Alan Clayson Talks ‘Ancient And Modern: Highlights of Half-a-Century’ Album And More

Vocalist, songwriter, musician, author and friend of JLTT Alan Clayson has a new release ‘Ancient and Modern: Highlights of Half-a-Century’ which is out now and is a testament to Alan Clayson’s five decades of musical brilliance. He very kindly spoke to us about the release and more:

Your new album retrospective ‘Ancient and Modern: Highlights of Half-a-Century’ is out now. How did you want to approach the making of the album?

Unleashed by Think Like A Key (see http://www.thinklikeakey.com/catalog) just before 2023’s Yuletide sell-in, it was designed to address my solo output as well as selections by (Alan) Clayson and the Argonauts from what I regard as our ‘imperial’ period to records since that amassed critical if not commercial acclaim after the issue in 2005 of the two-CD Sunset On A Legend motivated an expedient reformation of the group for a ‘farewell’ performance at the West End’s ultra-trendy Metro before a capacity crowd of all ages. Flying in from Minnesota was the president of our US fan club (which dates from a 1992 soirée in Chicago). Other parties arrived from as far away as Scotland and France. After that came more ‘farewell performances’- as a tribute band to ourselves – than Frank Sinatra or The Damned. Indeed, there was talk – but only talk – of not so much a tour as a ‘tourette’ of Belgium – where one of our B-sides had spent a 1978 fortnight in the country’s Top Twenty after a radio presenter in the Netherlands started spinning it by mistake

Where did you record the album?

Because ANCIENT AND MODERN’s sub-title is Highlights Of Half A Century 1973-2017, you might guess correctly that its content was created in all manner of locations, ranging from the BBC’s Maida Vale complex to a studio within a farm just outside Hitchin – with Styrofoam sound-proofing and an electricity circuit, both so inadequate that you couldn’t record when the cows came home without picking up the odd extraneous ‘moo’ or surges from the milking machines draining the power.

You also have the song ‘Moonlight Skater’. What was the story/inspiration behind the track?

The seed took hold on the night in 1990 when, during an evening spent at my house, Jim McCarty, mainstay of The Yardbirds, tinkled on the piano a slowish but most evocative melody intended for the next album by Stairway, his New Age outfit – and the co-writer of ‘Still I’m Sad’ and ‘Shapes Of Things’ wondered if I had any ideas for words

The following afternoon, I roamed secluded countryside, and by dusk, I had them – but suggested to Jim a slight fracturing of the tune to make the last line of each verse scan.

Two years later, ‘The Moonlight Skater’ – with a vocal refrain by Jane Relf somewhere in the quarter-hour of instrumental cascade – appeared on Stairway’s Raindreaming on Oasis Records – with the lyrics printed incorrectly on the sleeve and my name spelt wrong too. However, I was assured that all would be rectified for the next pressing. It was to turn up too on The Yardbirds Offshoots Greatest Hits, a Brisk Productions cassette – and, in 2008, on Jane’s Renaissance: The Complete Jane Relf Collection 1969-1995.

It was recorded too by Dave Berry – and, purportedly, by a winner of the Indonesian version of ITV’s Pop Idol talent tournament. The version on ANCIENT AND MODERN contains a ‘bridge’ penned as I hurtled home along the midnight motorways from a booking up north.

As I entered the M1, the river of imagination so burst its banks that I lurched into the shop area of the next service station. A half-awake check-out girl peered indifferently as, without a by-your-leave, I plugged my cassette recorder into a power-point, sang a few wordless bars, bought a Kit-Kat and was away again.

Finally, I still think that, as a song per se, ‘The Moonlight Skater’ satisfies every credential of nothing less than a Christmas Number One.

You are given the opportunity to write the score for a film adaptation of a novel that you enjoy. Which novel is it and why?

Over a quarter of a century ago, I completed a novel entitled The Thistledown Flash – ostensibly a subjective take on the old backstage plot – but one that could only have been written by someone with first-hand experience of the glory and stupidity of being in a pop group that had endured seedy dance halls, personnel in constant flux, concealment of guilty secrets, and the downright thuggery of the music business – with fame and fortune a far-fetched afterthought most of the time.

From skiffle roots to the Sounds Of The Sixties nostalgia netherworld, it unfolds in the dramatis personae’s own words throughout a plot in which you’ll a doomed romance, a sudden death and someone as mad as the bloke who shot John Lennon – and as well as stage door Jezebels, gangsters, drugs, la vie bohème, you name it. I could be talking about Commitments-sized box-office here!

What is your earliest musical memory?

I came to consciousness in a second-floor flat within the deep shade of the White Cliffs of Dover. All around the town, weeds and brambles had sprung up on those bomb sites that hadn’t become unofficial playgrounds or car parks, and it’s possible that my interest in music stemmed from military bands trumping marches at Remembrance Day parades along the sea front, all the more dignified since the country started paying for its war, and my mother, then a pram-pushing young housewife, negotiated a network of queues during the tightest period of post-war rationing.

Given your vast back catalogue, was it difficult selecting which songs to include and did you have a specific song selection process?

I didn’t want to include items reflective of me having been put in the position of making compromises I found embarrassing, even repugnant – as I was in the late 1970s when my investors were desperate for me to compose something, anything, they considered to be squarely in one of prevailing trends of the day, even as I proved incapable of not interfering with, say, a plain four-four backbeat or a standard twelve-bar blues sequence; not smoothing out oblique harmonies – and not fracturing simple lyrical expression with native quirkiness and chanson-esque verbosity.

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals, microphones etc?

When performing solo, I sing to a twelve-string Danelectro guitar plus, balanced on a two-tier stand, a cheap synthesizer purchased at a table-top sale (not ‘found in a skip’ as I tell ‘em on stage) – and a Roland Piano-Plus 11, a vintage model which, as well as an auto-rhythm component that can impose bossa-nova, slow rock, waltz, disco, march and so forth onto whatever I was doing, is unique for allowing the player to control the tempo manually. By placing small weights – like a mouth-organ – on specific keys, I was also imposing low register drones onto items like ‘Pagan Mercia’. Two small amplifiers power all this plus a cassette player with tapes of sound effects as the icing on the cake of a set-up that, according to the sound engineer at a festival in Somerset, was a ‘nightmare to tech’.

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

It’s reckoned by makers of television documentaries to be the most ‘average’ in Britain’.

Do you have any interesting, funny or memorable stories from the album recording sessions?

These will have to wait until the publication of my autobiography – with the working title, Nut Rocker – a necessary exorcism of personal and professional ghosts that has amounted to not so much closure as expanded interval notes on an on-going artistic voyage that only death will anchor.

Do you have any plans for live shows in Europe/UK in 2024?

There’s a London show in July with Dick Taylor (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Taylor) which will be in similar vein to that we delivered at an optimum moment in August 2022 at the Sol Party festival near Tunbridge Wells, i.e. combining Pretty Things stuff with my solo stage act (which defies succinct description). However, most of the British engagements this year will be by Clayson Sings Chanson, a presentation that has been on the road since 2011 to tie-in with an edition of my Jacques Brel: La Vie Bohème, the only English language biography of the great Belgian chansonnier – though it’s since entered an independent orbit for, as well as works by Brel, Charles Aznavour, Scott Walker and other exponents, Clayson originals blend seamlessly into the repertoire, and we – i.e. me and keyboard player Andy Lavery from the Argonauts – venture into curious but connected realms, ranging from an arrangement by Edgard Varèse of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s ‘Un Grand Sommeil Noir’ to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s ‘Last Night In Soho’ – sung absolutely straight – and, by contrast, ‘Sweeney Todd The Barber’ – which I used to do with Clayson and the Argonauts, but hadn’t unveiled in public for a quarter of a century.

Yet because Think Like A Key is a US label, a visit to North America by one of my manifestations – Clayson and the Argonauts, Clayson Sings Chanson and Alan Clayson as a solitary mister – might not be out of the question – not least because I now have what might be a toehold on the sub-continent already, having found myself in October 2016 entertaining an audience that filled a 300-seat auditorium in the heart of the Hamptons, an affluent region in upstate New York where such as Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, Paul Simon and Jon Bon Jovi own homes. Certainly, it was one of the last places on the planet I’d expected to be six weeks earlier;

What music are you listening to at the moment? Do you have any recommendations?

Nowadays, my recreational listening is limited – and for much of the time, I prefer silence. Otherwise, I click on BBC Radio Three in the car; endeavour to find ‘hmmm, that’s interesting’ replay-pressing if head-scratching moments in music in which a still, small voice had asked ‘How could anyone like this stuff?’- or spin records that epitomized certain eras in my life, over and over again, often in a state of puzzlement about why they still electrify me.

Who plays on the album with you?

See question 2. Over fifty years, I’ve been shuttered with myriad musicians, technicians and folk of nouvelle vague persuasion in a world of rehearsal and recording studios, interchangeable venues and, of course, the eternal van grinding up and down the motorways and autobahns of Britain and northern Europe.

How do you look after your voice?

Please forgive this name-dropping, but it was to Colin Blunstone that I turned during the darker hours of 2003 when my baritone kept shrinking to a tortured rasp midway through performances, forcing me to extemporize huskily as if a given number’s sentiment couldn’t be expressed through orthodox melodic articulation. Colin suggested a voice coach – which I tried for two expensive sessions until learning it was possible to receive therapy on the National Health if you could convince the Audiology Unit of the local hospital you did it for a living. Acid reflux was part of the problem. The rest was through vocal cords rebelling after a lifetime of bad habits, principally singing from the throat rather than the diaphragm. I also started quizzing other vocalists on what remedies they use. The late Phil May swore by a substance called Propolis – available in health stores – and so did Arthur Brown, who was advantaged further by the repercussions of two years of classical training when a young man.

Who created/designed the album artwork?

It was realised by the formidable Roger Houdaille, the Think Like A Key supremo – who was responsible too for the album’s excellent trailer (which may be investigated via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDwAvUOiz4U).

What makes Alan Clayson happy and what makes you unhappy?

I’m not sure. Should I be pleased that I’ve been around long enough to enjoy the company of my three young grandsons – or regretful at having to bear the ravages of age after seventy-two unquiet years? In the context of this discussion, however, I’m grateful that a greatest hits/best of product like ANCIENT AND MODERN didn’t come after the ‘plane crash or assassination!

Feature Image Photo Credit: Supplied By Artist 

Alan Clayson’s restrospective album ‘Ancient and Modern: Highlights of Half-a-Century’ is out now on CD and Digitally on Think Like A Key Music.

Purchase the album here: https://lnk.to/alanclayson 

For more information including live dates visit Alan Clayson’s official website here: https://alanclayson.com/