Programme: City to City Tour
Gerry Rafferty: Music to Music

Most people catching the City to City Tour and buying this programme will already know the information a standard tour brochure’s potted biography would provide: that Gerry Rafferty grew up in the West of Scotland; was with Billy Connolly in the Humblebums; and followed this with a classic solo album, ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’; that subsequently he and Joe Egan formed Stealer’s Wheel – which made three albums and had two hit singles in ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ and ‘Star’; that in the spring of 1975, Gerry returned to Scotland; and that nearly three years later he has re-emerged as a solo star.

What follows is an attempt to provide for this tour programme something more interesting and more informative and better value-for-money than the standard potted biography. It is a focus on Gerry Rafferty’s feelings about, and his tastes in, music. It takes the form of an interview, specially undertaken for this programme, by UA’s Head of Press, Michael Gray.

MG: How did rock’n’roll first hit you?

GR: The first record was Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. I think it’s actually the place you were in and what you were doing that mattered; the record carries those associations. They become part of why you love it. In my case I was nine years old and I walked into this fish’n’chip shop to get a bag of chips. The record came on just as they were pouring on the vinegar.

I’d never heard anything like that before. That’s my most over-powering memory of being affected by rock’n’roll.

But the terminology we use now about the music meant nothing at all to me then; it was just a sound.

Music itself struck me long before that – at four or five. I was affected by people singing; hearing vocal harmonies; realising that there was thing called harmony, which intrigued me totally. I remember Christmas parties where people would sing Scots folk songs, and Irish songs, and the hits of the day. I was very struck with the fact that people could do this thing and produce this sound.

MG: It’s interesting that we could be struck by the authentic new voice of, say, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and at the same time enjoy, at that age, something like ‘Love and Marriage’.

GR: Of course. Because it’s only later that we use these terms – what is good, what is bad. At that age those terms don’t matter. A child has a facility for picking up on anything; you’re soaking up so much stuff. Doris Day, everything.

MG: How old were you, d’you think, when you first learnt to discriminate? Or when the very idea of discriminating in music first occurred to you?

GR: Well that’s interesting. Maybe even at seven or eight even though you don’t discuss "what your taste is", you still know yourself what sort of things you like to hear and what you don’t.

But there’s so much bullshit talked about rock’n’roll. It’s easy looking back at 30 and saying ‘Yeah, when I was nine that changed my life’.. It didn’t change my life, you know? There you are, someone at school; only a child, and there’s so much stuff to go through. Rock’n’roll was only one part of it.

When Billy Connolly and I worked in folk clubs and such, we were both highly suspicious of folk singers doing songs by Big Bill Broonzy and all that. Guys from Dublin and Glasgow, 19 years old, singing old men’s blues – I could never take that seriously because I could never take them seriously. But all these people seemed to have so much more credibility because they were being so very ethnic. It was the same bullshit thing you always get, you know? I’m here thinking ‘Where have they heard all this stuff? Here’s me, I’ve been listening to Cliff Richard for ten years – I haven’t heard this on Saturday Club.’

My experience was not at all of being ethnic about it, but just of soaking up a whole lot of things through the radio and records – through jukeboxes.

MG: Did you and Billy Connolly have similar tastes in music?

GR: Not particularly, no. But we had a common attitude towards pretentions in other people. I think we recognised something good in each other, the two of us had a kind of honesty; we knew what we didn’t know. And two people who get together like that for a couple of years are very strong, specially in recognising real talent in each other.

Billy’s talent was in getting people to respond immediately; mine lies in seducing people by singing, which is a much slower process. In some ways we had the best of both worlds. Billy shocked people into listening by offending their sensibilities; and that created a platform for me to come forward and sing.

MG: Did what you had in common have something to do with both your both being from the West of Scotland?

GR: It must have done. We recognised that in each other.

We both came from the same religious background as well so we both related to the kind of insanity we went through as kids in Roman Catholic Schools. A similar kind of humour played a bit part in it.

MG: What was the first song you wrote that you felt stood up alongside the records that had really reached you before you were a performer?

GR: There are two songs on the first album I ever made, when I was with Billy. It was called "The New Humblebums". One song was ‘Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway’ which I thought was fairly good and still stands up; the other was called ‘Patrick’, which was about the artist who paints all my album covers, John Patrick Byrne. They were the most real things I did.

I could still sing them with conviction today – and that’s good. That gives me a lot of encouragement, the fact that I can still sing songs from so long ago: because I know they still have a power to affect people. And that’s what we were really talking about earlier on-—he power to affect people.

In music and songwriting, you want to make people respond and say ‘That was great’. You always want them to say that. You’re confident in some ways and have a terrible inferiority complex in other ways. I think it has to be that way; if you were always sure, you’d never do anything anyway. But it’s only in retrospect that you discover whether a song stands up.

MG: Which do think stand up from the second Humblebums album ‘Open Up the Door’?

GR: Again I think there are two of mine, ‘Keep It To Yourself’ and a simple thing called ‘Song for Simon’ which was kids’ stuff and which I still particularly like.

MG: And from your first solo album, ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’

GR: The title track. I shall be doing that on this tour. Also I think that ‘Didn’t I’ stands up, and ‘To Each and Every One of You’. There are maybe four or five songs on that album that I still like to do.

The Stealers Wheel period wasn’t such a good period for me in terms of things I wrote myself. The best songs Stealers Wheel did were things that Joe Egan and I wrote together. On the first album I feel the best two songs were ‘Late Again’, which I still think very good, and ‘You Leave Something Better Inside Of Me’. They’re both pretty strong songs. But I wouldn’t do them on stage because Joe actually took the lead vocal on both of these.

Again on the second Stealers Wheel album, ‘Ferguslie Park’, with one exception the songs we wrote together were stronger. You see Joe would write three or four, and I would do the same, and then we’d write three or four together. It was a good way of doing it, too.

On ‘Ferguslie Park’ there’s one I wrote by myself which still stands so far as I’m concerned, called ‘Over My Head’. And on the tour I may do another, one of the joint compositions, which is called ‘Everything Will Turn Out Fine’. I especially still like the lyrics on that.

MG: How about the final Stealers Wheel album, ‘Right or Wrong’?

GR: Well – that was the weakest, both in terms of songs and commiment. Joe and I discovered halfway through making it that our management had gone into liquidation and everything was collapsing – that didn’t exactly produce a great deal of enthusiasm in us for finishing the album.

I suppose there are one or two songs I may do from it: there’s ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ which is one of mine and is a sort of country rock track, and I may do ‘Go As You Please’, which Joe and I wrote together.

I don’t want to be too negative about that time, but for the reason I’ve explained, that album has pretty bad associations for me.

MG: When you experienced real success as an artist, did it feel how you’d imagined it would?

GR: The first real success was with Stealers Wheel, in terms of a lot of people actually buying the records. The very first single. And the initial feeling for me was that I was stuck in the middle of two paths. We set this thing in motion: a sort of rollercoaster. And there was this ting trundling along at a fantastic rate, with no way to get off or stop it.

It went No. 1 in the States and it was the first single by a new band, and they wanted us over in the USA to tour immediately – and the band just wasn’t ready. We could do it in the studio but live it was a total shambles.

So I was aware of these things, and of the fact that they didn’t really care whether the band was ready or not – it was simply a question of cash while the going was good. So I thought ‘Well, I don’t like this’ and so I sort of ran away for a while.

MG: So there was certainly a gap between what you’d expected success to be and how it felt when it came?

GR: Yes. Because you grow up listening to music and you do have pre-determined ideas of what it is and what it’d be like to have hit records.

But I’m sure that for most people it’s quite different from what they’d imagined it would be. I think it’s just part and parcel of growing up. That isn’t just in music – it’s in many aspects of life.

MG: Was it less exciting than you’d expected?

GR: I don’t know if it was less exciting – it was less satisfying than I’d thought it would be. It seemed pretty hollow really; and pretty crass as well. Specially because all the time I became more and more aware of aspects of the music business – of what went into making records sell.

MG: How about when you first toured successfully – I mean with Stealers Wheel?

GR: Well, I didn’t, really. Stealers Wheel did a British tour but I wasn’t part of it. I went my separate way from the band shortly after ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’. I was sitting up in Glasgow watching it move up the American charts, thinking ‘Hmmmm…’

And I wondered what would happen when it came to doing TV, because it was my lead vocal on the track. There were actually suggestions that Joe should do the mime to my voice and stuff, which was totally absurd.

Then as it turned out, after four or five months up in Glasgow I realised there was nothing I could do about it anyway so I went back to the band. But while I’d been away they’d been stuck as support act for the first David Bowie British tour, which was the worst thing the management could have done because their audiences were completely different from Bowie’s.

MG: How did you get back into the band? Did you pick up the phone one day and say "Guess Who?"?

GR: (Laughs) No… I was still thinking "I’ve had enough of that band" and "I’ve definitely finished with bands", and my idea was to get a bunch of songs together and do another solo album. And out of the blue one of the managers phoned me and asked me to help out with the band. So I "helped out".

I came back and there was a small tour lined up – 8 or 9 gigs in Holland. Then shortly before we were about to leave, Joe Egan had decided he was going to quit the band, because he’d had a terrible time while I’d been away. He’d had to shoulder all the responsibility. So the record company didn’t know what was happening and were running around in despair at this awful, rumoured latest development: ‘Well now, Gerry’s come back and Joe’s leaving’.

Eventually Joe consented to do this Dutch tour before he left, but that was going to be it. So we trooped across to Holland. Now then, while I’d been away from the band I’d been replaced by Luther Grovesnor(Ariel Bender)(!) and the bass-player had changed and so on, so by the time we were in Holland there were six of us – and it was absolutely crazy..

Nobody knew each other. We were working with perfect strangers. We had very little in common, either musically or in any other way. A complete farce.

So while we were in Holland Joe and I did a lot of talking together and discovered that the management had been playing us off against each other – telling Joe all sorts of lies about what I’d been doing and telling me the same lies about Joe. So we thought ‘Fuck it. Instead of you and me leaving, let’s us stay and disband the others.’ We thought we’d work on our own and just use session-guys.

We had a great confrontation with our managers, in Holland, at 8:30 one morning at this open air festival, and we told them what scum they were and that the game was up.

So there were all these traumas happening, and people having nervous fits and breakdowns and screaming – fists flying and absolute insanity. Then we got back home and had a terrible scene in the office with the whole band, because we had to tell them we were all going our separate ways.

MG: This all sounds amazing.

GR: It gets better. That should have been that, but the management had already set up this gig at the Oxford University Ball, and when we tried to pull out they threatened to sue; so very foolishly we agreed to do it. You can imagine the atmosphere in the dressing room.

The band entirely blamed me, of course. They thought I was a real bastard – that I’d come back into the band and bust it up. They thought I was "dominating Joe", and "running off with Joe". Which of course was not the case at all because Joe was leaving anyway – he was totally at the end of his tether.

Ah, yes. It gets better still. So Joe and I met up before this gig, and had a few drinks – because we knew what the atmosphere would be like when we arrived. Then when we got there, the guy on the door taking the tickets said "Who are you"? So we said: "We’re Stealers Wheel!" He said: "You don’t look like Stealers Wheel to me – and I have seen Stealers Wheel".

So Joe and I just walked on in and this guy, who was about 17 or 18 but about six foot four, suddenly jumped on my back. So I turned round and hit him and seriously dented his nose. But then his father appeared, who was also taking tickets, and we had a set to.

Well that was the start of the evening and it went from bad to worse. We got to the dressing-room and I walked in the door and the band were all sitting with their arms folded, and they’d brought all their girlfriends and wives along for moral support, and they were all sort of sitting in judgement upon us. A big scene ensued.

Anyway the gig was atrocious. So that was the end of the Stealers Wheel period.

MG: Does that mean (laughs) that you’ve never really done a British tour?

GR: Yes, that’s right. Well, only with Billy anyway, and that was terrible towards the end, too. The last straw was turning up at this concert one night to find ourselves, an acoustic duo, supporting Atomic Rooster.

MG: Let’s go back to your songs. I’d like to know whether, if you can generalise, the ones you like best in retrospect are those which came comparatively easily and fast when you’re writing them, or those that you labour over for a long time.

GR: If anything, it would be the ones that took no great trouble to write. With ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’ I worked from the title, and finished it in about one and a half hours – which is pretty quick for me. ‘Mary Skeffington’ also. I wrote that in a fairly short space of time. So yes, that could be true. I’d never thought about that before.

MG: Which came easiest on "City to City"?

GR: Well, the hard work for me is always writing the lyrics. I never have a problem with melodies. I’ve always got quite a lot of melodies out and about in my head at any given time. For ‘City to City’ the first one I did was the title track, which was good. It was pretty easy and I had a definite idea of what I was writing about. It was just a train situation from Glasgow to London. I wanted to write a good train song.

"Whatever’s Written in Your Heart" I wrote in a night. I felt I needed something like that song – quite simple in terms of the way it was done. So I got down and finished it – I’d had the chorus part of the melody before – and we recorded it next day in the studio. So again that came out of the blue with no hard labour and I think it’s probably one of the better tracks on the album.

MG: How about ‘The Ark’? Because you were writing on a definite them, weren’t you?

GR: Yes, I’d had a melody for ‘The Ark’ way back when I was doing ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’ and I tried to finish it then but could never get a bridge for it. But I liked the melody so much – and the best melodies stay with me anyway; I don’t need to write them down. So when I was working on the songs for the ‘City to City’ album, it came back and I was determined to get a middle for it. That one proved quite difficult – I really had to work on it.

MG: In the lyric, you were really trying to summarise a book, weren’t you?

GR: Yes, I’d been reading various things in the layoff period, and one was a book on the significance of the Ark in both literal and symbolic terms. It suggested an interesting idea on the whole story of the Flood: that the Ark was a knowledge or a faith, a teaching, and it comes to the fore when a civilisation is going down. The Ark comes to the fore to help mankind. All very deep stuff, if you’ll excuse the pun.

I liked the idea – and of course so much of the stuff on the album is about travelling and going back. So I wanted to try to say something about both ideas and tie up all the themes in the song.

MG: Are you saying that you feel we’re in a period of civilisation crumbling?

GR: Yes, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I feel that – that the crunch is coming. I think we will be very lucky indeed if we make the end of this century without some pretty horrific things happening to us.

MG: Have your politics, or your ideas about society, changed much in the last six or seven years?

GR: I’ve never really been a political animal, though I take a passing interest in current affairs. I don’t take a stand in having a particular ideology. Does that sort of stand really change anything? I’m pessimistic in that respect. I always have been.

MG: I was interested that when Dave Laing reviewed the ‘City to City’ album, he assumed from comparing it to ‘Can I Have Money Back?’ that you’d mellowed politically. That the earlier album was much more overtly cynical – in its critique of business, and the music business in particular.

GR: That was a temptation I had to resist on ‘City to City’. I’d actually written a song for the album, called ‘Take the Money and Run’ – but I thought "People will think I have this money fixation". I’d written it after Stealers Wheel collapsed into lawyers meetings – but of course two years later I don’t feel quite so strongly about it. But I may put that song on the next album!