Interviews
Captain Sensible talks to Britsound
Interview with Captain Sensible, March 22nd, 2007.
ROB QUICKE: Well, first of all Captain: thanks for joining me on Britsound. Let me ask you something: do you still live in Croydon or do you go back to visit often?
CAPTAIN SENSIBLE: Yeah, I love Croydon. It's the home of Crystal Palace Football Club - the love of my life, I suppose. Crazy, isn’t it? I live just down the road now.
RQ: We have got a couple of things in common that I want to get out of the way first of all. Number one: I lived on South Norwood Hill for a couple of years and I went to Selhurst Park many times. And second: you and I were employees of Fairfield Halls. I worked in the kitchens and I believe you worked in the toilets.
CS: Yes, 14 toilets a day I had to clean in there! It was a pretty cushy job because, in the concert hall, you don’t usually have all the toilets used during the day until the evening performance. After about 10 o’clock when I was finished my rounds, I didn’t have much to do. I used to take my guitar in and practice in one of the toilets actually.
RQ: So how on earth did you go from working in Fairfield Halls and the toilets to being this pop/punk sensation that you were in the ‘80s?
CS: At no other time in pop history would I have had a look in to be quite honest. I was the luckiest bloke in show business - if you can call my career anything to do with show business. At any other time you had to be a s*** hot musician taught at the Royal College of Music or something like that. Well, that is the way it was in the ‘70s with all these ghastly Yes and Genesis prog acts or you had to be a pretty boy, which is the case nowadays with the likes of Simon Cowell and American Idol and all that sort of thing. You don’t generally get anyone who is a little bit weird looking. I am not the most handsome bloke. You look at John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix: if they applied for American Idol, they wouldn’t get past the first stage. I got very lucky. Punk came along at exactly the right time for me because I am a bit quirky and I am quite passionate about my music. Yeah, it was the right place at the right time. So that is how I went from toilet cleaner to punk group and then from punk group to ‘80s pop sensation (chuckles). I had a bunch of Damned rejects. I would write pop songs and cutesy kind of stuff as well I just love melodies. I listen to Rachmaninoff and I was inspired by some of his melodies and I put them in my pop songs. I got signed on the strength of them by A & M Records and the rest is history really!
RQ: Last year as you well know, Syd Barrett died - founder of Pink Floyd. I have been on your MySpace page: in your top 10 albums of all time, you have Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. How influential was Syd Barrett?
CS: Extremely. I consider there are two Pink Floyds: there is Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and the other lot that came later that played boring music for bank clerks - no disrespect to bank clerks. I like my music to be a little bit more experimental, you know. That is what Syd did with his slide guitar techniques and his kind of echo and his backwards guitar and these, like, crazy songs about cats and stuff like that. There was an innocence to it as well. It was a strangely beautiful world that he created and you could disappear into it. If you put The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on, it's just an amazing record full of escapism and imagery. I just really took to it. I remember listening to the radio on the way to school once and the DJ played See Emily Play. I was walking along with a transistor radio attached to my earhole and although I was like 10 minutes late and I was going to get detention, I just had to sit down on someone’s wall in their front garden and listen to this song. It just changed my life. I just fell in love with music at that point, whereas before I enjoyed it.
RQ: David Bowie said that Syd Barrett was a huge influence for him. David Bowie said that Syd Barrett opened up the doors because he was the first British artist who was unafraid to sing any songs using his normal, regular British accent and you also have that in your songs. Would you say that you were deliberately authentic in that you weren’t going to be someone you weren’t; you decided you were going to sing in your natural voice?
CS: Yes, pretty much, yeah and Julian Cope is another fan of that sort of thing. I mean, I know rock and blues comes from the States and we all love Little Richard and all these great rock and roll acts but I don’t want to sing songs about Memphis because I don’t know anything about it. I write songs about...well, I wrote one about Croydon which is really like a dodgy suburb of London. People over here laugh at me because I did that but they shouldn’t. Memphis isn’t the most glamorous place in the world. We have just got to sing about what we know, I think. For example, I Left my Heart in San Francisco...how many people around the world have sung that song and probably a lot of them have never even been there!
RQ: When I listen to Croydon the song, how serious is that song? Because what you are talking about...I can relate to the song because, having lived in Croydon - well South Norwood - I am now actually in America and I thinking it is bizarre listening to that song and I do think of Croydon. I don’t know if you know of the shop Beano’s - do you know Beano’s?
CS: Oh wonderful, yes. It’s closing. It was the greatest vinyl record shop in the world apparently.
RQ: I am absolutely gutted about that because I used to come over just to go to Beano’s. So basically what you are saying then is: by recording a song like Croydon, you were trying to put that place that on the map – in rock’s ‘heritage’?
CS: Yeah, not only that but it is a funny thing about where you come from - that even if it’s one of the crappiest places in the world - which Croydon certainly is - my heart will always be there for some reason or another. When you go back, you get a tingle and it’s just really weird.
RQ: I’ve been listening to your collection, your Best Of, songs like It’is Hard to Believe I am Not for example - they have aged brilliantly. You could imagine It’s Hard to Believe I am Not being in the charts right now, couldn’t you?
CS: That's one of my favorites, funnily enough. I wrote that with Robin Hitchcock who is also another psychedelic troubadour and Syd Barrett fan. Yeah, it’s a very strange lyric, that one. I think we were ahead of the game when we were doing that stuff in the ‘80s. It still sounds fresh now really.
RQ: If you look to the stuff you were recording in the ‘80s, which was talking about real life and presenting it in a way that was quite authentic, in many ways we have returned to that. Particularly if you look at some of the bands like the Arctic Monkeys, for example, who are a bit rough and ready, talking about real life as they see it: would you agree?
CS: Sorry, I have not heard them. I don’t listen to anything after about 1980 really! I am sure they are very good though. Oh…there is a pigeon on my balcony: I have got to get rid of it. (Shouts) “GO AWAY YOU!” The bloody thing’s done a pooh on my balcony! It’s really annoying (chuckles). I bought myself a plastic owl - a bird of prey sort of thing - but it doesn’t scare them off because it doesn’t move or flap its wings.
RQ: You have a plastic owl?
CS: I got it off eBay. It is quite big actually. It is about two and a half foot big.
RQ: That’s a massive owl.
CS: But it doesn’t do the job though.
RQ: If you are paying per foot of owl, that’s a bit of let down, isn’t it?
CS: It is a bit, yeah. I will give him some bad feedback.
RQ: You are still playing with The Damned and they’re are still going strong, is that right?
CS: Yeah, I think it’s our 30th anniversary. This is certainly the happiest line-up that I have known. Everyone gets on terrific. Whether people want to hear that or not, I don’t know. I think they probably want to know all the gossip: that we have been having punch-ups and food fights and causing chaos and smashing instruments like we used to do in the old days. We kind of bounce off each other at the moment. There is a healthy element of improv in there at the moment - the keyboard player and myself. We don’t go mad though, of course. Don’t let me put the audience off, that they are going to come down and see Yes playing 25 minute songs or something!
RQ: So the passion is still there?
CS: It is fun at the moment with The Damned. I’m really enjoying it.
RQ: You have also played with people like Mike Peters as well for Dead Men Walking?
CS: Mike Peters is a lovely bloke, yeah.
RQ: But can you not see there is an irony there because in the ‘80s when you were doing your stuff, The Alarm were a very serious, earnest band like U2?
CS: Were they? I don’t know anything about The Alarm. It’s because they are after 1980. I just don’t know anything about any of the bands after 1980.
RQ: So do you still listen to vinyl then?
CS: Yeah I do. I am still collecting old records from the ‘70s and it is surprising how fresh they sound. A band like Thin Lizzy - who I dismissed at the time - now I am buying their records because they are just so well recorded and not multi-layered and tweaked in the studio to sound like big and massive, like all the records you hear nowadays. Everything nowadays sounds so enormous - even the folksy stuff with acoustic guitars. It’s all compressed so much. It does sound brilliant but it also starts to grate on your ear and when you do you hear something from the ‘70s or the ‘60s, which was recorded in a much more easy going way, it just sounds magnificent. I am not a fan of The Beatles - I thought they were a bit sugary - but if you listen to Ringo’s drums, it just sounds wonderful, banging away in the background on something like Paperback Writer – it’s just unbeatable. And nowadays, if Green Day recorded that and it would just sound massive. You would be sick of it after about two plays.
RQ: In your top 10 of favorite albums is, of course, Jimi Hendrix. You talk about production and playing Hendrix on vinyl: that’s also an amazing experience, isn’t it?
CS: Yeah, that’s right. It almost makes you want to give up playing the guitar when you listen to his stuff because he’s just unbeatable. It has never been bettered. Eddie Van Halen was a wonderful guitar player and Allan Holdsworth can certainly twiddle about like the best of them really but Jimi Hendrix was just so darned inventive - that was the thing. I was lucky enough to turn up at the unveiling of a blue plaque on the wall of where Jimi used to live with Kathy Etchingham, his girlfriend in London in 1967 or whenever it was. I managed to get to the reception afterwards - I gatecrashed - and I was talking to Kathy Etchingham. She is absolutely a lovely woman and I could see why he went out with her. She is just so sweet. She doesn’t regret any of the lunacy of the ‘60s. She is married to a doctor now and she should not really be talking about, you know, substance abuse and stuff like that but she doesn’t regret anything and says Jimi was a lovely bloke. In fact, you don’t ever hear a bad word against him, do you? I mean, I have heard plenty of nasty comments about John Lennon, who apparently had a really dark side to him but Jimi Hendrix: you never hear a bad word ever about the bloke. I just so wish I met him.
RQ: If you don’t mind me changing the subject slightly: these days, you are involved in something very different from your music. I have wondered about this because you are now the spokesperson... and are you the founder of The Blah! Party?
CS: Yeah, well, it is either do The Blah! Party or chuck a brick through the television every time Bush or Blair appear. Basically that’s what it’s all about.
RQ: Was this entirely your idea? How did this come about?
CS: Yeah, I have wanted to do something like this for a long time. In fact, The Damned audiences have probably heard me waffling on when I’m on stage. You know, you open a newspaper and it makes you angry. They do all these things for some reason or another and it’s not good for the planet. We should all get on with each other, shouldn’t we? Just the fact that they spend so much money on arms, warfare and missiles and nonsense like that. If they didn’t spend a penny on it...they’d just have to try and get on with each other. I know it sounds a very simple thing to say, but if nobody had any armies and that, we would just have to talk more and fight less. That’s where it came from really. We are kind of cavemen still, aren’t we? It’s not an awful long time in the evolution of the planet since we were chasing after mammoths with sticks and now we have got these amazing weapons of mass destruction that Tony Blair keeps harping on about. We could destroy the planet many, many times over. To have those sort of weapons in the hands of cavemen is just daft and that’s the situation we find ourselves in. So I started The Blah! Party and it is very easy to do on the Internet with MySpace and the web. I’m just amazed how quickly it’s grown because we’ve got over 10,000 members now and we are actually one of the top 10 parties in Britain. They’re going to have to take us seriously and I have started to be invited onto the politics program on TV and stuff like that to debate with the so-called ‘proper politicians’, i.e. the a***holes to blame for all the ills of the planet. So, yeah, I’m having fun with it and I pontificate on all sorts of stuff on my blog. If people want to do it, it’s www.blahparty.org.
RQ: So let me ask you though: how do you reconcile your image, which is Captain Sensible - the fun image with the red beret - with this political party? Obviously it’s fun but at the same time you are actually making some quite serious points, aren’t you? How do you reconcile the two?
CS: First of all, if I thought that I would still be using the stage name Captain Sensible 30 years on, I would have changed it to something a bit more sensible! In those days, nobody in a punk group thought that it was going to last more than three weeks. I didn’t think I would be doing it for a year, let alone 30 years! Anyway, we all changed our names so that we could go down to the dole office and continue signing on to get our dole money. That was the real reason why there is a Sid Vicious and a Johnny Rotten. If your picture is in the paper with your real name - in the music paper - then they can hold it up and say: “Hold on, we’re not going to give you any money this week because obviously you are earning a fortune in a band.” So Captain Sensible it was. I know it’s a daft name and everything, but it is very serious what we are talking about.
RQ: You say that you actually get angry though when you turn on the television or read the newspaper?
CS: Very, very angry.
RQ: Again, the fun image that you have - certainly the ‘80s pop star that you were - that seems to conflict with that: the fact that this is actually very serious for you?
CS: Listen, all I want to do with my life is play the guitar and have a good time but you can’t ignore the fact that these megalomaniacs and these lunatics are destroying the planet. There is an oil man running the show at the moment and he doesn’t give a flying so and so for the environment or anything else. In fact, he’s been down to Brazil recently, hasn’t he, to check out this bio diesel so that they can keep all the energy needs of the world in the hands of the oil companies. I think everyone should take some responsibility for producing their own electricity because it’s easy to put a solar panel up on your roof or a wind generator or something like that. And if the Government started subsidizing these things then you find companies springing up all over the place making these products. That’s the way forward I think - do it yourself.
RQ: Have you always had these strong views: is this a vein that has been running through your work? If I look at what you have done: you have written a song called Yanks with Guns, for example. You have written a song called There are More Snakes than Ladders which would imply a sort cynicism about life on your part. Has this always been a part of who you are?
CS:
Yeah, what I did for my sins is I worked with Billy Bragg and Paul Weller for the election of the Labour Party in those grim years of Thatcher and Reagan. We didn’t know how good we had it, to be honest, when you look at what we have now. Anyway, we did our best to try and get the Labour Party elected in this country by getting young people interested in registering for voting and stuff like that. I was just so devastated when we finally got the Labour government in and it turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Tony Blair is anything but a Labour prime minister. He is more to the right of Thatcher than any of us could ever have imagined. So that’s where the “Blah” comes from really. I don’t want to be doing this: I want to be playing the guitar! But what can you do? You have got these lunatics running the show at the moment. If you turn on Fox News or read the newspapers over there, you wouldn’t think there were any alternative points of view, unless you go onto the Internet or stuff like that. People are getting their information from extremely biased places.
RQ: So let me ask you a final question if that is okay: has age mellowed you or are you getting increasingly angry as time goes by?
CS: (laughs) No, I am not getting mellower, that’s for sure! But I tell you what: as soon as I take The Blah! hat off, I am out there having a good time down the boozer with everyone else. They are about to ban smoking over here as well so it’s going to make things about 500 per cent more enjoyable down the pub in the future – it’s going to be fantastic.
RQ: Saying all of that, you still can’t buy a good plastic owl that does its job, can you?
CS: No, you can’t buy a good plastic owl. There are none on eBay that even look remotely like an owl. It’s a scandal, I say. Blah! to plastic owls that don’t look like owls!
Links:
http://www.captainsensible.com
http://www.blahparty.org
