SIMON KIRKE INTERVIEW  Pt. Two

December 30, 1983

Location: Simon’s house near the Thames, in Chiswick, London.

By Dave McNarie

 

Setting: On my first trip to London in April of 1982, I was barhopping in Hampstead with John "Rabbit" Bundrick. While discussing Rabbit’s work with the Who, Bob Marley, Johnny Nash, Crawler, and Free, he mentioned what a great guy Simon is. After too many pints and many stories, Rabbit said to try for an interview with Simon, and gave me a few contacts to aid in my efforts. Days later, while at the Eel Pie Boathouse Studios in Richmond, Pete Townshend said virtually the same thing: ‘Simon’s a great guy, and he’s the one to talk to.’

The next day, I was at Konk Studios in Tottenham to interview the Kinks’ bassist, Jim Rodford. While waiting for him, the Kinks’ then-manager, Pete Smith, was diverting my attention from the eminent arrival of Ray Davies and Chrissie Hynde at the studio.  I mentioned my unsuccessful attempts at reaching anybody from Bad Company through Peter Grant’s organization, Swan Song Records. Unbeknownst to me, Smith was having the same troubles, as he was trying to iron out problems with Grant over the acquisition of Simon Kirke’s services. Smith was also managing a band called Wildlife, who had already released one album on Konk Records. Simon had been playing in the band for several months, yet getting contractual problems with Swan Song and Grant resolved was proving an insurmountable task. Smith needed the green light from Grant’s organization in order to begin recording the second Wildlife album with Kirke in the line-up. Despite several amusing anecdotes about Grant, Smith couldn’t help in securing an interview with Simon.

Swan Song was floundering in the wake of John Bonham’s death. Peter Grant was becoming more reclusive, and reaching anybody other than a secretary at Swan Song was nearly impossible. Two days later I was discussing the problem with John Glover, the former manager of Free and Paul Kossoff’s band, Back Street Crawler. He gave me a few good leads but they, too, went nowhere.

In late 1983, having just graduated high school, I returned to London to do more bar-hopping and interviewing (roughly in that order). When I arrived in London, I picked up a copy of What’s On magazine and found Wildlife opening for the Michael Schenker Group. Pete Smith, it turns out, did come to terms with Swan Song and, indeed, the second Wildlife album was actually nearly the last release by that label. Unfortunately, due to a complete lack of support from either Swan Song or it’s mother-label, Atlantic Records, the album and the band floundered.

I continued calling people at Swan Song and Atlantic for several more weeks before someone at Atlantic broke down and gave me the residential phone number of Swan Song’s second-in-command, Clive Coleson. Clive proved extremely helpful and called me back after a mere five minutes with Simon’s phone number. Simon and I arranged to meet at a pub near the Kew Gardens tube station a few days later. I was nursing a pint of the house special right on time: One p.m. By my third pint, I was worried that I was catching a buzz in the wrong pub. I called his house, and his wife told me to hold tight because Simon was on the way. Simon strolled in at 1:15, smartly dressed in leather. I’d come with all my gear, prepared to do the interview, but Simon had come only to see who I was. As he sipped at his Perrier and I sucked down my fourth pint, he went through his terms for the interview. He wanted questions prepared in advance to minimize awkward moments of improvised conversation. This point I mildly protested, but also showed him a stack of pages filled with questions, chronological cheat-sheets covering details of his career, etc. Simon looked through the stack and, suitably impressed, asked me to return to the Kew Garden tube station the following afternoon, shook my hand, and went on his way.

Simon picked me up the station right on time the next day and took me to his home. Along the way he pointed out several things, including the funeral procession for victims of an IRA bomb at Harrods dept. store. Also, he showed me the home of his neighbor, Declan MacManus (Elvis Costello). Once inside his immaculate and beautiful home, we settled in the cozy living room off to the right of the entryway. As I set up my equipment, Si went to work on the fireplace and then set off to get orange juice for himself and tea for me.

 

DAVE: The basic idea is to span your whole career, right back to the days of Champion Jack Dupree.

SI: Right back to Champion Jack…

DAVE: You remember those days?

SI: Yeah! Vaguely! That’s going a back a long way!

DAVE: A common question that is asked is about musical influences. I’d like to ask the question, but in a different context-- Not what you listened to, because during that period it was usually the standard stuff…

SI: Mmm-hmm…

 

DAVE: …but what influenced you to actually become involved in performing music?

SI: Let me start by saying that my first musical experience, so to speak, was in the choir at school when I was, I think, about nine or ten. I was chosen to sing the lead verse, the first verse, from "A Christmas Carol". That really didn’t give me any burning ambition, any desire, to become a musician, but that was my first experience with an audience. I graduated from there to learning the recorder—the one you blow through. Up until I was about twelve I was, you know, an average musician. I had no particular interest in it. It was in the school curriculum so I attended the classes.

DAVE: It wasn’t a question of whether or not you wanted to do it.

SI: No, you just had to do it. It was on the curriculum so, boy, you went!

DAVE: How did you go beyond that to actually…

SI: Ah! ‘Round about my thirteenth birthday. I don’t know, I can pretty well pinpoint the exact time when I got hit by drums. I was watching a TV program called All That Jazz on an old black and white TV set. I’d never seen this program before. In fact, I’d never seen TV! It was the first day we had TV! That could account for a lot! The drummer, whomever it was, knocked me out! I was riveted, and I just could not stop watching this drummer… just waiting for the camera to get back on the drummer so I could see him. I would think it was from that day that I really wanted to be a drummer.

DAVE: Then what? Did you get the drums…?

SI: Well, out where I lived, no way! No, I lived way out in the sticks. I guess the American equivalent would be somewhere in Iowa…

DAVE: Utah!

SI: Utah, right!  You had to get things by mail order, and it took about three weeks to get a pair of drumsticks. So, all the equipment was out! I had to make my own! I made my own drums out of biscuit tins and chocolate tins. I covered them with tape and old magazines to get a nice, solid sound. The sticks I cut from a hedge. They were quite funny, actually-- I wish I had them today—because they were no more than about five inches long. I never knew that real drumsticks were about twelve to fifteen inches long.

DAVE: Still, this is pretty backwoods stuff that a lot of kids, I’d say, would do. Did you know at that point that drumming is what you were going to do?

SI: No. No, I dare say. Around about my fifteenth birthday I knew that I was destined…that’s what I really wanted to do. I knew, in those two short years from thirteen to fifteen, that I was pretty good. Obviously, I graduated from biscuit tins. I finally got a snare drum, and saved up enough money to get a little kit.

It wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just being able to play drums. I was really enjoying it and being very stage-minded. I liked crowds. I didn’t shy away from crowds. I liked being up on the stage. I thought, "well, if I can clown around on stage and play drums and make a bit of money…" This is what I wanted to do.

DAVE: How did it graduate from that stage to going semi-pro or pro?

SI: Semi-pro. We’ll take the semi-pro stage first.

I was asked to join a discotheque. This was, as I say, way out in the sticks. A guy ran a discotheque—he had a couple of turntables and a little amp and all these contemporary records of the time, plus a lot of old ones as well. He used to go round to the village halls and play to crowds, and they were paying money like discos do now. But he thought it would be a novelty if he had me playing with the records on my kit. I don’t know if anyone has done that before or since, but I consider those two years the most educational of my life. He’d go around and set up his stuff, and he had the contemporary records and the slightly older records, plus he had older records from the forties-- quicksteps and waltzes and things—and I had to play to all this stuff. For two years I did that.

DAVE: Sole drum accompaniment?

SI: Just sole drum accompaniment, yeah! And I learned a lot because I had to play in the time that was being pushed out of those speakers…

DAVE: As well as improvise.

SI: As well as improvise, sure! And today I’ll say to any aspiring musician, particularly drummer, that you can’t get a better education than by putting on a record and playing along to it.

After the discotheque thing, I joined a group called the Maniacs. We never recorded anything, but it was a pretty good band. We did all cover versions of things of the day. It was about the time of Satisfaction. We did Satisfaction, so it was about ’66, ’67, and ‘68. Beach Boys. Beatles, of course. A lot of blues by that time. Blues was getting really big in Britain.

The guy who formed the band was an ex-army guy. This was before our National Service disbanded. He’d been all over Germany and he came back with an amplifier with four inputs… no, eight inputs! I’m sorry! So, everything went through this one amp. We had three guitarists, a bass and a drummer, two microphones, and a spare input. They all went through this one amp, about twelve by twelve. And we were called the Maniacs.

We had a great time, I must say. That was my first real, full-fledged group, and I thought, "this is the life for me!"

DAVE: Was this in London, though?

SI: No. This was still in Shropshire. I’ll name the county. It was right on the border between Wales and England, way out in the boonies. [Kirke was born August 27, 1949 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. By coincidence, Ian Patterson was born there, too. Patterson changed his name to Hunter and fronted Mott the Hoople—DM]

DAVE: How did you move down to London?

SI: I moved down ‘round about the time that I was eighteen. I left school, what you call ‘graduated’. I did that, basically, for my parents. Over here, you can get what they call "O Levels," ordinary levels, or "A Levels," advanced levels. And then you can go to university. They wanted me to go. I didn’t, but I said I’d get the advanced levels for them. Otherwise, I would have come down two years earlier.

As it was, I came down when I was eighteen. Really, nothing happened for what seemed like a long time but, in actual fact, was only a year. Then, after phoning up for auditions and getting turned down… nobody really wanted to know a drummer, especially someone that was on his own, because musicians went around in twos or threes. To have someone come in from way out, all by himself, who had no money and no equipment, just what was in his head, was, you know… So, I had to be a bit pushy.

I saw Black Cat Bones blues band in the autumn of ’68, and it was Paul Kossoff that really knocked me out. I’d never seen or heard of them before but there was just some magical thing there. I thought, "well, I’d like to play with this band!" Plus the fact that the rest of them were all pretty good, too. They looked like ‘the Business’. They had their own van, their own equipment, and they had a following. They were playing steamy little clubs, and that was exactly what I wanted to do.

It was a pub so in the interval, when they had a half-hour’s break, I went over to Paul and bought him a drink. Then I said, "I don’t think much of your drummer." He said, "funnily enough, I don’t think he’s good, either." (Laughs) "He’s leaving, actually, and we’re holding auditions next week." That was a real stroke of luck. I turned up then, the following week, without any equipment. There was only one other guy who had answered the audition and, to add insult to injury, not only did I use his equipment but I got the job! (Chuckles) So that was it.

I played with the band for about three or four months. We did a lot. One of the gigs was the Champion Jack Dupree, who was a real legend. Not only was he an original boogie-woogie New Orleans piano player, but he was a black living in the north of England. It’s kind of the equivalent to a Jewish guy living right in the middle of Syria, y’know? It’s unheard of! But, the guy was really popular. He was a boxer, he married a white woman (laughing) so he’d compounded the felony… and he spawned, I don’t know, several coffee-colored kids. They were the nicest family you could ever wish to meet! He had this old Lincoln, I think, that he’d had shipped over from the States, all written with "Here Comes Champion Jack Dupree" on the front, and "There Goes Champion Jack Dupree" on the back! (Laughter)

One of the first pleasant surprises I got was when… I was a bit nervous when he came onstage, ‘cause the guy had been fifty years in the business. I’d been fifty minutes in the business, so you can imagine! We started playing an old blues and he looked at the audience and said, "Hey! This guy can play!"

(Simon gets up from the sofa and attends to the fire. When he returns to the sofa, he picks up the conversation where he’d left off.)

After that, it was 1969 in the spring, when the blues boom was at it’s height. You had bands like Cream, John Mayall, the whole "Clapton Is God" era. The psychedelic era was really taking a firm grip in England. Paul Kossoff was pretty unhappy playing blues all of the time. We loved the blues and we still do, but we wanted to form a new band that wrote their own material and didn’t rely on other people’s. He asked if I’d like to leave the band with him. I was kind of, you know, "I’ve just arrived…" And he said, "yeah, but you’re good! I know that we can get something good together."

I kind of looked up to him. Even though he was younger than myself, he’d been around London. He’d lived in London. He was born and raised in London, so he was streetwise and I trusted his judgement. He said he’d seen a singer and harp player in a band called Brown Sugar, down from the north. It had the vocalist Paul Rodgers. He’d been over and jammed with them, and they’d got on real well. Paul Rodgers wanted to leave his band and wanted to form a band as well, so we were three-quarters of the way there. We just needed a bass player.

We were pretty stumped for bass players because it had to be right. In the end we… [Here, Si seems to avoid saying something derogatory. DM.]

Paul Kossoff knew Alexis Koerner, who was instrumental in helping many, many bands. Alexis said, "I’ve got a great guy for you! He’s just been sacked from John Mayall." I thought, "well, if he’s just been ****fucking sacked by John Mayall, what’s he going to do for us?!"

"And he’s fifteen."

I said, "Jesus Christ! This is getting worse!" He said, "he’s the best bass player I’ve ever played with." That really… After the first two sentences, the third! He said, "I’m doing a gig tonight at the 51 Club. You come down and see us." The three of us went to see him, really not knowing what to expect. The place was packed. Down through the crowd, because the dressing room was at the back of the hall, came Alexis and the drummer… I couldn’t see a bass player. Then, I saw the top of this cherry-red Gibson bobbing through the crowd, right? It was being carried by this tiny kid, who was dressed in the most effeminate gear! I guess, today it would be okay. It would be cool to wear what he was wearing, but… Me and Koss and Paul Rodgers looked at each other and went, "what the fuck is this?!"

DAVE: ‘Poof’

SI: And he was a real pretty-boy, too! So, there were a hundred things flying around my head!  Anyway, he got up on stage and plugged in. The guy blew me away! He was brilliant. He was absolutely brilliant. Very cocksure, very swaggering, but he could really play. He took a solo that I remember to this day!

DAVE: Wasn’t he fired  from Mayall because he wanted to go in a different direction? It wasn’t his playing, it was the idea that he had too much of a…

SI: Oh, yeah! I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that he’d got the elbow. But, a lot of people went through John Mayall. He had, like, a typist’s pool of musicians. But, yeah, you’re probably right because three or four years later down the line that’s what Andy tried to do within Free! So, you know…

DAVE: (Laughing) We’ll get to that.

SI: Yeah!  Anyway, then we were four. We asked him if he’d like to join and he said, "yeah, I’d love to." We had our first rehearsal in a pub called the Nag’s Head. Appropriately enough, [it’s] where I’d met Paul Kossoff for the first time. Andy arrived by taxi, which really stunned us. He had his amp, which was on wheels, and he had his own guitar… ‘Cause he played with Mayall, [and] that was quite a big thing. I think we played pretty well into the hours of the next morning. All these young kids-- he was the youngest. He was fifteen, I was eighteen, Paul was seventeen, and Paul Rodgers was eighteen. There’s your ages.

But we were stumped for a name. We didn’t know what to call ourselves. I can’t exactly remember how we got our first management but, all of a sudden, we were told to be at some office and that this was our manager. Believe me, these things happened. Brian Morrison! I’ll never forget him! I’d like to, but I’ll never! He said, "No. Your name’s wrong. We’ve got to have a name." He said, "what about the Heavy Metal Kids?" Actually, today it’s a good name for a young band. But we said, "it sucks! Dreadful. Awful!" He said, "okay, we’ll have to let you go. We’ll have to get rid of you."

Hang on! Whoa!   Let me backtrack a bit. It wasn’t Brian Morrison.  It was Chris Blackwell [owner of Island Records, and the man instrumental in bringing the likes of Bob Marley and reggae to the popularity—DM] and he’s a nice guy. He says, "we’re having trouble getting a name for you." Right about this time, Alexis had a band called Free At Last. He’d had a band, with Ginger Baker and Graham Bond, and it had been called Free At Last. They had disbanded several years prior so he said, "why don’t you just call yourselves Free?" Cause in those days you had bands with strange names like Blue Cheer. It was the psychedelic era. Art, that was another name.

DAVE: Love.

SI: Love! Right! So, everyone thought, "Hey! Peace! Love, man!" Hell, there was probably a band called Peace!

DAVE: There was, eventually!

SI: God! Paul! Right!  Anyway, we called ourselves Free, which was to cause a lot of upsets in advertising. People would come up to gigs expecting not to pay.

DAVE: Free.

SI: Thinking maybe it was just a disco or something. "Eight O’clock: Free".

We had our first argument with Chris Blackwell about the name. He said, "it’s not a strong name. It runs through your fingers. It doesn’t do anything." So, we said, "we really like it. We’re gonna stick by it." Then, he came up with the Heavy Metal Kids. We said, "no! It’s a fucking horrible name! Take it!" He said, "well, that’s it, then. We’ll have to say goodbye." We said, "all right…" And, inwardly, we were cringing because Island Records had Joe Cocker, Spooky Tooth, Traffic… It was the big company, and here we were telling the manager to fuck off!  For your edit point, "telling him to go to hell". I’m thinking of your career as well.

DAVE: Fuck  it.

SI: So, there was this big silence and we trooped out of the office. And we thought, "oh, my God! We’ve just blown it!" But, a few hours later he phoned Andy, who had taken on sort of leadership of the band. He said, "Okay, we’ll give you six months’ trial under the name Free."  Free didn’t really happen for two years. We did what we call "the Transit", the van transit circuit. We did all over England. We must have played just about every club and pub and town hall that you could play at least once. We made an album that got dreadful reviews, Tons of Sobs.

DAVE: I thought it caused a bit of a ruckus.

SI: "Caused a bit of a ruckus?" I think the only ruckus that it caused was the fact that it featured Mickey Mouse in a glass coffin on the front cover. Otherwise, it was a straight-ahead blues album. Also, the inside photographs were all taken weird. Everyone had to sort of make a lot of movement through the lens so that it would all be blurred.

DAVE: Is it the same shots that are on the front cover of the American version, where you’re all sitting on the bed…

SI: Yep that’s it. Brown and sepia. Yeah, that’s it. That was dear old Guy Stevens, rest his soul. He was instrumental in producing the album. I haven’t heard it… I never listen to our stuff. I should.  Anyway, the first album sank without trace. There was a single pulled off it, but it didn’t do much.  But, you see, that was ’69, early ’70. That was when pop ruled. Pure pop ruled the airwaves. Nowadays, thank God, it’s a bit more varied. But then it wasn’t. So, they didn’t do anything.

We did two years of slogging around and then one day we did a gig in Durham, which is up north. It was a dreadful gig. The audience was very unenthusiastic, and the numbers we were doing had those turgid beats—which are still good, but it didn’t really inspire anything. We thought, "we’re going to need a song that’s more up-tempo. Something you can dance to!" The days of people sitting with their heads bowed and listening like that were going very quickly.

DAVE: You needed something a bit more accessible.

SI: Sure. (Chuckling) ‘A bit more accessible.’ Yeah.  So, we went backstage and Andy and Paul wrote "All Right Now", pretty well backstage there and then. They were writing furiously, those two.

DAVE: They made quite a good writing team.

SI: Oh, they were great. I mean, I’ve got to say the first album had it’s rough edges, but "what the hell". But from then on, right up until Free At Last, they did a good job. They really did. Especially the Fire and Water album. It would be my favorite. Gotta be my favorite, cuz…

DAVE: I think it was the actual peak of the band.

SI: Yeah. It wasn’t the most-polished, but Free were never a really polished band. It didn’t have the nicest songs…

DAVE: Ohhh!

SI: …it’s just something about it. Well, when I say ‘nice’, I mean "nice, squeaky-clean" songs. [Fire and Water] probably embodied what Free was all about the best.

Anyway, "All Right Now" came out and went straight to number one in, I think, two weeks. It went in at nineteen the first week, went to number three the second week, then went to number one. Three weeks. So, we were off on this mad, helter-skelter of ‘Big Time’.  And none of us had reached the age of twenty.

DAVE: It seems that… John Glover [manager of Free and, later, Paul Kossoff and Back Street Crawler—DM.] said that, from the start, you were very motivated and knew what you wanted. You were a band that didn’t want to be bullshitted…

SI: That’s right. We were very headstrong.

DAVE: You wanted to go for the top. But once you had this hit it seems as though you had, or were at least on the verge of having, the world at your feet. Yet, within about a year and a half, you had broken up for the first time.

SI: Well, it’s like your eyes are bigger than your stomach. If you see a big meal and think, "right! I’m gonna have all that!" And then you get halfway through and, "Mmm, cor! No!" That’s a parallel I can draw, but… I said it before and I’ll say it again. I’ll keep on saying it: We had no experience, whatsoever. All right, we had two years of slogging. We were very young. That’s the number one criteria: We were [too young and inexperienced].

[Simon’s wife enters the room at this point to tell him his buddy, Ronnie Wood, would be dropping by soon. Si leaves to talk with Woody on the phone for a moment, then returns.]

 

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©1983, 2002 D.C. McNarie. May not be reproduced in any manner without prior written consent of author.