Cottage Views Interview with the Strawbs
Reproduction without permission prohibited. © 2002 Cottage Views
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JOHN FORD October 19, 2001
Michael Cimino: Can you tell me about this new song that you did with Hud?
John Ford: I don’t live in England anymore, but the main thing over there before all this Afghanistan stuff started happening was the British, or most of them anyway, don’t want to be run by Brussels and have this one currency, which is the Euro-Pound. As far as I can see, it is Labour versus Conservative. The Conservative part of the country wants to keep the Pound and the others, meaning Tony Blair, want to go with the Euro-Pound. Hud wrote this song, because he’s a staunch Conservative, called “Just Say No.” So, he sent me this song and said, ‘What do you think of this,’ and I said, ‘pretty catchy,’ and it was. He made his own recording of it over in England and when I went over to do the Strawbs tour, which was in June, we played it on the tour as an acoustic opening thing. Then I took his vocal back and re-recorded it in my studio, so there is two versions on the CD. There’s my version and his version. I took his vocal, bare, and made up a backing track and put my harmonies on his vocal and finished the whole thing. It’s slightly more Rock-ier than his version. Basically, it’s the same song.
We did this song and it went down pretty well on the tour. Whether it convinced anyone to keep the Pound, I don’t know (laughs).
MC: So this is the first time that Hudson-Ford has recorded in almost twenty years?
JF: Yeah. In fact, I have a new song called “Together Apart,” and we’ve been, tentatively, thinking about that as a new album title for Hudson-Ford because it’s very hard for us to work like 3,000 miles away. We were thinking of him doing a few tracks and me doing a few tracks and putting them on one CD. Whether that will materialize, I don’t know.
MC: Do you
think the possibility of doing a Hudson-Ford album is stronger than doing a
Strawbs album at this point?
JF: I don’t know. The two Daves and Brian Willoughby have done the acoustic thing.
MC: Would you welcome going back into the studio with the entire band?
JF: Yeah, but in all honesty, really it’s hard enough getting us all together to do a tour. And don’t forget, the Strawbs don’t have a major deal. For the two Daves and Brian to go into the studio to do an acoustic thing is a bit different than getting us all together. At the moment I’ve got to say unless Dave Cousins calls and says, ‘Come on over,’ I don’t think it’s in the wind, although, there has been talk about the next tour, which will be next year, of us touring with an orchestra. Which orchestra I don’t know, but that is the word. There is a lot of orchestral stuff on past Strawbs albums. I’d like to do that. I’d like to do that with Hud, but it’s all logistics.
Above: John Ford (left) and Richard Hudson Below Right: Acoustic Strawbs (left to right - Dave Cousins, Brian Willoughby, Dave Lambert)
DAVE LAMBERT
October 29, 2001
Michael Cimino: The album sounds terrific.
Dave Lambert: Yeah. Dave took an awful lot of time on the mixing, and the guy who engineered it knows the studio back to front. It was a real joy to do, that was.
MC: I’ve spoken to a bunch of guys in the band, but I’ve never had the opportunity to speak with you…
DL: No chance of you coming over, I suppose? (laughs)
MC: If you don’t mind we talk a little about your history with the band. How come you left the Strawbs back in 1978?
DL: That was a time when the forward momentum had dried up. We weren’t really going forward at all, and the band has always had a basic aim of what used to be called ‘progressing’ – trying to do something unusual and new at the same time. I just felt that that had come to an end, really, for that period. And I had so many things that I wanted to try on the solo front, so the two things came together, and I chose the start of a new album to leave the band, because the start of an album is always the start of a sequence, which is followed by touring and then getting together another album. The best time to leave is as a new album is being put together.
MC: Dave had told me that you had become a ski instructor. Is that true?
DL: Yeah. I had, yeah. When I left the band I stayed in Los Angeles for quite a while, because I made the Framed album, and then chose to move back to England again, and I was offered seasons in Austria playing solo which I took very gratefully because I always wanted to get back to skiing which I had started when I was about thirteen. I was playing three nights a week in Austria and skiing all day every day. Then the Austrian ski school asked me, because I was going there so often, whether I’d like to train as a ski instructor. So I did that, which was very tough but very enjoyable.
MC: How many years did you do that?
DL: Twelve years.
MC: What brought you back to the Strawbs?
DL: Purely the
fact that we did the Chiswick House, the 30 year anniversary show, and everybody
just got on so well and rehearsed so easily together that it was sort of
decided, obviously mainly by Dave, but by everybody else as well that we’d put
together what’s known as the classic line-up, the Part of the Union line-up,
and which would be able to go together okay because everyone was prepared to do
it and we did that for a one off tour which has lasted three years so far
(laughs) and after that we formed the Acoustic Strawbs when the opportunity
arose to attempt something a little bit different. 
MC: Whose idea
was it to put together an acoustic album?
DL: The album came because we were
getting so many offers of work elsewhere and Dave has always been of the opinion
that live work is pointless unless you have a product.
Not from a commercial point of view, necessarily, but also from the
point… this is what I was saying
earlier on – the Strawbs always had a reason to be, never just a band playing
music, there was always a reason for it, albeit an ethereal reason or a
commercial reason. I agree with him.
When you’ve got something to work for you work much more focused and
ultimately it’s much more satisfying. So,
as we were doing so much acoustic stuff it was decided that it would be good to
focus it on a product which is the album and then that gives it a reason to be,
if you know what I mean. There’s
something material that you can actually say ‘this is something that we do and
this is why we do it.’ As opposed
to just getting together and saying 'so and so' has offered us a load of money
to do this show so lets go and do this show.
MC: It’s always nice for the audience to take home a souvenir from the show, also.
DL: Absolutely. It gives them a focus as well. It gives everybody a focus on what… It makes it a material thing. It makes it solid as opposed to just being, “Oh, I just saw so and so playing with so and so the other day. And then tomorrow I’m going to see so and so play with so and so.” It’s nice, that kind of thing, but as a musician it doesn’t actually have a lot of satisfaction in it unless there is something solid to go on.
MC: On the new record you sound like you’ve never been away. Have you been playing and singing all these years?
DL: I’ve been playing solo stuff mostly, yeah. I’ve done a lot of different ventures with different people as one off things. I hadn’t been in the studio for a full-blown album for many years and that was the first time… to be honest, we made so many recordings in those days that it just came back quite naturally. There was no great feeling of having been away for many years.
MC: I would love to see you perform this acoustic show. Will you be able to bring this to the United States?
DL: We are talking to the states at the moment through two or three different channels. So, yeah, that is the intention.
MC: How about filming it for a television special or an M TV Unplugged?
DL: That would be the ideal thing to do. That’s ultimately what we really want to do, on some kind of permanent record. I’m very surprised, in fact, that it hasn’t been picked up so far. To be honest, I’m very surprised that somebody like channel 4 over here or an independent company hasn’t picked it up. It’s something worth doing. It would be the natural band to do it with, would be Strawbs. It’ll come. Sure, it will come.
MC: What was your inspiration for your new song, Inside Your Hell Tonight?
DL: I don’t know if you know any Cricketers over there (laughs). I do a lot for the English Cricket players over here. I do shows for them and I do parties for them. We also have a benefit system here, where at the end of ten years a player has a year to raise as much money as he likes, tax free. Thanks to the clubs and the organization, they support them to do that. It’s another way of not paying them very much, quite frankly.
MC: Is that
for their retirement fund?
DL: That’s the whole idea. They usually raise anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000 pounds during that year. So, it’s worthwhile for them to do it, yeah. I spend maybe four or five shows a year I do solo for Cricket benefits for this country. Mainly, because I’ve been a Cricket player all my life, and I was sitting talking to one of the players in Kent and he showed me a photograph in the newspaper of a dead guy. It was one of these cheap, trashy, newspapers. He weighed about 30 stone and he’d fallen from a window, and he was just like a mass of jelly. I said to him, I thought there was an understanding, an agreement, that these kind of things were never shown in newspapers. And from that we went on talking about the ethic of non-interference on the part of reporters – whereby if a reporter is at an incident and something is happening to somebody they are ethically not bound to help that person. I don’t know if you know about that. If you speak to any reporters they uphold that ethic. They believe in that ethic. Now, I don’t. I think that every human beings first duty is to humanity and to fellow man. I believe, I don’t care what job you’re doing, if you see somebody in trouble you help them. I went home after that discussion and started to think about conscience and about how things are permanently left on your conscience. So deeply scared that they can never possibly be removed. That’s what the song is about.
The verses are about different things. Marilyn Monroe is there, the first World War is there. Slavery is there. There’s a personal one at the end. It’s mainly about the conscience. Living Inside your Hell is what you’re left with. It’s quite relevant to what happened in recent months and the discussions that ensue.
MC: Is it brand new?
DL: Brand new.
MC: Do you see a time when the whole band will do a new electric album?
DL: The whole band? Certainly, yes. There are discussions underway, and there have been for the last two months or so. That’s quite a real possibility.
DAVE COUSINS
November 27, 2001
MC: Are the
Strawbs back together on a full-time basis?
DC: Yes, and no. We’ve toured the same time for the last three years, in April/May, but we’re not going to do it next year because I don’t feel that we’re getting anywhere. The reason for that is we’re playing to good audiences, not the big halls we used to do, but good audiences – very well received – but we haven’t put any product together. There’s no new record so we’re going around sort of selling ourselves and it’s not really advancing us. That was the idea of doing the acoustic album – to use that as an interim period and give the band breathing space to get something else together this year.
MC: Do you see a time when the Strawbs will do an electric album with the full band?
DC: Well, we are discussing doing an album with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I’ve been asked to cost the musicians out that we would need and give them a line-up. I don’t want to go back and re-do old songs again. I want to do new songs. Not to keep rehashing the same songs, otherwise, it gets very dull. So we’ve got to have quite a lot of rehearsal time to rehearse an album up properly and to rehearse the material up properly before we do it. It’s a question of when. John Ford lives in America now, so it makes life difficult for him to come over. He’s nervous to fly at the moment, so it’s going to be quite difficult to do.
MC: What occupies your time when you’re not with the Strawbs?
DC: I’m
still involved in my radio research work. Effectually,
I design radio stations from beginning to end.
That’s not designing the studio side, it’s actually going out into
the market, researching the audience, finding out what the hole in the market
is, designing a radio station and programming it, and then applying for a
license and winning it, and getting the station up on-air, investing in it, and
making sure the whole thing works. It’s
actually starting a radio station with a blank piece of paper, with no idea of
what it should be doing, researching what the audience should be, researching
what the music policy should be, working out the business plan for it for a
three or four year period and raising the money, getting the thing on-air,
getting the studios built and then launching the thing. 
MC: Do you own the company that does all this?
DC: I own the company that does the design work.
MC: Do you own the stations as well?
DC: I invest in the stations, usually. The last one I was director of. I was the chairman of it.
MC: And now you’re working with the Classic Rock Society as well?
DC: Yup.
MC: What does that entail?
DC: I’m a director and investor in the Classic Rock Society. We’re developing the magazine. When I joined it, about 18 months ago, it didn’t have a color front page. It now has a color front page. It’s got decent quality paper in it. We’ve got the attendance at the shows we promote. The next stage is to get some more capital investment into it and take it from being a subscription only magazine to getting it in the shops. It’s quite hard work (laughs).
MC: All of your work revolves around music.
DC: Yes, it
does.
MC: Do you have a really good handle on what’s contemporary and what people are listening to now?
DC: Very much. What we do when we’re designing these stations – part of the research that we do – is to monitor the output of the existing stations and see what their format is and see what records they are playing, so I very much keep up to date with the new product that is happening. The new bands that are coming through and what is actually selling in the marketplace.
MC: Where do you feel your music, and the music of your contemporaries, fits in with today’s programming?
DC: Our music is very much a niche product. What has happened over here – and I think it is a tragedy – it’s actually all down to a silly piece of legislation that the government passed many years ago which banned pubs and clubs from having more than two musicians playing on stage unless they had a full music license. Now, that full music license costs a fantastic amount of money, very expensive indeed, so the majority of clubs and pubs don’t bother to have live music. They just have a pair of guitar players or a guitar player and a bass player who use backing tapes. As a result there are no new bands, very few young bands, coming through, and as a result the whole damned music business stagnated. At the same time, people found it was easy to buy a computer and start to make dance music tracks and use drum machines. So, the whole of our music industry began to revolve around home productions and cheap productions and as a result I think we’ve lost a lot of the production values. We no longer, as a Country, have a presence in the United States. We have hardly anything in the American charts whereas we used to be very powerful in the American charts. We’re not leading, we’re following. What is actually happening now is that while we’re monitoring our radio over here that new young bands are beginning to come through and the music business has suddenly said, ‘Hang on. We’ve had enough of these dance tracks.’ Because they’re not selling albums. The bands that sell albums are Rock bands. So, now we’re seeing Star Sailor, Cold Play, beginning to come through, but there are even more new bands beginning to come through. There is…. Stereophonics are huge over here. I don’t know if they’ve hit America yet. These sort of young bands are beginning to break through and they’re Rock bands.
MC: It’s sounds like a backlash is happening.
DC: It’s a backlash, in my opinion, yeah. And it’s a very good thing that it is, too. It means that people are becoming musicians again. People forgot how to play their instruments. And one thing that we found when we went to America is that the audiences are very conscious of the fact that you have to show that the fact that you can play. American audiences demand musicianship. And I think we came across as a band that could actually play our instruments, therefore we went down well.
MC: What new music do you like? Who impresses you?
DC: Very little, frankly. I don’t like particularly the new bands. Like Cold Play, they had that song Yellow, and I didn’t like it very much. I found it very dreary. I still go, I’m awfully sorry to say, but I still hark back to the things that I’ve been listening to for years. Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne. I bought a Jim White album recently, I thought he was great, but there’s only a half a dozen songs that I can listen to. The rest of the album goes off into very strange tangents. And yet, over here he’s getting rave reviews.
MC: What do you think of Dylan’s new album?
DC: At first hearing I thought it was awful. Second and third hearings I like it a great deal. But you can’t sit in the car with your lady-friend because they don’t like it. It’s male music, I’m afraid.
MC: Who came
up with the idea to do an acoustic album?
DC: I did,
I’m afraid. What happened was we
had done an acoustic set before the band’s show.
The whole band sitting down and playing the songs and it went down very
well. And last year we played at the Edinburgh festival for a weekend, for three
nights, in the summer and I thought we’ve got to have a record to go with
this. Why don’t we go into the
studio, just the three of us, and put this down as a record to see what it
sounds like. Essentially, we played
the whole thing live. Very little
of it was overdubbed, and very little vocal overdubs.
It was essentially a live record. We
were so thrilled with it when it happened, but then I thought just to have those
three guitars going for a whole album is a bit too much, so I got in touch with
Robert Kirby and brought him in to do some string arrangements and then the
album sounded balanced to me. I
love it. I think it’s the Strawbs
album we should always have made.
MC: The sound quality is just amazing.
DC: We recorded the guitars both through microphones and the DI electric systems as well and mixed the two together so you get this bigger sound on the guitars. Somehow that worked, but sometimes you’ll find it’s just the acoustic guitar and sometimes it’s a bit more electric. It varies as the songs go through. We did concentrate on getting as big a sound out of the guitars as we possibly could with using just acoustic guitars, and I’m astonished at how big the sound is.
MC: It’s so in your face that it sounds like you’re in the studio.
DC: Well, we mixed it like a Rock album. It was an acoustic album but we mixed it like a Rock album. It’s heavily compressed in places and we mixed it, as you say, up-front and I think it’s a very powerful sounding record despite the fact that it is an acoustic album. And for a strange thing, the first time ever, it appeals to women. The Strawbs have always been down to earnest young men and suddenly I find women like our record, which is a great thing for me (laughs). This record, I find, they think is very romantic sounding. They can listen to it and it’s not threatening. Whereas, I think, a lot of Strawbs things, at times, were threatening. Especially things like The Life Auction and things, were very violent.
MC: There has been a lot of darkness in Strawbs records over the years. I find the new songs also have dark themes.
DC: They do.
MC: Did they take on new meanings after the Sept. 11 attacks?
DC: Not really. They were done and dusted before that happened. What happened was, the song There Will Come The Day was written for a film on human rights for the Council of Europe. I recorded it in Strausberg, in the European Parliament Building. It’s a fifteen minute film and visiting dignitaries who want to know what the European Parliament does and touring parties get sat down in a little theatre and are shown this film. It’s a very oppressive film about people being in prison and children’s violence and that sort of thing. The tune was written at that time with Don Airey, the keyboard player. Soon after that the Sariejvo crisis started to erupt and I started to write the words for it then. It then got set aside and then Cosivo came along and it seemed to be very appropriate. So, now it’s been recorded more with Cosivo in mind than it has with Sariejvo in mind, but nonetheless, it’s written about that whole middle-European Balkan uprising and the violence and the tragedy that went on there. So the lyrics are very dark. It’s one of those things. I get inspired… not inspired by – I get appalled by it and so I write about it.
MC: Is Not All The Flowers Grow a brand new song?
DC: No, it’s a very old song. It was written about a tragedy that occurred over here when thirty children were killed in a school when a coal tip slid down a hill and buried the whole school in a storm. The thirtieth anniversary of that incident came on the television as a documentary and virtually the children of the entire village were wiped out and killed, all in one go. The whole lot. Every child in the village.
It’s a song I’ve only sung twice in public. I could never sing it without bursting into tears. It was too emotional. When this documentary came on the television, I thought, ‘We never recorded it. Let’s put it down.’
MC: Do you think you’ll be able to bring this record to the states in some sort of live format?
DC: I’m working on it. I’m talking to an agent who handles a few English Folk-Rock bands but he’s concerned about the economic situation in America, at the moment, and whether people will go out to concerts. He said after September 11th everything stopped and he had to cancel tours immediately. I’ve sent off also to a couple of other agents and I’m waiting for replies from them. We’re also talking to a couple of labels in America, and if we get a release over there I’m sure they’ll want us to come out and tour. Now touring with the electric Strawbs is virtually impossible because it’s just too big a unit to take around these days, so the Acoustic Strawbs, as a three piece, is perfect.
MC: I found an interesting entry where you mentioned, years ago, that you used to equate the Strawbs with the Byrds. What did you mean?
DC: Byrds were
my favorite band and always have been. If
you listen, for example, to On Growing Older on Grave New World you’ll hear
that very Byrds-y way the guitars jangle and the singing goes.
They were always my favorite band. If
somebody would have said, ‘Would you come and join the Byrds?’ the Strawbs
would have been dumped immediately (laughs).
But they didn’t actually phone me up unfortunately.
But, they’re my favorite band and I think that we have got that Folk
basis to us, although I never regard us as being a Folk group.
Some would regard the Byrds as being a Folk group but they’re not.
They’re a Rock band. But,
we listened to Folk music and we sang in a Folk music way.
There’s a guy named Richie Underburger, he’s one of the editors of
the All Music Guide, he’s writing a book on Folk-Rock at the moment and he’s
including the Strawbs in that, and Fairport Convention.
But he’s also including the Byrds and Neil Young because he said
they’re all Folk-Rock bands in his opinion.
He and I are disagreeing over it – in a nice way.
I said, ‘No. The songs
came out of tunings and not out of Folk music.’
And he says, ‘Oh, no. You’re
a Folk dude,’ so I’ve sent him a copy of the album (laughs).
You got the album off of the front of Wondrous Stories?
MC: Yes. It’s fabulous – such an array of songs from your career.
DC: Well, it’s just a summary of what we’ve been up to because people have been saying, ‘What have you been doing all these years?’ I just wanted to show people what we’ve been doing. If you hadn’t had the records then at least you’ve got the chance to catch up on what we do. We’ve got a box set, a four CD box set three quarters finished, but when Universal took over A&M it all stopped, so there’s another reason for me to go over and see them.
MC: Will The King single be included?
DC: Yeah. It’s on there. It’s already done. The great thing is I’ve got another… that track with Rick Wakeman and I that we just did in concert – The Shepherds Song – I’ve got another half an hour of that material. Just the pair of us.
MC: The one from 17 years ago?
DC: Yeah.
MC: Did you record the Classic Rock Society gig this year?
DC: No, we didn’t. I broke a guitar string so I was very unhappy. But, it was great fun to do and the audience went wild.
MC: I’m sure the fans will be very happy to hear that you two will be working together again. Many of us here in the states believe that Rick was integral to the shaping of the overall sound of the band.
DC: Very much so. He and I are good old friends. He spends a lot of time in Italy at the moment, but he did say, quite specifically, ‘We must get together and either revamp some of the old songs and record some new stuff,’ and I’m going to nail his foot to the floor this time (laughs).
In concert photos courtesy of Michael Cimino Archives.
© 2002 Cottage Views
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