Author: wamdines

Formed in the early 80s but languishing in obscurity after the tragic death of their frontman, Hell were one of metal’s great fan. But in the early 2010s, acclaimed producer and superfan Andy Sneap helped resurrect the band, introducing them to a new generation of metal fans.

In today’s crowded marketplace – where genres and scenes constantly divide amoeba-like into increasingly narrow entities – a genuine sense of the unique is sadly something of a rare commodity within music, metal included. Indeed, such is the proliferation of bands that it doesn’t even seem to be an issue anymore – if a new band sounds like another older band, who cares – they’re just paying homage, right?

But then, every once in a while, you discover a group who are so fresh that they turn all your preconceptions on their head. Hell are such a band. Watch the video for On Earth As It Is In Hell, or, better still, see them live, and initially the gloriously unsubtle spectacle is so over the top, so theatrical and so unlike anything else out there, that you’ll be wondering what it is you’re witnessing.

Few obvious points of reference exist, yet its heart is also quintessentially and undeniably heavy metal, combining dashes of Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate and even Rush with a sense of melodrama that makes King Diamond look shy and retiring. And the strangest thing about this groundbreaking outfit? They’re not even a new band. Far from it; last year’s debut album Human Remains was some two and half decades overdue, and all the more poignant for it. Indeed, behind Hell’s larger than life music is a story of tragedy, obscurity and resurrection.

Formed 30 years ago, the seminal five-piece managed to carve quite a name for themselves during the early 80s with their theatrical and progressive take on the heavy metal template, but a number of setbacks – most obviously the collapse of their record label and mounting debts – eventually led the band to split before they could release a full length.

Sadly, this would play a part in the suicide of their distinctive guitarist, vocalist and frontman David Halliday soon after. So it was that the group were consigned to the history books, with only a handful of legendary demos as proof of their existence.

But that was not to be end of the tale. During their brief time together they had made a fan and friend in a young guitarist named Andy Sneap, who’d go on to become guitarist for legendary UK thrashers Sabbat, and a producer for Megadeth, Machine Head, Cradle of Filth, Arch Enemy, Dimmu Borgir and many other big hitters within the metal scene.

“I originally met these guys when I was 12 years old,” Andy recalls. “I started having guitar lessons from David Halliday, and then saw Hell about three months after that. I didn’t even know he was in a band and I was totally blown away by them. I think the only other band I’d seen was Iron Maiden and I was as impressed with Hell as I was with Maiden – even though it was in a pub it was as big a show! I became very good friends with them and, if I’m brutally honest, with Sabbat we ripped a lot of Hell stuff off. Not intentionally, but if something is that much of an influence it just comes out on your playing.”

Despite their close relationship in the early 80s, Andy would lose touch with the members of Hell following their split, just as they in turn would lose touch with one another as their lives took them in different directions. Guitarist Kev Bower, in particular, would prove highly elusive, spending much of his working life in the US – in fact, it was only a chance move by his son that led to the various parties meeting once more and reuniting the long-dormant band.

“I went through a really messy divorce which resulted in me losing contact with my son for five years,” Kev explains, “and when we were finally reunited, this little chubby kid had grown up into this six-foot, tattooed metalhead. As we started spending time together again he would play me these bands he liked – Trivium, Exodus, Nevermore, Opeth – and going through the booklets I saw all these albums had been produced by this Andy Sneap guy. I had no idea that Andy had gone on to become a producer and told my son, ‘Bloody hell, this kid was at the front of every show we played, we were his heroes!’ He didn’t believe me though, he thought it was some dad bullshit, and actually made contact with Andy to find out if it was true. Of course it was, and Andy was delighted as he’d spent all these years trying to find me!”

“Kev came down to the studio,” explains Andy, picking up the story, “as he was always interested in the recording side of things, and straight away I put a guitar in his hands and said, ‘Play that riff, I want to hear this song’, ’cos all I had was the cassettes, the demos for the album. I’d been listening to these songs for 20 years trying to remember how good it was live, and I just said, ‘For shits and giggles, why don’t we record some of these songs? I have a studio, we have weekends off, we can do it just for a laugh.’ That was four years ago and we slowly began piecing this album together three songs at a time, in blocks, and we ended up with this album recorded.”

Finding the band’s members was only the start of the challenge, and making Hell a working band once more was no small task, particularly since only one guy had continued playing his instrument in the intervening years.

“It’s funny,” laughs Andy, “when they knew me I was this blond kid on the front row of every show who used to follow them round. Now I’m the one cracking the whip and telling them what to do. It’s never easy and I’m just as guilty – when Sabbat stopped I wasn’t playing as much, I focused on being a producer.”

“It’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and the worst,” smiles Kev. “We do these shows in front of huge numbers of people and you’re a rock star for the weekend, then it’s back to the day job, so it’s a bit of a cleft stick at the moment. But coming back to the band is just awesome. I’d been out of the music business for the best part of 25 years and not played for 25 years, so this is a dream come true!”

A true labour of love, the three remaining original members (completed by drummer Tim Bowler and bassist Tony Speakman) worked with Andy – who both produced and played guitar – crafting an album that stayed as close as possible to the true spirit of the original band, and its sadly departed frontman.

“I’ve never been better prepared to produce an album than this one,” says Andy. “I’ve been listening to the songs for 25 years! When Dave died he left me everything; his guitars, amps, the rights to the songs in his will. I’ve always felt I had to do something with this and carry it forward, and having this opportunity to get his songs out there… it was something I had to do for him and his family really. I’ve really gone to a big effort financially and personally to make sure it was all done properly, all the publishing has gone to his next of kin and we made an effort to include him as much as possible on the record. In the middle of The Devil’s Deadly Weapon we lifted his voice from the demos, on the intro to Macbeth that’s him, the ‘bring out your dead’ part of Plague and Fyre, that’s him from a live show, so I’ve really gone in and tried to put him in on the album as much as we could.”

Of course, a gaping hole still existed within the group in terms of a vocalist. Initially Sabbat/Skyclad vocalist Martyn Walkier took on the role, but when that didn’t work out the group accidentally found their replacement in Kev’s brother David, who’d come in to the studio to do a few backing vocals. It’d turn out to be the final piece of the puzzle and David’s superb voice and incomparable stage presence has provided a definite figurehead for the group’s live performance.

An actor by trade who’s worked on high-profile UK TV shows (Casualty, The Bill, Heartbeat, Coronation Street), his dynamic performance brings a unique sense of drama that the band have built upon in their stageshow, making use of elaborate stage props to create a theatrical experience. The songs themselves naturally stand out from the crowd for the simple reason that they were written back in the early 80s and updated by a band who – Andy aside – are largely unaware of the last 30 years of metal history.

“It’s so important to try and do something original and I don’t see that in metal nowadays,” ponders Andy. “In the 80s you’d put a record on and you’d know immediately who it was because every band sounded and looked a bit different. Now it’s gone the other way, you have to fit into a genre, you have to have that haircut where the wind is blowing from one side. Unfortunately, we don’t have hair – it blew a little too hard I think!” he laughs. “But it is important, I don’t think we’re like anyone else. There’s a quirkiness to Hell which is so original and uniquely British really, with the little bit of tongue in cheek humour, it’s got a charm and I always liked that about the band. Germany’s got Rammstein and I’d like to think we’re putting some of that similar theatricality into our music too.”

“One of the great things about this band is we have a Grammy award-winning producer, a trained Shakespearian actor and I’m a carpenter,” chuckles Kev. “That’s my trade, so all the stage set is my work. The latest thing we’ve done is kit Dave out with a pair of four-foot stilts. He’ll be there as Pan and be 10 feet tall with the horns going on. One thing this band is definitely not short of is ideas. There are so many bands who just wander onstage in jeans and play, which is cool, but it’s never been enough for us, it’s not what we’re all about. Our objective is to entertain and I think people appreciate that.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 233, June 2012

Led by singer, guitarist and chief songwriter Jeff Lynne, ELO – or Electric Light Orchestra, to give them their full name – bestrode the 1970s like a bearded, frizzy-haired giant before splitting in 1986. In 2012, Lynne returned his old band once more with Mr Blue Sky, a solo album that found him re-recording several ELO hits. When Classic Rock sat down with him in London, he was ready to look back over his stellar career.

The hair is smaller, the beard neater, but those impenetrable sunglasses still give him away. In a changing world, there’s something reassuringly unchanged about Jeff Lynne, the one-time composer and producer of symphonic rock ensemble Electric Light Orchestra. Dressed in an understated black jacket and jeans, Lynne, a famously private man, peers out of the window of his chosen venue, a smart boutique hotel near London’s posh Sloane Square. “Most people don’t know about this place,” he says appreciatively.

Forget punk-rock revisionism and critical scorn (“Electric Light Orchestra are technically adept, cynically presented froth,” carped Rolling Stone). ELO ruled the 1970s, with multi-platinum albums such as Out Of The Blue, and US and UK Top 20 hits with the likes of Livin’ Thing, Sweet Talkin’ Woman and Turn To Stone. In 1978 there was no one bigger. That year, ELO undertook a record-grossing US tour with a spaceship-style stage set that pumped out 525,000 watts of light and required 13 trucks to transport it from city to city. ELO were just as big in the studio: hiring 40-piece string sections and 30-piece choirs to recreate the sounds inside Jeff Lynne’s head. With their huge choruses, deluxe production and everyman lyrics, they were once likened to what The Beatles would have sounded like had they been beer drinkers instead of dope smokers.

It was apt, then, that George Harrison asked Lynne to produce an album for him in 1986. “And after that, everything changed,” Lynne says, smiling. Within months he had joined Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty in roots-rock supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. In 1995 he co-produced The Beatles’ ‘comeback’ single Free As A Bird.

Today, despite more than 30 years of Beverly Hills living, the Shard End, Birmingham-born Lynne still hasn’t lost his Midlands burr. No wonder more complex, hung-up artists, such as Dylan and Petty, like having him around. You suspect he leaves his own complexities and hang-ups at the door.

In October Jeff Lynne released two solo albums: Long Wave, a collection of mostly pre-rock’n’roll standards; and Mr Blue Sky, his new interpretations of classic ELO hits. Both aim to reproduce the extraordinary sounds whizzing around inside his head. “I love being inside a song,” he says. “So close that it’s like I can almost touch it.”

ELO were never off the radio in the 70s. Long Wave is full of the songs you heard on the radio, growing up in the 50s.

My dad had the radio on all day. There was no TV until I was 13 so all I got was his music. A lot of these songs I hated as a kid, like [Rodgers & Hammerstein’s] If I Loved You. I also never thought I’d be singing [Bobby Darin’s] Beyond The Sea. But if you listen to the strings in the middle, they sound like ELO. It’s only when I discovered how to play the songs that I fell in love with them. It’s the way they’re constructed that intrigues me. I wanted to be a record producer from the age of 13.

Why so young?

I heard Only The Lonely by Roy Orbison [in 1960] and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. All I could think was: “How do they do that? How do they know what to play?” After that, all I thought about was music. I left school at 15 and joined a group called The Nightriders, but I still had to work. So I took a job in a warehouse where I could always go behind the bins and practise my guitar for half an hour. When I turned pro at 18 I was so relieved.

What did you think when you first heard The Beatles?

Please Please Me [The Beatles’ second single, released in January 1963] was the one. The first single Love Me Do didn’t do it for me. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but it was very simple, only a couple of chords. Please Please Me felt like it was something else entirely. It was mind-blowing.

The Nightriders later became The Idle Race. While recording their first album,The Birthday Party, in 1968 you visited Abbey Road studios and watched The Beatles making the White Album. Did you ever imagine you’d end up working with George Harrison?

Never. Not in a million years. It was like meeting your gods. But I knew I was pretty good and could make a living out of music. I had a feeling I’d never have to go to work again. I’d been asked to join [fellow Birmingham group] The Move in ’67 and I turned them down. I thought I owed The Idle Race, as they’d saved me from this awful life of working. But their albums weren’t hits, so when The Move’s singer Roy Wood asked me again I had to say yes.

As soon as you were in The Move, though, you and Wood were plotting ELO.

By the time I joined in 68 The Move were doing cabaret, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. Roy and I had been talking about the idea of ELO for months. So we made those Move albums [1970’s Shazam and 71’s Message From The Country] to help pay for ELO.

ELO’s debut LP, Electric Light Orchestra, in 1972, featured bassoon, oboe, French horn, cello… Is it true you wanted the group to continue what The Beatles had started with I Am The Walrus?

I Am The Walrus was a big influence because of the cello parts, true. So was A Day In The Life. But I never said we were picking up where The Beatles left off. I get the blame for that, and I never said it. It was Roy Wood. At the time I thought, oh fuck. Now I think, fucking great, Roy, you’ve saddled me with this for years! [laughs]

You once described the early ELO gigs as “shambolic”. What went wrong?

Everything. We did our first gig at The Greyhound in Croydon. It was horrible, dreadful. It was amazing how Roy taught himself to play the cello in a week, so he could play it on our first single, 10538 Overture. But on stage it took him forever to change instruments because he was also playing the bassoon and the oboe. And we couldn’t hear ourselves properly. We used to have to get a little drunk just to take the edge off. Then I did something wrong.

What did you do?

It was the third ever ELO gig, in Liverpool. I’d had a drink and I needed to take a piss. There was a big curtain behind the stage dividing the room in half. So I went behind it and called to my roadie Phil to get us a bucket. He came back with this great big cleaner’s bucket and held it up for me. I was playing bass, and all I had to do was play an open-string A on the song we were doing. So I was playing with one hand and piddling into this bucket. But it just went on and on. I’d not finished when Phil moved and it was all up his arm [laughs]. I never did it again after that.

Why did Roy Wood leave ELO so soon?

Roy and I didn’t collaborate as well as we thought we would. We couldn’t work together. It was like having two individual bosses in the band. So he went off to do [Wood’s next group] Wizzard, and I got to be the sole writer and producer of ELO.

When did ELO start getting better?

About six months after Roy left. We made the second album [ELO II], and that had [a version of Chuck Berry’s] Roll Over Beethoven on it. It went Top 40 in America. So suddenly we’ve got our foot in the door over there. But I always remember my dad saying to me: “The trouble with your tunes is they’ve got no tunes,” because he didn’t think much of my songs. So I thought, I’ll show ya. And I wrote Can’t Get It Out Of My Head, a tune that was full of tunes. We put that on the fourth record, Eldorado, which sold half-a-million and went gold in America.

Growing up in a suburb of Birmingham in the 50s, you must have dreamed of going to the States.

It was a very big deal. The Idle Race had been on United Artists, and on their record labels it used to say ‘United Artists, Sunset Boulevard’, with a picture of a street with palm trees. And I used to think: “God, I want to go there.”

The first time we went to the States was supporting Deep Purple [1974]. They were playing 10,000-seater ice hockey stadiums. You could see the audience looking at us with our cellos and thinking,: “What the hell is this?” But they liked us. So it took off there, even before the UK.

ELO were managed by Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne, and a man nicknamed The Al Capone Of Rock. How was he to work with?

His reputation precedes him, yes. [Long pause] I don’t know if he was a good manager or a bad manager. He got us there. I always had the studio time I wanted. He helped make us successful. So I owe him that. But he had his flaws. He was good and bad.

Was there a particular point when you realised ELO had made it?

In America. After a while we started doing the 20,000-seaters. We were driving in a limo up La Cienega towards Sunset Boulevard, and there was this great big billboard that said ‘Welcome ELO’. I thought: “Fuck, this is good.” The record label had put us to stay in the Continental Hyatt House, which used to be called the Riot House after John Bonham or someone rode a motorbike around the top floor. And there was another sign saying ‘Welcome ELO’ outside. That’s when I felt like we’d made it. But after that it just got bigger and bigger.

Did you do all the things rock bands were supposed to do when touring America? Was there such a thing as an ELO groupie?

Yeah, there were ELO groupies [looking surprised]. But we only ever wrecked one hotel room. We played Washington, and the president Jimmy Carter’s son, Chip, came to the gig and invited us to visit the White House the next day.

I dunno why, but after the show we ended up trashing somebody’s room. We piled all the broken furniture in a heap in the middle like we were going to have a bonfire. Then we looked at it and panicked. I always remember someone saying: “Shall we leave now under the cover of darkness?” We didn’t. But when we left the next morning, we saw Sharon [Osbourne] in reception and she was paying the bill, and it was 10,000 dollars cash. We all went: “Oh fuck,” and ducked out before anyone could see us. We didn’t do it again.

ELO were a seven-piece group, with two cellists and a violinist. How difficult was it to keep seven people on the road happy?

There were two separate camps, y’see. There was us – we were the rock’n’roll players – and then there were the string players. We got on okay, but they had a different mentality. They weren’t in the clique. They weren’t rock’n’roll people – they’d all come from string player’s college.

On stage you always looked like you were a reluctant frontman, though.

I didn’t want to be there, no. I enjoyed the first two or three tours, but after that I was out of joint with it. I just wanted to be at home, writing and recording.

Did ELO compensate for that by using so many special effects in their live shows?

I was compensating, I suppose. Any idea that was really daft, I’d say: “Oh yes, we’ll have that.” Our cellist Mike Edwards had this idea for playing [French composer Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns’s] The Dying Swan while rolling an orange up and down the neck of the cello. Then he had a cello that exploded on stage. Mind you, sometimes it exploded, sometimes it didn’t. It was good when it worked properly. Mike, unfortunately, later got killed by a bale of hay [after it fell on to the roof of a van he was driving, in 2010].

ELO’s 1976 album A New World Record went to No.1 in the US. A year later Out Of The Blue was top five in the US and the UK. Next, ELO were touring with a spectacular, spaceship-style stage set, and US opening acts that included Heart, Journey and Meat Loaf.

We were doing 70,000-seaters in some parts of America by then. But the shows were getting too big for me. The spaceship was Don Arden’s idea. We first tried it out at The Who’s studios in Shepperton. Pete Townshend came in, saw it and said: “I want one of them!” The spaceship was amazing – the noise it made at the end of the show was incredible, like rocket engines. I used to dash out to the front and watch from the audience. It was Don who got Tony Curtis to introduce us on stage at Wembley that year, where we played to royalty [the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester]. But I was more impressed at the reception afterwards.

Why was that?

They’d put all our gold discs up on the walls at the reception. I kept thinking: “This looks impressive. These are for songs I’ve written.” That was the problem: I just wanted to be in the studio. Touring cramped my style.

ELO’s music has a reputation for being upbeat, but hits such as Telephone Line sound extremely sad. Were you having a really miserable time of it?

I always thought our music was sad. Whenever people say: “Wow, your songs makes me feel so good,” I think: “Hold on, I’m writing about loneliness.” [Laughs] Telephone Line is the saddest of them all. It was written just after an American tour. I’d got a girlfriend over there and she wasn’t answering the phone. That’s why I used the sound of the American dialling tone. It was all about long‑distance telephone calls. Touring played havoc with relationships and anything like that.

Which is the greatest ELO album?

Out Of The Blue would have to be one of them. My favourite now, though, is On The Third Day, after I realised what a cheeky bastard I’d been. I had all the music plotted out, but there are two or three songs where I hadn’t written any words. So I just stood in front of the mic and sang the first thing that came into my gob. And I was amazed when I played it again, as it sounds pretty good. A lot of ELO songs are simpler than you might think. I could show you how to play Mr Blue Sky in 10 minutes. It’s no symphony.

ELO split in 1986, and then you were asked to produce George Harrison’s next album, Cloud Nine. How did that happen?

I‘d had enough of ELO. It was a relief to do something else. I’d been doing some recording with Dave Edmunds, and we had just finished dinner in a restaurant in Marlow. He was about 200 yards down the street when he shouted back: “Oh, Jeff… by the way, George Harrison asked if you would like to work on his new album.” For fuck’s sake! We’d spent two hours having dinner and he never mentioned it.

Were you intimidated by meeting George?

I was intimidated by George’s house [the 120-room Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames]. It was like a mansion, a castle and a palace all rolled into one. When I first turned up there I thought: “I don’t know if I can do this.” I was that worried it was going to be too posh. But George put me at ease. He said: “Look, before we start, just so we can see how we get on, shall we go to Australia to watch the Grand Prix?” I said: “Er, yeah, alright.” He said: “Great. Meet me in Hawaii in two weeks’ time.”

So 18 years after you’d watched The Beatles making the White Album, you were working with one of them.

I know [laughs]. But I didn’t feel intimidated about making suggestions in the studio. That’s what George wanted me for. But you could ask him about The Beatles’ records and he’d tell you stuff. Like how Please Please Me had been really slow to start with, like a Roy Orbison record, and George suggested they speed it up.

Who came up with the idea to put together the Traveling Wilburys?

One night, George and I had a bit of a smoke and a drink, and he said: “You and I should have a group.” I said: “Who should we have in it?” “Bob Dylan,” he said. “Oh yeah, okay… Bob Dylan… What about Roy Orbison as well, then?” And we both suggested Tom Petty. I didn’t imagine it would actually happen. But it did. We did the first Wilburys’ song, Handle With Care, in Bob’s garage.

What’s Bob Dylan actually like?

Bob’s a normal guy, friendly, not aloof… But he’s on his own wavelength. I mean, it’s Bob Dylan, so you are always a bit in awe. I kept thinking: “He wrote all those words [laughs].”

After The Traveling Wilburys, you produced Tom Petty’s first solo album, Full Moon Fever. Petty said that your arrival upset his group The Heartbreakers. Did you sense that?

A little bit, yes. But I was only interested in Tom. He’d asked me to write with him and produce, and that was all I cared about. Free Fallin’ was the second song we wrote for that album, and it was a huge hit. Full Moon Fever came together so easily. It is still one of my favourite records of all those I’ve worked on.

You’ve just re-recorded and remixed some of ELO’s biggest hits for the new collection Mr Blue Sky. What was wrong with the originals?

There was no clarity to them. They sounded like they had a sock over them. It was bugging me whenever I’d hear them on the radio. I didn’t have much studio experience when I produced the originals. Now I’ve had 30 years more experience and technology is 30 years ahead. So I tried doing Mr Blue Sky again and it sounded so much better. Then I did Evil Woman, Strange Magic, and I ended up doing 17 of them again, but we got it down to 12 for the album.

You can’t stay out of the studio, can you?

No [laughs]. They have to come and drag me out. But it’s what I do. I’ve enjoyed making these two albums more than anything I’ve ever done before. In the studio I can just block everything out. I walk in there, shut the door, sit down and think: “Ah… this is the fucking life… Happiness.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 178, November 2012

Mark Blake is a music journalist and author. His work has appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the magazines Q, Mojo, Classic Rock, Music Week and Prog. He is the author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, Is This the Real Life: The Untold Story of Queen, Magnifico! The A–Z Of Queen, Peter Grant, The Story Of Rock’s Greatest Manager and Pretend You’re in a War: The Who & The Sixties. 

Thanks to classic albums such as Wheels Of Steel and Strong Arm Of The Law, Saxon were NWOBHM trailblazers. But by the time of 1984’s divisive Crusader, things were looking less steady. In 2008, frontman Biff Byford looked back on an album that deserves more love than it gets.

“We were trendsetters back then,” laughs Saxon singer Biff Byford. “Today everybody from dresses like knights going to the crusades, and writes lyrics about it. But back then it was virtually unheard of for a metal band to do anything like that. And what did we get for being innovative? Yep, we got slaughtered by everyone. That’s what you face for trying something new. Still, at least we can turn to all of those people now and say, ‘Well, who was right?’”

When the Yorkshiremen released their sixth studio album, Crusader, in 1984, they were a major force in metal. Starting out as Son Of A Bitch in 1974, they became Saxon five years later, the same year they signed to French label Carrere and released their self-titled debut, the first album put out by any New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band.

But it was 1980 that propelled them to fame. Biff, guitarists Graham Oliver and Paul Quinn, bassist Steve Dawson and drummer Pete Gill issued the Wheels Of Steel and Strong Arm Of The Law records, both of which were hugely successful. They continued to spread the word with 1981’s Denim & Leather, although Gill left the following year – he later joined Motörhead – and Nigel Glockler came on the scene.

The new-look Saxon released the live album The Eagle Has Landed in 1982, before heading out to Atlanta, Georgia to record 1983’s Power & The Glory. Having already made their mark back home, they were making strides in the US, where they’d recently toured with Iron Maiden and Mötley Crüe. They started writing Crusader in Doncaster, a few miles down the road from their native Barnsley. But when it came to recording it, they decided to return to the US – specifically Sound City Studios in LA with producer Kevin Beamish.

“We never got too involved in choosing producers,” admits Biff. “Perhaps we should have, as some bad decisions were made. Most of the time the label would come up with a name and we’d go with it. The theory seemed to be that we wrote and recorded the songs and that was our contribution. American producers understood melodies and commercial tunes but weren’t able to come to terms with typical British power and aggression.”

Kevin flew to England to meet Saxon during the writing sessions. “He helped us to write Do It All For You, as the label wanted a ballad. That was his only contribution to any of the songs,” says Biff.

Decamping to Los Angeles to record the album, the band were happy to mix business with pleasure.

“We had a great time in America,” laughs Biff. “We were there for about eight weeks and all had apartments by Universal City; there were parties with our girlfriends. And groupies. The sun shone all the time. If you’re a celebrity in LA then life’s good, and the band were well known because of all the touring we’d done. We used to hang out a lot at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Strip, where all the rockers end up. You’d always bump into some band or another who were passing through, like the Scorpions or Bon Jovi.”

While the songs lacked the raw punch of their NWOBHM-era classics, they still had their moments. The centrepiece was the title track; a sprawling historical epic that’s taken on a life of its own over the years.

“I’d always had a real interest in history, especially the Crusades,” explains the frontman. “But this was the first time I’d managed to write a song about that era. I did it from the viewpoint of a young lad watching as the knights go off to fight and wishing he could join them. The first piece of the song could be about any war in any part of the world. But then the lyrics got very specific.”

Two decades later, those words would cause Saxon a major problem. They were due to play at the Dubai Desert Rock Festival in 2006, but were then pulled from the bill when a local newspaper published the lyrics for Crusader. The line ‘The Saracan heathen will taste our steel’ didn’t go down at all well with the authorities in the United Arab Emirates. As a result, the Department of Tourism And Commerce Marketing refused permission for the band to play.

“I think that song’s been misunderstood over the years. Also, because it was the title track of the album, people thought we’d done a concept record, which wasn’t true at all. Mind you, we did use the Crusader imagery all over the place. We must have done hundreds of photo sessions dressed up as knights of the period. Some of them did look a bit ridiculous.”

Perhaps the two most contentious songs on the record were Sailing To America and Set Me Free. The former was seen by many as Saxon buttering up to America by praising it as their spiritual home. Not so, insists Biff.

“It was about the Pilgrim Fathers finding a new home. Maybe I should have made it more obvious by calling it Pilgrim Fathers. Besides, we’d been to America loads of times by then on tour. So why on Earth would we want to do a song about how we longed to go there?”

Equally divisive was Set Me Free, a cover of an old song by 70s glam rockers Sweet. “One of our guitarists suggested we do it,” says Biff. “It was the first time we’d done a cover. It turned out alright, but it could have been so much better. Our big mistake was in trying to do it the same as the original – we should have been looking to do it in the Saxon style. Also, the vocals were outside my range at the time – too high pitched. But it turned out OK.”

Crusader was released in January 1984. It featured a striking cover by artist and future Bloodstock founder Paul Gregory, featuring a knight en route to the Crusades.

“That was such a classic painting,” says Biff. “It was so heavy metal. We were able to use parts of it on t-shirts and the tour programme. It represented what we were trying to get across on the record.”

But reviews for the album were mixed – some claimed that Saxon had lost more than they gained by recording in the US. In the UK it peaked at No.18, their lowest position since the debut, while in the US the record only made it to No.174. Neither Sailing To America or Do It All For You were hits when they were released as single – the former limped to No.81, while the latter didn’t even make the Top 100. Biff has an unusual theory as to the disappointing critical and commercial reception.

“I think people loved us too much,” he explains. “They felt a lot closer to Saxon than most other bands. So when we made what were considered to be lousy decisions they’d criticise us more than anyone else. We were probably victims of our popularity. Yet despite this, Crusader is our biggest-selling album.”

The subsequent tour certainly was a massive affair, with the band using a stage set based around the album, including castle battlements and a fake stone floor.

“The floor was made of lino and looked great, but the dry ice made it very slippery. We all fell over three or four times during the show. Crazy! After three gigs, we got rid of it.”

Despite these teething problems the tour was a success, though Crusader itself didn’t kick Saxon’s career to the next level in the way they hoped. It was also their last album for longtime label Carrere, with the band switching to EMI for 1985’s Innocence Is No Excuse. But looking back, Biff considers the record deserves the respect it was denied at the time.

“It’s a good album, one that turned out better than I believed back then,” he says. “And its success down the years has really proven we did the right thing. All those who had a pop at us for Crusader were wrong.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 178, April 2008

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term “thrash metal” while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021. 

Welcome to The Classic Rock Quiz, a new weekly quiz that takes your rock knowledge to the limit, one more time.

This week we have 22 questions, covering everyone from Aerosmith to Rory Gallagher, via the Stones, Motley Crue and Mott The Hoople – and much more besides.

All questions are multiple choice PLUS you win the chance to be humiliated and insulted at the end, depending on your score.

Share your scores with your friends and come back next week for more. Good luck!

Tom Poak has written for the Hull Daily Mail, Esquire, The Big Issue, Total Guitar, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and more. In a writing career that has spanned decades, he has interviewed Brian May, Brian Cant, and cadged a light off Brian Molko. He has stood on a glacier with Thunder, in a forest by a fjord with Ozzy and Slash, and on the roof of the Houses of Parliament with Thin Lizzy’s Scott Gorham (until some nice men with guns came and told them to get down). He has drank with Shane MacGowan, mortally offended Lightning Seed Ian Broudie and been asked if he was homeless by Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch.

Alright, maybe that headline is a bit much. But you can stick your Kent, that I do know! From where I’m sat right now in my house in Southend, I can see Kent in the distance, ruining an otherwise beautiful view of the Essex riviera, the inhabitants probably over there feeling smug about all the hipsters who relocated from Hackney Wick to Margate. I’m shaking my fist at you, people of Kent!

It is probably not healthy for the soul to adopt such a combative siege mentality about where you’re from to the point that you refuse to take your family on daytrips to the Kent coast (heard it’s nice, refuse to believe it), just because you consider it a betrayal, but I am who I am.

I was born in Walthamstow, east London, in a time way before no-one in their right mind described it as “Awesomestow”, as its new influx of residents are prone to (it was the 80s, it was more like something out of Mad Max), and I moved to Essex as an 11-year-old. I still considered myself a Londoner for a lot of my teens, probably thinking it was cooler because I was a loser, but the older I’ve got, the more I have become prouder and prouder of being from Essex. I stand before you, about to try and convince you of its musical pedigree, as a proud, mid-40s Essex boy.

Even if I don’t manage to successfully argue the case, hopefully you will, at least, come out of this whole foolhardy fandango with an appreciation of this glorious county’s contribution to UK music. That one is not up for debate.

If you’re for some follow-up reading then check out Tim Burrows’ excellent book The Invention Of Essex, and if you’re up for further investigation after that, get in touch and I’ll recommend some estate agents.

The Prodigy

Transport yourself to 1997, to a field on the outskirts of Chelmsford. The Prodigy are headlining one night of that year’s V Festival. Blur are headlining the other. It’s one of my favourite teenage memories: two bands from Essex who have taken over the world headlining a festival in Essex at the height of summer. Braintree’s The Prodigy reinvented what dance music could be, a cut and shut of techno, punk and rock. In an early sign of how territorial I would become about my music tastes, I swapped my copy of Definitely Maybe for Music For The Jilted Generation. I realise now, 30 years later, it’s OK to have both.

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Blur

Like me, Damon Albarn left east London to move to Essex as a teenager. Unlike me, he went on to form one of the greatest British bands of all time and then invented a cartoon band who were also mega-successful and mega-brilliant. Although Blur have too many songs about west London and the Westway and not enough about Essex, I will let them off because they come home from time to time – I saw them do a warm-up show at Colchester Arts Centre a couple of years ago and it was one of the most joyous shows I’ve ever seen.

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Dr. Feelgood

But let’s go back, right back… to 2014. I have just moved to Southend and returned to the homeland. I have lived here less than 24 hours and I am driving out of the tip in Leigh-on-sea and I look up and see Wilko Johnson, guitarist extraordinaire, punk progenitor, Game Of Thrones star, strolling past. This is the equivalent of getting a “Welcome Home!” thumbs up from the Essex gods. The late, great Wilko was local royalty. His band’s raucous, bluesy rock’n’roll was hugely influential on an array of artists who went on to reshape British music, their jagged brilliance inspiring Joe Strummer and Paul Weller, to name just two.

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These New Puritans

A day or two after I saw Wilko near the tip, I saw Jack Barnett, the creative dynamo in These New Puritans, going for a jog near my house. I felt like I’d moved to Essex musician Stella Street. These New Puritans, who are made up of Jack and his twin brother George, are one of the 21^st century’s most underrated bands. They have released four records of experimental, art-rock brilliance, music that can be atmospheric, ambient and serene at some points and dramatic and explosive at others. Think Radiohead, Massive Attack and Steve Reich going on a geography field trip together. Their fifth album is out in May.

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Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis was born in Tottenham and raised in Rayleigh. He died in 2019 but what music the Talk Talk leader left behind: a genius meld of 80s pop, tranquil soundscapes, loose jazz and hypnotic dynamism that would come to be known as post-rock.

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Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode are all-timers. Their music was a neat mirror of their upbringing. They were raised in Basildon, a new town with no echoes of what had gone before, so it made sense they invented a brand new sound, first conquering the world as electro-pop trailblazers and then morphing into the muscular synth-rock titans who made Music For The Masses and Violator. Every time my train went through Basildon, I always wondered when the last time Dave Gahan visited his hometown. In a cover feature for Q in 2017, I got to ask him: he’d taken his family there the year before to show them the house that he’d grown up in. Nice one Dave!

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Vince Clarke

Pop svengali Clarke co-founded Depeche Mode and was their chief songwriter until he left shortly after the release of their debut album Speak & Spell in 1981. The band still play one of his compositions in their set over four decades on, a little ditty you might know called Just Can’t Get Enough. The split was down to the rest of the group’s wish to get a bit darker and Clarke’s desire to make uplifting, bright pop songs. That’s exactly what he did, first with Yazoo and then with Erasure, who’ve sold over a whopping 28 million records. The fella knows his way round a memorable tune, that’s for sure.

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Alison Moyet

There was some mad shit in the water in Basildon in the 70s. Not only did the town give the world Depeche Mode and Vince Clarke, it also gave us their schoolmate Alison Moyet. She was in Yazoo with Clarke after he left DM and went on to carve out a successful solo career and establish herself one of the UK’s most enduring and distinctive singer and songwriter talents.

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The Horrors

When The Horrors first emerged in the mid-00s, the Southend crew were cartoonish garage-rockers for whom every day was Halloween. Who knew what a special band would emerge from what felt like it could be a quickfire thrill: with every record, they have tweaked and shapeshifted into one of the UK’s most inventive and exhilarating guitar bands.

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Underworld

And so to the last slot, which could have gone to pioneering IDM maverick Squarepusher but instead lands at the feet of techno dons Underworld. The story of Underworld, you see, just shows the supernatural power of Essex. Underworld were rubbish before they moved to Essex, a ropey funk-pop band whose career was petering out. Then Rick Smith moved to Romford, met DJ and future member Darren Emerson, started making dance music, and the rest is history. Essex, then, is totally responsible for all their deserved triumph since and I won’t hear a word otherwise, I’m finishing writing now so it’s not even worth you trying to raise an objection.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

When Kiss lumbered on to the scene in 1974 with their self-titled debut album, no one could’ve predicted how much a part of popular culture their bat-winged, fire-breathing, blood-drooling totem, Gene Simmons, would become. When Simmons – born Chaim Witz in Israel, the son of Hungarian Jews – relocated to New York at a young age he immediately embraced the American dream. As Kiss’s career exploded – quite literally – the bassist/vocalist proved he was no shock-rock novelty act, masterminding an extensive merchandising range and helping transform the band into a global business.

Simmons’s larger-than-life personality helped him inveigle his way into rarefied social circles, and he enjoyed unlikely love affairs with a couple of the world’s top female singers. In 2010, Gene looked back on several of the (non-sexual) encounters he’d had with the great and good of rock’n’roll, Hollywood and even the White House.

Lou Reed

[Producer] Bob Ezrin started rehearsing with us for the Destroyer record in 1975 and he had just come off working with Lou Reed on Berlin. We rehearsed in a place called Carol’s on 42nd Street and 6th Avenue in New York City. Lou walked in and I’d been aware of, and had been a big fan of, Walk On The Wild Side, which was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. Reed walks in, we’re rehearsing, trying to work out songs, and Bob says that he would like Lou to work on lyrics with us and maybe get another angle. But it didn’t work out, actually, and we went off and did Destroyer, because we couldn’t wait to put all these new songs down, like Detroit Rock City and Flaming Youth and all that.

So then the next time Bob Ezrin worked with us was on (Music From) The Elder [1981], which had the best of all intentions but was misdirected. It was intended for the band to kind of move inward, to write something that meant something, and I take full responsibility [for it being a commercial disaster]. It was my concept, the title, the ideal and the idea, the story line. I wanted to do a motion picture. As we were working on it, Paul [Stanley] came in with something called Every Little Bit Of My Heart or something like that, it was sort of a pop ditty, and we tried to work it up but it was too pop. Lou came up to King’s City in Toronto and we sat around and he scribbled away on song title ideas and so on, and everyone immediately focused in on A World Without Heroes. It just felt like the song could write itself. So we took the chordal progression of Paul’s Every Little Bit Of My Heart and the line ‘A world without heroes… it’s no place for me… it’s like a bird without wings…’ and it’s pretty poignant. That was Lou’s contribution, just the title, so he got a songwriting credit.

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Frank Zappa

I knew his son, Dweezil, socially and he actually learned to play guitar from a guitar player I discovered… Eddie Van Halen. So it all comes full circle somehow. Dweezil actually brought me over to see Frank before he passed away and we started to talk about stuff – music and life philosophies and so on, and after he passed away it was his family that actually gathered around the idea of doing something post his passing. I asked if they had any unfinished Frank pieces because I’d love to finish them and get the family around, and so we came together on Black Tongue, which was Frank’s title, not mine. I had this 30-second bit that I built an entire song on, this loop, and I played all the instruments and got all the Zappa family in. It was the only song in the entire Zappa history where the entire remaining family members actually sang around the same mic.

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Cher

Cher had just signed to Casablanca. Kiss were the first act on Casablanca, but she was gonna do a disco record. The label president asked if I’d come by for Governor Brown, some kind of charity event, and also he wanted to introduce me to Cher. So I said, “Great, sure!” So I got there; I was just scouting to see who was there and I wanted more people for my solo record.

Cher, in the meantime, was forced to go to the party that she didn’t want to go to by Chastity, her daughter who was a big Kiss fan. Chastity told her, “You’ve got to go to this thing, Gene Simmons is going to be there!” So when she got there, I walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Gene Simmons.” But she looked confused. She was off-centre because she thought it was the female Jean Simmons in movies. Cher had no idea that the Kiss thing had infected her household through her kids; especially Chastity, who wore the make-up and did all that stuff, and Elijah too when he was little.

Literally that first night I said, “You wanna come with me?” So she hopped in the limo and off we went. It started that fast. Hey, you want my advice when it comes to women, it’s this: say what you mean and mean what you say. If you see a beautiful girl and you find her attractive, say those words.

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Diana Ross

I was going to buy Cher a Christmas present. By that time we were not living together and I was off touring, but I wanted to buy her something. But what do you buy someone who has everything? Cher said, “Call my best friend, Diana. I tell her all my secrets and she knows exactly what I want!” So when I was in New York, I rang Diana up and said, “Would you help me?” When I met her at her apartment she gave me a slice of chocolate cake… and then she gave me a different slice of chocolate cake. It happened very fast.

Thereafter Cher and Diana weren’t such good friends. But I continued to be close to both and valued our time together. The word ‘lady’ in the dictionary has photos of both of them. I had my own place in New York but I was living with Diana too, and Cher was often coming to New York to do Come Back To The Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, which was her at the beginning of her acting thing. Cher didn’t want to stay in the city alone so I said, “Stay at my place.”

And so sometimes I’d stay with Cher at my place and sometimes I’d stay at Diana’s place. Everyone complicates things. Just simplify it and be clear with everybody. The only thing that bothers women is the dishonesty and not being clear. You see a Rottweiler coming towards you, it’s very clear what’s going on. You have to get out of the way because it’s a Rottweiler. so it’s clear. You see a French poodle and then it bites you, you’re pissed off! Be clear about who you are.

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Bob Dylan

Next to Zappa one of the other pivotal people for me is Bob Dylan. There’s certainly no greater lyricist in pop culture. But Dylan is classic poetry to me. And I’ll never forget, he got on the phone to me out of the blue one day. I go, “Hey Bob” and he’s like, “Hey, alright, Mr Kiss!” Always called me Mr Kiss. Even to this day, he won’t call me Gene Simmons. I say, “How you doing?” and he says, [something incoherent and Bob-like]. “Uh, what did you say, Bob?” [Laughs] His voice is instantly recognisable; no other human being has ever had that sound. You can’t quite figure out what country it’s from, never mind which town.

But I have the tapes, I recorded the whole thing. “Gee, I wanna write with you, Bob.” “Alright, man…” [more Dylan-esque gibberish] and I’m thinking, “Does he want to know what time and where?” So I say, “How about so-and-so on this day?” He says, “Sure.” And sure enough, there he was. A little van pulls up, and we both pulled out acoustic guitars… actually, one acoustic and one electric, because I haven’t a second acoustic. I tossed around an idea and he says, “How about this? Try and do that.” I sang a melody against his lyric and the tune happened fast, about 45 minutes. But of course, there were no lyrics, just a sense of melody and a chordal structure, and then Bob was gone. That was in 1994, and it took me eight or nine years. I kept badgering Bob, “Write the lyric!” “No, Mr Kiss, you write the lyric!” “Bob, you write the lyric! That’s why I called you!” “No, man, you gotta [gibberish].” Anyway I couldn’t get him to write the lyric, so finally, in desperation, when I had my solo record come out, I actually finished the lyric because I couldn’t wait any longer. Bob liked it. It’s called Waiting For The Morning Light, about a guy on the road, sees the picture of his love next to the telephone and here he is staying up all night, you know, waiting for the morning light.

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Michael Jackson

I knew Michael. I ran into him a few times. I met him the first time before he became the superstar, when he was sort of teenagey, when he was still a Jackson Five. This was in the Cher days, when Cher and I lived together.

I remember this shy kid who knew his stuff and actually suggested we did a record with this guy called Mutt Lange, who he liked very much. So, yeah, he knew his stuff. It would have been a great record.

Once when I was managing Liza Minnelli’s recording career, she was playing Universal Amphitheater and Michael came to pay his respects because she was one of his childhood idols. I don’t remember if he walked in with Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren… either one… and we both just hung out and shot the shite.

When I lived with Diana Ross, it was she who brought me to the Encino Compound and I joined Michael as he went to a corner juice place and had a glass of orange. That was all he had to eat that day. He fasted two, sometimes three days a week. That was his regimen. I was always taken by his innocence and he was always very polite and kind.

But as time moved on, and no matter what my fond memories and fond images of Michael were, with one allegation of paedophilia after another and another and another… Oh dear. I knew some of the musicians he toured with, and specifically one who quit because of seeing boys coming out of the hotel rooms. And then you factor in that his travel agent was put on the stand and in court said that she was authorised to fly to Brazil and bring boys back to America for him… Well, you know, where there’s smoke there’s fire. There’s no question in my mind he molested those kids. Not a doubt.

What we do know is Michael settled for $20 or $25 million to keep one suit dead and the other one was $3 or $4 million. Now what $25 million dollars means is if somebody said the most vile thing about me and I paid a lawyer $500,000 a year, I could defend that case for 50 years for the amount of money that Michael paid to make it go away.

Michael’s on tape going, “Give the kids Jesus juice.” Which is wine. I mean, it’s just endless. So on one hand he’s a sad kind of a character who seems to have been lonely… And incidentally, there’s never been a single female of any age that I’ve ever known about who has ever made a claim that she has had a physical relationship with Michael, ever. In fact, while he was alive, I never heard about mature men ever making that claim either – and believe me, you can’t keep it a secret. If you’re a celebrity, somebody somewhere will say, “Oh yeah, I shagged him.”

The only sexual references ever made about Michael Jackson that were made by anyone, anywhere around the world, have always been made by kids, and specifically males usually 10 to 14 years of age; never females, that age or older, and never grown men. Oh, I don’t think this is going away any time soon.

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Robert De Niro

It’s just a hello, goodbye kind of relationship. But the interesting thing about De Niro for me is that he has a long and very public history of exclusively loving dark flesh. He loves black women. And so here’s the Kiss connection: Eric Carr, our beloved drummer who unfortunately passed away to cancer in 1991, had a really sweet and pretty hot black girlfriend named Pantera, before the band of the same name. I mean, you could tell, with a name like that she was gonna be hot! It’s not Magda, it’s Pantera. She was hot stuff. De Niro met them both and wasted no time on zoning in on Pantera.

The connection there was that one of the biggest fans that we had was this guy called Fat Vinnie, who must have seen 200 or300 Kiss shows. He travels around the world, he’s had triple-bypass heart operations, and all the way through the recovery process he has still seen every show. Now, De Niro was about to start filming The King Of Comedy which deals with an extreme fan of Jerry Lewis, and De Niro wanted to meet one and get to know one. So Eric’s like, “Hey Bob, meet Fat Vinnie.” De Niro actually lived at his house because he wanted to get see what an extreme fan was all about. He fashioned his idiosyncrasies and his style of talking for the entire film on a Kiss fan! In fact, there’s a pivotal moment where De Niro said he wanted Fat Vinnie to come and work for him as his driver and personal assistant, and Vinnie said, “Sorry, I can’t – Kiss is going back out on tour!”

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Eddie Van Halen

Edward, as Edward likes to be called. I went to see The Boyzz play at a place called the Starwood, and the first band is a group called Van Halen. By the second song they had knocked me out. I was like, “What the hell? Look at the guitar player, look at the singer doing acrobatics and stuff!” So immediately I was waiting for them backstage. I even curtailed my groupie activity – they were that good!

When I got there, Edward and David [Lee Roth] and all the guys – they were babies – were telling me how excited they were that I was there. They were big Kiss fans and they often did Firehouse in their sets – you can go on YouTube and pick it up – and they were excited because there was a yoghurt manufacturer that was going to invest in them. I begged them and said, “Don’t do it! I’ll finance your demo and fly you to New York.” And I did.

I bought David his first pair of platform heels and some leather pants. I put them up in a hotel, got them in Electric Lady studios and got in Dave Whitman, who engineered some of our records and worked on Humble Pie and lots of other stuff. And we recorded about 15 songs and it’s still never been released.

I took the tape to our then manager, Bill Aucoin, and I let Paul hear it and the guys in the band. Everybody shrugged their shoulders and went, “So what?” And I’m going, “You’re killing me! Whaddya mean, so what? Listen to that!” But everybody was too busy with their life. So I got Van Halen to do a showcase for Bill but he still didn’t get it. He thought they were like Black Oak Arkansas, because Black Oak had a guy with long blonde hair [Jim Dandy] and all that.

So even though they were signed to my production company exclusively, Man Of A Thousand Faces Incorporated of course, Kiss were about to go out on tour with Love Gun. I said, “I’m tearing up your contract because I don’t want to tie you down. I can’t ethically, morally and in other ways keep you locked in if I can’t work on you. I’ve got to go out on tour. I’ll get off tour in six months, eight months. You’re free to go get your own deal. If you don’t get it in that time you can come back to me and we’ll try it again.” And within a month they were on Warner Bros and off into the studio. By the time we got off tour You Really Got Me was on the radio and it was a massive hit.

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Simon Cowell

I like Simon! We understood each other right away. He’s the only honest one on American Idol. I’ve known Randy Jackson for a long time too. Paula Abdul and I were going to do some projects together. I was a judge on American Idol for a few episodes three years ago. But the only one who tells the truth is Simon. Just because you’re on television you’re supposed to say nice things, but in the real world, if you get off stage and you suck, you suck! And tough love is good. But he’s not nasty. Truth hurts.

There was this one guy who came on the show, a black guy with a gold, I think they call it a grill, where your entire teeth are covered by a piece of jewellery that you put on. You couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was so extremely bad that it was fascinating. It’s like Keith Richards’ skin. When I met Keith I was fascinated by his hands and fingers. Now most people would say that’s ugly, but it’s not – it’s fascinatingly beautiful in its ugliness. Have you held his hand? It’s like leather on a sofa and you’re fascinated by it.

I said to this kid on American Idol, “You don’t belong here, but you’re a fascinating guy. You should be in movies, because you look like a guy who could hold up a 7/11 [store] and be like that.” And sure enough, he was arrested for holding up a 7/11 after the show. He’s in jail as we speak.

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Well, Donald is a huge fan of Gene Simmons. Mostly he’s jealous of my hair which is much cooler than his. Everybody thinks we both wear wigs, but no, we don’t. They’re all just jealous. I’ve known him off and on for a long time. Even though he comes from a good background and all that, he’s a self-made man, I’d like to think that he thinks like me. He would like to think he’s like me of course, but the bitch never will be and he knows it!

I like to kid with him because he comes off as this hard-headed guy because it’s part of the game, but he’s a pussycat. You’ve got to hand it to somebody like him. Like Richard Branson, who I know well too. Branson, Trump, self-made guys who continue to live by their own rules.

If you take a look at their business model, it defies logic. Branson will sit in a business meeting and when these guys toss due diligence numbers at him he says, “Look, just cut the shit. What is it? Don’t give me 10 reams of information, just give me the sense of it.” The big guys play the big games in simple ways, because at some point you have to say “go” or “stop” or “buy” or “sell”. At some point you have to make that assessment. You can over-think things.

It’s like being in the studio. It’s never been proven that the longer you stay in a studio, the better your record is. Or the more money you spend…

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 142, February 2010

Chris Ingham is the former Group Publisher of Classic Rock and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Nothing Else Matters: The Stories Behind the Biggest Metallica Songs and The Book of Metal.

In 2014, Gong founder Daevid Allen’s cancer diagnosis forced him out of the band’s upcoming tour in support of that year’s album I See You – their best, most forward-looking release in years. He told Prog about the work and his belief in always looking ahead instead of back. Soon afterwards he refused further treatment, and died aged 77 on March 13, 2015.

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“Hopefully the cancer will recede to give me a few more years of creativity, but at 76, I can accept that my days are numbered,” observes Daevid Allen, without any hint of drama or mawkishness regarding the discovery of a cancerous tumour in his neck.

Following treatment, Allen is on the mend, having received an almost tangible current of good vibes from fans around the world since his illness was announced in June 2014. Though profoundly grateful, he remains philosophical. “There are so many people now suffering from cancer that it’s never far from any of us and I wish them all well. As for me, I’m coping… just.”

Talk to anyone who knows Allen or has played with him in one of the numerous variants of Gong, and the same words and phrases keep getting used: charismatic, energetic, sharp, bright, instinctive, funny, free spirit, timeless, intense, incredibly musical, unafraid to speak his mind. Ask anyone who has seen Gong at any point over nearly six decades and they’ll point to Allen’s performance, which still has more sparkle and stamina than most artists half his age.

Ever since he arrived in Canterbury in the early 1960s from his native Australia, he had a habit of being interested in what other people could do, then whipping up a creative force that would make things happen. He did it for musicians including Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge, who gathered around him to form Soft Machine.

Undaunted when he was denied re-entry into the UK following their European tour in 1967, Allen remained in France, ducking and diving between pop festivals, student unrest and confrontations with the police, accruing a ragtag, shifting ensemble that would eventually coalesce into Gong. From being an obscure foreign import to a regular fixture on the polytechnic and municipal hall circuit, the band added their own idiosyncratic, dazzling splash of psychedelic colour to the monochrome mid-70s United Kingdom as they toured albums such as Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg (both 1973), You (1974) and 1971’s Camembert Electrique (reissued in 1974).

Time will tell as to whether 2014’s I See You will be regarded in the same reverential tones as those illustrious predecessors; but listening to its punchy tracks, wry humour and biting analysis, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is without doubt the strongest and arguably the most coherent Gong record in a long time. For a band often perceived as having their heads in the clouds, what’s striking about the new album is its desire to engage with the realpolitik here and now, at a time when no one else seems interested in discussing where society is heading.

So why does Allen think there aren’t more artists and albums railing against exploitation and ideological excess in the way Gong do? “Social media soporifics such as taste tailoring and mindset feedback loops are possibly absorbing radicalism to some extent,” he replies.

”In my own songwriting I try to strike a balance between political clarity and absurdist spiritual uplift. Art as a mirror versus art as transformer. What I see is a great deal of activity, both creative and destructive. Obviously change is all around us. I suppose it depends whether we want things to stay the same or whether we are conservative or adventurist. Personally, I find the future is always more exciting than the past.”

Daevid asked me play guitar in Gong. I pointed out that he’d never heard me play. He said, ‘I don’t need to’

But if the album sounds forward-looking and very much located in the present with tracks such as Occupy, When God Shakes Hands With The Devil, This Revolution and the title cut, it’s also flecked with samples and snippets of Gong’s musical past; little self-referential bubbles percolating up from the leaves in the musical teapot. “They come from my son, Orlando, who’s taking my love of crazy collage to another level,” explains Allen. “He has a huge respect for early Gong history and all its aspects and he feels they should be referenced as flashbacks from the past – reflected in the present moment.”

To what does Allen attribute Gong’s longevity and appeal? “Firstly I would say not letting it get too commercially successful. Virgin Records had a good hard go at it in the mid-70s, but as with Soft Machine, as it started to peak, the wrong people were being sucked in and it smelled suspicious to me. So, as always, I skedaddled till it came back down to earth.

“Secondly, it has constantly changed its personnel, musical style, image and attitude, without losing that central current that made it still sound like Gong. Some attribute this mysterious current mistakenly to myself – but I feel it’s intellectual laziness to do so. Gong has rejoiced in a cast of musicians of extraordinary brilliance and diversity, from Pierre Moerlen to Tatsuya Yoshida, Steve Hillage to Kawabata Makoto, Bill Laswell to Francis Moze, Didier Malherbe to Theo Travis to Ian East – and I could go on and on.”

Though possessing little in the way of formal musical training, Allen’s antenna has always been finely attuned when it comes to picking up potential musical partners. The newest recruit to Gong, guitarist Kavus Torabi of Knifeworld and Guapo, remembers the moment Allen approached him to join the band.

“He was in London in 2013 playing with Marshall Allen from Sun Ra. We had Daevid as a guest on the radio show I do with Steve Davis, and out of the blue he asked if I would like to play guitar in Gong. I told him I’d love to but pointed out that he’d never heard me play. He said, ‘I don’t need to. I can tell you’re right. I was like this about Mike Howlett. I just know you’re going to be right.’

“I’d heard Gong in my mid-to-late teens, starting with Flying Teapot, and straight away I was hooked. For me, Gong starts with Camembert Electrique and goes up to You. Those are the four main Gong records for me. With that in mind, I told him that I couldn’t play like Steve Hillage. He said to me, ‘Kavus, I’m not interested in what you can’t do – but in what you can do.’”

He’s keen to say the current band is a democracy, that we are all equal – but I think he’s more equal than others

Alongside Allen and Torabi, I See You features Dave Sturt (bass), Ian East (sax and flute), Fabio Golfetti (guitar) and Daevid’s son Orlando (drums). There are points on the album which sound utterly unlike Gong, yet at the same time it couldn’t really be anybody else, as on Shakti Yoni & Dingo Virgin, suffused with Allen’s eerily shifting trademark glissando guitar and Gilli Smyth’s echo-drenched space whispers. While Allen’s presence is of course significant, it’s nevertheless the work of a collective process, as Sturt points out.

“The album comes from a mixture of jams, as well as swapping files remotely. It’s quite surprising how homogenous the whole thing is; a really good mix of formally composed and music made in the moment. That’s definitely one of its strengths, and I think that’s what Gong’s always been about. The members who are involved now have all melded together really well – a good mix of musicians and compositional ideas.

“As a player, while the album comes together you focus on one track at a time. But Daevid is capable of holding the overview, knowing what the whole finished album is about and what he wants to present.

“Since 2012 he’s been very keen to say that the current band is a democracy, that we are all equal – but I think he’s more equal than others. Why? Well, because he’s been there since there were riots happening in Paris in 1968, when Gong came together. He’s got the overarching vision as to what it’s all about, but he needs other people to feed off.”

While Allen’s illness meant the cancellation of a tour that would have included Glastonbury and other high-profile events, the band will be playing live dates – albeit without its founder. “We’re honouring the album and his music,” Sturt says. “We’ll be playing some old songs and some of the new songs from I See You in the spirit of Gong. The hope is that Daevid will recover enough to be able to play again with us, but there are no concrete plans at the moment. We just want him to get well.”

When asked to choose the Gong record on which Allen feels he got closest to realising what he wanted to achieve, he replies, “This one, of course! For me this album is also a grateful farewell – as you can tell from Thank You.” He’s referring to a lyric that states ‘Thank you for the music, thank you for your cheers, thank you ’cos you’re here now.’

“This current album and line-up makes me very proud. My greatest wish is that Gong can become a musical tradition and continue to give pleasure, excitement and positive uplift for a long time after I am gone.”

Sid’s feature articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Prog, Classic Rock, Record Collector, Q, Mojo and Uncut. A full-time freelance writer with hundreds of sleevenotes and essays for both indie and major record labels to his credit, his book, In The Court Of King Crimson, an acclaimed biography of King Crimson, was substantially revised and expanded in 2019 to coincide with the band’s 50th Anniversary. Alongside appearances on radio and TV, he has lectured on jazz and progressive music in the UK and Europe.  

A resident of Whitley Bay in north-east England, he spends far too much time posting photographs of LPs he’s listening to on Twitter and Facebook.