Diesel Park West
The enduring Leicester rockers on deep quality, superstardom and being loved “too much” by EMI.
Diesel Park West arrived, straight out of Leicester, in a blaze of great expectations with a glorious debut album, Shakespeare Alabama, released in 1989. They are now on to their ninth album, Let It Melt, the latest testament from a lifetime spent at the sharp end of the rock’n’roll dream. Released on Texas-based label Palo Santo, it is a superlative collection of new, wiry, literate, melodic, riff-tastic, Anglo-Americana, classic rock anthems. “We never put the baton down,” says John Butler, singer, guitarist, songwriter and mainstay of this insanely enduring group.
Who’s in the band nowadays? We’ve got Rich Barton on guitar, who’s played on just about everything we’ve ever done. Geoff Beavan, the original bass player, who I’ve known since we were eleven years old. And Rob Morris, the drummer, who still seems like this new guy, but who actually joined 16 years ago. It’s eighty per cent the original line-up, really.
What has inspired you to keep going for so long? It’s always been this forward movement. We’ve always been striving to get it right, to do something that hits the spot. The years turn into decades and you always think maybe it is possible to achieve that elusive goal to write something that really rocks and has a deep quality about it. I think we may even have pulled it off this time.
Diesel Park West started out in the era of the major label deal and the big advance. What do you miss from those days? You miss the ease of it. Having a road crew and stuff. You tell yourself that you’re in this imperial position because the money and power is giving you a gilded existence, which is nice for a few months until you start to take it for granted. Then you turn into an asshole. Which we all did. Well, everybody except for Geoff [Beaven, bass]. It was just a phase. We were only young men in our early thirties.
Did EMI overplay their hand promoting the band? Definitely. They loved us too much. They were so convinced that we were going to become enormous that they didn’t spare any punches, to such an extent that a lot of people in the media suspected it was all a big hype – which it wasn’t. Somebody from the BBC actually said “It doesn’t matter how much EMI spend on that band we are not going to break them because they are too old.” Can you imagine!? And that was back in 1991/2.
“We’re darkly optimistic. you have to be, don’t you?”
The Diesels went through baggy and Britpop. How come you were always in the right place at the wrong time? I think it was just the fates. If there are some gods of rock’n’roll on a cloud looking down, they’re saving us for a special thing. “We’ll break Oasis, Blur, everybody else, but not this lot – not yet. We’re going to wait until they’re in their eighties before we break them.”
Are you optimistic? We’re darkly optimistic. You have to be, don’t you? If we’d been massive thirty years ago we’d all be rich superstars which might be very nice materialistically. But would we still be writing these new songs? The portents for this new album are strong. We’ll see how the future unfolds. We’re only at the start of it. DS
Let It Melt is out now on Palo Santo Records.