XHits tHe spot
A 35-year career. A multitude of cherished cult records. An epic drama of addiction, bad luck and imperishable genius, starring a Liverpudlian songwriter who’s never heard ‘The White Album’… Michael Head takes tom pinnock on a tour of his hometown, and u
In Liverpool, perhaps more than in any other British city, the ghosts of pop culture poke through the surface of the present. Here is where the original Cavern used to be, Michael Head explains, as he takes Uncut on a brisk walk around the centre of the city, down to Strand Street and up to Mathew Street; and the quaint White Star pub, where The Beatles would hang out before their early appearances. There, eric’s club, where Head and his first band The Pale Fountains would mix with the likes of the Bunnymen, oMD and The Teardrop explodes in the fertile post-punk years; and the original site of Probe, the record shop where he would hang out after school.
Sometimes these traces of pop culture are more like ghosts at the feast: ‘Filled Barms, £1.00,’ advertises The Beatles Café, ‘bacon, sausage, egg, cheese, hash brown, black pudding…’ It’s what the Fabs would have wanted.
“I didn’t hear The Beatles until I was about 25,” says Head over a soft drink in the back room of the White Star, “when I moved back to Liverpool after living in London. I’ve still never heard ‘The White Album’ – what pisses my mates off the most is that I refuse to hear Dark Side Of The Moon. Have you heard it?” He leans in. “Is it shit?” When many think of Michael Head, or his bands The Pale Fountains, The Strands and Shack, they think of bad luck and worse habits. Like being ousted from Top Of The Pops by Keith Harris and orville, and almost losing an album in a studio fire; to years of heroin and alcohol abuse, and the ‘next big thing’ predictions that came to naught. The Liverpudlian singer-songwriter has most definitely been through the wringer. Today, though, the 55-year-old is in a stable, healthy place for perhaps the first time in 30 years, facing the future and his past with calm optimism.
After 11 years away, Head is preparing to release Adiós Señor Pussycat, the first album by Michael Head & The Red elastic Band – 13 genial, expertly crafted songs that recall his beloved Arthur Lee and The Byrds, but most importantly pick up the baton from the modern classics of his past, records like Shack’s HMS
Fable and The Magical World Of The Strands. Sober for almost two years, lean and newly energised, Head is keen to make up for his squandered years.
“Maybe things could have been different,” he muses. “But at the end of the day I’m still writing music – boss music, as far as I’m concerned! And that’s more important to me than a mortgage or a hefty bank balance.” “I ’Ve got ideas and plans,” Michael Head explains, now sitting in the summer sunshine on the steps of St George’s Hall, the grand, Pantheon-like building in the centre of Liverpool. “And there’s so much I wanna do now I’m in my fifties. I feel like I’ve been in a freezer for 30 years. It’s like, bing! It was like a parallel universe at first. People were coming to terms with me, and I was coming to terms with their perception of me. I’ve got lot of freedom now to express myself, more time.” “He is in a good way, and it’s brilliant,” agrees John Head, Michael’s brother and lead guitar foil in Shack and The Strands. “All the people who are around Mick and closest to him are just so happy that he’s doing what he should be doing.” Recorded with Strands producer Steve Powell in Liverpool, after the pair reconnected at a Head gig at St George’s Hall, Adiós Señor Pussycat was tracked at weekends, with Head playing gigs along the way – “smash’n’grabs”, as he calls them – to fund the sessions. Like the eP, it’s self-released on Head’s Violette label, created with fan Matt Lockett. “The people in the Red elastic Band kept me really focused,” he says, getting visibly emotional. “I had doubts about myself, at times, and their enthusiasm kept it ticking over.” While his friends were getting into prog, the young Michael Head discovered Love’s Forever Changes and Da Capo, Syd Barrett and The Byrds, influences that still flow directly into Adiós Señor Pussycat. “I was off my head one night,” he recalls of his wilder days in the last decade. “I was convinced Arthur Lee was talking to me – he was telling me about the lyrics. That obviously didn’t happen… but I do think there’s something that goes on when the doors of perception are open. There’s a lot of truth in that, through history. I mean, Merlin – come on! Do me a favour! Mushrooms!” Having got deep into heroin in the ’90s, and immersing himself fully into alcohol in the new century, Head is now enthusiastically into sobriety, and it’s a state of consciousness that he’s finding as
“I’m still writing boss music, as far as I’m concerned” MiCk HEad
eye-opening as any controlled substance. “The past 10 years have just been all about fucking booze, just shit,” he says. “Before that it was obviously, um… ah… heroin, and other things. But I made a decision to stop drinking and that was that. I was determined, and the longer I stopped drinking the more I made connections with my family, my sons and my daughter. My life just started getting better. I was a recluse for at least 10 years, because when I was drinking I was making a cunt of myself, sometimes, so in the end I just kept myself to myself, and became a solitary drinker. That’s about the last seven years, after [ final Shack album, 2006’s] …The Corner Of Miles And Gil.
“Was alcohol harder to kick than heroin? Yeah, it was for me. But I’m getting right into sobriety!”
Adiós Señor Pussycat hangs together beautifully – from the supernatural shuffle of “Picasso” to the Brian Wilsonesque piano ballad “Winter Turns To Spring” and the joyous beat-pop abandon of “Adiós Amigo” – impressive considering the songs were written across a period of decades. The waltzing “Picklock”, inspired by a conversation involving Dr Samuel Johnson, is the newest song, while “Workin’ Family” is almost prehistoric, penned by Head in the period between Shack’s debut Zilch (1988) and Waterpistol, recorded in 1991.
“Mick’s always been really brilliant at coming up with great ideas,” says John. “There’s never a single process, but he would always come up with little gems of magic. ‘Workin’ Family’ just didn’t seem to fit. We tried it with a lot of different versions of Shack.”
“A lot of my ideas come from dreams,” explains Michael Head. “You can formulate ideas that are different to what you’d think of if you were walking down the street to Asda or Tesco. Sometimes the songs come out with a full title, first verse, chorus – ‘Workin’ Family’ came out like that, from a dream, but I got stuck on the second verse. A few years ago, the second verse just came, and I was delighted with myself. It doesn’t matter that it took 20 years!” A nYone who watched Top
Of The Pops in late 1982 may be unable, no matter how hard they try, to forget the appearance of Keith Harris and orville; yet things could have been very different. “The best thing that happened to The Pale Fountains was that orville got on Top Of The
Pops instead of us,” says Michael Head. “We were no 47, he was no 48, but we asked for an orchestra, and he just had a puppet. But I didn’t want any of that.”
The Pale Fountains, formed by Head and bassist Chris McCaffery in 1981, signed a huge deal with Virgin the following year, but couldn’t quite reach the stardom, or sound, that their label had in mind for them.
“We went in with music that sounded like ennio Morricone when they wanted Haircut 100,” Head laughs. “We played our A&R man demoes of three songs. He was an old-school ’80s A&R, with his feet on the desk, pink-rimmed glasses and ringlets, and he said, ‘If you take the middle-eight out of the second one, put it on the end of the third, use the chorus from the first one…’ At a Virgin label party, someone asked me, ‘So are you the frontman?’ And I said, ‘Do I look like a frontman? I’m a songwriter.’ He couldn’t understand it – where’s your Hadley or your Le Bon?”
“The Paleys were brilliant,” remembers John Head, who joined the group on guitar a few years into their career. “They were very different to what you would see on TV. At their gigs, you’d see people with open mouths standing round the front. Mick’s songs were incredible for his age. It was just something else. But they were left with people who didn’t know what they were about and wanted to turn them into Culture Club.”
After the dissolution of the band in the late ’80s, and the death of McCaffery from a brain tumour, the Head brothers formed Shack, a showcase for Michael’s increasingly sophisticated, classicist songwriting. “Shack had a lot of different facets to them,” he remembers. “As well as all being into psychedelia, there was a lot of jazz in there, and a bit of classical thrown in. Fundamentally, we were all in tune with each other.” After their glossy, Ian Broudie-produced debut,
Zilch, the group headed to Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire with producer Chris Allison to record their second album, Waterpistol. The songs – “Sgt Major”, “neighbours”, “Stranger” – were strong, but yet again their impact was scuppered.
“Mick’s a very talented songwriter,” remembers Allison. “I think Shack could have done a lot more if they were together during that Waterpistol period. I don’t know what he was doing outside the studio, but I think they were definitely experimenting with various things. Both Mick and John would constantly be coming up with ideas that they wanted to try, though, so it was pretty hectic in the studio, constantly trying new things and trying to interpret what they wanted into reality on tape.
“The main issue was getting the vocals done. Mick would get up early and disappear for the whole day, so I literally had to get up earlier than him one morning and lock him in the studio. He was like a caged animal, going crazy – ‘You let me out of this studio!’ But I talked to him over the PA, ‘Mick, please, we’ve got to get this finished.’ The first track he had a go at was ‘Stranger’, and the vocal you hear on the album was his first take. That encouraged him to go for another – he did about six lead vocal takes in one morning.”
With recording finally completed, disaster struck when Star Street Studios in London burnt down with the only master copy of Waterpistol inside. Luckily, Allison had a
“I feel like I’ve been in the freezer for 30 years…” Mick head
copy on DAT but, unluckily, he’d left it in a hire car in the US. On his return to the UK, he heard about the fire and miraculously managed to get the tape back from Alamo. Even with that calamity averted, Waterpistol only limped out in 1995, by which time the needle and the damage had been done – the group had splintered and Head was heavily into heroin. “Somebody said to me the other week about
Waterpistol,” says Head, “‘Your head must have been done in after that.’ But I’m not a dweller – even in the bad times, the dark times, the excesses, it was still not pressurised, because you’re in a different state of consciousness anyway, so you don’t give a fuck.”
After Shack’s split, the Head brothers reconvened as Michael Head & The Strands to record The Magical World Of The Strands, funded by French fan Stéphane Bismuth. Although Head was deep into narcotics and flitting between Liverpool and Paris, the album is most likely his masterpiece, channeling the eeriness of Forever
Changes and the ornate folk-jazz of Pentangle. Made over a protracted period, only when the money was available, its creation is surprisingly similar to that of Adiós Señor Pussycat.
“We didn’t actually think anyone was gonna listen to the Strands album,” says Head. “So there was no pressure, working through the night on a shoestring in downtime, writing songs as we were going along.”
“It’s my favourite,” says John Head. “We found an essence that we tried our best to keep hold of all the way through recording, and I think we managed to do it. Because we didn’t have a record company we didn’t get that sort of pressure… Steve Powell was great, he was very flexible with the studio time – I think he only got paid a few months ago!”
“Recording is a very simple process,” laughs Powell. “There’s no magic about it, really. Having the songs is the trick! Mick does have some quite firm ideas, but he has a flexible attitude as well – it’s all about what the song is asking for as it’s growing.”
With the album eventually released in 1997, it seemed a good time for the Head brothers to capture the public’s imagination again. But with Shack reignited, signed to London Records and hyped on the cover of NME (“our greatest songwriter”), the Youth-produced
HMS Fable, a perfect album for the postBritpop years, once again failed to fulfil expectations. “I wish it had sold millions,” says Michael Head, “because we were all in the zone.”
“I don’t think anyone likes people to start blowing your trumpet before you’ve got your trumpet out of its box,” says John Head. “That was kind of what was going on. The record could have been finished in two months, but it took nearly two years. And when Youth got involved, a lot of the songs became a lot more anthemic, which I wasn’t necessarily into. Then all anyone wanted to talk about was drugs anyway, so it was quite disappointing.” The album did spawn a few of Michael Head’s greatest songs, however, including “Comedy” and “Streets Of Kenny”, a shanty-like hymn to Kensington, the inner-city area of Liverpool where the brothers grew up. The mood seems elegiac and wistful – “Searching through the streets again/Through the streets of Kenny” – until it’s revealed that “the boys” Head is searching for are dealers who can get him “a big… bag”. “I’ve got one or two blue-nosed mates who reckon people from Kenny are unhinged,” laughs Head. “I take that as a compliment, to tell you the truth. We’re just different!” Shack made two more excellent albums in the 2000s – Here’s Tom With The Weather in 2003, and …The Corner Of Miles And Gil in 2006 – the latter the final album Michael Head would release until Adiós Señor Pussycat. “I didn’t wanna do an album in a million years,” he explains of his wilderness years. “I was five-stone heavier, didn’t wanna leave the house. I was in a bad way.” Neither brother rules out a return for Shack, however. “I love playing with Mick,” explains John, “and I always will. That never goes away. We’ve literally been playing together since we were kids… you don’t have to think, it just comes out.”
ÒE vER since I was a kid, Hollywood has fascinated me,” says Michael Head, once he and Uncut are tucked away in the Florrie, a Dingle community centre the songwriter has heavily supported, performing benefits and raising awareness. “That whole Laurel Canyon thing, right up to Sharon Tate. I got robbed once, and the only thing they robbed was
[Kenneth Anger’s book] Hollywood Babylon, because it was a rarity. CD player? Nah! DvD player? Not bothered.
Hollywood Babylon? Yeah. Cultural thieves! I was gutted.” Head is already planning two new albums – one based around the piano, the other with the Red Elastic Band – along with a set of short stories, plays and some screenwriting. “Ultimately, I wanna fuckin’ conquer Hollywood! But I’m gonna start with these short stories – one’s called ‘Tosshead’, which is about growing up with the surname Head. I really love it, it’s good.
“The next album’s going to be completely different. There’s a lot of farewell in the lyrics on this album, a lot of kismet, and it’s good to get it out of my system so I can move on personally, and creatively as well. Steve asked me what my plans were, when we finished this album. I said, ‘Well, you know, get back into heroin, go to France, live there for six months, come back, detox, make an album…’ He knew I was messing with him, but there was a bit of truth in that – ’ey, not the heroin bit – but going away for a bit, getting a bit more experience.”
In a taxi from the Florrie back to the centre of Liverpool, Head and the driver get chatting. “So what do you do, then?” the driver eventually asks. “I write songs and sing them,” says Head. When the driver asks what kind of places this singer-songwriter plays, Head is evasive, even when the car passes right by St George’s Hall, where he’s performed so many times.
Out of the car, Head shrugs off the incident, observing that he’s learnt to keep his name out of those kind of conversations. “They either think I’m taking the piss, or they’re my biggest fan,” he laughs.
It’s this modesty that has perhaps kept Head going. He’s shaken off the ghosts of his past and, instead, his life is all about serving the songs. This is no tortured soul in recovery, either: “Bit of a twat of a question,” he asks
Uncut at one point, “but… Top 3 films?” Each answer is met with an enthusiastic, “Boss!” “Do I wish I was bigger? What is ‘bigger’?” he says as we prepare to part, Head on his way for dinner with his girlfriend. “Does that mean being in more magazines, more money? More hassle? I’m not big on material things. I make do. Obviously, I’d like the Red Elastic Band to make money so I can have a safety net for my family. I had nowhere to live last year, so I’m happy with the way that’s turned around. I’m happy in my own mind, I’m happy with my personal life, and with the music. “No disrespect to some of the old songs,” he says, “but with some of them I was going through the motions, wanting to finish them as best I could at that time. Now, with Adiós Señor Pussycat, I’m in a position to put into fruition the things that I’ve wanted to do. I’m really excited about the future.” There’s a glint in his eye. “I’m only just starting, mate.”
“I’m really excited about the future. I’m only just starting…” Mick head