Behind The Shades
In the mid-’70s Graham Parker came out of nowhere, with a fistful of killer songs and a hell of a band. And if he never enjoyed the fame of his flashier new wave contemporaries, he left with the kudos and, as his new album underlines, a career. “I shouldn’t have survived,” he tells Sylvie Simmons.“But I did.” Photo by Tom Hill.
BIBLICAL THUNDERSTORMS ARE BATTERING THE Hudson Valley. There are floods and powercuts and the heat is off the scale. “Otherwise,” Graham Parker says, “I’m surviving. Sitting here waiting for the next round.” This picturesque spot in the lower end of upstate New York is where Parker lives, though he still has the flat in London’s Maida Vale that he bought in 1980. In recent years, he says, he’s been spending more and more time there. “I call myself an international man of misery,” he adds with a laugh. Right now he’s three shows away from the end of a solo US tour and two months away from the start of his UK tour – this time with The Goldtops, the band he made his new album Last Chance To Learn The Twist with. But today’s a day off – “There’s a lot of days off. I like it that way. People expect me to tour like I’m a twenty-something, which I’m decidedly not.” He’s 73.
It’s been 47 years since Parker came out of nowhere, fully-formed, with his powerful first album Howlin’ Wind (1976). Small, wir y, always in sunglasses, he looked like a hybrid of Dylan and Springsteen and sounded somewhere between a soulful Van Morrison and a gritty Mick Jagger. He was also a great songwriter. Backed by The Rumour, Parker delivered the kind of smouldering anger and energy that Elvis Costello was known for – but Costello wasn’t around yet. By the time
My Aim Is True appeared, in 1977, Parker was working on his third album, Stick To Me.
For all his mainstream success in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and the sustained quality of his output over the decades, Parker somehow bypassed becoming a household name and instead became an artist monopolised by connoisseurs. Then, part of Parker’s appeal is that he’s never seemed bothered by what people think of him. Behind those impenetrable shades, anything could be going on.
“My sunglasses? In fact they are very light these days,” Parker laughs, “otherwise I’d be falling off the stage.” ➢
BORN IN 1950 IN HACKNEY, LONDON, AND raised in Deepcut, Surrey, Parker can’t recall when he started singing, since he was doing it all the time. There was Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan – Parker and the kid next door had a skiffle group when they were about nine. And there was Elvis Presley and, even more to his taste, Little Richard – his mum worked as a waitress in the officer’s mess at the nearby US military base, and sometimes she’d inherit records from soldiers going home. But the watershed was when he was 12 and The Beatles arrived. “And then the Stones and all the other beat groups.” In short, Parker concedes, “It was a lucky spot to be in if you’re going to turn out to be a singer-songwriter.”
At 12 or 13, he and two local boys dressed up in Beatle mops and Cuban-heeled boots – “God knows how we got Cuban heels for kids, but they were available” – and, calling themselves the Deepcut Three, they sang Beatles songs, charging little kids threepence to see them. “The girls would scream. It felt good. But it was a dress-up band, not a real band.”
In his mid teens, his dad bought him an electric guitar, an old Rosetti. He taught himself a few chords, “but I was lazy about it.” And by that time he’d moved on to soul music.
“I’d go to clubs in Woking on a Sunday afternoon or early evening midweek, and these kids, 15, 16, 17, would be dancing to ska and Motown and soul for two hours. Incredible! It was like a cult.”
The cult required a scooter and some serious clothes, and Parker got both. He left school at 16 – “victim of the class system; you get thrown out pretty quick to work as a grease monkey” – and he religiously put a bob or two of his wages aside to buy three suits from Burton Tailoring in Aldershot.
Next came blues, then psychedelic rock: “me flying my freak flag period.” He was 18 and living in Guernsey when the singersongwriters came along. “I thought, Maybe I could do that. I bought this cheap acoustic guitar and tried to finger-pick and I was writing a lot of songs.” He spent three months dossing in France with his guitar, followed by the obligator y trip to Morocco. “I was writing and writing and getting better and better – write them, dump them, write some more.” When he ran out of money he was told to go to Gibraltar, where he scored a job at the docks. He also made an appearance on Gibraltar TV.
“I met these musicians and I was sitting in with them,” he recalls. “They were all a bit psychedelic, and I was coming out of the end of that. I wanted to have actual songs with structure, not just navel-gazing, and an edge. But all you needed to get on television in Gibraltar, it appeared, was you’re English and you play a guitar. So I did three of my own songs. I’m sure that footage has long been taped over, but all these little pieces were a chain leading up to eventually getting a record deal.”
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975. THE HOPE & ANCHOR, A HANDSOME VICTORIAN pub on Upper Street, Islington, had the best-stocked jukebox in London. Downstairs was a smoky, black beer cellar where pub rock and punk bands played. Upstairs was a small recording studio, put together and presided over by one Dave Robinson. The first time Graham Parker set foot in the pub, acoustic guitar in hand, was to meet this putative impresario.
A year before forming Stiff Records, Robinson had, among other jobs, tour-managed Jimi Hendrix and The Animals, and managed Young Rascals, Van Morrison and the pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz. Parker had, among other jobs, been a tomato-picker, ditch-digger, pinball machine coin-collector, mouse-breeder for an animal virus lab and, most recently, pump attendant at the petrol station down the road from his mum and dad’s.
“I came out of nowhere, my name was nothing, I wasn’t playing in bands, I was living back with my parents in Deepcut. That’s a potted histor y for you right there.”
He was nearly 25 years old; it had taken quite a while to “knuckle down and learn to play.” But, ready to go, he put an ad in Melody Maker in search of a band: “Something like, ‘Looking for likeminded musicians, Stones, Dylan, Van Morrison.’” Most of the replies came from suburban prog rockers. “You’ve got to realise that
Genesis ruled in 1974, ’75. It wasn’t even punk then.” But there was one person from London who answered, who had an old Fender and played slide and dobro: “Noel Brown. He understood what I was doing and loved the songs.”
Brown introduced him to Paul Riley, a musician likewise untainted by prog, whose pub rock band Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers were a familiar sight in the basement at the Hope. Riley suggested to Parker that he talk to Robinson. So he did.
Walking up the stairs at the pub, Parker’s first impression was, “it was all a bit down-at-heel. You were allowed to walk downstairs and pull yourself a few pints, which was handy. I think that’s how Dave used to pay the musicians.”
Parker played Robinson one song after another. “Dave would be saying, ‘That’s a good one. I’m keeping that. Have you got any more?’ You could see a light bulb go on. He had the vision of this really crack band behind me. He took me away from Noel Brown and Paul Riley and anyone else I’d worked with loosely and brought in musicians he knew. And through no design of mine really, he built The Rumour around me.”
THE SUMMER OF ’75 WAS “A NICE SUMMER”, Brinsley Schwarz recalls, aside from the lingering “serious shock to the system” of his self-named band having broken up a few months earlier. He’d bought a sax and would practise that, or go fishing. Then out of the blue, Schwarz got a call from Dave Robinson.
“He said he’d found a really good singer-songwriter and they were going to be recording in his studio.” Brinsleys keyboard player Bob Andrews was going to be there, guitarist Martin Belmont from Ducks Deluxe, also recently defunct, “and two guys I didn’t know, [bassist] Andrew Bodnar and [drummer] Steve Goulding of Bontemps Roulez. But Dave said they were very good, and he thought I’d enjoy it.”
So there they all were at the top of the Hope & Anchor – Parker at the mike, Robinson at the console, and a quintet of pub rock royalty. “I just went along with ever ything,” Parker says. “I was like, What do I know?”
“I don’t know about the others but I was nervous,” says Schwarz. “It was the first time the five of us played together, so it was still new to us. Graham, although quiet and not saying much, seemed to be quite angry and a little bit scary. The songs were meaningful to him and he wasn’t mucking around. They were great songs.”
Locking together behind Parker, the band relaxed. Afterwards they all admitted they’d had fun, and Schwarz suggested they try some gigs. “Martin knew the guys at Newlands Tavern in Peckham [now The Ivy House] and they let us rehearse there. It was going well, everyone was enjoying it. It sounded different, more urgent than the stuff I’d been involved with before.”
But they were taking it easy. “Part of our getting-together protocol was we were not going to get hauled into being a band for five years, which we’d all just done, and all of them had ended up a little bit sorely. Then all hell broke loose: Graham got his record deal.”
Robinson had sent the Hope demos to Charlie Gillett at Radio London. Gillett had a show on Sunday mornings called Honky Tonk that played roots, rock’n’roll, R&B, Cajun and country. Everyone on the pub rock scene listened to it. So did the record companies. Gillett played Parker’s Between You And Me. Phonogram called Gillett and said they were interested in signing him. The DJ referred them to Robinson, now Parker’s manager, and Parker had his first record deal – assigned to Vertigo at home and Mercury in the States.
“Graham’s deal,” says Schwarz, “was nothing to do with us.” They didn’t even play on Between You And Me –“but we were hauled in to be his backing band.”
The five were at Newlands, rehearsing for their first gig there, when Robinson told them the record company wanted them to be Parker’s band and Parker said the same. “So we said, ‘Yes, OK, one album, one tour and no more than that.’ And Dave said, ‘You need a name,’ so we had a vote and chose The Rumour.”
“Graham seemed to be quite angry and a little bit scary. He wasn’t mucking around.” Brinsley Schwarz
Their Newlands gig became the first Graham Parker & The Rumour live show “and it all got suddenly very exciting,” says Schwarz. “We were up and running.”
The next four or five years they didn’t stop.
WINTER WAS CLOSING IN WHEN RECORDING began in Eden studios, Chiswick, for Graham Parker & The Rumour’s first album. The man Robinson chose to produce Howlin’ Wind was Nick Lowe. “When he called me and said, ‘Do you fancy producing Graham’s album,’ I rather jumped at it,” says Lowe. “He paid me 300 quid, I remember, which even then was a little bit mean, but I was grateful for it at the time.”
It was “a bit peculiar”, Lowe says, given his history with Brinsley Schwarz. “Obviously I’d been in a band with Bob and Brinsley – and really Martin as well, who was a sort of semi-detached member of the group that I was in. And I had been responsible in a way for breaking Brinsley Schwarz up; at least, I was the one who stepped forward and said, Boys, I think our work here is done. But there I was suddenly in a position of some authority, if the record producer can be said to have that.”
Lowe had become aware of Parker through the Charlie Gillett show. “I thought he was great. Lest we forget, Graham was mentioned in the same breath as Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen. That first record I did with him was straightforward. I was never a knob-twiddler, I was an arm waver-arounder and a cheerleader really. I just did what I could with their really, really good songs.”
“What I remember,” says Schwarz, “was trying desperately hard to please Graham, as he never said anything. He never said, ‘I like that bit you played there.’ As I found out later, he was just taking it all in and not believing it was happening to him.”
The album done, it was ever yone in the van and on the road – opening for Ace, Thin Lizzy, Kokomo, everyone. “I know I had 13 days off that year,” Schwarz recalls. Then it was straight back in the studio for their second album of ’76, Heat Treatment, this time produced by the more polished Mutt Lange.
Says Parker, “In the first year of my career with The Rumour I was playing America – in a station wagon, one of those woodies, the whole lot of us, and the two crew members were in a Ryder truck with a few bits of rudimentary equipment. It was down and dirty.”
Parker was getting rave reviews in the US rock press, many of them referring to his ferocity and fury and/or comparing him with Dylan, Springsteen and Van Morrison. Stakes raised, an 80-piece string orchestra was hired for Parker and The Rumour’s third album, but the sessions were cursed: bad separation between tracks made their first effort unmixable and the whole thing went belly up when the master tapes literally fell to pieces. Robinson, desperate to have the album ready for their next US tour, corralled Nick Lowe to record a new album and gave him a week to do it.
“The story,” says Lowe, “was that someone had taken the masters onto the tube across London and the magnetic whatever in the air damaged it. I never heard the first version, but I think the one we made was a pretty good record.”
Stick To Me (1977) made the UK Top 20. So did their next album Squeezing Out Sparks (1979), which Jack Nitzsche produced. Parker’s first US Top 40 hit, it made the best-of-year lists in Rolling Stone and Village Voice. Parker, however, was already unhappy with his label – fan-favourite non-album track Mercury Poisoning excoriated their faults (“their promotion’s so lame”) – and The
Up Escalator (1980), produced by Jimmy Iovine, would be his last with The Rumour. “He was not enjoying the way people were conducting his career and spending his money,” says Schwarz. “So he wanted to stop, and see what he felt like.”
In 1982, Parker released his first album as a solo artist, Another
Grey Area. Like its follow-up The Real Macaw (1983), it received a warmer reception in the US than the UK. Schwarz returned to coproduce the excellent The Mona Lisa’s Sister (1988), which made the list of Rolling Stone’s 100 best albums of the ’80s. And so Parker continued into the next millennium, as a solo artist or with bands The Shot and The Figgs, a stream of very fine songs on often selfproduced albums, released on one different label after another.
“It started with Arista, who gave me ridiculous amounts of money,” says Parker. “I was doing all right, having a blast, making money, but of course if they give you that much money you’re supposed to sell millions.” So Arista dropped him. “But labels still kept signing me! RCA picked me up – but this time I said, Don’t pay me so much. I’ll bring in a good record for you, just leave me alone. But record sales per se are something of the past now. Music had changed and I shouldn’t have survived. But I did.”
AFTER THE DIVORCE FROM PARKER, The Rumour carried on as a four-piece – making three albums before splitting. “When The Rumour broke up,” Schwarz says, “I did exactly what I did when the Brinsleys broke up: nothing.” He stopped playing and became a luthier, learning to fix guitars. “It was 2010, we had just moved house so I’d been to IKEA and came back with wardrobes on the top of my car. I struggled into the house and made a cup of tea when the phone rang. It was Graham. He said that Graham Parker and The Rumour were getting back together to make an album.”
Says Parker, “I was pretty sure I would never ever do that again. But it was 30 years later. And it happened almost by accident.” He’d e-mailed Steve Goulding about Steve and Andrews playing on his next album. Goulding’s light-hearted reply suggested he should ask the rest of the guys, “and you’ll have a proper band”.
Parker had been busy enough, playing live, making albums, including 2003’s From A Window, working with Kate Pierson of The B-52’s and Bill Janovitz
of Buffalo Tom on The Beatles songs that the Deepcut Three loved but couldn’t really play. He’d also published several books including short stories and a sci-fi novella. Now he was flying The Rumour to America to make an album.
And, it turned out, to be in a Hollywood movie with him. Director/producer Judd Apatow, a big music fan, was writing a film called This Is 40. The story, he explained to Parker when they met in New York, was about a 40-year-old music nut with an indie label who loves ’70s and ’80s bands, and signs Graham Parker in the vain hope that he’ll rescue their finances.
“It was a great experience, that movie,” says Parker. “I always felt it would fall through or I’d be dumped and they’d get someone more popular than me, but Judd said, ‘You’re the one for the job.’ Because he wanted someone who can be selfdeprecating to play the part of this guy who ruins record companies. I said, I am that guy!”
Parker laughs. It’s a real laugh. He seems genuinely happy. Whatever’s been thrown in his path, he’s just kept going. Asked if he thought it was luck or some decision or other that prevented him from crossing the invisible line into the household name territory occupied by some of his peers, he says: “It was what it was. It doesn’t occur to me now to be compared with anyone. I’ve always felt in a field of one anyway. I think my voice was so gruff in the first place it wasn’t going to get radio play.
“But,” he shrugs, “that seems like the ancient past now. I feel I’m on kind of a roll.”
“My sunglasses are very light these days, otherwise I’d be falling off the stage.” Graham Parker