Discography + 2001 Mott Fanzine Interview revisited
This page contains my rather short discography - and an interview I did for a Mott The Hoople fanzine in 2001, which I have updated.
DISCOGRAPHY
Mott The Hoople:
1974 - album Mott The Hoople Live - Hammond Organ, Yamaha Keyboard
Dexys Midnight Runners:
1985 - track The Waltz on the album Don't Stand Me Down - Piano
- track Kevin Rowland's 13th Time on 2002 re-issue of Don't Stand Me Down - Piano. On the accompanying DVD the music which repeats on the menu page is my piano solo on Kevin Rowland's 13th Time
1986 - track Marguerita Time on the single This is What She's Like - Hammond Organ
1986 - track Kathleen Mavourneen - Hammond Organ
1986 - single Because Of You (theme to Brush Strokes) - Keyboard, Hammond Organ
1986 - Sometime Theme - Keyboard
Kevin Rowland:
1988 - track The Way You Look Tonight (issued on the 12" single Walk Away) - Piano. Recorded 1984.
Paul Brady:
1987 - tracks Soul Commotion, I Think It's Gonna Be Alright, Paradise Is Here, The Awakening on the album Primitive Dance - Hammond Organ
- single Paradise Is Here - Hammond Organ
Balloon:
1991 - album Gravity - Piano, Hammond Organ
Linda McCartney:
2001 - tracks Endless Days Lonely Nights and Poison Ivy on the album Wide Prairie - Piano, Keyboard, Backing Vocals
*********************************************************************************************
In 2001 I was interviewed for the Mott The Hoople Appreciation Society magazine - called TWO MILES FROM HEAVEN. The original interview was conducted over the phone by Keith Smith, the editor. With Keith's kind permission I've reproduced it here. The interview was done ten years ago so I've amended some of my answers and added some extra bits and pieces.
You originally come from Wigan don't you Mick? When did you first move down to London?
Yeah, that's right - Wigan, Lancashire. The first time I moved down to the London area was when I was a student teacher at St Mary's College, Twickenham. That was in 1966 until 1969 - a great time to be in London. There was so much good music around.
I remember I used to go the 'Midnight Court' all-night concerts at the Lyceum in the Strand. That was just brilliant. You'd go in at 11pm and emerge at about 6am. You'd see about three or four bands each night - people like Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac and Yes, all on the same night.
I saw Spooky Tooth there - that's one of my best memories of that time. I was about ten feet from the front, right in the middle. I can still picture Luther standing centre stage - churning out these wonderful solos. Brilliant! If someone had nudged me and said: 'you'll be up on stage with him in a few years time', I'd have thought they were mad. I hadn't even thought of joining a band at that time.
How about your early musical influences? Who were you listening to?
I loved The Band, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell. I liked Free, Man, Argent, Zeppelin. And I was always very much into classical music.
How about your own early musical experiences? I believe you were in a band called White Myth?
White Myth was the first band I was in. I left teacher training college in 1969. I didn't finish the course - I was more interested in going to see bands than studying, so I was given the choice - either leave or get dismissed. So I left. I joined that band in 1969 playing an old Farfisa organ with a plastic top - complete with cigarette burns. Horrible sounding thing.
We intended to do original material. We called ourselves a progressive blues band, but we never very good at that. Then we found we could get regular gigs and actually get paid by covering the hits of the time. We still did a few original songs though. White Myth used to gig all over the North - steaming across the Pennines in an old beat-up Ford Transit.
I was with them for about two years until about 1971 when I joined a band called Blind Eye, which seemed like a step up at the time as they were a well-respected blues-rock band in the Lancashire area. We played some good gigs, such as supporting Slade at the Parr Hall in Warrington. We were playing quite a few of my songs and hoping to get a record deal, but then it all came to an end when our manager just upped and left and was never seen again! So I moved down to London in 1972 hoping to get into a band.
I joined a band that never really had a proper name. Our manager wanted to call us Clockwork Orange, and he planned to make us look and act like the characters in the film - but that was never really going to happen. Still, he bought us some equipment and rented us a flat so that we could work on our songs - so we did some gigs under that name. For a while our lead singer was John Butler, who was later with Luther Grosvenor in Widowmaker. He went on to form his own band - Diesel Park West. We never actually gigged with him - we rehearsed for a few months and he left before we played live. I took over on vocals along with the guitarist Steve Donovan. We played a lot of clubs in Soho including one called La Poubelle - I thought that was a classy-sounding French name, until I found out that it meant 'The Dustbin'. We also played at the Pheasantry and the Whiskey a-Go-Go. In early 1973 that band had split up and in May I saw an advert in Melody Maker for a piano-player and a Hammond organist and that turned out to be Mott. I went along and auditioned for the piano job.
What can you remember about your audition with Mott The Hoople?
I think it was mostly a jam. They may have asked me to play along to some of their own stuff though. I remember they asked me to play something of my own. So I just a bashed out a boogie. I didn't think I'd played very well so I didn't hold out much hope.
Did you know much about Mott's material?
No, not really. But I knew they were a big band. I knew 'All The Young Dudes' of course and I'd heard some of their earlier stuff - I remembered it having a bit of a Dylanish sound. In those days it wasn't as easy to hear music - if something didn't come on the radio, you didn't get to hear it unless you were looking for it.
Stan Tippins rang me a couple of days after the audition and said: 'I'm really sorry, but there was this guy who was just what we were looking for'. That was Morgan Fisher. Stan wished me well for the future and I thought that was the end of it. I wasn't particularly disappointed as I didn't really expect to get the job. But then Stan rang back a few days later and asked me if I played Hammond Organ. I'd never really played a Hammond (apart from when I jumped up on stage with Deep Purple to play a couple of songs at an instrument demonstration in Manchester - Jon Lord hadn't turned up and they invited someone up to play a couple of songs). But I said: 'yes, of course I can play Hammond'. I'd played organ with all my previous bands, so I knew it wasn't going to be a problem. So I was given the job. Stan sent me some Mott albums and a list of the songs they expected to be playing. I went back to Wigan for a week and borrowed the organ at the local workingman's club to rehearse the songs. Then I came back down to London to start rehearsals with the band.
After the rehearsals we flew off for the first US tour. I'd never even flown before so the whole experience was quite dramatic - lurching into the sky on an Air India jumbo jet for New York City. After some production rehearsals in NYC we flew to Chicago for our first concert - at the Aragon Ballroom, which to me was huge at the time. I wrote a song called Rainbow Over Michigan which was inspired by all that - though the details actually relate to the second time we played Chicago when there was a huge thunderstorm over the city.
I understand that on that US tour you and Morgan used to room together. The new boys, eh?
Yeah. I just re-read Morgan's interview in TMFH where he talks about us rooming together. We got on really well, but I was definitely the quiet one! He mentioned that maybe I wasn't happy being in the band, but actually I was. I was really, really happy being in the band. But I can understand why it might have looked as though I wasn't - I was just so introverted back then. I never had much to say. Actually I loved every minute - the gigs, the audiences, the travelling.
Probably anyone would appear introverted next to Luther!
Yeah, there were some mad scenes. There's one image of him that's always stuck in my mind. The UK tour was in winter and he went everywhere wearing this enormous full-length grey fur coat - imitation fur I think. I can still picture the look of horror on the faces of a very straight looking American tourist in the lobby of a hotel in Edinburgh, when what looked like a grizzly bear in a floppy pale blue hat wobbled towards them on platform clogs, shoved a cigarette under her nose and growled, 'have you got a light mate?' He hasn't changed much, as I found out when I sat next to him at the 2010 premier of the Ballad Of Mott The Hoople documentary.
There were lots of laughs when we were on tour and I know the other guys have all commented on that as well in their interviews. Mostly it was a double act between Morgan and Luther, with additional material by Overend Watts! A lot of that was unrepeatable but Buffin and Pete specialised in spoonerisms - and still do. Most bands I've been in have had some running joke - with the Paul Brady band it was rhyming slang as in the phrase: 'I'll meet in you in the Leamington for a Germaine'. (Leamington Spa = bar; Germaine Greer = beer). With Mott it was spoonerisms - juxtaposing the letters or syllables of words. So when we were driving to the Hammersmith Odeon and someone said: 'I believe Jack will be here tonight', we all knew that he meant Jack Migger of the Rolling Stones. The Blue Oyster Cult became Coy Ulster Bloot and the Moody Blues became the Bloody Moos - which seemed somehow quite appropriate. It wasn't uncommon to see a bemused look on the face of a hotel receptionist trying to understand Pete complaining to Stan Tippins about the sleeping arrangements in his room - 'Stan, there's only a Bengal Sid in my room - I need a dead bubble'. (single bed, double bed). During the 2009 reunion gigs I spent an evening with some friends at the flat that Morgan was renting. As I was leaving I asked him if he had a dead bubble or a Bengal Sid - he said: 'no, I've got Ben Twids'.
Was there ever a chance that you could have contributed songs to Mott The Hoople? Did you ever bring any of your own songs into rehearsals?
Well, we hardly ever had any rehearsals while I was with them - just the initial rehearsals when Morgan and I joined - and then again when Luther joined.
If I'd stayed with them I'd like to think I would have had some creative input. I left before they started working on The Hoople album, but I read an article in TMFH about the creation of that album and Buffin commented: 'and Mick Bolton had some good ideas'. After every concert I would go out on the stage and sit at the grand piano while the road crew were clearing up the equipment. I would mess around with a few ideas for songs and sometimes various members of the band would hear what I was doing and show an interest. Just before I left I was given a small advance from the publishing company - so hopefully one or two of my idea might have been knocked into shape and become Mott songs.
The first time I saw you was on Top Of The Pops with Roll Away The Stone. Were you excited to be appearing on TV? Was that one of your ambitions prior to you joining MTH?
I suppose it had been before I joined Mott, but suddenly everything like that became part of the job. It was great and I loved it. I'm not going to say it didn't seem special but once you were in that position it was just what you did. My wife Carol and I went along to watch them recording Honaloochie Boogie there too - and we danced with the studio audience. It was funny to see the audience being herded around like sheep from one stage to the other. It was interesting being in TV studios and seeing various things that go on and meeting interesting people - standing next to actors dressed in 19th century costumes in the queue in the canteen - talking to Kenneth Williams at the Wogan show, when I appeared there with Dexys Midnight Runners. He put his arm round our friend Stella and said in his best Carry On voice: 'Ooooh, you're lovely aren't you!!' We were having complimentary drinks in the green room when we spotted a lady washing wine glasses in a bucket of dirty water. We got talking to her and she said (in an accent similar to Mrs Cravat in the Tony Hancock Show): 'typical BBC - cheapskates, that's what they are. They just don't give me the facilities'. When we were at the Burbank studios Near LA I went into another studio and sat in the audience watching Lucille Ball recording a comedy show. We did three TV shows in the States - the Midnight Special and Don Kirshner's Rock Show in Los Angeles - and a show for ABC TV in New York City.
Can you remember much about the Hammersmith Odeon gig in December 1973?
I remember seeing the curtain coming down and Luther getting stuck out there in front of it - and wondering if we'd ever get him back. You could hear his guitar sort of coughing and spluttering. It sounded like he was getting torn to pieces.
That was night I left the band. I had come to hold certain religious beliefs at the time and I just decided that being in the band wasn't compatible with them. I probably took things to an extreme - I wasn't involved at all in music for several years after that.
That UK winter tour featured Queen as support. Did you get to know them well?
Yeah, Carol and I often sat chatting with Brian when we stopped at a motorway café. Actually I'd seen them before - when I was in White Myth we had supported them at St Helen's Technical College. I watched them a few times when they supported Mott - I thought they were a pretty good rock band, but I never imagined they would go on to achieve what they did. I'd actually seen Freddie in about 1970 at an open-air festival in Bolton. He was fronting a band called Ibex. I remember him singing Communication Breakdown and Johnny B Goode.
Mott were supported by a lot of different bands in the States. Have you any memories of the New York Dolls or Iggy Pop?
I've got the same memory of Iggy as Morgan mentioned in his interview. Morgan and I were walking along the hotel corridor and Iggy stuck his head out of the door and asked us if we had any drugs. He was asking the wrong band - I never saw any members of Mott taking anything ever - apart from copious amounts of alcohol. We always had two large dustbins in the dressing room crammed with ice and lots of different drinks.
I don't think the audiences understood the N Y Dolls - they were booed a lot of the time. Of course with hindsight Mott and the Dolls and Iggy were a great combination. Joe Walsh and Barnstorm were probably the best support act we had. Aerosmith were another band who supported us and went on to much bigger things.
Did you have any problems with redneck types in the States?
I nearly did. We were in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We were booked to play a festival with Santana but our equipment didn't make it in time, so we didn't play. I walked out to the edge of town to the stadium on my own to see Santana - I was rather disappointed in them as they seemed to be going through a mellow jazz phase at the time and I was hoping to see them doing their Abraxas type material.
I was walking back to the hotel, when I suddenly realised I was in a military town and there were dozens of young clean-cut soldiers hanging about outside bars watching me walking past with my long hair, flares and platform shoes. I suddenly felt threatened, especially when I passed a bar and had to walk out into the road to avoid a crowd that had gathered around someone who was lying on the floor bleeding. Finally I was within sight of the hotel and there were these guys walking towards me. They probably weren't going to do anything, but I kind of panicked and jumped in a cab for the final few hundred yards. I must have really panicked - I'm too stingy to pay for a cab normally!
Did you ever regret leaving Mott The Hoople?
It would have been difficult for me to be in the band whilst pursuing the religious beliefs that I had, but I wish I had stayed longer and been involved in making the next album (The Hoople) and then being on the next US tour. Of course the band broke up in 1974 anyway, but I wish I had been involved to the end.
I was thinking about things like missing the chance to play on Broadway.
Yeah, I know, but I played the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, which was pretty unusual for a rock band. And there were some other great venues - the Kennedy Centre, the Forum in Philadelphia and two nights at Bill Graham's Winterland.
You said you dropped out of music for a while. When did you start getting back into playing again?
In 1977 I started playing in pubs in Blackpool where I lived - it was easy money. Then we decided to move back down to London and I started playing in pubs there, but then in 1984 I saw another ad in the Melody Maker for a piano player. This was for Dexys Midnight Runners. They narrowed it down to two of us - me and Vincent Crane, who had been in Atomic Rooster and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. It took them about three weeks to make up their minds by listening to the tapes of me and Vince at the auditions. Finally Vince got the job and he went off with the band to record in Montreux.
They recorded the whole album, but then a few weeks later Kevin Rowland phoned and said: 'we made a mistake and we want you to play on the album instead'. So I started rehearsing with them and and recorded the whole album in a studio in Kensington. When it was finished they said: 'we'll give you a call when we're going to promote the album and go on tour.' About a week later I phoned the organist Bob Noble and asked him what he had been up to. He said 'haven't you heard, we've just done the whole album again.' They'd got Vincent back on piano and a new drummer and bass player. So the Don't Stand Me Down album was finally made up of tracks from all three recording sessions. Great album though!
So what was the problem there then?
Well it wasn't really a problem. Kevin just had very definite ideas about what he wanted and he chose whichever musicians he thought could give him it. He insisted on recording everything live with no overdubs at all. He'd had big hits with Geno and Come On Eileen and I think he must have thought he could spend as much time and money on making the album as he wanted and it wouldn't matter. He refused to put out a single - he saw the album as a whole entity. And of course, that just wasn't the way you promoted albums back in the eighties - there had to be a hit single. I toured with Dexys in 1985 - side by side with my old rival Vincent Crane - him on piano and me on Hammond.
We did a few gigs in France and then a UK tour, finishing with three nights at the Dominion in London. We did some TV - The Tube and the Wogan Show but the album didn't sell as well as expected although it reached number six in the charts. I've still got a tape of one of the shows - at the Colston Hall in Bristol and some of it sounds just brilliant - an eleven-piece band giving it everything they've got.
Didn't Woody Woodmansey play drums with Dexys for a while? Did he play with them at the same time as you?
Yeah, that's right. He was in the first line up that I was with, recording the album. I don't think he enjoyed the experience too much though. It was the middle of summer '84 and at one point Kevin gave the rest of the band a break for a week. He got Woody in the studio on his own with an electronic metronome. Woody used to ring me every night and say: 'this is driving me mad - I can hear that thing going beep-beep in my sleep'. They used it to try to get every drum beat in exactly the right place, as they saw it - slightly behind the beat. Still, as Kevin sang in one of his songs: 'my name is Kevin Rowland, I'm the leader of the band'.
It's strange that I've never met a Mott fan who liked Dexys - and vice-versa! Actually, they were both great bands - very different from the other music that was around in their respective times. And playing in Dexys was a great experience - an eleven-piece rock band including acoustic and electric guitars, piano, Hammond Organ, a brass section, violin and a pedal-steel guitar. When the whole lot was playing at full-tilt it was as powerful as anything I've ever heard.
It's weird - Woody from the Spiders From Mars and you from Mott together in Dexys Midnight Runners.
Yes - and the bass player for a while was Trevor Burton of The Move. That line-up came to an end after we recorded the album and they got in some American players - bass player and drummer from Memphis and steel guitar player from Nashville. There was talk of a touring in Japan and the US, but the band split at the end of the UK tour in '85. I did a couple of things with Kevin Rowland after that - in 1986 we recorded a song called Because Of You which became the theme music to a TV show called Brush Strokes - and in 1988 I appeared with Kevin on The Last Resort (Jonathan Ross' TV chat show) playing the Chris Montez song The More I See You.
You also played and recorded with Paul Brady, didn't you?
Yes. I joined his band in 1986. For those who don't know, he's an Irish singer/songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, David Crosby, Jackson Browne and others. Working with him was one the most enjoyable things I've done. He's just a fantastic live performer. He'd start off with a few acoustic songs, then bring on the band and take the show up to a peak about half way through - then he would drop it right down to just piano and guitar for a song called The Island. I remember that at every concert the audience would be spellbound as he sang that song, which is about the troubles in northern Ireland. Then the band would come back on and we'd have them all rocking again. He would usually end with Steel Claw which is a song that Tina Turner recorded on her Private Dancer album. He'd get a fantastic reaction from every audience we played to including on the US tour in 1991 when many of the people we played to had never heard of him - especially in small clubs in the mid-west where they just turned up because there was some music on that night. They were all Paul Brady fans by the end of the night though.
I recorded an album with him in 1986 called Primitive Dance. We did lots of TV in Europe and Ireland including a documentary that included live footage from a concert in Cork.
What else had you been up to during this time?
I also worked with Linda McCartney between 1987 and 1995. I had my name down with an agency as a keyboard player and they contacted me to ask if I gave lessons. I said that I didn't, but then they said it was Linda that was looking for some tuition, so I agreed and became her keyboard coach. I would travel down from London to the farm near Rye in East Sussex and we would sit at a couple of keyboards knocking out old rock and roll songs like Ain't That A Shame and High Heeled Sneakers. One day we were working on one of her songs called Endless Days. She said that she felt it needed a little something extra in the middle. She went out of the room to make a cup of tea and when she came back I had written an eight bar section complete with lyrics. That was a very profitable cup of tea - I recorded the song with her and it was included on the album Wide Prairie that Paul McCartney put together after she died.
One day I was standing outside the house talking to Linda and I was vaguely aware of someone cleaning out the stables about a hundred yards away. The 'farmhand' started walking over towards us and as he got up close it was Paul, holding out his hand and saying, 'sorry to offer you such a horsey hand to shake'. Sometimes when I arrived in the morning I would have breakfast with Linda and Paul and I was impressed to see that Paul would set off for his studio at the same time every day with his briefcase in his hand as if he was going to a regular job - which I suppose he was really. I also got to play with Paul and his band in his studio He put as much effort into his performance just messing around in the studio as he does on stage in front of thousands. I'd never realised what a great singer he is until I played with him. Linda kept in touch over the years - sending us cards and calendars. When I worked with her I used to have to travel down from London and it was very sad that she died just after we moved down to Hastings which is about 15 minutes away from the farm. She was a lovely lady - she used to spend ages on the phone talking to my wife. I sometimes felt a bit guilty though when I had ham sandwiches in my briefcase for the journey home.
Another strange job that I found myself doing was teaching French to Michael Jackson's sister Latoyah. She was making some backing tapes for some live gigs in Paris and I was playing keyboards on them. It was in 1990 in a tiny studio in Hoxton Square in London. I overheard her manager say, 'OK, when is this French guy going to turn up?'. She was recording La Vie En Rose and Je Ne Regrette Rien in French and they had hired a French teacher to help her. I'd done A-level French, so when he didn't turn up I offered my services and earned an extra 200 quid for going through the songs teaching her the pronunciation. It was all a bit of a struggle for her and I remember her manager saying, 'it's OK honey - just put a rose between your teeth and they'll love you.'
What did you do after you finished working with Paul Brady in 1991?
I played my last gig with him at the Thurles festival near Tipperary and flew out the next day to embark on my 'career' as a solo piano-player in Norway. I arrived in Norway to find that their version of a piano bar is a bit different from the usual image of a piano bar as a sophisticated place with a candelabra on the piano and ice tinkling in cocktail glasses. It was all these rabid Vikings clattering their pint mugs together and demanding I play Rawhide and Great Balls Of Fire twenty times a night.
I played one place - it was 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle - in February. I was there for a month - starting at 10pm and finishing at 3am every night. The place was packed every night - the grand piano would be surrounded by people swaying from side to side with the music, shouting out requests and flinging money in a bowl on top of the piano. Sometimes I had to restrain them from climbing up on the glass piano lid. I had a brilliant time there and the scenery was fantastic - all fjords and Northern Lights. I went to Denmark a few times too and also Dresden in Germany.
Would you work with a band again?
Yes, if the right opportunity came along? I've been playing with some excellent musicians here in Hastings, but I enjoy playing solo too and I do a lot of gigs in hotels just along the coast in Eastbourne. I like playing as a duo with just a drummer - that way we don't need to rehearse much. I can change arrangements as I please without anyone else needing to know the chords.
Have you done much song writing over the years?
Not as much as I should have done. I play my own stuff at my gigs and people seem to love it, but I've never really tried to earn any money at it. You'd think I would have learned from the Linda McCartney cup of tea episode that the rewards can greatly outstrip the effort involved. I entered a song in the UK Songwriting Contest in 2008 and it reached the finals and another one reached the semi-finals in 2009, so I know my songs are good, but I just need to motivate myself to actually do something with them! There are some good venues nearby where people sit and listen to original material. I played one such place a couple of weeks ago with a drummer called Phil Little. We played about forty minutes of my own songs and the audience reaction was fantastic, so I really must make a point of recording a CD soon and see where that takes me.
*************************************************************************************************