Peter Sinfield telephone interview with David Buckley.

[who is writing a book about Roxy Music.]  

Interview conducted 17 June 2003  -but subsequently edited & updated a tad.

 

"The reported opinions of

Peter Sinfield

re events, and or persons, mentioned in this interview are his alone
and are disingenuously believed to be close upon the truth of times recalled.
The interviewer, though hopefully amused, bears no responsibility . . . *PjS*"

 

DB: How are you?

 

PS:  I’m a bit knackered, actually.  

 

DB: You weren’t very well last week?

 

PS: I have recovered.  I had a friend coming down.  Ironically, he wanted me to sing a song I’d recently written - which I’d done as a joke, back to him down the phone.  We’d had a few beers, and I was doing my Bob Dylan impression, which I do quite well.  I can either do Bob Dylan or Bryan Ferry, but I have quite a problem doing myself! As it happened, he came down, and I’ve got all these new computers here, and I’ve installed all these new computer programmes such as Logic, and we ended up writing this rather lovely song.  At the end of which he said, “Now, do you want to sing the other one?’ And I went (makes coughing/sick noises), because it was several packets of Gitanes, and several bottles of beer and whiskies later.  Singing it down to the phone to him is one thing, but singing it in the studio is quite another.  I put the cans on, and it’s such a long time since I’ve sung anything with cans on with echo, and I’m suddenly in this very odd place.  It was like being in the studio, though I was sitting exactly where I am now in the study, and I froze.  I got a bit of “red-light-itis’, on top of the fact that I was pissed.  I couldn’t sing it softly, because I didn’t have the control, and then because I’m not a very good singer, when I tried to sing it loudly, I sang it out of tune.

 

DB: So is it a bit like people not being able to perform sexually when they’re pissed, is it the same for singers when they’re pissed? Do you start singing in the pub....?

 

PS:  No, I hate appearing on stage for this very reason .(the  lack of confidence in my singing)  We’d spent twelve hours writing a new song in the first place. But- If I’d been fresh in the afternoon, I probably could have got through it, I could have pitched it, but I was knackered...

 

DB:  Are you recording a new solo album?

 

PS: Yes indeed, so rumour has it.  My friends are sort of encouraging me, nudging me into finishing it off.  All the players in King Crimson, whoops, ahem I mean The Schizoid Band with the exception of one perhaps, i.e both Ians, Ian Wallace and Ian MacDonald, Mel and Jakko have offered to play on it which is very nice, as I approach my sixtieth birthday. . .

 

DB:  Really!?

 

PS: Yes, it shocks the hell out of me too.

 

DB:  Well, I’ve got eighteen months to go to my fortieth, and that feels horrendous.

 

PS:Well, there you go - you’ve hardly started.  I feel like I’m on my third lifetime, I do really. I was planning to have a day of rest over Sunday in preparation for this interview but that didn’t quite work out.

 

DB:  But, you’re alright to talk now?

 

PS: Sure enough. I have a nice Beck’s bubbling away in front of me.

 

DB:  In fact, I have a Weissbier, because I’m in Munich.

 

PS: Beck’s was the best I could do. I only drink German beer because well it’s beer!

 

[ A November update: The solo album may be slightly delayed for I have recently been asked and agreed to read next June at The 2004 Genova Poetry Festival. This is of course flattering & more than a little daunting.

 

For, although much of my work is 'poetic in nature, it is mostly 'verse' and not, as such, POETRY. Yes. I have written a few poems but I am well short of the required 40 minutes. However I have a cunning plan to fill this chasm by taking some of my lyrics and then sort of interrupting them with spoken rhythmic additions.

 

Jakko has bravely agreed to aid & strumscape along side me while I attempt to do this - I shall also ahem, perform some improvised, post modern? Ha! 'sound poetry' in non-existent languages. This sly stuff, which we shall record, may extend my theory that the sound of placed words is often more important than their meaning.  Indeed a spoken/noise, distant relative, of Eno's 'Music For Airports'...? Which leads us back to the interview.]  

 

DB:  Am I right in infering that you don’t get on with Fripp [Robert Fripp of King Crimson and former colleague and collaborator]?  The reason I ask this is that I wrote a book on David Bowie.  It came out about four years ago.  I’m a big David Bowie fan, and I wanted to speak to Robert Fripp.  I did get to speak to Adrian Belew [ King Crimson], and he was very pleasant.

 

PS: Yes, he’s a very courteous guy. (Well he was nice to me on the one occasion that I've met him and he has that reputation. Oddly... Yesterday I heard him talking on the radio about Zappa with particular reference to Zappa's guitar playing. He was careful and kindly positive; unlike the drummer from the The Mothers who  was less so; pointing out that Frank, & I  paraphrase ,"never knew when enough was  enough."  I agree with the drummer.) 

 

DB: He said to me something like, Robert Fripp said that he wouldn’t do a phone interview, because a phone interview is not a proper interview, and he’s absolutely not interested in talking about his work with anyone else, only his own work. ( Eh? Well its a semi-valid point and one reason that this, originally done over the telephone interview has, over time, been edited, expanded and updated by DB & PjS.)

 

PS:  Anyway - Yes, well, that’s Robert for you.

 

DB:  Which is a shame, because I think he’s a great guitarist.

 

PS: No doubt about it.  A fantastic technician, brilliant, always was. As you probably know I was Ian McDonald’s mate who wrote a few words and ended up being the roadie; because I sat there listening to HIM and the others (GG&F) and couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  It was the most magical thing I’d heard in my whole life.   

 

Robert has always been - how can I put it - eccentric, and he hasn’t got any less so.  Now he’s also running out of time, so has ever less 'space' for anything that he considers not to be essential to the core of his being - art, work, or whatever it is - apart from his wife.  I don’t know if you saw her on that island thing [I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here]? She came off the island, and Robert was actually sitting there looking a little like a camp Gestapo officer.  It’s in the jungle, and he’s got this big leather coat on and these glasses, and was rather severe.   It was really good because he said [in a more than passable Fripp accent], “I don’t know why I should be speaking to you when I’ve got my little wife sitting here next to me.’ Which was classic Fripp.  Nobody else would have dared to say that in front of 13 million people.  He doesn’t care.  And he has all these rules to his life.  He’s got more rules to his life than they’ve got rulers in Smith’s probably. He’s an extraordinary chap and I have great admiration for him.  I sort of love him in a way.  I worked with him non-stop for two-and-a half, three years,on the first four King Crimson albums.  Everyone can be awkward, but Robert has a very special sort of awkward, and we just clash every so often.  He takes a sort of unilateral stance on something, and I notice. And I speak up, and the others don’t. The other guys are all sweet and lovely, and perhaps I’m not as sweet or lovely, and thus say, “Excuse me, this isn’t right is it?  But I’m an admirer and I wish him well. When we were working, one of the reasons  we worked so well is because he’s so precise, and so exact. He hardly makes any mistakes, but nevertheless, won’t repeat the same solo twice, which can be very annoying when you get a really good first bit, and you want an end bit.  He won’t, or he can’t, repeat the same solo. Eno ignored all that, and sort of looped the first bit, and said, here you are Robert, here’s your solo. And Robert went "Ooh that’s rather good, Brian, I like that" I never dared do that. There was a sort of awe. He can be moody & hard to handle. Ask anyone, as it were. ;-)

 

DB:  I have to say that when I was four or five years of age, one of the first records that was played to me by my big brother was In The Court Of The Crimson King.  I remember when I was about 14, buying it on vinyl.  It’s still an absolutely fantastic record.

 

PS: It is.  It’s still in the Top 100 of the most extraordinary records.  It might not be very high, but it’s in there with albums such as Love’s Forever Changes. Ground-breaking, brave, deft, bold  and yea possibly pretentious (as ahem, some said at the time) never the less the standard of the musicianship is incredible, the harmonic quality marvellous & the words are  [coughs, self-deprecatorily] pretty good, if a little oblique on occasion. Tho' I note, pikestaff plain compared to what followed :-¤ 

 

DB: Did you write the lyrics for the whole album?

 

PS: Yeah, some of them long before the album, in fact.

 

DB:So you wrote “21st Century Schizoid Man’?

 

PS: Indeed so, to/ i.e. after the music, which was a collaborative effort.

 

DB: Oh, I love that.

 

PS: Yes, Tony Blair’s favourite song - did you read about that?

 

DB: No, I didn’t.

 

PS: Great fun. There was a whole hoo-haa about it. There were articles in a couple of UK papers.. Because, although the song is plainly anti-war, anti politicians/leaders/Tony Blair. Apparently he just loved the guitar solo. Presumption-There was an odd bit of old hippy left in him somewhere?

 

DB:  David Bowie picked it as one of his favourite tracks of all time [Radio 1, Star Special, May 1979].

 

PS: It’s an amazing track.  In fact I will have the joy of hearing it in Hyde Park on the 17^th  when the Schizoid band plays it [the July “Route Of Kings’ gigs in Hyde Park ended up cancelled when the promoters, Triple A, went into receivership.  Roxy Music were to be the headline act].  Do you know about the Schizoid Band?  The Schizoid Band now has more members of King Crimson in it than King Crimson has.  Adrian and those guys have taken up the standard, as it were [But Ian Wallace, Ian MacDonald, Peter Giles, not Michael Giles, and Mel Collins and Jakko Jakszyk, who played with Level 42, and is a brilliant guitar player and very good singer are playing together. They are not a tribute band, in so far as we are already writing new stuff, and they are also very good players and are supporting Yes.]

 

DB:  Prog Rock Heaven!

 

PS: I guess!  The mind boggles at what the audience is going to look like.  Most of them are going to be almost as old as me - also with their younger brothers & their children. I had a bank manager who was a KC fan (which is useful in a bank manager), and his 12 year old son liked the band too. It reaches a second and a third generation. The point being clearly its (The Music Of KC) got something.[er, like yeah man...PjS]

 

DB:Tell me about Roxy Music.  I was intrigued because I was commissioned to write a short article on Roxy Music’s first album for Mojo, and I dug up an old quote from you about Brian Eno, where you were trying to articulate a sense of frustration in that I think you thought that Eno and you were doing the same act.  Is that true?

 

PS: I actually did say that, but added that he did it better. Which was a sort of joke, and sort of true, in so far as I was “the other’ member of King Crimson but never appeared on stage, although I had all of the lights, and all of the sound, and the synthesisers in the audience.  Now, he had the same synthesiser, the VCS3 on stage, and he had the peacock feathers.  And I thought if I were sitting at Sheffield City Hall or where ever it was, it was not the best idea to be sitting in the audience wearing peacock feathers.  But we did more or less the same thing - we did the same tricks with the sound & the environment. Tho' he did it on stage and I did it off.  Because he’s this post-modern non-musician - which means that you can’t play anything very well, but have fantastic ideas - I relate very much to him. I can’t play anything very well either.  He puts dots on his piano keys.  Well, I’ve been known to resort to similar techniques.  He really took looping tapes and things to huge degrees, so, we have a sort of affinity.

 

Of course, there was a clash [In Roxy] Bryan was singing but Eno is very clever. AND Ferry on stage, especially in those days, not so much now, looked well - awkward. I remember the first time I saw them [Roxy Live], and I thought," my God !Its like Joe Cocker on a bad night." He was so awkward. I mean, It was so uneven his performance; the positions he took. His stances were so odd [angular/stiff/jerky] - a bit like somebody had gone mad with one of those little artist’s models, do you know what I mean? (Laughs). He just had  very, very odd stage movements. He’s cooled it all down now, he’s famously Mr Smooth. But back then it was eek!! What are people gonna think?  But it didn’t matter did it?

 

[It occurs to me, as I read this, that even the holy Elvis, in his early performances, looked more than just a tad peculiar/awkward/original...hmm...Gold jacket... however no peacock feathers.]

 

DB: How did you get the gig?  At that stage you were still part of King Crimson, weren’t you?

 

PS: No. I was not. Robert, on the day he famously changed his name from Bob to Robert, rang me, 'twas just before before Christmas Eve, the end of 1971, & said (in again, a more than passable accent), “The thing is, Peter, I really can’t work with you anymore, one of us has got to go’. So, it was a case of, this town ain’t big enough. And it had to be me, because they (KC) were booked to do an American tour. And my guitar playing was barely four chords, let alone up to King Crimson’s music. I wanted them to do the tour, so I said, “Fine, bye’, and put the phone down. Leaving me not a little sad and having not so much lost a battle but lost the opportunity to take the band in a certain direction that Robert didn’t want to go in. So it was truly was a matter of er, musical differences. I didn't think at the time it was personality differences so much as musical direction.

 

[Now I must add, in retrospect, that of course when one's vision or ambition/fun is frustrated by a former ally. One likely treats said ‘frustatetee’ with increasing, off-hand disrespect.  [Shock .... a reaction most overcast & well, there you go ... musical differences do/did become personal. C’est les egoistes.....]

 

It left me rather exhausted, living in a little cottage down in Somerset, which I’d saved enough money to buy.  Because in the music business you don’t actually ever get some real money no matter how successful you are, until they take you off wages and give you a few quid, or lend you the money to buy a house. Anyway I was still managed, if that is the right word, by EG management.

 

DB: And what were they like?

 

PS :  Well the original EG management, that is to say David Enthoven and John Gaydon, were absolute darling people - wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. They actually mortgaged their house to pay the bills so that we could finish the first King Crimson album.  More than that you can’t really ask of your management. And they were charming, ex-Harrovian, wonderful people. John Gaydon now works in films, and David’s doing pretty well as the manager of Robbie somebody or other.

 

DB: Are you still in contact with them?

 

PS: Slightly.. I like them very much. However round about that time other partners joined EG. Sam Alder, an accountant from the Isle of Man and Mark Fenwick of Fenwicks ( They have a large shop in Bond Street.) I think it is true to say that Sam, a shrewd business man, who could and did charm birdies down from trees to sign on dotted lines overa period of time distanced EG from the idealistic, 'good hippy' ethos that existed at the genesis of EG + KC.

DB: Mark Fenwick went on to manage Bryan Ferry, didn't he?

PS: Yes, for a time. They were very good pals.

I'd say Bryan is/was not the easiest person to manage because he is very much an artist. He's a painter in some ways. Originally he was a painter who happened to sing, I think he often paints rather than just sings his songs. . . .

I think Johnny Gaydon left because he got fed up with disagreements with Greg Lake as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their egos became huge (famously so) and so he moved on to other things. . Yes it was about this time that EG said, "We've found this band' and I went down to their rehearsals. I thought they were very, very interesting, not so far on musically, but very intelligent, lovely people with brilliant ideas. They made up for their lack of technical ability with imagination. I wasn't doing anything else particularly at the time. I had recovered from my split with King Crimson. So when asked if I would produce their album I said, "Yeah!', and then it all got very rushed. I did it for no advance and 1.5% royalty.

DB: So this was Sam Alder negotiating?

PS: Frankly I can't quite remember. Quite possibly. Because of course it should have been 3%, Any producer would have got 3%, allowing for the fact that I had already done four albums and knew my way round a knob or two, to coin a phrase. But I was excited and one trusted ones management did their best for you.(I was not concerned about conflicts of interest or that they owned the album.)

DB: Indeed

 

PS: So it was all very rushed.  We rehearsed quite a lot, two or three weeks, then we went straight into the studio.  They had a few gigs inbetween, and it was really when I got into the studio that the lack of technical ability made life difficult; given the standards that I was used to in King Crimson, you understand, with lots of very fine musicians.  We didn’t have the toys we use now.  You couldn't put things back in time or pitch like you can now.  You had to do another take or cut up large pieces of tape. 

 

And also the bass player Graham [Simpson] was having a mild nervous breakdown, he really was.  Kept bursting into tears, which didn’t help very much. The one stalwart person was the drummer, Paul [Thompson], who was solid, just like a rock. There is an old expression, “a band’s only as good as its drummer’, well, thank God for him, man, because every time we did another take, he’d be right there, right on the clock, holding it together, which was a God-send. 

 

If they had all been as good as that, it would have been much easier.  He was always there, so at least I knew I would always get a drum track, and then I could drop a bass in and build it up - and work from there.

 

DB: I have to say that Roxy Music’s first album is my favourite of all the albums they’ve ever done.

 

PS: Woargh!  Well, it’s messy but it is atmospheric.

 

DB: It’s just for personal reasons because I remember when I was eight, I got Hunky Dory and my brother John got Roxy Music’s first album.  It was Christmas 1973, and he put both of them on, in the dark, as it was so early. For an eight year-old, it was literally, a mind-blowing experience.

 

PS: Yeah, I can imagine.

 

DB: “Ladytron’, to this day, is a haunting piece of music.  I think it’s Roxy Music’s finest song, actually.

 

PS: Well, that’s interesting.  It may be their finest song but we had this whole album, but no single, it was just at the beginning of the days - before that in the days of King Crimson and early Prog, if you like, I don’t like that expression, I don’t know what else you could call it, unfortunately -

 

DB: Art rock?

 

PS: Yeah, that’s better, it covers a multitude of sins, I suppose.  One didn’t have to have a single. Traffic had “Hole In My Shoe’, I suppose; but all us bands on Island didn’t have to have singles, we made albums  ;-)  It was just turning then the 'business. It was advised to sell your album  a single was a requisite, and I was most definitely trying to make, one. .I think it was the first track -

 

DB: “Remake, Remodel’?  It’s great isn’t it?

 

P : Yes, but I couldn’t get it into an obvious form.  I was working sixteen hours a day with this engineer (who really should get a mention, Andy Hendricksen.  He’s an unsung hero is Andy, he later did my solo album.  He had patience beyond Job.)  The album’s quite King Crimsony in a way. It has IMHO  my style stamped all over it - the little band sitting in one corner, drum kits in another, bombs going off and all that stuff. There are lots of pictures in it, which I used particular because they weren’t as funky and as groovy and as clean as they later became. They just couldn’t play well enough reall and it was verboten to get any session guys.  Fortunately -Just after the album, we were rehearsing and Ferry was in the corner going “de de de de’ in 8's. ( A tad Supertramp?)   Anyway…

 

I said, “what’s that, I haven’t heard that?’, and he said, "I’ve got this idea for this thing with the bass coming in ba-do-dah.’  He sung it to me, and I went “wow’. It was a bit like hearing “Satisfaction’ really in so far as you could hear a fuzz bass at the front.  And I said, “I can hear, it, I can hear it, I can hear it’, and I said, “what’s next?’  And he said, “well, there isn’t much more’. (although there was)  And I said, “let’s take it to the studio.  Why don’t we take every bit of the band, all the players, and do a precis history of rock and roll, illustrating something from rock and roll? That’s how those bits got into the middle, because there wasn’t a middle. Those bits in the middle, the Duane Eddy guitar, and the Ride Of the Valkyries and all that stuff, are there because there’s nothing else, but it seemed  a good way of showcasing the band.... 

 

[Note: Hi Peter: I think you are confusing “Virginia Plain’ with “Remake, Remodel’ surely?  The sequence where the players solo is on “Re-make, re-Model’ not “Virginia Plain’]

 

Oh my. You are right David!!  So as I confuse my myself with this and that of then.

 

 

A PROVISO

Mostly the answers given by me - *PjS* (a wily artiste), to the questions
posed by David Buckley (a crafty inquisitor) and now boldly quoted in this
interview: relate to events, the work of some very creative people and the
er, doings, allegedly, of our mutual managers - All of which happened many
moons ago. Given the passing of time, quirks of memory and the fancies of
my ego; I have strived to 'answer' with the tongue which is not forked.
Whatever - As is the case with all 'histories', even though the recollections
of witnesses can vary a tad - The inquisitor should never be blamed! *PjS*

 

Best to call a halt for now; say "happy hols" and finish part 2  in the new year *PjS*