Author: fgt

From musique concrète to stadium spectacles, Jean-Michel Jarre pioneered futuristic, yet accessible, electronica for decades. On his 2010 tour – when AI-generated art was still a theory – Prog found him paying tribute to visionary writer Arthur C Clarke, and arguing for a reboot of humanity’s future ambitions.

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In the realm of electronic prog, no figure looms larger than Jean Michel Jarre. He’s sold 80 million albums, staged some of the most spectacular live events the world has ever seen and almost single-handedly taken the instrumental synthesizer form academia and avant-garde art centres to the masses. And yet, despite everything he’s achieved, it’s often been tempting to write him off as irrelevant.

In the wake of his meteoric rise to fame via 1977 debut Oxygène and 1978 follow-up Équinoxe, a new breed of innovators entered the electronic field. As early as 1979, former punk upstart Gary Numan started a wave of electro-pop which swept the synth stars of the 70s onto the sidelines. The cutting edge had moved, leaving meandering, album-length suites behind.

Other new such as Depeche Mode and New Order soon followed, dominating the charts while the likes of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Jarre himself began to lose ground. The 1990s were even tougher, with the dominant dance music culture casting Jarre and his ilk as overblown, outdated anachronisms from a bygone age.

All this despite the enormous influence the pioneers of the 70s had on synth pop, dance, trance, techno, glitch, garage, house and just about every other form of electronic music.

Jarre, however, has never wavered in his commitment and his profile has remained high. He continues to record and tour regularly – and to his credit, he’s refused to play it safe. While the albums Oxygène 7-13 and Oxygène: New Master Recording have seen him exploiting the legacy that’s rightfully his, he hasn’t relied heavily on nostalgia.

Works such as 2000’s Métamorphoses – the first JMJ album to feature actual songs with lyrics – and 2007’s dance-orientated Téo & Téa have displayed a willingness to stray outside his comfort zone, take risks and even enter territory dominated by younger generations.

Whatever the relative merits of his studio output, his live shows have remained popular attractions, and he continues to perform on a scale few can match. Although his ongoing world tour is something of a greatest hits package, it sees Jarre innovating again and setting himself some stiff challenges along the way. Like everything he does, it’s big – but there’s an element of randomness and benign chaos in his current performances that’s very far removed from the choreographed theatrics he’s normally associated with.

“I’ve done my best to make it exciting and visual,” Jarre explains. “I’ve tried very hard to stress the cinematic side of the music for this tour. It’s not respectful to sit behind a laptop for two hours – people are buying tickets, after all. I’m up there on stage with three other guys and it’s totally live.”

What’s particularly striking about Jarre’s 2010 show is just how physical the whole thing is. Making his way to the stage through a gob-smacked audience is just the beginning. He remains animated throughout as his companions twiddle and fiddle with the vast array of vintage synths, jogging about the stage, triggering whooshing and bleeping noises as he passes each instrument, orchestrating bouts of hand-clapping as he goes.

He straps on an accordion for Chronologie 6 before firing up the legendary laser harp for Rendez-Vous. It’s as full- on as it is hands-on; and with everything happening in real time, they’re flying by the seat of their pants. “If you make a mistake on stage, people like that,” Jarre says. “It’s an element of danger. It’s a unique moment and it makes each concert different. Today so much is pre-programmed. I’m trying to make each concert as a unique moment that I can share on that evening with that audience.”

If the road trip has an unofficial theme, it’s the rediscovery of analogue. Jarre openly embraced digital synthesis and sampling when it first emerged – notably on 1981’s Magnetic Fields and 1984’s Zoolook – but time and time again he’s returned to the technology of the past and the mercurial instruments he popularised all those years ago.

The sound being played is as important as the notes being played… and there are things you just can’t do with digital

“We forgot what the analogue era gave us,” Jarre admits, “and we forgot what we owe to the period. Those instruments disappeared during the 80s and didn’t have a chance to grow up – to mature. Today, a violinist dreams about a Stradivarius, an instrument made in the 17th century. A guitar player dreams about a Gibson Les Paul ’58. For me it’s the same with analogue synthesizers.

“In the early days of digital you could play chords and notes, but with preprogrammed sounds. With analogue technology you can control the whole colour and tone of sounds. The sound being played is as important as the notes being played. People want the warmth – and there are things you just can’t do with digital.”

A perception persists that electronic music is generally cold and impersonal. In the 70s that view was rampant, and fed into wider debates about where technology was taking us. Synthesizers were perceived as inherently unmusical – even a threat to music, especially live music – and brought out latent Luddite tendencies spurred on by vague fears of the unknown.

“As part of my early work I was asked to do something for the theatre,” Jarre recalls, “and we had some trouble with the Musicians Union trying to unplug the speakers because they thought our machines would replace them!”

The dystopian nightmares of computer-dominated music never materialised. There has been some extremely austere and alien electronic music created over the years but the notion of technology radically undermining the basics of how music is created and performed has never come to pass. Most experiments with pure computer-generated music have proved to be dismal failures from a human perspective.

Since the 60s, when we talk about music we’re talking about songs. But music, historically, is without words

And therein lies one of the secrets of Jarre’s success: the human dimension. His tonal palette may be ethereal and otherworldly, but he himself remains the focal point and he is a star in the old fashioned sense. Where Tangerine Dream all but disappeared in darkened Gothic cathedrals, and Kraftwerk attempted to engineer themselves out of existence with robotic replacements, Jarre was centre stage, swamped by high-tech paraphernalia, lit up like a Christmas tree and with a million quid’s worth of fireworks exploding overhead.

He’s a celebrity who’s been married three times – twice to actresses – and a TV chat show regular who appears in glossy entertainment weeklies like Hello! How much do you know about Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter’s private life?

Aside from Jarre presenting a human face, his early compositions had an organic feel which appealed to many who wouldn’t otherwise have considered themselves fans of electronic music. His warm tones, bubbling melodies and subtle French folk music influences created a welcoming, reassuring audio world, even when the mood was melancholy or reflective. Crucially, its instrumental nature meant it could go global, crossing cultural boundaries to become a truly universal language.

“What’s unique in instrumental music is that you’re in the direct narrative process,” says Jarre. “You’re giving a story to someone. Instrumental music is the most interactive way of expression, where you leave the audience free to build their own story, their own scenario or their own movie in their minds.

I always thought it was artificial to call one part Oxygene: Fool On A Hill when I’m not telling the story of a fool on a hill!

“I always felt there was something very special about music without words. Since the 60s, when we talk about music we’re talking about songs. But songs are just a sector of what is music – music, historically, is without words.

“For me, electronic music is like painting: dealing with different textures and colours to create perspectives and soundscapes rather than telling a story. The reason so many of my albums have a part one, part two, three, four, five is I always thought it was artificial to call one part Oxygene: Fool On A Hill when I’m not telling the story of a fool on a hill!”

On first hearing, his music sounded highly futuristic. The clean lines and precise pulse seemed to evoke visions of a wondrous age to come, an era of enlightenment for a united humanity. Jarre’s portrait on the rear of Equinoxe depicts him in a silvery space suit, set against a spacious, spotless cityscape at sunset. It’s an image of man, his urban environment and nature in harmony, a tantalising glimpse into a positive future for humanity set to the soundtrack contained within.

The sense of joy and wonder found in Oxygène and Èquinoxe has never been lost. Mankind may be farther than ever from the utopian future of past promise, but Jarre maintains his positive outlook.

His latest tour is dubbed 2010 for more than the obvious reason. It’s a tribute to Arthur C Clarke, the towering literary and scientific figure who’s been immensely influential in Jarre’s life and work. One might even call him a mentor. As it turned out, the feelings of admiration were mutual, with Clarke writing in his book 2010: Odyssey Two, “I listened to all of Jean Michel Jarre’s albums obsessively, to the point of knowing every note by heart. His music accompanied me as I wrote.”

Our relationship with the future is full of anxiety and guilt… it’s quite arrogant to think we have the future of the planet in our hands

Jarre says: “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that! I’m a fan of 2001, the book and the movie. I was in London in 1982 when the sequel 2010 came out. I got the book and was amazed to see my name in the acknowledgements. So I wrote him a letter and we started a correspondence. He was a very interesting character. So I thought that, starting this really special world tour project in 2010, it would be nice simply calling it 2010 as a tribute to him.”

The pair shared a sense of untapped, unlimited possibility for the future development of the human race. In seeking out new sonic worlds, Jarre continues his lifelong quest to reimagine what music can be, to inspire others to reach beyond their assumed limitations and pursue the impossible.

“We have a dark vision of tomorrow,” he says. “Our relationship with the future is full of anxiety and guilt about pollution, the environment, global warming, how we’re going to survive on the planet and all that. Even if it’s partially true, I think it’s quite arrogant to think we have the future of the planet in our hands.

“There’s a lot of limitation in all this and it’s time to restore a dynamic vision for the future that’s not just linked to recycling our garbage and all those things. People like Arthur C Clarke gave us a very positive vision of the future. It was like after the year 2000 nothing would be the same. We had a lot of hopes and fantasies and dreams about the future.

“In these days, with the year 2000 behind us, it’s a little bit like we’re orphans of our own future. I think we need to recreate a dynamic vision for our future that we’ve lost.”

Randy Blythe wants to make one thing clear. “I’m not Buddha,” says the Lamb Of God singer. “I get angry all the time. But are you just going to sit here and be angry forever? Or are you going to try and figure out a way to make things better?”

He’s talking the inspiration behind his new book, Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head, a collection of first-hand stories of survival and self-betterment, and the insight they’ve brought him.

“It’s just trying to understand myself and the world,” he says. “It’s just about navigating those thoughts.”

Do you think you could have written this book before you got sober?

“No fucking way. I couldn’t have written any book when I wasn’t sober. I used to write when I was younger. I did a couple of fanzines and stuff, I quite enjoyed it, but that was in my early 20s, and then sometime around then the drinking and drugging just became way more important than writing.

I did write lyrics, but writing a book is much harder than writing a song. It’s a much more sustained creative exertion. I didn’t have that sort of stamina when I was drinking. No way.”

There’s a lot of personal stuff in there: bereavement, mental health issues, fear, anger. Was it cathartic writing all that down and putting it out there?

“If you stuff something down, it will come back and fuck you up. I know it did with me. I lost a daughter, the only child I ever had [Randy’s newborn daughter died in 2000 of a heart defect], and I didn’t want to deal with that. I just stuffed it down behind alcohol and drugs and shit and just didn’t look at it, and it fucked me up years later. It’s absolutely imperative that you do let things out, it really is.”

And those perspectives are helpful to other people as well…

“I’m doing this book tour right now. There’s a Q&A and I will talk about my [late] grandmother a lot. Then after, when I do the signing, people will come up and it really moves them. It really does, because it makes them think about their grandmother or an elderly family member. If one thing comes out of the book, I hope that if people do have older people left, it encourages them to go visit their family.”

In the book, you make no secret of your disdain for social media and online culture.

“Because it’s fucking bullshit! Punk rock and metal have been warning against this for years. Look at Fear Factory! We’ve been talking about this, but we’ve been in the underground. Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of dirtbag fucking idiots!’ Fuck you! The pattern was easy to see, and lo and behold, the idiocracy is upon us.”

There’s a lot in the book about what it means to be an artist. How important is that to you?

“I could go live in a fucking cave somewhere, I’m good with not much, but that is not taking advantage of what I view as my purpose in life: being an artist, which in my case requires expression, and expressing to people. I could write all the wonderful songs in the world, write 15 books, take a bunch of photos and never show them to anyone. They may be great, but what good is it if nobody gets to see them?”

So do punk and metal still have the power to change anything?

“Yes. I don’t think metal or punk or hardcore is ever going to drive a mass societal change, and that’s OK, because I think the only thing I can do in this crazy time is try and be an effective person individually. Punk and metal have the very real power to effect individual change, because they certainly did in my life.”

You talk in the book about the physical struggle of being in Lamb Of God. How long do you think you can continue with doing that?

“I think we can be in Lamb Of God till the day we die. I hope when I fucking croak, I croak as the singer of Lamb Of God, and at a ripe old age. We’re such good friends now, way better than when we were younger, because we shelved the egos and learned how to be a team more.

That being said, physically it is taxing. Man, my back hurts. It hurts bad. I have no idea how long we can keep it up at sort of the manic level that we do. But I don’t think we ever have to completely stop.”

You’re a musician, an author and a photographer. How do you satisfy all of those creative urges?

“It is frustrating for me in a way, because I love shooting photos, I love writing, I love being in a band, I do some acting every now and then… not very well! The frustrating thing is trying to find a balance between all those things, because since I got sober, my creativity is just like a fire hose. I have three or four books outlined that I want to write, then I need to do a photography book. All of these things are swirling around up here [taps head]. I want to do music of different sorts, not just with Lamb Of God.”

What other kinds of music are you talking about?

“Other wild side-projects. I will always do music as long as I can. When I get older, I think it will definitely be something a little more mellow. But I’m a physical performer. I won’t be able to restrain myself. To this day, I’m like, ‘I’m not going to jump off the drum riser, I hurt like shit.’ And then I’ll get onstage and it’s like, ‘Fuck this!’, and I’m flying through the air, because I can’t stop. It’s just too much power.”

It sounds like retirement isn’t on the cards any time soon.

“I’ll be doing it to the day I die. I will never retire. I don’t even understand the concept.”

Randy’s new book Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head is out now via Da Capo on in the UK and Grand Central Publishing in the US.

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.

In 1975 Jethro Tull decamped to the French Riviera to record eighth studio album Minstrel In The Gallery. As the record celebrates its half-century, Ian Anderson recalls its creation between breaks in a lengthy touring cycle that would eventually lead to the departure of bassist Jeffrey Hammond – after having led Anderson himself to consider getting off the road for good.

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In spring 1975, had you been in the vicinity of Radio Monte Carlo’s premises in Monaco, you might have seen Ian Anderson dismount his Ossa trials motorcycle and go inside. It was there, in a sprawling live room big enough to facilitate games of badminton between takes, that Jethro Tull recorded their eighth studio album, Minstrel In The Gallery, between May 15 and June 7.

While Renaissance made Scheherazade And Other Stories at London’s Abbey Road and Mike Oldfield tracked Ommadawn in rural Herefordshire, it was the first time Tull had recorded an LP outside the UK, and they’d shipped the Maison Rouge Mobile Studio out to Monaco along with Anderson’s bike. Now all he, guitarist Martin Barre, pianist John Evan, bassist Jeffrey Hammond and drummer Barriemore Barlow had to do was resist holiday resort temptations and knuckle down.

“In 1973, we’d tried to record an album [1974’s War Child] in the relatively famous residential studio Château d’Hérouville, just outside Paris,” says Anderson. “It was awful. That notion of removing yourself from everyday life and concentrating on the music often just meant people lounging by the pool wasting time and money. But for me, personally, Monte Carlo wasn’t much of a distraction. In fact it was the antithesis of the kind of place where I’d have said, ‘Ooh, let’s go there for a holiday!’ Then, as now, it was full of affluence and snobbery.”

Anderson was there under slight duress. Both Jethro Tull’s accountant and their manager Terry Ellis had recommended recording there to gain non-resident tax advantages – but this, says the band leader, made him feel uncomfortable. “And it turned out that there were no financial benefits anyway,” he adds. “I paid all of my UK taxes for that year, just as I have done all of my life. But we didn’t want to go back to Château d’Hérouville and Monaco was reasonably accessible. In the end we were pretty well-organised. I might have jokingly referred to my bandmates ‘goofing off’ because, unlike me, they had time to go for a drive down the coast. But the truth was I had a lot to do on my own anyway. It was a very productive time.”

Now at its 50th anniversary, Minstrel In The Gallery was a near- masterpiece. Melding Elizabethan classical elements with nuanced and complex folk music, it also saw Martin Lancelot Barre’s brawny electric guitar put the rock into baroque on the LP’s fine title track and wondrous, near-17-minute epic Baker St Muse. “We were trying to extend the boundaries – always pushing forward,” the guitarist told Louder in 2014. “We were also quite isolated from other influences, and that made us unique.”

Songwriting-wise, one might consider there are two Ian Andersons on Minstrel – there’s the starry-eyed balladeer of Requiem and Grace, then there’s the outsider figure and people-watcher who, on Baker St Muse, sketches the seedy underbelly of the northwest London locale he was living in when he wrote it. Vomiting drunks, Rubenesque prostitutes, furtive back-lane fumblings and a destitute old woman all figure; the song inhabits an earthy, almost Hogarthian world.

Minstrel was prog rock part-adjacent to Anderson’s famed codpiece and raincoat, then, not just the stuff of amour-gone-wrong or pastoral beauty; although there was plenty of that, too. Better yet, the intricacies of the musical arrangements kept pace with its extraordinary lyrical invention.

“Anything to do with Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson was automatically of a very high standard,” said Minstrel violinist and long-term collaborator Patrick Halling in 2012. And in February 1975, after the band had played five sold- out nights at the LA Forum, the world at large was hip to their ascendancy.

“Are they the world’s biggest band?” Melody Maker wondered. Difficult to imagine now, perhaps – but with Jethro Tull’s US concerts making pioneering use of giant video screens they playfully dubbed ‘Tullavision,’ their primacy, or near-primacy, had become very real.

The rather personal backdrop to Minstrel In The Gallery was Anderson’s divorce from first wife Jennie Franks the previous year. When she was a photography student, she’d co-written lyrics for the title track of 1971’s Aqualung. The imagery she’d used was reputedly inspired by photographs of homeless men she’d shot on a project with the Salvation Army in Victoria, London.

I was married to Jennie for a few years… There were no big fights or arguments. It just wasn’t going to work

Anderson’s break-up with Franks isn’t the easiest subject to broach when his wife of the last 48-odd years, Shona Learoyd, is sitting opposite him. But he explains, “I was married to Jennie for a few years before we very amicably split up. There were no big fights or arguments. It just wasn’t going to work.”

The divorce seems to be implicated in Minstrel’s gorgeous song of farewell, Requiem. Sentiment-wise, it’s akin to Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again, but there the similarity ends; Requiem is a more refined, tender and poetic thing. ‘Saw her face in the tear-drop black cab window / Fading in the traffic; watched her go’, sings Anderson wistfully. Was it about Franks?

“No,” he says. “I never really write about people I know. The characters in my songs are stereotypes, people I don’t know, or completely imaginary. I’ve always been against the idea of betraying any kind of confidence.”

And what of Requiem’s similarly classy companion piece One White Duck/0¹⁰ = Nothing At All, which is surely one of Anderson’s finest ballads? Some sources claim that it, too, was about his divorce. “No, not all,” he says calmly. “That’s wrong. Clearly the song is about the end of a relationship, but it wasn’t about the end of my then-relationship. The only personal aspect of it had to do with a childhood memory of mine. We had white plaster ducks on our living-room wall, and I can still see my mother sitting in a chair watching television with the ducks flying behind her. In the song those three ducks became one.”

The notion of not betraying confidences leads him to cite another instance: he says that, in 1972, he was approached to star alongside actress Carol White (best known for the famed 1966 BBC play Cathy Come Home) in the British drama film Made. “Basically, Carol White’s character enters into a relationship with a singer-songwriter, who then uses that relationship to write lyrics, which betray her intimacy,” Anderson says.

The film was that it involved getting naked in the bath with Carol White. I thought, ‘I’m not getting my kit off for the camera!’

“I turned it down saying, ‘Number one, I’m not an actor; and number two, it doesn’t suit my ethics.’ They said, ‘OK, that’s a shame – anyone else you can think of who might be suitable?’ I thought for about 10 seconds and said, ‘Yeah. Roy Harper!’”

Harper, the famed singer-songwriter behind such landmark prog folk albums as 1971’s Stormcock, was indeed cast in Made. And, for Anderson at least, what happened next was predictable. “Roy ends up having an affair with his co-star, of course! I remember him bringing Carol to my house, arriving late at night and asking if he could come in for a drink. After about half an hour of merriment I said, ‘Look, Roy. It’s getting late and I’m up early tomorrow – can we call it a night?’ He said, ‘No problem, Ian. I’ve just remembered Carol’s still outside in the Rolls-Royce!’

“Another reason I didn’t want to do the film was that it involved getting naked in the bath with Carol,” he adds. “I thought, ‘I’m not getting my kit off for the camera!’”

When Prog asks about Summerday Sands – a bonus track on later editions of Minstrel, and a brilliant story-song ornamented by Hammond’s exploratory bass and Barre’s Richard Thompson-like guitar fills – Anderson maintains that its lyric, too, were just a product of his imagination. Was it, though? It seems too perfect an evocation of a chance romantic encounter to be fiction, too rich in tell-tale clues (‘I gave her my raincoat…’). True, there’s no mention of the song’s protagonist seducing anyone via Bach’s flute sonata in E minor, but still…

“It’s just a nostalgic song, imagining some romantic liaison at some remote beach somewhere,” says Anderson. “It was recorded in Surrey, if I remember correctly, and Dee Palmer put some lovely strings on it at some point. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine Roy Harper doing, actually. Roy’s songwriting and guitar playing were quite an influence on me from about 1971 onwards.”

I said, ‘Look into my eyes while I ask you a question: Don’t you think I’d be the ugliest fucking woman you ever met in your life?!’

Remarkably, given their complexity and intricacy, several Minstrel tracks were first takes. That’s why you can hear Anderson counting in songs, and sometimes announcing their titles. Tull had done their homework, having rehearsed and finessed the material in the annexe of the Montreux Palace Hotel. “That was thanks to dear old Claude Nobs of Smoke On The Water fame,” says Anderson. “He’d been our promoter in Switzerland since 1969 and had pulled some strings.”

Anderson had completed the songwriting for Minstrel while renting a villa in “LA somewhere – one of the canyons,” ahead of an epic US tour. String arranger extraordinaire Dee Palmer, who’d soon become Tull’s full-time keyboardist, had visited Anderson to fine-tune arrangements. Although she left in 1980, the frontman still speaks of her with fondness and admiration.

“This was long before music notation software programs like Sibelius,” he explains. “It was fascinating for me as a non-academic musician to see how Dee worked so brilliantly with pencil and manuscript paper.”

Anderson wanders off-piste; but the story he relates demonstrates his loyalty to Palmer, who came out as transgender in 1998, and without whom Aqualung and Thick As A Brick would not be quite so special. “I’d come home from tour, a few months after that Italian fan club convention in 2001, and my wife told me the News Of The World were camped out near our farm, and that one of the journalists had come to our door demanding to speak to me. Shona had been very upset by the intrusion, so I immediately got in the car and went to confront them.”

The reporter had apparently had a tip-off that Anderson was transgender, had been wearing women’s clothing for years, and was changing his name to Dee. She was quite insistent and badgered him, repeatedly asking if he denied it. “I said, ‘I will not deny it, because that would sound disapproving, and I’m not disapproving.’”

Competing with Elton John to see who could do the most shows at Madison Square Garden never interested me

Finally, having had enough of the intrusion, he snapped. “I said, ‘Come closer. No, closer… Right, look into my eyes while I ask you a question: Don’t you think I’d be the ugliest fucking woman you ever met in your life?!’ At which point she scurried back to her colleagues and they all drove off!”

He guffaws at this, then continues: “About two miles down the road, I suddenly remembered that we sometimes called Palmer ‘Dee P.’ So I rang her on the spur of the moment and explained what had happened. She laughed and said, ‘How fortuitous that you’ve called, Ian. I’ve been meaning to get something off my increasingly ample chest…’ Apparently Dee had felt that way for many years, and when her wife died, that was the trigger for her to become Dee Palmer. Fair play to her.”

If there’s ultimately only so much Ian Anderson can remember about the making of Minstrel In The Gallery, it’s unsurprising. It was half a century ago; two weeks of relative serenity in an otherwise hectic year rammed with January-December live shows. Jethro Tull undertook two lengthy tours of North America and a similarly gruelling trek across Europe in 1975. Anderson appreciated the ravenous appetite for Tull’s music, but the massive arenas where the ‘Tullavison’ screens had become something of a necessity didn’t float his boat.

“I’m a theatre guy,” he says. “Maximum capacity is about 2000, the audience seated comfortably. That suits my style as a musician and performer. Competing with Elton John to see who could do the most shows at Madison Square Garden never interested me in the slightest.

Jeffrey was known for his elaborate, zebra-stripe suit… after that final show he set fire to it behind the venue in order to cleanse himself

“Even in 1972, by the end of a particularly arduous leg of the Thick As A Brick US tour, I was close to telling my then-manager Terry Ellis, ‘No more concerts, full-stop,’” Anderson adds. “Instead I said, ‘No more arenas, please!’ But then I relented, of course. There was a lot of pressure to meet the demand.”

Little wonder, then, that after the further touring demands of 1975, he felt like a minstrel in the gallery himself; a court jester, subject to forces and demands beyond his control. Indeed, Minstrel’s cover art – a tweaked version of an 1838 oil painting by Joseph Nash depicting minstrels performing before a raucous crowd/menagerie at Haddon Hall, Derbyshire – said as much.

“I felt we were in the public domain, but cut off, like entertainers,” Anderson told Classic Rock in 2020. “You were of a different caste; you were travelling salesmen, carnival people. The audience found you seductive and interesting, but you didn’t belong with them.”

As so often with bands on tour, this odd bubble of isolation bred mischief. At a 1975 show in Portland, Oregon, Tull brought a fake zebra onstage, whereupon bassist Jeffrey Hammond was seen to ‘extract’ two white balls from its rear end and make like a circus performer. “I bet you never thought you’d see us juggling zebra shit,” quipped Anderson.

Perhaps it was the striped beast’s ordure, or maybe it was just exhaustion, but after the final date of that tour –at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana on November 2 – Hammond quit the band and subsequently became a painter of landscapes.

“Jeffrey was known for his rather elaborate, zebra-stripe suit,” says Anderson, “and after that final show he set fire to it behind the venue in order to cleanse himself from his time in Jethro Tull. I thought he was just enjoying a theatrical moment and he’d come back to us after some proper rest. Sadly, he didn’t. None of us could persuade him to do so.”

But Tull were far from done, of course, and by November 19 they were back in Monte Carlo to work on 1976’s Too Old To Rock ’N’ Roll: Too Young To Die! on which John Glascock would play bass.

“Like I said,” says Anderson, “it was a very productive time.”

James McNair grew up in East Kilbride, Scotland, lived and worked in London for 30 years, and now resides in Whitley Bay, where life is less glamorous, but also cheaper and more breathable. He has written for Classic Rock, Prog, Mojo, Q, Planet Rock, The Independent, The Idler, The Times, and The Telegraph, among other outlets. His first foray into print was a review of Yum Yum Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington, and in many ways it’s been downhill ever since. His favourite Prog bands are Focus and Pavlov’s Dog and he only ever sits down to write atop a Persian rug gifted to him by a former ELP roadie. 

Somewhere in the south of France is a ski chalet called Chez Glycerine. It’s owned by producer Clive Langer, whose starry CV includes successful albums by Madness and Elvis Costello. But it was an entirely different band who inspired the name.

“He was losing it,” Bush singer and guitarist Gavin Rossdale says of the gaff in question. “Madness hadn’t put out a record for a minute and Elvis hadn’t written a hit since Shipbuilding.”

Salvation was at hand in the shape of Bush’s 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone, produced and engineered by Langer and his studio partner Alan Winstanley. That record went on to sell six million copies in the US, helped in part by the success of its stripped-down fourth single, Glycerine. Happily for Langer, the money he got from it meant he could keep his chalet.

“It saved it,” says Rossdale. “So he named it Glycerine. Not that I’d know, because he’s never fucking invited me.”

Glycerine was a striking left-field grunge ballad. Centred on Rossdale’s voice and bare-bones guitar, and augmented perfectly by unobtrusive but stirring strings, it was a moment of stark calm amid the knotty noise of Sixteen Stone.

Bush were an unlikely success story. Rossdale spent the second half of the 1980s kicking around the London scene in a series of unsuccessful bands, none of which reflected his own “more primitive” musical tastes. There had been flickers of interest from labels for various of those endeavours, but it always came to nothing.

After his latest group fell apart towards the end of 1991, Rossdale spent four months crashing on sofas in Los Angeles in an attempt to shake himself out of the rut he was in. “When I came back I had a different lust for life,” he says.

On his return he formed a band named Future Primitive with guitarist Nigel Pulsford, who he had met at a gig. By the time Future Primitive changed their name to Bush, the line-up was completed by drummer Robin Goodridge and former Transvision Vamp bassist Dave Parsons.

The others had no interest in writing songs, so the job fell to Rossdale. He was living in a basement flat with four other people when he began writing Glycerine.

“The main thing I remember is standing at my dresser,” he says. “I put my cassette recorder on it and started that song. Sometimes you get songs that just fall out of you. There’s probably some esoteric way to explain it. I don’t know about that, but it’s really beautiful, just having this focus on your craft and getting out of the way of yourself.”

He found the process surprisingly easy. Suspiciously so, in fact. The first time he played it to the rest of the band was to check he hadn’t inadvertently ripped off a song by someone else.

“We were in this shitty rehearsal room, and I said: ‘Listen, I wrote this but I think it might be someone else’s song,’” he says. “So I began it, and halfway through I look up and no one’s listening. ‘Fuck’s sake, can you just listen for a second…’ And it was Nigel who said: ‘No, it sounds like yours.’”

Like the rest of Sixteen Stone, Glycerine was recorded at production duo Langer and Winstanley’s Westside Studios in Holland Park, London. At one point, Brian Eno was working in the next room.

“We had a few dinners with him,” says Rossdale. “He’d give the most brilliant lectures. You’d ask him one question and he’d be off talking about spheres or the element of chance in music.”

As Rossdale remembers it, the version of Glycerine that he recorded for the album wasn’t radically different to the one he’d written at home. There was talk of putting drums on it, but the idea was abandoned, leaving the frontman to play and sing without a rhythm to anchor him.

“It was weird, no drums, really tricky,” he says. “But I did it and it took two takes to finish it from top to bottom.”

The finished track wasn’t completely unadorned. Decorative but restrained strings were added to add a subtle emotional kick. “Nigel’s father had passed away during the making of that record,” Rossdale says. “It’s obviously difficult for anyone to lose a parent, but it happening in the middle of realising everything you’ve dedicated your life to is terrible. He wrote those beautiful strings for his father, and they really add to the authenticity of the song.”

What Glycerine is about isn’t immediately obvious. “I think my lyrics are like my thought processes,” he says. “There’s a degree of ‘scattered’ and ‘fragmented’ to them. I admire people who write chronological stories, but it doesn’t get the best out of me. But there’s no line in that song that doesn’t have truth or veracity to it.”

Still, lyrics such as ‘Everything gone white, everything’s grey/Now you’re here, now you’re away’ hint at a relationship that’s gone south. Rossdale said in 1996 that it was inspired by “a girlfriend of mine named Suze” (presumed to be Suze DiMarchi of the Australian band Baby Animals). Today he’s politely cagey about naming names.

“I had long term girlfriends, they all fucked me over in different ways,” he says with a smile. “Likewise, I haven’t always been… [tailing off]. We’ve all been very //human// to each other.”

Whatever its subject, Glycerine became Bush’s biggest US single yet when it was released in November 1995, reaching No.28. Sixteen Stone had already sailed passed five million sales by that point. Today, Glycerine is Bush’s most streamed track, the modern measure of a song’s success, and remains a fixture in the band’s set.

“I don’t have any qualms about playing it,” he says. “I’ve never once played it with any degree of anything other than ‘That song helped give me all this…’ I know there’s the whole Radiohead, Meeting People Is Easy thing [the 1999 documentary that found Thom Yorke and co. recoiling from stardom] but, fuck me, if you’ve experienced failure and rejection, how can you possibly be anything but elated?”

A vinyl reissue of Sixteen Stone is out now via Craft Recordings.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

When Richie Kotzen was 12 years old, he had two baseball T-shirts that he would wear to school. One was a Black Sabbath shirt with an image of the Grim Reaper holding a crystal ball and the number 666 on the front, the other was an Iron Maiden The Number Of The Beast shirt.

“I was a Maiden fanatic,” he says, some 43 years later. “When I’d wake up for school, I’d put that record on and get dressed. It would be [solemnly intoning the intro to TNOTB’s title track] ‘Woe to you, oh earth and sea…’ echoing around the house. Luckily my parents were cool with it. So this whole thing with Adrian, sometimes I gotta smack myself around the back of the head to realise I’m not dreaming.”

Adrian is Adrian Smith, longtime Iron Maiden guitarist and one of Kotzen’s childhood heroes. For the past few years the two men have been partners in Smith/Kotzen. It’s a chance for the former to step outside the musical boundaries of the day job, and for both of them to show off their talent as singers as well as guitarists. Their second album, Black Light/White Noise, is a bluesy, soulful modern rock record with a charge of electricity running through it.

They’re not quite the Odd Couple, but they are an unlikely pairing. Smith is a 68-year-old Londoner, a veteran of one of the world’s biggest metal bands. Kotzen, 12 years younger, is a former teenage guitar prodigy who emerged in the late 80s as part of American label Shrapnel Records’ stable of shredders. Smith is friendly and modest, not afraid to talk about his insecurities as a musician. Kotzen is talkative and confident, with a brilliantly manic cackle. Smith is an avid angler, Kotzen is… well, not so much.

“I’ve watched Adrian fish from the shore, and I get the impression that Adrian does his best work alone. I don’t think he wants me sitting in the boat next to him, talking his ear off while he’s casting a line,” says Kotzen, the UN levels of diplomacy not quite disguising the suspicion that he’d rather gnaw off his own toes than step into a pair of waders.

But they have more in common than what separates them. Both men are crack guitarists, obviously, but both have great, soulful voices too: Smith’s smoky and restrained, Kotzen’s powerful and acrobatic. It’s a combination that works well, if Black Light/White Noise is anything to go by.

“Having two guitarists could go horribly wrong,” says Smith, “but it’s about chemistry and personality.”

They didn’t meet so much as stumble into each other’s orbit. Kotzen was hanging out at swanky Hollywood hotel the Sunset Marquis a decade or so ago when he was introduced to a woman who turned out to be Smith’s wife Nathalie, a sometime LA resident. Introductions were made, and Kotzen was invited to one of the get-togethers the Smiths would throw.

“Most of my friends are musicians,” says Smith. “The first party, there was Richie, Taylor Hawkins, and Rob Trujillo from Metallica, having a few drinks and talking. I said: ‘Come and have a look at my music room.’ So we went in there and just started playing – Bad Company, Stevie Ray Vaughan…”

Smith and Kotzen would jam whenever they could, but it came from Nathalie Smith.

“Adrian’s wife was the one,” says Kotzen. “She said: ‘You guys need to get together and try to write a few songs.’ And that’s what we did. And the people we played them for liked them. They said keep going. So we did.”

Many of those early songs were on the pair’s 2021 self-titled debut album and the subsequent four-track EP Better Days. Kotzen insists that there were no ambitions beyond just making music they like.

“Expectations are a bad thing,” he says. “When you do something with the attitude ‘I expect to get this out of it’, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. I wanted nothing from it, but now it exists, and I like the fact people get to hear it.”

Adrian Smith was surrounded by music long before he joined Iron Maiden. His mother played piano and his dad used to sing and play banjo and mouth organ. “We’d always have sing-songs,” he says. Like any kid growing up in the 60s, The Beatles soundtracked his childhood. “I had the Beatles wig,” he says. “I used to jump up on the table and pretend I was John Lennon.”

His young mind was rewired by the wave of heavy rock bands that emerged in the late 60s and early 70s. “I heard Deep Purple and Sabbath, and it was life-changing,” he says. But he didn’t pick up a guitar until his mid-teens, and even then it was to avoid having to follow his dad into the painting and decorating trade.

He joined his first band, eventually christened Urchin, alongside his friend and future Iron Maiden bandmate Dave Murray.

“I wanted to get in with Dave, so I said: ‘I’ll sing,’” he says now. “I had no idea if I could sing or not, but I did it, and I learned to play guitar as I went along. I was terrified when I first went on stage, but I thought: ‘If this is what you want to do, mate, you’d better get your arse up there.’”

Smith put in the legwork with Urchin, playing gigs to a handful of people and earning 25 quid a pop. They were hardworking but largely unsuccessful. Not that it mattered. “As long as we had money for beer and food we were happy,” he says.

Everything changed for Smith in 1980 when his old mate Dave Murray invited him to join Iron Maiden. Six thousand miles away, Richie Kotzen had heard about this exciting young British metal band, and was all over them.

“My first rock concert was Iron Maiden,” he says. “Number Of The Beast, Piece Of Mind, backtracking to Killers… I was a massive fan.”

Unlike the largely self-taught Smith, the American had his first guitar lesson when he was seven. But like his bandmate, Kotzen started out as a singer and a guitarist. “I was always someone who wrote music with vocals,” he says.

That changed when he signed to San Francisco-based shred-guitar label Shrapnel when he was 19. “I was this hotshot guitar kid from the Philadelphia/New Jersey area,” he recalls, “and I realised there was this label putting out guitar players, and every guitar player that ended up on the label was really celebrated. So I started writing and recording instrumental music to get a record deal with Shrapnel. After I made that first record [self-titled, in 1989] I realised: ‘Now I’m in the game, I don’t really like instrumental music much.’ So I went back to singing, and started taking that seriously.”

Vocals or not, Kotzen was part of a generation of young shred guitarists either revolutionising the instrument or simply wanking off in public (“Hey!” he says mock-indignantly at the suggestion it’s the latter). For Smith, the shredders represented something different.

“I found it intimidating,” he admits. “Guys like Richie and Tony MacAlpine and Blues Saraceno, they’re way beyond you technically. But I’ve always been like that. I remember Maiden’s manager sitting down with us in the mid-eighties and saying: ‘We’re going to tour Europe this year. Michael Schenker’s opening for us.’ I was like: [alarmed] ‘Jesus. Really? I’ve got to go on after Michael Schenker?!’ That caused me a few sleepless nights.”

Both Smith and Kotzen have subsequently taken very different but similarly winding paths to get to this point. Smith quit Maiden in 1989 to focus on his own band, Adrian Smith And Project (in which he once again took on the vocals) and, later, Psycho Motel, before rejoining Maiden at the end of the 90s. Kotzen did a two-year stretch in Poison in the early 90s, and replaced fellow Shrapnel refugee Paul Gilbert in hard rock survivors Mr. Big around the turn of the millennium. He’s released a steady stream of albums as both a solo artist and, more recently, frontman with hard rock supergroup The Winery Dogs.

A decade or so may separate them in age, but Smith and Kotzen are the product of the same pre-internet era. White Noise, the first single from the new album, is a blazing rocker that takes a dim view of certain aspects of modern technology. ‘Late in the evening, I’m watchin’ my feed, I’m fillin’ my eyes with nothin’ but greed,’ Smith howls. ‘The frequency cracking drives me out of my head, loosely distracted by all they said,’ roars Kotzen. It’s a great song, but they sound like a couple of grumpy Victorian gentlemen shaking their fists at a new-fangled motor car as it splutters past.

“It’s the modern way of life,” Smith says of the song’s subject. “People on their mobiles, people spending hours and hours on the internet, getting bombarded with this information. It’s kind of like brainwashing.”

That’s ironic, given that the internet has become home to the modern guitar hero. Where it used to be albums and live shows that gave musicians of Smith and Kotzen’s generation a platform to display their talents, these days Instagram is full of dazzling young hotshots doing things on guitar that their forebears could only dream of or couldn’t even imagine.

“They’re at a level that is far, far beyond where I was as a teenager,” says Kotzen. “It’s incredible to watch. Back in the old days, to learn a lick you had to listen to a record over and over, putting your finger on it and playing it back. Now I can watch George Benson play a lick a hundred times on YouTube and work out what he’s doing.”

Do you miss the romance of the way it used to be? He laughs loudly.

“The human nature is to romanticise the struggle,” he says. “My attitude is fuck the struggle, let me get there before anybody else.”

Technology’s relentless forward march can’t change everything. A live show is still a live show, even if Smith/Kotzen’s own debut run of shows, in 2022, gave at least one of them the fear.

“I had anxiety,” says Smith. “I hadn’t sung on stage for twenty years, since I had my solo projects in the 1990s. But I just had to get up there and do it. And at least I had someone to share vocals with. Carrying a whole show on your own is hard.”

Given their individual success – Smith as guitarist with Iron Maiden, Kotzen with various solo and band projects on the go at any one time – neither of them needs to do this. But they do it all the same.

“What makes this work is that it’s truly authentic,” says Kotzen. “There’s nothing here that’s forced or being done with any sort of agenda.”

“Hopefully this’ll grow and get out to more people,” Smith adds. “And if it doesn’t happen it’s not the end of the world. We’ll still do it because we enjoy it.”

Black Light, White Noise is out now via BMG.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

Singer-songwriter, drummer and Gizmo co-inventor Kevin Godley met his soon-to-be creative partner Lol Creme at art school in the 60s. They played in numerous bands together, including Hotlegs, which eventually became 10cc. They left in 1977, became Godley & Creme, and were soon elevated from pop stars to in-demand pop video directors.

Godley tells Prog about the, ahem, consequences of the duo’s creative career, the recently released 11-CD set Parts Of The Process – The Complete Godley & Creme, and that time he was mistaken for Paper Lace’s drummer.

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Art-school alumni, one-time prog pop star, songwriter, video and filmmaker, environmentalist: Kevin Godley has, for decades, confounded expectations in pursuit of what might be called his vision – though he’d probably baulk at the idea of being a visionary. At 79, he shows no signs of slowing down; he’s just completed work on an orchestral piece with American classical composer John Califra entitled America WTF? “It’s about the current political situation and divide in America,” he says. “It’s very dark.”

He’s also busy working on a musical, trying to finance two screenplays (both of which he had a hand in), and joining a video games company. “I’m not one of those people that will retire to the country and paint. I’m not that guy.”

We’re here to talk about the expansive new box set navigating Godley’s musical collaboration with former longtime writing partner Lol Creme. Parts Of The Process charts their musical arc post-10cc from the great triple disc/musical folly (argue among yourselves) Consequences – a concept piece that’s as much about divorce as it is meteorological disaster – to their final glimmering pop farewell, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky. However, our conversation touches on everything from his former band and writing with comedy giant Peter Cook to helping to pioneer the music video revolution and almost working with Bob Dylan.

Consequences reminds us of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell album. He was in thrall to making music with the Synclavier, while on Consequences you and Lol were intent on using the Gizmotron (Gizmo) device you invented. Would that be close to the truth?

Yes, we didn’t really get to use it very often in the context of the band. It just didn’t sit for whatever reason. We’d used it on one or two tracks. We kind of created this thing, conceived this thing and we thought, “Shit, what are we going to do with it?” I mean, we didn’t even know what it was capable of.

Not many musicians invent a piece of machinery in their downtime, let alone a Gizmo.

It was an actual piece of machinery, true. We’d always wanted to work with an orchestra in some capacity. But to actually do that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, and they’re not cheap and they break for tea – stuff like that. There were Mellotrons around but we didn’t love them, and they kept breaking down.

On a good day the Gizmo sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw

We were looking at the guitar thinking, “This is a stringed instrument; why can it not be bowed in some way?” So, we sort of gaffer-taped Lol’s Stratocaster to the wall and. put an eraser on the end of an electric drill and held it against the guitar strings. A bit of a Leatherface vibe to it: it nearly sawed the thing in half! But for about four seconds there was a sound that was vaguely reminiscent of a violin. And we thought, “Ooh!”

So you made and marketed them.

Yep – John McConnell from the Manchester College of Science and Technology helped us develop the prototype. It was this bunch of wheels, sort of Da Vinci-ish, though not quite up there with the helicopter. It was John’s prototype that we made Consequences with. Then they were mass produced in the US by a company called Musitronics – but the timing was atrocious. It was the beginning of cheap synths, and it was very vulnerable to weather change and stuff like that. On a good day it sounded like an orchestra, and on a bad day it sounded like a chainsaw.

In 1976 – post How Dare You! – you and Lol took the Gizmo into 10cc’s Strawberry Studios to start work on Consequences. Were you still in 10cc at this point?

Yeah; it was the end of the album cycle and tour, but we were still in the band. We had some downtime – three weeks in Strawberry, as I recall – and the potential of working the Gizmo got us excited again.

Weren’t you excited by 10cc any more?

The problem with being in any band is everything becomes rote after a while. You lose the spark; it’s like, ‘Oh God, there’s another tour coming, there’s another album coming. We’ve got to write another bunch of songs.’ We were looking for something fresh. Our attention span was very short.

You were smoking your own body weight in dope and recording through the night. What was your mindset like at the time?

The label thought, ’We better get a responsible adult in to tame them.’ And the responsible adult was Peter Cook!

I suppose it was like – not a vanity project exactly, but something to test the capabilities of what we’d done. But there was no master plan. The first week or so was, “Let’s plug it in and see what comes out,” because we’d never really used it other than on Old Wild Men [from Sheet Music]. At one point, we created a tape loop – Phil Manzanera’s idea, as I recall. We put a bump in the tape and it sounded like a soprano opera singer. That was a revelation. But mainly, it was fun again. Then, as you know, it turned into a monster.

When did you both decide that you’d had enough of 10cc?

It wasn’t really one moment. There were a few meetings had because the label had been in touch. “It’s time for you to make a new album, boys.” Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman had started writing songs for it. And we just didn’t have a taste for it. We were too into this.

They played us something – it might have been The Things We Do For Love – and we just thought it was beige. We’d had this pre-production meeting about the next album, and it went something like, “We need one of your long, weird ones, a slushy one, and we need some humour.” I was, like, “Hang on a minute – we don’t work to order.”

Prior to that, it was all about spending a certain amount of time in the studio and doing what we were capable of doing. We’d been relatively successful by going in the opposite direction. That’s what I enjoyed more than anything else. It was becoming a day job: we were taking care of business, but we didn’t take care of each other. We might have gone away and decided to come back if we’d had the time to stretch out and do what we wanted for a while, but that wasn’t allowed to happen. Four blokes. Four albums. Four years. That was it.”

Going back to Consequences, you and Lol decamped to the residential Manor Studios for three months, with Peter Cook in tow to continue with the recording sessions. Of all the people…

I don’t think he was there for the full three, but we had a lot of fun. I have this suspicion that by then the record label was thinking, “What the hell are these two idiots up to? We’ve agreed to release a record, but they’re spending more than the value of our country on this project. So, we better get a responsible adult in to tame them.” And the responsible adult they chose was Peter Cook!

They didn’t know there was a live mic open. We heard: ’What the fuck was that?’ ’No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?’

It was a fascinating time. There were maybe two or three hours in the day where we were in sync. We worked at night and Peter, obviously, worked in the day. His concept was the divorced couple in the story; we’d provide the music and react to what the other was doing, but we’d rise at lunchtime, and we’d have a few hours together before Peter would start drinking. We were enjoying every second – that’s not to say we had a clue about what we were doing.

And there was no outside influence or producer to help guide you, tap on the studio glass and ask what the hell you were doing?

We were those producers! I remember there was an instance very early on when we were still at Strawberry. The managers of 10cc at the time came to hear what we were up to, so we played them the first 15 minutes that we had. We left them to it and they were saying all the right things – “Wow, extraordinary, amazing!”

We went out to have a cigarette, and they carried on talking in the studio, but what they didn’t know was that there was a live mic open. And we heard: “What the fuck was that?” “No fucking clue. Are we going to sell that?” The complete opposite reaction – but very managerial!

Among the dialogue and storytelling tangents, there are songs like Five O’ Clock In The Morning, which would have fitted perfectly on any of the first four 10cc records.

It was part of who we were; it’s in our DNA, so when we decided to write some actual songs, it sounded like us.

That album and a lot of your 10cc work is very visual. Is that a part of how you’re built too?

I think everything we ever wrote was visual. The only tools we had were audio tools; we didn’t mix with film people. We didn’t have a way into film, but we were art school trained. So there was always something bubbling underneath, but we did it in sound. I think we even called Consequences an “ear movie” at the time.

We’d become audio hermits. We weren’t aware of what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the polar opposite of what we were doing

I remember going outside to record windscreen wipers on the car in the rain – I forget for which song, but we were dedicated to getting it right. I’m in my car and the windscreen wipers were going, and it’s pissing rain and we had this mic outside. And there’s the guy on the pavement just looking at me, and it’s night time, and eventually he plucks up the courage and taps on my window. I wind it down and he leans in and goes: “Excuse me, are you the drummer from Paper Lace?” We got that on tape!

Lol says you were personally heartbroken when the album died a commercial death. Is heartbroken too big a word?

No – I was, because something happened to me maybe about three-quarters of the way through making it. I was very aware that we’d become audio hermits. We weren’t remotely aware of the outside world, what was stirring: punk rock, the Sex Pistols, the exact polar opposite of what we were doing. And when things like that happen, you must be aware of them. You can’t just keep going blindly and deathly forward, because it doesn’t really make sense.

I learned a lesson from that, but we were too far into it to start from scratch – forget about it. Then we heard they were going to release it as a three-album box set, selling for the extortionate amount of £12 quid in 1977 [approximately £70 today]. It was so ill-conceived; it did us a huge amount of damage. It fucked us up. We both put a huge amount of work into it, and no one liked it. No one understood it , and that ain’t going to help a career. It got slated in the press. We were the audio version of the movie Heaven’s Gate.

Did it really cost a million pounds in today’s money?

I don’t know how much it cost. It couldn’t have been cheap. Everyone was in and there was no way out. Peter Cook – even just that cost them a pretty penny. That’s for damn sure.

Remarkably, a mere two years later, the label fronted you cash again for something that couldn’t be quantified at the time: a music video.

I know; we weren’t a touring band. We had a single coming out, we were always a bit of an anomaly for the label. They didn’t quite know what to do with us, particularly after Consequences. The album was Freeze Frame and the lead single was Englishman In New York, and we thought the only way to get seen or heard was to do a short film or something. So we came up with a storyboard and the label loved it. We didn’t know there was going to be such a thing as the video industry or indeed videos. Nobody did then.

They got us a director called Derek Burbidge [The Police, AC/DC] and his job was to make our vision, such as it was, come to life – which he did, admirably, and during that one day of shooting and the subsequent day of editing, a huge light bulb switched on above our heads. We thought, “Fuck, this is brilliant – we could do this!” I even liked being out front in my red shirt and my swish suit, Mr Cool. When I looked at myself I thought, “Fuck off!” but at least I was trying.

Then in 1980, Steve Strange and Visage approached you about making something for them for their Fade To Grey single.

Yeah, our albums were slowly ticking over, but we still weren’t touring; we weren’t doing anything. They wanted a video because they couldn’t get on Top Of The Pops or Whistle Test, so they made a film as a stopgap. People would play the film and liked what they were seeing, but there was no infrastructure in place; no video commissioners.

It was all word-of-mouth, musician to musician – a trust thing. So we were lucky. We were at the beginning of something; we’d never been in that place before. We filmed it, helped do the edit, learning all the time. Then we began to be the go-to people for a while. We had this reputation. And we got to do some really interesting things.

You must have had so much creative energy at that point. You did more than 50 music videos in the 80s for The Police, Duran Duran, George Harrison Lou Reed and others, and yet you were still making music.

Orson Welles was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance

I remember us putting out Under Your Thumb [from 1981’s Ismism], and we didn’t have any hope for it at all as a single. And we were shooting a video for Toyah Willcox [Thunder In The Mountains] on an airfield somewhere. A production guy came running up and said the single had just gone in the top 50. I was like, “Hang on a minute – how do we deploy the two things that we do?” But it was the same stuff. It just came out of two different taps. We turn this one on when we’re doing film. We turn this one on when we’re doing audio. It was just a natural thing, and those two things had somehow matured together.

You ended your creative partnership with Lol after arguably one of the best albums of your career, 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky – which earned you an unlikely fan.

Dave Stewart got my wife and I in to see Bob Dylan at Hammersmith Apollo and we got to stand backstage and watch him. At the end of part one, after wowing everyone with Maggie’s Farm or something, he walked straight up to me and said, “You still making videos? Want to make one for me?” And then walked off. We met him at a hotel a few days later and he said, “You did a video where people were going through each other. Coming forward and going back,” and I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. It was A Little Piece of Heaven, which must have been on MTV all of two times – and he’d seen it! We never got to work together, but what a moment.

Did Cry – the haunting video and the equally haunting song – feel like the culmination of both of your creative taps?

Yes. People still want to talk about that video to me; it was a real moment in time. Elbow got me to recreate it for their Gentle Storm single – you know the crossfading faces? That was plan B; that was never meant to be the video. We wanted Torvill and Dean to skate to it, but they couldn’t do it when we needed them. We had to come up with something else sharpish, and that was what we came up with. Even after we’d shot it, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with it until we got into the edit suite. Then we started dissolving between faces and that’s when the penny dropped, and it got really interesting.

What’s the best 10cc album, and why is it Sheet Music?

Because we were a little bit more knowledgeable. It’s 1974; it’s our second album, so we’re a little bit more sophisticated – but we didn’t know it all then. Which from that point on we kind of did. We kind of knew who our audience was and what they might want.

Something that Orson Welles once said when he was asked about how he’d made Citizen Kane. He said one of the most important ingredients was ignorance: “I didn’t know how to do things, so I figured that anything I thought of would be possible.” Which he made happen. Not only by doing things like that, but thinking like that. That’s how you move a medium and the technology that drives it forward. If it’s too easy and too obvious, what’s the point?

Queens of the Stone Age have shared a trailer for Alive in the Catacombs, a film documenting their performance in the world-famous Catacombs of Paris, the final resting place for millions of French citizens, interred in the 1700s.

The Los Angeles band’s performance in the eerie tunnels beneath the French capital represented the fulfilment of a long-held dream for QOTSA frontman Josh Homme, who first visited the extraordinary location almost 20 years ago. No band had ever before been granted permission to play in the Catacombs, which made the group’s stripped-back set, augmented by a three-piece string section, genuinely historic.

A press statement for the film, which will be available to view from June 5, reads: “Every aesthetic decision, every choice of song, every configuration of instruments… absolutely everything was planned and played with deference to the Catacombs- from the acoustics and ambient sounds – dripping water, echoes and natural resonance – to the darkly atmospheric lighting tones that enhance the music. Far from the sound-insulated confines of the studio or the comfort of onstage monitors, Alive in the Catacombs sees the band not only rise to this challenge, but embrace it.”

Josh Homme says, “We’re so stripped down because that place is so stripped down, which makes the music so stripped down, which makes the words so stripped down… It would be ridiculous to try to rock there. All those decisions were made by that space. That space dictates everything, it’s in charge. You do what you’re told when you’re in there.”

He adds, “If you’re ever going to be haunted, surrounded by several million dead people is the place. I’ve never felt so welcome in my life.”

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Queens of the Stone Age will play their first shows since summer 2024 next month.

Their US mini-tour kicks off with a pair of shows at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston, on June 10 and 11. The band will travel to Europe to play shows in July and August, including an August 20 Dublin gig at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and a headline performance at the Rock N Roll Circus at Sheffield’s Don Valley Bowl on August 27.

Cancelling shows last summer, the band released a statement saying, “QOTSA regret to announce the cancellation and/or postponement of all remaining 2024 shows. Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care throughout the remainder of the year. Josh and the QOTSA family are so thankful for your support and the time we were able to spend together over the last year. Hope to see you all again in 2025.”

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.