Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

This interview was one of the first I wrote back in the days of Hi-Fi Review magazine (it appeared in September 1988). It isn’t a great piece of writing but it does, I hope, provide some insight into the lives of two extremely talented musicians, whose partnership lasted from 1985 to 1992, and was described by Rolling Stone as “the state of the art in British folk-rock”. Gregson relocated to the USA in 1993 and continues to tour and write songs, while Collister continues to tour the world having now celebrated more than 25 years in the music business.

Gregson & Collister

Clive Gregson and Christine Collister have been described as a combination of one of the country’s finest singer/songwriters with the most exciting female vocalist to have emerged in years and we wouldn’t disagree. Malcolm Steward met up with them recently for this interview.

The night before I met Clive Gregson and Christine Collister at HFR’s offices I had seen them playing live at the Half Moon in Putney. From my vantage point at the side of the stage there seemed less of a physical disparity between them; Clive’s to-ing and fro-ing across the stage and Christine’s high heels apparently equalising the difference in their heights. Furthermore her choice of attire for the evening – a tight fitting black and red two-piece that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a fashion conscious neo-jazz chanteuse, added to her perceived stature alongside the casually clad Gregson. He definitely looked more at home in the sartorially inelegant South London venue, his partner’s sophistication making her appear rather like a lamb cast into a den of wolves. Any impressions of frailty, however, were soon dispelled when she unleashed that magnificent voice. During her performance of ‘I Specialise‘ – a song where the traditional male domination of relationships is forcibly uprooted and turned on its head – strong-looking men in the audience shied visibly. Her slight build cunningly disguises the power and range her vocal chords can summon and her innocent features betray only the merest hint of the emotional depths that her voice can plumb.

At the appointed hour on the day after the gig the duo arrived at my office. Christine now dressed in chinos, sports shirt and flat shoes looked Peter Pan-like alongside the ursine Gregson. Conventional roles are re-established: when Prince Charles and Diana were photographed together he had to stand on a box: for our photo session a convenient speaker cabinet beneath her feet brings Christine eye to eye with her taller partner. The ricocheting humour and repartee that was much in evidence during last night’s show hasn’t abated after their night’s sleep. The string of jokes at a Soviet car manufacturer’s expense has thankfully expired but there’s plenty of material left to entertain us over a lunchtime pint. At least I had a pint: Clive doesn’t touch alcohol preferring to sup Diet Coke, and despite his jokes about Christine enjoying a tipple her second request is for a Perrier. The pub’s radio is tuned to Capital and both shame me with their knowledge of contemporary pop tunes. I never listen to the chart shows but this pair obviously do. In between singing harmony vocals to the records playing and enlightening me to the subtleties of their production Christine makes a point of telling me that she isn’t Samantha Fox’s number one fan and Clive manages to add a new word to the English language – “Knopflerised” – a descriptive term referring to any record that has suffered the ministrations of the former Dire Straits guitarist. He accords the gentleman the same respect that his partner reserves for the busty page three model turned singer.

Back at the office, suitably refreshed, their sometimes acerbic but good natured humour shows little sign of diminishing. I begin to wonder if the real Gregson and Collister were in fact unavailable and their management has sent a lookalike. male/female version of Little and Large in their place. So far I had only once detected any note of anger or cynicism within the multitude of anecdotes Gregson had regaled me with: it seems that he had once spent many fruitless hours remixing a master tape to satisfy the demands for ‘more bass’ from the A&R executive of his then record company in America. In the end he flew out with the tape himself and confronted the man in his office. When the tape was played it did indeed sound bass light but it wasn’t Gregson’s fault: the A&R man had the speakers in his office stereo wired out of phase. “There he sat“, said Clive, “earning thousands of dollars every minute for sitting in judgement over the quality of his artists’ work and he hadn’t even realised that his speakers were wired up wrongly.’”

I decided to begin the interview proper by asking the pair about what they did before joining forces with each other. Clive answered first: “ I started playing in groups while I was at school. At eighteen I went to college to study music – I was planning to teach when I left -and towards the end of the course we got a band together called Any Trouble, which was my first ‘proper’ group. We piayed semi-professionally until we left college, after which we moved the band back to Manchester. That was when punk was starting to happen: we didn’t really fit into that but we did team how to play things really fast!

“I’d become a teacher by the time the band started to gain more popularity but after two years I gave up that career to concentrate on the band. For one thing it was unfair on the kids – imagine being taught by someone who most days had been up all the previous night driving back from a gig. I felt pretty bad about sitting there trying to keep my eyes open and teach and I guess the kids felt even worse about it. I needed a job that would fit in with my ‘hobby’ so I joined the civil service and went to work in a dole office. There I could sleep during the day and nobody would really notice. In 1979 Any Trouble released an independent single which picked up some airplay, and thanks to John Peel playing it a lot on Radio 1 record companies started to notice us. After that I’d be sitting at the dole office getting phone calls from labels wanting to sign us, which was a bit weird. In March 1980 we turned professional, signed to Stiff and sank without a trace, basically. We made a couple of good albums for them but they weren’t commercially successful so Stiff gave us the chocolate watch. Then by some amazing miracle we got signed up by EMI in America and embarked upon a career of trying to become successful in the USA. That also failed abysmally. We made two LPs for them, one of which was truly awful and one -The Wrong End Of The Race – which I felt was the best that Any Trouble had ever made. At the end of 1984 we gave up in a fit of apathy. Having made four LPs, gone through two record companies and done a lot of gigs we thought it best to quit while we were still friends.

“I straightaway made an album on my own for Demon called ‘Strange Persuasions’ which was my way of saying that Any Trouble was over and that this was the direction my music was now going to take. I finished recording that and Richard Thompson, who I’d worked with before on sessions, rang to see if I wanted to join his band far a tour of the USA. I agreed and working with Richard has since become one of my regular sidelines. Christine was on that tour as a singer and that was the first time that we worked together.”

At the end of that tour neither of them had any pressing commitments so they decided to carry on working together playing the club circuit as a duo. Christine picks up the story: “We thought that playing the dubs as a duo would be just an interlude filling in the time before our next ‘serious’ job. But it grew into something more and took us over – it was a happy mistake, something we just blundered into. People liked the act and started asking us if we’d made a record or a tape. We thought “right, you’ve asked for it” and we made ‘Home and Away’. We took a Portastudio to a few gigs and recorded them, picked the best performances and put them out on cassette. It was really home-grown, we did everything ourselves, even putting the labels on the tapes and folding the insert cards! Then Cooking Vinyl took it up and put it out as a record. From that point things started to really take off. We began selling quite a lot of records and tapes and what we had regarded up until then as a hobby became something far bigger. Its whole profile changed.”

I asked Christine how she had progressed to this point from her early years in the Isle of Man.

“At school I was in the choir and in a guitar group, then I went on to sing in a folk club -rather the folk club: there was only one! I was in a couple of rock groups as well but then I left the island to come to Manchester to do floor spots in folk clubs just to see what the reaction would be; to see if I could get any regular work. Having been a big fish in a very small pond I thought I’d be just the opposite when I arrived in England. I imagined there’d be thousands of singers on every street corner and that I wouldn’t have a chance. I was almost right. But at one gig an engineer from the local radio station heard me and asked if I had a tape he could have. I said I hadn’t so he invited me to the studio to make one. He ended up getting me a job singing on the radio – between two and six in the morning, ‘the graveyard shift’, doing five or six songs twice a week. That gave me a living wage and left me with plenty of time to do other things, like singing in the local folk clubs which was where I met Clive. He wanted to make me a household name but I was having none of it”

Gregson’s previous experiences within the music industry had taught him many hard but valuable lessons. Indeed he felt initially that the idea of them working together was perhaps not a good idea, and that his previous commercial failure might hold her back or that he would be seen as ‘the old fogey latching onto the hugely talented chick singer’. (Here he plays the part of self-deprecating devil’s advocate conveniently ignoring his abundant talent as a gifted, intelligent songwnter, a skilful producer and accomplished guitar player – you don’t get to work with Richard Thompson by being ham-fisted. He also expressed doubts as to the desirability of becoming a hugely successful ‘pop commodity’ where the image and ‘packaging’ of the artist assumes more importance than the music that they perform. Throughout a long discourse on this subject it became patently clear that this man’s heart – and that of his partner – belongs to getting up on stage and performing his songs for his audience. With the wholly common sense philosophy they expressed to me about how their professional lives are structured and organised, Gregson and Collister seem to have mapped out an ideal course for themselves: it is one that will allow them to retain their musical integrity without having to bow to commercial pressure. Were they, for example, to release an album that sold unsuccessfully it wouldn’t sink them. They commented that their only worry would be that they might have put out a poor record. It certainly wouldn’t spell the kind of disaster than might befall an artist flying at more stratospheric heights, one who dwells under the Damoclean sword inscribed with “You’re only as good as your last record.”

Their second album ‘Mischief’ was a studio recording and has sold very well in independent label terms – over ten thousand copies. All the bills have been paid and the project is now comfortably into profit. To that last statement I would append the word ‘deservedly’: it’s a record anyone could justifiably be very pleased with. Its music reflects the varied influences Gregson has absorbed and discussing this with him he emerges strongly as the kind of person who dislikes labelling or classifying musical styles: to him there are only two types of music – good and bad. To expand this point he comments that he finds little in eighties pop music for example, to excite him, feeling that it is too manufactured and impersonal with little intrinsic merit or worth. He continues:”In the old days they used to say “you can’t shine shit” but now you most definitely can! My personal view is that most popular music is very hi-tech and glossy but it has no depth to it But I still buy lots of records and occasionally I find something I can get into – the new Aztec Camera LP and the Van Morrison with The Chieftains album are both very good. Returning to the Mischief LP I commented that I found the song writing to be one of its major strengths but that the pall of sadness hanging over the compositions contrasted markedly with their on- and off – stage personae. Clive responded that there was a vein of positivism and sometimes even joy within them: “It’s there but it’s subtle! If you look at modern pop songs they’re often a celebration of very trite and insubstantial things, a joyous noise but about nothing. This may sound pretentious but what I try to write about is reality, in a sensible and realistic way. But if you look at what are potentially my most cynical songs like ‘We’re not over yet’ which is a catalogue of absolute depression really – they often end on a positive or optimistic note. But life’s like that, perhaps not as bad as that song suggests but it’s not always a bed of roses. Life’s a bitch!”

I asked Clive about the production of the ‘Mischief an album whose vital, vibrant sound I really appreciated. It sounds devoid of obvious overdubs and has a spontaneous and natural character. Did he strive for that deliberately? “In the old days recording was exactly what the word implied: you got musicians together to play and simply recorded the event. If you cocked things up you did it again from scratch. Most of the records I cherish were done that way, early Elvis and the Beatles, for example. When multi-track recording spread and gave people the chance to fill 48 tracks with fifteen hi-hats, six different bass drums and so on, where you could make all sorts of choices at the mixing stage, it seems to me that you dissipated much of the immediacy, energy and urgency of the performance. Instead of making the decisions at square one and recording what happens – saying let’s play the song this way and all the musicians playing together so that, say, the bass player could watch the drummer and go with him if he accented a beat – you lose all that chemistry when you patch songs together from component parts.

“We did an Any Trouble album that way, starting with the bass drum recorded to a click track, then added the snare and so on. The album was technically perfect, well recorded, good sounding but as boring as shit. A really dull, lifeless record. I learned that lesson the hard way. We had good songs and arrangements and it would have been much better to have gone into the studio and just played them straight off. From that day on I decided on the way I wanted to record all future albums, carefully preserving the life of the performance. ‘Home and Away’ was done that way, of course. We just recorded five or six shows on a Portastudio. One microphone on each voice, one for the guitar and another to pick up the ambience and audience, mixed down to two-track with just a bit of reverb added. It’s simple and I think it sounds good, very real. When it came to making ‘Mischief’ I wanted to carry that ethos through to recording a band in the studio. Because of the small size of the studio we used we had to do some overdubs and cheating though: for example, the drums would spill over into the guitar mics so we’d record the tracks playing together as a band (with the guitars fed direct into the desk) then immediately re-record the guitar parts to maintain their immediacy and freshness but on their own through mics to give a proper acoustic sound. There’s also – I shouldn’t give too much away here – quite a bit of technology on the album. For instance we did mix in some samples with the drums to create the kind of drum sound we wanted. But at the end of the day it was all played – we actually sat and cut the tracks live. There was no piecing it together from hundreds of takes, just a wee bit of legitimate cheating to compensate for things like the studio’s physical size and to get a better sound.

“It’s an anachronistic way of working: you end up with a record that perhaps sounds like it was recorded twenty years ago to some people, those used to modem production techniques. But we’re ploughing our own furrow and that’s the way I prefer to do things. That might make it uncompetitive in commercial terms but I don’t see a place in our music for over complicated production. When people come to our gigs they want to hear the same songs they hear on our album, so it’s no good putting songs on the LP that we can’t play live. Anyway, with strong songs and a voice like Christine’s there’s no need for banks of synthesised massed strings and suchlike.”

I was interested to find out if there were any plans for a new album in the pipeline.

“Yes, hopefully we’ll start working on it in the New Year ready for its release in the Spring.”

And will Clive be producing it?

“Yes, in the absence of somebody proper to do the job! It certainly wouldn’t bother me working with another producer; I enjoy working with other people but it’s a question of finding the right person. We learned some hard lessons with Any Trouble. We did the first record with John Wood who I admired then and still do. He’s a great bloke and one who if it’s happening in the studio gets it on tape as well as anybody can, a great recording engineer. That record wasn’t a commercial success but it more than did us justice: as a band we weren’t very good at the time but he got the best out of us. But with the next two records we were told “you will use this person because he’s got records in the charts, etc…” Both albums were terrible experiences leaving me feeling ‘what’s the point’? I like people who come into the studio and say “Yes, I like the songs and the way you play them. Let’s just tweak this up a bit and then get it on tape as a performance”. The minute somebody comes through the door and says “Why don’t we just record the drums, then we’ll overdub the keyboards and….” that’s when I show them the door and say “that’s not the way I do things. Goodbye.”

“I’m always amazed at the way records get made these days; people do some totally bizarre things; it just seems to be the norm to put together a tape with vocals that were recorded in five different studios on six different days and then spliced together. But that’s the way things happen now, particularly with pop records where there’s pressure on the performers – some of whom may be talented but haven’t had the necessary time to develop their craft – to get the product out fast and compete. That’s why you get the formularised music, the Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and the ‘whatever’s in vogue this week’ approach to music.

“We tend to stick to a philosophy that says “be able to look back and not see anything you’ve done that you’re not happy with”. We set our own yardstick. We have to like the records we make, then we can stand up and shout for them. Then if someone else says they don’t like them we can at least say “we like it because….” or “we did it that way for such and such a reason”. If we’re not happy with the music then we can’t expect anyone else to appreciate it.”

Within the independent label world the duo must rate commercially as a very successful act, yet in the multi-million dollar arena inhabited by the major labels their sales would be deemed far less significant. How do they feel about occupying this no-man’s-land?

“We’re banging our heads against that whole commercial element. I’m sure we could take ‘Mischief’ to a major label’s A&R department and say “We’re an act that can sell 250 tickets on any night in any town in Britain you can name; we’ve knocked out ten thousand copies of this album and ten thousand of the other one” and in a way that’s presenting a success story. But someone like EMI might have signed fifty acts in the past year, of whom forty nine have sold eight records each and are useless and have wasted a fortune in the process but the fiftieth act will be somebody like U2 who will have sold millions. That will be the yardstick by which we’d be judged, that would be what they’d want us to aspire to. So in terms of major labels and that kind of commercial success you’re either spending a fortune making expensive records and selling them by the lorry-load or you’re doing zilch. There’s nothing in between for them, but that’s the space we occupy. To get up to that top level we’d have to sit down and ask ourselves if we wanted to play the game. Either that or you just keep pegging away and get there on our own terms.

And a thing with people like us is that we can keep going on as we are now forever -there must be nothing more frustrating than being a has-been at nineteen, the group who’ve had the statutory two hits then disappeared without a trace and gone back to selling insurance or whatever.

I asked them finally if they felt that being saddled with the tag of ‘a folk act’ had restricted their audience. Both voices struck up in unison; “It’s frustrating that folk’ is very much a dirty word – we call it the ‘F word’. It’s a shame because the term is so all-embracing. People see an acoustic guitar and two singers and think “oh, it’s a folk act -I don’t like that”. But we’re trying to push back the boundaries. Say ‘folk’ to most people and they think of Peter, Paul and Mary, The Spinners or finger in the ear stuff. They forget that Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen both started out as just singers with acoustic guitars. To say that because John Denver plays an acoustic guitar and sings songs he’s written puts him in the same bag as Bob Dylan is ridiculous but people do it: it’s the visual image I suppose. Pigeon-holing music makes life simple and unfortunately too many people are guilty of it. They miss out on a lot of stuff they might actually enjoy that way.”

That last comment struck home forcibly: had I, in fact, not been told aboul Clive Gregson and Christine Cdlisler by someone whose judgement I trust the suggestion that they might be a ‘folk’ act could well have discouraged rne from buying ‘Mischief’, the album that got me irrevocably hooked on their music. Listening to the album now serves as a constant reminder to me that one should not unthinkingly dismiss previously unfamiliar types of music without according it the courtesy of an open-minded audition. Certainly, one runs the risk of losing a couple of quid here and there but fate’s fickle finger might just open a door to musical delights whose existence was formerly undiscovered. If you had told me that Clive Gregson was a folk musician I’d never have taken the trouble to find out that he, a fifties child like myself, actually shared many of my musical tastes and heroes. I discovered to my delight that he had a great affection for one of my all-time favourite songs. Lowell George’s ‘Roll ‘Em Easy’ which he tells me he frequently plays at soundchecks. Any fan ol Little Feat is an OK person in my book. And Christine Collister is no archetypal finger-in-the-ear folk singer, churning her way through the ‘as I woke up one wintry morn’ repertoire. Her versatile voice, which is as equally at home with Motown classics, straightforward rock, or jazzier styles. is one of the most enchanting I’ve encountered in over twenty years of actively following music.

They may be – to use their description – ploughing their own furrow in a record company no-man’s land but they’re not having to do it alone. They have won a burgeoning following who happen to like their particular way of doing things and are more than happy to keep them company along the way.