The New Cue #554 December 15: Wreckless Eric
"Elton John had a crush on me."
Hello,
Apologies for last week’s break in transmission. The previous weeks of grief administration finally knocked everything skew-whiff, but here we are, back on track on a Monday with another Life & Times interview, this time with the world class raconteur and wit, Wreckless Eric, aka Eric Goulden, aged 71.
We last interviewed Eric back in 2023, around the release of his late-career gem Leisureland. It still sounds so good, a state-of-the-nation address sent from the seaside town they forgot to knock down, a masterclass in jaundiced melancholy and one of the decade’s best independent British albums…
It’s part of a late career renaissance that has been a long time coming. Wreckless Eric emerged in 1977 with the hit Whole Wide World, initially ahead of the other members of the pub-punk Stiff Records pack that included pals Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. A timeless hymn for teenage longing, here he is doing it with Jools Holland on Later a couple of years ago.
It’s a masterpiece song that transcended its era to such a degree that it found a whole new generation of fans when Will Ferrell sang it to Maggie Gyllenhaal in the romantic comedy Stranger Than Fiction, in 2006.
Songs that powerful can trap their authors, however, and that was the case for Eric, unfortunately, who became known as a one-hit wonder despite all his subsequent solo work, as well as plenty of records with his other groups such The Len Bright Combo. And some real bangers, too, such as Take The Cash, a personal fave and life motto (of Ted’s). Here he is miming it winningly on Spanish TV in 1980.
Moving to the US in 2011 to be with his wife, American singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, pepped up his career, though, as they made a trio of lovely records together. Now they’re back and living in Norfolk, with Eric working at great pace and on a run of magnificent albums, the latest being England Screaming.
Eric is the only interviewee I’ve met who gets on the Zoom five minutes early and he was there nice and early last Friday when I, Ted, logged in, ready to share his tales of Captain Beefheart, Ian Dury, Elton John, drunk driving, getting nicked, the misery of poverty, the majesty of love and much more. He’s an all-timer interviewee and long may he reign.
See you on Friday,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of…Wreckless Eric
What was the first record you loved?
The first one that utterly thrilled me, I think, was probably Twist and Shout by The Beatles, The EP, yeah.
Now, the first album that I bought was Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. That was a mind-blowing experience, to hear that for the first time. Like nothing in the cosmos! It was in mono, and I still have it. It’s a bit worn out because I played it a lot, but it’s still good. I’ve heard it in stereo, but I didn’t like it.
What was the last record you loved?
The last record that I really, really like from this year is the album More by Pulp. I love that record. I mean, I’ve always loved everything that they do, you know. It’s never more of the same stuff. Obviously, it’s 20 years or something since they last made a record, but it’s just so casually brilliant. I find it inspiring. You just want to get up and start making a record, but at the same time, hold your head in your hands and never try to make a record again, because it could never be that good.
What is your earliest memory?
Probably being in the back garden of the little house that I grew up in, in Newhaven, Sussex. It had an enormous expanse of grass, there were earthworms, and there was me and my sister on a crochet cream blanket. She was three years older than me, and there was a massive, great garden gate and big, high walls. Eventually, when I was quite a lot older, like 30 or something, I went back and had a look at it. I went round the back to this back alley. It was a terraced house with this tiny little gate and a tiny little square of grass… this woman came out and said, ‘Can I help you? Are you looking for something?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I was born in this house.’ She said, ‘I know who you are.’ I mean, I was still famous then... But then she said, ‘I remember you. I haven’t seen you since you were a tiny baby’. The house is still there, and I’m thinking that I’m going to get a breadboard, one of those circular ones, paint it blue and white, couple of screws, and I can screw my own plaque on it. I don’t think anyone else will bother. Self-plaquing, it’s the way forward.
What is your daily domestic routine?
I wish I had one, really. It depends. It depends how late I stay up the night before. But the day starts kind of haphazardly. I always try to be dressed and ready to face the world, even if I’m just going to face the world on a computer. I don’t like to be one of those people that sits around in their pyjamas, nibbling on a slice of toast and doing their emails, except that I probably am sometimes, but I try not to. So there’s cups of tea, and then quite often, I go out in search of a really good espresso. We live in the middle of Norfolk, so there’s not much of that, but there are a couple of places, so sometimes I go out and do that, try and have a walk and then get to whatever silly thing it is that I’m doing. Then as the day progresses, somewhere around about seven or eight o’clock, we have a bit of dinner, and then we watch the telly for a bit.
And that’s it. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? I mean, this morning, we went to Mundesley, which is on the Norfolk coast. It’s only a couple of miles up the road. We had a walk around Mundesley. There’s a park with all these really silly fitness things, so we had to go on some of those, me and Amy, my wife. We thought that was very funny. There was no one around, so it was okay. And then we went for a walk along the seafront. The tide was in and it was wonderful. Then we came back, and here I am.
Who or what is the love of your life?
I think the love of my life must be Amy Rigby, my wife. We’ve been together for so long. I was telling someone just yesterday that she still fascinates me. I think it’s because she’s an Aquarius or something. That’s how the conversation happened. I was talking to someone who said that they were an Aquarius. I don’t know what I think about star signs, but they’re a bit of a guilty pleasure, really, aren’t they? I mean, you don’t want to admit to being one of those people, but… Amy’s an Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius and all that. She still fascinates me. I can’t figure her out. That’s nice after all these years. And, yeah, we have fun. We have a nice life together.
What was your first job?
My first job, um, was a bit illegal because I was only 14 at the time. I was a petrol pump attendant at the petrol station on the Newhaven Marina. Sometimes I used to man - or I suppose I used to boy - the petrol barge on the river, and all these posh people with yachts came along. I’d have to pump 140 gallons and they’d want their Green Shield stamps. Never knew how to calculate that. The best job I ever had was working at Butlins in Saltdean, just outside Brighton: coffee bar assistant. We used to collect the coffee cups and that. The old ladies would give you 50p to put in the jukebox, so we’d put on Rock Your Baby by George McCrae, Get It On by T Rex… it was just great.
When were you at your most creatively satisfied?
If I was ever creatively satisfied, I think I’d give up. I’d become a dog walker or something, you know? I mean, I’m never creatively satisfied. I just keep thinking, ‘Oh, I can do better than this’. Then it’s, ‘Can I do better than this? God, why am I so useless!?’ It’s what drives you. You meet those people who make an album and go, ‘Yeah, come out pretty good.’ They’re so smug about. I can’t be one of those people. There are people in this world who say, quite rightly, that I’ve got nothing to be smug about.
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Absolutely. Three people that I can think of immediately spring to mind. Captain Beefheart, for one. We went to the opening of his show at the Waddington Gallery. It was 1986 and I was with Humphrey Ocean, the painter. We weren’t invited but we thought we’d gatecrash. We imagined we might get a look at him and then we’d probably get thrown out. We came up through the doorway on the corner and, right there, we saw this big towering figure. It seemed like a monument standing in the doorway, lighting a cigar. We were, like, that’s him, that’s Beefheart! We sidled past him and he looked down from this great height, said, ‘Hello boys.’
We got in there thinking, ‘Right, okay, they’re probably gonna throw us out now.’ Suddenly Peter Blake was there. ‘Eric, Humphrey, how lovely to see you. Now, have you met Don?’ So, Peter Blake introduced me and Humphrey Ocean to Captain Beefheart. I didn’t know what to say. I was a bit, you know, Wayne’s World: we are not worthy. Felt like a gibbering idiot. Humphrey’s public school, bit better at meeting people in those kinds of situations, so he said, ‘Well, I expect after all this excitement, you’ll be wanting to have a quiet afternoon.’ And Beefheart looked down with a withering look and said, ‘I ain’t never had a quiet afternoon.’ ‘We are not worthy! Oh, my God, he’s so cool’ – we’re doing this inside, not outwardly - and then, he looked up through the ceiling of the building, through the roof and through the cosmos before growling… ‘And I ain’t ever had a quiet night neither’.
Andrew Weatherall is another. I was playing the 100 Club and a friend of mine said, ‘Everyone’s here tonight, it’s amazing. Andrew Weatherall’s over there.’ What?! What the fuck?! Because I love his Two Lone Swordsmen in particular. I just found Andrew Weatherall to be a fascinating person all round, and even more later, when I got to know him, but I loved his music. I said, ‘What’s he doing here? My friend said, ‘Well, he’s come to see you. Would you like to meet him? I’m sure he’d like love to meet you.’ I said, ‘He won’t want to meet me!’ He went over to see Andrew and apparently Andrew said, ‘Oh no, he won’t want to meet me.’ There’s a photo of us, and we just look stunned to be meeting each other.
The third is Elton John. He came to see me playing in 1978. He had a crush on me, it’s quite well documented. This woman that I knew vaguely because she had been a PR at Stiff Records, she came into the dressing room and said, ‘Elton John’s here, and he’d love to meet you.’ ‘Well, bring him into the dressing room.’ She goes, ‘Oh, he won’t come in here. He’s way too shy for that.’ So I had to go out and see him in the corridor. And he was just lovely. He’s a great person, I won’t have a word said against Elton. I remember he was wearing this brooch at the neck of his shirt that was almost like a Bakelite bow tie. I said, ‘Does that light up?’ He leaned in and said, ‘No, I’m off duty.’
Have you ever been arrested?
I have, actually. The last time I was arrested I was with Johnny Green, who was the Clash’s road manager. After that, he was my manager briefly, and we got involved in a lock-in in a pub. Then there was some drunken driving. Well, Johnny Green was driving and I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t a very good idea.’ If I could speak, I’d probably have said something about it. Then we were stumbling over broken glass with half the neighbourhood trying to catch up with us, because we had destroyed several parked cars at about three o’clock in the morning. And then I was taking a swing at someone who turned out to be a very high-ranking police officer. And then I missed and then I was face down on the front of my neighbour’s Ford Granada, which was his pride and joy. And then I was being taken off to the police station in a van with two policemen who were intent on kicking me to death…
Yeah, that was the last time I was arrested. I mean, I was a drunk, you see? It’s a terrible thing. I’m not anymore, but for a long time I had quite a problem with it. So, I did get arrested for being drunk and disorderly on quite a few occasions. Also for what they saw as wanton acts of vandalism, all that kind of thing. The first time I was arrested was actually for house breaking, but I was only 13 at the time. That was a bit embarrassing. Did I get charged? No, I got an absolute discharge. That was a result.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
I have no idea. I think everything that you see and hear is some sort of influence. Even things where you think, ‘Christ, I don’t want to sound like that,’ they can be a negative but positive influence. I hesitate to say because I’ll never be as good as these people. I’m a bit of a fan, really. I just do the best that I can. I work really hard. Most days, I do some sort of recording, and some of it’s serious and some of it’s quite frivolous, and some of it’s just buggering about. But I do it. I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, I’m influenced by Brian Eno or the Clash or Muddy Waters, or Andrew Weatherall’ because they’re in other echelons of greatness to me. To see them as influences would be terribly pretentious.
What was the home you grew up in like?
It was awful. I was born in this little terraced house, and it was great. Then, when I was just short of four years old, we moved to a new bungalow. When I was clearing out my mum’s effects, I found a photo of me and my sister, we’re really little, I’m holding her hand, and we both look really worried. There’s a corrugated iron builders hut next to us on a bit of a barbed wire fence. And that was the site of the bungalow that my parents had built: that’s where we did the rest of our growing up.
It was a square box. It had none of the charm of a Victorian terraced house, the funny little corners and the cupboard under the stairs. There were no stairs. It had tiles on concrete floors. It had parquet wood block flooring in a herringbone pattern in the hallway, and what they called the lounge, because they came from the north, but they were trying to sort of better themselves on the south coast. It was really freezing. The ceilings were made of some kind compressed cardboard. Just above that, there was this loft with no insulation in it and a thin layer of some kind of tar paper, and then the roof tiles on top of that. It was on top of a cliff outside of Newhaven in a place called Peacehaven, and it was fucking freezing. The windows were this thin glass, and they vibrated. They actually vibrated in the wind. There were radiators that were run from what they called a boiler in the kitchen. It was a stove, and you had to light the stove in the morning, and that heated the water, heated the radiators until they were tepid, and then it was time to leave, go down to the South Coast Road, leaning into the wind and the rain and everything, and get the bus to school. So…does that answer the question?
Do you mind getting older?
Well, of course not. You know, you have dignity, and you have wisdom and all the life experience, and, and, and… I fucking hate it. But it’s something that you have to come to terms with. You can’t go around thinking that, you know, I’m just 29 years old, because you’re not. You catch yourself saying something or thinking something that might have been your dad. It’s all quite awful, getting old.
You’re starting to think, ‘Hello, my body’s giving out.’ You know, you’re walking up a hill and you’re sort of wheezing a bit. I go out with my daughter, son-in-law and the grandchildren for a walk, and I’m hoping they’re not noticing that I’m having a bit of trouble keeping up. ‘Come on, Grandad’ How did this happen? I think, ‘Oh, only a couple of years ago, I was this kid, making another record, showing off on stage with a guitar, how did this come about?’ It’s an awful feeling, but you have to embrace it somehow. It’s like bloody coastal erosion. Every other day, someone else goes and you think, there’s another chunk of the cliff falling. When I grew up on this chalk cliff when I was a kid, there were these long gardens, and then beyond that, there was a long expanse of grass. Then there was a fence, and then a good long space between the fence and the sheer drop. I go back there now and there’s people that have French windows that open up onto a sheer drop. That’s old age.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Ah, from Ian Dury. I was in a psychiatric hospital. It was the mid-80s and I had a really bad time. I ended up in this psychiatric hospital having a nervous breakdown. Ian Dury came and visited me. Straight away, he was there. He gave me a huge, great lecture. ‘I saw this coming. I knew this was gonna happen. I’ve always known it, you wouldn’t listen….’ But in amongst it, he said, ‘If you look after your talent, your talent will look after you.’ And it’s very true. It’s absolutely it. At the time I thought it was glib, but it stayed with me. He’s absolutely right, because Ian was always right. After he died, I had to assume the mantle of being always right. I’m just as annoying as he was. Lovely man, Ian. But the thing about the talent is it’s true. That’s why I record most days, I always work. It’s important because it will, it will give you something back if you do something with it.
Eric doing Whole Wide World with Ian Dury on drums on Granada TV…
What is your greatest regret?
Not having the gift of stupidity. People talk about a gift, a very gifted musician who’s a gifted artist, a gifted writer…that’s all very well, but wouldn’t it be great to be fucking completely stupid, because you wouldn’t care about it all. You wouldn’t be driven to do all this bloody stuff, because being creative and being driven to do it is a bloody nuisance. You lay yourself open to all kinds of criticism. The world hurts. If you’ve got any kind of brain, the world hurts. You see what’s going on in it. You see the atrocities that are happening. You see people like Donald Trump. You see people like Nigel Farage. And it hurts. It hurts to see all this. If you were stupid, you wouldn’t care. It would be the most wonderful thing. You’d be a complete waste of space, but carefree.
What’s your favourite film?
I think, usually, the film that I’m watching at the time is my favourite. Gosh, I haven’t thought about that. I mean, there are so many films that can be favourites for all kinds of reasons. Like, Play Misty for Me with Clint Eastwood.
I love that film because I’m trying to figure out what the layout of his apartment is, to go out into the back garden, to get into the bedroom… Hmm, I’m trying to think of something hifalutin’ so I won’t look thick. Recently, I watched Let It Be, which is a much-maligned film. I really loved it. I know Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was the director of that, because we would go and have coffee together in New York. He invented Ready, Steady, Go! He did the Jumpin’ Jack Flash video! He worked with The Beatles! He did let all this, and we’re having coffee. I had a great experience in a July heatwave in upstate New York, where it was like 102 outside, and we’re sitting in this air-conditioned storage unit, either mine or his, because they were moving and so were we. I said, ‘So what do you think about the Magical Mystery Tour?’ He said, ‘I hate it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because they didn’t ask me to direct it.’ Anyway, Let It Be is very good.
When were you happiest?
I don’t know. You can never be fully happy. How I could be quite happy, there’s awful stuff going on. After I nearly died of Covid, and then a heart attack that was brought on by Covid, and I started to get over that, I really liked that time. The government gave us a bit of money, so I was very lucky, we didn’t have to go out anywhere, we didn’t have to deal with anything. Just sit at home and do recording and stuff. I think I was quite happy then.
Which living person do you most despise?
It changes on a daily basis. I mean, I try not to be one of these people that’s filled with hatred, loathing and anger, but I think the most despicable person in my fairly close orbit is Nigel Farage. He persuaded everyone that Brexit was a good idea. I think we’re probably all agreed that it wasn’t a good idea now, most of us anyway. So, he disappeared but now he’s back again, and his politics are just despicable. I don’t like all this Union Jack stuff, the St George’s flag. We know what that’s about. Besides anything, the Union Jack is so badly designed - it’s one of the graphic aberrations of all time, the Union Jack. But anyway, yes, obviously, there are an awful lot of them on my list. Elon Musk. Donald Trump, of course. By naming these people, there’s almost a perverse glory. Fucking despicable, all of them.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
The fact that I’m sitting here now. I don’t know how I’ve managed to sustain a career that’s nearly 50 years old, with most of the time no record label, with no management, with no real representation, but I’ve actually kept going. I’ve always felt that I was a bit of a ne’er do well, but I’ve stayed in the same job for years, so it’s not bad, you know. I think the fact that I’ve done two albums with Tapete Records and I’m looking forward to making another - that’s a hell of an achievement for me. Usually halfway through the first one, I hate them. That’s an achievement for me, personally.