of Europe. This person had abused his position in show business and advertising to manoeuvre his way into that role, almost as a game or a challenge rather than a thirst or lust for power. I wrote a whole suite of songs and it became a kind of concept album, so then I had to decide how I wanted to perform it. I didn’t really want to take a band out on the road and I couldn’t afford to, anyway. I didn’t want to play in regular rock clubs because I’d already done that, so I chose to work with tape recorders and slide projectors, Super 8 film and things like that. I ended up performing it as a one-man show and making it quite theatrical. I was also able to put it into different venues, like Art galleries and museums, or hospitals and prisons… Fortunately, there were a lot of Performance Art venues around that time, like the Pyramid and the Knitting Factory, where people like Laurie Anderson or David Byrne could perform this really interesting stuff. I really loved that approach and decided that I wanted to open a place like that when I got back to London. Luckily enough, I was able to find a venue in Regent Street which was actually a gay club but it would only have two or three customers on a Monday night, so I did the same as I had done in Twickenham and told the landlord that I could double his crowd ! I had this idea for a once-a-week multi-media club called Cabaret Futura and he said, Okay, let’s give it a go. For the first night, Richard Jobson did his poetry, Blancmange played a set, there was a mime artist and Cristina came over from New York. It was 1980 and just at the beginning of the Club scene with places like Blitz and the New Romantics, so it really took off and suddenly, I was up and running again. I had the club and I’d already recorded the ‘Phenomenal Rise’ album by myself, when Richard Branson got in touch and said, bring the tapes in and let’s have a talk. It was probably because I was hot again due to the club, but we ended up in some very unconventional negotiations. He’d go out to his car with a copy of the cassette and then come back every half-hour with a different offer. ‘£54,000’… ‘£32,000’… ‘I hated that track…£18,000’. In the end, we ended back at £54,000, which is what he originally offered. So I was releasing records again, this time on Virgin, and the whole club thing was going well. But again, it didn’t result in a big hit and, at a time when Virgin also had the Human League, Culture Club and Simple Minds, however much they might like you, or however engaging or funny they think you are, you’re not going to last very long. That period of grace with record labels has just got shorter and shorter. When we first signed to Polydor, we did at least have that period of three albums to achieve something before they dropped you, but now, it’s more like three minutes. You have to chart instantly or else you’re dropped. At one time, record labels signed people or bands with the idea of nurturing talent and not just pushing them instantly into the studio. They wanted to give people their best chance rather than just trying to make a quick buck.’
‘After we played a final set of gigs, the band broke-up. That being said, I still think there are some really good songs on that record, things like ‘Triple Vision’, ‘Sons of Survival’ and ‘Back From The Dead’, but it felt like a valedictory record. It was like a farewell, which made it ironic that it was called ‘Sons of Survival’. But it was also a political album, slightly embittered and also slightly confused.’
Did you already have any plans for what you wanted to do next, or did it take you a while before you moved on ?
‘I had to think, what was I going to do now ? I had to reflect and decide, what am I good at ? What are my strengths and weaknesses ? I realised that I was good at conceptualizing projects, so after a while I started writing an album that was a sort of political fantasy, called ‘The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange’. I projected it into an imaginary near-future, where Europe had become a federation and there was now a President of Europe. This person had abused his position in show business and advertising to manoeuvre his way into that role, almost as a game or a challenge rather than a thirst or lust for power. I wrote a whole suite of songs and it became a kind of concept album, so then I had to decide how I wanted to perform it. I didn’t really want to take a band out on the road and I couldn’t afford to, anyway. I didn’t want to play in regular rock clubs because I’d already done that, so I chose to work with tape recorders and slide projectors, Super 8 film and things like that. I ended up performing it as a one-man show and making it quite theatrical. I was also able to put it into different venues, like Art galleries and museums, or hospitals and prisons… Fortunately, there were a lot of Performance Art venues around that time, like the Pyramid and the Knitting Factory, where people like Laurie Anderson or David Byrne could perform this really interesting stuff. I really loved that approach and decided that I wanted to open a place like that when I got back to London. Luckily enough, I was able to find a venue in Regent Street which was actually a gay club but it would only have two or three customers on a Monday night, so I did the same as I had done in Twickenham and told the landlord that I could double his crowd ! I had this idea for a once-a-week multi-media club called Cabaret Futura and he said, Okay, let’s give it a go. For the first night, Richard Jobson did his poetry, Blancmange played a set, there was a mime artist and Cristina came over from New York. It was 1980 and just at the beginning of the Club scene with places like Blitz and the New Romantics, so it really took off and suddenly, I was up and running again. I had the club and I’d already recorded the ‘Phenomenal Rise’ album by myself, when Richard Branson got in touch and said, bring the tapes in and let’s have a talk. It was probably because I was hot again due to the club, but we ended up in some very unconventional negotiations. He’d go out to his car with a copy of the cassette and then come back every half-hour with a different offer. ‘£54,000’… ‘£32,000’… ‘I hated that track…£18,000’. In the end, we ended back at £54,000, which is what he originally offered. So I was releasing records again, this time on Virgin, and the whole club thing was going well. But again, it didn’t result in a big hit and, at a time when Virgin also had the Human League, Culture Club and Simple Minds, however much they might like you, or however engaging or funny they think you are, you’re not going to last very long. That period of grace with record labels has just got shorter and shorter. When we first signed to Polydor, we did at least have that period of three albums to achieve something before they dropped you, but now, it’s more like three minutes. You have to chart instantly or else you’re dropped. At one time, record labels signed people or bands with the idea of nurturing talent and not just pushing them instantly into the studio. They wanted to give people their best chance rather than just trying to make a quick buck.’
But just as your relationship with Virgin was coming to an end, you also started your career as an actor. Was that something that you’d previously been interested in ?
‘No, never. Everyone I knew seemed to want to be an actor, but I didn’t. It was completely fortuitous that I met someone who had been working with a friend of mine and she had just started a new job as an assistant to Franc Roddam, the movie producer. She introduced me to him and he said that I needed to get an agent. He said that I had an interesting face and I had a good voice, so I’d always be able to get work. He introduced me to an agent and I’ve been with them ever since. I didn’t work on the film that Franc was working on at the time, but I did go on to work on ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Batman’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Gangs of New York’ and even ‘Harry Potter’… I’ve just been incredibly lucky to work on some very big movies. I’ve worked with Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Harmony Korine and Martin Scorsese… some very brilliant people, so I’ve been very lucky.’
And you’ve been able to balance that work against the less-mainstream work that you’ve continued working on…
‘Exactly. In fact, today is actually quite poignant, because the film I worked on with Harmony Korine was ‘Mr Lonely’, which was probably my favourite of all the ones I’ve worked on. But it was also the film I worked on with Anita Pallenberg, who has just died. She became a great friend after that, and we all had such fun working on that film. It was up in the Highlands of Scotland and the premise was that we were all retired impersonators living in a retirement home, Anita was the Queen, I was Abraham Lincoln, Diego Luna was Michael Jackson, Samantha Morton was Marilyn Monroe. Harmony was a director that I already loved from day one, with films like ‘Gummo’ and ‘Julian Donkey Boy’, and he was an absolute joy to work with. It was so much fun, almost like being all together on a cruise ship. While this was going on, I was also offered a part in a World tour of Hamlet, so that turned into a year and a half of work, playing one of the gravediggers alongside Jimmy Nesbitt. We went everywhere with that, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and all over Europe, so it was a brilliant experience. Then, just as that was coming to an end, I met Robert Wilson at a party in London and found that he was just casting for ‘The Black Rider’, the William Burroughs and Tom Waits project. I told him that I loved William Burroughs work and would really like him to consider me for it, so he asked me to come along to the auditions at the Barbican. I went there and he asked me if I knew any of Tom Waits’ songs, which of course I did, but I wasn’t going to try and perform a Tom Waits song for Tom Waits - I’m not stupid ! So I played one of my own, thinking it was just on the cusp of something that Tom Waits might appreciate. They put me on film, sent it to Tom and then came back a few days later to tell me that Tom liked it and I was in. So I ended up working on a tour of ‘The Black Rider’, with Marianne Faithfull playing the Devil. We played in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sydney and the Barbican in London, which took just over two and a half years in total. Tom Waits was with us through all of the rehearsals… ‘Yeah, it’s all great, if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it…’ That’ll do for me !’
‘No, never. Everyone I knew seemed to want to be an actor, but I didn’t. It was completely fortuitous that I met someone who had been working with a friend of mine and she had just started a new job as an assistant to Franc Roddam, the movie producer. She introduced me to him and he said that I needed to get an agent. He said that I had an interesting face and I had a good voice, so I’d always be able to get work. He introduced me to an agent and I’ve been with them ever since. I didn’t work on the film that Franc was working on at the time, but I did go on to work on ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘Batman’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Gangs of New York’ and even ‘Harry Potter’… I’ve just been incredibly lucky to work on some very big movies. I’ve worked with Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson, Harmony Korine and Martin Scorsese… some very brilliant people, so I’ve been very lucky.’
And you’ve been able to balance that work against the less-mainstream work that you’ve continued working on…
‘Exactly. In fact, today is actually quite poignant, because the film I worked on with Harmony Korine was ‘Mr Lonely’, which was probably my favourite of all the ones I’ve worked on. But it was also the film I worked on with Anita Pallenberg, who has just died. She became a great friend after that, and we all had such fun working on that film. It was up in the Highlands of Scotland and the premise was that we were all retired impersonators living in a retirement home, Anita was the Queen, I was Abraham Lincoln, Diego Luna was Michael Jackson, Samantha Morton was Marilyn Monroe. Harmony was a director that I already loved from day one, with films like ‘Gummo’ and ‘Julian Donkey Boy’, and he was an absolute joy to work with. It was so much fun, almost like being all together on a cruise ship. While this was going on, I was also offered a part in a World tour of Hamlet, so that turned into a year and a half of work, playing one of the gravediggers alongside Jimmy Nesbitt. We went everywhere with that, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and all over Europe, so it was a brilliant experience. Then, just as that was coming to an end, I met Robert Wilson at a party in London and found that he was just casting for ‘The Black Rider’, the William Burroughs and Tom Waits project. I told him that I loved William Burroughs work and would really like him to consider me for it, so he asked me to come along to the auditions at the Barbican. I went there and he asked me if I knew any of Tom Waits’ songs, which of course I did, but I wasn’t going to try and perform a Tom Waits song for Tom Waits - I’m not stupid ! So I played one of my own, thinking it was just on the cusp of something that Tom Waits might appreciate. They put me on film, sent it to Tom and then came back a few days later to tell me that Tom liked it and I was in. So I ended up working on a tour of ‘The Black Rider’, with Marianne Faithfull playing the Devil. We played in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sydney and the Barbican in London, which took just over two and a half years in total. Tom Waits was with us through all of the rehearsals… ‘Yeah, it’s all great, if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it…’ That’ll do for me !’
You also organized the Burroughs-related event, ‘Language Is A Virus from Outer Space’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hall…
‘2014 was William Burrough’s centenary and I started thinking that I’d like to do something as a celebration of Burroughs. Initially, I was just thinking about doing something in a room above a pub… that’s how everything seems to start with me ! I was just thinking about doing some readings and maybe playing a few of my songs which had been most overtly influenced by Burroughs. Perhaps show some film-clips and basically just talk about my love of Burroughs for an hour or so. But gradually I started to think, maybe I should be a bit more ambitious. What I’d really like to do was write an opera that referenced Burroughs, both his texts and his life. I had no intention or desire to write the music for it, I just wanted to work on the libretto and one day I was discussing this with a colleague at the college, the arranger and cellist Audrey Riley. She asked me who I’d like to work with on the project and I said that if I could work with anyone at all, I’d most like to work with Gavin Bryars. To which she replied that he lived next-door to her in Leicestershire ! At that point, the die was cast. I had already worked with Gavin on the Hamlet production, so we arranged a meeting while he was travelling through London, and I had half an hour to make my pitch. He was interested, but he said that he just wouldn’t have enough time to work on an opera in the timescale we had. But he said he was definitely interested, so I suggested that maybe we could work on a cantata and reduce it to just twenty minutes, which he agreed he would be able to do and we shook on it. This was the first building-block in place and now I was really going to have to take it seriously. I mean, it would have been all very well for me to do a one-man show in a room above a pub, but we couldn’t have the premiere of a new Gavin Bryars piece in a pub ! But at the same time, it was only going to be twenty minutes long, so it was like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was something potentially great, but on the other, it was going to be difficult to place. You couldn’t place it by itself in the Festival Hall or somewhere like that as it would be too short, but if it was placed in a full programme it might lose the focus of the piece. So I started thinking, perhaps I could arrange a whole tribute evening to Burroughs and the Gavin Bryars piece would be the jewel in the crown ? I got in touch with various people, like Gavin Turk, Sarah Jane Morris, Rupert Thompson and Bill Nelson, and asked if they’d like to perform some short pieces either inspired-by or referencing Burroughs ? Everybody said yes, so it was all starting to come together when I suddenly realized there was a Doctors of Madness-sized hole in the middle of it. I hadn’t really seen any of the guys for maybe thirty years but I got in touch with them and suggested a one-off reunion, just playing six songs, as part of this event. Everyone said yes, so we booked a rehearsal studio and put a short set together. Joe Elliot from Def Leppard very kindly put up some money towards the evening, as he was a big Doctors of Madness fan, and asked if he could sing with us, so he ended up singing ‘Suicide City’. We eventually put it on at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and it was such a great evening. The piece I did with Gavin Bryars turned into a twenty minute staged-performance involving actors, projections, live music and twelve guitarists coming in from the back of the auditorium in William Burroughs masks. It was a really great success and it gave me a huge personal sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.’
‘2014 was William Burrough’s centenary and I started thinking that I’d like to do something as a celebration of Burroughs. Initially, I was just thinking about doing something in a room above a pub… that’s how everything seems to start with me ! I was just thinking about doing some readings and maybe playing a few of my songs which had been most overtly influenced by Burroughs. Perhaps show some film-clips and basically just talk about my love of Burroughs for an hour or so. But gradually I started to think, maybe I should be a bit more ambitious. What I’d really like to do was write an opera that referenced Burroughs, both his texts and his life. I had no intention or desire to write the music for it, I just wanted to work on the libretto and one day I was discussing this with a colleague at the college, the arranger and cellist Audrey Riley. She asked me who I’d like to work with on the project and I said that if I could work with anyone at all, I’d most like to work with Gavin Bryars. To which she replied that he lived next-door to her in Leicestershire ! At that point, the die was cast. I had already worked with Gavin on the Hamlet production, so we arranged a meeting while he was travelling through London, and I had half an hour to make my pitch. He was interested, but he said that he just wouldn’t have enough time to work on an opera in the timescale we had. But he said he was definitely interested, so I suggested that maybe we could work on a cantata and reduce it to just twenty minutes, which he agreed he would be able to do and we shook on it. This was the first building-block in place and now I was really going to have to take it seriously. I mean, it would have been all very well for me to do a one-man show in a room above a pub, but we couldn’t have the premiere of a new Gavin Bryars piece in a pub ! But at the same time, it was only going to be twenty minutes long, so it was like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was something potentially great, but on the other, it was going to be difficult to place. You couldn’t place it by itself in the Festival Hall or somewhere like that as it would be too short, but if it was placed in a full programme it might lose the focus of the piece. So I started thinking, perhaps I could arrange a whole tribute evening to Burroughs and the Gavin Bryars piece would be the jewel in the crown ? I got in touch with various people, like Gavin Turk, Sarah Jane Morris, Rupert Thompson and Bill Nelson, and asked if they’d like to perform some short pieces either inspired-by or referencing Burroughs ? Everybody said yes, so it was all starting to come together when I suddenly realized there was a Doctors of Madness-sized hole in the middle of it. I hadn’t really seen any of the guys for maybe thirty years but I got in touch with them and suggested a one-off reunion, just playing six songs, as part of this event. Everyone said yes, so we booked a rehearsal studio and put a short set together. Joe Elliot from Def Leppard very kindly put up some money towards the evening, as he was a big Doctors of Madness fan, and asked if he could sing with us, so he ended up singing ‘Suicide City’. We eventually put it on at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and it was such a great evening. The piece I did with Gavin Bryars turned into a twenty minute staged-performance involving actors, projections, live music and twelve guitarists coming in from the back of the auditorium in William Burroughs masks. It was a really great success and it gave me a huge personal sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.’
Although that was the first time you’d played with the original Doctors of Madness since the original split, you had also played some shows in Japan with different musicians, performing those songs again…
‘Yes, that was actually around the time of ‘Black Rider’ in 2005. A Japanese record company wanted to put-out the Doctors material on CD. By then, I had thought that any interest in us was dead and gone. The vinyl albums had been long-deleted and only a few dedicated souls would still track them down. So when this Japanese label got in touch and said that they’d like to reissue the records on CD, I said it would be fine. When it got closer to the release date, they asked if the band would be interested in going over to play a few gigs. The problem with that was the logistics of it. We’d have to get together and rehearse as much for two shows as if we were going on tour for two years, so it just wasn’t practical. Instead, I offered to rework some of the songs and go over with David Coulter, who is a multi-instrumentalist, and perform the songs together. But then, two weeks before we were due to fly out, I got another call and was told they had good news and that they’d found a Doctors of Madness tribute band in Tokyo ! I didn’t even need to hear them as I loved the potential absurdity of it ! So when David and I arrived in Tokyo, they were there to meet us. We hadn’t even spoke to them before then, as it had all been brokered by the record label, but we went into a rehearsal studio with them and had two sessions booked before the first gig. I’d already said to David, if it turns into a disaster, we’ll go ahead and play 45 minutes and then the band would just do 15 minutes with us. But we got into the studio and suggested playing ‘Marie and Joe’ first. As soon as the band came in, they were great ! Probably better than we ever were and it didn’t even matter what song I suggested, they had them all down. There were three of them at the time and the only thing they couldn’t do were the vocals, because they didn’t speak any English at all. So after we played those gigs, we stayed in touch and I went back to play with them again in 2007 and they also came over to play here as their own band, Sister Paul, which is now just a two-piece, drums and bass, but absolutely brilliant. Anyway, soon after Doctors of Madness played at the Burroughs’ event, Stoner sadly died and Pete let me know that he wasn’t really interested in playing anything else, but I realised that we had a drummer and a bass player in Sister Paul who were not only brilliant but also knew all of the material. So last year, I went over to Japan again with Urban Blitz and we played ten shows with them. I love Japan anyway, so it was really good fun. And then, soon after that, Cherry Red got in touch and said they wanted to release a full retrospective, including all three albums plus bonus tracks, demos, b-sides, live recordings, everything… They really wanted to do it properly, so I agreed and became really closely involved with the project. Everything was re-mastered and I think it sounds really good now. As that release date was coming up, they asked if we could do a London show ?
‘Yes, that was actually around the time of ‘Black Rider’ in 2005. A Japanese record company wanted to put-out the Doctors material on CD. By then, I had thought that any interest in us was dead and gone. The vinyl albums had been long-deleted and only a few dedicated souls would still track them down. So when this Japanese label got in touch and said that they’d like to reissue the records on CD, I said it would be fine. When it got closer to the release date, they asked if the band would be interested in going over to play a few gigs. The problem with that was the logistics of it. We’d have to get together and rehearse as much for two shows as if we were going on tour for two years, so it just wasn’t practical. Instead, I offered to rework some of the songs and go over with David Coulter, who is a multi-instrumentalist, and perform the songs together. But then, two weeks before we were due to fly out, I got another call and was told they had good news and that they’d found a Doctors of Madness tribute band in Tokyo ! I didn’t even need to hear them as I loved the potential absurdity of it ! So when David and I arrived in Tokyo, they were there to meet us. We hadn’t even spoke to them before then, as it had all been brokered by the record label, but we went into a rehearsal studio with them and had two sessions booked before the first gig. I’d already said to David, if it turns into a disaster, we’ll go ahead and play 45 minutes and then the band would just do 15 minutes with us. But we got into the studio and suggested playing ‘Marie and Joe’ first. As soon as the band came in, they were great ! Probably better than we ever were and it didn’t even matter what song I suggested, they had them all down. There were three of them at the time and the only thing they couldn’t do were the vocals, because they didn’t speak any English at all. So after we played those gigs, we stayed in touch and I went back to play with them again in 2007 and they also came over to play here as their own band, Sister Paul, which is now just a two-piece, drums and bass, but absolutely brilliant. Anyway, soon after Doctors of Madness played at the Burroughs’ event, Stoner sadly died and Pete let me know that he wasn’t really interested in playing anything else, but I realised that we had a drummer and a bass player in Sister Paul who were not only brilliant but also knew all of the material. So last year, I went over to Japan again with Urban Blitz and we played ten shows with them. I love Japan anyway, so it was really good fun. And then, soon after that, Cherry Red got in touch and said they wanted to release a full retrospective, including all three albums plus bonus tracks, demos, b-sides, live recordings, everything… They really wanted to do it properly, so I agreed and became really closely involved with the project. Everything was re-mastered and I think it sounds really good now. As that release date was coming up, they asked if we could do a London show ?
I thought it would be the right thing to do, because we’d played those gigs in Japan last year and the back had already been broken in terms of rehearsing and getting ready for it. So we said we’d do it and booked a show at The Lexington. But with social media being what it is now, a lot of people started asking if we’d be playing in other places across the country. We hadn’t really thought there would be so much interest, so I just told these people, if you can help us set up the gigs, we’d love to do it. And that’s been one of the things that I’ve really liked about the recent gigs. The whole tour was set-up by fans. There were no corporate promoters involved and no agents, it’s been entirely set-up by people getting in touch and saying, we have a club we can use that holds 250 or 300 people, we’d love to put on a show for you… We had no real expectations that anyone would come and certainly weren’t expecting them to be as well-attended as they have been, or that people have been so excited about them. I think the thing that I’ve realised is that, while the band wasn’t commercially successful, we really touched people in a significant and meaningful way. I already knew that we’d influenced a lot of bands and musicians because a lot of them had told me as much, but I didn’t realize that we still had so many dedicated fans who would be so excited that we were playing live again. Now that I’m older and I’m not interested in that whole thing of trying to act like a star or being aloof, I was meeting all these people before and after the shows and what became clear was the loyalty, dedication and excitement that the tour had engendered. It was really very moving, and I was deeply touched by it.’
It’s great that it’s all come together almost organically and has received such an enthusiastic response…
‘It just seemed that it was the right thing to do, at the right time. One of the things that occurred to me is that, if we had managed to have a hit record back in the Seventies, we may well have continued to eke-out a living for the next forty years, like a lot of other bands have done from that era. But, for me, having to play the same one or two hit songs continually for the rest of my life would be my idea of absolute misery. In our case, because we failed as rock stars, I’ve gone on to have a really interesting life. I’ve worked with all these great people, I’ve run a successful club, I’ve written a book, I’ve taught kids, I’ve worked in Hong Kong and Japan, I’ve done theatre all over the world – Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Berlin, Rome… I’ve been incredibly lucky and all of this has been down to the fact that I failed as a rock star ! It’s one of the things that I always refer to when I’m teaching or lecturing… you should always dare to fail ! If you don’t risk failure, you’ll never create anything original or worthwhile. All you’ll do is accept your limits and stick to what you can do, but it’ll only be something that someone else has already done. Dare to fall-off your horse ! In my case, I was lucky that we never had those one or two hits that would have made it tempting to continue squeezing-out a living from it.’
It’s great that it’s all come together almost organically and has received such an enthusiastic response…
‘It just seemed that it was the right thing to do, at the right time. One of the things that occurred to me is that, if we had managed to have a hit record back in the Seventies, we may well have continued to eke-out a living for the next forty years, like a lot of other bands have done from that era. But, for me, having to play the same one or two hit songs continually for the rest of my life would be my idea of absolute misery. In our case, because we failed as rock stars, I’ve gone on to have a really interesting life. I’ve worked with all these great people, I’ve run a successful club, I’ve written a book, I’ve taught kids, I’ve worked in Hong Kong and Japan, I’ve done theatre all over the world – Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Berlin, Rome… I’ve been incredibly lucky and all of this has been down to the fact that I failed as a rock star ! It’s one of the things that I always refer to when I’m teaching or lecturing… you should always dare to fail ! If you don’t risk failure, you’ll never create anything original or worthwhile. All you’ll do is accept your limits and stick to what you can do, but it’ll only be something that someone else has already done. Dare to fall-off your horse ! In my case, I was lucky that we never had those one or two hits that would have made it tempting to continue squeezing-out a living from it.’
There’s also the fact that, coming back to performing again now, you don’t have that craving for stardom or success that young bands inevitably have and, without those expectations, you can just concentrate on playing the music and enjoying it yourselves…
‘Exactly… we’ve had so much enjoyment onstage. It’s been brilliant working with the two Japanese musicians because they bring so much energy to it and the visual focus is so right for us now. Had I been casting for two new people to play in Doctors of Madness, I couldn’t have imagined what those two people would look like, but they turned out to be perfect for it. And I think, perhaps misguidedly, that the songs still have a continued relevance, politically, socially, musically and artistically. There’s nothing there that, even as a 66 year old, makes me think that I’m pulling the wool over people’s eyes. I believe in the songs when we’re playing them and I think they still have a strength and integrity. They have a point and a relevance for anyone, not just my contemporaries. I’m as proud of it now as I was then and I certainly don’t think we’re only performing pale versions. I think there’s a new dynamism and a lot of energy in the way we perform those songs now.’
The show at The Lexington was more like a multi-media event, with specifically chosen support acts, projections and artwork. I assume the rest of the gigs you played were not quite as involved ?
‘That was going to be our only show, originally, so I wanted to make it a real event. I wanted it to reflect what our influences were, going back to the Warhol thing and the idea of The Factory, so I involved some performance art, some dance and the Band of Holy Joy. And I was able to involve some students from the London College of Fashion to transform the space for the evening and set-up the projections. In the end it also reflected some of the things I’d done in between times, bringing it all together. I’m not just interested in rock’n’roll, so everything fed into everything else. But obviously, we weren’t going to able to take all of that to every show, although we were able to use the projections every night. Lily Bud was also able to come along and play with us at four or five of the shows, so we did try to retain as much of the Lexington performance as was possible.’
With the positive response to the recent gigs and the Retrospective set released by Cherry Red, are you intending to continue performing as Doctors of Madness ?
‘I think so. Not as a full-time band, of course, but I think we will continue playing occasional shows when it seems appropriate. And it’s still very early days yet, but I’m looking to work with a guy called Ivan Pope. He’s been a fan for a long time and he’s also someone who understands both Art, in its’ broadest sense, and technology. He’s had this idea that a lot of the older songs could be put together with a narrative and perhaps staged as a musical. He had this whole idea concerning a refugee crisis, with Marie and Joe on opposite sides of a visa-situation and an atheist-jihadist militia called the Sons of Survival. Suicide City is the place that everyone is trying to get to and from… He convinced me that all these songs could fill a narrative point within a single production. So he’s started work on this idea as a stage play. I don’t think Doctors of Madness would actually perform as part of it, if it comes together, but perhaps we could put together some sort of ensemble that could reflect both East European and Middle Eastern music on one side, and Western music on the other, to illustrate the political and cultural divide. The songs would then be reworked to support the narrative, which would basically be a refugee love story. Ivan will write it and I’ll direct it and hopefully we’ll be able to get some really good people to play it. I think it could be a good way to rework the old songs and give them a whole new relevance in a 21st Century political setting.’
‘Exactly… we’ve had so much enjoyment onstage. It’s been brilliant working with the two Japanese musicians because they bring so much energy to it and the visual focus is so right for us now. Had I been casting for two new people to play in Doctors of Madness, I couldn’t have imagined what those two people would look like, but they turned out to be perfect for it. And I think, perhaps misguidedly, that the songs still have a continued relevance, politically, socially, musically and artistically. There’s nothing there that, even as a 66 year old, makes me think that I’m pulling the wool over people’s eyes. I believe in the songs when we’re playing them and I think they still have a strength and integrity. They have a point and a relevance for anyone, not just my contemporaries. I’m as proud of it now as I was then and I certainly don’t think we’re only performing pale versions. I think there’s a new dynamism and a lot of energy in the way we perform those songs now.’
The show at The Lexington was more like a multi-media event, with specifically chosen support acts, projections and artwork. I assume the rest of the gigs you played were not quite as involved ?
‘That was going to be our only show, originally, so I wanted to make it a real event. I wanted it to reflect what our influences were, going back to the Warhol thing and the idea of The Factory, so I involved some performance art, some dance and the Band of Holy Joy. And I was able to involve some students from the London College of Fashion to transform the space for the evening and set-up the projections. In the end it also reflected some of the things I’d done in between times, bringing it all together. I’m not just interested in rock’n’roll, so everything fed into everything else. But obviously, we weren’t going to able to take all of that to every show, although we were able to use the projections every night. Lily Bud was also able to come along and play with us at four or five of the shows, so we did try to retain as much of the Lexington performance as was possible.’
With the positive response to the recent gigs and the Retrospective set released by Cherry Red, are you intending to continue performing as Doctors of Madness ?
‘I think so. Not as a full-time band, of course, but I think we will continue playing occasional shows when it seems appropriate. And it’s still very early days yet, but I’m looking to work with a guy called Ivan Pope. He’s been a fan for a long time and he’s also someone who understands both Art, in its’ broadest sense, and technology. He’s had this idea that a lot of the older songs could be put together with a narrative and perhaps staged as a musical. He had this whole idea concerning a refugee crisis, with Marie and Joe on opposite sides of a visa-situation and an atheist-jihadist militia called the Sons of Survival. Suicide City is the place that everyone is trying to get to and from… He convinced me that all these songs could fill a narrative point within a single production. So he’s started work on this idea as a stage play. I don’t think Doctors of Madness would actually perform as part of it, if it comes together, but perhaps we could put together some sort of ensemble that could reflect both East European and Middle Eastern music on one side, and Western music on the other, to illustrate the political and cultural divide. The songs would then be reworked to support the narrative, which would basically be a refugee love story. Ivan will write it and I’ll direct it and hopefully we’ll be able to get some really good people to play it. I think it could be a good way to rework the old songs and give them a whole new relevance in a 21st Century political setting.’
Would you consider writing new material as ‘Doctors of Madness’ ?
‘Yes, in fact, we were talking about this only last week. I would like to write new material for this band because now, knowing everyone’s strengths and skills, it could be very interesting. There’s a real chemistry between us when we play and although I’m aware that in the case of Susumu and Mackii, they’re currently reproducing music that was written forty years ago, I’m sure that if we went into a studio and created something new from scratch, we could come up with a fantastic record. The only thing is that, as I’ve done so many different things since the Doctors of Madness records, I honestly don’t know if what I would write now would be in the same mindset as the original band. I don’t know if I could do that and I don’t know if I would actually want to. So it would be difficult to know what would make it a Doctors of Madness record now, except for the name on it. It would still be my songs, but at what point do you lose the continuum ? I mean, if the elusive fourth album was to come out forty years later than the last one, is that going to be so much different to it coming out five years later ? Except that it will be imbued with a lot more experience and, I would hope, more compositional skill and lyrical nous. So it is a risk and, especially after the recent gigs, I’m a lot more aware now of our heritage and what it means to people. The temptation is to quit while we’re ahead. Everyone, from the Guardian to Jools Holland and Robert Elms seems to have reappraised the material, said we were a good band and given us these amazing reviews. So to record another album that might only get a five out of ten review and end up thinking, why didn’t we just leave it alone, is a bit unnerving. But at the same time, it is a challenge and I do think it could be very interesting. Even the actual recording could be done differently, recording some parts here and others in Japan, perhaps with one producer taking control of all the results and building it into something that would be recognized as contemporary rather than just trying to recreate a 1970’s
record. I’d have no desire to just try and make some sort of retro-throwback. I’ve always continued to write songs and some would fit more into a Doctors of Madness mold than others, so I think that if we decide to do it, I would have to put the time aside to concentrate and write, say, ten songs specifically for it. I’d really have to approach it as a challenge and with the same excitement and sense of adventure as we had the first time around. The other thing is that now, the recording process has become a lot more democratic. People can record things at home on their laptops instead of paying £200 an hour at Abbey Road and you don’t even need a record label to back you as you can crowd-fund something or self-finance it. There are a lot more ways to do things now, and I’m certainly more inclined to try and do something now than I was three months ago, before we’d played these dates. Both the warm reception we’ve received at the gigs and the warm reception that the reissued albums have had, has been very encouraging. We’ve been under a lot of scrutiny, but the music has stood up to it. There isn’t any sense of desperation in making another record because the original work has finally been acknowledged. The only attraction in doing it would be for the sheer exuberance and fun that it could be and the adventure of finding out what kind of music we would make now.’
‘Yes, in fact, we were talking about this only last week. I would like to write new material for this band because now, knowing everyone’s strengths and skills, it could be very interesting. There’s a real chemistry between us when we play and although I’m aware that in the case of Susumu and Mackii, they’re currently reproducing music that was written forty years ago, I’m sure that if we went into a studio and created something new from scratch, we could come up with a fantastic record. The only thing is that, as I’ve done so many different things since the Doctors of Madness records, I honestly don’t know if what I would write now would be in the same mindset as the original band. I don’t know if I could do that and I don’t know if I would actually want to. So it would be difficult to know what would make it a Doctors of Madness record now, except for the name on it. It would still be my songs, but at what point do you lose the continuum ? I mean, if the elusive fourth album was to come out forty years later than the last one, is that going to be so much different to it coming out five years later ? Except that it will be imbued with a lot more experience and, I would hope, more compositional skill and lyrical nous. So it is a risk and, especially after the recent gigs, I’m a lot more aware now of our heritage and what it means to people. The temptation is to quit while we’re ahead. Everyone, from the Guardian to Jools Holland and Robert Elms seems to have reappraised the material, said we were a good band and given us these amazing reviews. So to record another album that might only get a five out of ten review and end up thinking, why didn’t we just leave it alone, is a bit unnerving. But at the same time, it is a challenge and I do think it could be very interesting. Even the actual recording could be done differently, recording some parts here and others in Japan, perhaps with one producer taking control of all the results and building it into something that would be recognized as contemporary rather than just trying to recreate a 1970’s
record. I’d have no desire to just try and make some sort of retro-throwback. I’ve always continued to write songs and some would fit more into a Doctors of Madness mold than others, so I think that if we decide to do it, I would have to put the time aside to concentrate and write, say, ten songs specifically for it. I’d really have to approach it as a challenge and with the same excitement and sense of adventure as we had the first time around. The other thing is that now, the recording process has become a lot more democratic. People can record things at home on their laptops instead of paying £200 an hour at Abbey Road and you don’t even need a record label to back you as you can crowd-fund something or self-finance it. There are a lot more ways to do things now, and I’m certainly more inclined to try and do something now than I was three months ago, before we’d played these dates. Both the warm reception we’ve received at the gigs and the warm reception that the reissued albums have had, has been very encouraging. We’ve been under a lot of scrutiny, but the music has stood up to it. There isn’t any sense of desperation in making another record because the original work has finally been acknowledged. The only attraction in doing it would be for the sheer exuberance and fun that it could be and the adventure of finding out what kind of music we would make now.’
For those wishing to investigate further, the Doctors of Madness boxset ‘Perfect Past’ is available now via Cherry Red records and is an extremely thorough overview of the band’ original career. Richard has also been involved with the completion of a film made of the ‘Language is a Virus From Outer Space’ performance. It is being directed by Neville Farmer and edited by David Lewis and will hopefully become available shortly. For more news and information, you need only check the following website ;
www.richardstrange.com
www.richardstrange.com
