Herbie
and the music that they listen to is
probably like that, but I’m not a moaning
grumpy old man.
I do a lot of work with kids and we run
what we call ‘rock shops’. We put on
music courses and in that week I get
a dozen or so tiptop professionals. It’s
a real, intensive week’s work where
the kids get the chance to write – it’s
all based on new material – they have
to compose music and they have just
that week in which to get all their songs
sorted out. We do a big concert on the
Friday night and they’ve made a quantum
leap, these young musicians, because
they’ve met and mixed with working
musicians of all standards - and all
shapes and sizes…
Flowers
Liza met up with one of the UK’s true music legends
I was born in Isleworth 1938 and we were
evacuated to Sussex during the war. I still
believe the countryside is good for your
eyesight, good for your lungs, and also
good for the peace that one needs to
practice or try and write a piece of music.
I can actually hear birds out here and at
night-time I can see stars. There are lot of
people who live in London who don’t know
what stars are - funny innit? Anyway,
that’s where I was born and raised.
My early days weren’t tough. We were
fed. But I didn’t like school. It was tough
because the road where I lived during
the war got flattened and – so that was
harsh. Things were on ration, but there
weren’t really any fat bastards about
‘cause of the rationing. I think the reason
people start fattening up is peasantry
- it’s what people do in the good times stock up. The hard time’s coming round
the corner, I think.
I liked music even when I was a toddler.
There was something about seeing
84
bands marching about and we used to
go Jaywick Sands for our holidays where
there was a funfair there that had a
jukebox and the owner of the funfair was
a mad fanatic for Latin music, like Xavier
Cugat and Pérez Prado and all these
Cuban bands, so I developed a love of
big band when I was about seven.
It’s all I thought about – I wasn’t very
good at school, I was always thinking
about the music but I wouldn’t advise
people to avoid school because you
gotta be clever in this day and age,
even in music. When I started out in the
business, doing shows like West Side
Story and Hello Dolly and goodness
knows what else, there were 30 or 40
musicians in a pit. Obviously we played
the same music every night, it was such
a lot of fun because the music was great.
Now, when they put West Side Story on,
they’re using three musicians. That’s two
synthesisers and a drummer. Now they’re
thinking about just using backing tracks,
like these boy bands and girl bands.
They’re not bands. They’re quite goodlooking young people, but most of ‘em
can’t play a musical instrument.
Over half the music you hear on TV is
done by one person in the studio, or
in their garage, or in their bedroom,
like the music that they use for news
programmes... Why do they use it – can’t
understand it. Don’t know what it’s for.
I don’t think music will revert back to
how it was. Nothing does – time doesn’t
go backwards. No, this is what we’re
stuck with, what we’ve got. You know,
computers are great, but on the last set
of recordings that I did, when I went into
the control box to listen back to what
we’d done, the three staff members were
sitting there playing about with their
mobiles. One was playing bingo; another
one was answering an email, obviously
from his girlfriend, because he banged
the mobile down, and the other one I
think he was playing a game. I find it
disperses all the focus and the energy,
But my narrow point of view gets even
narrower because of the fact that the music
industry generates so much money and
that so little of it stays within the business
and publishers get half of everything that
is earned. They don’t believe in copyright.
That sounds like an awful mouthful, but
they don’t really believe in it in places like
China. It’s like, if somebody writes da-dada-da-da-da, Happy Birthday to You, every
time you sing it and you don’t pay money
to the Performing Rights Society, you’re
breaking the law. I find that codswallop. I
think every time a band’s song is played,
it generates an income, like the BBC or
companies or concert halls have to pay the
composer of that piece of music, of which
the publisher gets half, well in actual fact
the person who wrote that song is using
a media, or a medium, like CDs, DVD
players or iPads, they didn’t invent the
iPhone, they didn’t invent the iPlayer, and
they didn’t invent means of broadcasting.
If they’re gonna make money they should
sell the record and get money from that
and go out on tour, get paid from the door
money and also, merchandising. They
can make money from that, because my
grand-daughter and all the youngsters that
I work with, they actually believe that music
shoul B&Rg&VR