Author: fgt

Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody has spoken about how Nirvana‘s first and only show in Belfast, Northern Ireland made him want to be in a band.

As a teenager, the first rock band that Lightbody fell in love with – “or at least the first one I’ll admit to getting into” he once told Rolling Stone – was AC/DC, but it was hearing Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind which “exploded everything”, and flicked a switch within the County Down schoolboy.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

With their fifth album Nine Lives about to propel them onto the world stage, the Von Hertzen Brothers told Prog about singing in sleeping bags, recording in a monastery and dreams of the Royal Albert Hall in 2013.

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“There’s my snare drum,” says Mikko von Hertzen, strapping a thin rail of bells to the side of his boot, holding it in place with what looks like a yard of gaffa tape. His brother, Kie (guitar, vocals), attaches a jumbled ball of small bells to his own boot. They walk off grinning and jingling. Jonne, the most reserved and youngest of the three, sits happily back in his chair, his bass low on his hips, a rumble of notes gravitating across the floor of the basement studio of the Future’s West London office.

The room is surprisingly full, and it quickly becomes apparent why when the three brothers break into an acoustic reading of River, from 2006’s Approach album. Mikko supplements his makeshift snare with a bass drum fashioned from a plastic case; he’s playing guitar and singing lead too – though that could be any of them. As soloists they’re beyond accomplished; together they’re out of this world. After three runs at River – all note-perfect – they cheerily set about rattling off Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, leaving the makeshift audience quietly astonished by their virtuosity; they seem able to easily hurdle most of Freddie Mercury’s somewhat testing high notes.

Heavy snow has set in over London as they settle into the Future boardroom, a corner office with tall windows looking out over the crystalline sky. While the UK’s in thrall to a smattering of the white stuff, the three Finns are less impressed. Kie glances out of the window: “You call this snow? This isn’t snow.”

The last time the Von Hertzen Brothers felt the cold was late last year on a short European tour opening for Opeth. Their latest album, Nine Lives – the first where they opted to record, engineer and oversee everything themselves – was running late. They’d overshot their self-imposed deadline, and consequently found themselves all bunched up in the back of their tour bus, wrapped up tightly in their sleeping bags, recording the final harmony tracks.

“It was a trial,” says Mikko. “We booked ourselves on tour with Opeth while we were still in the studio, so we were stressed over that. We couldn’t keep the deadline – we got delayed by a month.”

“We were singing in the middle of a snowstorm in Sweden,” says Kie, looking a little pained by the memory. “It was quite rough and stressful. Everyone had a day off, and we were in this freezing bus trying to get the vocals done.”

“It did work, but it was tough,” Mikko adds, “but we changed the way of doing things by recording the whole album ourselves, engineering everything ourselves, editing it all ourselves. We didn’t go to an expensive studio. We went to our rehearsal space and took more time with it, to have that more relaxed atmosphere, to feel that we weren’t in a rush – even though we were. That’s how you end up singing in a sleeping bag.”

I don’t think we have any songs where we go, ‘I don’t know why we did it.’ Maybe on the first album there are a few?

They’ve often publicly complained about the sound of 2008’s Love Remains The Same album. Was that a case of the deadline impacting on the final result? Kie’s sigh is audible and exasperated. “That’s a perfect example of the deadline messing with the final results. If only we’d had another two weeks to mix it, there could have been more finesse; more room for the songs to breathe…” He tails off in what seems like quiet frustration.

“The songs were okay though,” asserts Mikko. “I don’t think we have any songs where we go, ‘That’s a shitty song; I don’t know why we did it.’ Maybe on the first album [Experience] there are a few?”

There aren’t – and one listen to Nine Lives has you forgiving the Von Hertzen Brothers their tardiness. It might be their fifth record, but it’s the one that will likely introduce them to a new and more international audience. At home in Finland they’re as popular as ice hockey (so very popular indeed), with a slew of gold albums and even a Finnish Grammy for their second album, 2006’s Approach. Nine Lives is, if you’ll excuse the gratuitous hyperbole, something else entirely; a grand step up – if perhaps not the cohesive and more streamlined record they planned to make when they started writing it over a year ago.

“With every album you want to rethink or reinvent yourself in some way,” says Mikko, “which was the intention. Plus we hear all the time that our songs are too long. It’s not that we’re trying to be prog or complex, it’s just the way it happens. And then if a song is short, we’ll sometimes feel like it doesn’t fulfil us somehow; that there’s not enough dynamics, or the perfectionists in us think we can make it a little better with a little more tinkering. So eventually the album took the shape that isn’t that much different to what we’ve done before – even though we thought it would be much more different.”

Named after the stunning art that adorns the album’s cover, painted by acclaimed Finnish artist Samuli Heimonen – a fan who’s been known to work to their music – Nine Lives is, for all of Mikko’s protestations, a musical evolution. (Mikko: “We were thinking, ‘Is it too much to name your album the same name as an Aerosmith album?’ Not a great Aerosmith album, admittedly, but…”), Shorter, more concise songs outnumber the longer, more drawn-out pieces, though all are united by their depth, dynamics and sheer invention.

As with all their recordings to date, it’s unfettered by anything approaching conventionality in approach or thought. Inspired as a band by Boston as much they are by Black Sabbath, the Von Hertzen Brothers are equally unafraid to give as much credence to German composer Stephan Micus as their more rock-flavoured brethren.

We got access to this church where no rock band has ever recorded anything before, and it was really special to us

“I was living in India when I was introduced to Stephan’s music,” explains Mikko, enigmatically. “It was all so wonderfully contemplative. He went to the monastery on Athos Mountain and made an album about it [1994’s Athos]; the journey to the mountain, to the monastery, and it was very reflective, and, in a good way, spooky. I was reminded of this because we went to a monastery to record an a cappella song dedicated to our late grandmother, Katri Willamo.”

World Without opens with the three brothers intoning a haunting melody in their native tongue, cloistered in the monastery in Valamo in Finland by icons and artefacts that their grandfather had bequeathed the church after his death.

“Our grandparents collected icons and art from Russian Orthodox churches,” explains Mikko. “So we had a bond to this place – it houses something like 400 pieces from their original collection. We got access to this church where no rock band has ever recorded anything before, and it was really special to us.”

“It was amazing – it was the middle of the night and the full moon was high in the sky. It was very, very special,” adds Kie, nodding.

Mikko’s in something of a reverie: “We wanted to capture the space of the church, the sense of the ages; there is something very real to it.”

Were they close to their grandmother? “We were,” says Mikko. “She was a big lover of culture. She went to the opera and classical performances, and she was very into art and music. She never played, but she was very culturally enlightened. She made a big impression on us.”

It wasn’t just their grandparents who left an indelible mark; their parents started them early, enrolling them into musical kindergarten before they could barely read or write. “It’s singing and playing with music,” says Mikko. “We were very young. All the playing we did with the other kids was somehow related to music – the dancing, the games – my enduring memory is of it being really fun.”

When they were teenagers, their father would travel abroad for his job with an insurance company, and would always receive a hero’s welcome on his return; not least because of the Quality Street toffees and music – Queen, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd – he’d bring home with him. Years before that, he played with an instrumental guitar band in the mold of The Shadows called The Savages.

We were kids having dinner while people were boozing and watching John Mayall. People were like, ‘What are these kids doing here?

“They were good,” says Mikko. “It was ’63 or ’64, and they won the best band of the year competition in Finland. Before then they really didn’t have bands in Finland. In the early 60s you’d have a singer and the backing band, but then there was a shift, and my father’s band was one of the first to call themselves a guitar band. It was because of him too that we went to see people like Johnny Winter and Frank Marino when we were young.”

“You were 10 and I was 12,” recalls Kie, “and we went to see John Mayall with the Bluesbreakers. We went with our dad and our uncle. My first gig was Eric Clapton and then The Shadows came and played when I was about 11.”

“I think the Mayall gig was one of the biggest shows for me,” says Mikko. “The one experience I remember vividly. We were at the Tavastia Club in Helsinki, which is our home venue these days. We were really young and there was an age limit; we were kids having dinner while people were boozing and watching the band. We were eating French fries and people were like, ‘What are these kids doing here?’

“Our father spoke to the manager – he’s still the manager – who let us in. I remember it being so cool. Jonne was so much younger, so he didn’t get to go. But even now it’s quite defining; that was such a strong experience.”

The trio’s debut Experience was released in 2001. Its initial recording sessions were done in a hired house called Lonely Planet in India, where Mikko was living at the time. He still keeps an apartment there. That record aside, the band has never moved to record or live away from their beloved home city of Helsinki, let alone Finland. Is that why it’s taken them this long to gain real recognition internationally?

“It’s the eternal discussion,” says Kie. “Do we go somewhere with phones and computers off, and have two weeks with no interaction with the rest of the world? It could be a very good thing – but our families are there, our rehearsal space, our studio…”

We were talking to people in the UK and the US, and they all said we should relocate the band

“We had that discussion when Love Remains… came out,” says Mikko. “We were talking to people in the UK and the US, and they all said we should relocate the band. We talked about taking our stuff to LA or London, starting from scratch again and trying and make it work from there. But then we thought, ‘Let’s make another album, and let’s try to find a manager who knows what they’re doing.’”

They do appear to be remarkably patient for a band in this fast-paced business. “As long as there are songs that want to be heard, that need to be written, then we’ll keep going,” says Kie. “The music always comes out; it’s about the process. It’s not like we won’t be happy until we’re playing the Royal Albert Hall…”

Mikko smiles: “Though we’d really, really like to play the Royal Albert Hall.”

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion. 

Surly, cantankerous and occasionally violent, the late Ginger Baker was nonetheless one of rock’s greatest drummers. In 2011, as the former Cream man prepared to release his autobiography, Classic Rock stepped into the lion’s den for an audience with a genuine one-off.

The World’s Greatest Drummer is lying flat out on a bed in a West London hotel room when the man from Classic Rock is ushered into his presence.

“’Oo are you?” he moans, barely taking a handshake before soundly berating his publicist for various unperceived slights. “What other fuckin’ interviews ’ave I got to do?” he barks. “What newspapers am I in? Sunday Times? What good’s that?” he snorts. “Why aren’t I in the Daily Mirror? Sort of paper I’d read. A proper bleedin’ paper.”

The World’s Most Irascible Drummer swivels a notch. He is evidently in pain from the chronic osteo-arthritis in his back, hips and knees, which he has long kept at bay with pills, potions, painkillers and heavy doses of prescription morphine. Ginger is also very deaf, and his eyesight is none too good either. No lover of the cold, the 70-year-old has got the heating in the room turned to maximum and he’s in a right old hump.

“Where’s my tea?” he snaps at his long-suffering girlfriend, Kudzai, a 27-year-old lass from Zimbabwe who he met on the internet and now lives with at his ranch in South Africa.

A flunkey arrives bearing pots of tea for “Mr Peter Baker”. Baker is very cross. “That’s it! See if you can put the tray on my toes; bounce it around, eh?” he snorts. His girlfriend’s young daughter pours the tea while he fires up a Rothman’s. “Come on, then, speak. Ask your questions.”

And good afternoon to you too, Ginger Baker.

The drum legend is back in London from his adopted home in Tulbagh, Western Cape Province, to promote his recently published autobiography, Hellraiser. It’s an extraordinary account of a life, punctuated on every page with mind-boggling accounts of heroin abuse, social dysfunction, fist-fighting and musical escapades in post-war Soho, the Swinging Sixties and beyond. It’s a car-crash read – literally and figuratively. Ginger makes enemies at every turn. Friends are few and far between, although bankruptcy and fiscal disaster have kept him company.

Baker was also in London to attend the Classic Rock Roll Of Honour and receive an award, and play a rare gig at the Jazz Café, which was attended by one former Cream bandmate, Eric Clapton, but not the other, Jack Bruce, who underwent a liver transplant a few years back and didn’t get a Get Well Soon card from Baker.

“Eric Clapton is probably my best friend,” Ginger says. “Him and Stevie Winwood. Eric is like my younger brother. I’m very proud of him. He’s done very well for himself. I didn’t realise he had such a following when I met him before Cream. I used to see ‘Clapton is God’ written on the wall but I was unaware of that. I’m unaware of most things.”

Recalling his first proper meeting with Baker, in the mid-60s, Clapton said: “He came to see me play with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in Oxford and asked me to form a band. I was frightened of him because he was an angry-looking man with a considerable reputation.”

According to Baker, Eric said: “I know you, Ginger. You’re not such a hard nut as you think.” The guitarist, more a lover than a fighter, recalls being impressed by Ginger’s physique: “He appeared physically very strong, also extremely lean, with red hair. And he had a constant expression of disbelief mixed with suspicion… Later I also saw he was a very shy and gentle man, thoughtful and full of compassion.”

That night Baker drove Clapton home to West London from Oxford in his new Rover 3000. Driving like a maniac, he nearly crashed the car on the A40 when Eric suggested Jack Bruce as the bass player for their new venture. Ginger’s first reply was a flat no. A few days later he phoned Eric and told him he’d changed his mind.

Before Baker and Clapton extricated themselves from the Graham Bond Organization and Mayall’s Bluesbreakers respectively, the fiery drummer had already shared stages with Bruce, the classically trained and gifted Scottish bassist. The antipathy between Baker and Bruce is well known and well documented. But surely their feud, which goes back decades, is based on a love/hate relationship?

“Not at all,” Baker counters. “I found Jack in 1962. I got him into all the bands we worked in, including Cream. I was the catalyst. He had ego problems once Graham Bond got him to sing [during Bruce’s tenure in the Graham Bond’s band]. Even today Jack refuses to accept that I’m anything other than a drummer. He admits I’m a wonderful drummer, but he won’t admit I’m a musician. I write music.

“Same with Pete Brown [Cream’s lyricist, who at the time of Cream was working with his highly regarded band Battered Ornaments]. I first saw him during a show at St Pancras Town Hall in 1961. When it comes to Cream, he just says he got ‘a phone call’; won’t say it was from me.”

As Ginger sees it, the Bruce/Brown axis tried to usurp him and Clapton within Cream from the off.

“We all contributed on our songs,” Baker protests. “The ones that piss me off are Sunshine Of Your Love and White Room. I was a major part of those tunes – the whole bolero 5/4 thing [in White Room], I got no credit. Years later, Jack goes mad because Eric’s playing White Room in his set! That’s Jack, I’m afraid.”

Running sores continue to erupt. Cream’s reunion shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall in May 2005 (also the scene of the band’s farewell concert in 1968) were received as a triumph. Ginger got out his mallets for We’re Going Wrong, and turned back the clock with his legendary drum solo vehicle Toad. The crowd went nuts. A three-minute ovation. The three old geezers were up to their old tricks, and that was the kind of indulgence the audiences paid top money to witness. But by the time Cream did some more reunion shows six months later, playing three nights at Madison Square Garden, the bad karma returned.

“Jack’s behaviour was different,” Baker says. “He behaved like a prick, grabbing the microphone, dancing all over the stage. The Albert Hall was one of the most enjoyable gigs I’ve done; Madison Square Garden was a fucking disaster. Jack apologised to me afterwards because he’d freaked out at me in front of the whole audience for playing too loud on We’re Going Wrong. That was the last straw. He thinks he can do that then say sorry? It was why we split up in the first place.”

According to Baker, Bruce and Brown still earn more money from Cream’s royalties than him and Clapton. “Does that seem right?” he says. “I got a letter from Pete Brown telling me I should be grateful to him for writing all these wonderful words so I can earn money! I can’t stand either of them. They stole Cream from Eric and me. I insisted Eric got a writing royalty on Sunshine…, and I thought someone would say: ‘What about old Ginger, then?’ Nah. It was totally unfair. Eric used to come to rehearsals and say he’d got a great riff, and Jack would retort: ‘Well I’ve got a lot of finished songs,’ and if we didn’t play ’em he’d throw a fucking tantrum.”

The animosity in Cream’s rhythm section was a fixture with a murky past. After one altercation in pre-Cream days, when Baker threatened to kill Bruce, he made a pact that he would never get violent with the bassist again. Maybe anger management counselling would have helped?

“Of course it fucking wouldn’t have helped! My solution was to go the bar and down as many as possible until I forgot. Otherwise I’d have gone back and hit him.”

The personality clashes between Baker and Bruce reached a peak during Cream’s lengthy tours of the US in 1967/68.

“Musically they were great, like a well-oiled machine,” says Clapton. “Personally it was a different matter, they rubbed each other up the wrong way. It got to the point where we never socialised any more, or shared any ideas; we got on stage, played and went our separate ways. So that was it for Cream. It just fizzled out.”

He probably didn’t miss Bruce, but Baker evidently missed the limelight after Cream split up in 1968. Bruce was working on his first solo album (Songs For A Tailor), and Clapton was now a bona fide superstar who had played on The Beatles’ White album and appeared with The Rolling Stones and John Lennon at the Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus extravaganza.

Feeling somewhat miffed, Ginger drove to Steve Winwood’s Berkshire cottage one night with a new proposal to put to him. Clapton and Winwood were inside getting royally stoned when the fiery figure of Baker loomed at the door. While young Stevie was overjoyed to see him, Clapton felt a familiar dread returning.

Reticent as ever, Clapton was nevertheless eventually cajoled into a new alliance with Winwood, Baker and former Family bassist Rick Grech. Named, ironically, Blind Faith, the new ‘supergroup’ debuted at a free festival in Hyde Park on June 7, 1969. However, that show was nearly cancelled when Clapton thought the drummer was back on heroin [Ginger claims otherwise in his biography]. In any case, Blind Faith evaporated after one album and a handful of shows.

It wasn’t the only gig of Ginger’s to be over almost as soon as it had begun, a couple of examples being unlikely stints with John Lydon’s post-Pistols outfit Public Image Limited and an unhappy alliance with space rockers Hawkwind (playing on 1984’s Do Not Panic, This Is Hawkwind).

“Yeah, I played drums on his track Rise [on PiL’s Album] in 1986. And it’s incorrect to say I didn’t meet him. I met him on several occasions. He was a bit of an odd guy, to say the least. The first time I met him he was sitting in a room cutting his finger nails with a razor blade. Then we met at various sessions. Me and [acclaimed jazz drummer] Tony Williams from Lifetime both played with PiL. It made me laugh later, because the reviewers never knew who was playing the drums on that record. I can’t even tell myself, and to be honest. I didn’t give a fuck. I just took the money. Me and Tony had a good laugh about that gig.”

As for playing with Hawkwind in the mid-80s: “That was the biggest joke in history,” Ginger scoffs. “I needed the money, and that was the only reason. Sadly I never saw what was offered, because they didn’t have any money. Hawkwind were more interested in their stage appearance and their lighting than their actual music – and their music was fucking appalling. Atrocious. I hated it all. Thank Christ I wasn’t with them very long.”

Despite the pair’s explosive history, in 1994 Jack and Ginger again found themselves in an uneasy alliance, this time with Gary Moore in what would prove to be another short-lived venture, the decidedly Cream-like BBM. Baker, who had lost substantial fortunes on various Nigerian adventures, and with an expensive polo hobby to support, agreed to the BBM project only if he got good money and also First Class airfares from Colorado to Europe.

“As usual I received profuse apologies from Jack for his past behaviour,” Ginger says. “And the studio sessions we did delighted everyone, even though he was acting like my boss again and treating me as a session player. A tour was suggested; I’d get £50,000 a gig. What I didn’t realise was that Gary Moore was playing so loud that he blew his ears – just as Jack done to me. More gigs were cancelled than played. And they were awful anyway. Unlike Cream, everything with Gary Moore was contrived. Every solo he played was the same. I like to improvise.

“Unknown to me they organised a rehearsal at Brixton Academy, and when I got there I could hear Gary Moore’s guitar outside on the street. We played it note-perfect, as usual – should have been the fucking gig. The next day his manager phones me and says Gary’s blown his ears again and they’ve taken him to the doctor. I said: ‘Why don’t you take him to a fucking psychiatrist, cos that’s what he needs.’ That wasn’t the right thing to say to Mr God Almighty.”

But it was funny.

“Yeah, it was funny until I got the bills for retrieving my gear from Berlin, and paid for my polo horses to be taken to Boston, which they were gonna cough up for. And didn’t. My credit card bill wasn’t fucking funny.”

Fifteen years later, memories of BBM still throws Ginger into a rage. “That’s why I’m not happy with the cover photo of my book, cos that picture of me was used on the album cover [of BBM’s Around The Next Dream] where I’m standing in front of angel wings, smokin’ a cigarette. It’s a cool picture with very bad connotations. That was a terrible time, playing with the Pampered Pompadour Of Pop. One gig in Paris was cancelled when he cut his finger opening a fucking tin. Eric would have put a plaster on and played. Oh no, not Gary. And Jack became Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde again. He didn’t like his hotel room; his family didn’t rate the view. He didn’t want the Mercedes, he desired a limousine. For a 10-minute ride to the gig? Hello? It was ludicrous. And, again, it was so loud I had to have baffle boards on either side. I hate volume. Why does rock music have to be so loud? That was rock’n’roll finished for me.”

At the publisher’s request, Ginger devotes a short chapter of Hellraiser to Jimi Hendrix. He softens slightly at the mention of his name. “A great player,” Ginger says. “Better jamming than he was in front of an audience. I wasn’t impressed when [Hendrix’s manager] Chas Chandler asked if Jimi could sit in with Cream. I didn’t know who he was then, just some geezer, and he starts going down on his knees, playing guitar with his teeth. I wasn’t impressed at all.”

Still, on October 1,1966 at the Central London Polytechnic, Hendrix joined Cream on stage for an incendiary version of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor, complete with behind-the-head picking and flamboyant splits – most of his moves copped from Eric’s hero, blues legend Buddy Guy.

“Eric liked Jimi, and I got to know him as a person and we became very good friends,” Ginger says. “We were going to get some music together in 1970 after Blind Faith ended, but he ended up picking the wrong chick, Monika [Dannemann]. She was responsible for his death. He’s in bed with a chick and he’s sick and she runs out, leaving him in his sick? Disgraceful. When they picked him up he was cold,” Ginger wails. “He’d been dead for four hours. And that night we’d searched everywhere for him. We were going to invite him round, cos we had a big bottle of cocaine. If he’d done some coke,” Ginger laughs darkly, “he’d be alive, he’d never have gone to sleep. I had good times with Jimi. He used to come to my house in Harrow for dinner. His thing was pulling chicks when he was on stage. We shared a few.”

So many rockers have played the ‘I could have saved Jimi Hendrix’ card. Why was Ginger’s hand any different?

“I told you!” he shouts. “We was gonna play moosic together! I don’t know what we’d have done. It was early days. Stupid question. Bloody hell. I was very keen on it and it would have happened. Unfortunately it didn’t.”

As the Swinging Sixties faux psychedelic military world of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band became a battleground littered with casualties – live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse – Ginger found himself increasingly sidelined (Whinger Baker) while lesser talents, in his view, alchemised rock into gold. He knew them all and didn’t rate many, remaining convinced that his original drummer heroes – Elvin Jones, Phil Seamen, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey – soared above the emergent superstar elite.

“Keith Moon as a drummer? Nah. He was good with The Who, I suppose, when he tried to play like me. I liked Pete Townshend. His dad was an old jazzer in the Squadronnaires, sax player, so Pete’s from a proper background. He’s another one who blew his ears out, like me. Those stupid Marshall amps are to blame.

“Moonie was a wonderful guy, but if you’re going to judge from minus two to 10 then I’m a golden 10. Mitch Mitchell was a journeyman. He was hopeless. John Bonham, Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts… they’re a three or four. I like Charlie, he’s a good friend since the old jazz days and he’s perfect for the Stones. He got me a gig with Alexis [Korner’s Blues Incorporated] and I recommended him for the Stones. But I hate the Stones and always have done. Mick Jagger is a musical moron. True, he is an economic genius. Most of ’em are fucking morons. Phil Seamen told me: ‘These pop musicians wouldn’t know a hatchet from a crotchet.’ Paul McCartney boasts he can’t read music! How can you call yourself a musician, then? John Lennon was the best musician in The Beatles by a country mile. He was a very talented guy. But George Martin was The Beatles. Without him they’d have been nowhere.”

That’s a contentious opinion.

“Fucking true an’ all. I remember it was the day my son was born, and I was doing a session with George Harrison for Billy Preston – That’s The Way God Planned It. And that didn’t last long. He [Harrison] was like Jagger, didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. His way of explaining an idea was to wave his arms about. He’d be going: ‘Y’know, Ginger, play it like this,’ flailing his arms. What the fuck are you talking about! Write it down so I can see what you mean. He couldn’t.”

To say that Ginger doesn’t suffer anyone gladly is an understatement. The way he sees it, rock ‘musicians’ are adept at accumulating fame and wealth but otherwise exist in a talent-free zone. “Fucking idiots, most of ’em. When Cream were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame [January 1993] it made me sick. Who was that bloke… Dick Morrison?”

Jim Morrison?

“Him. His band [The Doors] made all these fucking speeches, thanking their parents, their uncles, the dog… They all did it. Took about eight hours before Cream got to play our gig, which was why it was so terrible. All that rubbish. I was with Eric on his table when he was with Naomi Campbell – gorgeous chick she was, we got on very well – and we were bored fuckin’ rigid. Even cocaine couldn’t have kept you awake.”

After an hour or so of Ginger’s grousing about how banal and terrible rock’n’roll is, he lets slip that there is actually something, or someone, that he likes: “Kelly.”

Kelly Jones?

“‘Oo? Kelly Rowland, from Destiny’s Child. She’s my favourite. Beyonce is okay. I’m not keen on the track When Love Takes Over, but her voice… she’s like Whitney ’Ouston. And she’s a very beautiful girl, dances like you wouldn’t believe. Otherwise, nah. Modern pop is rubbish. And I don’t like the music business at all. I was with Cream on Atlantic for how many years? And I still got a letter one day addressed to Miss Ginger Baker! ’Ow do these people get a fuckin’ job?!”

As the afternoon shadows lengthen it becomes apparent that Ginger has had enough. He has few regrets about his book apart from the fact that it peters out towards the end, thanks to a sub-judice wrangle with a South African bank teller involving embezzlement, and a scar on Ginger’s genitals.

“The book says ‘fuck’ too much for my liking,” he adds, “but my daughter Nettie, who wrote it with me, says that’s how I speak.

“Wife two and three? I never speak to them. My first wife Liz is different. She’s my best friend. Very loyal, is Liz Baker. I wish we could get on better,” he sighs. “We argue too much. When we talk we end up putting the phone down. But she’s a good girl. She’s the only one who was.”

And on that conciliatory note, The World’s Greatest Hellraiser falls asleep.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 142, February 2010

Max Bell worked for the NME during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for The Times and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the Standard and mags like The Face and GQ kept him honest. Later, Record Collector and Classic Rock called.

Few expected Alice In Chains to return after the death of original singer Layne Staley, but that’s what the grunge icons did in the 2000s with new frontman William Duvall. In 2013, as they prepared to release their second post-comeback album The Devil Put Dinosaurs here, Metal Hammer met the band in LA to talk about their turbulent past and bright future.

A late-winter heatwave has driven Los Angeles into a frenzy. We are only a few steps from the blissful shade of our hotel and we’re already burning up in the midday sun. The roads have ground to a halt and the mad rush of residents making a beeline for Santa Monica Beach is met with a collective ‘Ah’ as they find everyone else and their dog have had the same idea. The tantalising aroma of burgers and hotdogs wafts through the dusty air, luring all in its path closer to a heart attack, and the streets are busy with locals and tourists, though it’s hard to tell them apart.

Hammer is here to meet Alice In Chains, the grunge pioneers whose career slowly crumbled on the slopes of a magical yet treacherous peak, eventually claiming the life of frontman Layne Staley and, years later, original bassist Mike Starr. Yet today the band are in a very different place indeed and, after the resounding ‘Fuck yes’ that met 2009’s comeback record, Black Gives Way To Blue, which introduced new singer William DuVall, the multi-Grammy-nominated quartet are preparing to begin their next chapter with its successor, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.

As we stroll into the legendary Amoeba music store of West Hollywood, we spot Alice In Chains mainman Jerry Cantrell with William by the tills. They are both grinning and pointing at a black metal birthday card with the greeting ‘It is time to celebrate the quickening of your death’. Not far off, drummer Sean Kinney is almost crying with laughter at the vinyl artwork for the soundtrack to 80s American TV series Beauty And The Beast. “Now that’s fucking metal,” he chuckles, throwing the horns to a long-haired monster wearing what could be one of David Coverdale’s leather jackets.

Upstairs, bassist Mike Inez is eyeing up what looks like a Slayer shirt but actually has ‘Celine Dion’ scrawled across its chest in giant red letters. “I’ve met Celine a few times, she’s actually really nice,” he beams. An hour later and we’re cooling off in a gelato cafe, debating whether sangria sorbet is better than honeycomb crunch and trading our favourite ice cream ‘moments’. What happened to the endless tunnels of inner turmoil and, if black gave way to blue, what colour are they at now?

“We’re in our red period at the moment,” smiles Jerry, as we stroll to the shady courtyard of the historic Capitol Records Tower. He speaks softly and with slight caution, maintaining a level of reverential distance and mystique, his words barely audible over the perpetual hum of the building ventilation system.

“Every record is a snapshot of time,” he continues. “You get an idea of our evolution and, while a lot of things change, a lot of things stay the same. It’s never comfortable for me to make a record, but it’s something we love and it’s cool we’ve been given a second chance to do it.”

“Last time we didn’t have a record label or management sorted,” Mike interjects. “We were finding ourselves and had to work through lots of stuff. The main question was Alice In Chains surviving without Layne – which was the central theme of that album. Coming into this record we didn’t have a lot of those anxieties – we’re brothers that walk through the flaming hoops of life together and this time we feel more like a touring rock band.”

So as one door closes another one opens, and you get the impression that it’s much relief to a band who spent the majority of their last album cycle talking about drug overdoses and death, focusing on the pain of the past rather than the optimistic future ahead. Instead of shying away, the band bared their souls for the world to see and shared the very anguish which drove them to hiatus and later inspired them to return to the stage.

“It wasn’t stuff we’d really talked about in a decade so I’m glad we did it,” admits Sean. “Though it’s not a comfortable thing, none of those are pleasant stories, but I’ve learned a lot from seeing the amount of care people have for my friends.

“People dwell on the past? I hadn’t noticed,” Jerry deadpans, before bursting out laughing.

“It does get a little skewed once in a while,” continues Sean in a more serious, no-bullshit demeanour. “Especially when people feel that this affects them more than us – it’s an impossibility. Loved ones will die, your mother will die and you will have to deal with it.

“But am I gonna show up at your house or on the internet saying, ‘Quit living ’cos your Mom died’? No. And if you’re going to honour my friend, at least spell his name right. It’s disrespectful and then they have the nerve to be like, ‘Fuck you guys, for daring to go on.’”

“We get a lot of it,” shrugs William. “They keep telling me I’m no Layne Stanley ha ha!”

From the sludgy grind of Hollow to the acoustic balladry of Choke, everything about The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is pure, unadulterated AIC – though the album name caught a few people off guard. On February 13, the band cryptically posted the message ‘Decode the past to reveal the future’ on their website, along with the letters of the album rearranged. One day later and the title was confirmed, generating some interesting reactions from fans worldwide.

“The perception of the band has always been an insular one, about personal and internal struggles, but this makes a nice change and breath of fresh air,” explains William. “A reference to the outside world to maybe get a debate going.”

And the chorus of the title track – ‘The devil put the dinosaurs here/Jesus don’t like a queer/No problem with faith just fear’ – is guaranteed to do exactly that.

“Some people still believe that dinosaurs are the devil’s work,” reasons Jerry. “They also believe the earth is flat, is only 6,000 years old and sits at the centre of the universe!”

While the words poke fun at some of the extreme views harboured by some creationists, there is also a much darker undertone and venomous polemic to the band’s message, and one that questions whether mankind is still evolving.

“It’s OK for our beliefs to grow instead of flat-out ignoring new ideas,” he muses. “It just amazes me that we’re still so fucking brutal to each other, just because of people’s skin colour, sexual preference or gender. That Westboro Baptist Church, those God Hates Fags fuckin’ guys, it’s just so disrespectful and hurtful. You’re right and everyone else is wrong – that’s the sort of mentality I have a problem with.

“As if it’s OK to strap on a bomb and go blow people up, or beat up people ’cos they’re gay or tell a woman what she can’t do with her body? It’s hate-mongering and fear-mongering and I’m not down with that. We’re trying to have a sarcastic laugh about something that isn’t that fuckin’ funny!”

“I can’t see us ever writing songs about boning strippers and doing cocaine in limousine jacuzzis,” laughs Mike.

Life for AIC looks very different these days, and the world around them has changed just as much as they have. Their final studio album before unofficially disbanding was made in an era when most artists were still recording to tape and fans were buying CDs. Fourteen years later, however, online piracy was wrapping its talons around the physical medium and, consequently, Black Gives Way To Blue entered an entirely different market. One week before releasing the most important album of their career, AIC joined the long list of bands who were getting ripped off.

“We were having a night out in Chicago with Lars Ulrich, and someone on his bus told us that our album had leaked,” Mike reveals. “There were 300,000 downloads in just that night – the numbers were mindboggling. We put in all that time, money, effort, love, sweat, piss and blood and it’s out there before we even get to do it ourselves.”

He pauses, staring at the paper cup in his hands.

“It’s like people want their art for free but are happy to pay five dollars for their coffee. We’re bitter old rock fucks at this stage, we’ve seen it all!”

“All the illegal downloading and social media is stuff we’d never dealt with before,” Jerry admits. “There was a lot to get used to and a lot of it was shit I didn’t want to get used to.”

Those haven’t been the only changes in Jerry’s life. Ten years ago, in the wake of Layne’s death, Jerry came to a crossroads that forced him to choose between “going out the front door” with those who let their chemical dependencies make decisions for them or “jumping out the back window, down a cliff into the blackberry bushes” of sobriety. Last year, he received the Stevie Ray Vaughan award, or as Mike gently put it, the ‘Junkie Of The Year’ prize, at the annual MusiCares benefit for all his work helping fellow musicians battle their demons and guiding them to recovery, following in the footsteps of previous honourees James Hetfield, Chris Cornell and Alice Cooper. For someone who was very nearly consumed by the same downward spiral that claimed the lives of many friends, the acknowledgement certainly meant a lot.

“A lot of people helped me get my shit together,” confesses Jerry. “Keeping yourself together can be an inspiration for someone else to go, ‘Well, if that fuckin’ guy can do it, so can I!’ It’s not easy, but it’s doable. I tried to replace the unhealthy habits with healthier ones.”

And what healthier habits might those be?

“Mainly golf! It’s fun to spend a few hours out in a beautiful place and forget all the bullshit. I don’t think I’ve ever cursed more than when I play that sport. There’s a bunch of us that do it – you know Alice Cooper is a ridiculous golfer, he could go pro. We went out with Alex Lifeson from Rush once; Vinnie and Rex play, too. Dime loved golf, he always used to dress up, get drunk and ride around in a golf cart with side pipes and flames on them and shit,” he reminisces.

With glowing reactions to Hollow, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here’s first single, through a fan-made lyric video using Instagram, as well as a highly conceptual sci-fi video directed by Robert ‘Roboshobo’ Schober [Metallica, Deftones, Mastodon], AIC are stepping into unchartered territories. Jerry is excited about them being in a healthy enough place to embrace evolution (not just in the lyrical sense) and continue building their legacy after re-establishing themselves as one of the most passionately admired groups on the planet.

“I think the videos came out well and were different,” he enthuses, as the temperature cools after the blazing Californian sun has gone down. “Videos are a strange medium for us, but Robo took the project on with a really strong vision, which is what appealed to us. We liked it so much, we’re doing our next one with him. Having the fans do the lyric video was killer too, and now it’s passed a million views…”

“Which doesn’t pay shit,” jokes Mike. “It would be great to get a dollar for every one of those views but I think it shows our level of commitment. We don’t just go out and buy a fuckin’ Ferrari or whatever, we put a lot of our own time and money into this…”

“Yeah, but I’d like a Ferrari some day, though,” grins Jerry.

“So there we go, that’s our next video: Jerry in a Ferrari stuck in traffic!”

Despite everything they’ve been through, AIC stand proud and still clearly love making great music. Long may they continue to do so.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 244, April 2013

Amit has been writing for titles like Total Guitar, MusicRadar and Guitar World for over a decade and counts Richie Kotzen, Guthrie Govan and Jeff Beck among his primary influences. He’s interviewed everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy to Slash and Jimmy Page, and once even traded solos with a member of Slayer on a track released internationally. As a session guitarist, he’s played alongside members of Judas Priest and Uriah Heep in London ensemble Metalworks, as well as handling lead guitars for legends like Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols, The Faces) and Stu Hamm (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, G3).

Cult rock’n’rollers Dogs D’Amour emerged from the scuzz of late 80s London like a bunch of rock’n’roll vagabonds. For frontman and pirate-in-chief Tyla, it was the start of a journey that saw him become rock’s own answer to Charles Bukowski. In 2011, he sat down with Classic Rock to look back over his unique career.

Arms high and wide, Tyla is recreating the moment nearly 21 years ago when he cut open his chest with a broken bottle onstage at the Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this, but this time he had pushed the jagged glass in too deep.

“I misjudged it,” he says. “I was doing angel dust at that point, and I just went: ‘Let’s fucking play’ and slashed myself. I threw my arms up, which didn’t help, and then the wound really opened up.”

You can go online and find a clip of the incident , if you’ve got a strong stomach. It was October 1991, and Tyla’s band, the Dogs D’Amour, were a combustible live outfit who were attempting to translate their UK success into a Stateside buzz. They were holding the Florentine Gardens audience in their thrall, and were part way through the song Back On The Juice when the singer decided to take the bottle to his torso. The footage shows his chest flapping open, a bloody maw. A hint of realisation that something is amiss appears in his eyes, before he collapses onto the stage.

It says something about Tyla’s charisma that even while slumped unconscious on a gurney, waiting to be wheeled into the back of an ambulance, three different girls all claimed independently to be his wife and demanded that the medical crew take them to the hospital so that they could be at the singer’s side when he came to. The crew, quite sensibly, ignored the tear-stained trio, leaving them sitting on the sidewalk, staring miserably at the departing revolving red lights as the mercy wagon sped off into the Hollywood night.

At the hospital, the doctors staunched the bleeding and closed his chest up, but his travails weren’t over. “I had all these staples in holding me together,” he explains. “A few weeks later, the doctor was using a clip to take them out, and he slipped and they all opened up at once. It made this ripping sound, and my whole body just sort of shook and came apart again.” He cackles at the memory.

Tyla has come a long way from drug-induced self-mutilation, though his charisma remains undimmed. Sitting in the corner of a North London pub, he stands out from the pre-Christmas shoppers slowly filling it up: black pinstriped suit and cap, crow-coloured hair touching his shoulders, a beard that makes him look like he’s been castaway with Johnny Depp and his Pirates Of The Caribbean. His voice is a low burr that occasionally pitches sideways into a distinct Wolverhampton twang. A pint of Guinness sits before him; later he’ll finish half of it in one long gulp. He puts you in mind of a character from a Tom Waits song who’s surprised to find he’s lived so long.

He’s frequently taken the road less travelled during a 30-year-career that has propelled him from the promise and chaos of the Dogs D’Amour to a solo career-cum-cottage industry. As befits a man who adores Pablo Picasso, Charles Bukowski and maverick Be Bop Deluxe mainman Bill Nelson, he sits outside of the mainstream, surviving and thrived where many of his peers have fallen by the wayside. He is, in the words of one his own songs, the last bandit.

Tyla first saw the future from the balcony of the Wolverhampton Civic Hall. He was 14 years old and the band were Be Bop Deluxe, who were touring their then brand new album Modern Music. They were the first live band he’d ever seen.

“They had suits on, they looked so cool,” he says, “I went out and bought Modern Music, Futurama and Sunburst Finish all at the same time. People used to go on about how the Dogs were influenced by the Faces and Stones, but for me it was Bill Nelson, Bowie, Lizzy and stuff like the Spencer Davies Group.”

The young Tyla’s dad was a printer who brought home reams of paper for his son to draw on. He went from mimicking the Topper comic to aping his artistic heroes, Picasso and Dali, before finding his own inimitable style.

It was also his dad who got him his first guitar. He learned to play that dusty old parlour song Beautiful Dreamer, but what he really wanted to play was Jailbreak. When a friend showed him how to do exactly that, Tyla discovered a hitherto hidden musical talent. By his late teens, he was an ardent fan of old time bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. It was inevitable he’d form a band sooner rather than later; when he did, it was with fellow Black Country native and future Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven. The band were called Kitsch, after Tyla’s day job as a kitchen porter.

“We were all going to have these different looks,” he says with a grin. “I was going to dress up as a fencer. I was into (Pierrot-costumed SAHB guitarist) Zal Cleminson at the time, and thought: ‘If he can do that then I can dress like a fencer with my rapier!’”

Mercifully, that never came to pass. Instead, by 1983 Tyla had left Kitsch to form a band called The Bordello Boys, who soon changed their name to the Dogs D’Amour. In the earliest days he was just the guitarist; the singer was a transplaneted American named Ned Christie (real name Robert Stoddard, and a future singer in an early incarnation of LA Guns). It was a short-lived union, although Christie did turn his bandmate on to Charles Bukowski. At the time, Tyla was living in a small room at the top of an old house off the Portobello Road in West London; he was 22 and developing quickly as a songwriter. He found a flood damaged acoustic guitar just around the corner: the back was off and it only had three strings, but it was still a bargain at 10 quid. He taught himself to play slide on it and write prodigiously. Bukowski’s poems and stories about life as a down at heel, drunk laureate, detailing lost love and the drudgery of the everyday, were an inspiration for the aspiring artist and writer.

“Ned gave me a copy of [Bukowski’s 1975 novel] Factotum and said: ‘This guy’s just like you’,” says Tyla. “I read it and was blown away. It was: ‘This is day-to-day, just a normal life like I’m living.’ I wrote How Do You Fall In Love Again in this little room. I went on a roll after that.”

Christie was gone within a year, and Tyla took over as the band’s singer, albeit reluctantly, in time for the band to record their debut album, The State We’re In for Finnish indie Kumibeat. Opening for the likes of Johnny Thunders at a time when London was enraptured by anything in cowboy boots and bandanas, the Dogs’ wasted-vagabond look was a hit. Despite this the next few years would be a series of frustrating near-misses with various labels, while band members came and went.

Eventually, in 1988, the band signed a deal with China. By this time, Tyla and bassist Steve James were living in a flat in Kentish Town. Their living room could barely contain the pool table they’d bought, and which Tyla used as an easel to create his band’s artwork. “I was so drunk when I did them,” he says. “I look back and think: ‘That’s terrible’. I have to redo the hands so they look normal. The thumbs are everywhere.”

Though they were all hardened drinkers, it was the singer who led the way in chemical consumption. “No one was ever really mega into drugs apart from me,” he says. “I was never addicted, but any drug coming along I’d take. I was into anything and everything. It wasn’t a self-destruct thing. It either closed the door on my mind or opened one up.”

Their extra curricular activities didn’t get in the way of their work rate. The band’s first album for China, the charming, ramshackle rock’n’roll of 1988’s In The Dynamite Jet Saloon, spawned a minor hit single and live favourite in How Come It Never Rains. The following year’s acoustic mini-album A Graveyard Of Empty Bottles and full-length follow-up Errol Flynn – the latter arguably their best album – sealed their status as the kings of vagabond rock’n’roll. By the time 1989 single Satellite Kid staggered into the Top 30, the band had made the inevitable move to Los Angeles.

“We’d played there and had a taste for it,” he recalls. “But I was the only one who had any cash, as I wrote the songs and no one was on a retainer. I was getting all the attention too. I’m not sure that helped the mood in the band.”

The band arrived in California in the middle of what turned out to be glam metal’s last hurrah. The two biggest-selling new bands of 1990 were Slaughter and Firehouse, but the Dogs were a world away from that. But while they never felt part of any scene, their shows were selling out (one early US tour found them supported by one Mother Love Bone) and Errol Flynn – renamed King Of Thieves in America for legal reasons – had done good business. The new location hadn’t slowed down the band’s prodigious work rate, and they were keen to start work on their next album, Straight??!!. Their label pulled in the requisite big name producer – in this case, Ric Browde, who had overseen Poison’s multi-platinum debut.

“It cost a fortune to make, like £300,000,” says Tyla, partly exasperated and partly resigned. “I think Ric Browde got about 40 grand to produce it. We’d have a knees-up every day. We had these two litre moonshine jugs of Jack and vodka, all laid out for us, and everyday we’d finish them.”

The hangover came when Straight??!! was panned by the press, albeit unfairly. Worse, it failed to even get a release in America thanks to an increasingly sour relationship between China and the band’s US label, Polygram (though it would spawn a series of US appearances that include the infamous chest-slashing show at Florentine Gardens). By the time of 1993’s More Unchartered Heights Of Disgrace, things had sunk even lower – the tidal wave of grunge had washed away everything that came before it, and the album failed to crack the UK Top 30. An offer to support Aerosmith was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“It was a 100 grand just to get on that tour and we’d just spent 90 grand on …Unchartered,” says Tyla. “We went to China for the money and they just said: ‘No’. So I said: ‘There’s nothing you can do for us anymore, can you just let us go?’ And they said: ‘If that’s the way you feel, yeah’, and we walked off up the road. I remember thinking that someone should have filmed that, us just walking away, because it was the end.”

Tyla had what he calls his first midlife crisis in July 1990, three years before …Unchartered proved to be the Dogs’ last howl. The band were second on the bill to Magnum at the Cumbria Rock Festival, and the singer found himself questioning the reality of his surroundings. “I was like: ‘What the fucking hell am I doing?’,” he says. “ ‘What the hell is this all about, it’s bollocks’.”

He lost it again, years later. “I’d had a rapid rise into the 90s and then a whole 10 years of what… I really don’t know. I think I needed to just walk into a pub and have a pint with my mates, but I didn’t have any mates, because they were all in the band and the band had split up.”

From the outside, he seemed to hold it together. The Dogs D’Amour splintered after Unchartered, though Tyla had tried to keep the band together. In 1994, flush with money from a Japanese deal, he roped them into playing on his debut solo album, The Life & Times Of A Ballad Monger. But subsequent demos weren’t picked up, and Tyla went back to playing solo shows, just him and his acoustic guitar.

“I kept me head down and got on with it,” he says. “I did gig after gig after gig. The outlet for everything for me was my gigs: so I could play there, open up a portfolio of my art and sell that. I gave up waiting for phone calls, waiting for my manager – I went out on my own.”

A gypsy-like lifestyle meant he was always on the move, though he managed to stay still long enough to record the excellent Libertine and Gothic albums (1996 and ’97 respectively) and build up a portfolio of art that entices people on both sides of the Atlantic to this day (he says if he paints ten pictures, then he sells ten pictures). By the end of the decade, he’d settled in Barcelona with his wife, where he became a one-man recording industry, releasing a string of solo albums on his own label, and even reuniting with the Dogs for 2000’s Happy Ever After.

“Even though I was married, my wife at the time and I had separate lives,” he says. “I’d ride my bike around Barcelona, smoking spliffs, and come back and I’d make music. There are some great songs on those albums, but because I did a lot of those with drum machines and in isolation, some people just don’t get it, so I have to go back and do them again and use a real drummer this time.”

He’s already started revisiting his own back catalogue. Last year, he re-recorded the Dogs D’Amour’s In The Dynamite Jet Saloon, and he’s talking about doing the same with A Graveyard Of Empty Bottles and Errol Flynn.

“It’s like Michael Gambon going back to doing all the great Shakespeare roles,” he says. “He said he hadn’t done them right and wants to go back and do them properly, now he knows how to do it. I know how he feels. It’s only in the last few years I’ve pulled my head together to look at some of those songs and go back and decide to do things differently. Most of those songs were written when I’d left somebody or was in a dark place. It was odd to sing some of them again, thinking, what the hell was going on in my life there?”

After his marriage fell apart, Tyla relocated to London. He lives a few miles from the pub we’re in, with his partner Bess (immortalised in song on his latest album, Quinquaginta) and their two kids. These days he makes as much money from his paintings as he does his music: he exhibited in London last year, Munich the year before that (he attended the opening of the latter on crutches, nursing a broken leg, and made the front page of the local paper). This year there’ll be a memoir of sorts, Dog Tales – “epic little stories about my life”, as he puts it.

“I’m having a bit of a renaissance,” he says. “I think it’s because I took a year or so off, rather than keep going out and doing stuff. Also, I actually have a price that I’ll go out for or I won’t do it. Some people go: ‘Fuck off’, some don’t, but you have to draw the line. I’ve got an audience, I’ve got a distribution deal, I’ve got interest from Japan again.”

He smiles wryly. “But I did wake up at five this morning and think: ‘How do you write a song when you’re happy?’.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 168,