10/ The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange [ Back to excerpts ]

Of course, when celebrity visits, you embrace it like a dear friend and hope it will stay for a while. I was as enthusiastic as anyone, and for a while I was invited to every party and opening, every reception and every media event. We had an amazing time. It was impossible to buy a drink because there was always someone who wanted to send me champagne. We never paid to go to the cinema because we got free tickets for every preview.

Nothing ever prepares you for the jaw-numbing tedium of celebrity. You never get used to the Interview Treadmill. The sheer bloody repetition, the knicker-wetting predictability of the questions, and the familiar feel of the words of your answer, as they form yet again in your mouth, like a meaningless mantra. From every direction I was pursued for my words of wisdom, for my analysis of the state of British Culture, or for the Meaning of Life. Every time I picked up the telephone it was someone calling from the radio, from a TV programme, from a newspaper, or a magazine. I would be confronted face-to-face on the street, they would even come cold calling to my home. Publicity is the fuel of celebrity, and is very seductive when it first comes knocking at your door, but after a very short while it becomes a bore and a nuisance. The interviews and the interviewers quickly lose whatever unique identifying features they may once have had, and all start to merge into one. All you are left with is the irritation when they over-run and the sense of affront when they under-run. You end up wondering, ' Which do I find more distasteful? The chippiness of the interviewer, or the obsequiousness.'

With media interest so intense, I knew that this was the time to get cracking with the new album, The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange, to try to get it finished while there was still a buzz about my name. I financed the recording of the album myself, with a bank loan, intending to pitch a finished album to record companies, rather than a collection of demo recordings. I sent Angus and Pete down to Drumbo's studio in Cornwall to rehearse, with a few quid in their pocket for beer money, while I did a few gigs in Europe alone with the Revox to earn the rent. I had briefed Drumbo as to what I was after, in terms of a sound and an atmosphere on the record, and, besides, he knew most of the songs from when I had recorded the backing tracks for my one-man show with him. Angus and Pete, who were barely in their twenties, and Drumbo, the veteran, worked like devils while I was away, and by the time I returned they had not only learned all the songs, but Drumbo had got them to start recording some of the basic backing tracks as well.

When he had taken the boys as far as they could go in his studio, he loaded his unwieldy 16-track tape-machine up onto a flat-bottomed boat and sailed it up the creek to Sawmills, his friend Simon Fraser's studio, near Fowey. There they transferred the backing tracks onto 24-track, two-inch tape, which was at that time the industry standard, and recorded the acoustic piano parts, played by a talented local kid called James J Hallawell. They recorded basic backing tracks for all ten songs while I was away, and I was very satisfied with the results. I was also very satisfied with the fact that I had completed a large chunk of the recording at a fraction of the price of a London studio.

The next stage was to bring the tapes up to London and book myself into Matrix Studios, just round the corner from the British Museum, in Bloomsbury. Matrix was a moderately priced, moderately well-equipped 24-track studio, which I knew was capable of turning out good quality finished product at a price that I could afford. Most notably, one of my all-time favourite records was made there, Marianne Faithfull's Broken English. I used one of the house engineers, Nick Bradford, to help me with the next stage of the process, the overdubbing, the vocals and the mixing. Nearly all the musicians I used on the record were friends who came to help out. Steve Boltz played extra guitar on a few tracks, and Dave Winthrop played saxes. The Scottish band Everest The Hard Way had played a few shows at Cabaret Futura, and at one point I was going to produce a record for them. Their keyboard player Jim Telford played synthesisers for me and TV Smith and Ross Middleton, from the highly-touted band Positive Noise, helped out on backing vocals. Rene and Boltz's wife provided female backing voices. The only bona fide session musician I used was the amazing African percussionist Rebop Kwaku Ba, a hugely likeable guy who had worked with all the great bands of the sixties and seventies. He arrived at the studio in his flowing African robes, with a fez perched at an alarming angle on his head and a car full of percussion instruments from around the world. We just ran the tracks for him once or twice, and he was so instinctive and switched on that we didnÕt really even have to tell him what to do. He just played like a dream and we put him on nearly every track somewhere, playing congas or shakers, tambourine or cabasa. He got his longest workout on the 12-inch version of International Language, and its B-side God is Science. Geno, who was by now aged five, came along to the studio a couple of times, and, as a fledgling drummer, fell madly in love with Rebop and his box of magic tricks.

While recording The Phenomenal Rise I was occasionally aware of a familiar-sounding voice emanating from the other studio. It was only when I went to make a cup of tea in the kitchen that I met its owner, Marianne Faithful. She was in the studio with her producer Mark Millar Munday once more, recording her follow-up album to the delicious bittersweet Broken English. I remember her going over and over a song called The Bitter Truth for days on end. Polishing and overdubbing, adding vocals and scrapping them, and finally starting again from scratch. It's a rather lovely song.

The songs on The Phenomenal Rise Of Richard Strange are, stylistically, quite diverse, but all are driven by their lyrics. On Top of the World is pushed along by the drums and bass in a repetitive pattern. Hearts and Minds is a jazzy, piano-led European cabaret-style song. Magic Man has pure noise and a sledgehammer intensity. Gutter Press is mutant rockabilly, International Language is mutant disco, Who Cries For Me? is almost folksy. Premonition is like a drugged up James White and The Blacks, The Road to the Room is like a modern-day religious epic and I Won't Run Away is a huge, self-indulgent, torch-song ballad in the style of No Regrets or My Way. I found the whole process of recording it immensely enjoyable, not least because I was able to make all my own decisions without worrying about other band members or record company hacks putting in their two-pennyworth. Winthrop and Boltz added fabulous top-line colours to the songs, and the cinematic power of the music was sufficient to be able to carry some over-wordy songs like The Road to the Room, the song that describes the scene when the main character is kidnapped, with a verse like:

The road to the room is enclosed inner space

A poisonous snake that links any two places

And I'm in a car as it races towards I don't know where

The car that I'm in has an anonymous driver

Our paths seemed to cross at some arbitrary juncture

And I donÕt know what happens next

And He doesn't care

My hearts in my mouth

There's a gun at my head and

My life's in their hands

Hand on my heart

My head understands ItÕs in their well-fed, mercenary, fascist hands.

 

Or in the closing song, I WonÕt Run Away, where the eponymous hero chooses death over dishonour:

I always felt that I Was not cut out to just get by

But to either be a beggar or a King

Now I have time to see that both these things are true of me

And now I'm man enough for anything

So what if things we planned

Now seem bizarre and out of hand

I did them all and I stood tall anyway

I won't walk out now on the things I believed all my life

I won't turn my back on the things I believe to be right

I may end up beaten, I may end up dead,

Stretched out on this floor with a gun at my head I don't care

I won't run away.

 

Once I had finished mixing the last of the tracks, I ran off some cassette copies to play at home and just lived with the mixes for a week or so to be sure that they sounded as good as we could get them. I had had a lot of record companies sniffing around since I came back from the States, and especially since the success of Cabaret Futura, and I knew I was in with a really good chance to become The Comeback Kid.

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