Crawfish & Caviar - Anthony Thistlethwaite (R2 RnR Magazine 2013)

Here's another blast from the past, an interview with former Waterboys saxophonist Anthony 'Anto' Thistlethwaite that I compiled for R2/RnR magazine back in 2013 when Anto was preparing to rejoin The Waterboys for a tour celebrating the Fisherman's Blues album, around then, I guess, the time of the expanded Fisherman's Box album release. 

I've met Anthony a few times, firstly when I was researching for my Strange Boat book on The Waterboys, and later at various Saw Doctors gigs. I note, with some sadness, my mention in the interview about the 'temporary' hiatus of the Saw Doctors, which largely, despite a few ad-hoc get together shows, still goes on to this day. I really miss them. Haven't talked to, or seen, Anto in a few years now - I think the last time we talked was on the telephone for a piece I was writing for Vive Le Rock about the great Nikki Sudden, who Anto had played with on various of Nikki's LPs - but I always found him to be one of the nicest, most genuine, people that I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing. 

I'm always amazed how often he turns up on records that I love, such as those by Nikki Sudden, including ones that I've been discovering for the first time, as was the case with Nikki's 'lost' album with Simon Carmody and Johnny Fean, The Last Bandits In The World, for last year's RSD, which came expanded with recordings featuring Anthony and fellow Mike Scott comrades Steve Wickham and Max 'Lizard' Edie, or tunes that I remember from way back when...  Bruce Foxton's first solo records, Robyn Hitchcock's Groovy Decay. He's on The Psychedelic Furs Book of Days album and Working With Fire & Steel by China Crisis... among many others.

Looking back at this piece, actually it's rather unfocused (my fault entirely) but I think it does at least describe some of the mercurial adventures that Anto has enjoyed along his way. He'd kindly allowed me to reprint a piece of his own in Strange Boat which described his year busking the streets of Paris in the early 80s, pre-Waterboys, and I guess if you've read that, this interview is at least a bit of a companion piece, even if I didn't quite manage to do this gently understated but fascinating and hugely talented musician the proper justice his wide-ranging work deserves.

A stalwart of the original Waterboys, Anthony Thistlethwaite was Mike Scott’s constant collaborator from The Red & The Black, their pre-Waterboys band, through to the Celtic summer of Room To Roam. Twice-over he’s been Davy Carton and Leo Moran’s staunchest ally in The Saw Doctors, including an almost unbroken fourteen-year run as their bassist, though he’s best known for being the man who Mike Scott describes in his autobiography as ‘The Human Saxophone’. 

With the ‘Docs on temporary hiatus and ‘Anto’ about to re-join The Waterboys for series of shows to follow a seven-disc anthology of the legendary Fisherman’s Blues sessions, he’s a number of exciting projects developing. I phone him at his Irish home to chat about these, and about his solo albums, which he’s made digitally available via Facebook. Knowing him as I do, though, I’m not surprised the first thing he wants to talk about is his unabashed delight at someone else’s good fortune.

“Mick Taylor has been playing with The Rolling Stones recently and I find that very heartening,” he tells me. He’s a huge admirer of their former guitarist. “He played on my solo albums and was very good to me. I always loved the Stones when he was with them. I look on YouTube and see the numbers he’s played on in the last few weeks and it’s great to see him enjoying himself. In his youth he was very demure on stage. These days he seems full of beans, playing very well. I’m delighted for him.”

I’d already planned to ask about their work together. “In 1982 I’d just started playing with Mike, but I thought I’d do some recording on my own in a studio down by Westbourne Grove. The studio engineer said, ‘You know, we had Mick Taylor in here a couple of weeks back’. We found the invoice for Mick’s session… with his address on it. I plucked up courage and knocked on his door, explaining I was recording in the studio that he’d been using and wondered if he’d play guitar for me. I was really chancing my arm. He was very nice but said that he’d have to hear what I was working on. Some kind of quality control, I’d guess! But I went back a few days later with a cassette, played him the track, and he came down and it was brilliant! I went around a few times, took my sax and he’d have a go on it, and we made friends, in a small way. Then he got a call from Dylan’s manager to work on what became Infidels and I didn’t see him for a few years.

“Things may not have worked out as he might have hoped, but he’s always had an amazing talent.  I’d have some tracks for him to play on, and it was like he wouldn’t have to learn the chords… there was one song where he played the whole thing on the first pass and he’d never heard it before, it was just innate.”

Mick’s contribution to Anthony’s solo records includes his 1997 Crawfish & Caviar album, noted as being principally recorded in St Petersburg and Louisiana and being by turn Russian folk and Cajun-tinged. Before encountering Mike Scott, Thistlethwaite had spent a weekend that became a year busking Parisian streets; at the Café Mazet on the Rue St. André des Arts you contacted him by telephoning for ‘Tony-Le-saxo’. But these further-flung recordings were intriguing.

“I’d been on the road with The Saw Doctors for three years and felt like a break. I intended going to Prague and disappearing in some mysterious way, but when I got there it didn’t really fit the bill! So I caught this train that went up through the Ukraine and ended-up in St Petersburg. There I met the bassist from a group called DDT, the Russian equivalent of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, a big band with an intelligent and charismatic vocalist. I was telling him what I’d been doing in the West and he said ‘You’ll have to rehearse with us’. I went down with my sax and mandolin and ended-up travelling around darkest Russia with this bunch of lunatics, visiting places I’d never imagined and flying in aeroplanes with chickens in the cabins! Just what the doctor ordered.”

While in St Petersburg he received contact from Boris Grebenshchikov, “a sort of Russian Bob Dylan who heard I was in town. Apprehensively I arranged to meet him, someone of such stature. He was sitting in his flat and in the middle was a coffee table with a bottle of single malt Scotch and two glasses. ‘Welcome, Anthony. We will drink the whisky. We will talk’. I didn’t normally drink whisky… but we finished the bottle and by then were quite good friends! So I ended up playing with his band Aquarium. It meant I was playing with two of the biggest bands in Russia, so I thought I’d better do some recording. I got the rhythm section from one, some players from the other and went and recorded.” 

If that explained the album’s Russian element, the Louisiana part came from happy coincidences that led Anto into finding a hitherto unknown family branch. Back in ’87 he’d played on ‘Ship Of Fools’, the first World Party record. “There’s a town called Opelousas, near Lafayette in the Cajun country, with a large contingent of Thistlethwaites. Now, ‘Ship Of Fools’ was a hit in the States and one of the Thistlethwaites there saw my name on the sleeve and sent a message. ‘Hello, I live in Louisiana, I’m a musician, and we have the same name’. A couple of years later I was on a US tour with The Waterboys, so he came down and we got talking. He said, ‘Have you heard of this book by Bernard Thistlethwaite?’ That was my grandfather who’d spent years researching the family, wrote a book and gave copies to his relatives. I’ve a copy here. The fact that he had a copy in Opelousas meant that we absolutely were related! Sharon [Shannon] was with The Waterboys at the time and she wrote this instrumental track, which is on her first album, called ‘Anto’s Cajun Cousins’ with a Cajun lilt to it! They seemed to know everybody around the heart of Cajun and Zydeco music, its black music equivalent. They’d known Clifton Chenier, who was a Zydeco accordion player. His wife was their nanny when they were kids. I was really thrilled to meet these people, such as Christine Balfa, from Balfa Toujours.  After my adventure in Russia I had half an album and what I needed to do was to go to Louisiana and make the other half. I spent three months in Opelousas, inviting everyone I could down to the studio and just had a great time, however ridiculous it sounds now!”

Current endeavours are closer to home, with Leo Moran and others of the Irish music scene in The Cabin Collective, who’ve already had their first television appearance, on Ireland’s The Late Late Show, performing their debut single, ‘Lines Are Fading’, again with Leo on an acoustic tour of America in September, and then from late November through December with Mike Scott and Waterboys mainstay Steve Wickham where they’ll not just be playing songs from Fisherman’s Blues, but generally rekindling their three-way magic. 

Talking about The Cabin Collective first – their single is a totally infectious romp – Anto explains: “Outside of Tuam, where Leo lives, there’s this fellow called Larry, and his lady, who live in this Scandinavian log house. He’s had a scene going on there with a recording set-up, and people have made albums in the cabin. Keith Mullins’ band, who supported The Saw Doctors, recorded there. So we were friends with them, and with Noelie McDonald who’d also supported us. They’d been congregating at the cabin and, being less busy than normal this year, I got invited to go down there with Leo and Rickie [O’Neill, Saw Doctors drummer], so we joined forces. Now there’s a band with two drummers, three singer-songwriters, or four if you want to count me, I play sax and a bit of mandolin, and there are nine of us involved. We got a chance to play on national Irish TV before we’d even played a gig!”

That musical comradeship which permeates through Ireland’s West Coast is also reflected in his re-embarking with The Waterboys. He’s played occasionally with Mike Scott since parting company when Scott moved to America in 1990, including a couple of shows with Scott and Wickham last year in Spiddal, home to later Fisherman’s Blues sessions. “We did a charity gig for a dear friend of ours there: Mike, Steve and myself. There was so much demand that we did two shows in one day. We do still have that wonderful chemistry.”

There’s real excitement in the three of them working together again. “We’ve also got Trevor Hutchinson [Fisherman’s Blues bassist] who plays in Lunasa, a great Irish trad band, and I’ll be playing sax and mandolin. The music from that era was very free-flowing. I think Mike wants to capture that spontaneity.” 

Before then comes Anto and Leo’s American road trip. It’s different to the things they’ve done before, a stripped-down adventure, the two of them driving across the States in a hire car. “Leo will be singing songs familiar to Saw Doctors fans; I might sing a few of my songs, maybe a Dylan or something so obscure that I don’t know who wrote it. We’ll have fun. It’s quite refreshing, doing something without relying on pounding drums and 100 decibels. I’ll play mandolin, sax, harmonica, might play guitar… not really sure! It’s an unknown quantity. There’s something wonderfully delicate about playing acoustic music without a rhythm section because every note counts and you can have great effect with some tiny thing. I toured with Donovan once and that was a joy because you could hear everything and everything I did mattered.”

So while on a practical level the current halt to The Saw Doctors activity has left a gap, it’s clear that this versatile and engaging musician has good friends who’ll take him off on tangents, just as his Russian and Louisiana travels did way back when. Here’s to them all.

Anthony Thistlethwaite on Soundcloud

John Oates - Travelling the Mississippi Mile (R2 RnR Magazine, 2011)

This is one of a couple of Daryl Hall & John Oates related pieces that I wrote for RnR magazine a few years back, this one an interview with John Oates around the time of the release of his blues and roots solo album, Mississippi Mile. I spoke to him on the phone to his Colorado home and found him approachable and friendly, and happy to chat Hall & Oates as well as talk about his work away from the duo. 

I've liked his records with Hall ever since first hearing them around the time of Private Eyes and 'I Can't Go For That' and owned most of their catalogue on vinyl back in the day, bar their debut Whole Oats LP, which to this day I've still never heard. For such a major act, their catalogue has been rather neglected over the years with much of their 70s output having limited availability in recent times - my current, less extensive than when I owned the vinyl back in the 1980s, collection, is I suspect a typical hodge-podge: Private Eyes, H20, Voices and Abandoned Luncheonette I have as jewel-case CDs, my copy of Along The Red Ledge, probably my favourite record of theirs, is a Japanese pressing that I acquired from Tower Records in Piccadilly (sigh) in the early 90s, and I found a cardboard sleeve copy of X-Static in a local record shop a while ago, broken down from a vanilla-release replica sleeves set I suspect. Ooh Yeah! which I have a soft spot for, I've owned since its original release. Others in the catalogue seem elusive to find in any format. Must be a catalogue ripe for reappraisal and reissue, surely. 

The chance to interview John Oates was too good to miss, one of those opportunities that keep me wanting to write about music - the chance to chat with someone whose work I've enjoyed. Here it is:

There’s a moment on the Daryl Hall and John Oates album Voices where they declare themselves ‘still hung up on the Duke of Earl’. It reflects of one of the wide range of influences displayed in their brand of Philly-soul-pop. I’m dialing in to Colorado to talk to John Oates and chew over some other influences, to discuss his own particular reference points and how he’s revisited them in the gritty, rootsy, Americana of his latest solo album, Mississippi Mile. It’s his own interpretation of classic songs that he’s loved, a couple of new entries into his own canon, and one glance backwards at a Hall and Oates classic.

He looks at the songs he chose for this project as being “everything that mattered to me as a musician before I met Daryl and we started working together. This was the stuff that turned me on to music and gave me the dream of pursuing a career in music. It’s the artists, the songs, the style; from folk-blues to r’n’b and rock‘n’roll. There were many other influences, but I had to be realistic and touch on those that meant the most.” 

The resulting album was released mid-2011 in the US; a full UK and European distribution is set for January 2012. It’s a captivating wander through his musical starting points and Oates is an enthusiastic and friendly interviewee who seems to genuinely relish talking about his long career. I ask him about the way this project evolved and how he approached re-imagining songs that clearly meant a lot to him. “It’s a very delicate balance to treat a classic song in a way where you honour the original but at the same time try and make it your own” he concedes. “The key to the album was the song ‘All Shook Up’. I was sitting in my home studio, playing the guitar in this sort of delta blues riff and for some reason, I have no idea why,  began to sing ‘All Shook Up’ over it, imposing the original melody and words over this minor-key thing. I loved it. Elvis was an icon and an inspiration to me.”

Oates then began to consider others in his list of favourite ‘old’ songs. “Maybe I could do [the same] to others. I began to look at Chuck Berry and at Curtis Mayfield, Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson, these important artists. Their songs had become my personal repertoire over, and I hate to say it [laughs], the last fifty years. If I’m with a group of people, just jamming or picking, I play these songs. ‘Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor’, or ‘It’s All Right’ by Curtis Mayfield, or a Chuck Berry song. I discovered that I could re-imagine them without, in my personal opinion, messing with the original.”

I enjoy the way he approaches this. “I had to define what a song is. A song is lyrics and melody. I think the chord changes and the arrangement are up for grabs, the approach, the attitude, the energy. They don’t constitute the song, the song is the lyrics and the melody and in that regard I kept those things pretty much intact. It was the chord changes, the feel and the groove that I messed with.”

Many years ago Daryl and John contributed a cover of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ to the classic NME mix-album The Last Temptation Of Elvis. I remind him of this and recall how my own ‘indie-kid’ friends were blown away with, to them, the compilation’s unexpected highlight. “We have a great respect for other songwriters and that translates into our ability to interpret. You want to interpret something so that you’re comfortable you’ve made your mark on it, but honouring the original is very important.”

I’m interested in the part these songs played in his own development as a musician, though he concedes that his first single, ‘I Need Your Love’, recorded in 1966, was more representative of what was happening in Philadelphia back then, a Philadelphia r’n’b that he was a part of. “But I made a joke today that back then I had two distinct musical personalities. I would be wearing a denim work shirt and singing in a coffee house, doing traditional Appalachian ballads and delta blues and the next night I’d be wearing a Sharkskin suit and playing r’n’b with a band. To this day I’m doing exactly the same thing! I’ll play with Daryl and we do our version of r’n’b pop and the next night I’ll be playing with [Mississippi Mile collaborators] Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas in some little place in Nashville. Nothing’s really changed!”

Recognising that duality in his work I wonder whether, despite often being quoted as the most successful duo in pop history, he sees Daryl Hall and John Oates as a duo or as a band, since over the years they’ve gathered around them a recurring set of collaborators who seem to give them a ‘band’ ethos. “We’ve always been a band,” he considers. “We perceive ourselves as being two individuals working together. Our company is called ‘Two-Headed Monster’ because that is exactly what we are not. We always recognised ourselves as individuals with the freedom to do our own thing. That’s the premise of our relationship and probably the reason we were able to stay together. But I agree with you, Ian, the co-writers, Sara Allen, Janna Allen, were very important, and the sound of the band in the ‘80s, T-Bone [Wolk], G. E. Smith, Mickey Curry and Charlie [De Chant] defined those pop songs... and vice-versa. Those songs were a vehicle for the band to do what it did.”

I’m also delighted to find him in agreement when I mention my contribution to R2’s ‘It Started With A Disc’ feature, a write-up of my enthusiasm for their 1978 LP Along The Red Ledge. “It’s one of my favourites as well.” It leads me to ask how he now perceives the body of work that he and Daryl have established, since their catalogue together is diverse in tone and texture from the folk of their initial recordings, the progressive War Babies with Todd Rundgren at the helm, and their most commercially successful years with Private Eyes and H2O. Which albums does he think really nailed their vision?

“I’ve thought about this a lot; there are very specific albums that represent an important change or moment. The first is Abandoned Luncheonette; the next would be Along The Red Ledge, the next Voices because that was when we started producing ourselves. Then I’d say Big Bam Boom because it’s so experimental and is our transition from the analogue to digital world. That’s it, right there. Those set the course for the rest of our lives.”  

Returning to his latest work I ask him how he chose the one Hall and Oates cover included, ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’. “It’s the album’s oddball song. We recorded the album in a very old school style. All the band members were sitting in a circle looking at each other. Eighty percent of the vocals are what I sang while we were cutting the tracks. There was one guitar solo that we didn’t like and replaced with a harmonica but other than that there are no real overdubs. What happened, it was one of those happy accidents. Between takes I’d been fooling around with this kind of Texas swing feel and I sang ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’ and everyone laughed and said, ‘That’s cool’, so we just cut it and everyone loved it. It’s a bit of an aberration, though now I come to think of it, it is a song of my youth!”

What John Oates achieved, in his youth and across his very full career is now being repaid in respect from younger musicians so perhaps in that sense he’s come full circle in reflecting his own loves. “Believe it or not, it’s now one of my more fertile musical periods. The success of Hall and Oates has given me the freedom to do other things, and I love it. 

“A lot of younger artists feel like they took inspiration from what we accomplished, and they reach out to me. Sometimes they think it’s going to be this nostalgic thing and yet I come bringing a completely different energy. I’ve been playing with jam bands and I’ve been playing with lots of great bluegrass musicians and this is all part of my background that few people know about. They think I was born with a moustache and playing ‘Maneater’ but I had an entire musical life before that!“

Sonic Assassins - Print Edition

The print edition of Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins is now live for ordering! Amazon US have it immediately available... Amazon UK are taking orders but awaiting the print files from Createspace, which can take up to five days, so should be fulfilling orders by the weekending 21st January. I had a quick look at some Amazon Europe sites and they are either taking orders for imminent fulfilment, or are ready to go with orders.

Links:

Amazon US Print Edition

Amazon US Kindle Edition

Amazon UK Print Edition

Amazon UK Kindle Edition



Sonic Assassins - Digital Publication Day!

It’s digital publication day for Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins! (Why do I choose 23rd November… just like I did for Festivalized last year? Hmm… let me think… answers in the comments section please). The book is now circa 150,000 words, revised top-to-bottom, updated to 2016’s excellent The Machine Stops album and has new interviews and research. 

Q: OK, so where’s the physical edition?

A: Coming, honest! The thing is, this update has been on the cards and being picked at for a long time, and without a mainstream publisher handling it, there’s never been a deadline to get it finished, and writers will tell you, nothing concentrates our minds like a deadline. So, to give myself a deadline I decided to do the eBook version first, since I could pre-list with Amazon and Smashwords and create myself a deadline to finish by. Next, I’ll turn my attention to the paperback edition.

Q: I’m a reviewer / blogger /podcaster / radio host and would like to chat about the book or receive a promo copy. How do I contact you?

A: I want to hear from you! Email me through my Profile page here, tweet me at Abrahams_Ian, or contact me on my FB:

www.facebook.com/ianabrahams.musicjournalist/

Q: What’s new?

A: There’s a lot of stuff through the text which is new. Since the book originally appeared in 2004 I’ve had the chance to interview various people who could add their bits and pieces to the story, such as Mick Farren, who I talked to for Festivalized about eighteen months before he died, and who told me, among other things, about writing ‘Lost Johnny’ with Lemmy for Hall of the Mountain Grill, or Dave Robinson (of Stiff Records fame) who worked at the legendary Roundhouse gig in 1972 where ‘Silver Machine’ was culled as a single from. There’s little bits from Crisipian Mills of Kula Shaker, and Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson from interviews for other things where I tacked-on a Hawkwind question at the end. I got to chat to Jerry Richards, absent from the original book, and, as part of updating the story, to Mr Dibs, Niall Hone, and Matthew Wright. And I was able to chat through different elements of the original book with Dave Brock and gain additional insights and reflections from him, as well as talking about the wonderful legacy of his band.

Q: Does the digital version contain pictures?

A: Indeed it does! Many of the illustrations from the original edition – though not all – are contained within the text of the eBook. And there are new photographs both archive and up-to-date. Had a big internal debate as to what to do, whether to go for text only, include a photographic section at the end of the book, or to scatter them through the text and, as with Festivalized last year, I’ve gone for spreading them across the story. Huge thanks to everyone who helped with this… and I couldn’t resist the caption for P!KN!K’s great shot of the band on-stage at Crystal Palace in 1985…

Great 'Peace' Sign!

Your Author, with the writer of 'Shot Down In The Night'!!!

Steve Swindells (L), Ian Abrahams(R)

Q: What’s happened to the ‘Tracks and References’ appendices from the original?

A: Didn’t do the same thing this time around but subsumed most of the information  into the main text. Someone on Amazon wrote that the original didn’t seem to comment much on the lyrics, but that was largely in the appendices, so this time it’s part of the narrative instead. But those appendices were fun and frustrating to do, very much influenced by the TV programme guides of the 80s/90s by my friends Keith Topping, Martin Day, and Paul Cornell, so I’m tweaking them and blogging them and will get around to the albums released since 2004 as part of that.

www.sonicassassins-book.blogspot.co.uk

Q: Typos! They get everywhere…

A: There will be a digital reload, with an erratum listing any corrections made. Thing is, no matter how much you proof and re-proof, they slip through. I mention a gig in Swindon a couple of months after the events of 9/11 and describe the gig as being in November 2011… I meant 2001 of course! 

Q: Favourite Hawkwind album?

A: Just like Matthew Wright in the book, it’s probably Astounding Sounds or Quark Strangeness & Charm. But it could be Live Seventy-Nine (because that’s when I first properly heard the band, travelling with my cousin to gigs at St Austell Cornwall Coliseum) or Electric Tepee, or Hall of the Mountain Grill. Depends on the day!

Q: Are you going to shut-up about Hawkwind now this is done?

A: Nope. Sorry!

Amazon UK Link

Amazon US Link

Smashwords Link

Festivalized – Digital Publication Day!

Today is the digital publication day for Festivalized: Music, Politics, And Alternative Culture. The print edition will be available in the next few weeks. For the moment though you can get it for your e-reader via Amazon, Smashwords, iTunes and other retailers that are serviced via Smashwords. Some links here:

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Smashwords

If you are a reviewer / blogger who wants to cover his book we’d love to hear from you – drop me an email from my profile page and I’ll organise a download code or PDF for you.

Strange Boat Price Drop!

Looking forward to The Waterboys at Glastonbury? Price drop on the Amazon Kindle edition of 'Strange Boat - Mike Scott & The Waterboys' for the rest of June. Read it at Glasters - or anywhere else for that matter - for 1.99! Then I'll afford a hair cut!

Strange Boat Reviews

There are a few reviews starting to appear for the new edition of Strange Boat – Mike Scott & The Waterboys (Gonzo Multimedia paperback / Lumoni Press E-book).

Goodreads Website has a terrific review from musician and author Stephen Palmer that’s associated with the original SAF edition but is a commentary on the new edition. “In summary: a particularly well assembled biography of a fascinating musician. No fan of Mike Scott or the Waterboys, of ‘eighties music, or of the many strands of Celtic music will want to miss this entertaining book. Definitely recommended.”

Strange Boat Goodreads Review Link

The Rocker website doesn’t much care for Mike Scott or his music I’m afraid, but still thinks that Strange Boat is “still a good read… it filled an otherwise dull Monday afternoon quite comfortably.” You’ll need to scroll down to their 16th October entries to read this review.

The Rocker Review Link

At Get Ready To Rock website Jason Ritchie thinks Strange Boat “a comprehensive overview” and notes that Mike Scott comes across “a thoroughly nice person,” which I’m not quite sure chimes totally with his single-minded nature myself, but does conclude that “interviews with the man himself would have really provided a deeper insight into the lyrics and ways of creating music.” Which, of course, I can’t disagree with.

Get Ready To Rock Review Link