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Interview: Wreckless Eric
The “Donovan of Trash” talks Mick Jagger, cover versions and taking the K.A.S.H. in the music industry
Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric
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That Wreckless Eric has become a forgotten soldier of the late-’70s British punk scene is a small tragedy, but it’s a real one. A veteran of the original Stiff Records, the infamous independent label that once boasted the talents of Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the Damned, his eponymous first album is a rough cut gem of searing energy and angst cobbled up somewhat spastically and held together with spit. Its title appears to be scrawled out across the cover in black Sharpie with the “W” squeezed in as an afterthought. Today, Wreckless Eric is older, wiser, clean and sober, living in the French countryside, hosting a stellar internet radio show and composing unaffectedly charming lo-fi duets with his wife, former Shams member Amy Rigby. In a reassuring fragment of continuity, however, his official website’s header looks like it was drawn with the pencil tool in Paint.
He called us a few weeks ago from France, in anticipation of his concert tonight at the Bowery Electric.
So you’ve left Stiff Records for the second time.
I did, yeah. I don’t know if it was a good idea. [Working with the modern incarnation of Stiff] was good idea in the States, but they kind of let us down in England when we came back. They didn’t do any promotion in Europe and then all the people that we liked left, so that’s why we put the new album out ourselves.
How’s that going?
Better, because if we say we’ll do something, I suppose we actually do it. The problem with record companies is that they say they’ll do it and then that to them is as good as actually doing it. It’s a worldwide epidemic these days. People say I’m going to do this for you and then they never do. To them, the act of saying it was the act of doing it.
You’ve been handling your own promotions, as well?
Yeah. Well, I actually hate doing that. It’s very difficult. The thing is, I think people are finally waking up to the idea that the music business isn’t—there’s not much money in it. And, for years, people saw it as a get rich quick scheme in that they equated fame with wealth, which is the biggest mistake you can make. And I think people are clearing out if it now, so that’s probably quite a good thing, but of course everybody has a go at it because they can. So to get a tour, to get an agent involved, for us would be great because we hate having to find our own gigs and talk to promoters. I mean they’re nice people, most of them. They’re fine. But you’ve got to deal with 20 different promoters to put a tour together and you’ve got to chase them and you’ve got to check different websites to make sure they’ve got the details right and all these kinds of things. It’s taxing. It takes an awful lot of time and it wears you down. For us, we wish we could find people who could do that type of thing, but it’s better to have the business in your own hands in a way. It’s not ideal, because we’re not that good at business, but at least we know where we’re at with it.
Two-Way Family Favourites is an album of covers. What made you decide to move in that direction?
You don’t have to do your own songs because there are an awful lot of songs in the world. I think sometimes it gets a bit tiring. People write all these songs because they’ve got something to say or they’re under the illusion they’ve got something to say when they’ve got absolutely nothing to say. I mean, we went on tour for maybe two years around the last album and we followed that up with something that we wanted to do. We didn’t feel like writing an album and we had all these covers and people were asking us, “When are you going to record those?” So we did and we had a good time and now we’re doing an original album and I’m thinking that someone will probably complain about that too. Some people said, “Well, it’d be more interesting if they did their own songs.” But I think it was interesting. With songwriters, sometimes you don’t really get their perspective except as songwriters and we don’t just want to be known as songwriters. I personally only ever wrote songs because I needed something to sing. It wasn’t some burning ambition to be a songwriter; it was a means to an end. It was a question of having material. Also, I’d read all of these reviews that said I couldn’t sing. They probably don’t know what tune I’m trying to sing. They said, “He can’t hold a tune,” but I’m thinking, “Wait a minute, I wrote the tune!” So maybe if I sing something by someone else, they’ll see things a bit differently.
The track listing is really eclectic. How did you pick the songs?
We listen to all kinds of stuff, you know. Also, I think we’re good on what people now call “guilty pleasures.”
Like “Fernando,” for example?
I thought we gave it some depth that wasn’t apparent in the original. And, y’know, people have written off the Who, but as soon as I heard “Endless Wire,” I wanted to do it. It’s perverse and almost kind of ironic for us to do a Tom Petty song. We have this fan, a hard-core—like he’s really into punk, but in quite a good way—fan who said to me after a gig last night, “You bastard, you played a Tom Petty song and made me cry.” And I said, “He’s a man. He’s just a person like other people, so why shouldn’t his songs move you?” Speaking of Tom Petty, because we put the album out ourselves, we had to take care of all the publishing. We did it all through this agency you do it through, the Harry Fox Agency. And you have to do all the publishing business through them, so we had to pay the money out. It was a pitiful amount. I think we paid Tom Petty something like $97, but we had to do Tom Petty separately. He handles it all himself. We had to write a check out to Tom Petty and send it off to his office. We saw a photo copy of the check later. It had been put through into Tom and Jane Petty’s account. I said to Amy, “Well, he probably took her out for dinner.” And she said, “No, they live in Malibu. It’ll just be lunch.” I wonder if any of those people actually heard it. Do you think Tom Petty heard our version of “Walls”?
I hope so. I think he’d like it.
I had an e-mail from a friend of Cyril Jordan’s who was amazed that we’d actually done “You Tore Me Down.” And this guy is only person to spot that we amalgamated it with the guitar riff from “Take Some Action.” I sort of played this other guitar part to what Amy was playing. We were mucking about and we did it for fun and we liked it, so we did it live and everyone liked it, so we did it every night and almost became known for doing it. That’s why we recorded that one. We did a tour with Yo La Tengo last year and we sang it with them one night because they covered it as well, and I’m like, “They’re playing it wrong.” It was very funny because we just got such another version of it.
The history of rock and roll is somewhat fraught with covers. Do you have any particular favorites?
Oh God, cover versions. There must be loads. When you listen to the first Beatles album, “Chains.” I can’t even remember who originally did that, but if you listen to it carefully, you can hear John Lennon hawking up. He’s really ill. He’s got a sort of flu cold. I like that one. I always like the Stones doing Chuck Berry. I think they made Chuck Berry more accessible, really. I sometimes like listening to them more than Chuck Berry, which is actually quite—that’s a terrible thing to say. And I’m one of the Stones’ biggest detractors. They were a great pop group, but they were much better with Brian Jones and if you listen to them alongside the Who and if you listen to two albums that came out round about the same time, The Who Live at Leeds and Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, you realize what a much better band the Who were than the Rolling Stones. The trouble is they’ve got an actor as a front man. Mick Jagger is a thespian. He’s not the real deal. Mick Jagger pretends to be—it’s real Uncle Tom stuff. He pretends to be a black man from Mississippi and it’s just embarrassing. I think the most embarrassing thing they ever did was possibly “Love in Vain” or maybe “Far Away Eyes.” He pretends to be from Alabama or somewhere, y’know, and it’s horrible. He’s just a—he’s a wanker. That’s what we’d call him.
So that’s more or less the opposite of what you’re talking in terms of what makes a good cover.
This is the interesting thing about a cover version. There was always a stigma. When I was first playing in bands in the early ’70s, you didn’t do cover versions. You tried to sort of get beyond that. That was the mark of class, to be doing original material. And loads of bands, they would do a Deep Purple song and they would pretend to be Deep Purple, and then they’d do a Led Zeppelin song and be Led Zeppelin and then they’d do a Beatles song and be the Beatles and so on. And it was always about having your own identity. And the big reason I started writing songs in the first place was because we were doing all these covers and I always wanted to sound like us and not like we were trying to be this band or that band, but to have an identity. And I thought adding original materiel, even if it isn’t any good, at least it’ll be us. So there was always this kind of stigma about covers and when I saw the Flamin’ Groovies at Roundhouse in London in 1978 and they started off with “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” by the Byrds and then they did “Please Please Me” and then they did “19th Nervous Breakdown” and it was great. It was honest, kind of like photorealism or something because you felt this was just like the real the thing, but it somehow wasn’t. It was bigger, it was brighter. It was hyper-real. It was actually them. They were such a good band that they shone through. You didn’t get this loss of identity; you got almost like a heightened identity. And I suppose that’s why it’s interesting for artists to do cover versions, though it is getting to be a bit of thing now. We had no idea. When we did this album, we had no idea and suddenly we found that we were surrounded by cover version albums. We wouldn’t even call it cover versions. Someone who was going to do our promo but then we got someone else, this person shot himself in the foot straight away because he said, “Well, y’know, a covers album will always be seen as just a mark along the route. It won’t be taken as seriously as the artist’s own work.” And we’re going, “This is just as valued as anything we do ourselves.” We won’t call it a covers album. We always say it’s an album of songs composed by other artists, but then we put ourselves up alongside Brian Wilson and Tom Petty and Pete Townsend.
Certainly you’ve both written your fair share great songs though.
I suppose we might have earned the right to do a covers album. Do you know Harry Nilsson? He was a songwriter for years and years and his biggest hit was “Without You” which was written by, I think it was written by, Pete Ham from Badfinger. It’s the weirdest thing. Can you imagine being a songwriter and then having a big hit with someone else’s song? I wouldn’t mind it. [Laughs] But I mean, it would have been terrible if we’d had a big hit, wouldn’t it?
Can we talk a little bit about the album’s title? Two-Way Family Favourites was the name of a British Forces radio show, right?
Yeah, when I was a kid, British Forces Network would play all these requests. It would be, “This is private first corporal Dennis Hoskins stationed with the first battalion of whatever and whatever and this one’s for all his family and all his friends back home in Greenford, West London and the message reads, ‘Won’t be coming home for Christmas’.” And then they’d play a Seekers record. I suppose it came up really. I just thought it sounded so wholesome, Two-Way Family Favourites. I suppose there’s all kinds of reasons, but you just don’t get that anymore really. It’s like, y’know, I sometimes think we’d like to be the Seekers or something like that. It’s a really creepy thing. These people that were the reason for Two-Way Family Favourites, they’re all stationed in kind of military hot spots or whatever. They needed entertainment. All these pop record—I don’t know, it’s just an odd juxtaposition. There’s some amount of menace and grimness. There’s always some amount of grimness in anything to do with England.
In your autobiography you wrote, “When I was recording in Pathway, I was helping to create this thing called ‘Indie’—if I’d know what it was going to become maybe I wouldn’t have bothered.” Do you still feel the same way?
Indie—there’s no money in it, but we’re having fun and that’s the main thing, but meanwhile they’re pocketing all the money, not that there is a lot of money in it. I mean, it’s not the stuff that Lamborghinis are made of, y’know, and huge detached country houses. And the people who are saying what a lot of fun it’s going to be and all that are pocketing the money and that’s this thing called Indie, that’s part of it. I mean one of the biggest things you could do in the ’80s and what a lot of Indie labels did to get money was compilation albums. You’d get all these people to do a track for it and then, of course, they’d never get any royalties. You’re not going to change it up because it’s only like five percent of whatever, but if you multiply that number, that’s a lot of five percents that are not getting paid out and are going in to one pocket. And if all those little amounts of money go into one pocket, that’s quite a bit of money. It was hypocritical. It was also boring. And the way that a record would be made—they’re going to sound horrible and built ’round a repeating chord sequence and someone singing some drivel and they would then go into a studio and play the bestest they ever could in the shortest amount of time because they hadn’t got a big enough recording budget. But they were having fun and so on and everyone was being so fucking nice, but someone somewhere is making the money. I don’t know. It was just mediocrity really. See, I grew up with this kind of thing where, come hell or high water, you would arrive with your guitar and your amplifier and that was your sound. And then suddenly it was, “You can use my amplifier.” “Now what would I fucking want to use that for? It’s not big enough.” That’s indie. This apology for the crap budget and everything’s pretty crap, but we’re doing it and that’s the main thing. Well, no, the main thing might be to actually do something that was worth doing, not just do something crappy, apologize for it being crap and say but we’re doing it and that’s the main thing. Things have gotten better, but I did hate indie. I didn’t even know what it was actually for a long time. I used to see this word indie and then I saw indie charts and then I thought, “What the heck is this thing?” But I didn’t dare ask anyone because I didn’t want to look stupid. Then I found out it was short for independent. What a lie! What is independent? What the fuck is the difference? One is a more successful company than the other. What does it actually mean if you look at it in that context? It means unsuccessful and kind of like, y’know, lacking. A big company has got distribution, has got decent studios, has got the wherewithal to manufacture a good product, where the indie company hasn’t got all that. It’s all part of the haves and have-nots which became very prevalent in the ’80s when the rich poor divide became bigger. There are an awful lot of people who would say people shouldn’t be having a private education and I think, “Well, actually, everyone should be allowed one of those educations.” That’s a much better way to look at it to me. So the indie thing—it’s pathetic. I think it’s much better to say, “Wait a minute. We have a right to this. We have the right. All of us.” It’s this kind of keep it in the gutter socialism that I don’t subscribe to. I mean, I think I would describe myself as a socialist, but not on those terms, because I think, well, it’s obscene the amount of money that some people have got. I don’t understand a world where someone can pay more for a car than another person earns in a year, where some people don’t have a house to live in and some people have two houses or three houses. It’s not right to me. It doesn’t mean we should eat the rich and have all their property taken off; it just means it should be shared out a bit more equally and we have a share of what’s good, everybody in every country. But that kind of indieness runs contrary to that.
What do you think young artists can learn from the “do it yourself” attitude of the early days at Stiff?
That kind of approach that we had then is to some extent obsolete. As soon as eight-track came out, people said, “You can’t possibly make a good record on four-track,” and then when twenty-four-track became popular, all the eight-track studios were dying out of business. But Pathway was an eight-track studio and people said, “You can’t hope to make a seriously good record.” But we did, we made great records in an eight-track studio. You’ve got to have more brain, more attitude. You’ve got to have something more special than maybe the average person who does it has, but I mean you could get a garage band and muck about in a bedroom and with a bit of ingenuity—I think the ingenuity is the continuation of the punk theme in all this. You need to have ingenuity.