Jimmy Webb Interview in the Shropshire Star on 10 April 2015

Man behind the hits is taking to the stage

At the age of 68, Jimmy Webb is looking forward to a relaxed evening at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn on Sunday, as he told us over the phone from New York.

As the writer of some of the music’s most enduring songs of the past 50 years, Webb will be immortalised in tunes such as Wichita Lineman, Galveston and By The Time I get To Phoenix, all of which were hits for Glen Campbell.

So, by the time Webb gets to Shrewsbury, what can the audience expect?

“I don’t do stand up, but I do a lot of sit down.

“I’ve found my experience of making my living as a songwriter, as opposed to being a Sherpa or an astronaut, to be an uplifting, sometimes hysterically funny experience, and I try to get that across to the audience.

“It has its moments of pure nostalgia, because there are people there who fell in love to some of these songs, and you can see them hugging and kissing each other. It’s a tender moment for a lot of people, quite anecdotal and it goes on a journey,” he said.

Webb also penned the sprawling epic that is MacArthur Park, a Top 10 hit for Donna Summer in 1978, but originally written for the actor and producer Richard Harris.

It might not come as any surprise that Webb got to know the Irishman over a drink or two when the pair worked on a stage production in Hollywood.

“The first encounters I had with him were in bars. We would go out after rehearsal and start drinking
black velvets, with Jameson [whiskey] chasers, and that’s the first really heavy drinking I ever did in my
life,” Webb admitted, adding that their booze-fuelled evenings often ended in traditional Irish fashion.

"We would invariably end up singing a bunch of old Irish songs. I learned a ton of them, and somewhere one night, I said. ‘You know, Richard, we ought to make a record.’

“About two weeks later, I got a telegram from London that said, ‘Dear Jimmy Webb, come to London with record, love Richard,’ and I found myself up to my neck in this project. I had to come up with some songs for him, I was young and open to suggestion, and Richard, he was my leader there for a while, my big brother,” Webb recalls.

“MacArthur Park” reached No. 4 in the British charts in 1968 and is one of those songs that divides opinion, as Webb explained.

“Some people have, I’ll be frank with you, taken an enormous dislike to it and have issued threats against my body, I’ve had to argue with people for years about it.

“They come up to me after my shows and say, ‘What does the line, ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’ mean?’ and I say, ‘I’m not going to tell you – If I told you I’d have to kill you,’” he explained with a
laugh, before revealing a literary source.

“W. H. Auden said, ‘When I look in the mirror, my face looks like a cake out in the rain.’

“I read that in college and thought that it was quite a metaphor, given that it appears in a completely different context, and it’s an obvious image, a cake left out in the rain is a pretty pathetic sight.

“The carelessness or the abandonment of leaving a cake out in the rain almost doesn’t need to be explained, so the song is, to a great extent, an epic protest against a love affair that’s melting,” he said.

Jimmy Webb is at Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury on Sunday. See www.theatresevern.co.uk for details.

Rick Wakeman Interview in the Shropshire Star 27-03-2015

Yes man Rick back for more

As befits a former Grumpy Old Man, it didn’t take long for Rick Wakeman to get into Victor Meldrew mode about his drive home the previous evening.

“I was in Buxton last night, and they very kindly decided to do three and a half ton of roadworks on the A14, so I came via Glasgow, I think,” the otherwise very affable 65-year-old said over the phone from his office in Norfolk.

Wakeman’s qualification for a senior citizen’s bus pass last May is reflected in the title of his latest show, featuring his unique combination of music and humour, which rolls up at Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn this evening. So what can the audience expect to see?

“Over the years, people have said ‘I hope you play that, you should play that,’ and so I decided it would be a really good idea to stick them all together.

“It works pretty well. You try very much to put a set together that you think flows and makes sense and sends people home with a smile on their face, and that’s what I try to do,” he said.

Whether it’s Grumpy Old Men, Watchdog or a BBC4 documentary, Wakeman is an engaging presence on TV and his latest show draws on those skills to supplement his musical pieces.

The former keyboard player for 1970s prog-rock band Yes is aware of the need to maintain a feeling of spontaneity for every show.

“I want every night to be like an opening night, where I’m not quite sure myself what’s going to happen, ‘cause the great advantage of being on your own is that if I want to change a few pieces around, I can do,” he explained.

As the author of two books recounting life on and off the road, Wakeman is not short of a story or three, though it took a little coaxing from his publisher to convince him of this.

“Random House said, ‘Will you write a couple of books,’ and I said, ‘I can’t have enough stories to write a book.’ The editor took me out for lunch and said, ‘Look, I’ve got a pad here, every time you think of a story, I’m going to write it down.’ By the time we had had coffee, he said ‘I’ve got nearly 80 stories here.’ and that’s how the books started,” he said.

Wakeman will be back on TV this year with a couple of very different music documentaries.

“I’m doing the history of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. We’ve already done 10 days filming out in Venice. That’s great fun, I’m really enjoying that, for a series called Perspectives, which comes out on ITV in April. The BBC one is The History of the Tour Bus, which will be great fun. I’m not sure when that’s coming out, we start filming that in about two weeks’ time. It should be hilarious. It’s not so much about my tales, more tales from other people and roadies who rode on the original tour buses. I’m looking forward to doing that very much, it should be a lot of fun,” he said.

As for other projects, Wakeman is certainly in no mood to hang up his trademark flowing cape just yet.

“I’m going to be working on a project with Alfie Boe, who’s a dear friend of mine, and next year the
plan is to take some Journey [To The Centre Of The Earth] shows abroad and, hopefully, put the [Myths
and Legends of] King Arthur [and the Knights of the Round Table] show back on ice again.

“I thought when I became a pensioner, things would slow down, but they’ve got absolutely worse. I’ve got my diary in front of me and my next day off is August 11th, which doesn’t please the missus very much, but there you go,” he said.

Yet Another Evening With Rick Wakeman: The Music and Anecdotal Wit of an Old Age Pensioner features at Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, tonight. See www.theatresevern.co.uk for details.

By Stephen Taylor

Julian Cope Interview in Shropshire Star 23-01-2015

Sauce of inspiration - Cope falls off wagon

After more than two decades without alcohol, most folk would be mortified if they fell off the wagon. But for Julian Cope, it tapped into a fresh source of inspiration.

“I was teetotal for 21 years, but I did research in Armenia and the villagers put on this big spread for me. They insisted that I drink mulberry vodka [oghi], because it was their way of saying thank you, so I got absolutely sloshed and, since then I’ve become a drinker again, so I’m writing a series of drinking songs.”

The former frontman of The Teardrop Explodes is in good form ahead of his forthcoming solo tour of the UK, which reaches Birmingham’s Glee Club on Sunday.

And among these songs for boozers is one that harks back to the days when Cope made up one third (along with Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCullough and Pete Wylie) of possibly the most legendary Liverpool band never to record anything or even appear in public – The Crucial Three.

“My old mate Pete Wylie wrote a song called ‘Heart As Big As Liverpool,’ [so] I’ve written an answer song called ‘Liver Big As Hartlepool,’ and it’s a namecheck of Northern towns,” Cope explained with a laugh.

When Cope moved from Tamworth to Liverpool in the late 1970s, it marked the beginning of a career that has seen the 57-year-old go from Top Of The Pops in the early 1980s to a solo career over the past 30 years that has seen him gain a reputation as one of rock’s more eccentric characters, while at the same time producing epic tunes that are often as catchy as they are esoteric.

Cope’s new album, Trip Advizer, released earlier this month, is a compilation of tunes from the past decade and a half. Described, with typical Cope modesty, as “an anthology of 16 visionary songs,” it is a collection taken from his last seven albums, with a couple of non-album tracks thrown in for good measure, Cope explained how he made the final cut.

“By being thematic, making it true to myself as an artist and making it very songlike, so I was quite careful to pick stuff that I believed would bear repeated listening,” he said.

As if Cope’s prolific musical output hasn’t taken up enough his time, his writing career has moved from a two-volume autobiography through studies of 1970s German Krautrock and the post-war Japanese music scene to highly acclaimed studies of ancient Europe in The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European.

Cope’s latest book, One Three One, is his first foray into the world of fiction, though Cope admits it is based on his own experience.

“I’ve reported so many weird situations throughout my life, and weird conversations that I’ve overheard so I thought, ‘I’ve just got to tell this story,’ he said.

These days, Cope’s appearance is striking. Yet his leather gear, motorcycle boots and military headgear are more than an image. “I came out of punk, and the reason that punk took hold of my brain is because it was an opportunity to be the living embodiment of what we’ve been fighting for since we beheaded the king in 1649. And to be the embodiment of freedom, you’ve got to look like a crazy person.”

By Stephen Taylor