An unsentimental journey back to ‘new wave’ pop
Graham Parker is often considered the first of the fiery new wave acts that flooded out of Britain in the late ’70s, a step or two ahead of Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson.
Parker, and his band The Rumour, were working on their third critically acclaimed album when The Sex Pistols blew the top off the music world in October 1977. Parker’s music wasn’t quite the scabrous punk of the Pistols, but it did have an in-your-face attitude.
At the very least, Parker deserves credit as a trendsetter, despite the fact that his North American breakthrough didn’t really happen until 1979 with the release of his popular fourth album, “Squeezing Out Sparks,” and songs like “Discovering Japan,” “Saturday Night is Dead” and “Waiting for the UFOs.”
Parker doesn’t like talking about history, though. He hates the term “new wave,” in particular. “I came along and all this stuff followed,” Parker, 66, says on the phone from upstate New York where he has a house about 45 minutes from Woodstock. “New wave, I don’t have anything to do with. I don’t think about it. It just doesn’t seem important.
“There was nothing new about what I was doing,” adds Parker, who was raised in suburban Surrey, south of London. “I was looking back. All my stuff was just regurgitated soul and pop music. That’s all it is, it just sounds like me because I’m pretty good.”
Parker, who performs at This Ain’t Hollywood July 6 with his longtime collaborator Brinsley Schwartz, started out wanting to follow in the footsteps of Van Morrison, singing well-crafted originals with the passionate voice of Memphis soul and a touch of British working-class bitterness.
You can hear it on Parker’s first two albums, “Howling Wind” and “Heat Treatment,” both released in 1976 with the backing of Schwartz’s band The Rumour.
“I related more to (American band) Little Feat than anything,” Parker says. “I thought GP and the Rumour was the English equivalent to Little Feat, only not as good, as we would all fully admit.”
Parker admits, however, his sound went against the grain of an English music scene dominated by prog-rock monsters like Genesis, Roxy Music, Electric Light Orchestra and Pink Floyd.
“We were in a field of one, most of the time,” he says about 1976. “We had a year when it was just sort of us, out there all alone. By the time all these other (new wave) acts came along, we were already established and had our place.
“If anything, we may have upped the ante a bit — to the effect that you’d better be writing 12 great songs, not just three good ones and padding out the rest of the record.”
Parker and The Rumour parted ways in 1980 after four albums together (The Rumour
also made three without Parker). Parker continued making albums throughout the next 30 years, but none achieved the success of “Squeezing Out Sparks.”
Parker continued to gain critical raves as a rootsy singer-songwriter, and he believes his work didn’t achieve full maturity after 1990.
“Personally, I think my richest songwriting was ‘Struck By Lightning’ in 1991,” Parker says. “That’s when I really hit it and became a singer-songwriter. ‘Deep Cuts to Nowhere’ (2001), ‘Don’t Tell Columbus’ (2007), these are the kinds of things I prefer much more to my early records because I can see the arc of my creativity, and the influences are less severe than my early ones.”
Parker and The Rumour reunited in 2011 at the urging of filmmaker Judd Apatow for an appearance — playing themselves — in the feature comedy “This Is 40.”
The reunion stuck and the collaboration has since produced two albums — “Three Chords Good” and “Mystery Glue” — and some popular tours in the U.K. Parker says the reunion’s success means he now spends most of his time in his native England, living in a London flat.
“It’s pretty weird 40 years later to get together in a studio with all of these guys and everybody clicks like there had been no time in between,” Parker says. “We’ve remained friends, the whole lot of us.”