Mike & the Mechanics are real and loving it
>> For Mike & the Mechanics, these are truly the living years. With the release of Let Me Fly, their eighth album, the British group — founded in 1985 as a side project for Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford — are as active as they have been at any time in their career. Since relaunching in 2010 after a six-year hiatus and releasing The Road (2011), the Mechanics have toured regularly and become the kind of going concern that the band never was able to be in its earlier incarnation.
“The original Mechanics were a recording band,” 66-year-old Rutherford said. “We hardly ever toured.”
That group included vocalists Paul Carrack and the late Paul Young. It scored early hits with singles Silent Running (1985), All I Need Is a Miracle (1986) and The Living Years (1988).
“A new Genesis record would take a year and then a tour would take a year,” Rutherford recalled. “Then the Mechanics would record and then it was time to get back to Genesis. There wasn’t really time to tour and establish [the Mechanics] as a band.”
With Genesis dormant since 2007, however, Rutherford has been able to take a different tack with this edition of the Mechanics.
“We do a lot more touring,” he said. “Some of these songs were hardly ever heard live before, so it’s quite a nice happening to be doing this like we are now.
“It’s funny. Everyone knows the band from the records, but they don’t really know who we are as a live act, so we had to build it up — in quite a nice size in England, where we can do theatres and festivals, and we’ve been working on it in America too.”
The music also has been building. Rutherford sees The Road as “the start of the next stage.” That album introduced the new vocal tandem of Andrew Roachford, known in the UK as a solo artist, and Tim Howar, a Canadian-born singer/actor best known for his work with Van Tramp.
“I didn’t really know the two singers really well when we did the last album,” Rutherford admitted. “Now it’s been five years of touring and getting to know everybody and getting to know their voices, so [ Let Me Fly] was a lot easier to make.”
Rutherford recruited several collaborators for the new album, including old friend Brian Rawling, whose credits as a producer include work with David Bowie, Cher and Tina Turner. Frasier Smith has worked with Adele and Sam Smith, Ed Drewett has produced for One Direction and former Johnny Hates Jazz singer Clark Datchler became a songwriting partner for Rutherford, whose son Harry also was part of the creative team.
“The quality control on the songwriting has been high this time,” Rutherford said. “We’ve taken a different approach to songwriting. This time around we’ve kind of gone in and actually written a few songs and thrown some out and rewritten them. We really took a lot of time to make things right.”
Getting to know Howar and Roachford as artists has streamlined that process.
“I kind of know, straightaway, which voice will be right for a song now,” Rutherford said. “I think with one song there was a question mark, but the Mechanics have always had an R&B voice and a rock voice [Roachford and Howar respectively], so you kind of know which is going to fit best for the song.”
The Mechanics will continue working the road in support of Let Me Fly. The group toured Britain earlier this year and will be back in June to support Rutherford’s Genesis mate Phil Collins in Dublin and London. A European tour will kick off in early September, and North America is on the agenda for the spring of 2018.
The Mechanics have opened for Collins before, doing so in Germany a decade ago, during Collins’ last solo tour, and Rutherford — whose Genesis memoir The Living Years (Thomas Dunne, 2015) preceded Collins’ own recent autobiography — considers it a good fit for obvious reasons.
“It’s great for us because there’s an audience who probably know and like us anyway,” Rutherford said. “It’s a nice, friendly environment.”
He’s hoping, for many reasons, that Collins’ return to the stage is successful.
“I’d like to see him just get off the ground this time,” Rutherford said. “It’s great that he’s going to get back and do some playing live. He’s had a funny few years in many ways — they haven’t been the best time for him, actually. I think he needs something in his life like music again.”
If it does work, Genesis fans might hear the R word — “reunion” — bandied about again.