Ian Anderson

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to Bob west Said's podcasts. My
guest into two legendary one of the time, the one
and only and Anderson of Jeff Wild Tom Ian so
glad to have you on the podcast Big Fear. Well,
it's just a pleasure to be here. And thank goodness,
there is only one of me, the one and only.

(00:29):
Imagine imagine that there were two of me. I mean,
people will be recoiling in horror at that screeching flute
permeating every fabric of their being. It would be even
worse than it already is. I frankly, have always discovered
that the audiences are seduced during a live performance into
thinking I quite like the flute, But in reality it's

(00:49):
a horrible, horrible noise, and it's okay for a few minutes,
but for two hours, goodness me, I'm surprised they actually
remain in the in the venue. I have my cats
like the flute. My dogs run a mile, my wife
runs a mile, and and and she's an elderly lady.
But you know James Galway, he says that he has

(01:11):
played with you. He's a big flutist. Well you know,
he's um he's a big flattist, but he's a he's
a damned liar. We've we never played together. We were
supposed to play together in a concert somewhere in the USA,
and he was he was performing at the same place
the night after we were on and so we met
up and I sent him some music. We're gonna was

(01:33):
gonna come up on stage and we're going to play together.
And you know, I'd like to think I like to
think he would have done it if it wasn't for
the fact that he was a bit exhausted and jet
lagged and and probably a bit overwhelmed with the idea
of being on a stage with noisy people, and it
was out of his comfort zone. So I think, frankly

(01:54):
he chickened out. But we we've always talked about doing
something together, and on the one and only occasion when
we could have done um, he he checking out. He
just didn't show up for sound checks. So it was
a bit embarrassing. But anyway, I mean, I'm in touch
with James from time to time, elderly gentleman and in
the twilight years, just just a little bit ahead of me,

(02:17):
but not too much. But one of his proteges. Andrea Grimanelli,
who James was was a tutor to m he he
and I have played together many times, and in fact
we played played together in the Vatican Christmas concert just
before Christmas, played with with Andrea Grimanelli. And he's a

(02:41):
brilliant soloist, classical flute player and very nice and gentlemanly
guy who who's a huge as a huge relationship, great
fan of James Goldway, and we we we often chat
about it and our mutual experience. But that's classical music.
That's not what I do. I am just the I

(03:04):
am just the class cloud who sits at the back
and makes rude noises. Well, without being too self deprecating,
how do you read your flute playing? Well, the thing
is that you know, I began as a guitar player,
not as a flute player. So I was as a teenager,
you know, struggling to try and learn to play a
few notes of essentially what we're blues improvisation. And then

(03:26):
when I was some nineteen maybe eighteen or nineteen, I
heard Eric Clapton. It just joined John Male's Blues Breakers,
and that famous album cover where it Clapton is reading
a children's comic called The Beano. And when I heard
Eric Clapton, I thought, oh, this is um. This is

(03:46):
an object lesson in in um finding something else to
play as a musical instrument. So I said about finding
an alternative, and I traded in my trustee Fender strat
for a you know, it was probably worth today. I
mean the sixties strap that belonged to Lemmy, Lemmy of Motorhead.

(04:06):
It was the previous owner when he was a rhythm
guitarist and Reverend Black and the Rocking Vicars rock band.
How did you get the strap from Lemmy? Well, I
he was broke, so he had to sell it and
I took on the the debt, if you like. And
so I I got this this instrument, played it for

(04:28):
a year so and and then traded it in for
a thirty dollar flute. It was a basic student model
flute and seemed because that guitar today probably you know,
being a real genuine vintage sixties strap to a Japanese
collector would probably worth a thirty grand, forty grand maybe

(04:49):
if you add in the fact that it used to
belong to me, and before that it belonged to Lemmy.
So it doesn't seem like a very good deal, you know,
to part with that and then take on a thirty
dollar flute by way of exchange. But I think it's
probably one of the best business investments I could possibly
have made as it turned down. But of all the instruments,

(05:12):
the keyboards, the sacks, the drums, why the flute, Well,
there was no sensible reason whatsoever. I went went to
trade in my guitar and I looked around on the
walls of the music store and the sun. It had
been raining. It was a dreary day, I remember, in
in a place called Litham in Lancashire in the north

(05:34):
of England, and suddenly the sun came out and shone
through the window of the music store and glistened on
the on something that was hanging on the wall, which
was a flute, and it just beckoned. It just said
by me. And I had no idea how to play
a flute. It just seemed like a nice, shiny, well engineered,

(05:57):
rather attractive object. And I have a soft spot for
things that are a good engineering in a well designed,
well developed and I just thought this looked like it
was a sort of musical Swiss watch. Really, so I said,
I'll have that with no idea how to play it,

(06:18):
and I worked walked out with the flute, which for
the next few months I couldn't get a note out of.
And somebody finally told me it's like blowing across the
top of a Coca cola bottle, you know, you blow
at the right angle, it makes a makes a musical note.
And that finally dawned on me as I got the flute,

(06:39):
I think in August of nine seven, and somewhere in
mid December I actually managed to get a note out
of this flute. It was a note of G, and
then I found a note of E, and then A
and B, and then I had the blue scale. So
by the beginning of January, when Jethro actually became Jethrotel,

(07:01):
I was able to play not only just to play
a little bit of flute, but to play improvised blue
solos because I just translated what I thought I knew
from guitar playing into into the flute well, even though
I didn't know the proper fingering, and I was just
you know, making loud noises to try and equal the

(07:21):
impact of the electric guitar in the band. But it worked.
Out pretty well. I think I I think I probably
buy February March, people were beginning to talk about Jeth
Hotel not just as another blues band, but a blues
band with a guy who played the flute standing on
one leg, which seemed to catch on in a way

(07:41):
with the media and as a as a kind of
an image as a logo. From that day onwards. We
were a little different to Savoy Brown and Chicken Shack
and Fleetwood mac And and the other blues bands of
that era that also played at the famous Marquee Club
in London. Okay, all over the web it says that

(08:03):
your daughter picked up the flute and then you ultimately
learned you were using the long wrong fingering and how
to re learn it. Is that apocryphal or is that
a real story. That's a real story. She she asked
me when she was at school. I guess she was
about eight years old or something, and said, oh, we
we we've got to learn to play a musical instrument,
you know, kind of is just something that you've got

(08:24):
that I could borrow too to play. And I said, well,
you know, I've got drum kids, I've got saxophones, I've
got a whole bunch of stuff, but you know, maybe
the flute is the easiest one. And so I gave
her a flute, one of my old stage flutes, and
I made sure that it kind of played okay, and

(08:46):
she took it to school, and she came back and
had some little book, you know, how to Play the Flute,
Chapter one, and it was it was a musical notation,
which means nothing to me. But she was playing through
a few notes and I ventured to say, look, actually,
when you're playing this note and you do it like this,

(09:09):
and she and she looked at where my fingers were
on the instrument, said was that that's not what it
says in the book, Daddy, That's not what you're supposed
to put your little finger on the right hand. So
I said, rubbish, But of course she was right. It
was I'd been all that time. That's just somewhere around
about nineteen eighty nine or something. I've been doing it

(09:30):
wrongly for all that time. And it was a bit embarrassing.
But I then actually went off to to Bombay Mumbai,
although it was still Bombay at that time, and it
was the day after the India bombings, and Mumbai and
I arrived to do a preordained press conference before we

(09:50):
knew about the terrorist attack. So I was about the
only foreigner in town. Everybody had fled and so I
had the entire press and media of of of Mumbai
came to my press conference because they had nothing else
to do. There's nobody else to talk to, and as
a result, we we we chatted about various things, and

(10:13):
when I was back in my hotel room, oddly there
was a fax machine because my hotel was right next
to the one that got blown up, and there's a
fax machine in my room. And I thought, I'll I'll
phone one of the music stores in London and see
if they can fax over to me a flute fingering
chart to show me all the fingering positions for the

(10:36):
different notes, which they did, and I looked with horror
at the end. Resultant thought, that is going to be,
you know, very very difficult for me to relearn at
this point in my life, in almost twenty years after
I first played the flute, and to begin with, I
was so daunted by it. I thought, oh no, I'll
just stick with what I've got, But it kept luring

(10:59):
me back in with the idea that I should try
and do it properly. And so it took me about
six months really to incorporate the correct fingering into my
performances on stage, because of course I got set in
my ways and took a while to make the adjustment.
But it was worthwhile because they then gave me the

(11:20):
the scope to play at a more controllable different volume
levels and and and somewhat more in tune than I
had been, so it worked out pretty well. And then
I moved from playing closed whole flutes where all the
keys are covered, which is kind of easy for beginners,
playing open, open whole flutes, which allow you to kind

(11:41):
of slur notes and bend notes a little bit like
playing a blues guitar. And I made all that transition
really in nine nine, I guess, and and I never
looked back except to wonder why on earth I hadn't
learned to play it properly in the first place. Okay,
you mentioned you gave your daughter a road flute from

(12:04):
the stage. What would be the difference between a road
flute and a flute you keep at home and using
the studio monetary value? Basically, because you know, when you're
traveling around the world, and you're apart from the fact
that you're your flutes are going to be subject to
a certain amount of wear and tear, it's also that

(12:25):
you know you have to leave them in hotel rooms,
and or if you decide you don't want to leave
in a hotel room, you've got to put it around
your neck and go up into the depths of some
darkened Eastern European town, taking your life and your flute
in your hands, in order to try and find a
good takeaway curry or you know, or an empty restaurant
to eat in and and and get mugged along the way.

(12:46):
So it's it's a little nerve racking. So I've never
traveled with flutes of any huge value. I always tend
to I mean, they're kind of intermediate flutes, but frankly
not worth mugging me for. If you're gonna mug me,
take my watch, leave the flute. That's my advice. Now,
with most musical equipment and sports equipment, people who at

(13:08):
the elite level, there's a difference, like a pair of
skis or a guitar. This is my favorite. Do you
have a favorite flute where they all pretty much sound
the same? Well, going back to James Galway, it's an
interesting you know, he did a survey. I mean he
had lots and lots of flutes. I mean I know
because I've seen them. You've showed me the the cover

(13:30):
that contains all of his flutes, and I mean there
must have been twenty different flutes in there. And he
he did a sort of test to try and play
them all one after the other, playing exactly the same
piece of quite complex classical music. And I think he
amply demonstrated that there was so little difference in the
tonal quality of all of these flutes, you know, arranging

(13:53):
from basically an advanced student model flute to you know,
eighteen carrot gold flute that was probably costing, and there
was a little difference in it. And I actually replicated
exactly the same thing just a few weeks ago, when
I knowing that I was starting work on a new
album with a lot of flute involved in it, that

(14:15):
I did the same thing. I played a few flutes
one after the other on the same audio file and
listen to them back, and you know, you could detect
a tiny little difference, but it was much less than
it appeared to me when I play the flute, you
know you because you reson It resonates in your skull
as well as the sound of the instrument from the

(14:39):
ambushure whole and the sound that comes out of the
open tone hurls of the flute. It sounds more different
to you, but to a high quality microphone sitting you know,
thirty centimeters roughly one ft for you guys away from
your your flute. It's all my undetectable the difference. And

(15:02):
in fact, I was recording something for somebody else. It
was doing performing a guest thing for some other artists,
and I used I used two different flutes to to
to play so that the flute part that was my
contribution to his record. And when it came to it,
I realized there was absolutely no difference detectable between when

(15:23):
I've been playing one flute as opposed to you know,
thirty seconds later I switched to using the other flute.
Do you really couldn't tell? So I don't think there's
any great difference when it comes to what you take
on the road to play and what you might play
because you just like the feel of it or that
very subtle nuance that makes one flute different to another.

(15:45):
And I think the same thing obtains really for guitars,
which is why I've been utterly amazed and and perhaps
a little irreverent in my response to people like my
pile Joe Bonna Messa, who I remember going backstage and
seeing it about twenty guitars backstage to play a concert

(16:06):
at Hammersmith Odeon in London, and I said, what the
hell are all these guitarist for Joe? I mean, what's
it about. I mean, you just need one, you know,
you sound great? Well, why do you need all these guitars? Well,
I'm not sure. I might decided to play a different
one that night, or in the song I want to
play that one, or whatever. And and I found it.

(16:26):
It was quite amusing, you know. But I had to
take the mickey out of him because he was like
many guitarists. You know, it's a mark of how how
great your statue is in the firmament of guitar players,
as to how many guitars you take on tour, and
how many guitar roads you have to employ to change
the strings and tune them up for you, which is

(16:47):
the antithesis of life in Jeth Hotel guitar players take
one guitar and they change their own strings, and they
tune them up by themselves, and nobody is allowed to
touch them because your precious instrument. The last thing you
want to do is give it to some roadie to
handle and smear his bodily juices over the strings when

(17:09):
he's probably not watched his hands when he's been to
the toilet. So nobody touches my flute, nobody touches my guitar,
And the rest of the guys in the band are
exactly the same, you know, we we are. Our instruments
are the tools of our trade. I say, you know,
if you if you were a cop and you had
a you know, nine millimeter glocks glock strapped to your
your your your your your, your waist, and you know,

(17:31):
would you allow somebody else to clean it, to load it,
to check it and make sure it was ready to
roll when it's a matter of life and death potentially
that that thing is going to work for you if
you should need it. And I think it's the same
thing with musical instruments. You you should take on the
responsibility of looking after them yourself, because it is life

(17:53):
and death out there. If you pick it up and
it doesn't it's out a tune, or it string breaks
or something. It's um, you are going to die a
horrible death on stage in front of thousands of people
and looked like a complete turkey. Okay, So how does
Ian Ianerson know Joe Bonamassa. I mean, I know Joe
and he's very open, friendly guy. But you have a

(18:14):
reputation as being somewhat outside. But in reality, do you
know and connect with a lot of musicians or was
there a unique story with Bonna Massa? What's your relationship
with other musicians? Well, I I do connect in the
sense of there are a number of people that I've
met and I've known some of whom I played with,

(18:36):
but it's probably less than twenty in fifty something years.
I know Joe because our agent um said as a
suggestion for an opening act, and I was just young
kid who's um a bit of a whiz kid making
a name for himself, and you know, could he come
and do some shows with Jethro Hotel and an added apprehensively, uh,

(19:01):
and he actually plays one of your songs during his set.
He's a bit of a Jet Hotel fan. So I said, yeah, well, okay,
and I think I must have checked out some something
on long before YouTube, but it probably found something to
listen to. And he seemed he reminded me a little
bit of Rory Gallagher in the early days, because he
was that kind of a shouty singer rather than a

(19:22):
melodic singer, full of energy, full of youthful vigor. Great
description of Rory Gallagher, Yeah and well, and and of
the young Joe Bonamassa. But you know, he did some
shows with us, and he was such a nice, gentlemanly, quiet,
really easy going guy. And you know, a couple of
guys in this band they were they were okay, and

(19:44):
so it was an easy and easy, you know, a
good mix in terms of somebody to work with for
a few days on tour, and over the years, I
suppose we just kept in touch. But the mature um
Joe Bonna Massa is someone who I think has evolved
beyond the shouty blues. Now he's a much better singer

(20:09):
and a much better guitar player. He has the melodic
and the restraint that perhaps you would associate it with
with the Eric Clapton um. To begin with, he sounded
you know, it was just a little bit too How
many notes can you cram into a bar and sounds?
You know? Um, But if you're an opening out, you've
got to do that. You've got, you know, thirty five

(20:31):
minutes to struct your stuff and make a name for yourself.
You you've really got to turn on the turn on
the taps. But you know, once you've become a headline act,
you can afford to demonstrate a little taste and restraint
and try and try and make every note count, and
make the gap between the notes count, because that's the

(20:54):
thing that Eric Clapton always had, you know, he knew
the value of the space between the notes. It's like
dramatic clouds in the sky, but you see between the
clouds a little touch of infinite blue, and it's the
space between the clouds, just as the space between the
notes and the guitar. So that give it its shape,
its form. It's drama, it's dynamic range. And I think

(21:18):
that's something Joe's and and and once he grew up
a little bit, that's what he learned to do. Me,
on the other hand, I'm still stuck in the old days.
I just crammed as many notes as I can in Okay.
You happen to drop curries in there earlier of all
the big Jethro Tolfi and I was catching up on
you make sure I didn't forget anything, and it said

(21:38):
you're a big Indian food expert. Now in America, I
remember the Ramones talking about vindaloo. I didn't even know
what it was. There are a lot of Indian restaurants
in America today, but nothing like the curry shops in
the UK. So give us a primer on Indian food.
People who are un knowledgeable, what should they know about
Indian food? Well, what they shouldn't know about it is

(22:01):
that I mean apart from the connection obviously the primary
connection between Britain as a as a as a nation
who strutted its stuff across the globe and swept people
into its um, it's orbit and made such a huge difference,
some of it bad, some of it good. We inherited

(22:24):
Indian food going back into the eight hundreds when the
very first Indian restaurant opened up in London and it
really made its mark. After partition in India seven the
year of my birth, when the Hindus and Muslims were
split up when Pakistan was split up into Pakistan as

(22:47):
we know it today and Bangladesh which was which was
was East Pakistan back then, and so many Indians and
bangladesh he's and Pakistani's fled the country during the very
unpleasant times after the partition and they came, many of
them to the UK and set up Pakistani restaurants, Bangladeshi

(23:11):
restaurants and Indian restaurants. And this was really throughout the
fifties and sixties. So when I grew up at the
age when I was beginning to play music and travel
outside my hometown, then Indian food became. It became what
you you you you aspired to as a good night

(23:32):
out if you were whether it was on your way
back from some some gigs somewhere in the north of
England and there was some late night Indian restaurant open.
I mean that that you made a bee line for it,
because we all had a taste for spicy food Chinese.
I suppose it was the first thing that we knew
about in terms of more exotic cuisine, but Indian that

(23:53):
nailed it for most of us. So I guess it
would be very hard to find many British music then
and now who A didn't like Indian food and b
hadn't been to art school, So that those two things
somehow seemed to define what is about British musicians that

(24:15):
maybe marks us out from the rest of Europe and
most of the USA. You know, we're all nuts about
a good king prawne Vinderloo and we all we all
went to art college to study the creative side of
of life that then translated into music. So if someone
is going to an Indian restaurant, tell them hot at order,

(24:39):
Well that that happens to me from time to time
that somebody says, well I'm not sure what I should
what I should eat, So it's just you just asked
them a few simple questions. Well do you like do
you like food that has a wet source or do
you like something that is dry and not not not
not wet. Do you like something that is kind of

(25:00):
spicy like that a lot of spicy flavor is not
necessarily hot, but just the spices. Or do you like
something that is relatively bland? And do you like something
that is spicy as in hot or do you want
something that's really mild? And and you eat meat, do
you eat chicken, Do you eat fish, do you eat shellfish,

(25:21):
do you eat beef? To eat lamb? Or do you
are you vegetarian? And with a benefit of that, you
can perhaps direct somebody to something that hopefully is going
to be along the lines that that that might satisfy them.
And for people who are perhaps not really sure that

(25:42):
I would recommend something, I mean, assuming you eat chicken,
I would say, go for a chicken corner. It's a mild, creamy,
yogurt based sauce with the chicken boned pieces of chickens.
There's no bone in there. You know that that might satisfy.
But if you want something that's you know, if you
want to just jump in at the deep end and

(26:03):
you go for the King Prawn Vindaloo, and if you're
completely nuts, go for the King Prawn foul which is
the legendary hottest of curries. And these days, of course
they're made with the benefit of chili peppers that have
been refined and hybridized in Arizona and New Mexico. So
these days it could be but jell Okia or the

(26:27):
or the or the the or the or the Reaper
that you know, the hottest chili peppers on planet Earth.
I know because I've grown those and you know, one
goes an awfully long way in terms of spicing up
your your supper. Okay, you mentioned Indy, you mentioned Britain.

(26:53):
I have to ask what is your take unclapped in
It is the anti vax the answer? And what is
your stance on Brexit? Well, I'm afraid to say that
people like Van Morrison and Eric Clapton just a name two,
in the attitude towards COVID, its effects and the vaccine. Um, well,

(27:20):
I am ashamed of what they what they say, it really, really,
frankly makes me very angry because it's a you would
think you would think that they would be bright enough
to know better. And there are people who genuinely have
a reason not to have the vaccine. But if you're
a responsible citizen of planet Earth, and I think you

(27:42):
should take the chance and have your double vaccine or
your triple vaccine. And I mean I've actually had five
holes in my arm in the last twelve months, three
to do with COVID, one for pneumonia and one for
an annual flu vaccine. And I hate needles, I mean
I absolutely hate needles. Drives me nuts. And but at

(28:04):
the end of the day, three of those five are
about are about protecting, helping to protect people around me,
my family, my friends, or complete strangers. I think it
is a bit of a civic duty, frankly, to bite
the bullet, be vaccinated, and much less chance that you
could be the person who inadvertently infects somebody else, who

(28:25):
may be vulnerable, who may end up in hospital sadly
may die even with O macron, which is not the
pussycat quite that we were hoping for, but it's better
than nothing, and we have to accept that. Even though
infection rates in my country have now seemingly in the
last week turned the corner and started to go down,

(28:45):
I mean, they're almost half of what they were two
weeks ago, but our death rates, which lag behind the hospitalizations,
which lag behind infection rates, you know, are still going up,
and at the at a rate quite as high as
the worst of two thousand and twenty one, but still worrying.
And in your country, you know, you're you are as

(29:08):
of yesterday, pretty close to the highest daily infection rate
that's been recorded, and O macron is still going up
and death rates are still going up. It's um you
know we're not out of this yet. And I'm afraid
Eric Clapton and others send an irresponsible message in my

(29:29):
view to two people. They just simply fall into that
that kind of fake news and and conspiracy theory stuff
that that does seem to appeal to so many people,
but it's it isn't really without foundation. And when I've read,

(29:50):
because I go online and I look at what some
of these people say, and I looked to see where
they got it from, and it is it's neither science,
common sense or common decency in my view to take
an anti vax state a status in your in the
way that you influence others. But that's just me. I'm

(30:12):
a low abiding citizen. I'm a nice guy, and I
definitely don't want to catch COVID about possibly avoid it
because I'm in that vulnerable category with underlying health conditions.
So you know, I'm taking a little bit of extra
care and I'd like to think other people would do
the same thing on my you know, for for my sake.

(30:32):
And what about Brexit. Brexit is well, I remember when
I I woke up to Brexit. I was in Poland
to do a concert and I woke up in the morning,
around six seven in the morning and to hear the
the early results of the Brexit Pole and was pretty
horrified to find out that it was in favor of Brexit.

(30:54):
I mean, I I think that the EU needed a
sharp shock to wake it up to the fact that
as an institution, the EU was I mean, it was
a post war thing, you know, it was about bringing
the European countries together so they wouldn't murder each other
in battle. And then it developed into an economic union,
which is fair enough. And then it became the EU,

(31:15):
which was okay, but then it became increasingly caught up
with trying to homogenize the whole, the whole fabric of
Europe into accepting the same set of laws, same set
of taxation standards, and a whole lot of things that
I felt were removing the national culture and pride and

(31:35):
individual nation's sense of who they were, including in the UK.
So I think the EU needed a bit of a
sharp shop to wake it up. But at the end
of the day, I was I was disappointed that we
had not been able to find and accommodate some kind
of a rational way to remain broadly within Europe while

(31:57):
having more of our own laws, in our immigration policies,
in our own hands, rather than as part of a
European directive. Unfortunately, it resulted in us leaving the EU,
and I'm rather sad about that. I've been paying my
my German reunification tax since whatever it was nineteen eighty nine, when,

(32:22):
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification
of Germany as a as a performer going there to work,
part of the withholding taxes that we would pay were
that small part that went towards the cost of reunifying Germany,
which is basically building roads and infrastructure and housing and
the whole shooting match of what had been the Eastern

(32:46):
Germany ground into the into the dirt by the communist
regime as an offshoot of of the USSR. But you know,
I'm I'm I am sorry that we've left the EU.
I'm a European, I'm I'm a I'm a Britain first,
but I feel very strongly a European. It's where I've

(33:08):
spent much of my life and I hope, in what
remains of it I get to spend some more time
in Europe. So yeah, I'm sorry to have left but
I didn't want to. In a way, I'm kind of
glad we didn't stay on the terms that we were on.
I just felt there was prospects to tough it out
a little more and get more of what we wanted

(33:30):
while still remaining part of Europe. Not a problem that
you guys have. It's you, But you do have the
problem of NATO, and you do have the problem of
an angry Mr Putin who's hell bent on trying to rebuild,
you know, from the ashes of the USSR, trying to
rebuild a broader empire than the one that he lords

(33:51):
over at the moment. I have a photograph, we can
find this online, a photograph of of when I went
to play in St. Petersburg, I think in or ninety
one and met the mayor of St. Petersburg at the
time and his assistant kind of rather odd, weird looking

(34:14):
little man who was looking daggers at me. In this photograph.
It turned out to be the KGB Major Putin. Although
he was the chief economic advisor to the Mayor of St. Petersburg,
he was actually a major in the KGB at the
same time. And Putin is just the look on his
face as I'm you know, smooching with his boss is priceless.

(34:38):
And when I was well, it was brought to my
attention many many years later that there was a photograph
of us in the same frame. But you can see
something about putin that and look in his eyes. It's
he's a frightening guy. I actually have a huge admiration
for him as a international statesman and politician. But he's

(35:00):
a very scary man, and I can you know, like
everybody else, we know what he's trying to do. But
as someone who's supposed to be in Ukraine in um
in the middle in the one at the end of
the first week of April UM, it's one of those
slightly nerve wracking prospects that will Ukraine still be Ukraine

(35:22):
by the time I get there, Will I which would
be another gig in Russia? Well, I'm gonna be in
Russia for that matter, and whenever it is sometime not
too far off to do some concerts there that have
been rescheduled three times already, like most of our concerts
since early two and twenty, we're on our third or
fourth rescheduling of dates that people bought tickets for in

(35:46):
the middle of two thousand and nineteen and we've not
showed up for work yet. I mean's so embarrassing. Just
staying on the politics one more time. A couple of
days ago, the lead piece in the New York Times
our ed page was about the UK sliding into authoritarianism
Boris Johnson passing all these laws about being arrested if

(36:08):
you protest, etcetera. Do you think there's a possibility we
certainly have this issue in the US and needles sat
Putin is an authoritarian or is that overblown? But I
think it's a bit overblown. We are pretty much a
liberal society and media. You know, we have a couple
of right wing newspapers, but they're not anything like as
far to the writers say fox Um. And at the

(36:34):
same time, you know, whilst our liberal side of things
maybe a little more, a little bit more to the
left than than CNN, we're still generally speaking, I think
we're relatively tolerant country. And you know, once in a
while you've got to try and get to grips with

(36:54):
what is increasingly what is referred to here as wokeasm.
You know, it's a those who have adopted really an
ultra liberal position because they are partly following trends and
not wanting to appear hostile or out of touch and
so on. But you know, there's got to be some
common sense in all of it. And you know, some

(37:16):
of it I go along with, and some of it
i've you know, I feel a little awkward about. But
generally speaking, you know, we are pretty much a liberal country,
and the most extreme of our right wing media and
those within the Conservative Party are still puttycats compared to

(37:37):
the Republicans of the USA, not all of them, but
most of them. And you know, one of my great
chums was and absolutely died in the whole idealistic Republican
and and he was someone you could have a spirited
to argument or discussion with. But he was a true

(37:58):
Southern gentleman and loved by all Democrats and Republicans alike,
particularly during his stint not only with with Fox, but
as the as the press secretary for for President Bush,
actually two President Bushes. He was he was the scriptwriter

(38:19):
for Dad and then it was the press secretary for
for Junior, and and I was in his office one
day in the White House and he um, he said,
dropping names, but we were we were there just as
you know, unexceptional guests to watch a press conference, and
went back to Tony Snow's office. Tony Snow's the name

(38:42):
of the man. And and we got back to his
office after the press briefing and the phone rang, and
it was Barbara Starr from CNN, and I could read
his body language and the tone of his voice. He
was being so polite and nice to her. And she
was trying to get the scoop, trying to pin him
down on all that you know rubbish, you just said,
you know, covering up for Bush. But you know, what's

(39:04):
the real story here, what's the real And and he
was so nice and poline. He said, Barbara, you know,
if I if I could give you anything more, you'd
be the first person I would call. It's it's really
nice to hear from you. And but you've got the
you've got the impression he was somebody that was it
was really appreciated as a as a person of honor
and discretion and a gentlemanly way of doing things. And

(39:28):
he had a very easy relationship with the media left
and right alike. And I remember before Tony died finally
tragically after repeated illness, with with colon cancer. He I
did say to him, Toney, would you ever, you know,
would you consider a political career, you know, shift away

(39:50):
from being a backroom boy to actually, you know, running
for serious office. Um? And he was sort of bashful
about it. No, No, my wife wouldn't really want me
to do that, and blah blah blah blah blah. But
I've always thought that Tony, Tony would have been the
Republican president for the USA that the USA really needed. Um.

(40:12):
Sadly he was never around to do that. That his
last gig wasn't for Fox. His last gig he was appointed.
He took on the job with CNN to be their
Republican reporting the upcoming election where Obama won. And that
was Tony's that the last appointment he had at that point.

(40:33):
I guess he knew he wasn't going to make it.
And sadly he was never able to take on that
appointment because he became very seriously and died before before
that happened. But it was an interesting, an interesting twist
that you know, Tony was so appreciated and revered that
he would be taken on by CNN to be the

(40:55):
the voice of the Republican Party within CNN whenever they
were talking out and analyzing the the events leading up
to the election. So I, you know, I missed Tony.
He was a good guy and he would have been
a good precedent. And he was a flute player. And
that's how I got to know because his his whole
passion was playing the flute. He and I argued. I

(41:16):
said that he was the model for the the anchorman
flute playing sequence, the jazz flute bit, and he claimed
that no, he couldn't. Possibly it must be me. In reality,
it was probably both of us. But I would never
classify myself as a jazz flutist and an anchor man.

(41:37):
I mean, he was a media person, he was a
you know, he was a and so was Tony. So
I always had my bet that it was modeled on Tony,
But who knows. We'd have to ask the writers and
the and the the actor. You know, where did he
get that idea for him? Okay, let's go back and

(41:57):
set the scene in the sixties in US, there's certainly
always been music, but generally speaking, the early sixties were
very vapid, and then at the beginning of the sixty
four the Beatles arrived. What was going on in the UK?
You know, we hear about the blues records being imported
by soldiers. We hear the scene in Liverpool, the Beatles

(42:18):
play at the Cavern Club. You know, as I say,
in the US, people saw the Beatles on it solivan,
They picked up electric guitars. What was your experience of
the scene. Well, I had already picked up an electric guitar,
I think at the time, possibly when the Beatles came along.
That's another one of my questions. What motivated you? Yeah,
But it wasn't really that I was a Beatles fan.

(42:39):
I mean I remember when they first appeared with a
song called Loved Me Do, and I think what appealed
to me about it was the harmonica that kind of
set me off in the track of playing harmonica. But
you know, they were okay, but they were a pop
group and I had already at that point discovered as

(43:00):
and blues, and I was not really enamored too much
of of the early Beatles. Although they were catchy songs,
you could see the expertise and the energy and the
the ghost youthful the thing that they put across that
that allowed a generation of people to to feel passionate

(43:21):
about being young and expressing themselves. But for me, that that,
you know, in the UK at that time, you know,
was a curious mixture of different sorts of music, and
the pop music of the day was still for the
most part it had been emulating Elvis Presley and other
derivative imitations of other US acts, So it hadn't really

(43:41):
we hadn't really home grown very much. That was anything
to feel good about until until the Beatles came along,
and and and and In America you had to endure
Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clark five um as, the
imports from the UK, which people loved sure enough. But
when the Beatles arrived in town, it was a whole,

(44:04):
a whole new ball game. And then it seemed a
quite quick movement towards something where the Beatles we saw
them mature and developers musicians. And then the big landmark
thing that made a difference to me and I'm sure
many of my peers in the UK, was the advent
of what became not progressive rock but progressive pop. It

(44:27):
was Sergeant Pepper in the summer of sixty seven, and
within a couple of months of that there was the
Pink Floyd was Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and
these two albums they were like a signpost. It was.
It was like walking down a walking down a path
in the middle of the woods and suddenly coming across
a fork in the road and a signpost they're saying,

(44:48):
you know this way, And it was a huge motivator,
you know, to hear what you could do with pop
music on the one hand and what you could do
with psychedelic rock on the other. So it was quite
important to me, not as the actual musical style or
the or the elements of the of the music, or

(45:09):
the personalities of people playing. It was just that motivation
that you could actually take it into your own hands
and write and record and put music out. There wasn't
mainstream pop music. Of course, the Beatles had George Martin,
without whom I'm sure they couldn't have made that record,
and Pink Floyd had Said Barrett, without whom the lyrics

(45:29):
and the essence of those songs wouldn't really mentor busting amount,
but they were. They were real signposts and landmarks in
my early days as a teenager. So yeah, it was
definitely a step forward from the the imitative rock and
roll of Britain's music scene in the from the late

(45:51):
fifties through to the mid sixties, which was frankly a
little embarrassing. You were just copying people singing with American
accents and wearing the clothes and pretending to be um,
you know, the American artists that they revered and whose
careers they aspired to. Okay, so you're an art school.

(46:18):
Is that a holding place? Where do you envision being
an artist or a designer? And how do you pick
up the guitar and how does that become your direction
in life? Well, I had a guitar at the age
of I think eleven. I persuaded my first of all
I had had I think when I was eight or
nine years old, I got an Elvis Presley ukulele. That

(46:42):
was my birthday present or Christmas present. Boats not online,
but you know, a mail order thing. And and I
remember the black and white add for this ukulele, and
it was a picture of Elvis playing what looked like
a full sized guitar, and it was. It cost twenty
two and sixpence, which you know, in those days was
probably a couple of dollars, and naively, I thought, wow,

(47:06):
you know, that's the real deal. And what what arrived
in the post was this thing that was, you know,
fifteen inches long and fragile piece of plastic with nylon strings.
It wouldn't stay in tune, and I mean it was
really quite horrible, but you could actually play a few
chords and and and some simple tunes. And I went

(47:27):
on from there to get a beating up old Spanish
guitar to which I attached steel strings, which of course
meant that the action lifted up off the fret board
to the point where you had bleeding fingers and the
attempt to play C major and and it was. It
was pretty out of tune, but I managed to begin with,

(47:51):
along with a couple of school chumps, to make some
vaguely musical noises in the style of what was called skiffle.
Skiffle in the UK and the in the fifties was
kind of homegrown music form. It was a precursor to punk.
You know, you didn't have to be able to play
a musical instrument, you just kind of did it. And
you don't have drum kits. You had a washboard, you know,

(48:13):
the sort of corrugated metal thing that used for scrubbing
clothes on. And a t chest bass which was literally
a wooden t chest that he was packed in. And
you had a pole, you know, like a like a
broom pole, and a piece of string that was stretched
between the two and you have bum bum boom by

(48:33):
pulling the pole tighter or loosening it off. And so
that was skiffle, and it was homemade, very simple music
that was essentially derived from bluegrass and blue grass in
his turn, of course, derived from folk music from the UK,
from Scotland, Ireland, England, and from from Northwest Europe. So

(48:55):
it had turned around and come back to the UK
is as a music form that we could all pick
up on. You know. There was some energetic and fun
songs from the few artists who were able to record
and perform, but blue bluegrass in the form of skiffle
was something that I think probably was the starting point

(49:16):
for many of the musicians of my my era. I mean,
I've not really talked to any of them, so I
don't know most of them, but I would be surprised
if they hadn't also followed the same the same tracks
as I did. As a teenager, you know, through through
those early music forms, and I think what we didn't
like was the cheesy, show busy, imitative British pop music,

(49:39):
which was based on the American stuff that you know,
we we all preferred the real dealing. We're going to
do American music, then let's let's let's do Muddy Water,
Let's do Harling Wolf, Let's do even Chuck Berry or
or Bo Diddley, you know, which was obviously that the
pop side of the blues. But those of us who
grew up with us and jazz as teenagers, you know,

(50:02):
I think we we set our sights on something a
little more esoteric until it dawned on us that we
were middle class white boys. We weren't black. We didn't
have the experience, the background, the culture. We were just
still copying something that really wasn't ours. Which is why I,
after a few months of being in a blues band,

(50:24):
you know, I was anxious to try and write my
own songs and step away from the accusation potentially of
just ripping off black American folk music, which I revered
and to this day still do. I would hate to
be thought of as just a copyist. So you make
this transition, how do you end up going down south

(50:47):
to London and becoming professional? What is your goal? And
you were really starving, so what was that like and
how did you keep yourself on track with the dreams
supposed to giving up? When I grew up, I mean
I was born in Scotland, but I moved to the
age of twelve, I think, to the north of England,
to a town called Blackpool, a seaside town I've often

(51:09):
likened to either the worst of New Jersey. You know,
it's a it's a it's you know, it's a it's
a town where people go to have a good time,
but it's pretty desolate in winter. And um, the boardwalk
in in a in Atlantic city or in New Jersey,
it's it's reminiscent of the promenade in Blackpool. People strut

(51:31):
up and down and ever. In the summer it's nice,
you know, eating ice cream and eating burghers or doing
what you do, same sort of thing. But you couldn't
really think about being a full time musician in Blackpool
because the only opportunities really were to be essentially a
cover band, or or to be something really very show
busy and do you know some sort of very conspicuously

(51:55):
pop music, but everybody knew that if you wanted to
if you wanting to make it, you know, sure you
could go to Manchester or the or Liverpool and playing
some clubs that were perhaps more the the the up
and coming places. But long term, everybody the gout feeling
was you've gotta go. You gotta go to London. That's

(52:17):
where you make it. That's where the music industry has
really centered, the record companies, the biggest clubs and venues
and so on. So around sixty seven I decided that,
you know, I should bite the bullet and leave home
and try for the London opportunity should it, should it exist,

(52:39):
But you know I had a plan B and a
plan to see you know, it wasn't like I was,
you know, burning my boats and so it was. It
was a dangerous move, but it worked out in the
sense of having a couple of months of abject poverty
and literally going hungry and going very very cold, because

(53:01):
sixty seven and in the UK was one of the
coldest winters on record. But you know, it picked up
again January February. Got to get at the Marquee Club
and things moved on. From there and my days of
eating recycled off cuts of meat and bits of past

(53:21):
their cell by date vegetables and cooking them up. And
then you didn't want to waste anything, so you would
cook it up and then and then you'd add something
else to it next day, and something else. That the
part just stayed on the stove and you just kept
sort of adding to it, and so everything stewed in
its own juices. But it kept me, kept me going

(53:44):
for a couple of weeks of the bad period of time.
And then you know, we've got a few gigs. I
had enough money to go and buy you know, take
away Chinese or something that was unbelievably I mean, absolutely
lutally just the most amazing experience was to go in
a Chinese takeaway and order some egg fried rice and

(54:08):
and some sweet and style pork and you know, some
noodles and whatever, and take it back to your lonely
little bedsit room, and and it would still be warm enough,
and and you know, you put your hands on it
to try and warm your hands up first of all
before you ate it. It was that that was just
the most amazing, wonderful experience of being independent, being on

(54:31):
your own, away from your parents, and I spent most
of my time alone because I didn't really have any friends,
know anybody down there, apart from the guys in the band.
But there they lived in actually in nearby town, so
we didn't see each other unless we had a gig
to go to. So I spent a lot of time alone.
It was quite useful because I learned to play a
little bit of flute and I started to write some music,

(54:53):
and I read several of Jack carro Act's works, which
were an interesting, um parallel to my own rather desolate life.
I remember reading Desolate Angels as a time when I
was particularly cold and miserable and alone, and in a
way it was somebody sharing that experience of a stark,

(55:17):
rather bleak situation that that gave me a little bit
feeling that I wasn't alone in the world. Um so
I yes, I I you know, it all worked out
and I can't complain. I only went hungry for two weeks,
you know, Okay, So ultimately band puts out the album
this was Was it always you were band? Or was

(55:40):
it more of equal voice, equal membership? Well, I guess
right at the beginning, Um, you might have thought it
was for guys who had an equal stake in things,
and you know, we're equal voices. But in reality, Mick
Abraham's the guitar player and I were you know, more

(56:04):
dynamic musical forces. And we needed Mick because he was
a you know, virtue as a guitar player and a
and a shouter, a blue shouter. You know, he'd like
to give it a lot of energy, and you know,
he had a lot going for him as a blues
and rock performer, and he was vital to the band

(56:25):
um But I was the odd bawl who brought something
else to the party that was not mainstream in terms
of blues or an approach, and he and I always
had an uneasy relationship. I think he was uncomfortable with
me because of my musical aspirations didn't stop with you know,

(56:48):
imitative blues, and the other guys tended after a while
to come more towards me than Mike. It was very
set in his ways and a bit of a mercurial
character from time to time. But when we really fell
out with Mick towards the end of of we were

(57:10):
already getting a little bit established in the UK, and
it was at a time when it was make or break,
you know, would either build upon that early small success
and find a new guitar player or you know, go
back home to mummy, as were the options. Okay, so

(57:31):
how did it end with Mick? And is fat Man
on stand up about Mick? Well, it's not really about Mick.
It was just the only time we have a traveled
abroad because Mick wouldn't get on an airplane, but we
could get a ferry to Denmark and we went to
play in two clubs on the ferry from the east

(57:52):
coast of England. And on the way back to the
ferry to get the ferry home, we went past we
had a little bit of time in how we went
past a porn shop m in es Buerg, and I know,
just in the porn shop there was a mandolin hanging
there and I went in and you know, with my
whatever I learned for doing the club dates, I bought

(58:13):
a mandolin. Had no idea how to play or tune
up or anything. And on the way back, because it's
quite a long ferry journey, so we were it was
an overnight thing and Mick and I were sharing a
cabin and I really annoyed him by tuning up and
trying to play this mandolin, and he was just getting
really really testy about the fact I was keeping him awake.

(58:33):
And but you know, a little bit of a tune
coming on other what this is good? I like this.
And and we used to tease Mick, who was pink cherubic,
sort of slightly chubby. He wasn't fat, you know, he
wasn't a beast. He was just a little just a
little chubby in a healthy chubby kind of a way,
whereas the rest of us were sort of rake thin,

(58:55):
basically because his mom cooked for him. And when we
were start think, but I used to tease me about being,
you know, not fat, but you know, being a little chubby.
And so I wrote this song I Don't want to
be a fat man. And it wasn't really about him.
It was just, yeah, just a little notion really, And

(59:16):
but he was convinced I was. It was a sort
of bitter attack on his corporeal presence, and and and
he wasn't too happy about it. But it wasn't really
about me. I mean, I never write songs that are
about real people because I would never betray a relationship

(59:37):
by by making it so, you know, so intrusive into
somebody's life. But there is an amalgam of personalities and
people that's an as an observer. Since I'm that kind
of a writer, I might draw together a few different
people and that becomes a character in a song. But
it's never about a particular individual. I was certainly never

(59:59):
name name hims or you know, take an individual as
a model for a song. I would just hate to
embarrass somebody or betray something that is private between us
as a relationship, whether it's a couple of guys or
men and a woman, or you know, it's for me,
it's it's all, you know, pretty private stuff. So have

(01:00:21):
you ever listened to a blood Wind Pig record? And
I know he's had his health issues, but what's your
relationship of any with Mick today? Well, Mick went on
to do blood Wind Pig and got a lot of
help from us and our managers and record company, and
Bloodwind Pig were on tour with Gester Hotel a couple
of points along the way and and after Blood Wind Pig,

(01:00:44):
I mean just sort of mixed band. But they threw
him out of his own band in the end because
I think they just he was a tricky chap, you know,
to to work with. I mean, very nice man, you know,
he's had absolutely bighearted, nice guy, but just so insecure
and bundle of nerves and twitchy and it always um

(01:01:06):
and it's just kind of awkward to be around, so
desperate to be liked. It was, it was overbearing. But
after Blood Wind Pig, Mick went on, you know, through
a various musical and unmusical activities, and when he started
working again, you know, I played with him a few

(01:01:27):
times and we did some songs for one of his
solo albums and so on, and once in a while
we've spoken. Mike unfortunately these days having stuff with very
serious little health, it's not really you know, he's not
really able to have conversations on the phone or whatever.

(01:01:51):
And you know, I think changed emails a few times.
But but Mick's you know, you know, he's not well.
And I always been a little sad that he's not
able to do anything anymore at all musically. But my
son was actively engaged in doing a sort of tribute

(01:02:14):
charity concert in London for make and which I was
I couldn't I couldn't go to I wasn't. I was
away somewhere else, but it was nice to think that
my son James was one of the organizers of a
fundraiser for Mick to recognize his his role in those
years of being part of the British music scene. And

(01:02:36):
Mick has a lot of parles, a lot of friends
who were stand by him, and you know he was
in his day, he was one of those guitar players.
Maybe not so obviously on the level of the Eric
Clapton or Peter Green or Jimmy Page or any of
those guys, but he was, you know, he was a

(01:02:57):
revered blues and rock guitarist and until his little health
took over, you know, he was still doing pretty well. Okay,
let's go to stand Up. This is obviously a different
era and Needles say, it's not streaming, it's vinyl. The
white album would come out, which was actually a response
to overdone packages. But in sixty nine you put out

(01:03:20):
stand Up and it literally stands up when you open
the cover. Whose idea was that, well, I have to that.
Then all the credit goes to Terry Ellis, our manager,
because the the first album cover this was that was
that was my idea and Terry, bless him, went along
with it. I mean, Warner Brothers and Ireland I think

(01:03:42):
hated it because he can't possibly do this is a
picture of a bunch of old guys with a lot
of dogs around them, and then the name of the
band isn't even on the front cover. You know, you
can't do that. But but Terry kind of, you know,
he stood by us, and that was what I wanted
it to be like, and so he went along with it,
and I think it got people's attention because who who

(01:04:03):
would bring out an album cover and the name of
the band isn't even on the on the front of
the cover. It was on the back. But nonetheless it
was it was my my, my one. And then stand up.
Terry had come up with a with an artist in
the USA who did specialized in in wood cuts, and

(01:04:24):
I don't know what Terry saw this, but it was,
you know, very graphic. And as having been to our school,
I did some would cut some things at school, so
I was quite quite um, you know, quite happy to
go along with that. And and Terry came up with
the idea of a gate fall cover that you would
open up and there would be this sort of pop
up thing of the band, and you know what, was it? Okay, fine,

(01:04:47):
well if you can make that work, let's let's let's
do it. And that indeed was the was the was
the album cover, which you know was quite in its way,
quite iconic, and the fact that the album then did
go on to do very well in the UK. In fact,
we were on our second US tour. Um. I remember
being in Loose Midtown in Manhattan in the breakfast room,

(01:05:14):
having breakfast with the guys, and in walked Joe Cocker
and came over to our tables. That our congratulations. So
why what's happened? He said? Your album just went to
number one in the UK charts? So can I can
I have kind of you're gonna eat all of that bacon?
Can I have a bit? So the the you know,
the the good news was we were away from the

(01:05:37):
UK and could do nothing about it, but we had
a number one album in England and that was when
Terry said, Wow, you know we've got to We've got
to capitalize on this. We need something to keep the sea,
put it to keep the pot boiling while we were
out of the UK on a long tour. So can
you can you write a hit single that we can
release in the UK while we're away, and to humor him,

(01:05:59):
I say, yeah, sure, no problem, just give me a
couple of hours. And by then I think we we've
gone to Boston, and so we checked into a holiday
in the hotel alongside a band called Pentangle who were
also checking it at the same time, and and I said, Okay, Terry,
give me a couple of hours. I'll meet you in
the lobby and I'll write a hit single while I'm upstairs.

(01:06:22):
I was just I was just fooling around, you know,
I was just just just winding him up. But I
went back down to the lobby and he said, have
you written it? If you got it? And I said, well,
sort of, maybe, I don't know. He said, right, well,
i'll book you into a studio in New York next
week and we'll go and record it. So I had
to come up with, you know, something slightly more refined
from that basic idea, and we went in and recorded

(01:06:44):
the backing track to Living in the Past and in
a studio in m I think it was actually in
New Jersey, which across the river, and and then we
went then to the West Coast. I remember then I
did the flute and vocal over dubs in the studio
and in uh I think it was in San Francisco,

(01:07:07):
and we did the mix and sent it back to
the UK and it was it was released and amazingly
got to number three in the UK Singles charts. So
in fact I had written its single, but it was
one of those silly things. I was just bluffing, just
fooling around. But the fact that it was in five
four time signature it really wasn't a mainstream pop song

(01:07:28):
was quite gratifying because until that point there's only ever
been one other top ten hit in five four times signature,
which was was Dave brew Becks Take five. And so
it was kind of a nice, nice feeling that you'd
you brought something relatively new to the world of you know,

(01:07:52):
the pop music charts and music TV because it was
on top of the pop sore famous um uh weekly
television show that did the latest pop music stuff. So
that's how that worked out, and the stand up did
did pretty well and and in its own right, it

(01:08:13):
paved the way for what came next. Okay, but staying
with the second album for a minute, my favorite song
you have such an incredible memory. I look into the
Sun come about. I'd rather think it was something I'm
not sure where it was on a guitar or where
the fiddling around with the Hammond organ. It was in
the studio that I've got this really simple little line

(01:08:33):
and it was just meant to be a song about optimism,
um optimism and perhaps in the face of some adversity.
It was a very simple, you know, cheerful, quietly upbeat
song that didn't strike me as it was, you know,
so important to the album as a whole, compared to

(01:08:55):
songs like a New Day Yesterday for example, which I
knew it was a power, a full song, and the
worlds like for a Thousand Mothers and things that were
a bit more animated, and we're look into the sums
that you know, gentle placid piece. There are two or
three like that on it that were gentle um reasons

(01:09:17):
for waiting I think was another one that was a
similar sort of a feel. So yeah, it was just
just trying to bring something in the way of dynamic
range into the broad context of rock music, so it
didn't all have to be crash, bang wallop with drums
and bass pounding away on everything you could, you could,
you could do things that are a little bit more

(01:09:40):
varied and musically a little den less dense, and you know,
had different dynamics. And perhaps in the case of a
song like that, it was giving me the opportunity to
not have to pretend to be a rock singer, which
I've never felt terribly able to do. Um, So I

(01:10:03):
could just sing it in a relatively quiet, easy voice,
and it was nice to do something relaxed. Okay, so
the next album, let's talk about it from an outside perspective.
Many critics felt that the first album was best, needless

(01:10:27):
to say, that was a sound, a different sound. Second
album great reviews. Now for people who are younger today,
they will need not even understand the power of the
rock press. But that meant something back then. Third album
commercial breakthrough. But from the perspective of those paying attention,

(01:10:47):
it seemed a little bit more obvious, less cerebral, less internal,
and more on the surface. And of course you had
to cry you a song, which was a legendary riff song.
So just to what degree was this premeditated or those
on the outside are making this all up and you
just cut a record? Well, it was very much a

(01:11:10):
reflection of being on tour in America in sixty nine
when we'd you know, we we we were just just
making our presence felt. You know. We played in few
clubs and we've been an opening act on a few
theater shows. Um. But with the benefit album, it was written,
most of it was written when I got back to

(01:11:30):
the UK, but it did reflect on that what was
a sometimes a rather dark experience of being in the USA.
Suddenly we were either headlining and modest venues on our own,
but we were traveling a lot and spending a lot
of time away from home, and and I I think
it's it's much of it is. It's rather darker in

(01:11:53):
musical terms, not in a negative way, but it just
it just reflects the perhaps some of the ice elations,
some of the cultural confusion that comes out of visiting
another country and then finding that after the first initial
getting to know it, suddenly you begin to realize that

(01:12:15):
we don't really necessarily fit in and just feel a
little I felt out of place increasingly in in in
in American culture. Glenn are bass player. You know, he
loved America. He love he just loved everything about it.
He was a party guy. You know, he just had
made lots of friends and went out at night and
you know he had a great time. But Martin Barr

(01:12:36):
and Clive and myself, you know, we were kind of loaners.
You know, we just go back to the hotel room,
read a book, watchum. Dick Cavert was here around there.
But it was that it was that sort of era,
you know, where you just you picked up on American culture,
but you you did it in a slightly more vicarious way.
You know, you saw it from as an observer and

(01:12:58):
picked up things from television and media and the newspapers
and Smiley's a New York delicate testament that did the biggest,
the biggest Um, chicken liver sandwich is known to mankind
and child strawberry malted milkshakes. A guy with Martin Barren,

(01:13:21):
who are starving Hungary, we managed to scrap between us
a few dollars together, and we we bought. We bought
these enormous wedges of chicken liver sandwich and salad dressing
and lettuce and tomato and all the trimmings, and and
then these huge pots of strawberry malted milkshake. Went back

(01:13:43):
to our horrible hotel and ate ourselves into a stupor
having gorged on entirely unhealthy food. But those are the
sort of the amusing moments and what was otherwise quite
often a other a bit depressing in a way for
those of us who were missing being at home. You know,

(01:14:05):
we don't suddenly we were getting noticed and we were
not famous, but you know, people knew who we were,
but we made us he feel even more sort of displaced,
and I think some of that came out in the album.
But you know, an important part of it was I
remember being in in the USA at the time when
when Buzz and Neil walked on the Moon and and

(01:14:28):
Michael Collins, who didn't and was in charge of the
the command module. You know, I decided that was worthy
of a song was to write about Michael Collins being
the guy who didn't get to go to the moon
or step onto the moon, and the awful position that
he would have been in. And I'm sure it was
well planned for, and the eventuality that Neil and Buzz

(01:14:49):
either landing didn't made it back or crashed in the
first place, and Michael Collins had to return home to
Earth alone. He would have been the most vilified and
hated person on the planet. And but that was his gig,
that was the job, that's what he signed up for,
and I always felt it was rather a touching experience. Oddly,

(01:15:09):
my son in law played Michael Collins in a in
a movie about the moon landing many years later. Not
a fame, not not a highly successful movie, but he
did play Michael Collins. Was a curious um. We had
to do all of his research about Michael Collins and
everything to do with that. That that that journey, but

(01:15:32):
that that was one of the moments I do remember
being an America and feeling really sort of enraptured with
the whole the whole thing about America and Space Race.
It was. It was a you got really caught up in.
It was very exciting being there at that time and
at the same at the same time turning down the

(01:15:52):
opportunity to go and play at Woodstock, which was pretty
much around the same time of the year, along with
Led Zeppelin, who also decided not to take up the
invitation to go to Woodstock. And what was the thinking there,
I don't know what they're thinking was, but I would
imagine Peter Grant might have had the same view as
I do, which was we didn't want to get tarnished

(01:16:12):
with the brush of the dying embers of the hippie
era and you know, sort of a naked drug taking
massid throng of people who were you know, falling over
themselves to um love the music of ten years after,
who were forever stuck with that Woodstock appearance for the
rest of their lives to this day. Um, it's what

(01:16:34):
people remember ten years after four. Leo Lyons, the bass player,
when I met him a few years ago on some
festival that we were playing at, and and he just
come off stage and I said, oh, what, what what? What?
What did you play tonight? Lee? Or what's the set
list taped to the side of his guitar And I
leaned over to look at it, and he said, oh,
it's just the usual set list. And I said that

(01:16:57):
that wasn't the set list just for tonight. He said, no,
that's been taped to my guitar since nine nine we
played at Woodstock, So you have no regrets for not
playing No, No, I think we're way too early for us.
We were we were we were not yet fully formed,
and we were just you know, we needed time, We
needed time to develop and become a little more mature musically,

(01:17:20):
and it would have been awful if we If we'd
gone on, we probably would have done really well. You know,
people were like, wow, is that band even better than
ten years after? But it was too early for us.
I mean I came for the who they were on,
but they were already established. They knew what they were doing,
that who were the who they were, They had a repertoire,
they had an identity. But Jethro Tell was just an

(01:17:43):
embryonic finding our way sort of a bunch of young
guys who weren't sure what they were going to do. Um.
So it would have been way too early to achieve
any kind of mass exposure and any sudden success. It
was much better just to step step back into the
shadows and meet up with the Zepps and be their

(01:18:03):
opening act for a few more shows. That was better
learning process for me than confronting a bunch of naked
um hippies. So you talk about being somewhat of a
loner being in the hotel room, reading this is an
error when backstage in rock life was really exotic. So

(01:18:25):
when it comes to drugs and groupies. That was not
your experience personally. You just were who you were, and
you took it on the road. Well. As I was
a little bit terrified about drugs. I mean, it's not
it's not a sort of moral position. It's just that
I saw so many people, you know, clearly not doing
themselves any favors as a result of taking drugs, and

(01:18:48):
you know, it's, um, it scared me. You know, Frank
Laddis didn't really want to take that risk. I was.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes back in those days,
so I assumed that my tendency to have an addictive
personality was such that if I ended up, you know,
smoking marijuana, I'd probably be doing it most of the

(01:19:10):
hours of the day. Wouldn't be something I would just
you know, do once or twice a week, it would
be I would I was terrified it would it would
take hold of me as a cigarette smoking did. And
so I never did any of that, and which got
me the reputation being a party pooper, because you know,
if you didn't go to you know, let Zeppelin's rhoadies

(01:19:30):
decided to put on a party and we got invited
and I didn't show up, you know, everybody thought, oh,
he's you know, he's he's a snob, he's you know,
he's some arrogant doesn't want to join in and be
one of the boys. But I was afraid to be
one of the boys. And I I was uncomfortable with
the you know, with the sex, drugs and rock and

(01:19:53):
roll bit. I mean, the rock and roll bit was
sort of okay, you know, it was it was a living,
but the sex and the drug it's were a bit terrifying,
you know, because even then we knew that. But you know,
there were some pretty nasty strains of gonorrhea going around,
and girls were quite frightening to me, you know, because
they were they were very um forward in their behavior

(01:20:16):
into quiet withdrawn um English boys who perhaps were you know,
not not used to these sort of things. You know,
they're very forward and confident nature of a lot of
American young females. They you know, they were quite frightening really.

(01:20:38):
So I didn't really go in that direction. It wasn't
something that's um yeah, you know, I'm sure I had
a a few relationships, short term and otherwise with with
with girls when I was in my twenties, but it
just wasn't the big thing for me. I was never
lured into that kind of party behavior and the the

(01:20:58):
one night stands and the you know, the whole rock
and roll excess things. It seemed everybody else was doing it,
So I suppose that was a good reason for me
not to do it. I just I prefer to try
and you know, be different, do my own thing. So
I read a lot of books, and I watched a

(01:21:20):
lot of late night talk shows, and I read the newspapers,
and I tried to use the time in a constructive
way rather than not be able to remember the next
morning what I'd done the night before, which is something
that's just befallen many bass players in just Hotel, they
all seemed to be the party guys. The bass players,
they they all seem to be the ones who wanted

(01:21:42):
to go and have a good time. And I know,
and at least one case, his idea of a really, really,
really good time was when he couldn't remember anything that
happened from the end of the show until coming to
sound check the next day. It was just just a
complete blank in his mind. Um so he could he
measured having a good time by the fact that he
couldn't remember it, which to me seems utterly ridiculous that

(01:22:05):
why have a good time and then you can't remember it?
I mean, I want to save them my good times
and recall them for years to come, not have them
fade into some deep abyss of of what did I
do last night? And you know why have I now?
You know these nasty scars or cuts on my face

(01:22:26):
or my heir or my arms because I got in
the fight off, you fell down a fire escape, or
on one occasion, somebody who should be nameless trying to
flush himself down a toilet. True story, I personally rescued him.
I mean he was going to going nowhere, obviously, but
he was in the toilet bowl, yanking on the chain,

(01:22:47):
try and determined to end it all. So I drank
him out. And is it an airport? And I got
him on the plane soaking wet. But no, we weren't.
We weren't no names to be mentioned. In fact, forget
that I even said any of that. I just made

(01:23:08):
it up. It's not a true story. Who came up
with and how did you create the riff for to
cry of a song? Well, I have to credit the
people who worked in that kind of Vein. I mean,
Eric Clapton and Cream had already come and gone by
then in the sense of Cream being a not a
direct influence, but they were the the obvious precursors to

(01:23:30):
Led Zeppelin and Jeth Retell arriving on American shores. Cream
did you know, after the after Homer's Home Is Dave
Clark five, the Beatles, then the Cream were the next
big thing. They just stampeded across the country being this amazing,
doing it on their own terms, not not not not

(01:23:54):
in any way fitting into any mold. And that's why
America loved Cream because they quite clearly really did care
whether you like them or not. They were going to
do what they did when they got on the stage,
and if you didn't like it fair enough, if you
did like it, then you know, thanks will take the
money and run. So Cream were the first example of
that kind of hit and run band who really didn't

(01:24:15):
care whether you like them or not. And when Zeppelin
came in, it was just the same. They gave that
impression they were there doing this for them. It was
very hedonistic, very self serving, and they really didn't care
whether you like them or not. And I probably picked
up on a bit of that. I think in the
early days of jethro Tell and you know, it seemed
to be what Americans generally speaking, seemed to seem to

(01:24:40):
really be drawn towards people who didn't try to appeal,
they didn't try too hard to be liked. They sort
of recognized the genuine and the honest nature of bands
who just came and did their thing, whereas there there
were others who desperately wanted to be successful in the

(01:25:00):
USA because that was the big prize, was to be
a hit in the USA, and they conspicuously tried too hard,
and the American audiences seemed to see through that and
reject them as some as wanting it too badly. Um,
so I guess they came across across maybe as being

(01:25:21):
you know, not genuine again mentioning no names, but we
you know, we we had a few bands who period
with us, who tried too hard and didn't do well
at all. Um, but we didn't really care that much.
So the next step is actually, sorry, I'm mentioning. Yeah,
you asked me about to cry, And so it was
really it was a kind of a post cream. Eric Clapton,
who in a band called Blind Faith and then and

(01:25:43):
they Eat had a couple of good riffs in that,
and I guess I took that as a not hopefully
not to copy it, but just just to take as
an example something that was a repetitive riff. And and
to cry your song was was very much in the
style of Eric Clapton at the time of Blind Faith.
There's a song I can't remember what it's called, Dad

(01:26:04):
da da da da da da da da duh. Yeah, well,
it's it's that kind of a thing, you know, it's
the monophonic guitar riff on the lowest strings. And Martin
would sometimes lend me his electric guitar so I could
write songs and and you know, come up with that
sort of thing. So the next step is aqualon you

(01:26:25):
create it. Do you have any idea how big it
will be? Sometimes, you know, people say I was totally
close to other people say, as soon as it sits,
the market's gonna go Guard Gangewin suddenly Jeff Road tall
as big as they were before Everywhere headline arenas did
you anticipate that well. On the last day of mixing

(01:26:47):
the album, um, which had been a bit of a
tortious experience because it was a brand new studio that
Island Records had just built conversion from an old church
and in London, and there are a lot of technical problems,
teething problems with the studio that Zeppelin were in. The
in the same studio where they were in the crypt
of the of the church, which was a much more

(01:27:07):
compact and nicer sounding room to work in. We were
in the main body of the church. It was just
echoing and horrible and cold and strange atmosphere and technically
a lot of problems. So it wasn't you know, I
wasn't really sure what we had. I mean songs, you know,
I felt fairly confident about most of the songs, but
sonically in terms of the end result, I was, you know,

(01:27:30):
a little worried about it. And John Evans, the keyboard player,
and I we went we've been working all night and
we went out to in the early hours of the
morning to some little cafe that served taxi drivers and
off duty policeman and things with a hot breakfast at
four o'clock in the morning or something. So we sat

(01:27:52):
in this place and I remember sitting there, we were
eating some breakfast and dead tired, just you know, we're
going to go straight to bed, home to bed after that.
And I said to John, what do you think, you know, what,
what do you think we've got here? Is it? Is
it going to work? And he looked at me as
I don't know. I said, no, I don't know either.
And you know, I remember that definite feeling of being

(01:28:14):
a little nervous that it was either going to be
the beginning of the end or it could be the
beginning of the next sort of step up the ladder.
And I really had no idea. And we delivered the
record of the record company, and you know, it was
Julie pressed and put out and some media response, but

(01:28:35):
it wasn't huge. You know, I have to say, there
wasn't a out of the box. It didn't set everybody
on fire, you know, it was it was okay, it
is so pretty well. And some of the music on
the album, I suppose Aqualung song My God for example,
that they were and Locomotive Breath. In Europe particularly, they

(01:28:59):
made an impact acts um, partly because the subject matter
and partly because of the music. But it was doing okay,
but nowhere near what it became over the next two
or three years when it gradually with us performing more
shows and different parts of the world and bringing out
new albums aqual and continued to sell at at a

(01:29:22):
very steady and generous pace. And um, and I suppose
more than anything else, became the the archetypal jethro Tyle record,
not only of the seventies but of all time, and
in many ways because it was a mixture of rock music,
of gentle acoustic music, of quirky, you know, fun music,

(01:29:46):
and strange, really very insular and gentle moments that were
sort of singer songwriters stuff. It was a mixture of
music in terms of dynamic range and musical style, and
I think that, um, you know, that was part of
what gave it an identity. That's people probably didn't like

(01:30:08):
every song on the album, but the doubtless there were
people who really loved the acoustic songs and weren't that
struck with the loud rock ones and vice versa. But
there was something in there perhaps for a broad spectrum
of listeners. And it's certainly kind of broke open all
of the European territories for us because we hadn't we

(01:30:30):
spent too much time playing in the USA and the UK,
and it was really with Aqua Lung that we were
then playing frequently, giving equal time to all the European
countries where we could perform, and that it really took
off broadly in Europe as well, in Spain and Italy
and France and Germany, and so we were we were
becoming quite international really at that point in terms of

(01:30:53):
not being the biggest band on planet Earth, but being
you know, one of the you know, one of the
the lesser but sort of well known and appreciated groups
that were not mainstream in terms of the rock music
that was the most successful and popular. So we were
doing doing okay. So the next albums thick as a brick.

(01:31:21):
To what degree was that premeditated I'm talking about music
one long piece? And to what degree was it just
kind of a lark, let's just do something different. Well,
it was both of those things. It was predicated really
on the fact that Aqualung had a few songs that
maybe kind of tied together a little bit um and

(01:31:45):
and then the packaging and the album cover and the
way that the album was sequenced on side one and
side two along with the liner notes. I tried to
bring a bunch of rather disparate songs and music styles,
try and bring them together a bit with the with
them with artwork and packaging, which would sort of draw
things together a bit, even if they didn't deserve it.

(01:32:09):
And I think that gave people the impression this was
a concept album, which it really wasn't. And ill from
the word go, I said, this is not a concept album.
There's a bunch of songs, you know, but music critics
and writers were determined to perpetuate this idea that it
was a concept album. So naturally I came to start

(01:32:30):
work on another album and thought, right, well, they thought
that was a concept album, Let's give them the mother
of all concept albums and go completely over the top
in a you know, in a very exaggerated way. And
I just thought of this kind of parody really of
concept albums, prog rock, you know, pretending it being written

(01:32:52):
by an eight year old boy, and and and writing
an album through the through the eyes of childhood, but
a childhood distorted by the post war years of growing
up with a lot of prejudices and views that came
down to a young generation of people from that postwar

(01:33:15):
derision of our of our opponents, and you know, we
we talked about Jerry as the un We talked about
the Japs. You know, we we were we were taught
to be really rather unpleasant and rather right wing, nasty
little children, and we didn't turn out that way. But

(01:33:37):
you know that that was what came down, that that
was the sort of general tenor of children's comics and literature.
You know, we it was reinforcing a lot of stereotypes
that I think we could have done with that. But
on the other hand, it was mostly a bit of fun.
And I think most of us just recognized that, well, okay,
you know, our parents went to war and did all this,

(01:33:58):
that that's the way it's that's the way we're being
handed down that message. But I couldn't help but feel
that as a child growing up, that you know, you've
got to try to make sense of a difficult world.
You've got to try and make sense of the things
that are stereotypical, that are prejudice, that are um perhaps
adult ideas that are increasingly becoming irrelevant as as time

(01:34:22):
goes on. And so I wanted to try and see
through the eyes of a child making sense of a
difficult adult world and that's really what the album was about.
I mean, it's it may seem like, well, it is
on the one hand, a spoof for parody, a lighthearted
bit of fun, but it also has a quite a
serious message lying underlying the whole thing. And I would write,

(01:34:45):
um the album in you know that I'd do the
next three minutes in the morning when I woke up,
you know, quite early. Usually I start working around eight
or nine in the morning and write the next three
or four minutes of music. And then after lunch I
would go and meet the guys rehearsal room in the
south of London, in the Rolling Stones rehearsal Room, and
and then we would add we'd learned what I wrote

(01:35:07):
that morning and added to what I've done the day before.
And so we built up the album over a period
about ten days of rehearsal so that we could play
it all the way through. And then we went into
the recording studio and we played it all the way
through and took another ten days to record the album,
and then actually a bit longer to do the album
cover because it was quite involved and you know, it

(01:35:31):
took quite a bit of time putting it all together
and shooting all the photographs and doing everything. Actually took
longer to do the album cover than it did to
record the record, but it was worth it again because
it was one of those zany ideas. I mean, Terry
our manager, he really didn't like the album covered. Nobody did.
They thought this was just insane, you know, sixteen page

(01:35:51):
newspaper is an album cover and even but he, you know,
he kind of went along with it, as he did
with them the first album, and it um, it was
part and parcel of what made that album, you know,
kind of stand out from the crowd, And poor old
John Lennon had embarked upon an album which was released

(01:36:13):
shortly afterwards and was already in the works at the
time when Things as the Brick was released and actually
went to number one in the American charts, and and
John Lennon's album, which featured the front cover front page
of the New York Times, was released shortly afterwards, and
of course he and his record company must have seen,
you know, this idea has already been done and out

(01:36:33):
there and is bigger and better in the sixteen phays newspaper.
But you can't pull it, you know, he did that
they had already printed, however, million copies of John Lennon's
album and the artwork and everything, So it must have
been quite galling in a way. You know, when you
you've got an idea, you think, wow, this is good,
and then somebody's actually beaten you to it and and
quietly sneaked something out there, and now you're you're the

(01:36:57):
you're the imitators and the late most to an idea
that I think it was very important to the album.
It was one of the worst John Lennon albums anyway,
sometime in New York City, So don't worry about it.
But let's talk about that album cover. I asked about
the standing up on stand up we have because of
brick rock history is littered with acts bitching about their

(01:37:20):
label saying they wouldn't let me do it, or they
let me do it, and I had to eat the price.
You had a very unique situation and that your managers
were the record company. Now in America, they were distributed
by other labels, Warner Brothers Center. By the end of
the by time you at the eighties, they have their

(01:37:43):
own freestanding company. So a number of questions, what did
Terry Ella's do, What did Chris Wright do? And I
always felt that Chrysalis was built on the back of
jeth Row Tall, So I wonder did they acknowledge that
financially they give you a piece of the company because

(01:38:04):
for a long time, Jethro Top was the only successful act.
So how did it work with you and your managers?
And the money Molley began when nobody wanted to record
Jet Hotel back in and Terry's I believe his father's
bank manager loaned some money and so Terry and Chris

(01:38:25):
took the chance and we made the records with borrowed money.
We had no record company, no deal, and then they
hawked around the tapes to try and find a deal,
and eventually Chris BLACKWELLO Island Records took it on and
um and it was released through Ireland, the first album.
And and then Terry and Chris had a you know,

(01:38:51):
they're a little older than I was, but they were
learning on their feet, you know, they were learning the job,
learning about the music industry, and so they ankered after
not just being agents or managers, but the idea of
having a record company. And and so crystalis Records was
born as a label. They were able to renegotiate their
deal with Island Records in the UK and with Warder

(01:39:13):
Warners in the USA, actually with the Reprise label who
then they got their label copy, but it was still
marketed and distributed by a major record company in the
in most most parts of the world, but it was
it looked like a Crystalist record, and Jethro Tell was
the first act to be signed to Crystalists. But it

(01:39:37):
would be a little bit too generous to say, um, Crystalists,
it was founded on the back of Jets Hotel or
you know, there's a bunch of other acts at that point.
You know, we were all important to Crystalist records and
who else who else in the sixties early seventies on
Chrystmas had anywhere near the level of success of Jeff

(01:39:57):
roll Well ten years after did pretty well to begin with,
and then procol Harum for example, came along that they
were quite meaningful, and then a whole bunch of other
acts um that that passed through the Crystalist ranks over
the next few years. But you know, sure Jester Hotel
was important, but i'm you know, I would Christened and
Terry are both generously said that Obviously Jesstel was very

(01:40:22):
important to them at the time, but you know, we
weren't the only We weren't the only thing. I think
they would have made it without Jethro Hotel. It's just
that we that the process was speeded up a little
by the fact that we were successful enough that Terry
and Chris could renegotiate the deals. And when they renegotiated
the deals for higher royalties and different deal structures, they

(01:40:44):
passed the benefits of that on to us. You know,
we we they they volunteered to say, hey, you know,
you guys, you should get a bigger royalty now, because
we're getting a bigger royalty, and so they were generously
took that initiative. And I mean Terry and I were
always I didn't have so much to do with with
Chris because he was really more looking after ten years
after in procol. But Terry was, you know, the one

(01:41:08):
focused on our careers, and he and I were always
butting heads and disagreeing on a whole lot of stuff.
And sometimes, you know, he won the argument, sometimes I
won the argument. And I think think as a brick
album cover as an example of you know, me winning
the argument. I really think this is what we should do. Terry,
I think it's going to work. Other times. You know, Terry,

(01:41:30):
you know he was he was the one who was
responsible for the benefit album cover and I wasn't really
keen on it at all. But you know, okay, Terry,
if you think this is right, let's do this. And
I think that was part of the relationship is that
both of us had our very strong opinions, but we
were not not averse to having a discussion, however spirited

(01:41:53):
and sometimes loud it might be. But you know, we
we both knew we could picturelate and say okay, let's
do it your way. And I think that was the
strength of that relationship that we were both learning as
we went along. I was learning about the technical issues
of production and making records. He was learning about the
business side of not just managing the band, but you know,

(01:42:16):
developing a record company. So you know, we got we
we got absolute can't blanche to do whatever we wanted
in musical terms, and that those who were involved in
the marketing and distribution, like Warners or or Ireland or
then BMG in the US, in in Europe, you know,
they were just they were there to do a job,

(01:42:38):
and they didn't really have any creative saying what we
were doing. I think Warners might have tried to do
that in the early days, but they soon accepted that,
you know, we were selling records and even if they
didn't quite get it in terms of why they were selling,
they they went along with it. And and we we
we never had any any kind of um real uh,

(01:43:04):
contentious input from record companies. You know, you quite often
they had no idea what they were getting to Let
deliver the master tapes. That was it. And you know,
Crystal has trusted me to do that, and I trusted
them to once they've got the master tapes, and I
trusted them to get on with it and do the
best job they could in terms of the the commercial
application of that. That that's the bit they were supposed

(01:43:25):
to be good at. Its exactly the same to this day.
You know, I hand over the master tapes, and when
it comes to marketing and promotion, I'm a pussycat. I'm
paying somebody else, you know, effectively to to use their expertise,
their knowledge and there and the weight of their the
their authority. In the case of inside out of boutique

(01:43:49):
label and owned by Sony Records that we have distributed
and marketing by Sony effectively, which is an ideal, an
ideal blend of being with a major, But at the
same time, at the front end we're with a sort
of boutique label, which is very much like how Chrysalis
were in the first two or three years. So um,

(01:44:10):
you know, things come perhaps full circle in that regard.
But let's talk about the money needles. Say Chrysalis was
sold to E M I early nineties, h E M
I was ultimately sold again broken up at this late date.
Do you still get royalties for those jeth World Toll

(01:44:32):
records in two Did you own the publishing or was
the publishing split with Chrysalis, And what's the status of
that today. Well, the royalty rate that we were on
right at the beginning was a very small one. Is
better than the Beatles got when they started, but it
was a pretty small piece of the action. Um, and

(01:44:53):
then it was redressed considerably around the time of Thick
as a Brick where we started, and quite quite a
meaningful royalty rate at that point. And I was also
getting paid as a producer because I was the guy
writing the music and producing the records. I was a
man in the studio taking on the mantle of all
of that. By seventy four, I was running the business

(01:45:14):
of jet Rotele financially, so I was paying all the
bills and running it is you know, from a commercial stand.
But what my company was UM. So we were getting
a pretty good royalty rate at that point, UM, and
by I don't know, by the end of the seventies,
we were on what was probably the you know, the
kind of highest level of royalty artist royalty rate that

(01:45:36):
anybody was getting paid. And Chris and Terry were always
you know, making sure that we were being rewarded in
the same way as the highest paid artists of the day.
So our contracts were being renewed and renegotiated and we
were getting better deals. But you know, it was never
a subject of no one was being held hostage or anything.
You know, It was just that I think it was

(01:45:59):
recognized that you you were all there to share the
benefits together, and so you try and be fair about it. UM.
But the publishing side of it, you know, originally was
published you know, it's Chrystalis Publishing. And then along the way,
Crystalis UM went into the publishing side with BMG, So
it was Christmas BMG and then um, and then it

(01:46:22):
became just BMG, which is just to day. And I'm
I'm still published by BMG at the same rate as
it was when I was published by in the latter
days of crystalis so um, you know, without without without
going into the percentage terms, it's about as high as
you can get. That comes to me, and they get
the sort of you know what I suppose is for

(01:46:43):
probably fairly standard in the business for people of our statue. Um.
So yes, I mean I owned the publishing and I
that was in the days of Terry and Chris. You know,
they said, well you should own your own publishing. It's
that you're writing all these songs. And you know, if
we if we make our cutters as the licensed publishers,
then that's good. So that's the way that it worked.

(01:47:05):
And so I continue to license our products and renew
those licenses with BMGH. I've got a long standing relationship
with it goes back forty years or something. So it's
the way that that one works. And in this day
and age, you know, I know, I mean long gone
of the days when I used to employ lawyers to

(01:47:25):
negotiate record contracts. You know, we've figured that one out
a long time ago. So quite happy to feel confident
in negotiating a record contract these days and for some
years in the past. And and so I I know
how all that works. I know what the deal points
and the structures and all the small print are all about.
And you know, at the royalty rate that we get

(01:47:45):
today is um. You know, it's the it's it's it's
that's sort of top rate you would get. Um. I
don't think. I don't. I don't believe anybody gets more
than we get. What they might get is bigger. Advanced
is But I'm not an advanced guy. I just say, look,
keep your money. You know, when we sold the record,

(01:48:05):
then you can pay me. But record companies and their
cash flows and all the rest of it, they sometimes
insist us to promoters or we want to pay you
some in advance. And so yeah, you know, I don't
mind having an advance, but I'm more comfortable and getting
a high royalty and a notional advance just as an
act of good faith to make sure that having laid
out some money, a record company going to make the

(01:48:27):
effort to try and sell product in order to recoup
their advance. But I'm always, always much prefer to have
a big royalty small advance. And if record companies want
to pay me a bigger advance, well that that's fine,
but it's not what I'm shooting for at all. I
just want to I just want a good royalty rate.
We're all we're all in the business of risk together.

(01:48:48):
It seems to me that you know, the back end
is the important thing. If you've done well, then that's
when you can afford to be generous. If you're a
you know, if you're a record company, you can afford
to pay your ours generously once we've sold the records.
If you don't sell them, everybody's a loser. And that
doesn't seem to be the business I want to be
in for sure. Would you ever sell your publishing, which

(01:49:10):
is something that's happening with a lot of acts of
your vintage at this point, Well that that that process
came back. I came up many, many, many years ago
as the idea of cashing in on your publishing and
taking a lump sum or taking a lump sum, you know,
selling it for a period of time and then getting
it back. I mean, all of that's been going off
years and years and years, and frankly it's not something

(01:49:31):
I mean, I think I looked at it, you know,
I've had a couple of offers to do that, but
it's not something that it's very hard to value because
especially with a swing towards digital UM technology and digital
UM ways of getting music, you know, when it when
it's you're dealing in the world of streaming and hardly
any paid downloads these days. It's mostly streaming and of

(01:49:52):
course physical products. That it's quite difficult really to put
a value on the on the residual life of of
copyright UM in publishing terms as fairly generous, you know,
seventy five years after the death of the composer, but
in up until a few years ago UM in the UK,

(01:50:14):
the life of copyright was was really rather minimal. It
was it was fifty years UM and then it went.
And so we were facing the time when many acts
of the sixties were going to fall out of copyright,
some of them famous people like the Beatles, but hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of artists who maybe only ever

(01:50:34):
had one hit or some marginal record sales suddenly that
that that little royalty that they were depending on every
year to pay for the heating bill or to you know,
put food on the table was going to disappear. And
I was one of those people, you know, making a
strong play with the UK government for extending life of

(01:50:55):
copyright for um in recorded product and the Prime Minister
of the day who I went to meet with and
tried to persuade him and did some back of an
envelope calculations to point out the value to the exchequer
of keeping copyright going and what this meant in terms
of gathering tax um. Just it was taking a political

(01:51:17):
view that copyright was something old fashioned and should be
free for everybody, blah blah blah. But luckily through the EU,
in fact it was reversed and we did in fact
get an extension to the life of copyright more or
less in parallel with how it already was in the USA.
So it's it's become a little more generous. And it

(01:51:38):
doesn't mean that's a little more value in copyright than
there was perhaps twenty years ago in the UK. I
mean it would be valued a little higher, you know,
the residual rights of of copyright, and I don't think,
personally speaking, I would ever be seduced into selling copyright,
and I think I would rather I would rather be
passing it on to my family, um initially and continuing

(01:52:04):
to you know, pay tax on that revenue, which is
um is to me, I'd rather be at the focus,
the center of it, rather than is somebody else's asset
to fool around with and offset against other corporate losses
or do whatever they might do with it. I mean,

(01:52:24):
I just really would rather I and my successors entitled
or hands on about it. I mean, Luckily, I have
a son who's grown up with me in the music industry,
and so he's you know, he's he understands all this stuff,
and Will is already taking a an increasingly leading role
in managing the assets of of both my personal musical

(01:52:50):
income and the corporate musical income, and he one day,
not too far from now, will be it will all
be on his shoulders. He may decide, hey, I've had enough,
I want to sell it. When that's that's his decision,
not mine. Ultimately, release Crest of the nave In becomes
mega successful. But also the inside story is the album

(01:53:13):
was focused group in terms of what singles. So did
you know that would be a commercial comeback into what
degree was the focused story true and did it affect
anything on the record. Well, I I may be wrong
in this, but I do think it was my idea
that we did that because I wasn't really sure that
there has been a huge change in not so much

(01:53:35):
in Europe, but certainly in the USA. That's big swing
away from what used to be called a O R
radio too very tightly regimented and researched playlists UM, and
the swing away from that a our album product to
alternative rock and contemporary pop and rock, and stations like UM,

(01:53:58):
like KLOS or double any W suddenly that they were
trying to get hip and do the new thing, and
and they changed their format, their playlists and everything, and
jet rteal just wasn't getting radio but sorry, playtime anymore
in the in the way that we had during the seventies.
But I think what happened was that the audiences that
the demographic that the American radio was increasingly playing to

(01:54:22):
prove to be fickle. They didn't actually spend the money
on the products that were being advertised on American radio
in the way that's been before, and so gradually it
swung back again to to not a complete reversion, but
to something that then became known as classic rock. And

(01:54:43):
many of those stations then went back to playing the
kind of music that they played before. And I assume
they replenished their coffers because the slightly older demographic was
was supporting the advertising that brought them their revenue. And
it we we began just to sort of get a
sniff of that, I suppose in the latter part of

(01:55:04):
the eighties, and I suggested that we should play the
record initially, not to the media, not to the press,
because chances are we've got a rough ride and people
would not be approving. I said, why don't we play
it to the fans, you know, and get a body
of thought and opinion, and we can, you know, maybe
choose the lead tracks we put to radio as a

(01:55:26):
result of what we think jeth rot Health fans want.
And and we did that to a degree, I mean,
not not in a hugely detailed, massive survey, but you know,
to a small focus group kind of thing. And it
got the record company interested. That was the most important thing.
Is it energized the record company a little bit because

(01:55:46):
they were getting direct feedback from the fans who were
going to buy this record or not. And I think
that's what what got them to sit up and take
notice of Crest of Benave and and the New York
office of Crystalists were suddenly making a lot more effort
than they perhaps had been to sell products and and
to and to promote it in a way that was

(01:56:07):
much more hands on and active. And the promo guy
in New York was was, you know, really um you know,
you really took it on as a personal crusade to
try and get your hotel noticed. And we got some
MTV play, and generally speaking, we um, we were. We

(01:56:28):
were not exactly back in favor, but we were getting
noticed again. And and the record company then nominated us
for a Grammy and a new Grammy category and the
rest of all that story, of course you know or
too well, but it was just the beginning of um

(01:56:48):
of It wasn't exactly a comeback. It was just sort
of in a way, well you said, refocusing jet hotel
with a with a with a demographic that that kind
of knew us already, and it was just remind people
we were still around, and you know very much that
that is not that is not just due to me
or the record, but it was the efforts of crystalists,
particularly in the USA, and particularly of Kevin Sutter, the

(01:57:11):
promo guy in New York. He was, you know, he
should take the credit for a lot of the success
of that album. Well, he's always told me the story.
Good to have it confirmed by you. Now somewhere around
thick as a bricks, certainly passion play, the media turns
against Jeff row Tall. Did you sense this? And I

(01:57:33):
would say, generally speaking, jeth Row Toll doesn't get any respect,
although I believe it deserves so much. And then some people,
you know, put it in the progressive camp. It's not
in the progressive camp in my particular world. How do
you view all that? And I think that any band,
any artists, will there will be a love affair with

(01:57:55):
the critics and and the public alike for a mile,
and maybe that last year three or four records, and
then something used coming along, and maybe, and understandably, particularly
you know music journalists who have been perhaps flattered by
record companies and managers and invited to concerts and given

(01:58:16):
free tickets and all the rest of it. Suddenly they
begin to feel, you know, they're in the pocket potentially
that people will see them as being a soft touch.
They're always going to write good reviews and and necessarily
they're going to say, no, well, this time we're going
to buck against the system. We we we don't think
this does deserve a good review. We're going to give
it a stinker, you know, and and show that we're

(01:58:40):
independent minds and independent writers. And I think to a
degree that's what happens, and certainly happened with Jester Tell
around the time of a Passion play, most notably in
the UK press, but also in the USA too and
in Australia. I remember, we've got some really really bad reviews,
and I can understand why, and to some extent I

(01:59:01):
having known some of those journalists. I mean, I I
you know, I had to say, look, hey, I think
you got this about right. You know, it wasn't it
wasn't that great. Had a lot of criticism could be
leveled at a Passion play, and some of it quite justifiably,
but of course it hurt at the time, but it
was greatly exaggerated, you know, especially with the ridiculous press story.

(01:59:23):
Jethro Hotel quit because of a horrible front page, bad
review and Melody Maker. We didn't quit. The first thing
I heard of it was when I walked down Oxford
Street in London and saw the copies of Melody Maker
on the news stand with this headline thing, and I what.
I bought one to read it, and I was absolutely insensed.
How what where did they get this from? So I

(01:59:44):
went to the nearest phone box and called my manager,
called Terry Ellis that Crystalists, said what the hell is this?
Who who put this out? He said, ah, well, sorry,
I forgot to mention it to you, But I thought
this was a good idea. We've got another front page
headline and Melody Maker. I mean one of the times
when Terry and I definitely butted heads and did not
agree on on the way forward. But it made us.

(02:00:07):
I thought it just looked really rather petulant and stupid,
and it took a while to come back from that.
But I actually took Ray Coleman, the editor of Melody Maker,
to tars. Ray, you knew this wasn't right, you knew
you were being fed a line. You just you just
went along with it because you were prepared to take
it at face value because it was a big story

(02:00:28):
you could use on the front page. You know, you
could have just picked up the phone to me and said,
is this right. I was a bit bit upset with
Ray and I mean, of course we did things together
in the future, and he was a lovely chat but
you know, he was convenient for him to believe what
he was being told, and it was. It was definitely

(02:00:48):
not not It was a total piece of manufactured front
page grabbing hysteria and I think actually rather silly thing
to do. And what about the Prague Moniker. Well, I
was always very pleased to be in the realms of

(02:01:09):
progressive rock in people's estimation, because that that term first
came about as far as I'm aware, in the UK
music press in nine and I first saw the term
progressive rock applied to a few bands, including Jeff Hotel,
and I thought, wow, that's interesting. I quite like that.
I quite like the idea being progressive rock. That's that

(02:01:31):
seems to me what I do, and and so that
was fine. But then of course they got shortened to
Prague rock and then just Prague and by the time
the early punks came along, Prague was a derisory term.
Meant to meant to describe people who were um basically

(02:01:52):
obsessed with showing off the instrumental prowess, and who were
arrogant and old fashioned and and generally speaking, you know,
up their own artists, to put it mildly, and and
I think probably bands like Yes and Genesis and Emerson
Lake and Palm we do have to bear some responsibility

(02:02:13):
for that. Great musicians and great artists as they were,
but Jethro Tell was a bit more rough and ready,
I think, a bit more, you know, but there was
a rougher edge to what we did, partly because we
weren't as good as they were in terms of musical ability,
but also there was an edge to some of the music,
particularly in the lyrics. So um, I guess, um, I

(02:02:34):
guess that's why some of the bands from the punk
era secretly were actually Jethro Hotel fans, like Johnny Rotten
from the Sex Pistols, huge huge fan of Aqualung and
then you know some of the other folks. Remember being
approached by Joey Ramone at a Swiss festival. It was
just all over and we wanted autographs because his mom
was a huge fan and and and the guitar player

(02:02:59):
from the Had Hot Chili Peppers, or or the Guys
and the Stranglers or Sting, and a whole bunch of
people who were part of that early punk thing. Who
was secret jethro Hotel fans um. I mean, I know
this because this firsthand experience. You know, they've actually said so,
and I'm sure they weren't just being nice to me.
Well perhaps they were, but it's it's just kind of

(02:03:22):
nice to know that that you did actually make an
impact on that next generation of musicians, even though they
couldn't possibly admit publicly to liking Genesis or jeth Hotel
or whatever it might be, but secretly they did. We
were part of their learning process, part of their background,
their points of reference musically, and even though what they
do was musically very different, it was still informed in

(02:03:43):
some way by the music that had gone before. And
I think Johnny Rotten saw in the song Aqualung and
saw in the album cover of that he saw a
persona a character that was angry and yet sensitive and fearful,
you know, the way was depicted on the Aqualong album cover.
And then that's Johnny Rotten. That's that's how he appeared

(02:04:04):
when he first appeared on TV. That's going a hunched
guy with sort of the same kind of pose and
and and he's a mixture of aggression and anger and
yet fear and vulnerability. I think he captured that in
in his stage persona. Um, maybe I'm being a little
fanciful in that, but he certainly told me he was
a huge fan of that track. He also hit Wore

(02:04:25):
the Long Coat. Okay. Many Jethroad Toll albums have been
remixed by Stephen Wilson, generally speaking on against remixing, but
he has a unique way of doing it without putting
down the other people who have attempted the same thing
with the Beatles and other acts. He seems just a
scrape away that his Tritus the Steel Wool, and it

(02:04:47):
sounds exactly like the original but better. So how did
you get involved with him remixing your records? How do
you feel about all that? He told me that you
wanted to fix some mistake from the past, and he said, no,
this is for fans, and this is how the fans
remember it, so you can he tell me the experience there? Yeah,

(02:05:08):
that that that is. That is how Stephen feels about it,
and I, you know, I told him to remix that
coolong and five point once around sound and put the
saxophone in another room. I said, just leave out the saxophone,
which he said, now we can't do that. We've gotta
we've got to keep everything there and the way it was,
but we'll just make it a little more transparent because

(02:05:28):
it was too dense that album. It's just too much
going on all the time. But you know, the whole
point about when I was asked by the record company,
you know, about doing remixes, and I somewhere, I think
I'd heard that Steven Wilson had remixed that classic first
King Crimson album. So and having believe that that Robert

(02:05:50):
Fripp was quite a kind of a control freak, hands
on guy, I thought, well, if he lets Stephen Wilson
remixes the big album, then you know he must be
all right it. So I've suggested Steven Wilson to the
record company I think at that point still Warners, and
I think that Coolong they wanted to do. And so
I said, we'll send him a couple of tracks and

(02:06:11):
see how he gets on. And he and I communicated,
and and so Stephen sent me a couple of you know,
rough mixes having got the digital masters, you know, because
obviously was transferred from the track analog tape to twenty
four bit audio, and then in that process you can

(02:06:31):
then tackle it in a different way. You can clean
up all the tracks. You can get rid of those
little clicks and hisses and hums, you can you can
delete the extraneous noise between lines of vocal or verse
and choruses. You can have absolute digital silence, and so

(02:06:51):
suddenly the music is much more transparent, you know, you
don't have all that sort of general kind of analog
mulchi kind of back grounds. Suddenly it's it's you can
see through the clouds, you know, it's it's it's daylight.
And I think that's what Stephen has always done well,
that he cleans everything up and then he he analyzes

(02:07:13):
the way the original mixes were done and sets out
not to replicate it, but to generally speaking, have the
same stereo field in terms of positioning instruments and gives
them the same dynamic um kind of place. But you know,
he fine tunes everything to a degree that I think

(02:07:35):
makes the music ultimately it is clearer punchier, more transparent,
and in some ways, you know, here's a bit of
a trade off because you're dealing with analog tapes that
are fifty years old and they can only probably they
get baked in an oven, so that glues the oxide

(02:07:55):
onto the backing for one more pass, which is your
one and only chance really to to lift off that
audience transfer it to the digital domain. But you know,
sometimes the tape has lost a little bit of quality
it's at very often the high end seems to suffer,
certainly with certain tape batches that came. I think the

(02:08:17):
A album suffered very badly from loss of oxide, and
it was quite a tough one to try and recapture
the high end on that album. But to an extent,
you know, you it's a bit of a trade off there.
But by and large the balance lies in favor of
being able to clean things up, tidy things up, give
it a bit more punch, a bit more transparency, and

(02:08:37):
and not radically change the balance of instruments or the
or the stereo fields positioning of instruments. But then, of course,
part of the remixing process isn't just recreating a stereo mix.
It's a it's five point one surround, and and in
that regard I'm more than happy to hand over the
reins because I do not have a five point one

(02:08:58):
surround system. I'd actual you don't own a record player.
I used to have a CD player, but Apple stopped
putting CD players in the desktop computer, so I don't
even have one of those anymore. So I'm being used
to listening for twenty odd years now. I mean, I
only listen to music as digital audio files. But then
for the most part, I'm listening to twenty four bit

(02:09:18):
digital audio files, which are great quality. Um that's the
medium in which I work as a writer, as a producer,
as a recording engineer, and when I'm recording for other
people as a guest. You know, I'm always used to
hearing and hearing good quality music, but I don't. I
don't as a music listener. I'm not really a music

(02:09:41):
fan or a geek. You know, the idea of the
Japanese tea ceremony of music listening by you know, gently
blowing the dust off your vinyl record and setting it
all up and putting it on the turntable and gently
dropping the needle on in the right place. So you
don't damage anything or make horrible noises, and then sitting
back and listening to an entire album. It's a great

(02:10:02):
thing to do, but it's it is, it's slowing everything down.
It's just stepping back. And that's why I say the
Japanese tea ceremonies are very formal and and stayed way
of listening to music. And perhaps that's the way people
did it in the sixties and seventies and they're doing
it again today, and good luck to them. But frankly speaking,

(02:10:22):
I if I have a record player, I don't know
where it is. I know I did have one or
two because I don't remember selling them, but um, you know,
it's the sort of thing I just don't really feel
inclined to to acquire, um technical stuff, you know, gadgets
and things. I've surrounded by these for all of my

(02:10:45):
life and I still am today surrounded by gadgets. But
I'm an acoustic guy. I like to pick up and
play acoustic instruments and you know, and have a good microphone,
and yes, I use all the technology when it comes
to recording and mixt thing, but it's not stuff that
I enjoy. It's just tools of the trade. You know,

(02:11:05):
it's just a means to an end, whereas I can
get quite attached to a good microphone or get attached
to a nice musical instrument, but the rest of the
ganger tree means little to me. It's um here today,
gone tomorrow. It's it's it's all. It's all as good
as the next update you know to your software. Okay,
stay with software. That's a very modern viewpoint which a

(02:11:29):
lot of older artists do not embrace, and they bitch
about today's system. What do we know? No matter who
you are, it's different from the pre internet era. Very
hard to reach people. Okay, maybe the usual suspects will
come to see you live, but to get your new
music into the hands of the public, to have radio

(02:11:51):
and other exposure outlets play it, it's difficult for absolutely
everybody new and classic acts. So you have a new
album coming out imminently, what was the motivation to do it?
Also knowing that it's harder than ever for people to
hear it. Many people don't record at all. Who are

(02:12:12):
your vintage and how did it suddenly become Jethro Toll
again as opposed to Ianni Anderson, Well, i've I mean,
people have found up saying, oh, it's the first new
jethro Tel album in twenty years, but it's not. It's
actually nineteen. And secondly, there's been quite a few record
releases in that period of time, you know. In two
thousand and eleven, I started work on a new project

(02:12:32):
which turned out to be as thick as a Break too,
although I released it under my own name at that point.
And and then two years later there was Homoerraticus, again
released under my own name, but in retrospect probably that
should have been released as a jet Hotel album because
it was the same bunch of guys who are on
the Zelo Gene and have been playing with me for

(02:12:53):
an average of about fifteen years, the longest lineup of
jeth Hotel ever. And and then of course the String
Quartets album, which once again got to number one in
the Billboard charts of some obscure category classical crossover or
whatever it's called. And it you know, I've not been

(02:13:13):
I've not been asleep on my feet, you know. I've
been busy working at things and obviously doing a huge
amount of tours. But the time came in during two
sixteen I decide I should I should make a new
record again of two years after the previous one, And
at the beginning of two thousand seventeen, I cracked on

(02:13:34):
with the job of a new album, which I decided
would be a Jet Hotel album. And decided I would
write a bunch of of songs that each one would
be about a different strong human emotion. That was the
simple underlying theme. So I wrote down a list of
words to describe human emotions, extreme human emotions, just one

(02:13:57):
word for each each one, and I wrote and words
like hate, vengeance, retribution, jealousy, anger, greed, and then some
nice stuff like fraternal love, spiritual love, erotic love, compassion, companionship, loyalty.
And I looked at my list of words which would
hopefully become songs, and I thought, Wow, these are all

(02:14:20):
words I remember reading in the Holy Bible. And so
in a whimsical moment of fancy, I did an Internet
search for examples of those words coming up in the Bible,
and and perused that with you know, a mixture of
amusement and some intellectual curiosity. Because I'm not a Bible
scholar and I am. I copied and pasted some examples

(02:14:44):
of those just as references when it came to write songs,
and the songs for the most part of songs about
the real world and the present day. But I allude
two elements of the biblical stories here and there, and
a couple of songs more obviously than others. But that's
the that's the that's the background to the record. And
it began in early two thousand and seventeen and I

(02:15:06):
we recorded seven tracks, four of which were complete by
the end of that that that year, and the rest
I kept telling myself, well, get on to finish the
rest of it, but we were on tour so much
in two thousand and eighteen and two thousand and nineteen,
and I kept putting it off, and then suddenly the
pandemic was honest, and another another period of more than

(02:15:27):
a year went by when we couldn't get together and work.
We were in lockdown, not allowed to be in each
other's company, and I understided I would do the last
five songs which I had written back in two thousand
and seventeen. They were all complete lyrically and musically, and
I just went back and relearned them and recorded them
at home as acoustic tracks, and which in a way

(02:15:50):
it was probably a good thing because it gave the
album rather like aqualung. It gave it a little bit
more variety in terms of dynamics and musical style. So
it was finally completed in and mixed and mastered in
June of this year, and the album art was stunned,
and I went in search of a record company who

(02:16:11):
might be brave enough to take it on. And you know,
we listened to the overtures of about six different record
companies and two in particular who we went into much
more depth with in terms of looking at the detail
of potential deals. And I made my decision. But unfortunately,

(02:16:32):
the the reality of today's world as we meant, meant
we would have to wait for some time in order
to get vinyl pressed, because it's the waiting time to
get with vinyl pressed from scratches somewhere. Some people will
say eight nine months, other people saying more than a year.
That's the queue to be in if you want to
get your new record pressed as a vinyl product. But

(02:16:55):
I've already um jumped the gun a bit by by
scheduling a release in the end of March two twenty
three for the next album, So we're already in the
queue for having that one pressed in time. But it's
been frustrating, to say the least, having to wait from
May June when I've sort of done the work, and

(02:17:17):
then thinking it's not going to be out until January.
It seems like another another long period of sitting on
my hands and then having to be re energized to
do all the press and promo, to try and um
make its presence felt amongst that small but argent body
of fans and perhaps introduced it to who people who

(02:17:39):
have perhaps not too aware of Jeter Hotel, but might
hear about it in what remains of the music media.
You're heavily active. If you talk about being on the
road so much that you can't finish the record, you
talk about scheduling a record in what is the motivation? Now?
There are a lot of acts they literally have to
work to pay the bills. You've had much more success

(02:18:02):
than many of those people. You're a smart guy. You
own your own publishing. To what degree is money motivation?
Some people they do the live gig because they just
cannot get that response anywhere else in life. That feedback
from the audience. So what keeps you still working on
the road and still making new records. Well, part of

(02:18:23):
it is just that that kind of creative urge that
you seem to have been born with and as a child,
you know, I can remember doing things. I was always
happy in my own company, playing alone, writing, reading, drawing,
and I mean that thing. I've always felt that creative urge.
And I don't feel the need to be with other
people necessarily to you know, for socializing, as I have

(02:18:47):
too much had too much older brothers, but I grew
up because they had left home. I was grew up
more or less as an only child, and I wasn't
particularly sociable at school, so I had plenty times to
try and develop that sort of creative side of my personality.
And I think that that never goes away. It's always

(02:19:08):
becomes a little quietly burning thing in the back of
your mind whatever else you're doing. And when it comes
to making a new record, you're also I could say
you we I am driven by another consideration, which is
that time is running out. You know, the the sands
of time are trickling through there in a very evident

(02:19:29):
and seemingly ever increasing way. And I was bigger. If
I don't do this now, it just could be too late.
That applies to touring as well as making records. So
I just want to crack on and do things that
I haven't done yet. And as long as I feel
that the that the creative juicies are flowing and the
end result isn't too embarrassing, that I'm going to carry
on doing it. And that's very evident in live touring

(02:19:52):
because of course the pandemic, the eighteen months that we
went through with not a single concert um that was
a of a heavy toll, particularly for the band. Guys.
I don't need to work, you know, I've got investments
and money stashed. I'm you know, I'm fine. I don't
need to work again. But they do. And so my
band and crew, you know, they had a real tough

(02:20:14):
eighteen months, was still having a tough time now because
although we did twenty shows in the latter part of
last year, and no we're near enough to recoup their
lots of earnings in the in the previous year and
a half. So you know, we we are. We're all
I think a little obsessed by having to crack on
with it and make up for lost time, and particularly
older people like me, older artists. Um, if some some

(02:20:40):
of us may have made the time may have come
and gone, it's too late, you know, the narrow window
opportunity unfortunately closed before some artists could re energize themselves
and get back on the road. Is the time has
gone by for some people. But for those of us
who are in reasonable health and mentally um equipped to

(02:21:01):
take on the you know, the stress and the mental
reality of what touring and performing us about. Then, you know,
I think we're all struck by the the inevitability. If
we don't do it now, there might not be another chance.
A year or two or five years from now, it

(02:21:21):
could be over. So I think that's a profound driving force.
However desperate it sounds. There is a degree of desperation
about it, but there's nothing wrong with that. You know.
Some people are just desperate to have a good time
and go and party with their friends down at the nightclub.
And I'm desperate to get on the road and do
some concerts and and carry on with the record that
I began twelve days ago. It's twelve diggers, yeah, thirteen

(02:21:47):
days ago. On the January, the Onet as I've done
with the last three or four records. January the first
nine AM, I told everybody that's when I'm starting the
new project, and I did, and so I'm I'm now
thirteen days into that, almost two weeks, slightly hampered by
the fact that I've been spending many hours a day

(02:22:09):
doing press and promo, but even today I managed to
slip a couple of hours in working up some refinements
on a couple of song ideas, and I am you know,
I'm now in a position where I can be pretty
confident by the end of this month, I'm going to
be making some demos to send to the guys, to
the band, in the band, and hopefully in the the

(02:22:31):
periods that we have ahead of us, when although I
hope we're on the road doing concert tours, we may
end up still ending up rescheduling yet again, and so
we may have time to start recording earlier than I
might have otherwise. But you know where, there's another record
in there for sure, and I know what it's called.

(02:22:52):
I have twelve pieces of music. I've written the first
draft of all the lyrics, and no, I'm not going
to tell anybody you or even my family or anybody.
I'm not going to breathe a word about what what
the record is and what it's about. And it's it's
too precarious, you know, because I always reserve the right
to change my mind, you know, scrap it if necessary,

(02:23:12):
and start again. But you know, it's to me, it's
like bad luck to tell people too much about what
you're doing. I couldn't agree more soon as I tell people,
then suddenly I can't do it now. You've also had
adventures in salmon farming. How did that come about and
how extensive was that? Well, I've been a musician for
quite a bit of my life and I thought I

(02:23:33):
did okay but doing that. But a little part of me,
I suppose it's um, you know, there's it's just that
it's just that feeling maybe that you you can turn
your hand to something else, and you don't want to
be too one dimensional in your in your life. So
I thought, there's probably a couple of other things that
I'm interested in doing, and maybe I should give them

(02:23:54):
a go. And I we we we got involved in
farming back in the late seventies, but that was you know,
sheep and cattle and wheat and barley and oilseed, rape
and stuff a bit bit bit bit ordinary, but I
was bitten by the bug of aquaculture. I read about
it actually in an airline magazine. I read an article

(02:24:17):
about fish farm in this growing new industry, and I
got quite interested in that idea. And I spent about
a year trying to find um some potential um sites
for marine aquo culture, which I was able to do
and got it. Literally put notched a toe, but the
whole of a both feet into the into the water

(02:24:41):
to get going on that, and it was an interesting
parallel career for twenty years to come, and during which
period of time we my companies. You know, we're one
of the major producers of smoked salmon, but unlike all
the other companies, I was producing the broodstock, the egg,
the hatchery, the fresh water part of salmon growth, the

(02:25:03):
marine on growing of the fish, harvesting, processing, primary processing,
and then and then finally the secondary processing and for
the most part smoked salmon which was going to some
of the premier outlets in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
And so we weren't the biggest company, but we were
the only company doing the whole thing you know, from

(02:25:25):
brood stock and eggs right the way through to the
finished product on the supermarket shells. And so there was
quite a quite a an interesting time learning about a
whole new kind of form of business and a mixture
of business and science and biology. But of course it

(02:25:47):
had a an unfortunate consequence in terms of its impact
upon the marine environment, the sourcing of feed for salmon
and and inevitably the use of of chemicals to to
protect the fish from an antibiotics to present the fish
from disease. And and we were very much in the

(02:26:10):
spearhead spearheading of of trying to find the way to
do that and not be impactful on the environment and
not be overly reliant on on the artificial side of
intensive farming. So we were, you know, we we were
quite active. I mean, I was quite engaged with people
like green Peace and Friends of the Earth, trying to
you know, show them what it was we were doing,

(02:26:30):
and trying and explain that this wasn't you know, it
wasn't a perfect industry. But we weren't as bad as
we were being made out to be in some quarters.
But in the end, the inevitability caught up with me
in the in the new millennium, I decided that I
really there were a couple of things that I was
finding uncomfortable about intensive aquaculture, and I decided it was

(02:26:53):
time to call it a day. So I sold off
various arms of the business to different companies and turned
my back on aquaculture forever. But you know, twenty years
of I wouldn't say enjoyment, And somebody was a bit
scary because it was you know, I was I was
the investor, the sole shareholder. I was taking all the

(02:27:14):
risks and something was very, very risky to do UM.
And you know, we nearly came a cropper a couple
of times, but I managed to keep my shirt on
and and I was able to get out of it
without any losses, which is all I ever really wanted
to do. I mean, all that any profits we ever made,
I just turned it back into the company, and we've

(02:27:34):
tried to use that for growth in the company rather
than rather than I didn't need the income personally, so
it was just something to UM to do for the
sake of doing it and for the four hundred people
that were employed on our fish farms and and processing plants.
But anyway, been there, done that, won't be going there
again anytime soon. I went back to being a full

(02:27:55):
time musician because I part from anything else, you know,
I felt I was being torn into two different directions
all the time. With my available number of hours of
waking energy, I thought I just should get on being
a musician again. That's where I started and where I
should finish. So I will look back on my years

(02:28:17):
in aquaculture with a degree of fondness and some achievement.
But it's not, you know, it's not something I think
I miss if I if I ever, if I ever
thought about carrying on with it, it would have been
in shellfish farming, which is really very very almost zero impact.
Um I'm you know, I would have been a muscle farmer,
perhaps an oyster farmer, scallop farmer, but um, anything that

(02:28:42):
involves intensive feeding and intensive husbandry where you're putting a
lot of live animals into a small space and then
having to bash them over the head or put toxic
carbon monoxide into a bath to kill them. And yeah,
I mean, I'm not I'm not a veg I am
mostly vegetarian, and I am one of those people who

(02:29:05):
find it more increasingly difficult to justify eating something that
had a face on it, which is why I can
carry on. I think I could have carried on being
a muscle farmer, because hard as you, hard as you
may try, you don't see a pair of eyes or
any anguish facing you. A lobster, on the other hand,
you do, and a squid or an octopus you certainly do.

(02:29:28):
And so some stuff I just wouldn't want to do anymore.
I personally killed thousands of fish, and at the time,
you know, you got on and did it because I
was working on the farm, you know, here and there
in a part time capacity. And I I look back

(02:29:48):
on the what would be seen as a rather callous
attitude in in in just and just dispatching all these
these beautiful creatures and turning them into what was then
still a relatively luxury food. I couldn't have carried on

(02:30:09):
doing that. Sound a bit of a softie. I'm I'm
a pussycat, partly because I like pussycats, and partly because
I I actually really don't like being involved in harming
living creatures. That goes against my principles and my my
spiritual beliefs. But it's not to say that I never

(02:30:29):
eat meat or never eat fish, but I do it
very sparingly and try to um. You know, I mean
eating meat is you know, I would have a difficulty
arguing for it. But it if it's if it's been
extensively reared, not intensively, and it's been organically reared, um,

(02:30:56):
and it's had a good a good bit of time
just sitting out there in the fields and chewing on
grass and filling the sun on its back and and
the wind and it's hair or its fleece or whatever
it might be. Then I'm it's marginally easier to argue

(02:31:16):
for it than something that's grown up on concrete and
and never actually never actually stepped out into the open air. UM.
So you know, I have a problem with eating chicken
because so often, of course it's battery real chicken. And
I know from from experience as to what that looks like.
Because we've occasionally taken in some some chickens that have

(02:31:39):
been unwanted by intensive chicken farms, and we've brought them
home to to rear and have another life at home
with us and miractus. They all started laying again and
and and living on for another couple of years of
a happy life being being able to go out and
in when it eastern and wander around a big space

(02:32:02):
suitably fenced against the the invading foxes and dogs and
cats that might otherwise do them hard. But you know
that I'm I'm a bit of a softy when it
comes to animals, and um, I don't feel embarrassed to
say that. Not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
You have your opinion. For those who were fans of

(02:32:24):
rock of Jeff Row Tall, they can't understand it. There
are dozens of acts that should not be in the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If Jeff row Toll
is not in it, what is your viewpoint of that? Well,
I you know, I appreciate that people who are the
best will in the world, you know, would be campaigning
or arguing for Jeter Hotel being inducted into the Rock

(02:32:45):
and Roll Hall of Fame. But first of all, when
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland,
I was one of the first people to, having been asked,
I donated some memorabilia to the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame. So we were in there right from the right.
From the get go. Jet Hotel was present in the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But if we mean

(02:33:07):
being inducted into the rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
that's a different matter. And I've always felt that the
American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is that peculiarly
American institution to celebrate American music and its influence perhaps
elsewhere in some cases, but it's about musical Americana past, present,
and hopefully in the future. And I don't believe that

(02:33:29):
Jester Hotel really qualifies in regard to that, compared to
many other artists. So I think it would be a
bit of an anomaly for Jester Hotel to be in
inducted into the American Rock and Hall rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. Equally, there are some other bands who
have been I also don't think really belonging there for
similar reasons. But you know, there are there are many, many,

(02:33:50):
many American acts who do deserve because they may not
be very famous or necessarily have left so much behind them,
but they are still influential, unimportant, and I don't think
I've been given the recognition that perhaps they they deserve
as part of that big, an evolving story of American music.

(02:34:13):
So you know, That's how I feel about it. But
we could go into the sort of mechanics of it,
which is that I think the board that make these decisions.
I'm not sure if it still does, but it certainly
did have a guy Jan Whenner, who was the editor
of Rolling Stone, who had a particular dislike of jeth Hotel.
And I've heard from a number of sources that you know,

(02:34:35):
he absolutely would you hate jeth Hotel and wouldn't dream
of of of us being in there. And that's fine,
you know, I'm for different reasons, I kind of agree
with him. You know, I don't know the man at all,
never met him, but you know, he's entitled to his opinion,
and that may be one of the reasons that that

(02:34:57):
it's never been broke. But it would be difficult for
me right now if somebody said, oh, guess what them,
you know, we want to induct you into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame? Are you were you available
two months next Tuesday to come to l A and
be to be there? And I'm afraid I would have
to say I'm sorry, I'm not. I'm supposed to be
supposed to be uh supposed to be playing in Santiago

(02:35:20):
de Compostella in Spain that day, or I actually got
to be in Moscow to do a show, um, or
maybe I'm just washing my hair, but the chances are
I would not be inclined, just as I didn't want to,
even as the record company wanted to pay for the
tickets for to fly us over to l A for
the Grammy ceremony, which they would convincedly wouldn't win, so

(02:35:41):
there's no point in wasting their money. But even if
they had, I wouldn't really have wanted to go. I
just don't really like long hold travel for the sake
of it. I can I can be pressed, pushed, nudged
onto an airplane if if I'm actually going to work
and it's the band and the crew and we're all
trying to earn a living. They are, But so just

(02:36:02):
for the fun and games of some awards ceremony or something,
my heart's not in it. I don't think I would
want to go, and it would then be seen as
very rude. If I had to turn around and say,
you know what, I don't want to come. I don't
want to do that. People were just thinking I was.
It was sour grapes. I was just saying it because
I was miffed. I was peeved that we've not been
previously asked. So I'm in a bit of a no

(02:36:23):
win situation there. But in telling you this, since you
were listened to by a lot of people in the
in the media and in the music business, it will
hopefully serve as a warning to anybody in the both
in the Grammy system and in the the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. There's no point in asking him
because he's made it pretty clear he's not going to come. Well,

(02:36:46):
there are a number of acts who have finally been
inducted who didn't come, and uh, most notably Todd Rongwan
in this last year. But without going down that path,
I must admit that I was anxious about doing this.
I only met you once, not that you would ever remember.
I think the show was at the Kodak and it
was after the show. I'm sophisticated enough to know it's

(02:37:07):
very hard to come down, but you have a reputation
as being somewhat difficult. So I am stunned that you're
such a rack and tour and you're so loquacious. Now
to me, I could talk to you till the end
of time. I've given you more time than I've given
anybody else. But you also say you're a loner. So

(02:37:30):
is it that you don't suffer fools and there are
certain people you'll talk to, or is it really you're
talking to me but you'd rather be alone. Well, you know,
part of it, you know, brutally it is. It's part
of the job. You know, you've you've got to overcome
that desire for a seclusion. You get on with it.

(02:37:52):
You know, you just have to get on with doing it.
And if you're gonna do it, do it graciously, do
it nicely, smile on the face, cracking joe and trying
to try to make in it, trying to be genuine,
you know. So that's what I do. If I have
to do meet and greets after a show, I grown,
oh my god, it's one of checking my schedule. I'm
meeting greet and I've got to do these things. It's
Bob left Set guy. I've heard of him, yeah, And

(02:38:14):
by fact that I mean I do remember meeting And
my wife actually said to me today, said I remember
meeting him backstage after a show. But you know, I'm
I'm usually you won't find that many people who said
I was shirlish or unfriendly or whatever. If if I
say I'm going to say hello to somebody and meet somebody,
I I do my best, you know, but but of course, privately,

(02:38:37):
I'd probably just rather be, you know, I'd rather be
heading back to the hotel and watching David Letterman, or
or you know, getting to bed and going to sleep.
You know, I'm just not naturally a gregarious and chumby guy.
But if I'm going to do it, I'm going to
try and do it properly. Because I've met a couple
of people who've been churlish and unfriendly and and it's

(02:38:59):
a huge just appointment when you when you actually do
get the impression that someone just is prepared to be
really rude to you and cut you off just because
they're not in the mood. And and so I I
am aware of how that comes across, because I feel
pretty badly towards off top of my head, two or

(02:39:19):
three famous people that I actually said, oh, hi, really
nice to meet you, Ian Anderson from jether Hotel, and
they just turned their back on me and walked away.
And what what did I do? What did that what
did I do to upset you? Van mentioned mentioning their names,
and so it's a it's you know, I'm I'm aware
of how much it kind of hurts if you if

(02:39:40):
you're a fan of somebody and then they and they
treat you in a off hand or a dismissive way,
is quite hurtful. So I would hope there aren't too
many people who would have that tale to tell about me,
But a lot of people who will say, I know,
he just doesn't like to meet people and like to
say hello. He looks say they're probably right, but I wouldn't.

(02:40:02):
I would hope they wouldn't. They won't be talking about
personal experience as much as anecdotal stuff that goes around.
But you know, I'm a pretty friendly guy to most
people when i'm you know, when I when I have
to do it, when I'm confronted it was somebody stops
me in the street. It's a fan, you know. And
most of the time I'm gonna say, hi, really nice
to meet you, thank you, thanks for you know, buying

(02:40:26):
a record or do whatever. But if they then produce,
you know, twenty albums from a from a bag that
I know, we're going to end up on eBay that
I'm probably going to lose my tolerance fairly quickly. And
in these COVID times, and I've had the experience of
this during the last few months. Is it's really not
a great time to be grabbing hold of me and
trying to get me to sign things or hug me

(02:40:48):
while you're doing a selfie. You know, we're in the
middle of a pandemic right now, and I do not
want to be the one who puts my band and
crew out of work by getting COVID when I could
avoid it. So, um, you know, I'm probably a little
more inclined to be avoiding people right at the moment,
and that may go on for some months to come.

(02:41:09):
So I've tried to say two people, please, you know,
from a distance, I will thank you and give you
a smile and you won't see it because I'm wearing
a mask, but I'm smiling at you. Trust me. But
let's just leave it at there. That's just not trying
to be too pressing about it. But what about your
personal life? How social are you and your personal life?

(02:41:30):
Is there anybody you email with every day or talk
to every day? Do you go to dinner parties or
you really more of a home body loaner. Well, I
have a family and my my my daughter's family, and
my son's family live you know, pretty close by, you know,
quarter of an hour, half an hour, so we see
them probably two or three times a week. My son
in law comes almost every day to take the dogs

(02:41:52):
for a walk. Since he's he's out of work even
more than I am. Being a thespian and pandemic and
other things have meant it's been very difficult for him
to do the things that he's should have been during
the last couple of years. But um, yeah, you know,
we we were pretty close as a family and I

(02:42:12):
we have a few friends, most of them long standing friends,
not not in the music industry, but um but you know,
I mean I exchanged emails recently with who who was it?
Um Uh. Mark Armond from Soft Cell is a big buddy.
Unlikely because of the age difference in the musical style difference,

(02:42:37):
but but he's become a big friend in the last
few years and we do consciers together. He's a guest
of mine on our cathedral shows every year when we
do fundraises for churches and cathedrals and Tony Iomi, who
sent me an email at Christmas and I must get
together and have lunch. And you say these things, but
you know, in reality, another year goes by, another two

(02:42:59):
years go by, and you've sort of forgotten to do it.
But I guess again, you know, if you're getting older,
you're thinking, well, if I don't have lunch with Tony,
one of us is going to pop off sometime soon.
And you know, it's not like we're lifelong friends, but
we've known each other since nine a little bit, you know,
and he's one of those people that you know, he's

(02:43:19):
a good guy. And you know other people I suppose,
um um that I don't really communicate with that that much,
but there are a few people who are not necessarily musicians,
but you know, politicians or sports people or journalists and
people that I particularly at Christmas. You know, emails and

(02:43:41):
best wishes fly back and forth for a few days
of Christmas and New Year. Um. But it's um, you know,
it's it's just in balance. Really, I suppose probably true
to say I have less less less of a a
gregarious social life on a personal level than your average person.
But it's not entirely absent um. It does, it does,

(02:44:06):
it does get tempered, however, by the fact that at
this particular point in time, getting together for a boozy
lunch is probably not a good idea, since we and
in your country were in the throes of the O
macron dynamic surge. And although there are some signs at
least where I live that things are tapering off. I mean,

(02:44:27):
our infection rate would appear to have gone down to
just over half during the last two weeks, which from
very high levels, but it does appear to be seriously
on the turn, and hopefully hospitalizations and deaths will soon follow,
and maybe in you know, a week or two, you'll
see the same thing at least in some US states

(02:44:47):
that it is beginning to drop, and there are signs
of that already in Europe. Europe in the US seemed
to have been about three or four weeks behind the
UK all the way through this um and apart from Italy,
which started off very badly, but we all caught up
with that pretty quickly. But since then Britain has tended
to be one of the most infected countries with the

(02:45:10):
highest impact on on our lives, and the rest have
been you know, three four or five six weeks behind
and so and then some European countries are even further
behind and O Macron has not even really got there yet.
So and their countries with you know, maybe twenty thcent
vaccination rates, Boy, are they going to be in big trouble.

(02:45:33):
But you know, I think in America, I've spoke to
sending email from my American agents a few days ago
suggesting some periods of times have come back, and there
are a few shows in the USA in two thousand
and twenty three, and I'd be reasonably confident that that
can happen. As I'm hopeful, if not entirely confident, that
most of the shows in two thousand and twenty two

(02:45:55):
we'll go ahead, albeit some of them will have been rescheduled. Um.
But you know, I'm trying to be optimistic about all
of this, But at the same time, I've got to
be realistic and be prepared to to go um begging
the airlines for a refund on the tickets you bought

(02:46:15):
that you know can't use. Actually managed just two days
ago I finally got a refund from the very last
flights that I had not been refund if I finally
came through and they were from May two thousand and twenty.
I finally got the refunds two days ago. They actually
paid up brilliant, you know, so there is some honor

(02:46:36):
even amongst thieves. I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, I
had a flight like just after COVID began. I was
stunned when they gave me my money back, which was
over a year. In any event, Ian, this has been wonderful.
Listen to the tracks that were already outside city Sisters.
I really like I look forward to seeing you live again.
I'm sure even more you look forward to being on

(02:46:59):
the road. Thanks so much for taking the time. A
great pleasure. Nice too, Nice to see you and talk
to you, and great to see you're still as active
and there's much a voice to be listened to amongst
fans and the industry alike. So you keep at it
and become filled with the same desperation as I am

(02:47:19):
that it's not time to quit. Yes, and there's more
to do. No, no, no, no. I'm not quite as
old as you, but I'm feeling it and I'm not retired.
You know. This is my one and only so in
any event, thanks so much until next time. This is
bad WEPST

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Bob Lefsetz

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