It’s all of those things – and all of those things were Adam And The Ants really – when we started working on the stuff we spent a long time trying to make it sound as old as possible and even going back to kind of a pre-seventies sound, a kind of Motown – not that it actually sounds like Motown – but that was kind of the idea in our head, and we played to a couple of people who are our age and they said ‘no no no – you’ve got to remix it… it sounds too old, it doesn’t sound fresh…’
You’re right it is that whole loop thing… so these people are in their late-forties and they are doing that kind of ‘hey man you’ve got to be down with the kids’ thing and for a few minutes I actually bought in to all that bollocks! But then we started playing it to twenty year-olds and they were saying ‘yeah it sounds great, it sounds modern’ blah blah blah which just goes to prove that you should never, never try to be down with the kids!
It’s funny… I don’t know if all this stuff, all the things you’re talking about, is deliberate but it’s definitely the kind of things that I like. I always really liked Teddyboys when I was growing up as a teenager, even though I grew up as a teenager in the seventies and there weren’t really many teddy boys around… and then that’s what attracted me to to the SEX shop and the whole punk thing.
For me, yeah definitely… punk kind of came from all that, it kind of mutated from there – funnily enough it did come out of that whole Showaddywaddy, mutated, seventies-view of teddy boys with Wizzard and that sort of thing.
Um… yeah I do… I’m trying to think of what they are really. Yes I do, but much like you and your website I look back and have a particular period, a particular year even – I think it was 1972 – and all the music from that year and from that time is the music I love the most, and it’s the music that I just can’t find anything to match it today, things like ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Transformer’… that’s not to say that I live in any sort of seventies timewarp or anything because I definitely don’t, but those are my formative times, my formative albums…
The Wolfmen is just what I feel like doing at the moment – I’m not trying to make a retro-seventies record or anything like that but I’m making records the way I want them, I’m making records that sound the way I want… I’m trying to make records that sound like records I liked which is the same as I tried to do with Adam And The Ants…
Well obviously it’s for all those things. That’s the whole point of doing it, I can’t do anything else… but it’s not purely for the music, it has to exist in the real world and the music business is very much the real world and it always has been, it has always operated on profit or loss blah blah…
Yeah. I don’t make music purely for my own pleasure… it’s just too much bloody work to make a record just for fun, people have to hear it and like it and I have to get something back from it even if it is only ‘you’re great’… or not!
I suppose the idea behind doing anything is so that people can say ‘you’re great’ AND you make a few bob out of it. I wouldn’t do it purely for my own pleasure, I’d watch TV or something…
Um… well everything I do has got me in it!
I don’t think that this has got more me in it than anything else… this is probably a bit more egocentric in that Chris isn’t someone who will dictate many things, but no this hasn’t got more of me in it than anything else although I can see how that might be the perception from the outside.
We’ve actually only been seriously working on it for about a year… I suppose it’s only really been about eighteen months…
The motivation behind doing it was that I started a record label with two other people and they said ‘you should make an album, you have to make an album’ and I thought ‘I can’t… I can’t sing…’ but I said I would, and my idea was to create this sort of fictitious group called The Wolfmen which would be a kind of complete conceit, a kind of sixties garage, punk, glam-rock band, but then after I got back with Chris and we started working on it those ideas kind of fell by the wayside. We couldn’t be bothered to dress it up in some sort of image and pretense… I’m too old for all that, it’s a lot of work you know, keeping a pretense up and I don’t have the time and I don’t have the enthusiasm to keep the pretense going.
Really it comes down to this is what we do, this is what we want to do, this is it – you either like it or you don’t and if you don’t like it then what do you want me to do about it? And I’ve got to say that apart from a few old twats going ‘hey you’ve got to be down with the kids’ it has been very positively received.
No… it’s just one of those real world things that we have to deal with, CDs just don’t sell singles, vinyl and download does sell but CD just doesn’t… so it’s on 10″ vinyl and download.
There’s almost enough material now I think for an album, so I think we’re going to start on that in October, but this EP – the reason we did an EP was as a sort of taster, to get the name out there, to get the whole project out there… we’re not expecting it to race up that charts – not that you have to sell very many these days to go up the charts – but we’re thinking of putting out a single in January or February and then an album in April.
I will stay schtum about that! I’ve been told I’m not allowed to speak about that…
I hate it! I mean I haven’t been onstage for about ten years and there’s not been one day in that ten years when I’ve actually missed it or thought about it…
It would be a massive hurdle.
No. There’s this strange perception – also by those old people – that ‘hey man it has to be a live-band touring thing to be real’… but it is real… we’re not making it up!
But these ideas sort of propagate and they become the law – to be seen as real you have to pretend to be four blokes with guitars. I don’t think people really give a shit about how many people are in the band or how it was recorded or whether they can play, if they like it they’ll just go and buy it!
We’ll see where it takes us… if nobody buys the album then obviously it’s not cost effective and no-one is going to want to put out another one. I would like it to be a long-term project and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.
That keeps vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again, but apparently, I’m told, that is now scheduled for a release in late September or October. It’s now being held up because there’s going to be an Adam And The Ants documentary and the documentary is going to be included on the DVD…
Yeah, it’s weird… there was a period when I really didn’t want to talk about it, not that I was ever ashamed or embarrassed about it, but I just didn’t want to talk about it, I was just bored of talking about it. There’s this weird thing now, as I get older, that it doesn’t seem to be that long ago… I don’t know, everything seems to co-exist in one timeframe. But no it doesn’t fill me with dread, it’s fine.
No, I can’t talk about Adam’s autobiography! He is going to do some promotion for it but I don’t know exactly what… I have seen schedules for it but how definite anything is I don’t know.
Yeah, I think he’s doing OK… I hope so!
Yeah but I’ve done it before! It may seem to people that I’ve disappeared but I haven’t – I’ve been working on various things but I have always been more comfortable working behind the scenes. Funnily enough the kissing the babies and shaking people’s hands I have always done and I’ve never stopped doing, it’s just part of what I do, it’s part of the business… but it’s fine, I’m very comfortable with it.
Ummm… no… I don’t think I had anything to prove in the first place…
© RememberTheEighties.com / ThisIsNotRetro.com – Not to be reproduced in any form without written permission. Link to the site but please don’t steal our content – thank you for your understanding and support!