The Cast :
Alan Thompson - Graham Gouldman - Midge
Ure – The Audience – The Music
Good
evening and welcome to a very special “I Write The
Songs” here on BBC Radio Wales with me, Alan Thompson. Now normally we
interview
Who’d
have thought… you’re in a Graham Gouldman and Midge Ure sandwich.
I am. Nice of you to point that out, Graham. And you’re not
look-alikes, you’re not a tribute act, you’re the genuine article.
That we are, yes.
Welcome to
BBC Radio
Yes,
St David’s Hall, we played in Cardiff Castle, I think that was the first time
back in ’75 and actually I’m playing live with my own version of 10cc on March
9th at St David’s Hall.
With your own special version of 10cc.
It’s 10cc featuring Graham Gouldman and friends.
Right.
Graham Gouldman and your friends doing all the hits of 10cc…
And more.
… of which
there were many and we’re going to get stuck into your songs very shortly and
also Midge Ure, out of Ultravox, Band Aid, The Rich Kids, Slik, loads of stuff,
solo stuff as well, we’ve got the solo stuff – how many times have you played
in Wales over the years, Midge?
Oh
loads of times. I’ve lost count. I’ve never played at the castle like him, he’s just doing that to show off.
To out-do
you.
I’ve
played outside the castle…
With a little hat.
…
busking yeah, honing my craft.
Well,
welcome to BBC Radio Wales both of you. Right, let’s get on with it then. This
is a lovely warm friendly audience here in
Well
actually it was probably in the late 50’s for me. I used to listen to Lonnie
Donegan, we used to hear a lot of skiffle songs and we used to do some of those
songs,
Midge can
you copy that? There’s a competition going on here tonight. I mean, he’s
already blown you off the stage with…
No
I can’t do that.
Oh okay
then – One Nil to Graham
There’s
a club I belong to, I’m a member of one and I refuse to play anything that
Cliff plays.
Any
particular reason why?
Well,
I dunno, it’s my club, I can do what I like.
It’s the
Midge club, it’s a Midge-Fest! So you started off by
that kind of thing, the Lonnie Donegan…
Yes
and really the bands I was in, initially we were just copying the Shadows
really. Everybody wanted to be Hank Marvin and bought a Fender Stratocaster
guitar.
Yeah what
about you, Midge?
Oh
he’s a rich kid. I had a Watkins Rapier that was given to me.
What was
that like?
Like
a Stratocaster but a kind of Japanese version. It was, I don’t know, the
Beatles – they were huge in my time, Gerry & The Pacemakers all of that,
but the first band I simply remember sitting, you know, everyone learned like
Blackbird – oh I’ve forgotten it now but – songs, first songs, because what you
used to do in those days because you couldn’t afford sheet music which is
usually rubbish anyway, sheet music you tend to get all the chords wrong, they
transposed it, put it into different keys and all sorts of things… was that
with your little record player you’d play the same song over and over and over
and when it got to the end you’d pick the needle up and stick it back on the
beginning and try and figure out what the chords were, what the core tunes were
so things like the Small Faces, they were a huge influence so things like (plays part of a Small
Faces song)
A round of
applause for that – note perfect – so that kind of stuff, you were a Small
Faces fan…
I
loved the fact that for a start they were small, which gave me hope – maybe I
can do this one day – but they were great characters, real fashion icons and
they wrote their own material. And that was really important, very distinctive.
What was
the first song that you ever wrote – I’ll ask you both this
in a moment. Can you remember the first song you ever wrote and how old were
you when you did that?
I
wasn’t that interested in writing songs to start with, it’s one of those things
you’re kind of drawn into or maybe embarrassed intro. I was more interested in
just being able to sing or play the guitar or whatever and it wasn’t until much
later I think my first foray into song-writing would have been at the end of
Slik and the beginning of the Rich Kids.
So quite
late really…
Yeah,
quite late in the day and I remember when I joined the Rich Kids, Glen Matlock,
it was his band, ex-Sex Pistols who’d written Pretty Vacant and all of that
stuff and I remember this dreadful realization that he wrote about stuff and I
just thought songs were clichéd hook lines that you just sang along, write
something that’s catchy. He wrote about subjects and I felt sort of embarrassed
and the first thing I wrote
was a dreadful song called, which I’d be arrested for these days,
called Young Girls. It’s alright writing something like that while you’re still
young yourself but when you’re a decrepit old man like me, you don’t want to be
associated with a song like Young Girls so it was dreadful.
Simple catchy?
I
can’t remember, it was kind of thrashy…
Kind of
punky! (Midge plays a few bars of Young Girls)
It
was very romantic.
Graham,
you obviously wrote loads and loads of hit singles in the 60’s for all sorts of
people, for the Hollies, for Herman’s Hermits and the Yardbirds. You were very
young when you started doing that, how did you first sort of get into
song-writing?
Well
it was out of necessity really, I’d sort of dabbled a bit in song-writing but I
had a band with
Tin
Pan Alley was
…and
anyway we didn’t get any songs that we liked or we weren’t given any songs
period and the Beatles had started and I thought ‘well, I’m gonna rally have a
crack at song-writing.’ I had dabbled a bit but they were really my inspiration
and gave me and I think a lot of other people the courage to actually do it. We
all wanted to be like the Beatles… most of us anyway.
Is
there a particular Beatles chord sequence you could show us?
I’d
love to give you a Beatles chord… (plays opening chord
to Hard Days night) …we used very similar chords.
Can
you just do that again, we’ll get the audience to join in, because there’s only
one thing that follows that chord…
Anyway
what happened was I wrote 2 songs and the record company we were with turned
down one of the songs, well the song they turned down was For Your Love, which
eventually found its way to the Yardbirds and…
How
old were you when you wrote that?
19
19?
Just remind us of that classic hit single 60’s song
(Graham
plays a verse or two of For Your Love)
That
song, I think I read somewhere, was kind of responsible for Eric Clapton
leaving the Yardbirds – he thought ‘I can’t play that, it’s too poppy’
Well
yes, I think it was more like the last straw rather than the other reason
because the Yardbirds had wanted to get a hit record and they were playing
rhythm and blues, and they were a fantastic rhythm and blues band and when they
made this change to being commercial, Eric couldn’t take it and he left… and
they got another crap guitarist – Jeff Beck, and then Jimmy Page.
When
you wrote that song, did you know you’d just written a hit single?
No
I didn’t know. I think sometimes this knowing you’ve written a hit single or
not, I’ve never been able to predict it. I mean there’ve been songs I’ve either
written or co-written and you’ve thought ‘that’s a hit’ and it hasn’t been, and
vice versa. It doesn’t always, I mean you have a feeling about a song sometimes
and sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong but I don’t know whether the
writer or the artist is the best judge.
Sometimes
it’s the public. What about you Midge? Do you know when you’ve generally sort
of written a classic hit single? We’ll come to
No
not at all. I knew it was something different. I knew it was kind of special in
it’s own right. But there’s
so many elements involved in turning a song into a successful commercial song
and those things you have no control over whatsoever. Once you’ve written it
and conceived the thing and in my case recorded it for myself – I didn’t write
songs for other artists – and you hand it across to the record company – it’s
like giving it to a big machine and it’s got to go through all this machine has
– all the different cogs all have to turn at the right time. There’s so much
luck involved and effort and focus and if one of the cogs don’t turn, your song
which is possibly quite potentially a hit song, disappears and no-one ever gets
to hear it, so no, I think maybe you have an instinctive feeling that you’ve
written something good and worthwhile but the process it has to go through
before you turn it into a successfully good, commercially successfully good
song is nothing, is way beyond your reach.
Right
and of course Ultravox’s
Which
I think Graham wrote…
How
does that make you feel, Midge? And can you play a bit of “Shaddup Your Face”?
“When
I was a boy…” no, don’t. It doesn’t deserve the royalties. He deserves to be
rotting in whatever hell-hole he’s in, in
Doesn’t show at all. You, Midge Ure, in 1975 or ’76 were a
bona fide member of a boy band called Slik.
I
was.
You
were the lead singer of Slik, who were the main rivals of the Bay City Rollers.
Any Slik fans in tonight?
Yeah
loads!
What
was Slik all about? What happened to you?
We
were a touring, working band in
And
it was number 1 of course, wasn’t it! I remember a couple of years ago you did
a “Big Buzz” for us on BBC Radio Wales in Cardiff Bay and you followed Hearsay
and you came on and said “Hearsay – they were note perfect, weren’t they” and
they were note perfect because they were miming to the record.
Note
perfect!
What
was the Slik song “Forever And Ever” is that what it was called – when was the
last time you played a little bit of that? Because you were on Top Of The Pops – you were a big star!
I
last played it in probably 1976, the year after it was number 1.
Could
you play us a little bit? Remind us what it was like. You didn’t write it but
that’s not the point.
(strums guitar) “I dedicate to you, all my love my whole
life through. I love you forever and ever”
Aaah,
let’s hear it for Slik. Well I think they should re-form Slik, gone but not
forgotten. Worried that I still knew all the words to that, once you got into
it I was well away. You were the rivals to the Bay City Rollers. I remember the
aftermath of
the Bay City Rollers in
It
was me
I
was a bit scared as well. It was a naughty word! But you were the Bay City
Rollers main rival.
Well
we were for a time, well for 6 months that we were famous but it was funny
because music’s kind of like that – songs as well – music kind of goes in
cycles and it was the end of that particular teeny-bop cycle thing because new
wave punk was rumbling under the surface about to explode and quite rightly
too.
Okay,
well, we’ll come back to that in a moment. We’ve got some audience questions
from our audience obviously, here in
Hiya
Graham. I was a big fan of 10cc back in the 70’s. one
of my favourite songs by 10cc was “I’m Mandy, Fly Me”. I’m wondering if you
could give me what was the inspiration to writing the song.
“I’m
Mandy, Fly Me” I used to see this, I think I first saw it in America actually,
a poster for United Airlines and on it, it used to say “I’m Suzy, Fly Me To
Miami” and it always kind of intrigues me that there may have been some sexual
undertone to that… I’m Suzy, fly me – and Eric and I started, you know,
thinking about songs to writer and I changed it to Mandy. I liked the name
Mandy better for some reason. I remember Eric actually wasn’t, he said “I don’t
like Mandy, I don’t like that name” and I said it just feels right, you know, and
we started the song. I had this sort of chord sequence that might sound
different to the record because it wasn’t played on an acoustic guitar (plays chords). So I just had these
three chords and we just started writing it and we had that title and, although
the words we wrote didn’t end up on the record. The lyric we wrote was rather
mundane and so we asked
Yeah,
“I’m Mandy, Fly Me” a huge hit single, a very complicated song put together
actually.
Yeah
well sort of like a few songs but at that time, you can hear a very big sort of
Beatles, particularly McCartney influence and I loved, I liked songs that had,
like when chords change and the bass part stays the same so you get a (strums chords on
guitar)
that sort of thing so I would put that kind of thing in.
“I’m
Mandy, Fly Me” – great song. Well we’ll be taking more audience questions very
shortly so if you’ve got any questions, get ready for that. “Bus Stop” was a
huge song that you wrote back in the 60’s. That’s a great song, a classic sort
of radio hit as well.
Well
Something I should tell you about the songs I wrote in the 60’s… my late father
was a writer. He wasn’t a professional writer – he should have been. But he
wrote stories, he wrote plays and he was great to have around. I would write
something and always show him the lyric and he would fix it for me. You know,
he’d say “there’s a better word than this” – he was kind of like a walking
thesaurus as well and quite often, sometimes, he came up with titles for songs
as well. “No Milk Today” is one of his titles, and also the 10cc song “Art For Art’s Sake”. That was something he used to say to me… “art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake” so we sort of
incorporated that into a song title. But “Bus Stop”, I had the title and I came
home one day and he said “I’ve started something on that Bus Stop idea you had”
and I’m going to play it for you, you can tell, can’t you…
In
a different key though
And
he’d written “Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say please share my umbrella”
and it’s like when you get a really great part of a lyric or, I also had this
nice riff as well, and when you have such a great start to a song it’s kind of
like the rest is easy. It’s like finding your way onto a road and when you get
onto the right route, you just follow it. Anyway I’ll sing a bit for you.
Yeah,
okay, we’d love to hear “Bus Stop”
(Graham
plays and sings an acoustic version of “Bus Stop”)
Brilliant!
You are listening to I Write The Songs live here on
BBC Radio Wales with me, Alan Thompson, coming to you live from the Newport
Centre. Midge Ure is with us today and also Graham Gouldman from 10cc and that
was Bus Stop”, a classic hit from the Hollies of course. Just before we go on
to Midge, when somebody, you write a song like that and a band covers it, it
must be a fantastic buzz when you hear their version of it.
Yeah, particularly the Hollies because I was a massive
fan of theirs. There was one chord that they changed in the song that I didn’t
like but as it went up the charts I grew to love it.
Oh,
what was the chord?
In the middle, for those that really want to know…
We’ve
got a lot of chords people in tonight!
…(Graham plays and sings a little piece of Bus Stop) and I had… (then
plays the same piece with one chord difference)… kind of subtle…
That
would never have been a hit
But
I am very sort of protective about, you know, you want it to be as you wrote
it. But it was a minor thing – I overcame it.
You
overcame it
I
dealt with it
When
the royalty cheque came in, you thought ahh whatever. Umm Midge back to you now.
I’m
not talking to you, they didn’t tell me HE was good!
Oh,
we’ve got a long way to go yet. Have you heard of a song called I’m Not In Love? Wait ‘til you hear that, it’s a belter. Um, after
the sad demise of Slik, one of the great boy bands of all time, you were in the
Rich Kids for a while. I’ll come to the Rich Kids in a second but briefly while
I’ve got you on the guitar, you were a member of Thin Lizzy for a while,
weren’t you, which a lot of people might not know.
I
wasn’t a member as such, I…
You
toured with them.
I
did tour with them, I was a friend, Phil Lynott was a friend and I had just
joined Ultravox, although no-one was particularly interested in Ultravox,
they’d had the three albums and they’d kind of gone at that point and I was
just finishing off the Visage album, the first Visage album, and I went out and
toured with the band. I was very much a member of Ultravox at the time so I was
never going to join the band. But God, it was like one of those Judy Garland
moments, you know, you see in the Sunday afternoon movie where the star on
stage falls over and twists her ankle and Judy gets a chance to go on and
shine. I was Judy Garland for six months. I was there jumping on the monitors,
playing the guitars, it was great…
Turning
it up to 11
Turn
it up to 11 absolutely.
So
you joined Thin Lizzy and toured
I
got the phone call. I was in the studio and I got a phone call from Phil who
was in
They
were great songs as well, Thin Lizzy’s, The Boys Are Back In Town, all those great
hits, they were complicated guitar parts as well. Can you still remember those?
(plays part of The Boys Are Back In Town) you never forget,
once you’ve been in Thin Lizzy it stays with you.
Good
enough for me… round of applause for heavy metal guitar playing. Heavy metal
guitar playing on an acoustic guitar – sounds good! Is the topsy-turvy world of
heavy rock as wild as we’re led to believe? During your six month period, you
must have had a ball.
I
did have a ball. The great thing was because it wasn’t my band. If they had a
really bad gig and they were having a fight, I was having a ball. It didn’t
matter to me, it wasn’t my band so I was just having a great time and it was
the full on Spinal Tap experience. It was the flights, you know, people walking
round in cowboy hats, it was the airports, it was the picked up by limo’s, the
first night that I arrived, we did a first show and we were opening up for a
corporate rock band Journey, who were huge in America so we’re playing these
massive stadium type things and I get there the first night and we were in New
Orleans and it was great and I thought I’ve got to get to Bourbon Street and
I’ve got to do all the stuff, I’d heard all about America and I met this very
gorgeous young lady and you know, being a young single man, and doing what a
young single man does, to find out she’s the guitarist of Journey’s girlfriend
and I had to spend the next four weeks with this guy so it was interesting…
Awkward
It
taught me to run.
And
before that, I’ll come back to you because I want to come back to the audience
now so we have another question from a particular member of the audience. Hi Bill
how are you? What’s your question?
It’s
to either Midge or Graham. Have either of you ever written a song that you wish
you could disassociate yourself from…
Interesting,
okay…
…because
Billy Bragg, some of his songs have been taken over by political organizations
that he’s not too happy about!
Right okay, interesting question, thank you Bill. Graham
first of all.
I
can’t honestly say that I would want to disassociate myself from, I mean, this
doesn’t sound too weird but they’re almost like your own children in a way and
you created them for, you know, for better or for worse and I mean there are
some I’d rather not discuss but I can’t say I’d go so far as to disassociate
myself.
What’s
the worst song you’ve ever written?
Okay,
we wrote a song for Manchester City and here’s the weird thing though, this was
like before we’d formed 10cc, we were working in our Strawberry Studios up in
Stockport and we’d been asked to do this and at that point, we had the studio,
we were doing any sort of thing just for, you know, for the money, it didn’t
really matter and we’re asked to make this record and a few weeks ago I was
watching I think it was on Sky and I heard the bloody song. I thought oh my God
it’s still there, you know, but some friends of mine are City supporters and
here’s the weird thing by the way, I’m a United supporter – I know, don’t tell
me – it was strictly business – they said they still play that song and people
love it so in a way it kind of did it’s job, you know, if it’s lasted all those
years so the answer to the question is no.
It
would be rude of us to ask you or expect you to play that
It
would be incredibly rude of you.
But
I will anyway so lets hear a little bit of it. What’s
it called, by the way?
Boys
In Blue
Boys
In Blue
(Graham
sings and plays a line or two of Boys In Blue)
How
can you be ashamed of that, Graham?
I
don’t know, it sounds great. Maybe I could alter it.
Same
question to you, Midge.
Yes
I’m going to disassociate myself from that. No, again Graham’s right. The songs
when you create these things, they’re like children and sometimes your children
go off and do things
you don’t really want them to do but they’re still yours. You’ve
got to love them no matter what so, I’ve never written songs for other artists
and then had them go off and twist them and “change the chord” you know, and
make them successful so it’s never really happened to me. But there’s plenty of
songs I’ve done that I look back at them, I can’t remember just what head’s on
at the time that I wrote them or what I was thinking about when I wrote them.
At the time I probably thought it was art but now in the cold light of day you
know, twenty five years later I just think I was an idiot.
Any particular examples there that might spring to mind?
Well,
just about any Ultravox album track, I think, it’s just difficult to go back
and think because you wrote it as a young man, you wrote it when you had no
kind of, you didn’t put parameters on what you were
doing. But as you get older, you think I can’t do that, I can’t do rock, I
can’t do a heavy metal song, you know but when you’re an idiot you can do
anything you like.
I
remember “Reap The Wild Wind”, you said, I remember
reading once, you said the words for that were complete and utter nonsense, you
just wrote them down.
They
were but that was part of it.
It
was a hit
It
was a hit single, it was almost all instrumental and I seem to remember Sir
George Martin was producing the album and I didn’t have the vocals coming in
‘til about three minutes into the tune and he just gave me a verbal clip around
the ear and said pull yourself together and bring the vocals up to the front
because you know, it’s a very catchy tune but a lot of the time the sound of
the words you use are almost as important as what they actually mean. David
Bowie used to do it quite nicely if
you’ve ever seen the documentary of him cutting up lyrics and mixing them round
because the soundbites, the little images that the vocals will give you sometimes,
a little bit like watching a snippet of a movie – it’s interesting just for
that ten seconds or whatever, you don’t have to see the whole thing and when
you mix them all up and put them together, you do get something like “Reap The
Wild Wind” which didn’t mean anything at all, it was just a series of images
that sat in your head.
And a huge
hit single. Do you play that now, can you remind us of it?
It
was a big keyboard-y thing, but…
We’ve
actually got a keyboard here today which we brought in specially
for you.
I’m
not a big keyboard-y thing so it was… imagine this on
a keyboard (plays several bars of “Reap The Wild Wind”) that was it!
Good
enough for me, Midge, sold a lot of records. Good stuff indeed. Graham, back to you. Now then, 10cc right, one of the most
influential of all British bands still now, maybe now, more than ever a lot of
young bands are quoting 10cc as an influence. How did you get together with
Eric and Lol and with
Right,
how long have you got? I used to go to school with Kevin. I didn’t know him
that well but I knew of him. I formed a band with Kevin called the
Mockingbirds, and we used to rehearse at a local youth club. IN another band,
there was Lol.
Lol
Creme. Lol Creme, and Lol and Kevin were best friends. Eventually, Kevin, Lol
and myself used to sort of jam together at, Kevin’s Dad had a shop in the
centre of Manchester and ewe used to go to the, he had a little warehouse near
it and we used to go there and play Ravel’s Bolero for like three hours for
some reason, and so we were kind of a team together. I then met Eric Stewart
when I was working at an office, I had a room in an agency called Kennedy
Street Enterprises, in
And the
thing with 10cc, all four members wrote songs.
Yeah
everyone wrote, produced, sang, played on instruments and also Eric engineered
as well, so we were completely self-contained, we didn’t need anybody else in
the studio whatsoever. Eventually we were doing an album with Neil Sedaka, we played and produced two albums with him and
during the end of the first one, we thought ‘you know
what, we could actually be a band.’ I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us
earlier, I suppose, I think we were just so busy and wrapped up in other
things, but Eric and I had written a song called Waterfall that Apple Records
were interested in releasing, what we thought was going to be an A-side. We
needed a B-side and we asked Kevin and Lol to write the B-side, it seemed only
fair. And they came up with this song called Donna and we recorded it and as we
were recording it, we were thinking there’s something about this, it’s very,
very good. Eventually, we thought ‘who’s gonna be sort of crazy enough to
release this and Eric knew Jonathan King, who’d just started a record company
called UK Records and he came up to the studio, in fact, we sent it to him and
he said “I love it, I want to release it!”
Right.
You got to number 2 in the charts. Extraordinary vocal Lol Creme did on Donna…
Yes,
he’s got a very…
I thought
it was a woman quite frankly and I was only 8 years of age, but I thought it
was a woman singing.
Where
we went, we went to do a TV show in
And it
was, was it a tense band to be in because you were only together in the initial
line-up for 4 years, I think, making four albums. You made an album a year and
you were all writing and producing, locked in that studio. Very
creative people. Was that, there a lot of competition going on in 10cc?
Not
really, no, it was a very creative, supportive time, we were all on the same
team and getting swept along by this wonderful thing that was happening and yet
I think because we were self-contained and away from the metropolis that we
felt very special and sort of clung to each other in a remarkable way, I think
back on it. But eventually after four albums Kev and Lol decided that they’d
had enough, they felt that there was too much planning, there was too much
premeditation and that was one of the beauties of 10cc, that we just went and
did, I mean, we thought about what we were gonna do but there was no plan,
there was no remit. There was no grand idea, we just did what we felt we should
do and and they felt as soon as that went, ‘cos’ we sort of went when we started working on the How
Dare You album, what sort of songs do we need? Should we have another ballad or
maybe we shouldn’t and they didn’t like that idea. There were other things
going on in their lives but that was one of the reasons why they left.