Interview with John Greaves :

[The interview was held at John Greaves’ Paris home and is build up as a blindfold test]

 1. Claude Debussy : « Colloque Sentimental »

[ after a poem by Paul Verlaine, Gérad Souzay : baritone & Dalton Baldwin : piano]

[John Greaves has just recorded a record with songs/poems by French poet Paul Verlaine.I didn’t knew at the time of the interview, that John had recorded the same poem.]

John recognizes immediately the song.

JG : I knew there were various versions of some of the songs , but I deliberately not wanted to hear, particularly the ones of Leo Ferré [famous French chansonnier, who recorded a record with poems by Verlaine & Rimbaud] and I am really glad I didn’t hear it before.

PA : Why Paul Verlaine?

JG : I kind of discovered him. We read him at school, but I couldn’t remember very much and I knew I wanted to do a record in French. I did originally wanted to write everything myself , but as I write about one song in French every five year it would have taken quite a long time really. So somebody suggested, that I should try the classics : Baudelaire, Appolinaire, Aragon, Rimbaud and I just took a few books out of the library at random and looking at Baudelaire again and at Rimbaud and it’s not there. I mean Rimbaud is great I love him, but I didn’t wanted to put poetry to music. There is something in the Debussy version you played that’s nice. It’s a song, while Ferré’s version is so declamatory : text with some music, but they are not songs. Just picking up Verlaine, looking on a very superficial scan of it, you can see, that these poems are songs.

PA : How do you approach the poems?

JG : Verlaine is very easy because it rhymes. That’s a very good start for a lyricist, especially he goes often ABAB, and he is so formal and classical in his construction. First I looked at it superficially, then I got deeper into the meaning of the words and it kind of grows from that. I am doing that for a long time now and I know how to open the channels to it and how a note will fit with the syllable an will be appropriate to the song, that comes quite naturally.

PA What’s the difference in  your approach to lyrics in French as opposed to English ?

JG : It’s more like a discovery for me, even so I've lived here in France now for a long time, there are still things to discover, especially in the singing. Writing the songs, turning the poems into songs, was in a way the easiest bit , but then I had to learn how to sing them and I spent a long time doing that. It may not sound like it , but it did , because it has to be convincing and these are not 19th century songs, and they sound like they sound and the interesting thing is that bridge between this 19 century poet and a very contemporary sounding record. It has not only to do with the composition of the song, it’s the way it was mixed and recorded and the way it’s sung. I am not a virtuoso singer like Gérard Souzay , and I wouldn’t want my versions of these songs to be treated that way. Also I must say I have a version of them with Jeanne Adedd. [French classical trained singer who worked with John on several projects recently] singing and they are nice too, but that ‘s for another time. So in terms of Verlaine, luckily I come across him again or he appeared out of the mist of time and I am very pleased with it.

2.Count Basie (arr. Neal Hefti) : « Lil’ Darlin’ »

JG : [Immediately] It’s Basie! Freddie Green on the guitar… great song…. I love this one.

PA : I read in your bio that you started to play with you father’s big band. Was that the kind of music you played back then?

JG : In an earlier time yes, but by the time I got to play, this period was kind of finished. My earliest memories, when I was very young , between six and nine, was  seeing the big bands, probably 40 or 50 musicians. It didn’t sound quite as good as Count Basie, but it did to me at this time. In the late 50’s and early 60’s we lived in North Wales and the nearest biggest towns were Liverpool and Manchester and my father took me to the most wonderful evenings when the big bands come over. I saw Basie twice! My father would rent a van and take all the band and me going to see these people who were idols. It was like me seeing John Lennon, this was my father going to see Count Basie. He was in heaven and he wanted me to share this with me. I saw Ellington two or three times, Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman... I was brought up with it. This was just about as exotic as you could get. They came from America. The music was played by big black men, who were just from another planet. I was so in awe for these people. It still is gorgeous, listening to the arrangements, Neal Hefti, fabulous! I suppose it was a big influence on me. I don’t know where, and if it comes out and I am very grateful to my father for introducing me to that. And that’s where it stopped for him, anything that happened later he wasn’t really interested. The music kind of stopped in the 50’s with the big bands, and Ellington was his favourite. He had a big collection of 78’s that I just got back I have to get them transferred to digital. It’s very interesting that someone from a completely working-class background, my grandfather worked in the coalmines and my father came out of that industrial wasteland Birmingham and just fell into this American jazz music. It saved him, and it saved me. He would have been, Gd knows, otherwise - and I benefitted from that.

PA : Did you get any formal training before playing with your father?

JG : On the bass I had no formal training. I did piano like anyone else, from the age of seven till ten and I started with great enthusiasm. I ’d seen my father play and I wanted to play the piano. He didn’t teach me himself,  he send me to a piano teacher. And over the course of three or four years, all my enthusiasm was completely drained by this horrible woman. I really lost contact with music and became more interested in Rugby and school work. And it was only revived in me because, as I said, we were living about 30 miles away from Liverpool and in 1962 the Beatles showed up, and that was an explosion for everyone. It was as big for me as the black American music for my father twenty years before and then everybody was in a band, everybody! I was slightly ahead of the game, because my father saw, what was happening , and he asked me, if I wanted to play in a band, if this was the kind of music I wanted to play. Things had changed, they were called beat groups and all the old-fashioned bands either changed their act or moved on to something else, and my father was really smart : he realized that he had to do that, and precipitated by the death of the double bass player -  who seemed to me at least a hundred years old ,but he was probably younger then I am now! When he died and my father didn’t hesitate : he bought me a bass guitar. Actually I had a few double bass lessons, but that must have been after. The bass guitar was much more versatile. My father didn’t count on the huge amp, that I bought with it, but that’s another story. So he bought me the bass guitar and I was in the band the next night and I played with him every night, for the next four years. And because I had done piano lessons, one thing that stayed with me was, I could read music.

3. The Kinks : « Waterloo Sunset »

[John recognizes immediately]

JG : ...One of the groups that we supported with my father was The Kinks in exactly the same way. We played at the Manchester University in 1966 and we were on first, and then people threw things at us, they didn’t want us! And then they threw things at The Kinks too, because there were drunken students! And The Kinks traditionally, especially Dave Davis would fight. I was in a group parallel to being in my father’s band - I had my group as well, at school -  we were called The Jades. In my school there were twenty bands. That was such a great time, everyone was just in a band and some were very good. And our repertoire was whatever, was in the charts, the important stuff, like The Beatles,The Stones and The Kinks ...we would do "You Really Got Me" - everyone could play that! - "All Of the Day And All Of The Night" ... All this  wonderful songwriting that Ray Davis managed.

PA : Do you feel yourself more as a composer or a songwriter?

JG : I think I am more a composer, but obviously I am both, because I do both. I find my artistic satisfaction in the composition. If I write a lyric that’s satisfying too, but it’s rarely that way. The lyrics that I managed to do are quite good, but it’s the song that carries the lyrics, makes them distinctive and me. Without any disrespect to Peter [Blegvad], what carries the music are the lyrics. They are great songs, you can’t really disassociate, but that’s what Peter is : he‘s a songwriter and I am not. I actually find it very hard to write a song just with two chords in it. I doesn’t correspond to what my need is, my creative needs. Maybe the next album would be an album with Greaves lyrics, but it takes me a long time. If I am getting onto a composition, I know where I am going. For lyrics I need to have inspiration.

4. Pacific Drift : « Yes You Do »

[A lesser known Liverpool band, that John doesn’t recognize. I solve the riddle.]

JG : Liverpool was a pretty extraordinary place. Liverpool, from the early 60’s through the 70’s was a really happening place. Obviously of what we know the most internationally known were The Beatles, but then in England there was a huge theatrical revolution: the Everyman Theatre. It was really important, in a way, that all changes in art forms are important. They represent a reappropriation of the means of production ... I am talking here like Chris Cutler, [he laughs] !... by the people who are involved in it, because they were ahead of the business. Inevitably all pop music has been like this, the theatre too and the Everyman Theatre was putting this back on to a working class daily. It was the Everyman Theatre, it was about working people, who repossessed the theatre, that would become this sort of icon over here, that belonged somehow to a different class of people. I am not necessarily talking about "class" in the Marxist sense, but about a new public that didn’t went to the theatre before. The Everyman Theatre really changed that. They made it quite clear, that art is for everybody. And Liverpool had always had that feeling.

5. Luciano Berio/ Cathy Barbarian : « Recital for Cathy Number One »

[John Recognizes.]

JG : I discovered Berio thanks to Henry Cow really. It was particularly Fred who knew everything about everything! And we had the great honour of performing just before Cathy Barbarian at a Festival in Bordeaux in 1974. Cathy Barbarian was doing a thing called "A la recherché de la chanson perdue", which she did just on her own with a piano player and she was in full diva regalia, with this wonderful little piano player, who was obsequious with his hair greased back, slightly kind of scruffy dinner suit... and Lindsay Cooper was the page turner. She [Cathy Barbarian] employed Lindsay just before we met. And I have never seen Lindsay in a dress [ laughs], sort of 19th century dress with her long beautiful hair, and she was turning the pages for Cathy Barbarian. I discovered Berio and this was a time, I suppose in everybody’s live, when you are in your twenties, you discover... and you have to be lucky, that you got the right people to give you the information. I think, if I haven’t gone to university, I might have stayed in North Wales playing a kind of pop music. When I got to Cambridge and met Fred [Frith] & Tim [Hodgkinson], it was a kind of revelation. I'd never heard of any of this music. I’ve never heard of Frank Zappa or Soft Machine or Berio. I played Count Basie, that’s what I knew about. I studied English literature in Cambridge. Still I knew that I was going to do music somehow. I arrived in Cambridge with my bass guitar, and that’s the way life goes - Fred came down to find me, because he heard that I got a bass guitar, and he invited me down to a rehearsal  that they were doing : just Tim and Fred. It was one of those epiphanies. I didn’t understand anything of what was going on. They were playing this very strange music, with very strange time signatures, that I didn’t understand at all, but I just felt it was wonderful. I was very happy to get involved with it and to learn and to discover. Fred began to bring along Frank Zappa records and contemporary music like Berio, whom I’ve never heard of before. I hadn’t had a musical education. So I discovered a lot : Berio, Varese, Ligeti or even Kurt Weill.

6.No Secrets In The Family : « Overleaf »

[John does not recognize, but the music sounds familiar]

JG : It’s amazing…Do I know her [the singer] personally? I would have gone through a whole lot of people from Julie Tippets to Patricia Barber.

PA : How did the ‘Kew Rhône’- live project started?

[‘Kew Rhône’ is a record by John Greaves and Peter Blegvad released in 1977, that was never performed live as such until June 2007]

JG : When ‘Le Triton’ [ Famous jazz/prog club in a Parisian suburb] turned down point blank the ‘Peter Blegvad Trio‘, because it wasn’t "prog" enough, Chris [Cutler] suggested : "Why don’t you do, what we wanted to do, come up with Jeanne Added and do a sort of ‘Kew Rhône‘? ". So I send [ Triton manager] Jean Pierre [Vivante ] the "Kew Rhône" record which he didn‘t knew, because it’s not "prog"... But Jean Pierre didn’t hesitated with that one, so we had ‘Kew Rhône’ in the schedule, and we hadn’t played most of it for thirty years ... I had to work like hell, because I couldn’t remember any of it! And I am not good at transcribing. It took me ages. Jeanne could have done it in an hour, but it took me weeks. So that was how the concert came about and it’s now up and running again and we want to get more gigs for it .

PA : Are there other projects ?

JG : The project with Alan Blésing [ former guitar player of the  Zeuhl band, Eskaton, who did a project around a series of progressive rock classics among them Soft Machine, Henry Cow & Hatfield compositions, first presented live during a jazz festival  in Nevers in 2004, and now released as a record "Songs From The Beginning" ] had some interesting things in it, and I just had fun singing on it. I sing "Beautiful As The Moon" [ a Henry Cow composition], and he and his band playing this piece : it’s quite extraordinary and it’s transcribed from the record [ Henry Cow’s "Concerts"] - the very wonderful [clarinet player] Catherine Delaunay got the job to transcribe "Beautiful as the moon" from the record. Alan gave her the first side of the "Concerts" album. So I turned up for the first rehearsal, Hugh [Hopper] was playing bass, and she'd transcribed it perfectly. But then it goes into "Nirvana For Mice", and I am hearing Hugh playing the part that I wrote for the bass!...  that poor woman has transcribed twenty minutes of the most complicated music in the history of rock 'n’ roll, and I couldn’t do it : she had done it! And we got two rehearsals to do that and five other songs, including "Mumps" [Hatfield and the North’] and she has fallen in love with it, she discovered Dagmar [Krause]. I said, 'but we don’t have time to do that, even to get only "Beautiful As The Moon" together!' And they played it better then we ever did! And it was very interesting, this meeting between the conservatory students - who are amazing, they can read anything - and  this bunch of self-taught people, who did these most extraordinary things, because they didn’t know whether they were going! I love it, and there was this great moment in 7/8 [John sings it], and then on the score it was  written : ‘bar 325 : accelerando’, so everyone speeds up, just because on the record Chris and I couldn’t keep it down and now it’s there! It’s ’official’! We were just speeding up and now it’s ’accelerando’!

7. Kurt Weill/ Bertolt Brecht : « Seeräuber Jenny »

( sung by Lotte Lenya)

[John recognizes immediately.]

PA : Did Dagmar Krause brought the influence of the Eisler/Weill tradition into Henry Cow?

JG : When Dagmar appeared to us she was in this pop band [Slap Happy] Did the music evolve to accommodate Dagmar’s potential? We'd only heard her singing with Slap Happy. She was great, fantastic, but did we imagine her then singing her post-Eisler stuff ? I suppose we did imagine it a little bit. I think that gave mainly Tim some ideas. The major piece for her was "Living at the heart of the beast", that exploited this direction. I am not sure, but I think we deliberately avoided going down the easy identifiable routine of 'Germanitude'. It  happened very naturally : we met Dagmar at that time, and we learned how to write and compose together as a group. We fed off each other and that’s what created this very special beast called Henry Cow, and the songwritnig evolved in that way too. And because we didn’t had a singer - unlike Fred or myself at the time, we tried occasionally with varying degrees of luck and success - Dagmar could sing. So obviously that opened things up immediately for Fred and Tim. It took me more time. I wasn’t really composing until the second album. But somehow it was there! I mean "Kew Rhone" was obviously influenced by Weill & Eisler, and this was one of the reasons I wanted to go to New York to get away from this side of the music. I wanted to find Lisa Herman to sing "Kew Rhône". We arrived with "Kew Rhône" pretty much formed musically, but of cause we could have gone every other way, we could have had Bill Bruford on drums and Dagmar singing, it. It would have been something completely different. But what makes it for me so special : I did want to go to New York and get Andrew Cyrille and Lisa’s thoroughly NYC attitude to it : uninhibited disco style, she’s fantastic. I mean "Pipeline" would not have been the same, if we had done it in Europe, a phenomenological text sung to a rhumba with these two chick singers.

PA : What about ‘Unearthed’ ?

[record by John Greaves&Peter Blegvad]

JG : Peter was approached by the label Sub Rosa, a Belgian label. They’ve done a lot of weird stuff. I think spoken word is pretty popular now, but this was quite early on. They wanted Peter to do a spoken word record. I wasn’t invited at the beginning. It wasn’t first a common project, but it became one. Peter suggested that we did it together and they were perfectly happy. I enjoyed that project a lot, because we had a very short time to do it. I think we had three days, because there was no budget for it. So we had to work very fast. I had to use stuff that I already got and then wrote pretty fast. I wrote them on a beach in Turkey on a little machine a Yamaha QY. And most of the stuff was written on that. It’s the only record I made this way : four  or five tracks are completely off that, untouched and then Peter’s voice. Something consistent in my working relationship with Peter is to keep up a kind of equity between the words and the music. You can hold 'em both up separately but it’s not desirable to do so. I mean there is a lot of stuff where you can see why a spoken word has been used there, a lot of rap is like that. One is there to sustain the other. In "Unearthed" there is an integrity on both sides .

8. Frank Zappa : « Apostrophe »

[After a moment John recognizes Jack Bruce and "Apostrophe"]

PA : Do you enjoy playing the bass in a rock context ?

JG : Every time I get the bass out, I feel a little bit inhibited, because sometimes I just don’t play enough. When you saw me in Carmaux I haven’t touched the bass literally for six months, but yes I enjoy playing the bass! I don’t do it enough, what have I done in a rock band context? Very little!

PA : Did you improvise onstage with National Health ?

JG : Yes, especially later on when the band went more jazz, when Dave [Stewart] wasn’t there anymore. But that wasn’t rock it was more a kind of jazz. And in fact it’s not jazz either it is jazz-rock. I ’ve never been a fan of jazz-rock and I can’t play it if my life depended on it! I’d love to play especially in respect for Jack Bruce. He was a hero! Cream were back in our days a revelation, and I love the way he sings.

PA : Jack Bruce also played Cello - an instrument that you used, especially with Vincent Courtois and the other day with Jeanne Added. Is it a sound that you  particularly like?

PA : The cello is such a romantic instrument! Jack played it because I think he studied the cello at school. It’s complementary to the bass, but it’s the absolutely opposite of rock. It’s a perfectly romantic instrument. A musician like Pablo Casals makes you fall over with emotion, because it’s so direct. But I don’t think that there any relationship you can make, even so I love the instrument. I was very lucky to have Vincent play with me - he’s so great. You are really lucky to have someone this great on his instrument in your band, or even if it’s just him and me, which we’ve done a lot. But that is more about Vincent Courtois then it is about the instrument. Still I like the frequency range of the cello, not too high and annoying like the violin is. It’s a nice register with a comfortable warmth, that I do like and it does fit with my voice very well. The things I did with Vincent and Sophie [Domancich] worked very well .

PA : What about the accordion?

JG : There has been an accordion an all my records since "Accident", which is the first one I did in France. The first serious apparition of the accordion was David Venitucci and I thought it was perfect like in "Chansons" for Elise [Caron], and this was to be my first really French record with Christoph Glockner’s texts and the accordion just seemed so perfect for it. And as for all music you could have done it in a hundred different ways. I don’t think I could have done it with a rock band, but I met Venitucci and it seemed right and he was absolutely perfect. It couldn’t have been just any odd accordion player, but somebody who is technically as good as he is and as sensitive to the songs. I think it’s astonishing, what he’s playing on this record. He worked two or there years with his wife Annick Cisaruk, who is a singer. He spent a lot of his time to accompanying her so, obviously he knows how to play with a singer. It’s a very overwhelming instrument and especially his double-chromatic accordion, quite a rare instrument. It’s like having two grand pianos. It’s huge! He had to give up playing all others and studied for eight years, just this. And yet he uses it with a delicacy and finesse, when he accompanies Elise’s voice. So again I was very lucky to get David and I always liked the accordion. Then I was very happy to do this record in French with a great text by Christophe Glockner. Then I wanted to get to the next stage : I wanted to sing myself in French, because I’ve been here for twenty years now. I think I owe it to myself and the three French fans [ laughs] to do something in French. For the Verlaine record I didn’t start with the idea of having an accordion on it, but it just kind of grew, not much, just two or three tracks, where the accordion seemed appropriate, but then I was very pleased not to have a French person doing it, just to keep it balanced, having Scott Taylor play it, who does not play like Venitucci. We did a sort of premiere with the Verlaine songs a couple of weeks ago, just Scott and me, in a nice little bar with a restaurant. On the record there are lots of people, it’s very sophisticated and developed with lots of arrangements, but I’ve been, from the beginning fairly convinced, that the songs should work, if I just play on my own with the piano and I wanted to try it just with Scott on the accordion. So we did the whole thing, just accordion and voice. And we are going to do a festival in Tulle : La Nuit De Nacre [an accordion festival], and it’s puts an edge on it : an American accordion player and a Welsh singer singing French poetry, me with my accent and Scott he doesn’t play bal-musette and it’s great, that we are doing that!

9. Fabrizio De Andre : « Gorilla »

 [Italian version of a song by French singer Georg Brassens]

[John recognizes the song but not the singer.]

JG : Brassens is so unique, it flattens it out, nobody can get the movement like Brassens does! That sounds very good so, I like it. Brassens is so fluid within the time frame vertically and horizontally. It’s never quite where you expect it to be! You know an English guy called Erik Zachary, this really strange guy. I saw him on the TV in the 60’s. He would come along on late night TV and play those really strange songs, his own compositions mostly, and he became a kind of cult. It was only years later, when I was in France that I made the connection, that this guy had obviously listened to Brassens, but not just translated from French, altough he did. He invited Brassens over to England. They did songs together, but he just got a whole style, completely his own, but he got the voice. Most people seemed to be happy with my version of "Saturne" [a Brassens song that John had recorded ] which was a major breakthrough for me. I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing this years ago and then taking an icon, singing Brassens. It’s nice to find out, that you can get hold of the songs, and in a certain way I can do that as a foreigner much more easily then a lot of French singers could do .

10. Flying Lizards : « Money »

[John recognizes immediately. He has recorded with David Cunningham ]

JG : Who would dare to do this ? He [Cunningham] did! This is Dave Stewart’s favourite guitar solo!

PA : You worked with David Thomas and David Cunningham. What do you think about post-punk?

JG : I think post-punk was quick thinking! It has been very fast! Here the guitars don’t play! Using that in post-punk and post-modern situations where you could go into a studio and you could make a record like that, would have been inconceivable five years earlier, because to be able, to be in a studio, you had to pass some sort of exam. You had to have some sort of credibility. When they came along, David Thomas and David Cunningham, they just ignored the rules and went in to the studio and recorded among the most amazing, extraordinary stuff, that nobody else would have possibly dreamed of doing, probably for various reasons, but it is too late! There it is! It’s done! It exists! It’s an object ! And it’s available on record! David Cunningham spent all his life doing that and David Thomas too.

11.Gilgamesh : « Arriving Twice »

[He recognizes immediately]

PA : What do you think about the term ‘Canterbury sound‘?

JG : I know these categories are invariably created from outside. I don’t know, who out of these designated Canterbury artists would think of themselves as a Canterbury artist. None would, I mean the only band that were from Canterbury was Caravan [and the original Soft Machine ed. note]. None of Henry Cow were. I think it’s probably quite useful, as a generic label. At that time it actually helped everyone to continue to create. I remember when we did our first John Peel session with Henry Cow, which was a major breakthrough for us, I think we probably only got it because the producer, the wonderful John Walters, thought we were from Canterbury! We were actually from Cambridge. It did help people in the media, like John Peel and they tried to slip us in on the same level as Caravan, Matching Mole and it kind of helped in that way.

12.Vaughan Williams : « Vagabond »

[after a poem by Stevenson sung by Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel]

PA :Are you connected to your Welsh roots?

JG : Yes, I am attracted to the more primeval aspects of language and if I get it right in my compositions it’s not in that way, as good as that is, it’s fabulously sung, the composer obviously knows what he’s doing, but I think it lacks because of it’s formality, the raw power of the language, there is not the blues in it. And again I think this is a misreading of traditional poetry of Dylan Thomas or Shelley or Blake. A lot of people tried to approach poetry and I think Mike Westbrook gets quite close, because he’s got a feeling for jazz. I am working in a very different way from the traditional classical composers. That approach to songwriting is not mine and I think they are missing the beat. The sound of the words is right, the melody is gorgeous and the interpretation is great, this guy’s technique is astonishing, but is that bringing across the real meaning of each word of each syllable it? It doesn’t get there for me. It has too be much more raw, much more rock’n roll. That’s what I try to do and if I get it right that’s when I am successful as a composer or a setter of words to music. I realize that I am denigrating a whole lot of important work, with a sweeping statement and I don’t want to say that it doesn’t work too. And I haven’t gone further with the Dylan Thomas thing, but maybe I will, having done the French for the last couple of years to go back to the English language, even the Welsh language. There is some Welsh language stuff that is absolutely astonishing and I don’t think anybody has ever done it. There was one period when I was very interested in getting a male voice choir of which there are several in Wales, the choirs that come from the mines and it’s a fabulous sound - hundreds of baritones and tenors, an earthshaking sound, but I haven’t yet found the right vehicle to do it. There is something very powerful in doing that , but I have to get a lot of money to be able to do it. I did a budget for it ten or fifteen years ago, but every item on the budget you have to multiply by a hundred, you have to get them all to the studio to do a session and you just add two zeros to everything and it gets large very quickly. And they need some rehearsal. I mean these choirs are good, but they do not sing like Bryn Terfel. They just work in a a mine, but maybe one day I can do it!

PA : Thank you for the interview John!

:::Martin Horst Nov. 2007:::

Indeed Fuxi and he's not only a gifted musician, but also a great human being.

BTW check out his solo records, for a start I recomend 'Songs' and you HAVE to check out 'Kew Rhône' an absolute masterpiece!!