Graham Parker - The Reluctant Pub Rocker (by Dave Thompson)



Pub Rock. Graham Parker. It's difficult to think of one without the other, even after twenty years of spiralling obscurity for the one (who remembers the Tyla Gang today?), and ever expanding versatility from the other. Parker's last studio album, the sonic roar of Acid Bubblegum (Razor & Tie) ranks among the finest albums of the decade so far, a blistering blend of - as the title itself says - corrosive pop, and if it's a million miles removed from the image most people still conjure up of a down and dirty soul 'n' blues rock band playing the beer soaked bars of London's hinterland, that's because it is... that's because Parker is. Always has been as well.
So why do people still call him a Pub Rocker?
'It's gotta be guilt by association. It's got to be Brinsley Schwarz's fault, Steve Goulding, Martin Belmont, in fact everyone in the Rumour, I blame the band absolutely. Everyone in that band was called a Pub Rocker, was in what was known as a Pub Rock band. And I didn't even know what Pub Rock sounded like. Still don't.'
In 1973, a 23-year-old Parker returned home to England from a couple of years hanging around continental Europe. 'I'd done a bit of traveling around and returned to Camberley, Surrey. So I was in the suburbs. I was living with my parents like a lot of other people did in their 20s, I worked various small-time jobs, and I was writing songs, saying to myself 'I've got to do something now, I'm 23, 24, have I got any talent or not?'
'My window to the world of pop music was Radio One and [the television program] 'Top Of The Pops.' Years before, there'd been the London blues scene which I used to go to, Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack and all that, and before that it was soul music, so I had that background of stuff. But at that point, the mid-1970s, it was still Progressive Music which was the thing... you might see a band at the Guildford Civic Hall, Wishbone Ash or someone, but not a lot else. It was a very dead scene as far as I could see, so I was listening again to soul music, Bob Marley had Catch A Fire out, and I was writing songs that I basically thought were influenced by the Stones, Van Morrison, Dylan, Bob Marley, soul music, swing. All my influences were coming into my songwriting, but it was essentially a totally solo thing that I was doing, completely on my own.'
Finally tiring of this bedsit bard-dom, Parker placed an ad in the weekly Melody Maker in 1974. 'And that's when I met this guy named Noel Brown, who would play slide guitar on some of the tracks on Howling Wind. He introduced me to [bassist] Paul Riley, who then said 'I know this manager guy who's got this little studio, maybe you should meet him,' and that was Dave Robinson. And that's how I was put together with these guys who were in these bands who were supposedly called Pub Rock.'
Robinson was one of the guiding lights of the Pub Rock scene. Best remembered today for his pivotal role in the Stiff Records label, he was also one of the minds behind the seminal Naughty Rhythms tour, which took at least a breath of Pub Rock into the British provinces. But a line-up highlighted by the disparate joys of Dr. Feelgood, Kokomo and Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers was in no way an adequate introduction to the true nature of the beast and Parker, who caught the show in nearby Guildford, admits he left the show as unaware of anything remotely resembling a 'scene' as he had been when he went in. Parker recalls, 'I think [Radio One DJ] Johnny Walker played a Dr. Feelgood track which I liked, or a Kokomo track, and it turned out that Paul Riley had been involved in that, playing with Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers. But I was still in the suburbs, still totally cut off from any of this. I just didn't know about this London scene, where you had all these bands playing like some kind of music with some kind of pop attitude. I saw the tour and it was just another gig with a few good bands.'
Parker's education, then, began when Robinson started introducing him to the roster of musicians who would accompany him on a handful of demos.
One of the best loved of these earliest recordings, the first Parker ever made, is the version of 'Back To Schooldays' which (finally!) appeared on the Stiff Records boxed set. 'I had that song in many versions, because I found it very strange,' Parker recalls. 'I thought I was onto something quite original in the way it went from E to B then jumped back again to E with a very sudden jump, and it was hard to know how precisely to pull that off, and what to do with it. So there's all these different versions, but the Stiff one was the first that worked.'
By mid-summer 1975, Parker had settled on what would become the final line-up of the Rumour: guitarists Martin Belmont and Brinsley Schwarz, keyboard player Bob Andrew, bassist Andrew Bodnar, and drummer Steve Goulding.
It was a star-studded line-up, but Parker didn't have a clue about any of that. Indeed, he still recalls his amazement when he first met Schwarz and Andrews and discovered that they were not - as Parker had assumed - refugees from a German Heavy Metal group. 'I think I'd seen Brinsley Schwarz's name in the gig guide in Melody Maker, a band that was doing gigs in London, and I swear I thought it must be a German Heavy Metal band.
'There was Ducks Deluxe, Martin's old band. I might have seen their name as well, but I knew nothing of them either. Bontemps Roulez (Bodnar and Goulding), I thought they were something French. It was only as time went by, and I'd heard them talking, that I gathered from my press that they were a Pub Rock band. And that shows how much I knew about Pub Rock. I'd never seen them, I'd never heard them, and I was amazed about a year later, when I finally decided to check out a Brinsley Schwarz record.'
It was, he says, 'way into 1976, I remember Brinsley giving me one of his old records when we were in Wales recording Heat Treatment. So I finally listened and I was amazed to find out it was some sort of soft wimpy country rock! I thought, 'what the f--- has this got to do with what I'm doing? I don't get it! People are calling me Pub Rock, what is this? I've got nothing to do with this, and nor have the band members in the Rumour.''
Things happened quickly. Before the band had even played a note, the press was onto them; Pub Rock may not have impacted on the British chart, but the media adored its lack of pretension; its beery, downhome good nature; its lumbering, loveable bulk. Grown men had wept when Brinsley Schwarz broke up. Even a partial reunion behind this hot (apparently - no one had actually heard him yet) new singer was a marriage made in Heaven. Pub Rock Heaven!
The Rumour did little to shatter this illusion. Through the late summer of 1975, the Rumour was rehearsing daily at Newlands Tavern, a staple of the Pub Rock circuit, and venturing out for the first of a mere dozen or so pub gigs - Parker's first ever professional show was with the Rumour at the Nag's Head in High Wycombe, another hoary old stronghold.
They played the legendary 'Nashville' and almost burned the place down. Much of what would appear on the band's debut album, Howling Wind, was already in the set, together with a clutch of almost barbarically rearranged Motown-type oldies. Parker, beating his acoustic guitar into a painful grave, was captivating even then; it is amazing, today, to learn that he didn't have a clue what he was doing back then.
'I'd had an acoustic guitar in Gibraltar, played in two bars, folk songs that I was writing. After I met Noel Brown, he got me a couple of gigs playing acoustic in a hamburger restaurant in Finsbury Park, singing to five people eating their dinner. That was the extent of my experience.
'I didn't know how to sing into a microphone. Even after those first gigs, when we started going out on the road... I would go on tour and lose my voice, it was awful, I had no experience. The first gigs with the Rumour, I was nailed behind an acoustic guitar, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, so I was there with the acoustic and - what do I do? Then one night, we were playing in Croydon, quite an big place, maybe a college, and my guitar strap broke during 'Don't Ask Me Questions,' so I started pointing my finger up in the air on 'hey Lord,' and from there on, I developed this whole theatrical thing which really became something.
'I was getting out there, holding the microphone, having a lot of fun, really living out fantasies. It got quite involved, we had a really theatrical gig. It just developed.'
Through the fall of 1975, Robinson kept Parker and the Rumour in the studio, recording what would become Howling Wind, the band's debut album. They were still there when Radio London disc jockey Charlie Gillett aired two of Parker's demos, 'Between You And Me' and 'Nothing's Gonna Pull It Apart' on his show. On January 9, 1976, Parker and the Rumour signed to Vertigo Records.
'[A&R man] Nigel Grainge heard us on Charlie's show, and signed us. It was that easy, but it was really amazing that I got a deal, because at that stage, unless you had long hair and looked like Rick Wakeman, you didn't stand a chance. It was just far sightedness on Nigel's part, because everyone else thought music had long hair, played guitar solos, and had lots of keyboards. And I was one of them who thought that was all there was out there.'
He elaborates. 'I saw Ian Dury playing Newlands Tavern, and I thought this guy is really good, kind of like Beefheart or something, but he'll never make it, he's too weird. They'll never give him a record deal.' Parker would, of course, eventually be proved wrong, as Dury emerged to become one of the most consistent British hitmakers of the late 1970s, but in 1975, nobody would have bet against Dury ending his days in obscurity.
Parker predicted an equally bleak future for Sean Tyla, breaking away from Ducks Deluxe with the increasingly eccentric Tyla Gang. 'He was just too wacky for the mainstream'; and as for the host of artists whom Dave Robinson would soon be gathering to his bosom at the infant Stiff label, the Nick Lowes, Pink Fairies and Roogalators of this world, they were all great but nobody seemed to care.
Resentment grew. Parker remembers, 'there were a few people who were pissed off with me, like when I played the first gig at Newlands Tavern with the Rumour, people came and had their arms folded across their chests because there was this guy who came from nowhere, playing with the great Brinsley Schwarz. They wanted to see who he was, but they weren't going to give him any encouragement.'
By the end of the evening, the Tavern was in rapturous uproar, but months later, Parker still recalls 'having these guys come to see me who were labelled Pub Rock; Ian Dury came and stood in the front at Dingwalls and just looked at me, like 'who is this guy who's getting all this attention?' Because they weren't getting the attention, these guys, whereas I'd come out of nowhere and was getting it all; a record deal, I'm going to America and Scandinavia, then coming back and playing bigger and bigger gigs all the time, and these people were essentially not getting anywhere.' And they couldn't understand it.
The problem, for many people, was of course that Parker had not paid those mythical dues which once seemed so important to the jobbing musician scene. He hadn't slogged his guts out around a thankless pub circuit; he hadn't spent night after night catching crabs in grimy northern bed and breakfasts, while local street urchins let down the van tires and rival promotors stole the PA. He'd simply appeared, and it was around this time, by way of damage limitation, that Vertigo launched one of the most enduring of all early Parker legends, how he had indeed prepared for his subsequent stardom in such much loved, and delightfully obscure, veteran R&B bands as the Deep Cut Three, and the Black Rockers.
Parker snorts derisively. 'They were when I was 13 years old. I couldn't even play guitar. The Deep Cut Three, we had our hair cut like the Beatles, we were 13, it was 1963. We didn't play, we just posed. We did concerts in my friend's father's store on a Sunday, we just leapt up on this counter and posed with guitars. We couldn't play at all.
'Even when I was 15, I had these R&B bands and we were trying to play Stonesy stuff, but I still couldn't play. We didn't even know about keys. I was a terribly slow learner, things only came together for me when I was 24, when I had a brainwave and started getting good.
'I guess when I was 22, 23, I started learning fingerpicking guitar, I was into James Taylor and all those acoustic things, Donovan and stuff, but it was a very hippy thing, the mellow singer songwriter, 'man, I've been around and I feel bad'; the sad 21-year-old who thinks he's seen everything in the world and plays bedsitter folk music. Yeah, I was doing that. But not in front of an audience! I literally went from five people in a hamburger restaurant to headlining at the Rainbow in a year and half.'
Undeterred by Parker's own peers' suspicions, the British press continued its love affair with the band. They, too, had begun to doubt whether rock could ever escape the clutches of the technoflash Prog merchants; had even begun importing new faces from America to brighten their days, one-shot, one-song merchants with names like Springsteen and Lofgren, 'streetwise, street punks' whose white Tees and black leather jackets bespoke an inner city grittiness which was a million miles removed from the topographic oceans which swirled through British rock.
And then Parker emerged, fully-formed and firebreathing, and after so many pretenders, he was the real thing. Even before a note of music had hit the streets, Parker and the Rumour were front page material, with or without the Pub Rock tag. When it came to excitement, only Dr. Feelgood, and the slowly emerging Eddie and the Hot Rods could touch them. When it came to actual material, the Rumour were streets ahead.
'Looking back,' Parker acknowledges, 'Dr. Feelgood were the first punk band in England. Musically, of course, they were too retro to change the face of music like the Sex Pistols did, but their whole attitude was this 'piss off punky f--- you f---ing hippies' thing.'
It was the combination of that attitude with Parker's genuinely seething, self composed, music which placed him so far ahead.
A blistering melange of rock, soul, blues and reggae comes close, the distillation of what Parker had been listening to at home, with the added ingredient of anger.
'Oh yes, I was angry,' he smiles. 'I had this whole schtick going, because I was angry at the way pop music was, I was angry with the flatulence of it all, and I thought what I was doing should be the kind of music people were into, instead of still lying down in the dark listening to Dark Side Of The Moon, and they all jump when the alarm bell goes off and they all roll a joint.
'I really thought that was over, so my anger came from trying to change the face of music, and I thought doing angry Motown was the way to go about it.' He laughs out loud. 'I think I kinda lost people there a little.
'But at the same time, it seemed that the members of the Rumour were in exactly the same frame of mind; they were all really angry, they hated this Pub Rock idea, they wanted to be a hardcore rock 'n' roll band with multiple influences just like me, and take it to a whole other level, which we did.' As far as they were concerned, Parker concludes, 'they didn't want to be called that because they knew those words have the stench of failure about them.'
Parker's first single, the anthemic 'Silly Thing,' appeared in March; the following month, as the band headed out on their first national tour with 'How Long' hitmakers Ace, their debut album, Howling Wind, hit the streets.
It was a phenomenal set, bolstered in the marketplace both by a rapturous press and the inclusion of a limited edition freebie single, coupling live versions of 'Silly Thing' and 'Kansas City.'
It was also a remarkable document of Parker's mercurial progress. ''Between You And Me' was the demo I'd recorded the previous summer, before the Rumour came together. The Rumour could never play that track because we wanted to be much more aggressive, and the way it turned out was really sweet, which is how it should have been done. We just couldn't play a song like that very well, it didn't work, so we used the demo on the record.'
There was another stab at 'Back To Schooldays,' radically revised from the demo version after 'the Rumour somehow got hold of it, and made it more rockabilly than I'd intended. It was a great idea and it really worked as well, the version we got on Howling Wind was a very cool version, and getting Dave Edmunds to play on it was a good thing as well.'
And there was 'Don't Ask Me Questions,' a song so great that even Bob Dylan professed amazement when he heard it.
In retrospect, Howling Wind is a mere shadow of what it could have been, recorded (as it was) when the band had a mere dozen or so shows under its belt. Dave Robinson was certainly aware of this when he demanded Parker start working on an immediate follow-up, while Vertigo started planning an 'authorized bootleg' type release, to give critics at least a vinyl taste of the band's live magic.
And all the while, the band's diary kept on filling. 'We came off the Ace tour, and did a Comeback In Glory show at the Hope and Anchor, the glorious Graham Parker and the Rumour with a record deal and an album and going to America and stuff. As far as London was concerned, we'd already sort of made it. So we did a few more pub gigs, then we did our own concert hall tour.'
Through the spring of 1976, Graham Parker and the Rumour were the most exciting thing on the live circuit, a boast which the limited edition Live At Marble Arch promo amply demonstrates. Released to the media in October, 1976 (and finally given a full debut on last year's Vertigo compilation), Marble Arch blisters with a fiery passion, 24 minutes of pure, sweatsoaked, adrenalin. Indeed, it probably did its job too well. Compared to Marble Arch, even Parker admits that the following month's Heat Treatment seemed a little lackluster.
'Heat Treatment to me is not as good as people think. After Howling Wind, Dave Robinson told me we should get a new album out soon, and it was - 'yeah, okay.' 'Got anything?' 'Er no.' And I suddenly had to write an album of songs!
'I don't write constantly like some songwriters, but once I get going, there's a build up of energy, and I seem to be able to write an album in a couple of months. We had Heat Treatment out within six months of Howling Wind; somehow I scraped together these songs.
''Just Something You're Going Through' is one of the songs which I had actually written a few years before, but I wrote it more as a Van Morrison acoustic thing and I turned it into this jivey Caribbean thing. I know 'Fools Gold' was a good one, although that's another one I originally wrote a few times in various incarnations that were very bad. But other things I'm not so sure about; 'Black Honey' was kind of a joke, because I'd written 'White Honey'; it's not really about anything, but it turned out to be a very pretty melody and interesting chords, so I'm very happy with it, but lyrically it was about nothing. So to me, Heat Treatment is a bit of a red herring. It's not my favorite, and certainly the sound of that record I don't like at all.'
Despite his reservations, Heat Treatment would sell over 60,000 copies in the U.K.; in America, where Mercury signed him on the strength of Marble Arch, it did almost as well, making #169. Later in the year, Stick To Me would climb to #125, low figures admittedly, but more than respectable in what was then the prevalent climate of hard rock stadium bands, wishy-washy singer songwriters and the eternal purgatory of Frampton Comes Alive.
An American tour with Thin Lizzy took the band into the theaters, and Parker recalls how the British press responded to that. 'It was ridiculous. You're on the cover of Melody Maker and NME and Sounds, you're touring America, and you come back and it's 'what happened with Graham Parker and the Rumour in America, this is very, very important stuff;' 'well, they're funny over there,' says Graham Parker, 'they're a weird lot, the Yanks.'' I find myself guffawing if I read something said by one of the members of Oasis, it seems so totally naive and stupid to me. Then I remember I was doing exactly the same thing.'
'And in the midst of all that, Punk happened.'
The first stirrings of Punk Rock had been recorded in the London media earlier in the year. The release of the Damned's 'New Rose' (on Robinson's Stiff label), and the Sex Pistols' 'Anarchy In The UK' a month later, kicked the new movement up another gear, then the whole thing exploded in December, when the Pistols appeared on nationwide TV and turned the air blue with profanities. The Rumour cast one eye over the teenaged rabble and groaned.
'Our attitude to Punk was, we were kind of jolted. We were in a field of one, we were the happening kids, we were outrageous doing things like 'Can't Hurry Love' really aggressively; doing reggae with this angry attitude; we had it all together, and suddenly we were not the only ballgame, there was this thing called the Sex Pistols, and it was 'oh my God, what's going on?'
'When I heard them, I didn't think much of it at first, because singing in an English accent is something I don't quite get; to this day I find it a little arch, not to my tastes. But it was all very shocking that these bands suddenly came along, and it was a bit scary for us. So we thought we'd better crank it up another level and came back with Stick To Me, which came out really nasty.'
The first sign of that nastiness came in March, when the Rumour played the 'Old Grey Whistle Test's' prestigious 'Live Test' showcase, turning in a ten track set which echoed the brilliance of the Marble Arch album (and has also, finally, been released, on last year's sensibly titled Live On The Test album).
Parker himself is not overly fond of the performance. 'I thought my voice was mixed too low, so I don't have happy memories of the show,' he admits. 'But I know I would have been especially angry then, because it was 1977 and the Sex Pistols had happened, so I had to keep up by being even more angry.'
In musical terms, of course, the Rumour was not that far removed from the energies of Punk; indeed, Parker remembers the band's audience actually increased in the aftermath of the new movement's initial breakthrough.
'Until Punk, we were not reaching a mass audience; we weren't really solidifying what we had, we were still a press act in a way. But when Punk happened, we increased our audience. We'd play some gigs where the whole front rows were swarming with kids spitting at us, because they had read somewhere that I was the godfather of Punk, or the grandfather of Punk, and so we did start to attract a wider audience.'
The group scored its first hits, a snarling remake of Trammps' 'Hold Back The Night' climbed to #24 in January, 1977; Stick To Me made the Top 20 that fall, and a British tour with Thin Lizzy saw that band earn some marginal Punk respect, simply from their choice of support.
Chronologically, however, the Rumour could also be considered a throwback to an earlier age. No matter that the likes of Brinsley Schwarz's old bassplayer Nick Lowe, Flip City's Elvis Costello, even Ian Dury, were now riding Punk's coat tails to glory, the fact is, they emerged with Punk, part and parcel of this exciting new revolution. Graham Parker and the Rumour, on the other hand, were already onto their third album before the Punk crowd even got round to their first.
'At the time, I thought it was good I was before everyone else, because I thought everyone would remember that; the attitude of the music I was doing would be reflected in what was going on, because it wasn't just Punk remember, it was Ian Dury, it was Elvis Costello, it was Nick Lowe, all those people with a songwriting background, that were not that far away from the hippydippy thing, or who were sardon-ic, satirical, intelligent, sometimes with anger, pretty much what I was doing. So I thought because I was first, that was great, I started it.
'I didn't have that self-aggrandizing 'this is mine' attitude, but when you're there and you're doing it, it felt like that. But on the other hand I also know that this stuff had to be going on somewhere. My feeling about Punk Rock is, I remember watching 'Old Grey Whistle Test' when the New York Dolls were on, in 1973 or whenever, and [host] Bob Harris saying 'I'm sorry, but I really don't like that.' He said it on the air after they played, and I think that must have inspired a lot of kids into saying 'well, we f---ing do, this is what we want to see, not bloody Osibisa'; I can imagine a lot of kids... whatever became the Sex Pistols, I think they saw that performance and realized there was something beyond Progressive Music, and I think that's what started it. It wasn't me! But I sort of felt that it was at the time!'
The three sides live Parkerilla, in May, 1978, strengthened Parker and the Rumour's position even further. A stunning document of the group's development, 'it sold more than all the other albums, it even did better than Squeezing Out Sparks ... there again, The Up Escalator sold better than Squeezing Out Sparks!
'But The Parkerilla went into the charts in the 20s, dropped out again, then went back in and got to #14, even though it was an album the critics said was not the best of GP & The Rumour, which may be true. I thought it was really good, but I guess it wasn't.' Actually, Graham, it was. You should never believe what you read.
A rerecorded version of the first album's perennial 'Don't Ask Me Questions,' available as a bonus studio track on The Parkerilla, was culled as a single and gave the band another hit single. And in July, 1978, the band played the biggest show of its career, opening for Bob Dylan in front of 350,000 people at Blackbushe Aerodrome, just a few miles from Parker's own hometown of Camberley. Graham Parker and the Rumour had 'arrived.'
While the Punks were still being Punks, gobbing on life and puking on cats, Parker and the Rumour had moved on completely. Widescale acceptance beckoned; indeed, it was theirs for the taking, and by the time of the widescreen glossy brilliance of 1979's Squeezing Out Sparks, they were poised to become the biggest band of the era, without losing a fraction of what made them so special in the first place. Catch the Live Sparks promo which backs up last year's reissue of Squeezing Out Sparks, or better still, the Best Kept Girl In The West bootleg. The biggest band of the era, and one of the best as well.
Why they didn't fulfill their destiny, of course, is another story entirely. But Parker himself still remembers the moment when underground acceptance finally passed them over and the band itself realized they had moved up to the next echelon of stardom and fame. It wasn't the Dylan gig, it wasn't 'Don't Ask Me Questions,' it wasn't their highly publicized signing to Arista Records and the ensuing Squeezing Out Sparks. It was just another night in London, when the Rumour played the Roundhouse.
'That's when I knew the wind was finally changing. Pere Ubu and Devo opened for us, and after the gig, all the press ran backstage. And I remember standing at my dressing door, and they all ran past me, straight into Devo and Pere Ubu's dressing room. It was like a cartoon, and I thought 'uh-huh, something's changed here.''
Parker is not one for regrets, nor recriminations. He'd wanted musical change and he did his bit to forge it. 'Be careful what you wish for,' he laughs. 'It might just come true.' Punk might have derailed his love affair with the media; might even have helped prevent him from attaining the peaks he deserved. But it also breathed a new breath of fresh air into the music scene, the same breath which would allow Parker himself to remain true to his convictions long after 'fame and fortune' had passed along.
Neither does he sit around and listen to his old albums and dream of what once was his. His new music is too exciting for that. He did, however, look back once last year, after being called in to write liner notes for the aforementioned Vertigo compilation.
'I wrote them and I didn't listen to anything. I might have played the beginning of a few tracks, but that was it. But after it was done, I thought I'd better listen to something; I've written the liner notes, I've pretended I'm interested, I've been a good boy. So I put on 'Between You And Me,' and it's the most bizarre thing. Right before the song starts, you can hear me scrape the guitar strings, and I got all kind of choked up.
'There was this innocent guy there, 25 years old, which at the time seemed really world-weary and old, but now seems like a boy to me, and it sounded so innocent. I really got choked up listening to this guy, I could feel myself back in the studio, this little demo studio, singing this song and not knowing... on the edge of my seat, the guitar on my lap, 'am I going to get this wrong? Will it be okay?' It was quite a weird thing.
'I couldn't listen to anything more after that.'

Copyright 1997 by Dave Thompson
from DISCoveries #116, 1/1998

Reproduced with kind permission from Dave Thompson.

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