Thanks so much to Paul and Iain once more! Just a week or so ago we did an interview about the fantastic Radio Ghosts, the band they were in back in the early 80s in Scotland. Then in the mid-80s they would move down to London and form A Tune A Day and released a 7″ record. I actually had written about A Tune A Day on the blog many years ago, so it was great to finally learn more about the band. It is time to find out more about them!
++ Hi Paul and Iain! Thanks so much for being up for another interview! How are you? Are there any plans for this summer, even in these strange times?
Iain: We are both busy working on new Radio Ghosts songs. (The Radio Ghost are dead: long live the Radio Ghosts). We have dozens and there are still more creeping in unbidden all the time. We are trying to burnish a selection of the brightest and shiniest to be released in the not too distant future.
Paul: I’m hoping to go for a short walk this summer, possibly round the block, or maybe the park. Don’t want to get my hopes up though.
++ Last time we talked about Radio Ghosts, so just to put this in context, the Radio Ghosts ended as a band in 1982 and when did A Tune A Day start as one? Were you involved with any music projects in between?
Iain: I moved down to Eastbourne, a little seaside town on the South coast of England to work for a publishing house down there. Paul visited a few times and decided to move down too. It took a couple of years or so to get the band up and running, so mid-eighties or thereabouts.
Paul: To rewind a wee bit, after Radio Ghosts split, Iain and I started dabbling with some new musical ideas, and enjoyed it enough to start a new band together. We even got a new drum machine (a little Boss DR-55 Dr Rhythm, gear trivia fans), which turned out to be marginally more programmable but somehow less fun than our original Radio Ghosts one. So we asked Craig, the Radio Ghosts drummer, if he wanted to join us, which he did. So for a while we were three-quarters of the Radio Ghosts, reunited, but without the main frontman and songwriter. Iain stepped up brilliantly with the songs and vocals, but there was a bit of an instrumental gap without Martin’s guitaring. So we spotted an advert in a music shop (or possibly in Melody Maker music paper?) from a local keyboard player looking for a band. This turned out to be Paul Piacentini, who was a bit of a keyboard wiz, if not particularly in the right kind of New Wave/post-punk vein as us at the time. But we made a good noise together, started rehearsing, recorded a rough demo and even played a gig at the local Doune Castle venue. Then Iain moved down to Eastbourne…
I carried on with Paul Piacentini in Glasgow, as Bamboo Shoots, for the next two or three years, making demos and doing a few gigs. I visited Iain in Eastbourne a number of times, and in early 1986 we made a demo at a local Sussex studio, and I liked it so much I decided to move South to start a band down there with Iain. That was A Tune A Day.
++ Who else was in A Tune A Day? And how did they end up playing with you?
Iain: I recruited a friend from work, Nick Fuller on guitar, and we went through one or two drumming candidates, including a machine and a psychotic chef, till we eventually found Martin Scott by advertising, when we moved to London.
Paul: I think Iain and Nick had done a couple of small local ‘acoustic’ gigs before I moved down, but when ATAD started properly we got a full PA and a drummer. We quickly became regulars at one of the town’s best small venues (there wasn’t a huge choice – of venues or bands), which was a pub called, this is true, ‘Bilbo Baggins’. The highlight of our brief Eastbourne period was probably playing at an open-air festival in the middle of a Napoleonic fortress. It was like a toy village version of Pink Floyd at Pompeii.
++ So you had moved to London and that’s where A Tune A Day starts as a band. What prompted your move? Was it because of music? Studies? A change of scenery perhaps?
Iain: Again, work made it possible for us to live, work and play in London. By day Nick and I worked for a big publishing house in central London and by night we played the London circuit.
Paul: I’d only been in Eastbourne a few months when those bastards announced that their sodding publishing jobs were moving to London. But I didn’t want the band to just fall apart – again – so I moved up to London too. And we went from strength to strength. Or at least from low-strength to medium strength.
++ Whereabouts in London did you settle at? Did you both move at the same time? Were you flatmates? Or lived close by?
Iain: We were all relatively close in South London, near Clapham Junction, Balham and Tooting and able to easily meet up and play.
Paul: I slept on Iain’s couch for a few months, pushing the tolerance of him and his girlfriend, and then got a bedsit in Balham/Tooting Bec, just a train-stop away from Clapham Junction.
++ Were there any bands that you liked in town? Were there any good record stores? Or what about the pubs or venues to go check out up and coming bands?
Iain: Being in London gave us the chance to see loads of bands as well as all the other delights on offer there. It’s a great place to be when you are young and free and have a bit of money in your pocket. We were busy playing in all the places up and coming bands and those slightly more established played, the Rock Garden, Dingwalls, the Mean Fiddler, a place beside the Town and Country Club called the Timebox and many more.
Paul: It was a bit of a revelation, living and playing in London. When you grow up elsewhere, in Scotland for instance, you heard about these legendary London venues of the time – Dingwalls, The Rock Garden, the Mean Fiddler. And you imagine they must be, if not exactly lined with gold, at least big, plush and a cut above any of our local venues. But then you get to play there and you realise they’re just like any other small scabby ‘toilet’ venues anywhere, with dodgy equipment, watered-down beer and revolting toilets. And you never got paid anything – or very little. Sometimes bands even had to ‘pay to play’, to help cover a venue’s running costs. It was a bit of a racket. But we loved it all anyway. And we were in London, which enormously increased the chances of record label A&R people coming to see you play… more of which in a minute I’m sure.
++ What’s the story behind the band’s name?
Iain: I can’t remember how we came up with it but it’s the title of a series of music tuition books. The unprepossessing oddity of it appealed to us. We have always been suckers for quirky and odd.
Paul: It was, I think still is, the name of a series of instrument tutoring books. It only means something to people who know the books, and it would raise a rye smile, if we were lucky. Although I did once hand one of our demo tapes to Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid in the Harry Potter films – he’s not so tall in real life), and he belly-laughed and said, “A Tune A Day! Llovve it.”
We did find it very difficult to get the name across to anyone who didn’t know the books though – especially when we said it out loud. With our Scottish accent, apparently it sounded to English people like we were called ‘Tuna D’. We should probably have just changed the name to that.
++ How was the creative process for you? Where did you usually practice?
Iain: Anyone who plays in a band for more than a moment will discover that rehearsal rooms are mostly vile cesspits housing horrible sound equipment, designed to crush your spirit and leave you bleeding hope and creativity onto their sticky carpets. We were lucky in finding a nice clean rehearsal room with decent gear a stone’s throw from Millwall’s football ground where they brought you drinks and sandwiches and were nice to you.
Paul: Yes after months of trying all kinds of rehearsal dives around London (most of them under railway arches for some reason) we were lucky to find one that didn’t smell like a sewer or electrocute us. The Music Room in New Cross it was – they were very nice to us. Charged us a fortune, mind, but with a smile and lots of tea.
As for the creative process specifically, at that time it was mainly Iain writing the songs (I wrote the odd one too), and then he would show us what he’d written and Nick and I (and whoever the drummer was at the time – probably Chris by then) would create and add our parts to suit the song.
++ And who would you say were influences in the sound of the band?
Iain: Too many to mention
Paul: Here’s an odd story. The first time we played the Timebox at the Bull & Gate (a now-legendary indie venue in north London), which would probably have been late 1986/early 1987, someone in the audience said to us afterwards, “You must be REM fans?” And Iain and I looked at each other and said, ‘Who are REM?” They were apparently some American cult band that had made a couple of albums, but weren’t that well-known yet. So we were obviously a bit like REM, before most people knew what REM were like – including us.
We didn’t think we sounded like anyone, but I guess it was quite a clean-style jangly-guitar sound at the time, compared with some of the more raucous things we’ve done before and since.
Iain: It was around that time we bumped into Alan McGee at a London gig, the guy who discovered and managed Oasis. I had known him slightly in Glasgow. I went for a pint with him and some of Primal Scream and they were all banging on about REM; they had just seen them live. I went out and bought an album after that and finally found out what they sounded like.
++ Your label was The Clapham Omnibus. Was it your own label or was it someone else’s?
Iain: That was our own label.
Paul: Yes just us – with only one recorded release, as far as we know.
++ I was quite curious about the name of the label when I wrote about the 7″ some time ago. One thing that I was a mystery to me is that the address on the sleeve seemed to be more in the area of Tooting or Balham, not Clapham. Am I right? And the other mystery to me was the catalog number, FARE 37. I was told there was a 37 bus there. Was it a bus you usually took?
Iain: Both man and omnibus are theoretical. “The man on the Clapham omnibus” is a phrase used in court cases a hundred years ago as a guide to what the man on the street might think in a given situation. “The accused was observed to propel his bicycle along the high street in a state of undress, balancing a hedgehog on his head whilst playing the banjo and singing Rule Britannia. I put it to you that the man on the Clapham Omnibus would consider this behaviour…odd.” (Yes, I made that up, but you get the idea). An omnibus can be a collection as well as a vehicle and the local connection made sense too.
Paul: So yes we lived near Clapham, and there was indeed a local 37 bus, so the label name and catalog number made us laugh. Laughs were in short supply, it was the 80s.
++ The only songs you released, “I Am Going Home” and “I’m Not Going to Get Out of Bed In the Morning” were recorded and mixed by Lance Philips. In which studio were they recorded? And how was working with Lance?
Iain: Lance was great. He was a friend of Nick’s who just happened to be a trainee engineer at George Martin’s extremely impressive Air Studios in central London. He had the freedom to use and thereby learn the studio in downtime and we made full use of that. When Mark Knoplfler and Elvis Costello, who were recording there at the time, amongst others, went home for their tea, we arrived and worked on our record into the night.
Paul: And this was when Air Studios was still at Oxford Circus, right in the middle of London, before they moved out to some leafy suburban church. Proper historical landmark it was – and you felt a real connection to musical history being there. We didn’t do the whole single there though, mainly just mixing and overdubs – the rest was done in a tiny studio in Hackney where the engineer slept in a sleeping bag on the control room floor. Not during the session, I don’t think.
++ The cover photo, taken by Jane Skinner, where was it taken? Which pier is this? who is the person that was photographed?
Iain: That is a picture taken by our friend Jane of my then girlfriend Isabel by Eastbourne pier. It seemed to reflect the bleak homesickness of the A-side.
Paul: A lot of that pier was later destroyed in a fire. We had nothing to do with that.
++ Aside from the 7″ released in 1989, were there demo tapes released? Maybe sold at gigs? Or compilation appearances? Or was the 7″ the only thing that went public?
Iain: We had a few demo tapes but did not release anything else to the public.
Paul: Yes we had three or four other demo tapes, which of course I’ve still got in some form, somewhere.
++ Speaking of the 7″, how many copies were made?
Iain: More than we needed.
Paul: Probably 1,000, I think. I had boxes of them stacked up a wardrobe in my bedsit for months. Maybe years.
++ And how come there were no more releases?
Iain: If the world had beaten a path to our door demanding more releases, they would have been forthcoming, but that path remained unbeaten and that door remained shut, never again to open.
Paul: It was quite expensive to make your own records, even then, and we were rubbish at asking people buy them, even at gigs – so we didn’t shift enough to cover the costs. We hoped we’d get signed and get an advance to make more, but that didn’t happen.
++ Are there more recordings by the band? Unreleased songs?
Iain: Yes, but not the recording standards of the single, which had five figures of studio time costs behind it (even though it actually cost us nothing)
Paul: Probably about another 10 songs that are decentish demo quality, but never released.
++ You said you were very nearly signed by Virgin Records. What happened? What’s the story with them?
Iain: You tell that story Paul
Paul: Well… We never had a manager or an agent so I was the one doing all the gig-booking and record label contacting, sending out demo tapes and singles. Most often we’d get a straight, standard rejection letter, occasionally with an extra, personalised comment added by hand if you were lucky (still saying no, but they quite liked something or other). Now and again an A&R person would say they’d come and see us play live. Sometimes they even turned up. So we were playing a Saturday night gig at the Clarendon Ballroom in Hammersmith – now demolished, but seemed semi-derelict even then. It was a good gig though, we played well, and just as we finished the last song, before we’d unplugged our guitars, this guy leapt onto the stage (a good two feet off the ground), rushed up to me with his hand out. Not in a threatening way, as you might expect, but enthusiastic-like. He said, as he shook my hand, “Ronnie Gurr, Virgin Records – call me on Monday morning.” And then he rushed off again. I was a bit in shock, and didn’t really sleep that weekend. This was it, I thought, we were about to arrive in the big time. Monday morning came, I was up early, and I’m thinking, how early do A&R guys get to work? Not 9am surely. Prob not even 10am. 11am seems too late though, like we’re not interested. I opted for 10.30, phoned Virgin, got through to Ronnie, and he says, “Sorry, who were you again?” Having to remind him, and re-sell ourselves on the phone from scratch on a Monday morning, to a probably hungover record exec with a hazy recollection of the weekend… It was never going to end well. We never heard from them again.
I was also phoned at home by the boss of GoDiscs records, a fairly successful 80s label – but that turned into a dead-end too. We were destined just to be cults, with a capital L.
++ I think my favourite song of yours might as well be “I’m Not Going to Get Out of Bed in the Morning”, so what’s the story behind it?
Iain: In my foolish and curious youth I studied philosophy. I neither enjoyed it nor covered myself in glory in that study and the only area that spoke to me was existentialism. The song is about that youthful search for the meaning of life, namechecking Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in as non-po-faced way as I could manage.
Paul: Great song – Iain is a criminally under-appreciated songwriter. Even by us. No, we appreciate him. It’s the rest of the world that doesn’t know what it’s missing.
++ If you were to choose your favorite A Tune A Day song, which one would that be and why?
Iain: I suppose our signature song was My Friend. That is the one that got us gigs and attention and usually started or finished our sets. We would have released it at some point if we had gone the distance. We tried a couple of times but I am not sure we had a definitive recorded version though.
Paul: My Friend was always a classic. When we sent that out on an early demo tape, we were phoned up for an interview by a music journalist called Andy Darling, who worked at London mag City Limits at the time. In his review of My Friend he wrote something like “Music that makes you want to kick Coke cans down the street.” I think he meant in a feel-good way, not in blind fury. But I’ll take it either way.
There were some other great songs too – Run Round In Circles, from our first ever demo tape. One Man’s Ceiling, from a later demo. Enid Blyton Lied. Buster Keaton In A Polyester Suit (a title that even made John Peel smile.) No one but Iain could have come up with those songs.
++ What about gigs? Did you play many?
Iain: We played a lot of gigs around London, having already played quite a few on the South coast
Paul: Yes we did a lot of the ‘indie circuit’ gigs in the late 1980s – including the Mean Fiddler, Dingwalls, Rock Garden, Timebox, Hype, George Robey, Cricketers, so many I’ve forgotten most of them.
++ And what were the best gigs you remember? Any anecdotes you can share?
Iain: If I think back to those gigs it is details that I remember. There was a promoter called Jon Fat Beast (his choice of name) who booked us and introduced us, who would smear baked beans into his enormous naked belly and other such distasteful antics to get attention. Jason Bonham, John’s son and later replacement in Led Zeppelin wanted to jam with us at one gig. We said no. At a gig at the Mean Fiddler a young woman right at the front of the crowd where no-one could see, was making highly lascivious gestures at me as I tried to concentrate on singing and playing. But mostly I remember standing in the lights playing guitar and the brilliant feeling that being there making that music gave. Unbeatable. Who needs success, approbation or sales when you have that feeling? Well they would have been nice but not everyone gets close to what we did have.
Paul: Jon Beast, the Timebox promoter, was very good to us – his public persona was of a chaotic self-destructive extrovert, but he was also a nice, hardworking, helpful guy, trying to give a leg-up to as many new bands as possible. An enigma. He died a few years back, way too young.
The Jason Bonham incident was weird – it was some naff nightclub we were playing in Eastbourne (might have been called Tuxedo Junction). After the gig these very drunk guys approached us and said their mate they were with was Jason Bonham (son of Led Zep drumming legend John), would we let him play drums? And I was thinking, hang on, first of all, how do we know it’s really Jason Bonham (this was probably 1987, and he wasn’t that well-known) – why would he even be in a club in Eastbourne? Why would he want to play with us? So I’m thinking chances are they’re just taking the piss. And besides, in the unlikely event that it really is Jason Bonham, he’s just going to show us up. So anyway, we said no. That’s a kind of claim to fame, I guess.
The best gig ATAD never did was on the day that a big hurricane hit southern England, in October 1987. We were due to support the great Wilko Johnson in Hastings that night. But the roads were blocked with fallen trees, and we couldn’t get there. Damn shame.
We did once support the Rainmakers (a popular American pop band of the era who’d just had a hit with Let My People GoGo) at a big concert hall in Folkestone – that was fun.
++ And were there any bad ones?
Iain: Oh yes.
Paul: I think I’ve blanked most of them out. I did turn up at completely the wrong venue once. Just the once. We played so many gigs in so many venues that they all began to kind of merge into one in your head. So when I walked in, with my bass case, there’s these other, unfamiliar musicians there, starting to set up their gear. And for a split-second I thought, what do these guys think they’re doing? Then I immediately realised my mistake, turned round and walked out without saying anything. I can kind of imagine what they were saying about me as I left. Fortunately the ‘proper’ venue wasn’t too far away…
I also lost a bass combo amp after a late-night gig once. Because my amp was so big and heavy, and I didn’t have a car at the time, I sometimes asked the drummer to take it to his house after a gig. Unfortunately this one night he was so knackered when he got home, when he’d brought his drums in from the car he just went straight to bed – forgetting that he’d left my bass amp sitting out in the street, on its own, all night. And it wasn’t there in the morning. I still wonder sometimes who on earth would just walk off with a large bass amp that they randomly found in the street in the middle of the night, but you know, it was London.
++ When and why did A Tune A Day stop making music? Were you involved in any other bands afterwards? I must say I am very curious to hear the Potato Underground someday…
Iain: Paul became the editor of a music magazine, Nick became a millionaire businessman, having meetings with Boris Johnson and other undesirables, Martin became a lawyer and one of Paul McCartney’s management team. And I had pencils to sharpen and other such pressing matters to attend to. Life gets in the way.
Paul: I started working at a musicians magazine called Making Music, and eventually became the editor – so writing about music ironically started taking up more time than actually doing it.
But the main reason ATAD stopped was that Iain decided to move – again – this time back to Glasgow. And I just thought, enough is enough, I can take a hint. Even though I clearly can’t.
(Once back in Glasgow Iain went on to form a band with his two brothers, called, intrepidly, The Bain Brothers – and they even recruited Martin on guitar for a while, in a semi-reunion situation. But he might not want to talk about that. Families, you know.)
Meanwhile, down in London, one of my colleagues at the music magazine, a guy called Jon Lewin, asked me to start a band with him and a couple of friends, and we did some gigs around London as The Potato Underground. We also briefly went under the name ‘Crap’ – but we decided that people might assume it was an ironic bluff name, and they would expect us to actually be shit hot virtuosi. It wasn’t, because we weren’t. Good songs though. We did some very weird distorted cover versions too, like thrash punk versions of Kraftwerk’s Model and Pet Shop Boy’s Left To My Own Devices… Very strange, but fun.
++ What about the rest of the band, had they been in other bands afterwards?
Iain: Nick has just re-emerged and got in touch this very day in a band called Cutwater.
Paul: I think Nick has been in that band, under various guises, pretty much ever since the ATAD days. We did have a couple of brief reunions with him, to play a couple of parties and even make a short demo in about 2000.
++ Did you get much attention from the radio?
Iain: We did the odd radio interview but I don’t think we got much if any airplay.
Paul: Yes I seem to remember we were interviewed by BBC Radio Sussex, but I have no memory of what was said. And we did stalk John Peel outside the BBC studios in London one night, so we could personally hand him a demo tape. He liked the song titles, don’t think he ever played it on air.
++ What about the press? Did they give you any attention?
Iain: No
Paul: Well apart from the Andy Darling stuff in City Limits, as mentioned above. And we had a short review piece in Time Out once too, can’t remember who wrote it. They came and took a photo of us in my scabby bedsit kitchen too, I recall.
++ What about from fanzines?
Iain: And no
Paul: Mmmm, don’t think so, but possibly, somewhere…
++ Looking back in retrospective, what would you say was the biggest highlight for the band?
Iain: I refer you to my earlier answer in regard to how it feels to do this thing.
Paul: Mostly the above – making a record, working at Air studios, doing some fun gigs, playing the London gig circuit, almost getting signed…
++ Lastly one non-music question, one about football. Do you support any teams? Do you think Scotland has a chance to qualify to the next World Cup?
Iain: I watch the odd international game but have never been a fan. Glasgow has this ridiculous Celtic/ Rangers divide and there was always too much accompanying nonsense for me.
Paul: I admit to being a bit hooked into that partisan nonsense when younger – I’m still a big Glasgow Celtic fan, but just in a footballing sense, sensibly.
As for your second question – it seems unlikely Scotland will ever qualify for anything ever again! Not sure how that happened. They had some of the greatest players in the 60s and 70s (Celtic were the first British team to win the European Champions Cup, in 1967, and Scotland regularly qualified for tournaments in the 70s and 80s – more often than England at one period.) But I guess they haven’t invested enough in training for young talent, or whatever, I don’t know. It’s frustrating anyway. So we might stick to the music – we have a bit more control over that.
++ Anything else you’d like to add?
What about you, Roque? Have you played in many bands, made your own records, as well as releasing other bands? And how come you’re interested in obscure bands from olden-days Scotland? :0)
Thanks for the invitation anyway – it’s been fun reminiscing. All the best to you.
PS – we like your list of ‘beliefs’ too:
Cloudberry believes in:
+ unrequited love
+ systems of resistance
+ sense of community
+ DIY ethics
+ international socialism
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Listen
A Tune A Day – Im Not Going To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
