‘HEAD’ BOY The Strange Afterlife Of Rob Davis
“I’ve got a heart-shaped guitar – do you remember that?” says Mud guitarist Rob Davis from his home in Bromley. “In the 80s, I got a message from Prince’s management – he wanted to buy it. But I couldn’t bear to sell it. Still got it. It’s iconic, it’s been on Top Of The Pops countless times.”
In keeping with the glam tradition of having one designated member effete and outré – with The Sweet it was Steve Priest, with Slade, Dave Hill. Rob Davis played the role with Mud, a florid, extravagantly trousered counterpoint to the Teddy boyinspired machismo of singer Les Gray and the rest of the band. “The guys wore drapes. There was this guy, Colin, in Carnaby Street, who put together our outfits. And he said, mate, drapes don’t look right on you, I’m going to design you something else. So that’s where the flares and the big earrings came in. And with each successive record the outfits got more and more carried away.”
Mud peaked in the mid-70s, not just as glamsters but as rock’n’roll revivalists, the first moment of retrospection in rock music’s giddy, propulsive 20-year history. Their biggest hits were written by the Chinn and Chapman songwriting duo, but Davis penned a number of tunes for the group, including Mr Bagatelle, B-side to Tiger Feet, whose harmonies, tunings and chord changes are remarkably fetching and intelligent, as if the work of a different band altogether.
“I was always into bands like Steely Dan and The Isley Brothers in those days,” he explains, “which accounted for me later moving into funkier stuff in the 80s, and then dance stuff in the 90s.”
Davis admired the skills of Chinn and Chapman, taking notes for his post-mud career. “Mike Chapman had a way of keeping things simple but in a very clever way, lyrically,” he explains. “Hearing that was part of my learning curve. When I was writing back in those days, I was probably trying to be a bit too clever.”
The late 70s, following punk, were cruel to the mid-70s glamsters, as if the kids who had avidly followed their heroes as 12-, 13-year-olds were now in their late teens and embarrassed by their younger rock follies, having ditched their belt-looped flares and taken up the Sex Pistols. Mud split and Davis joined Darts for a brief spell where he met Stan Alexander.
“We did a few things for Liquid Gold in those early days,” he says. “We wanted to be like Hall & Oates but his missus got pregnant with twins, so he had to stop. So, I carried on writing myself through the 80s then met people like Oliver Cheatham – I liked that crossover funk. But I always had that pop angle in mind.”
By now, Davis was working behind the scenes as a session player and writer, along with fellow Mudster Ray Stiles, working together at their studio in Epsom. He secured a contract in 1985 to write for Cheatham, and then in the late 80s hooked up with DJ Paul Oakenfold, who he had known since he was a “runner” in his teens, trying to carve a career for himself. Oakenfold lived near Davis and would visit him at his studio, full of confidence about the direction music was going to take in the rave era.
“He’d take me out to these gigs, really late at night, and I’m like, fucking hell, all these kids raving – I’d sit with him in the DJ booth,” he laughs. “I didn’t like all of it, but I got into the vibe. He’d give me loads and loads of vinyl; I would take it and build up tracks from it.”
As a pop veteran but with a grasp of dancefloor dynamics, Davis understood that to forge a hit from this primarily beatsdriven music required a strong lyrical hook. “Sometimes on a dance track it can just be a one-liner, but it can be really massive,” he says. “The challenge is to make the vocals really original.”
Davis wrote Coco Starr’s I Need A Miracle, a hit in 1996, a still bigger hit when it was mashed up with Fragma’s instrumental Toca Me to make Toca’s Miracle, in 2000. That same year, he was put together by Simon Fuller with Cathy Dennis. The second tune they wrote in their first session together was Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, an undisputed 21st-century pop masterpiece, to which Davis contributed its most ingenious section.
“We did sense we had something special on our hands but at that time we had no idea that Kylie Minogue would be doing it,” he tells RC. “I sent a cassette to Parlophone – a demo with Cathy singing. It was completely between us. I had a drum loop up and a couple of chords – meanwhile, Cathy had come by car, and she said she’d been thinking about this line: ‘I can’t get you out of my head.’ We wrote it in sections. I came up with the ‘na na na’ bit. Kylie came down to record it in my little garage studio. The video cost £200k, the track £2k.”
Today, Davis continues to write dance tracks “with a Dutch and Asian label”. However, in a full circular turn, he and fellow survivor Ray Stiles have been touring as Mud, along with Keith Read and sometime Glitter Band member Pete Phipps, selling out venues such as Putney’s Half Moon.
“We just cram in a few gigs when Ray’s not touring with The Hollies,” he says. “In the Mud days when you were doing it every night it was a real grind. But just a handful of gigs a year is great.”
Mud featuring Rob Davis and Ray Stiles play Worthing Factory Live on 22 December. Thefactorylive.co.uk.
“WE DID SENSE WE HAD SOMETHING SPECIAL ON OUR HANDS BUT WE HAD NO IDEA KYLIE WOULD BE DOING IT”