September 2024
A little bit more than half a century ago, a Juilliard student abandoned a bright future as a classical composer and flew from New York to London where a gloomy rock ‘n’ roll career seemed to await him – and Danny Peyronel never looked back, because it didn’t take him long to land a job with HEAVY METAL KIDS, and from then on the sky was the limit for the young musician. Proceeding to play on UFO’s “No Heavy Petting” and leaving his indelible mark on the ensemble’s sound before that stint proved to be brief, Danny would go on to further creative challenges and successes. He wrote for Meat Loaf and Sade, heard his lyrics sung by David Gilmour and formed a few groups, yet cutting a solo path never felt too interesting a prospect for Peyronel. Although he made such an effort in 2004, another two decades passed until he decided to try again and deliver “It Happens When You Look The Other Way”: the album which will define the veteran’s talent and shine a light in his personality. Only his personality started to get shaped in darker period, the era that became a starting point for this conversation.
– Danny, you were born in Argentina…
Yes, in Buenos Aires.
– …in times of Juan Perón. How do you remember that period? Did it influence you in any way?
It’s funny, and it’s a really interesting question because I have a memory – a distinct memory, although I must have been two years old – of my dad, who was a Navy officer and a Marine. As a Marine, he wore a green uniform like the army, and the helmet, and I remember hum coming back home in combat uniform. I thought that was so weird, but it was the Revolución Libertadora, as they called it, to get rid of Perón, and my dad had been out there. Much later I found out, and this is really pretty horrible, that there was a Peronista general, who had said to his troops that, when they managed to beat down this rebellion, he was going to let them have the wives of every officer who had been involved in it. We lived in an apartment, on a ground floor, and outside the building, there was a black cross they had painted crudely, a black cross that meant that there was a Navy family and they could come in and help themselves to my Mum, can you imagine? Of course, they didn’t win, and he was punished, I imagine, for his crazy shit.
– So what was your reaction when you first heard “Evita”?
As you can imagine, the very name “Perón” was like a bad word in my home throughout my childhood, it was like swearing. We never spoke about Perón or anything like that, and I’ve learned in time that Evita was a very conflicted person – but she was absolutely adored. In Buenos Aires, they have these things called colectivos, which are short buses that go at a million miles per hour in the center of the city, and these colectiveros, to this day, carry a postcard, like a religious postcard but, instead of the Virgin, it’s a picture of Evita. She wasn’t in every way wonderful, as we know, but who am I to judge? I don’t know. It’s difficult to know what the propaganda was against her and what the propaganda was for her. So I had very conflicting feelings – and at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that (sings “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”) sounded like a tango that I had already heard. You know how they say that great songs often make you think that you’ve heard it before, but you can’t put your finger on it? It was probably a case of that. It was still beautiful, I could appreciate it. I love “Jesus Christ Superstar” – the whole thing; but I couldn’t get into “Evita” – I just liked that one song.
– You fictionalized you childhood memories of Argentina in “Martian Landscape” when you were in UFO. You shared your recollections with Phil Mogg, and he wrote the lyrics?
No, Phil wrote the lyrics to “Can You Roll Her” and “On With The Action” which were two pieces that I collaborated with him on. But “Highway Lady” and “Martian Landscape” are completely mine. You know the saying “wishful thinking”? I romanticized my memories of Argentina. But Argentina was… I couldn’t live there, or anything like that, but I have fond memories, and I have very dear friends. I went to a school there, Buenos Aires English High School, which had two particularities: one was that the Scottish guy who founded it was the guy who basically brought football to Argentina and started the Argentine Football Association, and the club from the school, called “Alumni A.C.”, was one of the first football teams in the country; and the other thing was that most of the kids were Jewish. One of them, Leonardo Levinas, is my absolute best friend. He’s a Renaissance man, a complete genius: a very well-known published philosopher, novelist, playwright, physicist – he’s got four degrees. And it’s wonderful, because we were little children, going together from elementary school up to high school – we used to call each other colleague – and we rekindled our friendship about three years ago. He came to Barcelona, and although we haven’t seen each other for fifty years, it was like nothing. All my friends were Jewish, I don’t know why, it helped me a lot when I met my girl. My lady’s granny on her dad’s side whom we adored and who totally became my granny, was Jewish. So my girl is Jewish from her dad’s side, and her mom was from a very aristocratic English family. Granny had been born in Baku, in Azerbaijan, and her dad had oil fields – they were really wealthy – and my wife’s granddad was an English Jewish person, probably from Dutch origin because they’re called Rubens; he was there with the British army in 1918 at the end of the war and the beginning of the Bolshevik thing, he met her, they fell in love – and the rest is history. She lived until 106 years old. She lived in three centuries! She died in 2005. And she used to say to me, “Danny, you’re the most Jewish of my grandchildren!” Which I took as a compliment. (Laughs.)
– You mentioned football. Did you root for Maradona, even though you didn’t live in Argentina at the time that he became a star?
I left Argentina before they even won their First World Cup, but of course, I rooted for him! (Laughs.) I wasn’t crazy about his personality but it’s like a pilot, isn’t it? You don’t care if the pilot is an idiot as long as he’s a great pilot and takes you from A to B. Maradona was incredible, and it was an incredible thing to watch him playing, but he was flawed like we all are.
– You lived in Argentina. You lived in the USA. You lived in the UK. You lived in Italy. Now you live in Spain. Where do you feel at home?
I have to tell you, we are completely head over heels with Barcelona, and I don’t know if it’s because of the age that we are now. First of all, it’s like the New York of Europe, in the sense that you don’t feel like a foreigner because almost everybody is a foreigner: you walk down the streets of Barcelona, especially the neighborhood we are in, and you hear English, Spanish, French, Catalan, German, Scandinavian languages, but not just tourists – also people who live there. It’s very much like a New York of Europe, except with much better food. We are very at home in Barcelona. The people are very warm, very Mediterranean, and we feel Mediterranean now too. Before this we lived in the south of France, but Catalonia has so much more because there’s so much culture, so much music! We finally finished putting the touring band together for touring the other day – we were only missing the drummer, and I posted on Facebook, saying that, surely, one of my local friends must know a good drummer. I had dozens of recommendations, and the one that we went for was perfect. But we’ve been happy everywhere that we’ve lived; it depends on the time in your life – that’s what it is.
– You sound quite English to me, so was this strong Spanish accent on “Bad Bad Amigo” and a few other THE BLUE MAX tracks done deliberately?
It was definitely deliberate. I don’t know what I was thinking but I was rolling my “r’s” – I don’t know why. I have a very English accent, and when I’m in America they just think I’m English, but when I arrived in London in 1973 I had an American accent, because I had been in New York studying at Juilliard, and Gary Holton from HEAVY METAL KIDS, who was Jewish as well, immediately made fun of me. But, I’ve got to tell you, it couldn’t have been more than two or three months before I sounded exactly like them, like a Cockney English boy. I really quickly got the accent, and I never lost it, and then, living with my girl, who speaks the Queen’s English, or the King’s English, I slowly started speaking better. But still, when I meet my old pals, I revert to speaking like an East London boy, and Alexandra looks at me and says “Why are you speaking like that?” (Laughs.)
– You refer to your wife as “my girl” after all these years?
She is my girl! (Laughs.) We’ve been together for forty-eight years… Actually, it’s going to be fifty next year, because we got married in 1976, but we started going out in 1975, at the time of HEAVY METAL KIDS’ first tour.
– You adopted English accent very quickly, but how long did it take you to get used to working with British musicians and their quirks?
It didn’t take me long at all! I remember watching the “Woodstock” movie many times, looking at Joe Cocker and THE GREASE BAND especially, and thinking, “That’s going to be me! I’m going to be one of those guys!” And that’s exactly what happened. After living in New York for a year and the Juilliard thing – and you know what New York is like: it can be a bit cold – when I moved to London, I felt at home immediately. It was mostly Chelsea, and it was like a village. English people were also very different in those pre-Thatcher years: they were very warm and very helpful in every way. I was never made to feel anything but welcome, and I was made welcome straight away, so I just blended in. Working with them was not a problem at all! I arrived there on a Monday, and I had one friend from school, another Italian-Argentinian, who was there already, and he let me sleep at his place that first night.
The next night I got myself a place, and he said, “I know this Italian girl who’s going out with an English musician, so maybe I’ll introduce you?” So that Thursday we went to her place, and she called this guy, a bass player, and put him on the phone to me. He said, “We’re auditioning guitarists, not keyboard players, but there’s a keyboard here. If you like, why don’t you come over tomorrow to help us out to audition?” I went there on Friday, we started jamming, and before the first guy came they said, “If you want the job, it’s yours,” which was incredible. Imagine the luck: maybe your typical English kid in those days might have had to try for three or four years, and this was a band with wages and a record deal!
– Did you ever regret quitting Juilliard?
No, not really, no. This was what I wanted to do, and I don’t look back anyway.
– Didn’t you go voluntarily to Juilliard to become a classical player?
It’s interesting that you used the word “voluntarily”: I went there half-voluntarily and half because my parents thought that, if I was going to go with this music thing, I had to do it properly. What they did was, they took me to meet this conductor at “The Teatro Colón” in Buenos Aires, Manfredi Argento, and he recommended that I go and meet his teacher who was, curiously, a Catalan composer who lived there, Maestro Martí Llorca. Basically, my parents wanted this old boy to evaluate me and tell them whether I had talent to pursue this – which was incredible now that I think of it! – and he was lovely. We had a few lessons, and he said to them, “Yeah, your boy has a talent. He has to study!” That’s why they agreed to allow me to do music and not get a “normal” profession, and Juilliard was part of that. But I really wanted it. It was between Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, which was a little bit more modern, and I was seduced by Juilliard. But when I was in, I had a friend in New York, Bobby Blaine, a really great piano player and organist – unfortunately, he’s gone now – who was also going there and who eventually was very involved with THE NEW YORK DOLLS. In Juilliard, the whole twelfth floor is rehearsal rooms, and every single rehearsal room had a Steinway grand piano, except for Room Eight or Ten that had two Steinways, so we would get into one of those rooms and play boogie-woogie with four hands. It was incredible, and I remember the first time we did that, when we finished and opened the door, the passageway was full of students who were sitting out there listening to us. But of course, it was very classical. My main teacher’s name was Czajkowski, Michael Czajkowski! (Laughs.)
– And what did your parents say when you quit?
They didn’t have much of a chance to say anything, because I just went and did it – and suddenly, I’m in England and, before they knew it, I was in HEAVY METAL KIDS. We had recorded an album, and I kept sending all these clippings, so they immediately switched to being proud of me. My dad, an admiral – oh boy, he was a lovely man! – kept a scrapbook with all the stuff.
– You play only keyboards, don’t you?
Yeah. I can play a bit of bass but I never managed to get into the guitar. I just didn’t understand how it worked. When I look at a keyboard, it’s all obvious to me, but when I look at the six strings, I just don’t get it. I preferred going for the singing rather than for another instrument. When you the piano, it is everything. I have a little book, about 80 pages, that will be coming out shortly, called “Ten Pianos” – I just wrote the Spanish version of it, “Diez Pianos” – about every single piano that I’ve owned since I was five years old. It tells kids the love story that you can have with a piano: a piano is your friend, and it never complains – all it does is give you wonderful music in exchange. It’s really easy to read. Half of each chapter talks about my experience with the piano, and the other half is a made-up romantic story about the piano or its previous owners, or the makers. It’s a sweet little thing, but it makes you fall in love with the piano.
– With HEAVY METAL KIDS, you played piano for the most part, and it was things like “Situations Outta Control” where you used Hammond. So you still pursued that boogie-woogie thing, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I did. There were people who used to say that I was a junior member in this trio of piano players: Nicky Hopkins, Mac, Ian McLagan, from THE FACES, and Stu, Ian Stewart, from THE ROLLING STONES. But I did play the Hammond – I did a Hammond solo in “It’s The Same” on the first album – and I used to play a little synthesizer as well.
– Was it a Wurlitzer on “Kind Woman” or electric piano, by the way?
It’s a proper piano, an acoustic piano, on this particular song, but in sounded like that because it was really honky-tonk, it was a little bit out of tune, on purpose. It was definitely an upright in the studio.
– You mentioned “It’s The Same” where you share credits with somebody named Soule… It couldn’t be Mickey Lee Soule from ELF, could it?
No, it’s Ricardo Soule, who was the leader, songwriter and guitarist of a band called VOX DEI, who were very big in Argentina – and rock was a big thing there. They sang in Spanish before any other country, including Spain, did that. Ricky wrote that song, and I did an adaptation of it to produce “It’s The Same: I wrote the English lyrics, and I changed it about a bit, because I didn’t have the record and had to do it by memory – it’s close, but it’s not exactly the same.
– Would it be right to say that you were the main balladeer in THE KIDS – with the songs like “The Big Fire” and so on?
Yeah, I guess that’s always been my strong thing, and there’s plenty of ballads. I don’t really know where it came from, but it’s very me, and the classical background may be involved in that too.
– You carried on with that mood on “Need Your Love” with THE BLUE MAX and “Ships In The Night” on "Make The Monkey Dance" when you went solo.
My girl sings on “Ships In The Night”: those whispers in a very sexy voice – that’s her. That was the only time she ever had anything to do with my work. Well, that – and she actually helped me write “Bigger Than Love” which is also on that album. Other than that, she has refused anything to do with my work. But she paints, you know, she’s a painter.
– How did you split your writing credits in HEAVY METAL KIDS? Some of the songs on the first album were credited to “H. M. K.” and those “Anvil Chorus” have a main writer and, slash, THE KIDS.
It was my idea that we should split everything. My thinking was twofold: if we split everything, then nobody is obsessed with trying to get his song played and we just choose whatever is the best song, because we all share everything anyway, but if we make a lot of money, who cares? and if we don’t make a lot of money, at least we have a nice relationship. Then, on the second album, whoever was the main writer in that song was one part, and the rest got split between the band, which I thought would give you more incentive to do your best and so on and so forth. But curiously, especially when you think of the fact that [bassist] Ronnie [Thomas] and I were the main songwriters, we wanted to do that, and other people, who were not at all songwriters, weren’t happy with that arrangement. The human nature is very funny. Some other songwriters keep everything to themselves in their bands, but this is not worth it, so on “The Monkey” I shared most of my songs that were new with the Italian boys who played on the album, because they contributed so much to the arrangements, to the working of the songs, to the recordings,- that I thought it was fair. I have never been greedy like that: I think whatever makes the song sound better, that’s what counts.
– There’s song called “Run Around Eyes” on THE KIDS’ first album. Apart from Jamaican artists – and Clapton who did “I Shot The Sheriff” played reggae in 1974. Where did you get the idea from?
We used to have an old beat-up Mercedes van, with the gear in the back and airplane seats in the front, and we had five or six eight-track tapes in the van – they were horrible and they were already on the way out – and three of them were Bob Marley and THE WAILERS ones, so we were really into reggae. We saw them at “The Speakeasy,” which was the club that we used to be a part of, and we used to speak with a Jamaican accent to be funny, so it was a natural thing to do a reggae track.
– How do you remember working with Dave Dee and Andy Johns as producers?
Dave Dee was a lovely person, he was like a father to me, and he was later my manager with [Argentine-Spanish band] TARZEN. A wonderful guy, and even on the last HEAVY METAL KIDS album that we did together Dave helped us out there, too. As far as Andy goes, he was a different story – he was a nice guy too, but he had a lot of problems with his health because of drugs, but miraculously, in the studio he was fine. We were very scared the day before we went in, but it was good working with him. The trouble was, in my opinion, that he was a great sound engineer, not a great producer. He may have been that for many people, but he didn’t get a sound for us. We sounded like many different bands in each song: if UFO had a sound on the album, HEAVY METAL KIDS had not. We were a very difficult band to record, as we were very much a live band, and it couldn’t have been easy, especially with the technology that there was then, to record a band like us. With the album that we did in 2003 [link id='2821' text='"Hit The Right Button"' anchor='hemeki'], I think we really captured that, we captured the live thing of HEAVY METAL KIDS, but not on the first two albums, not like it, not like we deserved. You can’t point the finger at anybody, though – it could be the technology, it could be a million things. It just wasn’t right, it wasn’t what we were.
– THE KIDS’ booking agency was Bronze, correct?
Bronze, yeah, the company of Gerry Bron, who used to have URIAH HEEP; that’s why we did a lot of gigs with them. He was okay.
– Gerry had a whole package: a record label, a management, this booking agency… So how come you weren’t signed to Bronze Records?
I don’t know how that worked. That was one of the doings of our manager, Rikki Farr, very much a special character. I was too young to be involved much in the managerial side, and I have no idea why we were with him. Maybe it’s because there was a particular agent, who shall remain nameless, who worked at Bronze and later went on to have his own massive agency. In the beginning of his career, he was our agent but he completely ignored HEAVY METAL KIDS in the 2000s, when we came back.
– You toured with HEEP and Alice Cooper, with KISS and RUSH. What do you remember the most about those gigs?
HEEP were fine. We were kind of palish with them, especially with ’Mick’] and ’Lee’], the drummer. I don’t remember much about RUSH, though: they weren’t that big, and I must admit I didn’t pay much attention, but I thought they were good, an interesting hard rock three-piece. KISS were much more in your face, and different, but again, not wishing to offend any fans here, they weren’t incredible as musicians – the makeup seemed to be their big thing, the image rather than music. The fact that we felt like that about them reflected in the fact that they kicked us out of the tour. (Laughs.) But Alice Cooper was wonderful. Wonderful! And such a humble guy, totally modest. I remember as if it was right now, because it was our first gig ever in a major stadium in America, and the reaction of the audience and everything was something that you didn’t see in Europe, certainly not in England. We finished our show, and with my adrenaline so high I didn’t want to go into the dressing room yet, so was sitting outside on a flight case, winding down, when Alice came out fully dressed. He came up to me and he said, “Hi, I’m Alice. I didn’t catch the show this time, but I heard that it was terrific. And I just wanted to tell you, thank you for being on the tour!” What a lovely guy! Again, I immediately thought, “That’s what I want to be like!” He was certainly on a different level from KISS, and his band was terrific. One of them lives near me here in Spain, about four hours down there on the coast, the wonderful Steve Hunter.
– And then you left THE KIDS before they released the “Kitsch” album. Some of the band members maintain that your ego was out of control. What’s your perspective on that?
Right… The thing is that when you’ve had an exciting career that spanned more than fifty years, and have survived it relatively successfully, people will say things. There’s a line in the great book of the Spanish language, “Don Quixote,” where he says “the dogs are barking Sancho, a sign that we are riding onwards.” This sort of thing is “par for the course.” Surely you’ve read what some people say of seriously famous artists? This is nothing, and lucky for me, only coming from a couple of minor players in my story who, sadly, haven’t been as fortunate as I have.
I left because I didn’t want to be involved in something that did not make me happy. I left in the middle of the tour, but I committed to finishing it, and I recommended the new guy [John Sinclair] myself. Of course, I was already friends with Pete Way, so it was almost a natural thing that I joined UFO pretty much immediately. The boys asked me to join, and they did me a favor, because I went certainly a step up. A similar thing happened after “Hit The Right Button”: that album was brilliant, but when we were doing a follow-up, what we wanted to do was to have all the guitarists that have ever played in THE KIDS do a guest spot, a solo. Mickey [Waller] did one from Paris, Jay [Williams] did one from Arizona, Barry Paul did one from L.A. – and Cosmo never got round to doing his part. So we recorded all of it, and it was never released. In the meantime, I formed X-UFO and HOUSE OF X with good pals who are great musicians, and we had a whale of a time for several years. Technically, we’re still even a band because we never split, so if somebody wants an alternative UFO show, they can still get us. (Laughs.) I enjoyed myself, as I went on to do something much more fun.
– You didn’t tour with “Hit The Right Button”?
We did. We did a little bit of touring in England. We did clubs and things like that. We did that cruise ship in Scandinavia. But we didn’t do much more. It wasn’t great. The problem with THE KIDS is, we never really had big hits, and if you didn’t have big hits, it’s difficult to resurrect a band like that, which is a shame because show-wise we were good, even though Gary was gone. I sounded very similar to him, and we had two Italian guitarists who were excellent.
– It wasn’t your first attempt to front the band, of course, you did that with THE BLUE MAX, but how did you feel playing live and singing old songs, rather than simply playing?
Completely natural, completely natural. I didn’t have any problem with that at all. I felt that they were our songs, even the songs that we did from “Kitsch” which I enjoyed. I enjoyed it because they’re very much the sort of songs that I like, like my new single “It Happens When You Look The Other Way”: if HEAVY METAL KIDS existed now, this would be the perfect single for them. Let’s face it: it’s totally HEAVY METAL KIDs, right?
– From what I read, there still is a band called HEAVY METAL KIDS. So you’re not part of that anymore?
Not at all. And neither is Ronnie as I understand it. I know nothing about the band still using the name, or if there is such a thing.
– Weren’t X-UFO and HOUSE OF X tribute bands by the very definition of them?
Well, it was a funny thing because we were kind of a tribute band and, with a big X, we made it very clear that we weren’t trying to be UFO – it was well-advertised. But three of us had been in the band, the fourth guy, Rocky [Newton], had been in MSG, as in the MACAULEY-SCHENKER GROUP, which is a branch of UFO. So you would think that ticks all the boxes – tribute and at the same time you have original members of the band – but at the beginning we got a lot of criticism when we did that, from like the management of the current UFO, and of course we laughed it off because what was it to them? We were going to play anyway, and I think we were presenting an interesting thing – a very alternative show to that of UFO, because most of the songs we were playing, they didn’t play, like “Highway Lady” and “Martian Landscape” that I wrote, and “Back Door Man” that Laurence [Archer] wrote. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the proof that there’s nothing wrong with that is that I know for a fact that Phil was perfectly fine with that. He didn’t care, and the only people who cared were other people on the sides.
– I think you had this affinity with Phil in terms of sense of humor.
Oh yeah, very much so. I regret two things about Phil. I regret that we haven’t been in touch for ages, for no real reason. But I am happy that I have grown to love his singing more and more with time because, when we were together, although I thought he was a great singer, his voice wasn’t my favorite kind of thing, but with age, it has become so good! To my taste, he’s a real blues singer, that’s what he is. So I regret that I didn’t see that before. Also, over the years I’ve read interviews with him talking about things exactly how I feel about them. We seem to have a lot in common as far as how we see the world, which is fun too – we have a lot in common now, maybe more than we did then.
That’s why I know that he wouldn’t have given a toss about X-UFO; on the contrary, he would have thought, “Hey, this is good. Somebody is out there working, keeping the name of my band going without me having to do it!”
– How was it to write in with him?
It was a bit strange. We didn’t really write together so much – we just gave him the stuff and he went off and wrote the words, usually in the studio, in the last minute, which is as good a method as any other, and it worked well. Some of his lyrics are great, really great.
– Even though, it was Pete Way who invited you to join UFO, he mentioned you just once in his autobiography, saying, “Our experiment with him didn’t really work out. Whereas Paul Chapman had filled us out, Danny softened us”: what would you say about this?
I say that the statement does not sound like “my” Pete. It reads more like the ghost writer he used to help him write the book. I refuse to believe he would ever say something like that, especially when he wrote, or co-wrote, the book shortly after joining us on the road and on stage with X-UFO/HOUSE of X. The first time he came up, he introduced me by saying, “May I introduce you to Mr Danny Peyronel, who wrote some of the best UFO songs you’ve ever known!” Yyou might be able to find this moment on YouTube, come to think of it! Pete, in spite of his clowning around, was very, very musical. Can we seriously believe that he would have thought of “Can You Roll Her,” a searingly cutting speed-rocker, as “softening”? As for mentioning me just once… Well, UFO had a very long career, and I was part of the band for just over a year. I like to think that the impact of my contribution had a longer life-span than the actual chronological time I spent with them, but I was still one chapter. The reissue of “No Heavy Petting” that came out before this present one, mentioned in the liner notes that my writing and co-writing affected the course of the band, and the author cited how songs like “Only You can Rock Me,” “Love to Love” and others were decidedly in line with the writing I brought into album. It does sound reasonable, since I remember hearing those songs at the time and thinking they sounded very much like my sort of writing. If that was, in fact, the case; I am flattered and happy to have helped.
In [Martin] Popoff’s book [“Lights Out: Surviving the ’70s with UFO”] Pete went on for, like, a whole page speaking nicely of me. He explained what really happened with me – that it had nothing to do with my playing or my being in the band, that the only reason why I didn’t continue with the band was because Chrysalis themselves had screwed up. We finished “No Heavy Petting” and went on tour, but Chrysalis changed distributors in America, so when we were doing these great gigs, kids were loving us, only when they would go to Tower Records or whatever, there were no records. Pete says, if everything had been normal, “No Heavy Petting” probably would have been Top 50 in America, because “Force It” had been nearly Top 50. So Chrysalis needed to find somebody to blame because they were never going to say, “Boys, it’s our fault!”
– So it was the new guy who they blamed!
Yeah, the new guy. And [producer] Leo [Lyons]. Poor Leo, who was – still is! – a lovely man. Leo and I paid the price. But everybody knows that a record doesn’t do great, it’s not because of the new guy – it’s a ridiculous idea.
– Leo, of course, was part of TEN YEARS AFTER and appeared at Woodstock, so you must have seen him in the movie, since you said you watched it many times. How was it for you to meet Leo in the flesh?
It was so, so wonderful. You know how they say that you must never meet your heroes because they will disappoint you? Well, in the case of Leo, he was definitely the exception. He did not disappoint at all. He was very warm, very modest, easy to talk to, easy to get on with. We’re friends still, and I’m really thrilled that he’s still going now with his power trio. He’s obviously having fun with that, and that’s terrific because he’s getting on a bit in age. I was very happy to meet him.
– What were the inner dynamics in UFO? I heard the British guys weren’t really friends with Michael Schenker, but how did you fit in all that?
I felt that when I joined, Michael, or (pronounces the German version of the name) Michael as we used to call him in those days, instinctively gravitated a little bit in my direction because he realized I was also a foreigner and not part of the club, if you like. Also, you have to remember, he didn’t speak much English at the time, so he was pretty close to me on the road, maybe because of that reason. This was obviously a band of three guys who had been together since they were practically children, certainly from school, Pete and Phil especially, and Andy [Parker], so I guess that anybody coming in would be an outsider, never mind if the outsider is not even English on top of it. I’m not even remotely suggesting any racism or anything because there wasn’t – everything was cool in that sense. But we could have even been English, Michael and me, and that wouldn’t have been the point; more of the point was the fact that they were a little clique. The dynamics are difficult to explain: I really don’t like to speak in any way ill of anybody I work with, not only because it’s not nice, but also because what kind of a fool would that make me if I got involved with people I disliked? It was obvious to me that Phil was most definitely the leader of the band, Andy and I got along perfectly fine, but Pete and I we were already pals by the time I joined.
We had become friends previous to that, thanks to a friend that we had in common who is sadly gone now, Paul Varley. He was a drummer in my first ever band, THE RATS, which was before HEAVY METAL KIDS, and then he went on to be in a pop band called ARROWS. That first band I joined was the split of a band called STREAK, and STREAK was Paul, Ben Bryan on bass and Jake Hooker on guitar, and Jake eventually formed ARROWS with Alan Merrill, who, incredibly, left us with the Covid thing. Really, really sad – he was a lovely guy and a great musician, and I was pretty close with him, contact-wise. So Paul was already in ARROWS, and I toured with THE KIDS in the States when I saw UFO on television. I remember saying to the other guys, “Oh, this is UFO. They’re friends of Paul’s!” But what a coincidence! As soon as I got back that tour, Paul came around with Pete, and we became friends – immediately. But still, the dynamic was a little bit strange, as a large part of Pete and Phil’s entertainment consisted of making fun of Andy, which is hilarious; it was their thing, and if you came from outside, it seemed weird. (Laughs.) In HEAVY METAL KID we had a real Monty Python-type of sense of humor – HEAVY METAL KIDS were very, very funny, our humor was up there- while UFO had more of a kid’s humor in school, so it was just as fun, but different. Yes, we had crazy moments, which became anecdotes, and a lot of them had to do with Michael, but we dealt with them, we had a laugh. It was very entertaining, so even if it was a bit negative at first, we managed to get over it. And the band on stage was great, which is the important thing.
– Was it crazy moment too that you took part in the creation of “On With The Action” but didn’t get a writing credit?
That was a typical “new boy” thing again. There were three obviously typographical mistakes in the in the art of the album, and all three of them involved me, not anyone else. (Laughs.) Let me see if I can recall all three of them. One was that they left my name out of “On With The Action” which not only did I collaborate, I pretty much got it going with Michael. I even have a photograph of the moment when we were doing it, because it was a dressing room in a San Francisco club that we played! And I recall exactly that that was the moment just Michael and I started jamming. He had that riff (sings), and I came up with the chord sequence, and then Phil started jamming some vocals on it, so it was very much a group effort between the three of us. Another mistake was that they added two names to the credits for “Martian Landscape” which was solely my piece, but that was on the American cover as I think they got it right on the English cover. What was the third? Oh, yeah. They put “Danny Peyronel: keyboard / vocals” in England but left out the “vocals” thing on the American one, which made me more miffed, because I can’t tell you how much time I spent doing the harmonies on the record! Phil, a terrific singer, wasn’t used to somebody singing harmonies with him, and when you’re not used to singing with somebody doing harmonies you don’t have to worry about how a melody line, say in a chorus, would go, because it doesn’t matter, as nobody’s singing a harmony to it. But if somebody is going to sing a harmony part to that, it’s going to stay in a certain note or notes. I managed to do the harmonies anyway, but it was very difficult because I had to follow these lines that he was doing. It was interesting, but it was quite a lot of work, the harmony work on “No Heavy Petting”! So, yeah, they forgot those three things were literally typos.
– You call leaving you out of credit a typo? It must have cost you some royalties!
It didn’t, but it’s complicated. In England, my society, MCPS, from the beginning considered me part of the writing team and that was all right. It was more in America, going with the cover and the wrong credit, that I had problems and I had to fight it and fight it. It was just pathetic. And in the end, fairly recently in this century, about fifteen years ago, some little publishing company I’d never heard about, an American one, bought the rights to Michael’s old publishing company, a small German company owned by one guy, and saw that I was getting royalties for it.
But we’re talking pennies here, it was never big money. [Meat Loaf’s] “Midnight At The Lost And Found” was big money, but one song on an album by UFO wasn’t a huge thing. Still, I kept producing evidence from MCPS, who stood up for me, but these people would just not let it go. Are you familiar with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges?
– Sure.
So Borges described The Falklands War, the Malvinas War, as two bald men fighting over a comb – and this is exactly what this business with “On With The Action” was like. I wasn’t even fighting, it was just silly. And in the end, I believe – I’m not sure, but I believe – Michael finally stepped in and said, “Of course, I wrote it with him!” And suddenly it all stopped, all these stupid arguing and complaints. But you are right: I probably did lose some money over the years because the whole publishing world has always worked like that. As soon as there’s some kind of little doubt here, they stop paying you, the artist, the composer, and somebody else keeps the money – usually not another artist, but the company, and what can you do?
– And then, the same thing repeated with Sade: you’re not credited on “Fear” which you wrote the lyrics for.
Sade is a different thing altogether, because she asked me, “Danny, what do you want to do with this? Share the credits?” But it was only twelve or sixteen words in total, so I said, “Look, it took me not even fifteen minutes to do, so just give me a special thanks and that’s fine!” So she said, “Oh, that’s great. Thank you!” She sent me a cassette copy of the end product, but I was very busy and having a great time with TARZEN, so I played it for a second and, as I couldn’t make out anything of the words, I just ignored it. And only years later, when I got the CD, I realized that my twelve or sixteen words had become sixty percent of the song, because she repeated them three times. I thought, “This isn’t fair!” and I tried to do something about it, but it was it was too late. Still, I think I did the right thing, I didn’t want to be like a mercenary about it. I’m sure she didn’t even do it on purpose, she didn’t even think about it. But I should have. I should have checked it and I could have fixed it initially. But I didn’t. So it’s my fault.
– You landed that gig thanks to Robin Millar from THE BLUE MAX who produced Sade, right?
That’s right.
– By the way, was “The Blue Max” ever reissued?
No, I don’t think so. But Robin now owns the the Chrysalis catalog, and if you go to the site of his company, Blue Raincoat Music, and you look at the roster and find UFO, there’s picture of the line-up I was in, so it’s a bit of a coincidence. We’re really good friends now, and he sent me a couple of copies of new reissues.
– You were a frontman in THE BLUE MAX for the first time. How did you find it, moving to the front?
I felt fine. I felt very confident. I used to have a friend who, when we were young, said to me that he was very disappointed to hear that I had never felt stage fright. He thought, “Surely, you’re an artist, so you have to feel it!” And I never have! When I go on stage, I love it, I feel completely at home. So when I stepped up to be frontman, it was perfectly natural for me. However, with THE BLUE MAX it was a mixed thing because I used to play the Wurlitzer right in front there, and sing and play at the same time. I didn’t just sing like like I did later with with TARZEN and even more with new HEAVY METAL KIDS and HOUSE OF X, and X UFO – there I was completely frontman. I learned a lot from Gary Horton, who was the consummate frontman. He really enjoyed it, and I enjoy it, too.
– Speaking about MAX… Who did the string arrangement for “I Know You’re There”? You, with your classical background?
Oh, no, they’re not strings! I did that on, well, not Mellotron, but a different machine that used to be around at the time in competition with the Mellotron. I can’t remember what it’s called. But I thought of it in terms of strings, and my classical upbringing definitely helped. And later, my operatic upbringing helped me with the singing. I used to think I didn’t need any help, but no: when you take serious lessons with serious teachers, it really helps.
– Did opera change your perspective on art in general?
Yeah, it did, completely. It brought me close to my roots as an Italian, and I just fell head over heels with the whole culture. It’s amazing what you can learn! I think that maybe the bottom line of everything when you’re in the arts is to never stop learning. I met Placido Domingo because my second teacher, a baritone called Franco Iglesias, was the only teacher he ever had – they were mates and they had sung together – and Placido said to me that he had done Othello about two hundred times, which is just huge, and that every time he sang it, he learned something new about the role and understood something. And I thought, “That’s so great, to never stop learning – never, ever!” It’s like the old story of the trip being more important than the destination: if you think you can always learn, you can always do better. It’s just wonderful! Otherwise, it’s incredibly boring. If you think you know everything, God! That’s what I mostly learned from opera – and also, that when you learn well it doesn’t sound like you’re using technique, it sounds like it’s completely natural. That’s the thing with the great singers: you don’t see them and go, “Oh, she’s got really great technique!” You don’t. It just sounds great, but behind all that is real technique that required learning.
– Back to the classical thing. Did it massage your ego in any way when you heard the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra play the piece you wrote for Meat Loaf?
No, it did not! (Laughs.) The cover and the name did. At first I thought, “Oh, wow, Royal Philharmonic!” but when you hear it, it’s not very good. It sounds very, like the Americans say, cheesy to me. Gosh, I don’t know why they had that idea and who did the arrangements! It’s really not very nice.
– A few days ago I spoke to another musician, Chas Cronk, and one name cropped up – the name of a musician he played with in Rick Wakeman‘s band and who you also worked with: Rick Fenn. How did you get to know him?
Our little boy, Jesse, who was five at the time, went to school in in Sheen, which is South London – we lived in Barnes, and Sheen is nearby – and on one of his first days there, Alexandra comes back from going to pick him up and says she’s met this guy who’s a musician too. But when you’re young, you go, “Oh, really?” I wasn’t interested. “No, no, he’s a proper musician!” “And who does he play with?” “Oh, he plays with Rick Wakeman and with Mike Oldfield! And in fact, he’s in 10CC!” Oh, okay, he really is a musician. (Laughs.) We met up and hit it off straight away. We became really good friends. Rick had a studio in his attic in his house in Sheen, with keyboards there, and we wrote quite a few really good songs together, two of them ending up on the [“Profiles”] album that he did with Nick [Mason]. I’m well happy with that, but we wrote other stuff as well – Rick mostly wrote the music and I the melody and and the lyrics – and we also had created a thing that never took off: a duo that we called it THE POPE, which was very offensive.
– And when you re-recorded “Lie For A Lie” from that album with Nick for “The Monkey” you added Latino melodicism to it?
I don’t know. I just let my Italian boys do their thing, but yeah, it has a kind of a Spanish thing with the guitar that works nicely. I plan to do that on-stage when we hit the road with my touring band next year. It’s a good song, but I wrote the words in the last minute for that and I hadn’t taken part in it. My song was “Israel” and I did “Life For A Lie” only because [David] Gilmour didn’t want to sing the original words – he thought they were horrible.
– Did you ever get to meet Mason and Gilmour?
Of course. I met Nick Mason when I went to Britannia Road Studios, PINK FLOYD’s studio in London, which coincided with our recording of the first TARZEN album at Jimmy Page’s Sol Studios in Cookham, Middlesex. But I had already met David when doing the first HEAVY METAL KIDS album at Olympic Studios back in early 1974: he was a friend of Mickey Waller’s and he popped in to say “Hello” to us.
– You cut new versions of three of your songs for “The Monkey”: did you want to reclaim your role in them, to change perspective or to augment them in some way?
No, no, I just wanted to present my version of the songs that I wrote for for others. There was no no intent of reclaiming anything. “Midnight” was a completely different song when I gave it to Meat in the first place. The chorus was exactly like that, they never changed the chorus, but the verses… It was much more of a Bo Diddley song. So I did Meat Loaf’s version in my way. As I said earlier, I was always a group guy – I love to be in bands – and I never really had much of an ambition to do solo things. And this time I finally did one because my friends in Italy insisted. They said, “Oh, you’re going to do a solo album! And I thought, “Well, I’ll do some of the songs that I wrote for others and then other new ones…” I viewed it more like a songwriter’s album, you know. Marco Barusso produced it and played some guitar, and then he played guitar with HEAVY METAL KIDS as well and produced “Hit The Right Button”: he is a genius of a producer and a good guy, a walking encyclopedia of music. He was house producer and engineer at Didde Studio in Milan, which was a tremendously great studio. Hhe said, “We’ll do it here and there!” and we put together a band of guys that he knew and I knew, all excellent musicians. It was all good. We even rehearsed! The studio was so large that it had rehearsal rooms distant from the actual recording part. It was fun.
– Still, it sounded like you were taking a stock of something, and not only with those three songs that you recorded anew, but also with this song called “When I’m Dead” – why?
That’s my sense of humor, I’m afraid. I have a very black, very, very English sense of humor. I’m not English, but I guess I should have been, because my humor is very Python-esque, as I was saying before. And “When I’m Dead” is like that, it’s tongue-in-cheek, like they say, it’s not serious, obviously. I’m often pessimistic only because I like to be surprised with good news.
– Was it your sense of humor or your cheek when you decided to upgrade the lyrics to “Russia With Love” on your new album?
I just added a verse, but I think it works, as it’s up to date with what’s going on. But it’s such a great song! I’ve always loved it and was fascinated by the great Lionel Bart, who wrote it, another amazing English and Jewish creative force of the fifties and sixties, along with Anthony Newly from whom Bowie borrowed so much, and so many others. Yeah, it was cheeky to write a new verse. In fact, I wrote more than one, but we kept it short.
– But the rest of this album is completely new, although it was written over the course of a few years, correct?
Yeah, some of the songs were older songs that I had in my catalog and that hadn’t been recorded – not necessarily because they weren’t good enough, but for many reasons, like too many songs on a record and there’s no room for this, or whatever political reasons. And I thought, “Maybe these are not so bad?” And when I played them to David Pereira-Oleart, my partner in this musical project, he absolutely loved them. So we recycled maybe three or four older songs, but the others are mostly are new. The single is completely new. I had a lot of inspiration when we moved here, to Barcelona, and I wrote about five or six tunes that are on that record. I think they’re a smash, the best stuff I’ve written!
– Why did you decide to release it not a year ago, not two years ago, but now?
Well, it took us two years to make it, so that’s part of the reason, the other part being the inspiration I’ve just talked about and writing so much new stuff. My lady thinks it’s the best I’ve done, and I tend to agree. It’s weird to get to this age and still be able to do that! (Laughs.) I remember my dad used to say, “Are you sure about this music thing? It’s a young person’s thing. And what’s going to happen when you get older?” I wish he was here to see that when I got older, at least in my personal opinion, I’ve written and created the best stuff that I’ve ever done. It’s so sad when you see so many artists that did their best stuff when they were twenty or twenty-two, and then never could emulate that. I feel the other way around.
– Is “It Happens When You Look The Other Way” a concept thing? Looking at the tracklisting, I see “You Won’t Have To Say Goodbye” there, then another epistle, “From Russia With Love” and then “The Last Goodbye” plus “Outro” – although you don’t have an intro. So is a suite of sorts?
The outro is just a funny little bit that uses the vocal harmonies of “Heaven’s In A Chevy Tonight”: a song that I should have written for Meat Loaf forty years ago but only wrote two years ago, once he was dead. Those harmonies are kind of in space, they’re mixed with sounds from the “Voyager” space probe, so it’s all very phantasmagorical, and it’s just a little musical end to the album. But these two “Goodbye” things are very different. “The Last Goodbye” is not really as sad as it sounds, it’s the contrary to that – it’s very upbeat, very Motown – and it very likely will be our second single now, while “You Won’t Have To Say Goodbye” is more of a romantic ballad, so it’s unfortunate that they both have the word “goodbye” in the title.
– What about “A Different Kind Of Blue”? Are you having a go at Miles Davis?
(Laughs.) No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! It’s a bit of a tribute to Gary Moore, a melodic blues number. I’m sure Gary would have loved to do a smashing solo on that, which David does. I love that piece, and I even do a little Hammond solo at the end there.
– And one of the bonus tracks on the album is “Now Or Never”: is it the Neapolitan song that Elvis did?
You mean “‘O Sole mio”? No, no, no, it’s nothing to do with that song. I wrote and recorded it for “Make The Monkey Dance” but didn’t include it on that album, so I thought it would be a fun bonus track now. The other bonus is a Spanish language version of “You Won’t Have To Say Goodbye” for which my brother Michel wrote lyrics: “Para Siempre Y Un Día Más” means “Forever And A Day”…
– Do you feel that your career has been like forever and a day?
Oh, absolutely! Way too long. (Laughs.) But I’m so grateful for the time that I’ve had. I’ve had a tremendously fun career – and I’m really thrilled to still be doing this and managing to make people happy, even if it is for just a moment.