Secret Interview
Our man Stu Smith conducts a straight-talking interview with Ian Page and Dave Cairns of Secret Affair
After the success of their show-stopping 40th anniversary tour, Ian Page and Dave Cairns of Secret Affair were kind enough to put time aside to answer some questions and talk candidly with our man Stu Smith.
SC: Having just completed your 40th anniversary tour, what gives you the most satisfaction when you’re performing?
SA: “There are certain songs that we do, I mean most of our songs are very, very tightly constructed, quite cleverly constructed to a specific pattern. I wouldn’t call it a formula, but they’re structured and we’ve got a couple of songs where we just let everybody do their own thing; and I never know exactly how it’s going to turn out and I think that’s the most rewarding thing for me, you know.
“‘I’m Not Free But I’m Cheap’ has a soloing thing and I never know, apart from the first bit, I never know exactly what’s going to happen next, and we do that with ‘No Doctor’, our cover of ‘No Doctor’ from the fourth album, where we just sort of let it build. It has a plan, but it doesn’t always come out the same and I enjoy that,” Ian explained.
Dave said: “I think the band is just fantastic to play with; wonderful, wonderful to be working with Ian and the players, but for me it’s really when we get on tour and there is an incredible audience reaction right from the very first note. It’s exhilarating and, in fact, knowing that when everyone starts smiling, you start enjoying yourself with them. Also, it makes us play better; it makes us play, I don’t know, with more verve and determination.”
Ian continued: “It’s always interested me that we’ve always had that kind of reaction in Manchester and I’ve never put my finger on it. We are so quintessentially definable as a London band that sings about Soho, and our most successful areas are in the north; in the northwest, in the northeast and in Scotland. Scotland is amazingly passionate when we play. Love going to Scotland, although this particular tour that we’ve done has been particularly successful in more places than any other.”
SC: What are your thoughts about the suggestion that Secret Affair could be described as the band which was at the forefront of the Mod revival?
SA: “I think possibly with the exception of The Jam we were one of the most successful, but really there were a number of bands that were sort of doing the same kind of thing, or their own version of the
thing round about the same time, and if anything it was a movement. I think it was more to do with the people than the bands to be honest you know; the revival of the interest and the fashion and the culture and the stuff like that, I think it was a bit more people powered than band powered,” said Ian.
“I think that when the Mod revival came about it wasn’t just about music and scooters. It was about fashion and music and a lifestyle, and when that happened, and it came to the attention of the Press, well obviously somebody, I think it was Gary Bushell, who called it a Mod renewal and somehow or other it became a Mod revival. The one thing about giving people a tag like that is that you could say to yourself, ‘Why wasn’t the Two-Tone Ska explosion described as the ‘Ska revival’?” added Dave.
SC: What’s a ‘Glory Boy’?
SA: “It was a bit Ziggy Stardust inspired I suppose, in the sense that it was a way of creating an iconic concept to address the music. Tied with that I’ve always had a fascination with Soho and its atmosphere, so I tried to create a youth icon I suppose that would inhabit those alleys and streets, and part of our thinking was, I was conscious of wanting to contrast what we were about, as not being punk, even though I think both Dave and I were extremely inspired by what I would generally call New Wave rather than punk. But I grew tired of the torn leather dirtiness of it all and so that’s how the idea of what a ‘Glory Boy’ was; you know, because they looked sharp and neat and they’re clued-up and they’re street-wise and it was just a way of creating an image for people and that’s what got us linked in with Mod really, isn’t it?” explained Ian.
SC: We discussed the subject of the lyric, ‘We hate the punk elite’, which appears in the song ‘Time for Action’.
SA: “What people didn’t understand about that, we weren’t talking about punks on the streets at all. We were actually talking about the punk elite being Malcom McLaren and the middle-class people that were actually about that, all of that, and it wasn’t an attack on punks whatsover,” said Dave.
Ian continued: “The whole irony to me, that I see, is that this was a significant difference and it might explain a few reactions that we got. I always saw punk as an essentially middle-class, or even an upper middle-class movement and so, yes, its cultural influence is stemmed out of Malcom McLaren’s shop ‘Sex’ in the King’s Road and a very, very tight crowd of people.”
SC: Who’s ‘Sweet Julia’?
SA: “I formed Sweet Julia. The name Julia is kind of sweet in itself so it kind of fits. Sweet – Julia rather than, you know, many other girls’ names. Sweet Julia is somebody on the train, defenceless and a gang of whoever decide to give her a hard time,” explained Dave.
SC: In the song, ‘I’m Not Free But I’m Cheap’, what’s a ‘Celluloid demi-god with photogenic eyes’?
SA: Ian and Dave laughed, and with a smile on his face Dave said: “It’s slightly more complicated than Sweet Julia!” Ian continued. “The whole song is about the phoniness of stardom, but what a lot of people don’t get is that the singer is not me, it’s a celluloid demi-god with photogenic eyes who’s in love with himself, because he says nothing important because nothing ever lies so it’s about phoniness and celebrity.”
“I had a bit of an obsession. I think both of us did with the whole concept of ‘elites’ and ‘in-crowds’. It’s not just punk, actually. It was rife in the music industry, that there was kind of an in-crowd of people to which the likes of Dave and I were kind of one step away from, and I had a very natural working-class lads’ resentment of that. This brings me to the point I didn’t remember to finish, which is why I saw punk as an essentially middleclass movement, whereas the Mod revival was very much born out of working-class kids from Canning Town you know, for our part of it. I’ve always seen it as much more, because the original Mod concept was aspirational; it was based on the newly-found post-war wealth of adolescents who suddenly found that they had money in their pockets, and what they did, they got jobs. Their aspiration, the whole business of suits and the dress wasn’t just fashion for fashion’s sake, it was a statement to say, ‘Now I’ve got money in my pocket, I can look just as good as you’, and I think it’s ironic that so many of the music press chose to be opposed to that.”