Interview with CHAS CRONK

September 2024

Calling him a stalwart of British rock wouldn’t be a stretch – if anything, such term would seem to be a compression of Chas Cronk’s almost six-decade-long career as a professional musician. A member of STRAWBS during their classic period, the bassist also worked with such prominent figures as Rick Wakeman – who might have not become am in-demand session player and then a star, if not for a chance meeting with Chas – and Steve Hackett, yet then, Cronk was one-half of the fantastic CRY NO MORE outfit that didn’t deal in prog at all, so there’s much more to the man than meets the ear. And what do fans know know about him at all? Over the course of a few conversations scattered over a few years, we dug into the veteran’s past.

– Chas, you’ve been in business for five decades. Everybody knows your playing but there’s almost no information about you. So where do you come from? Who are you?

Who am I? I’m a West London boy, like all the STRAWBS originally – or the original STRAWBS anyway. That area was the home of the “Crawdaddy” club where THE ROLLING STONES became famous, and lots of other musicians came out of the area. So even when I was at school, there was already plenty of places you could go and see great players. And it was in school that I started playing music in a band – well, even a bit earlier than that, as my mother was a trained concert pianist. My mother’s side of the family is from Ireland, and her father, my grandfather, was a church organist and choir leader in a town called Clonmel in Tipperary, so he bought me little music instruments when I was young, and encouraged me to play things. I got an acoustic guitar when I was about eight years old, and by the time I got to senior school, when I was about eleven or so, I met up with a couple of like-minded people. One in particular, who played piano very well, said, if I taught him guitar, he’d teach me other bits and pieces, so we kind of traded it off and we started writing songs from an early, early age. They were very much inspired by THE BEATLES and THE STONES, and all the music that was happening in England at the time. So it carried on through there, through school bands, progressively, and it got to the point where I became a semi-professional musician playing with all sorts of bands. And then I was signed to a company called Writers Workshop, submitting songs to various publishers – my parents had to sign the contract. as I was too young to sign legally at the time. There was a famous producer, Denny Cordell, and he and Writers Workshop had an outlet for their records with EMI, on a label called Regal Zonophone.

– Since you got signed as a songwriter, who did sing your songs?

Oh, God. The songs I was writing then were little projects for myself. I was like an apprentice. Denny said to me, “You’ll get studio experience out of it!” at the time. He was just keen to let us express ourselves, and we were making demos of songs, rather than going in. And it’s been a great experience being able to be around good engineers and all those people, even if we weren’t working with them. Denny would come in and listen to the stuff we’d recorded, and he’d make comments and then suggest improvements; then the publishing guy, who was part of the Writers side of it, would make similar comments about the songs and how we can improve them. So we got recorded, but we didn’t release anything – I don’t think that was the intention.

– So you saw yourself more as a writer than a player?

Oh, no. Well, both, I guess. I was really keen on writing but I was playing too, and I’d already moved to bass. I started on acoustic guitar, then it was electric, but we didn’t have a bass player in the school band, so I ended up playing bass. That’s how it started. Denny Cordell said to me, “I can give you some downtime in the studio for writing and recording stuff,” and it was a wonderful situation. Denny liked recording at night, but we – me and one of the guys from the school, we both got signed to the label at the same time – were actually given daytime time at Olympic Studios in Barnes, and we had to finish in the late afternoon because [Jimi] Hendrix was recording there. There was a loose collection of musicians he had signed to the label, and he had some established acts, too: he already had PROCOL HARUM, and he had just produced “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” with them, and the label quickly expanded with bands like T.REX. And then one day Denny said that they’d just signed a guy called Jimmy Thomas, the lead male backing singer from The Ike and Tina Turner Show – he’d come over to England, and they wanted to do a single with him – and asked me, “Do you know any keyboard players?” As things would have it, I had just met Rick Wakeman in a music shop in Ealing, West London. Rick was at the Royal College of Music at the time, and was in a little band that played social clubs and pubs – stuff like “Mustang Sally” and other soul and pop classics – so when Cordell needed a keyboard player, I said, “This guy. I think he’s really good!” And so I effectively got Rick his first session. We went in and cut a single with Jimmy Thomas, the first single I’d ever played on as well – produced by a young American producer Tony Visconti who had just come over and Denny Cordell had taken him under his wing. It’s the strange ways these things tie up. Tony took one look at Rick, and the next minute, of course, Rick’s doing sessions all over the place and becoming one of the most in-demand session players long before he was even in STRAWBS. He would get me involved in some of the sessions too, and I also initially met Dave Lambert when Rick got us both in to play on a soundtrack to a movie called “Zee and Co” and others.

– So that was why invited you to play “The Six Wives of Henry VIII”?

Yes, yes, just before I joined Dave Cousins and Dave Lambert in STRAWBS. By the way, Dave Lambert was another West London boy, and my mother worked for the Hounslow Health Authority and the lady that worked on the desk next to her was Mrs. Cousins, Dave Cousins mother, so my mum would come home and say, “Oh, you know, STRAWBS are doing well” or “Dave Cousins, blah, blah blah…” And then my mother would be telling her about all about me. So even though I was a long way from meeting them, there again were these interesting tie-ups, you know. And both of them were on “The Six Wives” as Rick wanted to have a variety of people there. I wasn’t the only bass player on it but it was great because he’d let me do my own thing.

– And what was your thing exactly?

I always thought of bass as a melodic instrument as well as, obviously, a rhythm section thing. Through the background I had from my grandfather and my mother, I had exposure to a reasonable amount of classical music, shall we say, so I always thought of the bass guitar as a part of string section in an orchestra where you counterpoint parts, with another melody going on underneath – subtly, but nevertheless, it’s there. So when Rick wanted me to do “Catherine Howard” I saw the opening to put melodic parts which he liked, picked up on and embellished – he kind of adapted the arrangement around parts I was putting in.

– But you were influenced not only by classical music. I hear soul influence in your playing as well.

Yeah. As a young kid, I was lucky, because there was a famous theatre down the road from where I lived, “The Hammersmith Odeon” – it’s now “The Hammersmith Apollo” or something – so within a short distance I was able to go and see the Motown Revue when it came through town, and Stax and Atlantic when they were coming across and doing a whole package with Wilson Pickett, THE BAR-KAYS and Booker T and THE M.G.s who were the house bands for that. I also loved to see THE BEACH BOYS when they came across because they were doing something different – I loved the harmonies and the melodies, and everything they were doing. So you’re right about the soul thing, because I was one hundred per cent influenced by those guys. You had people like Paul McCartney with THE BEATLES doing wonderfully melodic things, but then I’d go and see someone like James Jamerson or Duck Dunn and just be astounded by the way they played. And the guy that I started writing songs with at school, his mother was from Trinidad, so he had some black roots going on there big time, and he introduced me to things like THE IMPRESSIONS and Curtis Mayfield. We were doing this stuff, mixing it in with the stuff that was coming out of the U.K. I loved all that. There’s something about the energy and sheer excitement of seeing those early Motown and Stax acts.

– That’s why your music is much more interesting than that of today’s prog rock artists who don’t go to the roots that informed what you did.

I guess it was just coming out that my playing was evolving – evolving based on all those influences that you’ve just spoken about and on always having a big platform for really interesting basslines. And also, of course, based on the writing side which I gradually got into when I joined STRAWBS. We were doing the “Hero And Heroine” album over there in Denmark, and we needed more material in the studio, so David Cousins and I came up with “Midnight Sun” with my acoustic guitar playing coming out there. He felt that we were lacking something a little bit mystical and asked if I had anything, and luckily, I had something that sparked his imagination. I played him the chords, and he instantly picked up a notepad and pen and started writing lyrics. He got me to sit there playing the chords over and over again for him, and the song took shape. We worked together on the arrangement and pretty much recorded it within the space of twenty-four hours. So it was almost written to order.

– Were you impressed with the end result, with vocal harmonies added to it?

Oh, I was happy with the end result. I loved what Dave Lambert, Dave Cousins and I were doing with harmonies at that time – it was great! And also Rod Coombes, the drummer, had an interesting take on backing vocals: he’d occasionally come up with quite unexpected things.

– By the way, was it Wakeman who suggested you join the band?

When Rick’s album came out, he got an appearance on “The Old Grey Whistle Test” and “Catherine Howard” was one of the songs he wanted to do. Dave Cousins came in and did a slightly off-the-wall banjo bit in the middle of it, and that was when I met him properly for the first time. A few months after that he phoned up, as they obviously had a split with the old band, with Hudson and Ford, and he asked if I’d be interested in joining. But I’m sure prior to that he had phoned Rick and said, “What do you think?” And Rick, at that point was dreaming of what would become the ENGLISH ROCK ENSEMBLE, or ERE, as they called it, and he had already asked me about that, would I be interested? I remember phoning Rick after having got the call from Dave Cousins and saying, “What’s happening with your thing?” And he said, “I’m sure I’ll get my thing together in time, but it’s not going to be in the next few weeks or months. I’d take the job with STRAWBS, if I were you!” So I did.

– It was after their dalliance with glam was over, right?

Well, until “Part Of The Union” I had always seen STRAWBS as a university/college band: more left field, more artistic. People were following STRAWBS, but then, of course, they were searching for a breakthrough, and though “Lay Down” was not Number One, it was a successful record for them. It got them radio play. [Richard] Hud[son] and John [Ford] were also writing quite commercial stuff, and they were very, very good at it. They wrote “Part Of The Union” which was a big, big hit in England, but as I understand it, they had written that originally as a solo project, and then the record company heard it and said, “This is a Number One!” After STRAWBS had a hit with it, they were no longer playing to the people that had followed them up through colleges and universities. All of a sudden it was “Top of the Pops” and a pop audience which I thought was strange. And then, when that line-up split up and I was invited to join along with Rod Coombes and John Hawken, it was going to be a new venture – the two Daves were quite adamant about it – it was back to being an album band. That was the spirit that “Hero And Heroine” was made in.

– How much freedom did you have coming into the band?

STRAWBS were really inclusive: everyone that came in was allowed their freedom of expression.

– And what did you bring to the band, in your opinion?

I was a melodic bass player that thought symphonically. I wanted more symphonic rock flavoring to the songs, so I would play counter bass lines, musical and melodic bass lines, rather than just the root notes: I hope I brought some creativity there in that aspect. From a songwriting point of view, I think when we worked together, Dave Cousins and I were quite compatible, but again, I brought in some whimsical melodic stuff.

– How did you like playing the songs that STRAWBS recorded before you joined? Did you have any favorites?

I guess you always have favorites with songs, don’t you? Everyone’s got favorites! I liked all their songs but I definitely liked to play the more progressive ones and John Ford was also a really inventive bass player. Obviously, there’s always this little folk element of STRAWBS, which never went away, and it was always there because it’s Dave Cousins. I mean Dave Cousins on his own is not particularly proggy, although he writes very mystical lyrics which can fit, so it’s the people that work with Dave that made STRAWBS proggy.

– What did you like more: riff-driven pieces like “Round and Round” and “Cut Like A Diamond” or baroque things like “Autumn” and “Barcarole”?

I think I liked them equally, as I realized the need to get a balanced album that was going to be a bit rocky but also very melodic and, at times, wistful. So I appreciated all the various elements – they were all necessary to make a strong album.

– It must have been competitive back in the day, getting one’s song on the record.

It was an open thing. Obviously, Dave Cousins was the mainstay of the band, a head of the band, so he’s written by far the greatest amount of songs that STRAWBS have recorded over the years. But from the time we did “Midnight Sun” and just came up with it in the studio, he and I had a little affinity there and were able to get together and create music very quickly.

– Still, until “Deep Cuts” you had basically one song per album. Was that an arrangement between you and Cousins?

I wouldn’t say it was an arrangement; it was just how it was. Dave Cousins was always obviously the main songwriter of STRAWBS and he made sure he kept it that way, but the management had got us to do two albums just before “Deep Cuts” in quick succession, and then they wanted us to do another one. What we didn’t realize was that they were maneuvering to get us out of A&M Records. They had some friends, basically businessmen connected with DEEP PURPLE, who were setting up a new label [Oyster], based around Polydor. We were really happy with our label: A&M had been a great company for the band and suited the kind of credibility, the kind of artistic elements of STRAWBS. But all of a sudden, we came to the point where we’d left A&M – it was almost like a fait accompli, because it was STRAWBS management that ran the show, while we didn’t have much say, I’ll leave it at that, because that happened to a lot of bands – and we were presented with this new record deal and talks of big money, but Dave, for once, didn’t have material. Still, he acknowledged the promise he and I had shown in writing the odd thing together, and the management saw there was as well. So I was dispatched down to Devon, where Dave was living in the country at the time, where the plan was just to write together. I had quite a lot of ideas on the go that I presented to him one by one, and he pretty much picked up on every one and started running with it in the same way as “Midnight Sun” had happened – it was like stream-of-consciousness lyrics coming out of him.

It was a wonderfully creative process. He was saying, “Play me something, He’d take a pen and paper, and he’d be writing lyrics and singing his lines to me, so it was a kind of bounce-off, in the same way as we’re talking now. By that point, I was quite established in the band and was able to feel that I was having a creative input from the start of a process. Of course, I could put the bass on afterwards, but essentially all the writing was done with us just sitting around on acoustic guitars and recording demos onto his Revox. Within the space of two or three days, we found ourselves with a handful of songs, because the speed of writing was incredible. “Simple Visions” is a classic example of it: play the riff, keep playing, keep playing, pen, paper, lyrics – and before an hour or two were out, we pretty much had the song. I worried that it might upset the balance in STRAWBS a little bit, as I think Dave Lambert found it strange that I’d suddenly been sent down there and we came back from those writing get-togethers pretty much with the songs as you hear them on the album, but I explained to him how spontaneously it had happened. And of course, we had a single, “I Only Want My Love To Grow In You” – that was me, perhaps, at my most commercial – because there was a push, a pressure from the new record company to try and get a hit single, and it became record of the week here in the UK and achieved substantial airplay.

– So that commercial sound of “Deep Cuts” and “Burning For You” was down to the pressure from the label?

Well, there was the whole production change as well. Tom Allom, who had been the STRAWBS producer for some years before that, suddenly found himself out of favor. As far as I know, that wasn’t down to the band – it wasn’t the band saying, “Oh, we don’t want to work with Tom again!” The new record company, with the kind of money coming in and the management pushing for it, wanted a new approach. And out of the blue, we ended up with Rupert Holmes and Jeffrey Lesser, but I enjoyed that as well because I loved the elusive North American sound that English studios didn’t seem to be able to get at the time. So for me it was a thrill working with an engineer-producer like Jeffrey Lesser. Rupert Holmes was more of a creative influence, but it was Jeffrey’s hard work that made the album. Rupert would come in, have a fiddle occasionally and put some creative things in, but he was more of a butterfly floating around it – while Jeffrey would be still working in the studio at two or three in the morning on his own. And I learned again – I learned an awful lot from Jeffrey because he shared his knowledge, and he’d have me as his right-hand man, just helping him with the faders. It was a whole different approach.

And on “Burning For You” it was just Jeffrey Lesser producing. We went off to Holland to record that, but Dave Cousins wasn’t in such a prolific phase of writing then – hence, there’s a lot more shared writing. I was again asked to go and write with him to see if we come up with enough material, but some of the songs on there weren’t as strong as those on “Deep Cuts” were. For me, “Deep Cuts” fulfilled the brief of a STRAWBS album, which was for everyone to have an input. It isn’t just a case of, “Oh, here’s a song, and you’ve got to play it like this”: everyone had an input. I remember Rod Coombes came up with some fantastic harmony ideas on “Deep Cuts” as he’d done before. Wherever the songs came from, whether it was just Dave Cousins or someone else or a collection of people, it’s the people working together on the songs and giving that individual flavor – that’s what’s important.

– And then, the band ceased to exist at some point.

All that happened in 1980. We had just recorded an album called “Heartbreak Hill” – though Dave Lambert had left early in the recording process to pursue his own solo album. Jo Partridge who had played with me in Philip Goodhand-Tait’s band way back came in on guitar instead. We had just mixed the album when, let’s just say due to management and various things, the band had to stop working at the time, and we ended up in a bit of, shall we say, a financial pickle. And although Elton John’s Rocket Records wanted to put the album out and had a contract on the table, Dave felt at the time that he’d had enough of the music business, so he kind of retired. He said, “I want to go and do something else,” and that’s when he took time out and went into working in independent local radio, and I went on to do other things. With STRAWBS in limbo, I was back doing session work – a Gordon Giltrap album [1982’s “Airwaves”], things like that, and I was working a lot at a studio in London called The Redan Recorders, and one of the guys I was working with a lot there was Ian Mosley, the drummer who is now with MARILLION. And Steve Hackett was actually working in another studio in the same complex, doing the "Cured" album with Nick Magnus, as at that point his touring band had finished. I’m not quite sure the circumstances, but he was just doing it with Nick Magnus, and they were embracing early sequencing technology to do that. So I met them, and Steve asked if I will be interested in playing with them when the album was done and they wanted to go out on the road. They asked Ian Mosley as well, as we were working together, and that’s how I came to be with Steve Hackett for a couple of years.

– Given Steve’s technique, I’d assume your playing had to be much more intense than when you played with STRAWBS.

Yeah, you’re right. Steve’s music is highly structured and you can’t really deviate there. Well, you could, a little bit, but not much, Not in the same way as it was with STRAWBS. I mean, if I felt a slightly different lick come into my head or something, I could put it in, if it wouldn’t affect anything else. But with Steve, it was so structured you had to stick to it, and frankly, I actually enjoyed that at the time: the structure of everything was good, you know. Once you have the set down, it was all doable because it never got any harder or any easier. I think it could have been more difficult if it hadn’t been for the great Ian Mosley drumming because Ian had a way of being a wonderful technician, but still playing with a lot of feel. I loved the whole time I spent with Steve Hackett, I loved the production values he brought to bear on it. The interesting thing about Steve is that for all the talk about the technical playing and everything, sometimes it’s “Can we just have a jam? Can we just play blues?'” He always had harmonica in his back pocket and he used to whip it out and play.

– How do you remember working with Nick Magnus?

I have nothing but fulsome praise for Nick Magnus. He’s a really nice guy and a brilliant musician. I loved what he did. The way he achieved sounds was clever and the sounds he got were wonderful.

– You didn’t record anything with Hackett in the studio. It was only live, right?

Yeah, that’s right. He’d already done the “Cured” album, and as he had disbanded the previous touring band that he had, we were promoting that record.

– But why Steve didn’t offer you to play on his next album?

When it came to his next album, I was already with Rick Wakeman. I was a freelancer, so I was not under any contract to anybody, and in the meantime I’d been recording with Rick anyway – he was doing TV, music for TV series and everything. So it was logical that, when he finally wanted to go out on the road again, he asked me to go out on the road with him. And I did, so I wouldn’t have been available to Hackett.

– When you joned Rick, you played on the “Crimes Of Passion” soundtrack and then…

And then we recorded an album “Glory Boys”!

– I think it was a single.

Yes, the album was called “Silent Nights”! (Laughs.) I’ve got it back there somewhere.

– And you are on Wakeman’s live album from Hammersmith.

It was the only time I ever toured with Rick – despite all the recordings I’d done with him – we did a long tour in the US, Canada and Australia.

– Wakeman’s guitarist at the time was another Rick, Fenn, who played with 10CC. An interesting combination, you and him, wasn’t it?

Definitely, definitely. Rick was a good guy and a great player, but Wakeman’s band was always cool. And, of course, that was with Tony Fernandez on drums who had joined STRAWBS in 1977. I do like playing with Tony, like as a unit, the rhythm section.

– So who’s your favorite rhythm section partner?

It’s difficult to say. From the technical side of things, Ian Mosley was terrific in our days with Steve Hackett, but Tony’s a dear friend as well, and he and I worked together in so many kinds of situations by now. He too is very melodic.

– Well, he has an album titled “Zodiaque” where he’s leading and Wakeman following and soloing. So it must be very interesting for you as a melodic bass player to play with such a melodic drummer.

Yeah, yeah, and he’s a great song interpreter as well. I’ve never had any interest in saying, “Oh, look how clever I can do this!” It’s not the way I play, and I never think of myself as a technical player. However, I could see people who have much better technique than me, but maybe not as much soul or instinct for a song.

– Could you compare playing with Rod Coombs and Tony Fernandez?

Rod was more of a… I wouldn’t call him a jazz player, but he was more that way, while Tony, with his timing, just lays it down. He and I have worked on so many different projects over the years, some of which are noted and some of which are never known about, and he’s a really amazing, solid rock drummer, who’s also a really good technical player.

– The TV thing you said Rick was doing before you went on tour, was it “GasTank”?

Yeah. It was ridiculously good fun – and it was challenging too, in the sense that every week there’ll be different guests on, and we had very limited rehearsal time with them before we recorded the show. We’d get together in an afternoon, have a brief rehearsal and if it was someone like Rick Parfitt, then there would be a long time talking and probably him having a drink on the side as well with Rick, and then we would record it live. There are still “GasTank” clips I see now that I forgot I even recorded – I mean, I forgot that I’d done Donovan – but it was terrific because it was really live. That’s the thing about it: there’s no jiggery-pokery there.

– Was it around that time that you first met Oliver Wakeman who you would work with on STRAWBS’ “Dancing To The Devil’s Beat” many years later?

No, I sort of knew Oliver, because me and my wife Savina were really good friends with Rick and his first wife, Ros. When they got married, he moved to the other side of London, he was living in North East London, so I didn’t see him as often, but we were very close. And then, when he had success with YES, he bought a big place out West again, much nearer where we lived, so we’d see a lot of him, and my wife and I are actually godparents to Oliver. But because Rick and Ros split up fairly early on, the boys, Oliver and Adam, moved away with her, and I lost touch with them and lost touch with her for a while, so I didn’t see Oliver for many years after that – probably, not until he came to work with STRAWBS.

– How did you find it playing with son as opposed to playing with the father?

I played with both sons, because Adam toured with STRAWBS, and they’re both chips off the old block, aren’t they? But they’re quite different people: Adam’s done a lot more of overall round, across-the-board session work, whereas Oliver has more concentrated on his own stuff and a few choice projects. When we played together, you could see the Wakeman genes working in the boys’ technique: Rick has that kind of arpeggio, and when they both want to, they both play just like their dad there. It was like father, like sons, although they both have their own distinct characters.

– Let’s circle back to the Seventies and your own session work. One of your early notable recording was on “Songfall” by Phillip Goodhand-Tait.

It wasn’t only a studio work with Phillip; we became his backing band for a while. It was very acoustic based – no drums but a friend of mine called Ernie Hayes would play guitar before Joe Partridge came in who was Davey Johnstone’s brother-in-law. Davey was in Elton John’s band, so that was the whole DJM Records thing, because Elton’s career was rocketing, and we toured Europe opening for him. I got some terrific experience working with Phillip there. He’s a very talented singer and songwriter. We did quite a lot of things together, and that was a nice album to make song for as well.

– Was that your first real touring experience?

It probably was. We’d worked with all sorts of people which you wouldn’t really think suitable pairings for a songwriting kind of acoustic act – we would even open for DEEP PURPLE on European tours! – so I was getting quite a grounding in the music business through Phillip. It was exciting, to be able to go away and be part of a tour, to be doing arenas in Germany or such beautiful concert halls as “The Concertgebouw” in Amsterdam, and there was always something to learn from the people I was working with. Young at the time, I was still feeling my way into how the whole thing worked, but I didn’t get involved in any kind of riotous activity. (Laughs.)

– Was it physically or emotionally challenging to be away from home for the first time?

I guess it was challenging, but I never thought of it really as challenging. I had just met my wife, and we were getting to the point where, sooner or later, we’d get our own flat together, which we did, but I was still living at home with my parents at the time.

– Were your parents happy that you got out of their hair for a while?

I’m sure they were. (Laughs.) I’m sure they’d rather I become an airline pilot or a bank manager or something. But because of my mother’s background, she was quite happy that I was doing something in music, which is something secretly she’d love to have done.

– And then, you played on two interesting albums in 1977, while being a member of STRAWBS. One was Arthur Brown’s "Chisholm In My Bosom"…

God knows how it came about! I guess it was through session fixers or just word of mouth, but I’d forgotten that I even made that album. At times it was very busy, rushing around off a tour or coming in and doing a session, so it was only when I toured with ACOUSTIC STRAWBS in somewhere like Denmark, about fifteen years ago, that a guy came up outside a gig with a few albums that he wanted signed and pulled that one out, and I vaguely remembered doing a session for Arthur Brown but had no idea it had appeared on an album, so I said, “I don’t reckon I’m on that one. I’d never seen the album!” And he said, “Oh no, you’re on it!”. I hadn’t done the whole album, so I didn’t even know its title; I just got paid a session fee, but I remember Arthur being quite off the wall – in the nicest way. He was asking me to make my part more blue kind of thing. I said, “Pardon?” And he said, “Well, the Earth’s rotation today is a bit…” He was talking in spatial terms about what he wanted, so hopefully I did the job. (Laughs.)

– Your second appearance in 1977 was on Andy Bown’s “Come Back Romance, All Is Forgiven”: how did that come about?

That’s a bit more memorable in the way it came about, because STRAWBS’ “Nomadness” was produced by Tom Allom, and he asked me to do it. It was a regular collection of session musicians that I knew well, so that was a nice album to do.

– A couple of years after that you recorded a cover of “Slaughter On 10th Avenue” with ILLUSION. What was the reason behind Jim McCarty calling you instead of Louis Cennamo?

It would have been for a variety of reasons. I was introduced to Louis early on, but I didn’t particularly know Jim then. But I was working a lot with ILLUSION guitarist John Knightsbridge. John and I had been doing all sorts of things together, so he invited me to come along one day, do some meetup and have a play, with maybe a bit of recording, with Jim and Chris Dreja, who was THE YARDBIRDS’ rhythm guitarist. They were thinking of reforming THE YARDBIRDS as such at the time and they wondered if I was interested. I was unsure, and there were other things going on for me at the time, but nevertheless, we got together and we did some bits of recording. And of course, there was a John Hawken connection, as he had played with both STRAWBS and ILLUSION. I was quite surprised when that recording eventually appeared on an ILLUSION album.

– Jenny Darren and Robert Webb are two other people that you recorded with. They released the “Rare Bird In Rock” album a few years ago, but it was done in the late Seventies as well, correct?

That’s right. That album came out of the STRAWBS management connection and DJM Records. Jenny Darren worked with DJM, and they wanted to put this band together to do some recording and a big showcase gig for her to launch a new album which we hadn’t played on. There were me, Andy Richards, STRAWBS’ last keyboard player in the Seventies, and Nicko McBrain. Andy and I got along really well, and we knew Nicko from the management offices, a that was quite a band! I also wrote some stuff with Jenny, which I don’t believe ever saw the light of day. A couple of things were quite commercial, and I remember Dick James wanted to put one of our songs in for Eurovision that year, which was surprising, but it never happened. We did that showcase gig, though – it was somewhere in London, I can’t remember where – but there’s no recording of that, not that I know of. It all fell apart for her, Robert Webb and DJM Records shortly after that, I don’t know why; they wanted us to sign a contract, so that we would be exclusively her players, and then it all went pear-shaped. I haven’t seen her for a long while, but I was surprised to find out later that Robert Webb got involved in so many progressive things, because they were definitely attempting to go for more mainstream commercial approach with Jenny Darren there.

– You also played with Brian Connolly of SWEET, which seems like an unusual style for you. How did that happen?

I think it was through Brian Willoughby, the guy who played with STRAWBS: he had some connections there and he had done a couple of things with Brian Connolly, so he got myself involved and also Tony Fernandez on drums. We met up with Brian, got on really well with him, although he was quite a character, and ended up doing demos for him, some of which appeared on unofficial releases, and a single [“Take Away The Music”]. We also did some shows with Brian to promote the single, and I remember going over to Germany to do a TV show with him – it was mimed, unfortunately, but it was a memorable trip. As for the style, I’ve always considered myself a session player, as I have been one over the years, and I’ve considered myself open to most sorts of music. And some of SWEET stuff was quite progressive, actually – they had some really good songs; it wasn’t all Chinnichap material – what they wanted to do themselves was interesting.\

– You mentioned Brian Willoughby. Was it you who brought him into STRAWBS?

Yes and no. He already had a connection there because he was a local lad and knew David Cousins, but since I’d done some things with Brian and I was friends with a lot of guys in a band that he was playing with at the time, he was one of the guys that we looked to when Dave Lambert left. Brian didn’t particularly want the gig to start off with, but he took it in the end. I was probably closer with him than Dave Cousins was, even though they both knew each other, so it was a good thing to bring him in.

– Let me bring up another unusual credit: did you really master Tony O’Malley’s “Oh!”?

Yeah, I remember doing some mastering for Tony O’Malley, even though I never actually met him. We had a mutual friend who owned a recording studio, a chap called Kris Gray, who lives in Germany now…

– You mean Kris with “K”? I wrote lyrics for one of his songs!

Oh, how lovely! He had taken over the ownership of a recording studio in Chiswick in West London, and Dave Cousins knew the engineer there, Kenny Denton, and liked working with him, so Kris got me to do mastering for a few people. I did two or three things for him, for Chris Farlowe – all the recordings for that project had been done, so it was a new compilation being put together – and for Tony O’Malley as well.

– – I never knew that you had this technical expertise: a mastering engineer is something completely different from a musician.

I’d done a lot of studio work in the early days of digital recording. People trusted my ears, so I’d done a few things, and word got around, but I don’t think I would put myself up for doing it now, mainly because it’s not something I particularly kept up.

– Soon after that you returned to STRAWVS. What did you find more challenging or interesting: playing with electric or acoustic versions of the band?

Oh, both are challenging. Initially, from the time I got involved with acoustic STRAWBS, that had to be more challenging in a way, because I was having to play, in a live setting, not only bass but also a twelve-string. But the most challenging part was integrating the bass pedals, which I was using to drive a synthesizer so we could get string sounds, choir sounds and various other noises and effects. To be playing any guitar and then be doing something completely separate with my right foot, that was challenging – but it wasn’t so bad once I got used to it, settled in and became comfortable with.

– Before all this STRAWBS business, you released "Liberty": a brilliant album. How did you feel doing everything by yourself, except for a couple of parts? Was it liberating, to be doing what you want in your way?

I guess in some ways it was liberating, but I never really thought about it like that at the time. You kind of miss other people’s inputs. I’m much happier working as a team player and bouncing ideas off others. But it was an interesting project, and I enjoyed it, because it was done during lockdown, so I couldn’t have got together with anyone. Still, Dave Lambert played guitar on one track, which was old anyway, and Dave Bainbridge kindly put a guitar solo on the end of another one. Also, Major Baldini played drums on the title track. I just thought that it was the best way to use being confined to your home. Just before lockdown happened, I got a new guitar, and new guitars, just playing through the new things, always give you ideas. So I came up with the idea of the title track, I’d recorded it a bit here, and I thought, “That’s sounding quite good!” – and then, I couldn’t think of what to do lyrically on it.

But I was out in front of my house one day and looking wistfully down the road, where there’s a pub right down the end of it, a nice meeting place where I got lots of friends, and suddenly I was thinking, “Oh God, I wonder how long we’re going to be in lockdowns? Once I get my liberty back, I’m going to go down there and have a good pint or two of beer!” That’s where the idea for “Liberty” came from. So the song itself was all about that weirdness of that time. The weather here all through that first lockdown we all had was just glorious, just unbelievable! It was wonderful early March weather, and it seemed so strange hearing all the birds and the silence in the sky, because I live not so far from Heathrow, and if the wind’s coming from the east, which it doesn’t all the time, you’re very aware of planes taking off outside. But it was just silence, and it was very bizarre, so the song was about trying to convey that strange feeling, with the desire for liberty at the end of it.

– So the songs were written especially for this album or they accumulated over a few years?

No, some, as you probably know, were historical. There was a version of “A Splash Of Blue” which appeared on the Lambert-Cronk album [“Touch The Earth”], and also “Everybody Knows” which ended up on the STRAWBS album [“The Broken Hearted Bride”] with Dave singing, and I was glad to do those, But what had happened was, I did a little video when I put that “Liberty” track, because I had the time at home – a little video based around a slideshow of Portugal – and put it on YouTube, but then I joined Facebook, because it seemed a good way to try to connect with people while we were locked down, and I put it on Facebook too. And I got a reaction straight away, and lots and lots of hits and views, and no one was more surprised than I was. But also I got approached by Renaissance Records in America: the gentleman who’s the boss of that, John W. Edwards, got in touch and said, “I really love this. You got any more or you fancy doing something?” We spoke about it, and he said he’d love to do an EP, but my first thought was, “It’s all very well recording yourself at home, but I know how long it takes!” It’s a lot quicker when you’re working with other people, because you can make decisions, especially if you’re a Libran like me. So I thought, “If he wants an EP, I’m going to have to come up with something else!” I had one other new song on the go, but then decided to do my version of “Everybody Knows” and I could remix and have another go at “A Splash Of Blue” because that was all me anyway, apart from Dave Lambert playing guitar.

But when John came up with the artwork, which was great, he suddenly turned around, after he’d been speaking to distributors and people in the business, and asked me to make it a full LP, so from that point everything was new. I tried to follow the thinking process behind “Liberty” and “Take My Hand” – which was the other one I mentioned – and I wrote more songs. And of course, lockdowns came and went, didn’t they, so one minute I was thinking, “Oh no I haven’t got spare time to do it!” and then it would be lockdown again, so I just concentrated on using all the time I had. I wouldn’t be able to put a number on the amount of hours spent doing that, all in all, but it was very satisfying. I’d send my stuff to Dave Cousins, and I send him “Liberty” when I did it, saying, “I don’t think this is right for STRAWBS, but I respect your opinion, so what do you think?” I never heard back from him, but then again, there were other things going on that I was unaware of.

– You mentioned this Lambert-Cronk album, “Touch The Earth”.. Was it different, writing with Dave Lambert than with Dave Cousins?

It was different, yes. I guess Dave Lambert and I have more in common background-wise, but it was Nick Magnus who provided the means for Dave Lambert and I to get recording initially, on a lot of those things. Nick, my good friend and colleague from Steve Hackett’s band, is just the nicest man. In the late Eighties I had started working with Roy Hill as CRY NO MORE, and Nick was a little bit involved there as well, as he had his own little studio going before I did. I introduced him to Dave Lambert who had some songs of his own, so I went down to Kent, where he lived then, and we had a few couple of writing sessions and came up with the other songs. We were recording for the sake of it at the time, and the tapes lay there for quite some while until the early 2000s, when Dave [Cousins] was getting Witchwood Records together and said, “Why don’t you do something with those songs?” And of course, we had some songs from the project that Dave Lambert, myself and Andy Richards did with Tony Fernandez, when STRAWBS s finished at the end of the Seventies. We went and did some recording then, and had two great tracks, including “Touch The Earth” – but we had no representation, and here was a way of getting it out there, so we put it on the Lambert-Cronk thing, with everyone’s permission.

– Why did you need Andy Richards if you had Nick there?

Oh, this was before Nick. Andy was the last keyboard player in STRAWBS in the Seventies, he did the “Heartbreak Hill” album. He and I got on really well, so when STRAWBS stopped, we carried on working on some other projects. There was a thing called “Electric Ice” for a while thanks to Robin Cousins, a British ice skater who had become Olympic champion but then turned professional and wanted to do something showbiz-wise. He had this idea for a show called “Electric Ice”: a troupe of professional ice skaters working with rock musicians who would play the music in the vein of “Tubular Bells” and Vangelis. Now, ice skaters have to work to a very strict tempo, so you can’t play stuff too fast or too slow, and there was only one way this show was going to work, and that was using sequencing. It was very early-day sequencing, but Andy was ahead of the game with those things, so Andy and I got together with the producers of the show, and he was taken on to provide all the sequencer parts, to use sequencers, as unreliable and dangerous as they were at the time, with live musicians.

We had people there we all knew one way or the other: it was Andy on keyboards and myself on bass, Jeff Crampton on guitar, who had worked with Rick Wakeman a lot, a drummer called Peter Boita, and another keyboard player, Chris Parren, so there’s another STRAWBS connection – he had more HUDSON-FORD links at the time, but was part of the camp anyway. We were the live band that was working along with the sequencer tracks, and Andy was the maestro that had to make sure that the sequencers were working right every night; otherwise, the show didn’t happen. Of course, in those days he was loading all the data from cassette tapes very slowly, so it was a risky venture, and the Musicians’ Union were giving us a hard time, but it was quite groundbreaking, and except for a couple of classic cock-ups, it worked brilliantly. Andy’s career actually really took off from that point. After STRAWBS he wanted to go back up North and forget it, but because I persuaded him to stay and we ended up doing “Electric Ice” he met Trevor Horne, and the next minute he was doing FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. He was a brilliant player for his time, and technology-wise he was way on it, so when you listen to some of the FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD stuff and even Grace Jones, there’s a lot of the sounds from “Heartbreak Hill”: it was clever stuff. Andy went on to be a massive session player, he was so in demand.

– He recorded with Gary Moore and, as Neil Carter said, it was Andy who played on “The Loner”!

Yeah, he was playing with everyone – PET SHOP BOYS, George Michael, Annie Lennox – I lost track of the people he worked with, because the amount of hit records he played on was phenomenal.

– So that was a serious record, But how serious were CRY NO MORE? Tracks like “Landslide and “I Like I Like I Like” sound like musical comedy to me.

Andy co-produced the second CRY NO MORE album – “Love And Power”… CRY NO MORE recorded two albums for EMI and we took those very seriously. I got Jeffrey Lesser and his then partner Richard Gotteherer involved in producing the first album, but it was tricky, as my partner Roy [Hill] was a law unto himself. If ever you saw him live, you would think, “My God, that’s a star!” That is what that bloke deserves, and he would have been if he’d had half the chance; We played some big arenas supporting bands like MARILLION, but he couldn’t help himself being a bit of a comedian as well, and he had a habit of shooting himself in the foot by his comedy: sometimes it’s not appropriate to be that funny, and it could be frustrating from that point of view. But I love him dearly. He’s probably the one person I’ve worked with in my life who was never selfish about anything – well, maybe he was, but everything was just fifty-fifty. He appreciated what I did, and I appreciated what he did, but at times he’d go off the rails. And I went, “Calm down, Roy!”

– The band don’t exist anymore, right?

No, no, unfortunately not. In this West London area, it was legendary in its day, it was legend. We had a following like you wouldn’t believe. Even before we had a record deal, someone put us on at “Richmond Theatre” and we sold it out. It was unbelievable! Other than that, we were just playing pubs, and it was in a pub in Twickenham that we had both A&M Records and EMI Records watching us and making bids for us after.

– But you were big enough to tour with MARILLION. Was it thanks to Ian Mosley?

Well, I guess it was thanks to the fact that, when Ian had joined MARILLION, I got to know them. They came along to see CRY NO MORE live one night and thought, “Oh, this is incredible!” But it was all probably more thanks to EMI Records we were both signed to at the time. And of course, the thing about CRY NO MORE is that our manager was Jim Beach, who is QUEEN’s manager; he was a very powerful man in the music business, so we were taken seriously. Jim believed in it big time, other than he tried to keep Roy under control as well – not always successfully, but he tried. And I remember Dave Munns, the head of A&R that signed us, who was a plain talking guy, I remember that he looked at Roy and said, “Roy, I’m only signing you because he’s with you!” – and he pointed at me. – “Now listen to what he says!” So the MARILLION thing happened because they knew me and took a chance on us.

The first time we played with them was in a big arena in Germany, and when we’d pitched up, Ian and the boys said to me, “Oh, we’re a bit worried for you. Last night we had a support band in France and they had burning t-shirts thrown at them. We hope you don’t get any of that treatment!” There were just the two of us but, having said that, we were using sequencers and things. I had a 24-channel mixing desk on stage with me, and every channel had something going through it, so I would mix us on stage and just give the Front of House PA guys a stereo feed. The crews loved it big time! We were on and off that stage before you knew it. I mean, literally everything was on one massive flight case – 24-channel mixing desk, keyboards, everything – so it was just unplug out of the main PA, two cables out the main PA, wheel the whole thing off, gone, stage is clear, ready for MARILLION. And of course, because Roy couldn’t stop being Roy, they loved that as well – they loved the complete anarchy of it. With the German audience on that first night, with MARILLION fans, it could be quite hard, and when we went out there was dead silence, but within ten minutes Roy had them eating out of his hand! He was such a good communicator the way he went out there – arms aloft and he’s in his world – that the audience just warmed to him. And the girls loved it because he had self-deprecating humor of an extreme kind; he was taking the mickey out of himself and us, so once they saw that, they realized we were no threat, and we ended up getting lots of German fans from that.

– Moving closer to here and now, how did you get involved with the SPIRITS BURNING project?

This was another pre-lockdown thing. Don Falcone [the project’s mastermind. – DME] had made contact some years ago and asked whether I would be interested in doing something? Yes, I would. So he sent me some tracks, I put some bass on for him in my studio here and sent it back to him, and he seemed very happy. So I was approached by him really, and I was very pleasantly surprised to be.

– Before that there were “Mystic Mountain Music” and “Angelic Meditations” albums that seemed to be very unusual for you. How did you come up with that kind of new age material?

There had been this guru I met who had come over from India and I got on quite well with. He’d heard some stuff I was doing in my studio, early sequencer stuff, and he encouraged me to try and do something along those ambient music lines. My wife had become a Reiki master, amongst other things, and she was teaching Reiki using music, so I thought, “I’ll try and come up with something that she can use that’s original!” And so that’s what “Mystic Mountain Music” was: Reiki healing music with the bells taken off it – the bells that sound every three minutes to signal to move on to the next phase of hand positions. And I had a friend, Angela McGerr, who wrote books and was an angel card reader. She wrote a book called “Angelic Meditations” which had a CD accompaniment of one of her meditations that I recorded along with most of my Mystic Mountain Music. It was an interesting project and beautifully packaged by her publishers.

– Are you a spiritual person yourself?

I think up to a point, yes, but I’m quite grounded as well at the same time. I’m not religious in the sense that I particularly follow a strict religion, but I believe in a certain spiritual laws. The laws of all the various religions have a common central thing to them before they get manipulated. So I’m not over-spiritual, but I think there’s an element of that in me. I can see the beauty in lots of things. I see spirituality in nature as well. My wife inherited an old tumble-down cottage in Ireland twenty-five years ago, and we did it up: it was very remote, and to go there and just watch the sky changing and everything – the power of nature there was just unbelievable! That sort of thing affects the way I write and gives me ideas for writing.