SLY STONE (1943-2025)

Oh Sly, you great big mixed up ball of confusion! I loved your records and only The Who could have followed your set at Woodstock, the defining moment of your chequered career. But what a mess you made of things along the way. 

        I have written about meeting Sly before but the death yesterday of this musical-genius-cum-provocateur-extraordinaire prompted me to re-read the three editions of Melody Maker in which I wrote about him and reproduce the second – an interview – pretty much verbatim for the first time. 

        The first time I saw Sly was in November 1973, a show at the Hollywood Palladium. “Will he? Won’t he?” I wrote in my review for MM’s Caught In The Act page. “Sly Stone’s reputation is too firmly etched for those questions not to be asked when he’s advertised to appear anywhere in the USA these days. His tantrums and failures to show for concerts are legendary to the extent that his contracts now contain a clause with a heavy penalty for non-appearance. Well, Sly did show at the Palladium but only just. The Palladium was sold out for the funky guy with the panama hat – but Sly made only a token appearance, leaving the stage after just over half an hour, apparently satisfied that the customers had had their seven dollars’ worth on entertainment. It was as big a rip off as I’ve witnessed since I started reporting on rock’n’roll three years ago.”

        I went on to report that while his band was stage for about an hour Sly was present for only half that time, offering his audience endless choruses of his two best-known songs, ’Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’. “When the house lights went up everyone went home surprisingly peaceably. For what there as of it the music was tight and entertaining but other aspects of this show left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” I concluded.

        Although I didn’t realise it at the time I caught Sly Stone on a relatively good day when I interviewed him in a basement apartment on New York’s West Side in June of 1974. It was his HQ in New York that week because, I was told by his publicist, he didn’t like hotels but after less than an hour in his company I figured it was more a case of hotels not liking him. Either way, bad days outnumbered good ones at this stage of his career, and would go on to do so for much of his troubled life.

As I recall in my Just Backdated memoir, Sly dressed for his Melody Maker interrogation as he would for the stage: a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones topped off with a huge afro, his eyes hidden behind outsized sunglasses. Sat next to him on a couch in this cramped, untidy apartment was his fiancée Kathy Silva whom he would soon marry on the stage at Madison Square Garden. She was decked out in a matching outfit save for the petite mini-skirt that exposed a generous amount of thigh, so much so that shortly after the interview began Sly enticed her into the adjoining bedroom for an intimate tête-à-tête, quite noisily too. In the meantime, the mortified publicist and I made small talk and twiddled our thumbs.

I’d been warned in advance that interviewing Sly Stone might be problematic but I’d come away unscathed from an awkward encounter with Lou Reed earlier that year and fancied my chances. Things got off to a bad start, however. It was scheduled for 3.30pm but when I arrived I was asked to return at 5pm because Sly was having a blood test, a legal requirement for his forthcoming marriage. I did as I was bid but there was no sign of him at 5pm, so I waited for a further hour during which his soon-to-be-released LP Small Talk was played for me. “It was only a rough mix but, again, it’s a departure from previous Sly material,” I reported. “All but the two opening songs on the first side feature a prominent violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. Despite this, there’s still the pounding bass that has distinguished Sly’s recordings from the early days.” 

The new LP offered me a topic of conversation when Sly finally arrived but before we began I gave him a recent copy of MM that contained a feature on him in our Rock Giants series. This was a mistake as he promptly left the room to read it, evidently on the toilet as his return was accompanied by the sound of plumbing. I tried to sound friendly, smiling openly as I asked my first question, about the use of violins on his new album. 

        “It’s different. It’s unusual. That’s probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them.”

Have you been wanting to do this for a long time?

“Probably. I don’t need to think about it at all to get it together.”

You seem to be forever changing.

“Time changes me, man.”

Will you be introducing strings on stage?

“I got a violin player in the group now. His name’s Sidney. He’s from Sausalito and I’ve known him just long enough for him to get into the group.”

Did you arrange the strings yourself?

“Part of them.”

There’s a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material?

“There’s a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There’s 11 songs. I don’t count which are slow.”

How big is your group at present?

“Nine people.”

It was at this point that Sly and Kathy retired to the bedroom. They were gone for about 15 minutes and returned together, Sly looking rather pleased with himself. I resumed my questioning as if nothing had happened. 

Tell me something about the bass player.

“That’s me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything.”

[Later in the year I would interview Larry Graham, the bass player in the Family Stone, who refuted this.]

Wouldn’t the group like to be on the records with you?

“Sometimes they’re on the records also, but they feel good about it [not being on the records]. They like it this way and they’re pretty honest about what they like. I‘ve recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since ‘Dance To The Music’ I guess.”

Bass is such an important part of your sound. Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage yourself? 

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s in his heart,” chipped in Kathy who by now had returned from the bedroom and re-joined Sly on the couch. He plays it so good that he’d like to play everything on stage if he could. He’s only one man but he has a million thoughts.” 

Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance’ and ‘Higher’?

“No, they like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it too. I love every period of my career.”

Where you do you write?

“My songs come from environments. I just go about my day an as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there.”

Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material? Is the image mellowing these days? 

“I’m not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I’m still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word.”

Will you actually turn up for shows?

“I won’t ever be predictable.”

But there have been reports of you not turning up.

“It’s bad promoters, man.”

Your performance in the Woodstock movie helped you enormously in England.

“Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good.”

Are there other highlights of your career that you remember?

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know about them.”

Because I was the wrong country?

“It’s not the country you’re, it’s the skin you’re in. And it’s not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

“This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion,” I wrote. “Sly’s PR showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the soda with his fiancée. ‘You know something,’ said his PR girl. ‘He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he’s said more this afternoon than he’s said all week’.”

A triumph, then.

A week later I reported on Sly’s nuptials at the Garden in my New York news column. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy on the MSG stage as they were marred. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        “Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

THE WHO ALBUM BY ALBUM by Dante DiCarlo

In the manner of Revolution In The Head, Ian McDonald’s acclaimed book analysing the music of The Beatles, Dante DiCarlo attempts something along similar lines for The Who, and while his writing style falls somewhat short of McDonald, this is a workmanlike effort at evaluating The Who’s 14 studio albums, track by track, 168 songs in all. It helps that DiCarlo is a guitarist himself, thus enabling him to analyse the songs from a musician’s standpoint, recording which keys Pete Townshend plays in, D being his preference as anyone who’s ever essayed ‘Substitute’ surely knows, and chord progressions. 

To a certain extent this book renders my own Complete Guide To The Music Of The Who (1994 & 2004, the update written with Ed Hanel) redundant, though DiCarlo omits live albums and compilations, thus disregarding those singles (like ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, ‘Substitute’ and a handful of others) that appear only on collections of hits, tracks on the Ready Steady Who EP and ‘bonus’ tracks that have appeared on certain compilations and reissues. Most, however, get a mention in the text that prefaces each LP, especially those that somehow align with Townshend’s various musical concepts. My Who music guide was one in a series of 46 books designed in the shape of CD cases and, through necessity, was considerably more concise than Album By Album, even it did include live LPs and compilations, of which there are now too many to count. Album By Album contains far more detail, not just in the scrutiny of the actual songs but in the background essays that introduce each LP. 

So, beginning with ‘Out In The Street’ from My Generation (1965) and ending about 200 pages later with ‘She Rocked My World’ from WHO (2019) we get the low down on The Who’s recorded oeuvre, most of it positive though DiCarlo doesn’t shy away from critical assessments, mostly, as might be expected, on tracks from the post-Moon LPs. Those songs that might be regarded as landmarks in the group’s career – ‘My Generation’, ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, for example – get the five-star treatment, with up to three pages of worthwhile analysis.  

        DiCarlo was born in 1983 and thus missed out on The Who’s classic period and with this in mind he’s written a book aimed at newer fans of The Who, by which I mean those who’ve picked up on the group after Keith left us in 1978 and possibly also John Entwistle in 2002. For such Who fans this is a valuable guide to their legacy and to the way their long career has panned out. Older fans won’t find much here that they don’t already know if they’ve paid attention along the way and read all the books but DiCarlo has done his research well and produced an accurate, interesting summary of the group’s output. 

Of course, 168 songs (plus maybe a dozen or so that don’t make the book) in what is now a 60-year career is by no means prolific. The Beatles recorded 213 songs, 188 of which they wrote themselves, in eight years, a work-rate that exposes The Who as shiftless slackers. But that doesn’t consider The Who’s brilliance as a live act, which is what really attracted me to them towards the end of the 1960s, turned me into a rabid fan during the 1970s and has kept me banging on about them for years. This, for me, is where their true greatness lies. Perhaps, therefore, a follow-up book might consider their live legacy, contrasting and comparing all their many concert releases, even though the songs they perform haven’t changed that much over the last 40 years. 

Album By Album contains 16 pages of colour photos, many taken by the author, the vast majority from the new millennium. It’s 220 pages long with a useful index and costs £25 (£19.85 on Amazon). 

RICK DERRINGER (1947-2025)

Rick Derringer was everywhere in New York when I lived in the city in the 1970s, backstage at gigs, record launch parties thrown by labels, hanging out in the rock’n’roll clubs all over Manhattan. He and his first wife Liz were social animals and good hosts too, throwing parties at their downtown apartment where, one night, Rick showed me a guitar he’d had made that was constructed from granite. It was too heavy to wear on stage, he explained, but the tone was unique. 

        Rick was the main man in The McCoys who had a massive hit in 1965 with a song called ‘Hang On Sloopy’, also covered as ‘My Girl Sloopy’ by Jeff Beck’s Yardbirds, superior bubble-gum I guess you’d call it, but Rick went on to far greater things in the seventies and beyond, both as a session guitarist and record producer. His death last week saddened me, and prompted me to look up a very long interview I did with him for the March 16, 1975 issue of Melody Maker.  

        What follows is the first half of that interview, dealing with the rise and fall of The McCoys. 

The gold disc rests on the mantlepiece, taking pride of place as it justly deserves. There are two more on either side of it, but the gold record is the one that sticks out a mile, the one that’ll be remembered as the classic of its time and the one on which the laminated gold will never fade with age.

It bears the simple inscription: “Presented to Ricky Zehringer. The McCoys. Hang On Sloopy. Number 1 in the Nation.”

Oh, what a record that was! The ultimate pop commercial single out of America in the mid-sixties; the record that every discotheque danced to in 1965, the record that was played at every party and on every transistor radio.

It was so simple but so effective. Three chords repeated over and over again, same as ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Twist And Shout’ but slower and mellower, with vocal harmonies layered on top to produce that good-time feeling that pop was all about nine years ago today.

It’s changed now, of course, Ricky Zehringer is Rick Derringer. The McCoys are all involved with Warner Brothers. The music is hot, heavy, fast and complex. Derringer is now an ace record producer; lessons have been learned, experiences shared and good time spent. Everyone’s a little wiser and a lot richer, Derringer especially.

The first thing you notice about him is how small he is. Rick Derringer is tiny and this, coupled with what could be described as a baby face, gives him the air of a worldly teenager. Actually he’s 25, but he could pass off as 17 or 18 without difficulty. Only the rings below his eyes betray his real age. 

Rick began his musical life with The McCoys and they began as a high school band in Union City, Indiana. “The McCoys started when I was 14 or 15 years old, way before ‘Sloopy’,” he recalls, almost as if it was yesterday. “That was when I was in school. I’d just graduated when the record came out but we’d been together almost four years by then.

“We were playing all the top 40 songs. We just got together to make friends and play the local dances and have the kids come up to us and tell us we were cool. We’d be making a little money so I’d have something extra to spend on clothes but usually I’d save up for a better guitar. At the same time I never really went into it with the attitude that someday I would make records and be in the music business. We were just an ordinary little high school band.”

In 1965 The McCoys made THAT record – almost by accident. 

“One night we were playing with The Strangeloves in Dayton, Ohio. It turned out they were the act on a record called ‘I Want Candy’ and they’d told everyone they were from Australia and were sheep herders. In reality they were three record producers from Brooklyn, and they asked us whether we’d like to go to New York and make a record called ‘Hang On Sloopy’. We said ‘great’. We’d heard the record about a year before by The Vibrations when it was a number one R&B record in the States.”

The next day Rick’s parents packed the band into their car and drove to New York City. “We drove up on Sunday and went into the studio on Monday. We did the music part first and then the producers gave us a disc of the vocal and a portable record player and told us to go out and come back when we’d learned it. We practised it note for note and then went back and did it. The producers jumped up and down in the studio, saying ‘number one, number one’. A few weeks later we heard it on the radio. Two weeks after that it really was number one.”

The McCoys then began an endless series of tours in the United States. “The band hadn’t changed at all,” says Rick. “No one had ever explained anything to us so we just carried on doing exactly what we’d been doing before, which was top 40 material. And we’d throw in ‘Hang On Sloopy’ as the last song.

“In those days having a number one record meant you were like The Beatles, so all the kids would scream and flip out and try to pull our clothes off. It didn’t matter what kind of music you played because no one could hear it anyway.”

The McCoys had two other big singles after ‘Hang On Sloopy’. ‘Fever’ got to number three and ‘Come On Let’s Go’ reached the twenty. They made a total of nine singles but most of them never made the upper reaches of the charts.

“When that first one was number one, it made us think that everything was going to be easy because it was. We just did what we were told, they yelled ‘number one’ and it was number one. The second record was number three and the third was number 40 and that scared us so we made a better one and that reached the twenties. Then the fifth was in the fifties and the sixth was in the sixties and we got worried.”

The group also made two albums, the first of which had a classic introduction during which the band introduced themselves into the music. The second was very similar and the introduction was taken from their stage act when it was the done thing for the guys in the band to introduce themselves on stage. 

After a couple of years, The McCoys realised that their albums didn’t actually contain the music they were playing on stage. They switched to Mercury Records where they made two more albums, this time containing the wide variety of music that they used in their act. They didn’t sell well but Derringer says they are soon to be re-released as a double package. 

“When we went to Mercury we were in high spirits because we were being allowed to do the music we wanted to do, but because we didn’t have anyone to guide us we became entrenched in the whole psychedelic period in what we thought was supposed to be hip. The records weren’t selling and we were naïve enough to believe that if we made what we thought was good music, people would go for it.”

It was Steve Paul who came to the McCoys’ rescue. Paul was managing the Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar, and he offered his help to The McCoys. “We met him through playing at his club in New York and we told him that anything he could do would be appreciated. What he did was to give us the chance to stop working in these weird places and go and live in the country and straighten ourselves out. Then we met Johnny and started playing behind him and that’s when The McCoys ended.”

Later, of course, Derringer would join Edgar Winter’s band and go on to play on, or produce, records by countless other artists, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Bonnie Tyler, Barbra Streisand and Cyndi Lauper. 

MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE: My Encounters with Rock Royalty by Kate Mossman

Kate Mossman specialises in profile journalism of the highest order, her preferred subject rock stars well past their prime, two or even three decades older than herself. Carefully observing their tics and gestures, and if possible their environment, she brings them to life on the page, making them interesting even if they are not. What makes her work even more impressive, not to mention unusual, is that most of the musicians she writes about in this compendium are far from fashionable or cool in the accepted sense; indeed, some were positively vilified by the music press during the period of their peak popularity and they still bear the scars. 

Men Of A Certain Age contains 20 profiles that have previously appeared in either The Word or The New Statesmen. They are an eclectic bunch, ranging from country icon Glen Campbell, whom Kate idolises, to her childhood crush, Roger Taylor of Queen, passé rockers like Kiss and former Journey singer Steve Perry, punks like Shaun Ryder and Johnny Rotten and oddballs like psychedelic recluse Kevin Ayers, whom she skewers, albeit not in an unkind way, even though he proposed they sleep together. For whatever reason, often musical, she has some spiritual connection with the men – they are all men – in her book and in an era when fake news is everywhere, Mossman is its antithesis. She delves into the truth, crafting beautiful descriptive sentences about what she sees and what her subjects tell her, often in off-the-cuff remarks that reveal far more about them than they realise.

My attention was drawn to this book by The Blue Moment, my former Melody Maker colleague Richard Williams’ music blog. However, in this instance Richard had prudently invited his friend Caroline Boucher, a former writer on Disc & Music Echo, to review it simply because she was a female journalist who could contrast and compare her experiences with those of Mossman, which she did admirably. More specifically, Caroline pointed out that Mossman described Gene Simmons’ hair as resembling ’loft insulation’ which made me laugh out loud and – having encountered Simmons myself – was very true. This sharp-edged observation prompted me to buy the book. 

Caroline also made the point that when she was a music writer, a period that coincided roughly with the years I spent writing for MM, we tended to give whomsoever we were interviewing the benefit of the doubt. We were generally kind to them. Also, we didn’t tend to dwell too much on extraneous matters like how an interview was set up, how we travelled to where it took place or the furnishings in the room where it occurred. We rarely even mentioned what, if anything, the interviewee ate, drank or smoked during our allotted time with them. Mossman, however, excels in this aspect of her character sketches, drawing the reader into the experience of the interview as much as the dialogue between them which, in her case, often veers off into territories where a watchful PR might feel the need to steer it back towards whatever the interviewee was supposed to be promoting, like a new record or forthcoming tour. This, of course, makes Mossman’s work that much more readable or interesting. “There is no more boring question than, ‘Tell us about your latest album’,” she writes in one of her profiles. 

In new text that top and tail her interviews, Mossman writes about herself and occasionally lets us in on her technique. “The older man and younger woman dynamic is particularly fruitful,” she writes in a foreword to her interview with Tom Jones. “The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe: It’s just a pretty lady!... I have felt – and seen – the palpable relief on the face of a rocker when I show up, rather than a male writer their age: a brightening of the eyes, and a fractional loosening of the shoulders.”

The Tom Jones interview was done via Zoom which Mossman dislikes because, “you cannot ‘feel’ the body, so to speak, the tics and the tensions. It is harder to detect shame and embarrassment, awkwardness and irritation… the invisible force field between two people, containing all your unconscious projections onto one another.”

As a result of her penetrating gaze, I learned a great deal more about the characters of the subjects than I knew before, which is not always the case with interviews that appear in today’s mainstream music magazines. Who knew that Bruce Hornsby owns paintings by Edward Hopper, of whom he is a huge fan, as am I? Or that a group with a seemingly unlimited complement of musicians called Trans-Siberian Orchestra, founded by the now deceased Paul O’Neill, make millions performing prog-rock style Christmas music? Or that Neal Schon’s philosophy for Journey is that it doesn’t matter who’s in the group so long as the musicians on stage can reproduce their music competently and entertain their fans. Or that it took Ray Davies five attempts to pass his driving text? Or that Tom Jones lives alone in a flat near the Houses of Parliament. Or that Shaun Ryder and Bez, both broke, used reality TV to pay their tax bills. I did, however, know that Jeff Beck was the world’s greatest guitarist, an opinion to which Mossman concurs.

The book’s final interview is with Cary Raditz, the ‘Carey’* whom Joni Mitchell sang about on Blue, that mean old daddy who romanced her in the Cretan fishing village of Matala where they lived together in a cave, albeit fairly briefly. After reading it I learned more about Joni than anything I gleaned from the two biographies of her on my shelves. 

Men Of A Certain Age has 340 pages, b&w illustrations throughout and costs £16.74 on Amazon. 

_____

* Joni misspelt his name in the song's title. 

MICHAEL TRETOW

There are too many fifth Beatles to count – Brian Epstein, George Martin, Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and at least a couple of their wives – but there was only ever one fifth member of Abba, recording engineer Michael Tretow who death at the age of 80 was reported today.

        “You meant more to us four in ABBA than anyone else,” says Benny Andersson. “Our music lives on, it seems, and you are the one who made it timeless.”

        “His significance to Abba cannot be overstated,” added Björn Ulvaeus, and the two Abba singers, Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, are of the same mind.  

        So, too, is my friend Magnus Palm, the group’s premier archivist and historian and author of several Abba books, among them the definitive Abba biography Bright Lights Dark Shadows, commissioned by me in 2000 and still in print having been revised and updated many times. “Michael Tretow was an endless source of ideas on how to make their recordings more exciting,” Magnus tells me. “He was Benny and Björn’s unofficial co-producer. Just as importantly, he was an empathetic human being who knew how to lighten the mood when spirits sank during the group’s interminable backing track sessions, or when Agnetha and Frida got stuck during the recording of a vocal overdub.”

        It was Magnus’s epic biography that drew my attention to Michael’s contribution to Abba, specifically how keen he was to explore new studio techniques in an era when Sweden’s studios lacked the hi-tech capabilities of those in the UK and US. Like the group, he was ambitious, never one to stand still or abide by outdated procedures that had governed the way records were made for years. And like them, he wanted their records to appeal to an international audience.

        Ever on the hunt for anything that might help his endeavours, Michael found what he wanted in a bookshop. “He found the book he’d been dreaming about,” wrote Magnus in Bright Lights Dark Shadows. “Just published, Out Of His Head: The Sound Of Phil Spector was written by Richard Williams, the assistant editor of the British music paper Melody Maker who’d been present at the recording of John Lennon’s Spector-produced ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ and seen the legend at work. Michael headed straight for the cashier with this find, eager to secure his copy before anyone else snapped it up.

        “Björn, Benny and Michael were… big fans of the records made by Phil Spector in the early Sixties [but] what Michael wanted to know was how Spector achieved that enormous sound. Although he wasn’t entirely sure, he thought he had a hunch – and now Out Of His Head revealed all the secrets. ‘Then He Kissed Me’ by The Crystals had used ‘a whole gang of guitars’, the book established. On the following page, a section about The Ronettes’ classic ‘Be My Baby’ went into even greater detail. ‘The orchestra, outrageously gigantic, had pianos and basses arrayed in ranks in the studios,’ wrote Williams, ‘and everyone joining in to play the percussion which Spector had arranged with almost militaristic precision.

        “Michael nodded to himself. ‘That explained why it sounded like five guitars,’ he recalled, ‘it was because Spector really did use five guitars.’ But having several guitarists, pianists, bassists and so on in the studio at the same time would have been far too expensive for comparatively low-key Swedish productions. If a similar effect was to be achieved, they would have to do several overdubs of each of the instruments. Michael knew he simply had to try it sometime.

        “Similarly, Björn and Benny were thrilled to be working with an enthusiastic engineer. ‘Right from the first time I met Michael in the studio, I felt that here was a guy who thought this was just as exciting as we did,’ recalled Benny. It didn’t hurt that the engineer wasn’t just a technical boffin, but understood and shared their dream of achieving success outside Scandinavia.”

        The first Abba recording that Michael engineered was ‘People Need Love’, followed by ‘Ring Ring’, initially intended as the group’s entry for the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest but which failed to win sufficient votes. Nevertheless, by Swedish standards it was a breakthrough recording in terms of studio technique, the first song that Abba recorded that didn’t sound clumsy against UK and US recordings. A year later, of course, Abba won Eurovision with ‘Waterloo’, another Tretow engineering job and one clearly influenced by Spector. 

        In 2008 I was asked to write an introduction to a matching folio for Gold, Abba's multimillion-selling hits album. “It was Michael Tretow who discovered Abba’s ‘third’ voice,” I wrote. “This was the sound of Frida and Agnetha singing together, layer upon layer of overdubbed backing vocals creating the rich, all-enveloping choral landscape that became one of Abba’s most distinctive trademarks. Coupled with exemplary musicianship from Björn and Benny and the best Swedish session players available, the result was pop perfection.” 

        Michael worked closely with Abba throughout their entire career, eight studio albums, two live sets and the 4-CD retrospective Thank You For The Music, his final recording ‘The Day Before You Came’, the atmospheric track with a nod towards minimalism and electronica that became Abba’s glorious swan song in 1982. 

        As Magnus’ book makes clear, in the late 1970s, Björn and Benny rewarded Michael generously. From the Voulez-Vous album onwards Tretow received a 0.5 per cent royalty on all Abba recordings as a reward for his loyalty and contributions over the years. “It was kind of unprecedented,” says Michael with some understatement. “And it wasn’t because I asked for it, they were the ones who said, ‘You should have that’. I’ve never heard of anything like it.” This gesture meant that when the three per cent royalty rate allotted to the stars – the Abba members – was split four ways, it amounted to only 0.75 per cent, marginally more than the 0.5 per cent allotted to their recording engineer.

Michael suffered a stroke in 2001, and although he recovered well, he retired from the music business and as a result Abba’s 2021 album Voyage is the only one in their catalogue not to feature a Tretow credit. 

        The last word must go to Abba’s formidable vocal duo: 

        Anni-Frid: “You were the security in our little studio bubble with your never-ending creativity, warmth and joy and no one fit the bill as well as you! For us, you are forever part of the ABBA sound and you will never be forgotten!” 

        Agnetha: “So many memories are preserved, your encouraging words during the recordings meant so much. We are sad now, a talented and unique person has left us. Sleep well Micke, you are in our hearts forever.”

BOWIE ODYSSEY 75 by Simon Goddard

It is January 1975, cold outside, and 61-year-old Mrs Margaret Jones, Peggy to her friends, is shopping in Sainsburys in Beckenham, not displeased to be recognised by fans of her son David but still wishing he’d get in touch more often. The £3,000 mink coat he bought her for Christmas hangs unworn in her wardrobe, and stays that way, even when Angie, her daughter-in-law, accompanies her to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. She cries when she plays his records. 

        David, meanwhile, is in New York, recording at Electric Ladyland studios with no lesser accompanist than Dr Winston O’Boogie, who having lately duelled with Allen Klein is offering advice on two issues: how David can disentangle himself from manager Tony Defries and how to inject the correct thump into ‘Fame’, the single that will place him at the top of the US Billboard charts later in the year. 

Thus begins Bowie Odyssey ’75, the sixth instalment in Simon Goddard’s series of 10 fly-on-the-wall books, each one dedicated to a single year in the decade that announced Bowie to the world. It’s all here: Young Americans, playing Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, the fall out with Deep Freeze (as we used to call him), the toxic, narcotic-fuelled stay in Los Angeles, Iggy in and out of his life, the Bay City Rollers, Patti Smith and nascent Sex Pistols, and hints of the recording of Station To Station, his masterpiece; all played out against a backdrop that sees the emergence of Thatcher, the Cambridge Rapist and serial killer Patrick Mackay, a trio of villains, the first of whom bears an uncanny similarity to the Thin White Duke, as demonstrated in photos of both, cunningly printed opposite one another on pages 4 and 5 of the photo section. I found that slightly disturbing, which I guess is how Simon Goddard intended me to find it 

As I pointed out in a review of Bowie Odyssey ’73 elsewhere on this blog, Goddard’s books in this unique series are not biographies in the accepted sense but attempts to get inside Bowie’s head while at the same time place him squarely amidst all that was going on at the same time elsewhere, much of it unpleasant. The language is sharp, forthright, uncontaminated by anything that might ease a troubled mind, so much so that at the start of each book there is a warning that its contents might offend those of tender sensibilities, noting that they depict “prevailing attitudes of the time” and are included “for reasons of historical context in order to accurately describe the period concerned”. 

Well, they ain’t kidding. Like the others in the series I’ve read so far – all of them actually, Odysseys 70, 71, 72, 73 and 74 – Bowie Odyssey ’75 spares no blushes, whether it be Bowie’s bonkers behaviour, not least his fixation with Nazi Germany, obscure religious texts and keeping bottles of his wee in the fridge, his nomadic lifestyle and fury at Defries (the legal battle is wonderfully depicted as a boxing commentary), all you know about and quite a lot you probably didn’t, right down to the modus operandi of Peter Samuel Cook, aka the Cambridge Rapist. 

After a terrorising ride through the canyons of Los Angeles, skidding through mountains of cocaine, the book closes with a furious row between Angie, queen no more, and Corinne, aka ‘Coco’, David’s trusty girl Friday, who – as Goddard so decorously puts it, does everything but ascend to the top job, “the warmer his bedsheets”. 

        It doesn’t take long to read these books but that’s not the point. They simply home in on their targets with uncanny accuracy even if you do come away thinking it really wasn’t much fun being David Bowie during the 1970s. Recommended. 

LOVE AND FURY: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, DEATH AND LEGACY OF JOE MEEK by Darryl W Bullock

Among the more oddball singles I played endlessly on that juke box in the coffee bar in Skipton when I was 12 was ‘What Do Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ by Emile Ford & The Checkmates. At the time I didn’t know that it was an old song, originally recorded in 1917, only that it caught my ear because of the way it sounded. A number one UK hit in October 1959, it was a perfect little doo-wop pop song with a hint of Caribbean happiness about it, a record that simply sounded great, two minutes of what the best pop should sound like. The singer was from St Lucia and his voice, drenched in echo, rang out ever so clearly, enhanced by a single sharp drum crack that launched a chorus by a choir of backing vocalists doo-wopping away. There was even an upward key change after the first verse to add to its charms.

I long ago lost that 45rpm disc on the Pye Nixa label and had completely forgotten about it until I read Love and Fury: The Extraordinary Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek. Well, I should have guessed. Emile Ford’s chart topper was co-produced by Joe Meek, and that’s why it sounded so good on the juke in the coffee car on Mill Bridge. In the UK in 1959 only Joe Meek made records like this. 

        Long referred to as the UK’s Phil Spector, after reading this book I’m more inclined to consider Spector as America’s Joe Meek. Both were innovators and there’s a macabre coincidence in that both fatally shot women who’d evidently displeased them, Meek shooting himself immediately afterwards and Spector spending the rest of his life in jail. 

        Spector’s first hit, ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, by his group The Teddy Bears, was in 1958, but to all intents and purposes he and Meek were contemporaries treading the same path. The big difference was in the studio equipment they utilised. In America Spector had the benefit of everything modern technology made available; Meek, on the hand, was a DIY man, cobbling together bits and pieces of equipment he begged, borrowed or stole and wiring them all together in his home, three floors above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road in North London that served as his studio, his control room and bolt-hole. These days there’s a plaque above the door, dedicated to ‘The Telstar Man’, and another one at his birthplace at Newent in Gloucestershire. 

        ‘Telstar’ was Meek’s biggest hit, a UK number one in 1962 and, perhaps more importantly, a US number one as well, only the second UK record to reach top the charts in America after Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ earlier the same year. It’s a futuristic instrumental credited to The Tornados, which featured on bass Heinz Burt, the apple of Meek’s eye, on guitar George Bellamy (whose son Matt is the leader of Muse), on drums the venerable Clem Cattini and on keyboards, deputising for Roger Lavern, Meek’s writing partner Geoff Goddard who plays ‘Telstar’’s uplifting, anthemic melody on a clavioline. It opens with a rumble intended to sound like a spaceship taking off that simply explodes out of your speakers, especially on the 7” vinyl single, a remarkable bit of noise previously unheard on phonographic apparatus in the UK up to that time, but this was nothing compared to the sheer exhilaration of the upward key change and a guitar solo that sounds for all the world as if it was recorded on the bottom of a fish tank. 

        Joe Meek led a complicated life that Darryl Bullock carefully outlines in his richly detailed book. He was gay in an era when homosexuality was a crime, eagerly prosecuted by police with nothing better to do, and suffered as a result. He had a short temper and was constantly worried about money, and he almost certainly suffered from mental illness exacerbated by drugs. He believed in the afterlife and through seances tried to contact the dead. He may or may not have displeased the Kray Twins, who fancied muscling in on the record business, and through his erratic behaviour made enemies of powerful people in the record industry, among them Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI, and Robert Stigwood, then a struggling impresario, both of whom were also gay. 

        Meek was also a workaholic, recording countless singers and groups, many of them no hopers really, in his makeshift studio at all hours of the day and night. Many names soon to be famous, among them Tom Jones, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page, climbed the stairs at 304 Holloway Road, though the rumour that David Bowie recorded there with The Konrads is probably a myth.  

        Alongside ‘Telstar’ were other hits Meek either produced or engineered, the most notable ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton, an eerie masterpiece, and the Honeycombs ‘Have I The Right’ which reached number one in 1964. But this was the tip of the iceberg. “During his career as an independent producer, Meek placed 40 singles in the UK Top 50 charts,” notes Bullock. After his death 1,856 reels of tape from Meek’s studio would eventually find a home at Cherry Red Records.

        Meek was the UK’s first independent record producer at a time when most, like George Martin, were salaried staffmen at record labels, and this alone makes him important, so much so that in 1989 I assisted John Repsch in writing and producing The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man, the first ever biography of Meek. Oddly, Darryl Bullock fails to mention this in the extensive bibliography which, at the back of his 382-page book, is followed by copious research notes and a good index. There are also two 8-page photo sections in what must now be regarded as the definitive work on this most fascinating music man. 

ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES, 2025

Further shine has been taken off this year’s return of Oasis, already blighted by the ticketing chaos that saw fans paying exorbitant prices to see them perform from a great distance away at football grounds this summer. This is the news that, yet again, their name does not appear in the list of those to be inducted into US Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I look forward to hearing the reaction to this blow to their esteem from the Gallagher Brothers, Liam especially, who will doubtless respond with an expletive-strewn condemnation of an institution that, admittedly, does seem to be outstaying its welcome. 

I can hear it now: “Wha’ a fuckin’ useless bunch of fuckin’ cunts running this fuckin’ shit show. I ’ope it fuckin’ burns to the fuckin’ ground with them in it.”

Or words to that effect. 

Nevertheless, my poor record in selecting inductees appears to have taken a turn for the better with the list of 2025 inductees, announced yesterday. Earlier in the year, invited to pick seven from the following – Bad Company, Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Maná, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden and White Stripes – I chose Bad Co (largely on the basis that Free was a truly great little band, better than Bad Co in my humble opinion, and the two surviving member of Free will get inducted), Chubby Checker (because those Twist singles really were great), Cyndi Lauper (on orders from a mate), Joe Cocker (a Yorkshireman whose heart was always in the right place), Joy Division/New Order (because I wanted to see how Peter Hook would interact his former bandmates, whom he appears to loathe), Oasis (ditto re Noel and Liam, this nomination occurring before they buried the hatchet and announced their 2025 shows, of course) and White Stripes (because I liked them).

Inducted from among that list are Bad Co, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, Outkast, Soundgarden and White Stripes, so I picked five out of seven, which I think is a personal best. 

        Also inducted are Philadelphia soul producer Thom Bell, keyboard session wizard Nicky Hopkins, session bassist and Wrecking Crew member Carol Kaye, rappers Salt’n’Pepa, label exec Lenny Waronker and singer/songwriter Warren Zevon. This last six didn’t appear on the nomination form, and are elected by those who run the HoF. Salt’n’Pepa and Warren Zevon are in as ‘musical influences’, which I think is a new category, perhaps created by the board for those whom they believe deserve to be in but, stubbornly, don’t get the votes, while Bell, Hopkins and Kaye get in under ‘musical excellence’, and Waronker, a former president of Warner Bros Records, gets the Ahmet Ertegun award for influential record label A&R executives.

        I’m mighty pleased to see Nicky Hopkins on that list. I interviewed Nicky for the December 11, 1971, issue of MM, my piece appearing under the heading ‘The sixth Stone who almost became the fifth Who’, a reference to his prodigious session work with all the top names of the sixties. He even appeared on a Beatle track too, ‘Revolution’, the fast version that was a single, for which, on 11 July 1968, he was paid £6.50, according to Beatles mastermind Mark Lewisohn. 

Nicky Hopkins who, alas, died in 1994. 

        None of which takes away from my firm belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is an anachronism. Conceived in an era when there was little, if any, recognition for the great names in rock, it has now – with a few notable exceptions – recognised all the greats and is perpetuated, for purely commercial reasons, by inducting too many not-so-greats. I would have thought that the notable exceptions, among them Slade, Richard Thompson and Gram Parsons, would, because of their age, probably never get in now but seeing Hopkins on this list gives me a scintilla of hope. 

        Every year I think to myself that I’ll chuck in the towel when the nomination form arrives through my letterbox. Then I think, one more year. I’ll think about it again in 2026 if I’m still around. 

PRISCILLA

Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola and shown on network TV this weekend, was a strangely creepy movie that ramped up the general consensus that for all the great records he made during the 1950s, Elvis Presley had some weird ideas about courtship that, perhaps unintentionally, chime with how I imagine our current king might have behaved towards his first wife. Alone in Graceland, teenage Priscilla Beaulieu wanders its lushly carpeted rooms in a manner I imagine Diana Spencer doing in the corridors of Buckingham Palace, whence she was closeted for her own safety in the period between her engagement to Charles and the wedding ceremony in Paul’s Cathedral. Both of these virgin girls were seemingly lost, though perhaps trapped is a better way to describe the predicament in which they found themselves.

Priscilla is based on the book Elvis And Me, written with ghost-writer Sandra Harmon by Priscilla Presley, who is its executive producer, and first published in 1985. I read it while I was researching my Caught In A Trap book, my fictional tale of how Elvis was kidnapped in 1975, its title inadvertently reflective of Priscilla’s dilemma once her parents agreed that she come to live at Graceland, ostensibly chaperoned by Elvis’ witless father Vernon and his second wife. The film, originally released in 2023, follows the book fairly accurately, dwelling on the couple’s private life and how Priscilla shakes off her initial naivety to eventually confront Elvis about his macho attitude and the unrealistic demands he placed upon her. She’s portrayed as a heroine which, as matters eventually played out, is quite fitting. 

Unlike Elvis, the 1922 movie starring Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as his manipulative manager Colonel Tom Parker – who, tellingly, is absent from Priscilla – this film makes no attempt to hide Priscilla’s age – 14 – when she first met the singer, fatefully, at a party at the house in which he lived in Bad Neuheim in West Germany during his stint with the US Army. Thereafter she’s sucked into his orbit, increasingly moulded by him into the kind of Barbie-doll like woman he requires her to be; clothes, hair, make-up, subservience, keep smiling, the lot. Slightly alarmed, she goes along with this at first, her compliance gradually giving way to incomprehension and, eventually, dissent. 

As far as the bedroom department is concerned, Elvis desires his woman to remain a virgin until they are married, this despite her efforts to persuade him otherwise. He’s not above taking a few saucy Polaroids of her, though. Meanwhile, of course, it is suggested that in Los Angeles Elvis has his merry way with women who co-star in his films, amongst them Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret, while Priscilla remains at Graceland, her only companion a fluffy white poodle while she ponders over lurid stories about Elvis and them in movie magazines. When they eventually marry, Priscilla quickly falls pregnant, giving birth to Lisa Marie, and conjugal relations cease, again to Priscilla’s vexation. Along the way we see Elvis briefly engage with the counterculture, which is not to his liking; play with, and encourage Priscilla to use, guns; insult The Beatles; lose his temper and throw tantrums; share an acid trip with Priscilla; and generally behave like a spoilt brat towards everyone, apart from Col Parker to whom he bends the knee, albeit on the telephone. 

Not surprisingly Priscilla gets fed up and leaves, by which time she’s taken up karate, though her subsequent affair with martial arts teacher Mike Stone is not mentioned. Nevertheless, by the close she’s defied Elvis by allowing her hair to return from dyed jet black to its natural auburn, and flow down over her shoulders, and wear tight pants instead of dresses. Driving out of the Graceland gates or the final time, sound-tracked by Dolly Parton singing ‘I Will Always Love You’, she deserves a cheer, female empowerment the message. 

Cailee Spaeny is good as Priscilla, rarely off screen, Jacob Elordi too as Elvis, his accent just right. But overall, I felt the film was strangely unsatisfying, just like the marriage had been. 

DEEP PURPLE RECORD COLLECTOR SPECIAL

In his infinite wisdom, Joel McIver saw fit to interview me about my book on the band for Record Collector’s Deep Purple Special that he edited and which is on sale this week. 

        Joel and I go back to 2000 when he persuaded me that Omnibus ought to publish a book on Extreme Metal, written by him. Not being a particular fan of this genre, I was skeptical at first but decided to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did. Joel went on to become my go-to author for books on the noisier, more confrontational, end of rock, 36 at the last count, and he now contributes obituaries to the Guardian whenever a metal musician bites the dust. 

        Joel’s best-known book is Justice For All: The Truth About Metallica, first published in 2004, which has been translated into nine languages. “Very professional,” said drummer Lars Ulrich. “I get asked to sign copies of this book all over the world.” What’s more, Joel has it on good authority that Lou Reed bought a copy of the book to read before embarking on his collaboration with Metallica that resulted in the 2011 album Lulu.  

        This is a transcript of my interview with Joel for the DP special, which can be bought at:  https://recordcollectormag.com/rc-specials/record-collector-presents-deep-purple. 

How did you first encounter the members of Deep Purple, Chris? 

The first time I saw Deep Purple was at Bedford City’s football ground in the summer of 1970. Until that point, I was unfamiliar from them, apart from the song ‘Hush’, which I’d heard just like everybody had. I met them backstage, and I saw the show, and I thought they were really good. 

Which of them impressed you most? 

Ritchie Blackmore was particularly impressive. I played a bit of guitar myself so I could recognise a good player. It was obvious to me, watching him, that he’d had some formal training. I thought ‘God, what a terrific guitarist – he ought to be in the same league as Clapton, Beck and Page’. Every note he played was perfect. Not long after that I did an interview with Ritchie, and he told me that he’d had lessons from Big Jim Sullivan, the famous 60s session guy who played on everybody’s hit records. It was obvious that Jon Lord had been classically trained as well. 

What happened next? 

I got to know them after that, and I saw them seven or eight times over the next two or three years. I went to Paris with them and on a tour in America, where I learned that Ritchie was a bit of a mischievous character. He played tricks and liked to spook people out with horror stories. I thought he was a really interesting fellow, but he had a chip on his shoulder because he wasn’t regarded in the same league as the Claptons and Becks and Pages. Somehow, he wasn’t quite up there, but he deserved to be. We had dinner one night – him and a girlfriend, and me and my girlfriend – and he told me that the only two guitarists he thought were better than him were Jimi Hendrix and Albert Lee. He knew he was as good as Page and the others, and much better than Pete Townshend, although he didn’t have the rhythmic flair that Townshend had.

Why wasn’t he regarded as up there with the greats? 

It may have had something to do with tastes and fashions. For all their skills, Deep Purple were never particularly fashionable. I recently discussed this aspect of them with Roger Glover, and he said, ‘I know we weren’t fashionable – that’s why we’re still going. If you’re fashionable, you’re in fashion, and then you’re out of fashion’. 

Did you know Purple’s managers? 

I got to know John Coletta quite well. Tony Edwards was the money man, and a stay-at-home guy who did the admin, whereas John went on the road. He was a friendly enough guy, but I always felt he was a bit out of his depth, especially dealing with Blackmore. 

Was Purple basically an investment project by Edwards and Coletta? 

To a certain extent, but it wasn’t until I wrote my book about them that I discovered the truth about how they were financed in the beginning. They needed £15,000 to get off the ground [the equivalent of around £270k today], and Tony Edwards had £5,000 to put in because he had a family clothing business. Coletta didn’t have £5,000, but he had a friend who lived near him in Brighton who was an antique dealer, and he had £10,000 to put in. Unfortunately, it turned out that this antique dealer had a lock-up full of stolen goods, and he was eventually arrested and went to prison. Fortunately, Deep Purple had made some money thanks to ‘Hush’ being a hit in America. They kept this story quiet, as you would imagine, and I didn’t find out about it until I did my book in the 80s. 

How did the first edition of your book come about? 

I got in touch with Coletta, who managed Whitesnake at that time, and I said to him, ‘Would you co-operate with me on a book on Deep Purple?’ We agreed that Purple would receive a royalty on its sales and through Coletta, I managed to interview most of the members of the previous line-ups. The exceptions were Tommy Bolin, who had died; Rod Evans, because no-one knew where he was; and Blackmore, who completely blanked me, which surprised me. Coverdale said he’d do the interview, but then I got a phone call from some very unpleasant tour manager or PA, demanding conditions that I refused to accept. 

Were the others happy to be involved? 

They were. I interviewed Ian Paice at his home, and Gillan in a hotel in London, and Roger Glover and Glenn Hughes – both of whom lived in America at the time – kindly answered my questions into a tape recorder. I couldn’t find Nick Simper, but Simon Robinson at the Deep Purple Appreciation Society had done a long interview with Nick that he let me use in the book. 

And Jon Lord? 

Jon was an unbelievably nice guy – very accommodating, friendly and affable. I spent a night at his house near Henley, and we went out for dinner with his wife Vickie and Ian Paice and his wife Jacky who was the identical twin of Jon’s wife. After that, I did the interview, way into the night: we stayed up until two or three in the morning, drinking whiskey and talking. I really got him to open up about everything, and it was just great, because he didn’t hold back at all. 

That must have been refreshing. 

Well, at that point, no-one knew that there would be a future for the Purps, so there was nothing to lose by telling it like it was. He told me what he liked and what he didn’t like about the band – everything he could remember. It was Jon who told me the story about the investor who went to jail: afterwards I checked the local newspaper in Brighton, where it had happened, and found the guy’s name. 

Lord was a fascinating man, wasn’t he? 

He was. Did you know that after he retired, he used to go on the road with John Mortimer, who was a neighbour of his? Mortimer was the writer of Rumpole Of The Bailey, and he would go on book tours and talk about Rumpole for the audiences. Jon would go with him and tinkle away on the piano while Mortimer was telling a story. I didn’t discover this until after he died. 

Did the band like your book? 

Everybody loved it, I think, apart from Ritchie, because I told a few stories about him in it. There’s a Japanese edition which is very rare, because there was a fire at the printers in Japan and all the plates were destroyed, this being many years before digital publishing. As I say, I did the book on the assumption that Deep Purple would never reform. I had no idea that they would get back together a year after the book came out. That surprised me, but it didn’t make any difference to the book.

Rufus Stone have recently published an updated edition of Deep Purple: The Visual History, available in several luxury versions.

They’ve done a beautiful job of it, with a Standard Edition and a Deluxe Collector’s edition. Both of them are great – I’m really pleased with them. There’s loads more pictures, a completely new design. 

You’re now working with Roger Glover on his autobiography. How’s it going?

I’ve been working with him on it for three years now. We’re up to the reunion in 1984. I’ve learned a hell of a lot of interesting stuff. For example, when he was ousted from the band in 1973, it was devastating, because he’d finally found a great band and he was making good money and really enjoying himself. It came out of the blue, because there’d been no animosity, whereas there had been some animosity with Gillan, so in his case they knew it was coming. Roger told me that, after the last gig he did with Purple, Ritchie came up to him and said, ‘Look, no hard feelings, mate. It’s nothing personal: I did it for the band’. Roger said he accepted that, and he didn’t blame Ritchie, but he did blame Paice and Lord, because they didn’t say anything like that – which is why he went off to work with Rainbow. He still had a great deal of admiration for Ritchie, and he still does.

What are your thoughts on Purple’s current Mark IX line-up?

Simon McBride is really good. I went to see them play at the O2 Arena in London just after he’d taken over from Steve Morse. Ian Gillan charted a boat to take all the wives and families and friends to the O2: we all sailed down the Thames, drinking from an open bar, and when we arrived at the back of the arena they ferried us inside in coaches. We hung out backstage and watched the gig, and then went back on the boat. That’s the kind of band that Purple are.

The interview is followed by an extract from my book about the group’s ill-fated visit to Indonesia in early 1976. 

LEONARD COHEN: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall by Christophe Lebold

If you like your Leonard lyrical, this is the book for you. Christophe Lebold, an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, teaches literature, performance studies and rock culture, and he’s devoted much of his life to studying the work of Leonard Cohen and also Bob Dylan. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that his book takes the diagnostic approach, digging deep into Cohen’s soul to reveal what he believes to be the inspiration for his work, be it manuscript, music, mystique or merely his multi-faceted imagination. 

Lest this implies Lebold’s book is dryly academic, have no fear. Cohen’s text, poetry and songs are analysed deeply but warmly and, as befitting a literary scholar, his prose is at times poetic. In truth, the book is more of a tribute than a biography, and though the author’s palpable admiration for Cohen rings out from every page it never sinks to hagiography. Were this the case, it’s doubtful that Cohen himself would have given it his tacit approval. “I am deeply respectful of the mind that has produced this book,” he is quoted on its back cover, above a photograph of himself, looking elderly, with the author, both of them languidly smoking cigarettes in an outdoor setting. We can assume, therefore, that Lebold’s interpretations are as accurate as they are penetrating. 

First published in French in 2013, with a revised edition following in 2018, we can also assume that Leonard read it – in French – not long before he passed. I’m pretty sure he’d have been impressed with this latest edition too, translated into English by the author, published last year as a 440-page hardback (with an extra 100 or so of end matter), excluding the 32-page picture section, with more photos scattered throughout, beautifully designed and printed to the highest production standards; a book to savour, to dip into as you listen to any of those 15 studio albums, or contemplate Cohen’s fiction and poetry. Musically speaking, of late my preference is Live In London, a 2-CD set recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 2009, to which I was alerted by Sylvie Simmons, reviewing Leonard’s catalogue in Mojo, whose own acclaimed book on Cohen, I’m Your Man, I reviewed here in 2017*. 

        The two books complement one another well. While Simmons takes the direct route, skilfully tracking Leonard’s life in linear fashion, creating a bit of a page-turner in the process, Lebold takes the more scenic route, stopping off at places of interest to linger over the view, over arcane details in a manner that makes his book a more leisurely, and marginally more literate, read. 

        Both books are heartfelt and neither miss much but I was surprised that, unlike Simmons, Lebold fails to acknowledge the interview that Cohen gave to my Melody Maker colleague Roy Hollingworth in February 1973, during which, after a discussion on the impiety rife in the music industry, he announced he was quitting. “Make this your last interview,” Cohen told Roy. “And let’s both quit together.” At the time this appeared sensational and, if my memory serves me correctly, caused some consternation in the boardroom at Columbia Records. It’s not even mentioned in Lebold’s extraordinarily extensive (18-page, nine-part) bibliography. 

        Then again, I was startled by a passage, exclusive to Lebold’s book, that concerns singer and songwriter Phil Ochs, once my landlord, whom Leonard had befriended during the period when he lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, circa 1966. Ten years later they met again, again in New York. “After several years of decline, the man who had once been Dylan’s rival was now sleeping on the subway and fighting in bars,” writes Lebold. “That evening, over a bowl of soup, he explained to Leonard that he had been murdered the year before at the Chelsea Hotel. Also, that he was a secret FBI leader and, basically, that he was no longer Phil Ochs. On April 9, he hung himself.” 

        Where the two authors harmonise is on those aspects of Cohen’s character that might to some appear less than saintly. He was a ladies’ man who loved, and was loved by, many striking women. He fortified himself with strong drink, hard drugs and good food, and veered from an almost reckless disregard for his well-being to the caution he displayed by spending the six years between 1993 and 1999 in relative seclusion at a monastery in Los Angeles where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. Lebold is particularly good on this interlude in Cohen’s life, displaying as keen a knowledge of Zen as on the earthier tendencies of his teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, who became known as Roshi and was linked with sexual misconduct.

All of which adds a touch of spice to Lebold’s book, as does the financial malpractice of his manager Kelley Lynch, whose behaviour he puts down, somewhat subtly, to the “wounded heart of a desperate woman.” He’s quite hard on Lynch, quite rightly so, but, as we all know, this episode led to Leonard being obliged for financial reasons to resume his touring career to wild acclaim in the new millennium. “The very light that Lynch had sought to extinguish would be sent out into the world again and Leonard’s comeback would indeed be an act of light,” Lebold writes eloquently of the silver lining beneath Lynch’s cloud. 

Lebold closes his book with a deeply personal account of his encounters with Leonard, the first of which occurred out of the blue, on a Liverpool Street, the second, pre-arranged, in Los Angeles, and the third – and last – also planned and in LA. He learned a great deal from Cohen’s philosophy, he writes, and the most important he sums up simply as “we should just shine our shoes.” 

        Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall is published by Luath Press, an Edinburgh-based independent book publisher, and costs £35 (£26.16 on Amazon). 

_____

*https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2017/02/im-your-man-life-of-leonard-cohen-by.html