HUGH CORNWELL - INTERVIEWS

Hugh on hi fi

Tony Kinson - When I interviewed you in 1998, you said that your next album would be ”more radical, more extreme in the production” and “very psychedelic”. Do you think you achieved this with hi fi?

Hugh Cornwell - The production is in the hands of Laurie so I had a long talk with him and I planted certain ideas in his head about more extreme mixes. Normally with today’s production you have a stereo image of a drum kit – the bass drum is in the middle, the toms are on the left and the hi-hats slightly to the right and its become very standardized. It’s thought that’s the way people want to hear their music – as if you are sitting in front of a drum kit and that’s how you hear it. It doesn’t mean that it has to be presented that way on a record. A record is not a live performance and I go back to things like Love’s Forever Changes. On some tracks the drum kits to one side with all the guitars on the other, and that’s radical production.

Similar to the production on Leave Me Alone?

Yes, we did it on that track, and I like those sort of things. It can instill a new dimension to the music you’re trying to get across. Laurie’s treatment of Leave Me Alone was a classic example of this more radical production technique. It was his idea to close it down and open it up again, then close it down, as he said it went with the idea of the song – of leaving someone alone and so he showed me that he was totally in tune with what I suggested. That’s what’s so good about our relationship working together. We can sit and talk about things and he’ll go away and really think about them and come up with practical ways of manifesting ideas.

A few people on the net have suggested that Leave Me Alone is about the same topic as Putting You In The Shade – but I understand that Leave Me Alone is actually about a completely different topic?

Leave Me Alone came about after I’d been out drinking in Soho one evening. I’d actually left the place where I’d been drinking because of someone who was an overenthusiastic fan who wouldn’t stop talking, talking, talking and it really upset my evening. They weren’t being insulting or threatening or anything, they were just in my face the whole time. They were very thick-skinned and couldn’t see that I was just trying to have a night out with friends. I ended up leaving and as soon as I got home I wrote those lyrics.

People got the theme of Putting You In The Shade…

I don’t understand what you are trying to say about that song.

That it’s about your relationship with The Stranglers.

Putting You In The Shade was written after I’d split up from a relationship.

So we’ve all got that one wrong then!

People are always getting this wrong, but I love people putting those twists on things, because maybe subconsciously that’s a possibility. Whereas with Long Dead Train, I knew that when I was writing it, it was pointedly written with that in mind. Putting You In The Shade was another spin on a failed, finished relationship.

When you’ve performed One Day At A Time live, you’ve described it as a “protest song”. Are you protesting about anything in particular?

When I say protest, I mean protesting about certain situations you see in the world and just hopefully trying to be positive and suggesting ways in which situations can be improved. And there’s lots of references to things in that song that I don’t agree with, that I see, and the last verse is very much suggesting a way forward.

Do you think there are not enough protest songs these days, with song lyrics just dealing in escapism?

Absolutely. Pure escapism, nobody seems to be dealing with issues anymore. I suppose the Manic Street Preachers have tried to – they are the only ones I can really think of.

I understand that Dark Side Of The Room was inspired by seeing a friend’s band live, and mishearing the title of a song they were playing?

I thought that Dark Side Of The Room was the name of the song and if it wasn’t, that it would make a damn good title for a song. So I collared him afterwards, and asked, and he said it wasn’t, so I said great, I can use that as a title for a song.

It’s a song that comes across really well live.

It took a lot of work to get that arranged properly and it was one of the last songs we did when we were doing backing tracks, and it was a very new song. I wasn’t sure if I had enough time to get the arrangement right, and Laurie really liked it, so we tried it different ways and it took about 3 days to nail it. Laurie was very enthusiastic about it and we ended up coming up with the arrangement that worked and I was very happy with it. I really thought it was going to be the one that got away.

We got to hear a lot of the songs live before the album came out, but this was one out of the blue, that hadn’t been previewed at your gigs.

It was brand new.

It was good getting to hear lots of new songs like All The Colours Of The Rainbow, The Big Sleep etc live before they were recorded.

And I’m going to do the same now. I’m going to start previewing the next albums songs in my solo gigs. Hear tomorrow’s hits today!

From the feedback I’ve received via the website, Lay Back On Me Pal seems to be most people’s favourite hi fi track. It’s got a lovely Beatles feel to the song.

Really? It’s a very good tune. Nice descending bass line.

I Know A Gingerbread Girl

Gingerbread Girl was the biggest surprise on the album. This changed a lot from the live version.

It’s going to be even more of a surprise when people hear the remixed version.

What’s the story behind the transformation of the album version of Gingerbread Girl? Did it originally have a band feel to it?

Yes. When we were doing the backing tracks, Gingerbread Girl was the first one we did. It sounded like Buddy Holly & The Crickets. It had a very hard snare drum sound, and it was kind of like a surf song. We were quite happy with the way it went down. So we went through the rest of the backing tracks, and by the end of it Laurie took me aside and said that Gingerbread Girl’s not working for him, there’s too much music going on, it was rushing through all the musical changes too quickly, he thought we’ve got to slow it down, to give the musical changes room to breathe. I said fine, what are you thinking of, and he said I’m hearing something like Penny Lane meets Scott Walker. So I thought I’m getting that, what about strings? I wrote the string parts for it, and marshalled in Sumyungstrings from the Royal Academy of Music, and that’s how it happened.

Have the Black Dog team finished the Gingerbread Girl mixes?

They’ve just finished. The main mix that David & I went for big-time has got a reggae feel– it’s like The Harder They Come by Jimmy Cliff. It sounds fantastic. They’ve also done another couple of approaches and I think the idea is that the reggae / ska version will be added to the album in America and Germany. And if it’s released as a single it will come out as an EP with the other versions, which are completely different approaches.

I understand you’ve added some additional guitar to some of their mixes of your song…

For some of the different versions, yes.

Do you think this collaboration will lead to you working with Black Dog in the future?

The original connection was that they approached me and said they wanted to work with me, and so the Gingerbread Girl mixes came up as something that needed to be done, so we said why don’t you start with that. Now we’ve met, and worked together, I’d be quite happy to do stuff together in the future. And it’ll be something more along the lines of Nosferatu or a Sons of Shiva vibe, rather than straighter stuff.

Arthur Lying Down Dreaming A Dream

I know you’ve been a fan of Arthur Lee & Love for many years – can you explain the background to The Prison’s Going Down….

Arthur Lee was the lead singer, songwriter and guitarist with a band called Love, who were formed in Los Angeles in the early 60’s. He was, I guess, a half-caste, and they were a multi-racial band. This came across in the music – a lot of Spanish guitar, and a lot of lyrical, melodic acoustics. And the songs – although they wrote 3 minute songs most of the time, their approaches were very radical, and that’s what I liked about them. They used to change keys, they used to change major to minor, they used the chord that Burnel used to hate, which is Major 7th , all the time, but they used it in a bitter & twisted way. For people who dislike pop music, who have given up on it because it’s too lightweight, they should check out the music of Love.

Their approach pushed the barriers, and I tried to do this when I was in The Stranglers, trying to see what we could get away with, and Love got away with a lot, and so I champion them.

They had a big fanbase in the US, but they didn’t reach major status anywhere else. Part of this was because they were signed to Electra records, and Arthur, being a very altruistic kind of guy, he saw The Doors play in Los Angeles, and they were unsigned, and so he got his record company to come down and see them. They saw The Doors and thought, these guys are more commercial than Love, fuck Love. So they neglected Love’s career and concentrated on The Doors, who became hugely successful all over the world. So poor old Arthur, who thought he was doing them a favour, did himself no good at all.

I’ve also heard a story that he was one of the first people to recognize Hendrix’s talent, and gave him a gig at a festival that Love were headlining on the West Coast. Its funny because if you look at when Hendrix started making it big here, he started wearing all those old military uniforms, and that’s something that Arthur used to do. It’s as if Hendrix copped his whole look from Arthur’s wardrobe. So that’s another case of someone taking their ideas or making use of their connections. I think Love were hugely influential and that’s why I try to turn people onto them. I’ve had a couple of very positive reactions to that – I’ve had people come up to me and say “I’ve just been listening to all the Love albums through your influence, and they’re fantastic”.

I think these days music doesn’t matter whether it was recorded in the 60’s or 70’s, or now, because in the world of CD’s everything is the same age. In fact they’ve just remastered the Love album Forever Changes, with unreleased tracks, and it’s finding a whole new market.

I recently read on a website some Love fans reactions to the re-mastered Forever Changes, and the comments were that hearing with such clarity made it feel like listening to a fresh, new album.

Exactly. So Prisons Going Down is about Arthur, who is now in prison, and I thought it was time that someone wrote a song about him.

Wasn’t he sent down on a firearms charge under the “three strikes” rule?

Yes, he had a couple of misdemeanors. The reason for this attitude on the West Coast is to keep the rapists and murderers in jail. So he’s fallen foul of something which wasn’t supposed to catch him in the net. He’s got a long sentence, I’m not sure how long.

I think it’s 8 years…

That’s terrible. Well I hope my small efforts will highlight his case, maybe to some people who wouldn’t have known about him.

The phrase “the prison’s going down”, isn’t that to do with the phone calls?

Arthur would be on the telephone and a voice would come over the tannoy “ok, the line’s are going down in two minutes” and he’d say to whoever he was having the phone call with “the prison’s going down”.

I Am The Knot That Slips From It's Loop

You recorded the Sons of Shiva album with Sex W Johnson in 1998 – following on from the collaboration with Sex & Barry Flanaghan on Mantra Of The Awoken Powers. How did the album come together – did you already have some of the music written or was it all in response to Sex’s poems?

Barry Flanaghan came to our gig in Dublin and we actually performed Mantra Of The Awoken Powers on stage, a live version to a packed house, and Sex came to that gig as well. Afterwards we were hanging out somewhere in Dublin and I said to Sex that I really enjoyed doing that, and why don’t we do an album together. He said he’d love to, but how would we do it. I said just send me some of your poems. He sent me 30 or 40 of his poems, and I went into my studio and just messed around with my computer, and wrote stuff on my keyboards. I wrote a piece and put it on loop so it kept going, and read the poems until I found one that fitted the piece of music. And then I did the same again and again, and when I’d got about 3 I rang him up and said come over (he lives in Ireland) so he came over, and I hadn’t told him which poems I’d picked and played him the music. We got him to recite the poetry, and then Chris (Goulstone) and I polished up the tracks and put it all together with my guitars.

I understand that Sex W Johnson was a fan of Nosferatu, and this inspired him when he was younger?

Yes, he told me that the reason he started writing poetry was because he heard Nosferatu’s Irate Caterpillar..

It’s almost like you recorded 2 psychedelic albums after Guilty, with hi fi being the song based, commercial album, and Sons of Shiva exploring the darker, artier side.

Part of the reason I wanted to do that with Sex was because I’d just done Guilty, and I wanted to see what could be done so it was like Shiva was an experiment, a step towards hi fi. I was very pleased with the possibilities, but its a much more radical album than hi fi, as you say.

Some people have commented that the album is almost a Nosferatu for the late 90’s? (ie quite left-field)

Yes. That’s exactly how I see it. I think we should clear up the fact that Nuala Llewnroc is me! It’s almost my name spelt backwards. Alan’s my middle name and Alan backwards does not exist, but Nula is a girls name, and Nuala Llewnroc sounds like a Welsh name, so it’s a pseudonym folks!

Solo

The Solo & Mayday live albums have been well received – I understand that you’ve recently finished mixing Solo 2…

Yes, that was recorded at Leicester Guildhall just before I went to America about a year ago. It’s much better quality than the first one and its got different songs.

Any chance of a live album with the current line-up of Sumyunguise – it’d be great to have your version of Walk On By released along with the extended, almost freeform version of Torture Garden

We will record another one. I’ve got another live gig in the can but its with Michelle & Justin as the rhythm section. So that’s sitting there waiting for something to be done with it but Johnny & Midus seem to be well involved, so we will record something, maybe on this tour in June.


Mike Polson	Midus	John Miller
Sumyunguise at Chiddingfold October 2000 - photos © Simon Crosby

Lava

Do you plan to release an album of previously unreleased tracks via the website?

Absolutely, there’s a whole album’s worth of stuff, such as Lady In Mind, the set of songs that Everybody came from, So Sexual, I Can’t Handle It. They are all sitting there finished, and I want to put those together, and probably call the album Lava. That was a very crazy period for me, trying to find a direction. So that’s all sitting there waiting.

Covers

Over the years you’ve performed quite a few covers of your favourite songs, do you think you would ever record a whole album of cover versions at some point?

I’d love to do a Pin-Ups type album, but there is a time to do that. If I’ve got a fanbase of ¼ of a million, then yes, but it’s not worth doing at the moment. I’ve got too many albums to do of my own material

It must be more exciting to work on your own material.

Exactly. But the reason people often do cover version albums is contractual – they’ve got to get a last album to the record company, so they record cover versions. Its good fun to do though, I’d love to do it. It could be quite an eclectic mix – I’d love to do EO11, Cold Turkey & Spanish Castle Magic. I want to do Sounds Of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel. I almost did that with the Guilty line-up, but didn’t have time. Some of my favourite songs, songs that people aren’t necessarily aware of. It’s all down to how a song is performed. Its rather like with Gingerbread Girl – we had two versions and it depends on how the song is recorded. It’s the same with doing cover versions – you slow down or speed up songs, and people might suddenly like a song they didn’t like before. I think it’s important that people realize that a song can be recorded in many different ways, and this can influence whether you like a song or not.

Whatever Happened To?

Talking of cover versions, you recorded (but have not released) a version of No More Heroes for the BBC Mirrorball TV show late last year. What was it like revisiting that song after all these years – and with you playing all the music (apart from the drums)?

I played all the music, and we got Dylan Howe in from The Blockheads to play drums. The first thing I realized was how fast the bloody thing was! He kept me up there, he kept a solid pace all the way through. And I re-dubbed my guitars up to speed over his drum track. It’s a very good song, its one of the classic Stranglers song and it stands up very well playing it again. It didn’t sound dated. Its very difficult to get songs that don’t sound dated over a period of time.

You Can, Live It & Breathe It

If I received a £ for every e-mail I’ve received asking “when will Hugh release Live It & Breathe It” I’d be a rich webmaster! It’s still part of the live set, so presumably it’s going to be released at some point?

I’d love to release it. The story is that it was recorded with Michelle & Justin, and Laurie & I finished it off. I was happy with it, but Laurie thought we could do a better job, and Michelle & Justin left, so its still there to be re-recorded. It was going down so well live that I didn’t see any point in dropping it from the set, and its great because the only place you can hear it is when its played live.

I remember there was talk of including a large section of New York street noise in the song…

We did that, and it all got put together. I was blown away with it, I loved it. We’ve still got that soundscape of sirens and street sounds, so we could put that on any version of that song.

Hugh on Napster

Quite a few people, via the website, wanted to know what was your view on Napster? Before the interview, you went onto Napster with me, and we saw a lot of live recordings from gigs, lots of radio sessions as well as currently unavailable b sides. But there were also people making available the WHOLE of still available recordings such as the whole of hi fi, Guilty, Sons Of Shiva…

If I was selling millions and millions of records in shops and I was very wealthy, I’d be happy to give everything away. But I’m not, and I’m trying to make a living and so I cannot condone the posting of music that I spent money making, being given away for free. I loved hearing some of the stuff you played me that’s available – stuff that’s rare, such as the live version of Live It & Breathe It from a gig, which I’ve never heard. So that’s great, but when I see that my new album has been posted, and everyone can get that for free, if that carries on I’m going to go out of business. I don’t get a grant from the Government, I don’t have a benefactor.

Napster is good in some ways, but if maybe just one track was posted from a commercial record, as a taster, because I know a lot of people who go to Napster are real fans who want the original artwork, want the real article, and are not happy having something that’s downloaded. But then there are other people who are getting it for free, they are not giving me anything, and there has to be some sort of royalty paid or I’ll have to become a cab driver.

hi fi Europe & US

hi fi has been out in the UK since October, is the European & US release of the album imminent?

Some European dates will coincide with the German release in April. And America will come about a month later. When it comes out in America you need about 6-8 weeks to ship it around the country. It’s worth noting that this is my first domestic release of a record in America. The last time I was released domestically in America was with The Stranglers, and the other albums that came out in the US, Black Hair Black Eyes Black Suit & First Bus To Babylon, were repackaged & re-released long after being released over here. It makes perfect sense after the English dates to go straight over to America.

Back In The USA

You’ve paved the way with the solo dates in the US, so will the next dates be with the full band?

Yes that will be with the band. And I’ll do the same as I did here – I’ll do my own acoustic opening slots, play some new songs, and then the band will come on.

You seemed to have a good time with the two batches of solo dates in the US…