Interview: Graham Parker

Graham Parker is a musician who has been making music professionally for almost 50 years. He started playing professionally in the 1970s with The Rumour in 1976. Their sound is eclectic with it combining R&B, ska, and multiple types of rock and roll, genres that Graham grew up with in the 60s just outside of London. The band were made up of Graham and members of Brinsley Schwarz (named after the guitarist), Ducks Deluxe, and Bontemps Roulez. Early on, the band got the attention of The Village Voice. The Pazz & Jop critics’ poll ranked their 1976 debut Howlin’ Wind #4 in the best albums of the year list. A prolific year for the band, their 1976 sophomore album Heat Treatment was ranked #2 on that list. Back home, they performed their cover of The Trammps’ “Hold Back The Night” on Top of the Pops in 1977. The following year, they opened for Bob Dylan at the Picnic at Blackbushe. Like a lot of musicians, Graham Parker was frustrated with how his record label treated him and in 1979 he wrote an upbeat sounding diss track in frustration with his label at the time, Mercury Records, appropriately titled “Mercury Poisoning” (just one of many examples of his playing with words), which became one a fan favourite, even though the single didn’t have a lot of commercial success. However, his most famous album with The Rumour, Squeezing Out Sparks, came out that same year. It received much critical acclaim with it being ranked #334 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest albums of all time and getting the top spot on the year-end Pazz & Jop critics’ poll. Squeezing Out Sparks is a good place to start if you’re a new listener. Forty years later, he revisited the album, releasing a solo acoustic version of it. In the 1980s, Graham Parker split from The Rumour, but his career continued strongly with his solo albums. The Up Escalator was his biggest success on the albums charts in the UK. In the 90s, he moved from major labels to indie labels and still continued recording. In the early 2010s, his career received a boost when Freaks and Geeks director Judd Apatow cast him and The Rumour in his movie This Is 40. Around that same time, The Rumour reunited and recorded an album Three Chords Good. After moving between record labels, his latest release, Last Chance to Learn The Twist is being released on Big Stir Records, a Burbank based record label that specialises in power pop, indie rock, and guitar pop. The album comes out this Friday, September 8th. In the meantime though, you can listen to the advance singles, “It Mattered To Me” and “We Did Nothing” on Spotify:

We’re very lucky to have Graham here with us for an interview. If you want to find out more about his musical journey and his thoughts on the music industry, keep on reading!

Angie: How would you describe Last Chance to Learn The Twist to a new listener?

Graham: Varied. That would be one word. It’s pretty much what I do. But I think there’s more variety to it. I can only say that. The usual variety of styles I’ve employed for about 47 years, but with some very new types of arrangements on some of the songs. A little less traditional from here to there. It’s just the arrangements, the way I usually arrange songs is quite conservative. It’s just based on the pop song idea. Two verses, a bridge, solo, bridge, verse, there’s a few here that’s stretched out in different ways. I don’t know, it’s basically the same elements that I’ve always used. 

Angie: Why did you call it Last Chance to Learn The Twist?

Graham: It comes from the song “Last Stretch of the Road”, it’s a comedy song about our inevitable, painful, lonely, miserable, putrescent death and it has the line “last chance to learn the twist” because maybe it’s something that people didn’t do before they die. You know, when they were younger. Maybe they should be doing that now. I mean it’s probably easier than climbing Mt Everest when you know you’re going to die any minute. So yeah get up and learn to twist. I thought it was funny, really. I thought it had a lot of possibilities for a very interesting album cover.

Angie: It has a deep kind of message there. 

Graham: It might be, but it’s more playing with words and comedy, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. When the song has all these characters healing towards their death and there actually no angels singing, there’s no heavenly abode. I’m having fun. I have fun with words, Angie, that’s basically what I’m doing for the most part. I’ve always had fun with words. When I write a song like that, I just roll with laughter, at the outrageousness of it really. You’re gonna die, so give learning the twist a shot! There’s plenty of videos. Chubby Checker doing the twist. Might be a good idea before you shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s fun with words more than anything, but when you have fun with words you tend to do a few things that turn out to resonate with a lot of people. It’s a good thing. Whatever way people take it and make of it. When I’ve made a record, it’s like I give it away. It’s gone. It’s other people’s now, really in a sense because they can make of it what they will. They make all kinds of things out of it which is interesting.

Angie: You were recently on tour in America, what was that like?

Graham: Well I do that all the time, solo touring America, I’ve been doing that since 1989. That part of my career when I released a record that was very stripped out. Just four instruments largely, which is unusual for me. I like kind of dense music. My earlier music was very dense, but that particular album was called The Mona Lisa’s Sister. I stripped it down to about four instruments. So that came out in 1988 and I figured in 1989, why not strip it down even more and play it live solo, because that’s how the songs were written, that’s the genesis of all the songs. It’s just me on my own writing songs. So what I did just now in the last tour in the US was fairly typical, only I’m much better now than I was in 1989. Basically my act, a solo act. There’s a sense of freedom. I might be doing everything on the stage. There’s no backup to help me out. I’ve learnt over the years how to do that and be entertaining with it and tell a lot of jokes. It’s about a third stand up comedy, two-thirds singing. It’s a great way to really bring an audience in. That last tour was no exception. Fantastic audience! They really get behind what I do. They’re just used to seeing me play solo a lot. It’s very enjoyable really.

Angie: Was it always a dream of yours to tour America, because I know that seems to be a thing for a lot of British musicians?

Graham: Well, my first record came out in April 1976, I think it came out in July 1976 and early copies got to some of the press like Rolling Stone and The Village Voice that were really important in those days. Saying this is some good music. This is really something fresh and they were quite excited about it so as soon as my record came out, or even before, my manager got word of this and said, “We’re gonna tour America!” You know, quick, let’s get over there! So we did, me and The Rumour, my first band. We got over there in the first year of my career and we actually toured twice that year. We were unknown basically to the public, but a few people have read some words about it here or there and were getting this idea that I might be worth seeing. To me, I thought, that’s great, that’s bound to happen. They’re going to want me there. I will find an audience of some kind, but of course, from someone who really wouldn’t have ever gone to America, it was very exciting. For me it was a fantastic experience. You get used to it pretty quickly because on the road it’s kind of hard work and all that stuff, but as the years have gone on I’ve learned to love America quite a good deal and that is my main market, I think, because it’s a bigger country for one thing. It’s always still a pleasure to play to Americans and wherever I’m hired to play. It’s so good.

Angie: How did you get into writing?

Graham: I think it was something I was always good at. I was always good with words and the English language. A lot better than when I was a kid just writing essays and things. Basically when The Beatles came along and I was 12 years old in 1962, that excited my generation more than any other music we’ve heard before and they were writing songs and a lot of other bands, all that 60s period, The Kinks and The Who, and they were writing songs. They were obviously older than me, but they didn’t seem that far away in age and some of those people came from London, which was 30 minutes north of where I grew up in the county of Surrey. So the influence there, this music was suddenly on the radio and the idea that you could write your own songs, it wasn’t coming from some mysterious other source. It wasn’t coming from these top songwriters in America like the Brill Building people. It was coming from just guys who were largely working class and so it seemed natural to me and many other kids around to pick up instruments and have a go at it and it just happened to be natural to me to write my first song at 13. It wasn’t very good and I couldn’t play guitar very good, but it wasn’t that much of a stretch really. 

So it’s always been there and I ignored it for many years. I did normal jobs and worked in factories and the hippie thing came along and I travelled and went to live in the Channel Islands between England and France and then I did hitchhiking through France down to Morocco. I did all that, but I brought a guitar with me and I was always messing around, but I wasn’t taking it too seriously until I was about 22 and then I really knuckled down and started playing a lot and got pretty good and just writing, writing, writing over and over. The thing with writing songs or anything is I guess is you write a lot and you throw it away because it’s not good enough. I knew when it wasn’t quite good enough. It wasn’t ready for primetime. But then it suddenly was by about 1973 or 1974 and getting the right connections, suddenly I had a record deal and I still write now, obviously. The new record is all, of course, composed by me. It’s something I can’t quite turn off in my brain however much I might want to because once you’ve done that, you’ve made a record and people want you out on tour. So the work continues, but that’s the way I am. I write a song and think this is good, it’s as good as the early stuff, it’s different but it’s as good. So there’s nothing to do but carry on doing it until I can’t.

Angie: You contributed to the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, how did you get into that subculture and how does it influence you?

Graham: When I was quite young, probably about 17 or something when somebody introduced me to a William Burroughs book and I didn’t really understand a great deal of it, especially the heroin addiction, I never tried any illegal drugs so I didn’t really get it, but I knew it was brilliant writing and then I read a Jack Kerouac book. It was one called Lonesome Traveller, which I later found out was quite a lot of Kerouac’s writing cobbled together by the publishers and eventually I read On The Road, a long time later, his famous book. So I think that a lot of musical artists came along in the 60s after the beat writers and it influenced a lot of writers, Dylan and all those. People like that were very hip to the beat writers. Patti Smith was a big follower of much of that stuff. I wasn’t hugely involved in reading everybody who was a beat writer just because they wrote beat, it’s largely, a bit of William Burroughs, quite a few books of Burroughs, and a bit of Kerouac. 

Certainly not a deep student of it, but this fellow whose uncle, I think he was the brother of one of Kerouac’s wives, and they managed to get ahold of the Kerouac estate. This guy Jim Sampas [note: Sampas is the nephew of Kerouac and his literary executor] got ahold of me to appear on some show on stage somewhere it was, reading some Kerouac. So I did that and it turned out I did it quite a lot of times. Even in places like Town Hall in New York where Allen Ginsberg was on, he was still alive. Excellent people and I got mixed up with David Amram, who I think is the only musician to have backed Jack Kerouac on stage. Certainly the only surviving one and he’s still alive to this day. He’s quite old but he’s still out there doing it. Brilliant musician and we somehow, Jim Sampas, this guy who was part of the Kerouac estate got us involved with this Viking/Penguin double cassette release. We did that in the studio. So there were quite a lot of angles for it that I went through for a few years. And I enjoyed it a lot. I quite enjoyed reading that stuff. I was pretty good at it. 

Angie: How did the appearance in This is 40 come about?

Graham: It was Judd Apatow, the director and writer. He had this part for someone who was signed to an independent record label which was run by a guy named Pete played by Paul Rudd. He was signing up acts like me from the 70s, 80s, and 90s and no further than that. He wasn’t signing anything new. He was signing stuff that had its real heyday of sales back when records actually sold and signing them now in the modern streaming age. And it wasn’t going very well so he was wondering about finding an act who had a lot of self-deprecating humour and somehow he got ahold of my publishing company at the time, who operated in New York City and I was in New York living there mostly and they got ahold of me and said Judd Apatow wanted to have a word with me and so I said give him my number. We got together to talk and he told me about this character that I might be able to play and I said, “I’m your man, I can do this.” If I can destroy some innocent person’s record company that sounds like a great deal of fun to me! So I was in, and off we went and I was flown out to LA quite a lot of the time for different parts of the film. A great experience and it gave my career quite a nice, interesting little bump really, for quite a few years. I thought it was a good thing to do, no question about it. I enjoyed it a lot. 

Angie: Do you think movies like this or movies that have a lot of old music in the soundtrack like Guardians of the Galaxy, revive musicians’ careers?

Graham: I think it can help a bit. There were two other songs Judd Apatow used on two shows after that, most of them came from the album before Last Chance to Learn the Twist, that’s Cloud Symbols. He asked me and that came out in about 2018, Judd emailed me and said if you got any songs for one of my TV shows. He had one on Netflix and one on HBO. One was called Crashing, that was on HBO and the other one on Netflix was called Love and I sent him a song on the iPhone and he said this was perfect, please record it. So I got in the studio with a little band and recorded it simply, and he loved it and used that song on the Crashing show and then he asked for some more and I was already writing songs and going into the studio so I sent him some more and he grabbed one of those. 

And of course you get paid a lot better if you’re on HBO and Netflix than you do selling records because we’re in the age when records don’t sell and streaming doesn’t pay very well. So it’s not only a good thing for your career because people have heard this song “Dreaming”, that was the one that was used on the show Love on Netflix and they were hitting the sites and saying “Who’s singing that?”. People who don’t know me, who is that? That’s good! So you get that kind of result, a few more people might get to know who you are and then stream the song. At least it’s something. This is very useful to all of us these days, especially people like me who’ve been around a long time.

Angie: How do you think the music industry has changed since you started?

Graham: Well, obviously we’ve got streaming now and in those days when I started it was vinyl records with cassettes. Cassettes came along. Even my first albums, three of them at least came out on eight track, which was a very strange format but it sounded very good. The sound quality was good. Not so many people bought it though. But it was cassettes and albums. Right there the big change was records actually sold a lot. You didn’t have to be a superstar to make a good living. I never sold millions of records, but I had a very privileged life and sold a good deal of records and that was real sales in those days. 

But I think the internet is obviously very useful in as much as way more people know when I’m doing a show somewhere. Not many people have the excuse to say, “I’m just down the street, but I didn’t know this was on”. All they have to do is keep their eyes on social media and they find out where I’m playing in their town. So much easier. A lot of modern things have been very good in that sense. But I was very lucky. I started in an era where when you signed a record deal with a major label, as all of mine were until the mid 90s, actually, you got four albums and they stuck to it pretty much always, even if your first one wasn’t a big seller. They gave artists a chance to gain an audience and to grow what they were doing and keep making albums and maybe make them better and better and sell a bit more records every time, which is pretty much what I did. I sold a few more records every time. Nothing massive, but it tipped over and they were all pretty happy with it for the most part and they stuck with you. It’s not really the case now, I don’t think. That would be very hard for some young artists, unless they immediately exploded with huge sales and were a big fashion phenomenon and all that stuff. For a record company to stick with them for four albums and pay them money and the money was bigger for every album, that was how the deals were structured. That’s long gone for most people.

So again, I feel privileged to come from that period of time when that happened. Now young people have to do every single thing themselves. They have to work the whole situation and frankly that’s not something I would want to do. I had the benefit of those days when we had record companies who stuck with you and distributed the records. So it’s changed a great deal in that sense, of course.

Angie: It definitely sounds like it’s harder to make it as a musician now, compared to back then.

Graham: I think so, yeah. I think it’s got to be very hard. I hear some very good stuff. In the 90s it started to get difficult for people. Record companies weren’t clinging onto acts for longer. Independent labels were not so many. You got a lot of indie labels, which is very good like this record company I’m with now Big Stir Records. I didn’t know they existed until I saw them on Twitter and thought what’s that all about? And I had a look at their website, had a look at the acts, I didn’t know any of the acts. I heard one before, but I liked what they were doing. It was an exciting outfit, I thought. I thought their website was quite well-represented and it looked like a lot of fun. They don’t just sign anybody just because they don’t have a record deal. For people who are very good, they might not get signed by an indie label. 

So I think for young people it’s hard. They have to become some phenomenon quickly. Most people aren’t destined to be. I wouldn’t have liked to have been starting right now. I’ll tell you that much.

Angie: What do you think of young people who have an interest in classic rock?

Graham: They have such wide tastes now. My son, he loves a lot of that stuff. He’s got a very wide taste. Very modern stuff. He loves Electric Light Orchestra as much as some band called Portugal. The Man and other acts I’m not that familiar with. I play him things like a King Crimson record that I’ve got on iTunes from the 60s and The Incredible String Band. My daughter as well, she’s 36 or 37 or something, they’re up there, they all have wide imaginations and they enjoy classic rock, a bit of progressive, they enjoy modern stuff. I think it’s pretty healthy, a lot of the young people. They can stretch out a bit and enjoy different stuff. We were very tribal when I was young. It was a fashion thing. Suddenly at age 15 I was totally into soul music, it had to be Tamla Motown or Stax or Jamaican ska. I didn’t want anything else. I was over with The Beatles and all of them. It had to be black Americans or black Jamaicans. It was all very tribal and very fashion oriented. I suppose now that fashions are a bit all over the place really, so it’s kind of a fair game for people to like all kinds of music. So I think that’s pretty good and a healthy thing. 

Angie: You wrote a couple songs about the War on Drugs, “Nixon’s Rules” and on this latest album “Cannabis”. Why do you think ending the drug war is an important issue?

Graham: Well, I read a lot about it. I follow a lot of the websites over here. The organisations for drug law reform in England and in America as well. Because I think the more you read about it, if you get deeply into the subject, it’s fascinating for one thing. Drugs are fascinating. And everybody uses drugs. Everybody. Alcohol is drugs, period, done. There’s no argument. It’s just drugs. And a pub or a bar is just a safe drug consumption site. I mean alcohol is the most damaging drug to the human body. It’s a psychoactive drug. It gets you high just like caffeine and nicotine. So we don’t have a war on drugs, we have a war on people, certain people. And it’s always been people of colour and working and lower classes because they’re easy marks because they can’t afford to defend themselves and it’s always been used for political purposes, always. Richard Nixon trying to drum up hatred towards the Berkeley crowd who, for the first time in American history, were being beamed on TV screens burning draft cards and going against the Vietnam War. They were associated with marijuana and LSD so Nixon made those the biggest demons in the world, that marijuana was the worst thing you could possibly do to yourself and a threat to America so they targeted those people and they targeted the blacks because they’re black and they usually don’t vote Republican and so that’s what it is. It has nothing to do with the damage of drugs. It never has, because if that was the case, alcohol would be so illegal you’d go to prison for having half a bottle of wine stashed under your kitchen sink. So none of it is about the damage that drugs cause, it’s about other things. It’s so deeply wrong. It’s so deeply immoral. I think that if you look at the world, you could call this war on people thinly disguised as a war on inanimate objects, the greatest global long term policy of human rights abuse there has ever been. So yeah it’s damned important that people fight against it. It’s an uphill battle, but I think it’s that important. It’s a monstrous human rights abuse to criminalise people for changing their state of consciousness. It’s a monstrous abuse.

The song “Cannabis” doesn’t really say a great deal apart from the first lines. It’s just kind of a wistful [song], I imagined people going to a Holiday Inn lounge and there’s a jazz band playing, probably not a very good one, and suddenly the singer goes “Oh oh oh, cannabis” and everybody’s like “what the hell?” I thought that would be a very funny scenario, really. That’s how I started it. It’s a very jazz oriented song. But “Nixon’s Rules” is of course, a pretty fierce song. It’s pretty intense. And obviously it should inspire anger. It should inspire anger because I hated that so many people are bamboozled by it to this day. They think it’s about the terrible dangers of these other drugs and that they don’t use drugs when they say “Don’t even talk to me until I’ve had my coffee in the morning. I can’t answer the phone!” That’s drug addiction, that’s exactly what it is. It’s basically saying the stimulant drug I use every day has worn off in my sleep and I cannot face the day without it. That’s what people are saying, I need that drug, I need my fix and then I get working. We all do it. I do it. I don’t want to answer the phone until I’ve had a strong cup of tea with caffeine in it. We’re drug users and the whole thing of the war on drugs, it’s a misnomer for one thing and it’s immoral and a human rights abuse. So it will pop up in my material from time to time as will other things of some kind of political nature. I’ve written that song “Nixon’s Rules” particularly, it’s not entirely literal. It’s not a reference like the song “Cannabis”. That is a reference to a substance and not really going on and on about the awful discrepancy of the hatred involved with the actual war on people who use other inconvenient substances. It is what it is. 

I hated that that band that’s called The War on Drugs, I mean for God’s sake man. Pop music is a frivolous thing. The war on drugs is not frivolous at all. Don’t call your band The War on Drugs and make it frivolous. Anyway, never mind me, I’m ranting.

Angie: Definitely sounds like more of a freedom issue.

Graham: It’s about freedom of consciousness and it’s about the fact that when governments make a drug illegal, which not many people know, they also make it de facto illegal to research it. That’s why cannabis research is only just now being entertained as something we should do because they don’t want people to find out, like Richard Nixon did when he said to his people, “get me all the experts, I wanna tear the ass out of this drug. I want all the dope and marijuana and how dangerous it is.” So people researched it for him and came up with the answer, “you know what Richard, it’s not all that bad, you know”, which was deeply inconvenient. So they have to sort of make the research on these drugs, illegal drugs, so difficult. It takes years to get a permit. It just stops people from researching it and it’s all deliberate. Everything about this is deliberate. It’s all worked out as it goes along, they react to anything they can by throwing the hugely exaggerated negatives of everything.

Angie: Do you think the UK will legalise weed anytime soon?

Graham: Not anytime soon! Not in my lifetime! I’d be surprised if anytime ever. I really would at the moment. You’ve got the Labour Party who are fully endorsing Nixon’s Rules essentially. You got the Tory Party, of course, they’re conservatives, what else would we expect? The Lib Dems and the Greens, they might talk a good game, but they’re not getting into power anytime soon, I don’t think. We’re going to have the same old same old for the next five years with Keir Starmer, if he lasts five or the Labour Party lasts five years. He’s a conservative. He should be working for the other party and they’re terrified of the gutter press, the right wing gutter press. They’re terrified. An MP quietly told me that, “we can’t say anything or we’ll get killed in the press” and they mentioned The Daily Mail. Imagine that! The worst long term global policy of human rights abuse on the planet but you can’t say anything because you might offend a newspaper, which isn’t even a newspaper. It’s a tabloid that shills for the right wing, just like Fox News does, that’s all they are. The Express, The Mail, and The Sun. Both major parties are not going to cross them too heavily, they’re gonna tiptoe around and walk on eggshells. So that’s why I don’t see anything meaningful happening anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong, but yeah.

Angie: What are your thoughts on protest music? Do you think it makes a difference?

Graham: I think if you go back to a lot of the 60s stuff, Civil Rights Movement stuff, I think it made a great deal of difference. If it’s a popular song. You get a popular song that sells a lot of copies and a lot more people get the message and they might just start thinking about it differently, look into it differently, and try to understand why people are protesting certain things. We tend to think it didn’t change anything but, you know, it seems that justice moves at a glacial place, it’s very unfortunate. You hear a song that has something to say and you think that’s very clear, this is wrong, I agree with this song or I agree with the statements an investigative journalist has written in reaction to terrible injustices, but it seems like nothing happens, but it kinda does, but we have to put up with terribly slow increments, continually. You know, we have to, but things do change. Things do gradually get changed in some areas here and there in small amounts at a glacial pace, but they do. So there’s nothing wrong with having an outright protest song to something. It’s not usually my bag, I prefer playing with words in a different way. There’s a bit more sneaky sort of messages [that] come in, but they’re not really hitting you over the head. Occasionally with “Nixon’s Rules” and a song of mine called “Coathangers”, which came out a long time before they actually managed to make abortion illegal in America, which I did not ever think would happen. So I rarely do it in a literal sense. But there’s nothing wrong with that at all, to do literal folk protest songs, and that’s alright.

Angie: Coming back to Last Chance to Learn The Twist, what was it like writing and recording it?

Graham: We cut 14 basic tunes in four days, so that shows you it was a breeze and it was a lot of fun. There’s a lot of hard work [that] goes into beforehand. I’ve played the songs over and over again, when I’ve got them really where I want them to be, 95% perfect arrangements in my view, I send them to the band, like me on guitar on an iPhone or a small studio that someone might have and so the band learnt them as best as they can and we just get in there and mess around with them and within an hour, we usually got a take of the first song that we’re trying. We listen to it and say, okay that’s great, change this, how about trying this drum pattern, and we go out and we mess around for half an hour and say alright, ready, press record, off we go! And it’s usually two or three takes and we’ve got the take that I want, that I’m satisfied with. So it depends who you work with. These people understood me. They all understood what I was going for and to start off with the premise that the song knows what it’s doing. I know what I’m doing so follow the song, follow Graham, and then when somebody might suggest something that I do on guitar even, I’ll say, yeah, good idea. Then we throw a few things around, but we get down to it very very quickly and within seven days I had a whole bunch of overdubs, some keyboards, I did some backing vocals, some lead guitar, and then went off to a small studio that the engineer/co-producer runs, which will be cheaper because we were in a major studio for the first seven days, RAK Studios, which is famous 60s studios, it’s a walk up the road from me. 

Angie: How have the advance singles been received? 

Graham: They seem to have gone down pretty well. Big Stir are terribly enthusiastic and I didn’t know that there were hundreds and hundreds of indie labels that they’re… of course, that’s Big Stir’s bread and butter, those kind of, I mean indie stations, radio stations and they’ve been received well, it seems to me. I’m not used to this scenario where these indie labels now put out three or four songs as tasters for the album before the record comes out. I’m not used to that. My brain is still fixed in the 60s when you heard from a friend that the Stones have a new album out next week and then you heard a track on the radio and the album was coming out in days and nobody much knew about it and suddenly there it was. There wasn’t much of a fanfare until it was out. But now all this stuff is done up front, because there’s so much competition out there, I don’t know. It’s the modern way of doing things and they seem to be pleasing people in different ways. It’ll be interesting to see what people make of the whole album. I’ve certainly have talked to a few interviewers who seem to appreciate the album quite a lot. So yeah, it’s good.

Angie: What is your proudest accomplishment as a musician?

Graham: I think it’s to have gotten better in many ways as a guitarist and as a singer because I started out, the first gigs I did with musicians and The Rumour guys played live. I hadn’t really done anything. I was never in a real band. We had a few friends we got together, but we didn’t do anything with it and so I think getting better in certain ways that satisfied me as someone with what has turned out to be a long career. And I didn’t realise, I had no idea what it would be basically because when I was younger, the idea was you make three albums and then get out of the way, but it didn’t turn out like that. So I think the way I sing now is very different from the early days although most people know it still sound like me, but it’s improvements like that, more flexibility in my voice, and of course so much more knowledge of how to do this now. I don’t want a producer to come out of nowhere, listen to the songs twice, and tell you how the record’s going to be. I don’t need it. I know how to do this.

Angie: What do you think was the secret to the longevity of your career?

Graham: I don’t know, stubbornness maybe? I just keep popping up. You can’t get rid of me. It’s like Whack-a-Mole, you can’t get rid of him, he’s out of fashion, he’s old. Bang! Bang! Bang! No, I’m popping up again, mate. Sorry! Not gonna happen. For me I write a song and go, it’s been a long while since the last album, six months, fed up with that record, gone, and I need to throw another pebble into the stream, because I’ve been likening what I do as throwing a pebble into the stream. It swirls around a bit, then the current picks up and it goes downstream and eventually it’s like wow it’s gone out to the sea now. I need to do something about that. You know, pick up the guitar and see what I’ve got going for me and fail, fail, fail, until something comes along and then…

You can follow Graham on Facebook, Twitter, and his website. 

Loved this blog post and want to support and see more? Donate to The Diversity of Classic Rock on Patreon or Paypal or follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, click the follow button on my website, leave a nice comment, send your music or classic rock related books for review, or donate your art and writing talents to the blog. Thank you for the support!

You can also download the Brave Browser and earn tokens that you can donate to your favourite creators (including me!), donate to charity, or you can keep them for yourself and redeem them for cash. The choice is yours! Thank you!