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Mike: How has the Autumn Tour been?
Ralph: “It’s been great apart from the initial hiccup when I was a bit unwell. I really enjoyed it and as ever I am very happy to get out there, share the songs, and enjoy the travelling and company. As you know I now tour with my son Tom which is great. It is tiring there is no doubt about it and at the end of each day I am a bit knackered! We have got a good system working and of course the adrenaline rush twenty minutes before you get on stage carries me through it and I relish every moment.”
You have had a busy year with radio commitments particularly on BBC Radio 2. I found the soul music programme particularly moving.
“Well you know as yet I have not heard it Mike-isn’t that an awful confession? Often I have to be persuaded to listen to my media appearances and then I forget! I often prefer to sit and play the guitar rather than hear myself pontification on the world and things. Apparently a lot of people said it was an interesting programme?”
I thought they put it together really well encompassing Streets of London and how it influenced one man and his guitar playing and music. Your talking about the song and finally Derek Bentley’s granddaughter Maria talking about the Bentley and Craig tragedy.
“Did they? Oh I didn’t know they had found Maria. I played Streets of London at Iris Bentley’s funeral and Bentley and Craig at the re internment of Derek’s remains at Croydon Cemetery and Wizz Jones was there with me. I am so glad. That was so nice of Maria and I hope she is happy and well.”
I also saw you were in Ireland playing at the RTE folk awards?
“Yeah. I got to play with one of my absolute heroes of Irish Music Martin Hayes. He has made one of the most beautiful records, which has to be in my top fifty albums of all time. It’s called the Lonesome Touch. Just him and a guitar player and its perfect guitar accompaniment to Irish music. It is the East Clare style with languid and sensual fiddle music and is absolutely gorgeous. Martin was there so we asked him if he could do the second part, which is the pipe part of The Setting. He and Frank Gallagher played it and apparently it went down really well.”
How long did you get to rehearse it?
“We had no time at all. I played him the tune and then he and Frank went to one side and went through the part together. I haven’t heard that one either! You can put yourself in the safe hands of such accomplished musicians and they will carry it off.”
You were also at the BBC Radio 2 folk awards giving Mark Radcliffe an award?
“I was going to be there anyway- I always go and this year especially because my dear old Wizz finally was awarded a lifetime achievement award and I wasn’t going to miss that. While I was there Kelly While asked me if I would do Mark’s presentation. Mark is such a wonderful guy and a really lovely bloke. I had just recently heard him do a launch of his new book, which is well worth a read, and I felt very honoured to do that as well.”
Isn’t it good to see him up and running after his recent health problems?
“Indeed it is and that was the origin of the book as he found himself at his own particular crossroads and had to evaluate his circumstances and this inspired him to write his own wonderful book. I do urge you to read it if you haven’t. It is really good.”
What pleases you most about your new album?
“I am delighted to say we still are continuing to get good reviews for Hill of Beans. The latest one today is from Ken Hunt in Rock n Reel magazine. He remarked that the photograph on the front of the album should be in the National Portrait Gallery and that really pleased the photographer who found this review before anyone else!
“Does it sound too romantic to say that when I write a song and I have a good tune I can always imagine it with strings and a bigger arrangement? I think within my guitar parts, which I spend a long time on as you know, there has got to be a symbiosis between the lyric, the tune, and the accompaniment. It has got to be as big as one guitar and one voice can make it and if you work like that you can sort of hear the ghosts of the orchestra that haven’t actually yet played it. That is down to Frank Gallagher and Tony Visconti who are two great arrangers. I gave them songs with a strong melody line and chord accompaniments and when I heard the orchestral arrangements I knew it was just right. I didn’t alter a thing.
So tremendous musical satisfaction and lovely to rekindle old friendships with Tony who is firm, just and talented. He brings so much to the studio. He is a great encourager with all the artists he’s worked with whether they are David Bowie or some humble new comer. So that was a joy as well. There was one point when I had trouble with a piano part and a blank moment. I kept playing the wrong chords in the wrong place. We had a break and he said “ Don’t worry we can stitch that… we can edit that…” He calmed me down. He has that authority, keeps the engineers under control and keeps a hierarchy… but is still a bloke.
“I just found the other day going through some old manuscripts for music from Eight Frames a Second and a little note to the Hungarian cimbalom player, as he had never scored cimbalom before. So that takes us back to 1967/68 so it was very affirming to work together again and also he has a stidio named after him at Kingston University which is not far from where I live in Putney.”
How different is studio work now compared to you early days in the late 60’s?
“It is very different because in 1968, and don’t forget I am so old, that my first album was made in mono on a four track machine. These days you can make some one sing in tune. Timing can be manufactured. The organic way of putting four guys in a studio, or a rhythm section together and live vocals is just not done. The first thing they teach engineers is to map out a graph where the drumbeats are going to go. But Tony and I and the people I chose to work with do it the old fashioned way. Sometimes I would lay a track down just myself if it wasn’t to be overly decorated so I could get the feel I wanted and then everything would be scored at other times to working with a three of four-piece unit, which was lovely as well. The only thing with me is I can’t bear doing things more than twice or maximum three times. Then I would do another take later in the day and leave it and go back the next day because it is always different- only subliminally to the untutored ear- but every performance can begin to accumulate and to wear down the spontaneity or the fragility of certain songs. For example when I first recorded When They Were Young, which is a deeply personal song, I recorded it in Cornwall in the hall with my son on the machine in the other room and I had never ever sung it all the way through until we recorded it. I had wanted to keep it fragile you know like it was. Since then I have done it a couple of times on stage until I was more au fait with it. Again I’m going to do it we are going to start now and when we get to the end we are going to judge it and then say yes that’s the one we will go with it. On the other hand I had about eight attempts at West 4th Street and Jones and I thought this is not going to be better than me doing it live so we did that. We took a live track and I did some what we call vocal repairs at another studio when I wasn’t quite happy with phrasing. We took advantage of modern technology to a degree but nothing like the way modern records do these days.”
That’s interesting because I know a few musicians who won’t record a song until they have played it live on stage a few times.
“Yes when I first recorded it I had never played it all the way through I just knew my sequence and wanted to get that nervous hesitancy. I don’t know if I achieved it or not but sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet that I want to do things a certain way. Sometimes I can strive and strive and it just drifts further away. I don’t write for profit or for the industry or radio one or two. I am not a poet but I try to be poetic so you are not motivated by anything but your own song. You want to report certain things and that is where I have arrived now. Interestingly my voice records differently when I am playing the piano and singing live –my brother noticed that thirty years go. The guitar is a different instrument and it depends on your relationship with the instrument. You hold the guitar on your lap or against your chest and your mouth is near the sound hole of the guitar. With the piano the notes are coming three feet away from you bouncing off the lid and project a little more. These things are all important with respect to nuance.”
When They Were Young now has a very different arrangement?
“Well I gave the song to one of the great-unsung musical geniuses that I know Chris Parkinson who is one of the most musical accordion players you will ever meet. He listened to the song and came up with that little intro all by himself straight away. Then he found a few chords and the strings were added and they do something else. It’s a way of re hearing the song. Nanna loves it but it’s not about us it’s about something that happened to me before we met.”
The other song I really like is Gammel Dansk. What is Gammel Dansk and how did that song come about?
“It’s medicinal! It’s what the kids have in shots. To me it brings back memories of never ending tours with dear Bert Jansch stuck in Denmark and everything was monochrome black and white in the snow. We’d drive miles and end up in some seedy bar and Bert as you know had his well-documented drink troubles. Denmark sometimes with all its soulfulness is also known as the happiest nation in the world but it can be a very lonely place when you are touring. We would be around the docks sometime and I’d think how impersonal dockyards are when people come and go. I tried to draw a picture of the Filipino sailor who was totally abstracted from life and who had killed a girl. I used the Chagall influence with respect to the seagulls that have become the souls of the dead flying through the bones of events they have witnessed. And this guy is going to fade into the black and white monochrome world and they won’t even find him and they won’t find her. And in a while they will have forgotten about it all. It was a bleak scene. I was intrigued by the way birds take off with no sense of danger and then come back. One minute it’s raining then it’s snowing and the snow obliterates the evidence that might have been left. I spent a very long time on the song which was originally much longer.”
The tune is very atmospheric…
“Yeah that’s another thing. In Denmark a lot of folk songs are in minor keys and I am not a big fan of minor keys. I try to avoid them because it’s too easy to predict what the next chord is going to be. Eastern European and Klezmer music is the same. Of course it didn’t do Uncle Len too much harm did it? There is a darker intent going through the song. Funnily enough I said to Tony I’d like a klezmer clarinet on it and he knew a New York clarinet player who did a lovely job and congratulated Tony as well!”
How did the title song Hill of Beans come about?
“Well it’s the last scene in Casablanca where Bogart utters the immortal lines “ I’m no good at being noble but it doesn’t take too much to see that the lives of three little people don’t amount to a Hill of Beans.” I thought it’s so true the intensity that love and loss that engender. There is he is in a seedy neutral country exploiting both sides of pain and this woman comes back who is now married to a patriot of some sort and he steps aside for her. I think in this world so many of us have been in a situation where a decision has to be made about that sort of thing. Not everyone marries the love of their life and stays that way or they have had to compromise if they have lost somebody and I related it to art.”
That leads us on to Gertrude and Alice….
“I often ponder about the contribution that human beings make to art. In effect it is an expression of spirituality. It elevates us above the animals. We seek to make music, paint pictures, write poems, make films, do plays. All those sorts of things are an expression of our advanced humanity in a spiritual sense. You can never arrive at the end of art. Now Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas were a gay couple who moved to Paris around the time of the First World War. Gertrude was a sort of mad philosopher and her musings were almost impenetrable then and are even more obscure today. They somehow saw value and beauty in Picasso’s work or maybe they thought they would be trendy and buy a young painter’s work. In other words it was just good luck on their behalf but it sustained a young Picasso. They intrigued society. But Guernica, one of Picasso’s most famous pictures, didn’t change anything it just changed the way people decided they could draw and paint. In other words it defined a new mode of expression.
“In the end those great paintings didn’t change anything- it doesn’t amount to a Hill of Beans. The fact we put a stupid value on it. It is in fact the antithesis of art. It should not solely be about the value of money but of course people do invest in art. I think of poor Van Gogh who only sold one painting in his life and that was to his brother. His paintings are now of course worth billions! What it did do is give scope to a lot of people who can’t paint or draw to make lots of money and turned art on its head.
“But nothing really changes from all these sacrifices. It really doesn’t matter because if the pinnacle of all art expression could be reached it would stop everybody doing anything else. Everyone makes a contribution. Here I am debating about the value of art and succeeding generations. It was Paul Simon who so wisely said every generation throws a new hero up the pop chart. Every new generation thinks they have discovered new art and so it should be. There is a certain amount of serendipity in it all but at some point the art over takes you and becomes your driver. Bob (Dylan) realized this. Look at all the personas Bob’s been through from the scruffy amateur hobo kid to the Mexican slim moustache, the makeup and so on.”
Makes me think of David Bowie who was always reinventing himself.
“Indeed and here I am wearing the same jeans with just a larger waist size than I did!”
I liked the fashion comparison between you and Tony Visconti in the recent Sunday Times interview.
“Yes he was cool and I was cozy but in the words of Billy Connolly I really wanted to be wind swept and interesting….”
Casablanca is a lovely film and the final scene is memorable.
“It’s a little bit world-weary but that’s what Bogart was representing in that song. I just think it a lovely ménage of contradictions and affirmations. I have always loved that last scene although I don’t think it’s a particularly great film but there is such atmosphere and I have read so much about it. Bergman always broke my heart her ability to cry and convey that deep sense of loss and depth of her feeling.”
The melody is beautiful. Did you come up with the arrangement?
“I remember sitting down with it and finding that first change when it starts with D minor and goes to some sort of strange chord and its almost as if you have changed key straight away and then it resolves itself and there’s a couple of moving bass notes. I thought this is sounding like a 1940’s melody and then the gift to be honest with you was “ I’m no good at being noble” and then finding nobility is all about royalty- kings and queens- and finding that rhymes with Hill of Beans. So I threw that line in and I thought this will be all right. I used as much of the speech as I could that’s why it’s copyright control.”
I know your producers Tony Visconti and Gus Dudgeon produced Bowie, Bolan and Elton John. Did you get to hang out with these guys at all back in the day?
“I have met Elton a couple of times and Freddy Mercury a couple of times. I met Marc Bolan once. It was in Harrods and I was with my manager Jo Lustig. He had made me buy a very posh jacket and Marc was there and Jo said “ Show him your new jacket… show him your new jacket…” And I looked at Marc and said, “ He wants me to show you my new jacket…” That was the sum total of my contact with Marc. Sadly Marc got killed at the back of our house where we were living in Barnes… I heard the crash.”
Tony Visconti produced Tom Paxton back in the 70’s and you collaborated with him on his live album New Songs for Old Friends recorded at the Marquee Club. I love the backing vocals and harmonies on that album. Backing vocals and harmonies feature a lot on your own albums.
“It was and I do. Tom introduced me as Ralph McTell….. kid wandered in….. needs a break!
“Yes it comes back to that thing about melody. If you have a good tune you naturally find a harmony. I have asked Jessica who is Tony and Mary Hopkins’s daughter if she will come and sing After Rain with me at the Royal Festival Hall.”
I love Mary’s voice.
“You should listen to her version of Gallagher and Lyle’s song Sparrow. She told me to check it out on a Max Boyce show, which is on You Tube. I’d recommend you check it out.”
So Ralph to your 75th birthday concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Do you remember your first time there?
“Yes that’s on You Tube as well. It was in 1971 and Jo Lustig booked the hall for Van Morrison who had cancelled the gig. So he rang me up and said, “ I got a date. I got a date” he always said things twice… “Who can I put on and Nat Joseph of Transatlantic said I was doing quite well so he put me on. Tickets were about 3s/6d and we nearly sold out. Jo immediately made a pitch to manage me and we eventually signed with him.”
This show sounds very difficult and rather special.
“It is it will be with a Sinfonia and a choir and some guest musicians, I’ll just do two numbers on my own and the rest will be augmented. I’m sure some people would prefer me to be on my own. But Tom wants me to do it this way at my great age. Tony and Frank have done some arrangements. Graham Preskett is going to be there. Chris Parkinson, Dave Pegg, Gerry Conway and Jessica Morgan will be there with one or two special guests.”
Any message for all your friends out there Ralph?
“Yes thank you for staying with me. Hope you are enjoying the album and rest assured I am not hanging the banjo up just yet.”
Thanks Ralph. Happy Birthday from us all and go well at The Royal Festival Hall. It looks like being a memorable evening.
Mike Cohen
November 2019
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