Don't Tell Tom interview with Mike Rudd
0 Comments Published by Mazz on Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 12:13 AM.
I'm really not sure if we'll end up using the interview we conducted with Mike at the Don't Tell Tom gig, as we really should have put a light up or something. There's documentary footage, and then there's documentary footage. This interview footage falls in to the category of "they didn't know what they were doing" or the "they had no money" category. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), for us it was the latter. It was probably the most well-lit spot at the venue! But the interview is too interesting just to throw away, so here's the obligatory transcript for you. Our interviewer was Aidan, our camera man. Not a bad job for his first interview!
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Aidan:This must be just one of many gigs for you over the years, do you still get nervous before you go on?
Mike: Before a gig like this no, but if you’re in a different situation, that’s when you’re likely to get nervous and, while this is different, there’s nobody here! So I’m not nervous, just disappointed – shattered!
Do you think in a new environment you get a certain buzz, if not nerves? Or would nerves spur you on to do different things on stage?
Nerves can be counter-productive, but I think… yeah, I find nerves mostly counter-productive in fact. I actually prefer to be in a routine situation and being able to muck around with that, and get enjoyment that way – mucking around with a standard situation.
How many gigs do you think you have done over all the years, if you could possibly put a number on it?
No, I couldn’t possibly! But it would be thousands. We don’t work as much as we used to, but we used to work… well in the seventies we’d be working half a dozen times a week on average, and now we’re lucky if we do one or two gigs a week. So it’s a completely different kind of ratio.
Why do you feel that writing is your thing to do?
It’s hard for me to say, because I haven’t done a lot of writing recently (which is a bit of a problem, really). Although, when I say I haven’t written – I haven’t written any lyrics lately. It’s mostly… I can’t actually stop. If I pick up a guitar, at the end of half an hour or so of noodling, or doodling, or whatever, I’ve usually come up with something. What I’m looking for in that situation is kind of a unique combination of chords or something that spurs my interest, and stick them together and I’ve got a fragment of music. Now I’ve got, I would say I’ve got thousands of fragments of music sitting around waiting for me to put them together. And what generally tends to happen is that you write them in a series, so you get a particular idea and then you’ll get a series of ideas that are based around that idea. So, possibly in a week or so, you’d come up with a whole bunch of ideas that you later have to come back and address, and find out which is the best of them.
So does that mean that you would write the music before you go with the lyrics?
Yeah, I’m afraid so. That makes it pretty hard. It’s much better if I can come up with a lyrical idea, and to do that really I have to be moved, and I’m not often moved!
Do you care though, if you were just to write a purely melodic piece and not worry about having any lyrics?
Well, we do! Bill and I between us write quite a few instrumentals, and that’s quite nice. But ultimately it’s better if you can come up with a song that says something. And I guess I have standards in the sense that I don’t just write a song for a song’s sake – it has to actually say something if you’re writing it for yourself. It’d be great to be commissioned, and I have been commissioned a few times to write songs, and that’s a challenge. But it’s kind of good because you don’t have to live up to your own high standards, you know, somebody else’s standards that may or may not be as high. Or they may be just something different, but they’re providing a subject.
So those times when you were commercial, was that because other people (well, the public) liked what you were doing, or were you trying to be commercial?
I think it’s very hard to be commercial. Really, what the sixties musician replaced was a bunch of writers getting together and trying to hammer out pop songs, and we changed that. But, in a sense, Spectrum were lucky in that I wrote a song that was immediately appealing for my first song, so we kind of never looked back, really. But it’s still my biggest hit, but I didn’t really try to write it as a hit song. Having said that, it did evolve from a song without harmonica to a song with harmonica, and the harmonica proved to be the hook that captured everybody’s imagination at the time. So I guess you are looking for the best way for the song to work.
What would you say is Spectrum’s hook that draws the attention of people – that people enjoy?
Now?
Not necessarily now, but over the course of the years.
It’s hard to know. I mean, we still appeal to that same group of people that we appealed to in the first place, so that’s kind of grown with us. And they understand, probably better than we do, where we’re coming from. And Spectrum is a clunky sort of old name, but it actually is quite apt because we tend to cover quite a bit of musical ground within our own abilities, and we don’t feel restricted by genre, in particular. So we’ll go from blues to – which we do a bunch of blues covers, which I enjoy doing – but we’ll do that and we’ll do songs that are maybe a hint of reggae, and a hint of this, and a hint of that; eclectic, you know. So we don’t feel bounded by any particular restrictions of style and that’s what our audience has come to expect – is us to be doing something different, and something that’s probably uniquely us, because it’s translated through our musical ability (or lack of it).
So what is it that’s brought you here tonight to Don’t Tell Tom?
Well this is really speculative in a sense, but it’s serving a purpose because we have some releases coming up. We’ve got a new Spectrum album coming up and we’ve got a couple of our original albums – when I say original, the ones that came out in the seventies being reissued on CD – and so there’s going to be some launches coming up and I wanted to work in a whole bunch of different things and one of them was Hugh McSpedden’s light show. It takes about three months for Hugh to grind into action, so this is our first night with Hugh, and I expect it will develop from here until it becomes some kind of show. At the moment it will probably be fairly disjointed and that sort of stuff, but we have to start somewhere.
What is the significance of Hugh’s light show?
Well Hugh was famous for the giant Edison Screw back in the TF Much Ballroom days, and as well as being in the Leaping McSpedden Brothers and The Human Alphabet, and so forth, but Hugh’s show, he uniquely adapted a projection show based on oils and his knowledge of the songs. So he would have… we wouldn’t actually be aware of what was going on behind us, so we would really get half the show. We would just concentrate on the music, and there was all this other show going on in the background which we weren’t a party to. But everybody told us it was fantastic, you know, and knowing Hugh, I mean he is a really original guy.
Why did you choose to do it here?
Well, there’s not many gigs that we do that have got the elevation to put on a light show. So, as I said, it’s a speculative gig. I’m not sure how the sound will be, but it should be great for the projections!
Well we’ll probably finish up shortly because you need to be on…
Yeah, yeah…
But just to finish up… Obviously you love music – that seems to be your purpose…
In existing? Yeah…
Why do you feel that is? What is it about it that you love so much that keeps you here?
Well that’s an interesting question and I can only provide probably a pretty clichéd answer. It’s a permanent challenge. Music is a kind of something you’re always looking for perfection in, and I never seem to get there. But I’m enjoying it more now than I used to. I don’t know what that means; it maybe means that I’m relaxing a little bit, as I get older. But I still think there’s a lot of challenges there, and I don’t know where I fit in the overall scheme of things but if I’m given time (please God, give me time!) I might eventually find it, you know. So it’s a search – a search and a challenge.
____________________________
Many thanks to Mike for taking time out to chat with us before the gig. Hopefully we'll get some well-lit interesting tid-bits soon!
____________________________
Aidan:This must be just one of many gigs for you over the years, do you still get nervous before you go on?
Mike: Before a gig like this no, but if you’re in a different situation, that’s when you’re likely to get nervous and, while this is different, there’s nobody here! So I’m not nervous, just disappointed – shattered!
Do you think in a new environment you get a certain buzz, if not nerves? Or would nerves spur you on to do different things on stage?
Nerves can be counter-productive, but I think… yeah, I find nerves mostly counter-productive in fact. I actually prefer to be in a routine situation and being able to muck around with that, and get enjoyment that way – mucking around with a standard situation.
How many gigs do you think you have done over all the years, if you could possibly put a number on it?
No, I couldn’t possibly! But it would be thousands. We don’t work as much as we used to, but we used to work… well in the seventies we’d be working half a dozen times a week on average, and now we’re lucky if we do one or two gigs a week. So it’s a completely different kind of ratio.
Why do you feel that writing is your thing to do?
It’s hard for me to say, because I haven’t done a lot of writing recently (which is a bit of a problem, really). Although, when I say I haven’t written – I haven’t written any lyrics lately. It’s mostly… I can’t actually stop. If I pick up a guitar, at the end of half an hour or so of noodling, or doodling, or whatever, I’ve usually come up with something. What I’m looking for in that situation is kind of a unique combination of chords or something that spurs my interest, and stick them together and I’ve got a fragment of music. Now I’ve got, I would say I’ve got thousands of fragments of music sitting around waiting for me to put them together. And what generally tends to happen is that you write them in a series, so you get a particular idea and then you’ll get a series of ideas that are based around that idea. So, possibly in a week or so, you’d come up with a whole bunch of ideas that you later have to come back and address, and find out which is the best of them.
So does that mean that you would write the music before you go with the lyrics?
Yeah, I’m afraid so. That makes it pretty hard. It’s much better if I can come up with a lyrical idea, and to do that really I have to be moved, and I’m not often moved!
Do you care though, if you were just to write a purely melodic piece and not worry about having any lyrics?
Well, we do! Bill and I between us write quite a few instrumentals, and that’s quite nice. But ultimately it’s better if you can come up with a song that says something. And I guess I have standards in the sense that I don’t just write a song for a song’s sake – it has to actually say something if you’re writing it for yourself. It’d be great to be commissioned, and I have been commissioned a few times to write songs, and that’s a challenge. But it’s kind of good because you don’t have to live up to your own high standards, you know, somebody else’s standards that may or may not be as high. Or they may be just something different, but they’re providing a subject.
So those times when you were commercial, was that because other people (well, the public) liked what you were doing, or were you trying to be commercial?
I think it’s very hard to be commercial. Really, what the sixties musician replaced was a bunch of writers getting together and trying to hammer out pop songs, and we changed that. But, in a sense, Spectrum were lucky in that I wrote a song that was immediately appealing for my first song, so we kind of never looked back, really. But it’s still my biggest hit, but I didn’t really try to write it as a hit song. Having said that, it did evolve from a song without harmonica to a song with harmonica, and the harmonica proved to be the hook that captured everybody’s imagination at the time. So I guess you are looking for the best way for the song to work.
What would you say is Spectrum’s hook that draws the attention of people – that people enjoy?
Now?
Not necessarily now, but over the course of the years.
It’s hard to know. I mean, we still appeal to that same group of people that we appealed to in the first place, so that’s kind of grown with us. And they understand, probably better than we do, where we’re coming from. And Spectrum is a clunky sort of old name, but it actually is quite apt because we tend to cover quite a bit of musical ground within our own abilities, and we don’t feel restricted by genre, in particular. So we’ll go from blues to – which we do a bunch of blues covers, which I enjoy doing – but we’ll do that and we’ll do songs that are maybe a hint of reggae, and a hint of this, and a hint of that; eclectic, you know. So we don’t feel bounded by any particular restrictions of style and that’s what our audience has come to expect – is us to be doing something different, and something that’s probably uniquely us, because it’s translated through our musical ability (or lack of it).
So what is it that’s brought you here tonight to Don’t Tell Tom?
Well this is really speculative in a sense, but it’s serving a purpose because we have some releases coming up. We’ve got a new Spectrum album coming up and we’ve got a couple of our original albums – when I say original, the ones that came out in the seventies being reissued on CD – and so there’s going to be some launches coming up and I wanted to work in a whole bunch of different things and one of them was Hugh McSpedden’s light show. It takes about three months for Hugh to grind into action, so this is our first night with Hugh, and I expect it will develop from here until it becomes some kind of show. At the moment it will probably be fairly disjointed and that sort of stuff, but we have to start somewhere.
What is the significance of Hugh’s light show?
Well Hugh was famous for the giant Edison Screw back in the TF Much Ballroom days, and as well as being in the Leaping McSpedden Brothers and The Human Alphabet, and so forth, but Hugh’s show, he uniquely adapted a projection show based on oils and his knowledge of the songs. So he would have… we wouldn’t actually be aware of what was going on behind us, so we would really get half the show. We would just concentrate on the music, and there was all this other show going on in the background which we weren’t a party to. But everybody told us it was fantastic, you know, and knowing Hugh, I mean he is a really original guy.
Why did you choose to do it here?
Well, there’s not many gigs that we do that have got the elevation to put on a light show. So, as I said, it’s a speculative gig. I’m not sure how the sound will be, but it should be great for the projections!
Well we’ll probably finish up shortly because you need to be on…
Yeah, yeah…
But just to finish up… Obviously you love music – that seems to be your purpose…
In existing? Yeah…
Why do you feel that is? What is it about it that you love so much that keeps you here?
Well that’s an interesting question and I can only provide probably a pretty clichéd answer. It’s a permanent challenge. Music is a kind of something you’re always looking for perfection in, and I never seem to get there. But I’m enjoying it more now than I used to. I don’t know what that means; it maybe means that I’m relaxing a little bit, as I get older. But I still think there’s a lot of challenges there, and I don’t know where I fit in the overall scheme of things but if I’m given time (please God, give me time!) I might eventually find it, you know. So it’s a search – a search and a challenge.
____________________________
Many thanks to Mike for taking time out to chat with us before the gig. Hopefully we'll get some well-lit interesting tid-bits soon!
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