Photo credit: Steve Rapport
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
I don’t have a tour vehicle. We usually fly and rent a van and back-line equipment. I have a soccer-mum van and use that to transport my keyboards when I’m doing local gigs in New Orleans or out in the swamps. No notable breakdown stories.
The first car I had here was a funky old 60’s Chrysler New Yorker. It was great, but the alternator stopped working and I didn’t have enough money to get it fixed. At the time I played a regular weekly solo gig on Mondays at Tipitina’s and had to unattach the battery and carry it into the club with me to charge it while I was playing so I could get home after the show. So, I guess that counts as a ’no breakdown’ story.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Well, when I’m out on the road I’m away from Frady’s fried oyster po boys, huge plates of red beans rice and D and D sausage on Mondays and giant bowls of gumbo on Fridays and Popeyes fried chicken and shrimp etoufee – so anything I eat feels comparatively healthy to me – except, of course, when I’m back in England playing at Ronnie Scott’s or the Albert Hall where I make up on lost time by shovelling steak and kidney pies and proper fish and chips down my neck.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I play keyboards mostly, digital ones – and they don’t have strings. Before they existed we had to make do with Wurlitzer electric pianos and instead of strings they had ‘tines’, small pieces of metal with pickups that gave out a bell-like pitch when struck by a hammer. I remember breaking a tine once on a gig with Mighty Sam McClain in the mid-eighties. Sam was a great singer, a real growler and belter from the Bobby Bland and Z.Z. Hill school, and we were playing a gig for James Brown at his swanky, high-class night-club in Augusta, Georgia. I had to come out in the break, onstage, in front of a well-dressed and curious middle aged black audience to dismantle the keyboard and fix the offending tine using a soldering iron and and sandpaper, a long tedious process which I’m sure they all found very entertaining.
I do have strings on Herbert, my small scale guitar. But I hardly ever break a string.
Where do you rehearse?
We rehearse in my studio which is in the back of a hundred year old hardware store in Bywater, close to the Mississippi river. It’s pretty funky but has a great vibe and is where we recorded our new album. I recently had to rebuild after Hurricane Ida dumped a swimming pool through a new hole in the roof. During lockdown I started broadcasting from there on Tuesdays when I would normally have been doing my solo dog and pony show at a local club, Chickie Wah Wah’s. We called it the ‘Quarantini hour’ and my wife (‘She who must be obeyed at all times’) operated all the heavy machinery while I drank Guinness from a Martini glass garnished with a small wedge of potato and held court at the piano for an hour. That was fun.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
I can’t remember the first one though there was one called ‘Moon Pie’ that I wrote pretty soon after arriving in New Orleans when I was a kid. I loved the idea of a Moon Pie, they didn’t have those in England. They tasted horrible but I thought, for some inane reason, that it would be a good title for a song..
’Sitting on a sidewalk, takin my soul for a stroll
Talking that small talk, rocking to some rhythm and roll
Out from my head for the night for a while
Restin on ground and reachin for sky,
Taking my time, I’m happy with a Moon Pie.
Don’t ask make what it means, I have no idea.
Describe your first gig.
My first gig was playing guitar in a children’s revue at the age of eleven at the Hazlitt Theater in Maidstone, Kent. I think I played “Rocky Raccoon” and sang a sappy Eric Clapton song called “Let it Grow” to an audience of adoring mums and dads. The cool part was where me and the drummer and bass player got to do a 10 minute free form jazz/rock exploration. It was the same four chords that went on forever, ad nauseum. We were very proud of it and decided to call it ‘Clouds’. The resounding applause we received at the end probably signified relief that it was finally over. It felt pretty cool rocking out on the guitar on the stage of a theatre, though. I was pretty much hooked at that point.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I’ve done a few. The first one after leaving school was at a building site in London carrying heavy sheetrock up and down five flights of narrow stairs day in, day out. That was fun. The last one was painting the Maple Leaf, on arrival in New Orleans with a mate from school when we were eighteen. The Owner of the bar – a fella they called the Fat Man – explained the deal: we could work whatever hours we wanted, we got in to see all the gigs free, got half-price drinks at night and free drink from the bar while we worked in the daytime. Pretty much perfect terms of employment. It took us six months to finish the job and I often got to hear James Booker and Roosevelt Sykes, the ‘Honey Dripper’, whenever they came in to while away an afternoon drinking and tickling the ivories.
I guess I do have one current non-music job and that’s writing for my Substack. But writing is a little like playing piano and guitar, I suppose -except kinder on the fingernails.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
This is not a regular line of work, there aren’t regular hours and it goes up and down, in and out, back and forth. There’s no job security and we work in a fashion industry; and fashions, by definition, are constantly changing. But there’ll always be a demand from music lovers somewhere in the world for the New Orleans approach to funk and as long as someone can find a piano I’ll have a gig.
I didn’t get into this with a view to getting either rich or famous. Those things, if they happen are, as they say in New Orleans, lagniappe. I think this new record ‘The Bywater Sessions’ though is going to appeal to a lot of people who are generally a bit bored by much of what’s going on in music today. We’re not doing anything revolutionary, it’s borne out of a tradition and there’s no one else making records that sound like this. So, given all that, I think it’s entirely reasonable to state unequivocally that in 5-10 years I, and all my band mates, will be multi-millionaires, rolling in it and lighting huge unfeasible cigars with hundred dollar bills.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
That it would have been good to have kept a diary early on and to have written down stuff that happened. There are surely loads of good stories and funny adventures that I must have completely forgotten about.