The New Cue #375 April 22: Michael Head; Lush Film Premiere at The Social.
"In the ‘90s we were all off our tits all the time."
Good morning,
Another Monday. Yes, we can do this. All together. All for one. No surrender. Come on!
Let’s start the week with some good news. We’re very excited to be hosting the UK premiere of Lush: A Far From Home Movie, bassist Phil King’s short film compiled from his candid super8 footage taken during Phil’s time touring with Lush between 1992 and 1996. It’s released in memory of drummer Chris Acland.
The screening will be in The Social, in Little Portland Street, London W1, on Friday May 31st, doors open at 5.30 for a prompt (ish) 6pm start. The film is thirty minutes. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A with Phil and guitarist Emma Anderson hosted by Ted. Emma and Phil will also be selling and signing the limited edition film posters and Lush albums. It’s going to be a magnificent evening. Tickets are £18 from www.thenewcue.co.uk.
More good news! There’s an interview with newly-married Michael Head of The Red Elastic Band, formerly of Shack and the Pale Fountains, just below the drop. He’s got a fantastic new album called Loophole out on May 17, but before then he has a New Cue early evening acoustic gig at The Social this Saturday. See you then.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris.
Start The Week With…Michael Head
I’ve written the spiel a dozen times (at least) about how I believe Mick Head is the greatest British songwriter of the last forty years, so I’m not going to go there again. Here, just have a listen to some of his songs. It’s indisputable!
Ted (that’s me, hello), gave Mick a ring the other day, when the album was still due to be released during the first week of May. It’s gone back to May 17th, so hopefully this just whets appetites more.
How are you Mick?
I’m good mate, I’m good.
Where are you?
I’m in…my flat. Been doing these instore gig things. The night before last I was in…fucking hell. London? Yeah. No! Nottingham! It’s been good, you know. Liverpool, Manchester and Nottingham. We’re doing the Social with you next week. It’s fantastic, but different. We did Rough Trade in Brick Lane, it’s got a stage and that. But one of these has been literally in the middle of HMV, by the racks. They gave me a little plastic stool and I was, like, I think I’ll stand mate. But the fans afterwards, oh my God.
Why?
I’ve never done this thing where I’ve signed stuff, sitting at a desk with a pen. People were taking the opportunity to say what the music had meant to them over the years. Usually it’s at a gig and it’s brief, cos you’re in a hurry, just come off stage or arriving. But here they have a moment with you. A few times people have said, ‘Your music has been the soundtrack to my life,’ and you’re like, Fuck! It’s a beautiful thing. The first time I was, like, Nice one mate. But then you think about it and it’s, Wow! Such a beautiful thing to say, all the variations of what it means.
Kismet by Michael Head at Piccadilly Records, Manchester, April 14, 2024.
How’s married life?
I’m loving it. She’s a beautiful, beautiful woman.
How did you meet?
Oh fucking hell. We met thirty years ago, on the scene in Liverpool. As soon as I met her I was, like, what the fuck! But I had a partner at the time, she had a partner. She’s from St Etienne in France. French-Algerian. I went my merry-way, she went hers, life goes on. Sporadically over the years we’d meet and I’d always think, ‘I need to get to know Saida more’. There was just something about her. Saida went into teaching and actually moved near me in the North End but we never bumped into each other. She got married, had a beautiful daughter and then we reconnected about eighteen months ago. We were going to go on a bike ride. Our mate Manno, now known as Cupid, got us together. We didn’t actually go on the bike ride. We had a coffee instead and…that was that.
Love.
I said to her, I’m in love with you. She said, ‘How do you know you’re in love with me?’ So I said, ‘I’m in love with the possibilities of being in love with you’. She said, ‘OK, I’ll fucking have that.’ You know, what’s it like, when you meet the love of your life. It’s kismet, mate. The more we’ve got to know each other, the more we know. And she met me ma! Thirty years ago, before me ma died. A lot of beauty there.
Congratulations.
Thank you. I love married life, lad.
Michael and Saida, picture by John Johnson.
How are you feeling about Loophole, your new album?
In the past, we’d finish an album, and you’d listen to it with the record label and whatever. But I’d move on. I found that with Dear Scott, too, to a point. I enjoyed not hearing it for a bit. I’m sort of there with Loophole. I love it, though. It’s a collection of songs that I love and we kept it within the Red Elastic Band collective, Bill (Ryder-Jones) producing, weaving his magic again. The more I work with him, the more I admire his input. He’s brave, he just does stuff off the cuff….I mean, what do you think about it!?
I think it’s your most nostalgic set of songs.
Yeah, but that wasn’t intentional. The songs evolved from the mindset of writing the book [Head is writing his memoir, due sometime next year on Nine Eight Books]. I always have championed the importance of dreams, but my subconscious was on over time. The power of the subconscious mind. I’m upstairs writing chapters about the time me and Biffa [aka Chris McCaffrey, sadly departed Pale Fountain and best friend] met Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera in, like, 1981. I’m remembering the chords that Roddy learnt me. I was, like, ‘These are beauties mate!’ I don’t know if it was a mind over matter thing or because it was a jazz chord, but there was one where my fingers were just saying, No! Every other shape was fine but this one. I purposefully wiped the chord from my mind, never wrote a song with it. As I was writing the chapter about touring with Aztec Camera, ’80, 81, I was thinking, ‘What was that chord?!’ Then I wrote the song You Smiled At Me, on the album, with that fucking chord! But I still struggle with it. I can’t play it. I have to get Natty in the band to play that one chord. The mind, man, incredible.
The memoir went back a year at least. What happened?
Well, you’ll know as an author, but I underestimated the task. I was looking down at it from on high, saying, let’s have a beginning, let’s have a middle, let’s have an end. As I was going through it I was thinking, This is working. It’s gelling. I was enjoying it. It was weaving together and I was enjoying writing, but I underestimated the deadline. Probably not the first to do that, right? It became about word counts but I was like, ‘Fuck word counts’. I could’ve just filled the book with anecdotes if I was worried about word counts, no problem. But I wanted a book that really weaves together. So, I need a bit more time.
Sometimes you do just need a bit more time writing a book. And sometimes, you just need to end it where it is.
In sobriety, with clarity and focus, you learn to bat negative things away because they are irrelevant. And it works. It’s simple, it’s basic, it’s common sense. Moving on with my life, getting sober, falling in love, getting married, reconnecting with me sons, looking forwards, doing the book was slowly but surely taking over. And it’s all about the past, and I’m facing the other way. I was walking down the road as I always do, admiring the architecture, having a dream and my subconscious was telling me to get back to work. And it was right. But I wanted to enjoy it, and I had been, but that pressure took the joy from it. It was overwhelming me. Pete Selby, who I’m doing the book with, he’s beautiful. Originally, I declined it, back before Dear Scott even. Before a lot of things! He said you can tell your Arthur Lee stories, but there’s so much more than that. But thinking about the pivotal moments in my life, why I’m talking to you now, that is why I agreed. And from day one Pete said ‘I don’t want you to publish anything you’re not proud of’, which was beautiful. And when I told him I needed more time he said, ‘I’ll stick with that Mick.’
I always remember you saying you wanted to write scripts.
It’s funny, the first time I went to lunch with Pete I had my collection of short stories rather than an autobiography in my mind, and a collaboration with John Johnson, the photographer, where we were going to go round Liverpool together, like the Jeffrey Barnard book [with Frank Norman], Soho Night and Day. It’s a fantastic book. Something like that, going to the places in Liverpool that you wouldn’t normally know. With me narrating it.
That’s a brilliant idea.
Do you know what I mean? And some of the short stories are beauties. There’s one called The Rise of the Misfits, which is a true story about school. The A team got banished, so the headmaster said, ‘We’ll have a B-team, we’ll have the misfits, the smokers, the absentees when we can get hold of them…’ and he got this great team together. We started winning against teams we’d never beaten. All the ones that were smokers and those who were never in were the boss players. There’s quite a few stories there. Next time you’re in Liverpool we’ll have to get together and I can show. When are you up next?
No plans, but if Everton get relegated, I’ll be there for the QPR away day.
Haha! Oh! They got slaughtered the other day at Chelsea. Dearie me. He’s good that kid, Cole Palmer, isn’t he?
He is. Back to the album: I love the stories in Ambrosia, a chaotic night out in London where your brother John loses his shoes.
We’d just played Paris and a promoter came up to us after the gig and said, ‘Do you fancy playing Geneva?’ We were meant to be going back to Liverpool that night but this was in the ‘90s and we were all off our tits all the time. Someone said it was only four hours from Paris, so, is right. Let’s go. Thirteen hours later we’re in the Alps. What the fuck! We’re driving through the Alps, off our tits, fucking loaded with all kinds and as we come round the corner there’s a checkpoint with loads of cops with guns out. Close call. Then the bit about Tottenham Court Road was after the tour, we went back to the office in Star Street…it was those days when we were just having fun, running round Soho being fucking mad. The next day our John phoned me saying he wasn’t in the hotel he was supposed to be in and that he only had one shoe, so, could I get him a new pair? For some reason I had picked up this coat that you wore to stop traffic on the motorway, but it was the 90s so I got away with it.
You always get away with it.
Well, yeah. Ambrosia was the first song I wrote in the new flat with Saida, sitting on the floor, playing her daughter’s guitar with these big, fuck-off windows. It’s just on Sefton Park, Liverpool, beautiful. Halfway through formulating the lyrics, Tempo [Iain Templeton, Shack’s drummer] passed away. In the rehearsal room, it was just me, Phil and Tom from the band who I played it to. I admitted to them I was choking up singing it, you know, singing about Tempo. They’re such beautiful, beautiful young men. They just said, ‘Don’t worry Mick, we’ll do the song proud.’ And they did.
Coda is a good song on the album too. I remember you playing some of that live in Shack in the late 90s, but you were never sure how to finish it.
It’s one of those songs where at the back of my mind I’m thinking, Don’t push it. Let it formulate. In a way, it’s finished Comedy off. You know, the lyrics go ‘We played this riff in ‘93/at the end of Comedy/it’s had a chequered life/we called it G to G’. And Comedy has had a chequered life. We wrote in 1986 in Biffa’s bedroom in Kenny when we came back up to Liverpool from London. But it never had a home. I remember playing it and Biffa asked what the first chord was. G. Then what? G. Call it G to G then? Fine. It never had a home. Didn’t go on Zilch. Didn’t go on Waterpistol. Didn’t go on Strands. But when I played it on the Fable sessions it was, like, you gotta do that. So it was resurrected.
But I play that riff at the end of it and, I’m not saying it’s a nothing riff, but it’s so simple. You’re using all the strings though so it has this beautiful resonance. It also reminds me of riffs I used to play when I first played guitar, when I only had one string! It’s just the riff from the end of Comedy, but the lyrics formulated over many years. So had to be called Coda.
Comedy/Coda at the Trades Club, 15/12/23
Merry-Go-Round is another old song, one you wrote with Pete Wilkinson after you were both in Shack.
Yeah, we had that, but I reconnected with Pete over the last couple of years. I started playing the chords with the lads in the band – I always class Pete as a founder member of the Red Elastic Band anyway. It’s a beautiful song. Whenever I’d see Pete in Liverpool or London, we’d always say, ‘We have to record Merry-Go-Round!’ We were serious but we never got the opportunity – but now we have.
Merry-Go-Round at Rough Trade East, 2024
I’m gonna wind it up now, but I always have to ask you how your brother John is.
He’s sound, you know. He’s got a gig this Friday, with a great band behind him. I’m going to go see it, me and the missus. There’s a boss buzz around the city about it.
OK, Mick. Well I’ll see you next Saturday at 6pm at The Social.
Is right lad! See you then. Look forward to it. Alright, ta-ra.
TK
