Memoir

FLA 18: Penny Kiley (18/06/2023)

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The writer and journalist Penny Kiley was born in Kent, and studied English at Liverpool University, where she found herself at the epicentre of the city’s musical and cultural scene during punk, post-punk and beyond. In 1979 she became a regular contributor to Melody Maker and a little later on, Smash Hits. In the late 1980s, she became the music columnist for the Liverpool Echo, while also covering the Merseyside arts scene for other local publications.

Latterly, Penny continues to write about music, books and culture on her blog Older Than Elvis, and has now written a terrific memoir, Atypical Girl, about her life, career and belated diagnosis of autism. I was delighted that she agreed to come and discuss all of this with me on First Last Anything, and choose some favourite and significant records too. Our conversation took place on Zoom one evening in May 2023. We hope you enjoy it.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So what records did you grow up with in your house before you started buying music yourself?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It’s interesting, that one. When I was reading series 1 of First Last Anything, I felt there was some sort of dialogue going on between the different interviewees and between the interviews and the audience. And David Quantick [see FLA 6] was the one that said ‘old musicals’, and I guess I’m a similar age to him.

 

My dad was a Londoner, and he used to go to the theatre all the time in London because in those days normal people could afford to go. So we had Oklahoma! and Gigi and Carousel in the house. And I guess that gave me a grounding in really good songs. Over the years, that’s what I’ve always come back to, particularly now, when you get old and cranky and you don’t want to listen to the latest new sound: ‘I don’t care – I just want good songs, songs with stories.’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Musicals often seem to be about history or culture or identity, those elements.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

They have to be, because there’s a narrative anyway. But yes, I just like people putting thought into songs and not doing the obvious rhymes or references or allusions.

 

My parents weren’t hugely into music otherwise, but then schools were good. Everybody played the recorder when they got to a certain age, you know? And we had Singing Together (BBC Radio, 1939–2001), this schools radio programme.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, I remember. We’d had Time and Tune (BBC Radio, 1951–) at infants school…

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I don’t remember that!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

…but then at junior school, Singing Together. We’d all sit on the floor, cross-legged, in the school hall. There was a whole Archive on 4 documentary with Jarvis Cocker about Singing Together [broadcast November 2014, on BBC Sounds].

 

Did you play any instruments then at school, or were you in bands at all, anything like that?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I played the recorder and then when I left junior school, I learned piano for about a year, but didn’t really get on with it. I did enjoy singing, though. I was in the school choir, in the back row, at grammar school, and we did Handel’s Messiah with the boys’ school down the road. That was a big kick. That was the first time I realised you can do a performance and get this huge adrenalin rush at the end of it.

—- 

FIRST: T REX: ‘Jeepster’ (Fly Records, single, 1971)

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s also Johnny Marr’s first single, or so he told Smash Hits back in the day. Was this the first you knew of Bolan?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I must have heard ‘Get It On’ before then. I didn’t buy records very often, because I was thirteen, I didn’t get much pocket money.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

To buy a record was a big deal, wasn’t it?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Round about 1970, my parents bought a new stereo, so we had the opportunity to play records, and you’d see Cliff Richard or the New Seekers on the telly and that was a kind of entry-level stuff. But T Rex was the first thing that was mine.

Nobody else in the family got it apart from me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Did you stay with their stuff for long?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

For a few years. After ‘Children of the Revolution’ [autumn 1972], I got a bit bored. The peak was quite short. I mean, my husband owns everything Marc Bolan ever made and 50% of it is actually unlistenable. Although he will dispute that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Is this the earlier stuff, the long album titles, or the later stuff?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The earlier stuff and the later stuff! The earlier stuff is just like just the hippy-dippy stuff. And then the later stuff is just frankly substandard because the quality control had gone out of the window. But the peak’s so good – enough to hang a legacy on.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what is that peak? ‘Ride a White Swan’ [late 1970] to… ‘20th Century Boy’ [early 1973], I guess. Two and a bit years? And he becomes part of the light entertainment fabric, guesting on the Cilla Black Show [Cilla, BBC1, 27 January 1973], doing ‘Life’s a Gas’ on Saturday night television.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

‘Life’s a Gas’, the other side of ‘Jeepster’. That was like buying two singles. Of course, we always played B-sides in those days, but this was like having a double-A side because they were both so good. Both songs are on the Electric Warrior LP which I bought later – now seen as a classic. My first record has stood the test of time! I still play it, and I still hear new things in it all the time. Bolan had talent, obviously, but credit also to Tony Visconti, as producer, for bringing out the best in the songs.

 

I should also mention that, around this time, a lot of 50s and 60s stuff was getting reissued – the Shangri-Las, Phil Spector, doowop – and that fed into my musical education. There was also the rock’n’roll revival, another genre that’s stayed with me. The soundtrack LP to That’ll Be the Day (1973) was a big influence.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading your memoir [Atypical Girl], my first surprise – given that I associate a lot of your work so much with Liverpool – is that you’re not from there at all. You’re actually from Kent.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, a place called Sittingbourne. Everybody knows the name because it’s on the railway. But there’s no reason to get off.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So what was it about the city of Liverpool that appealed to you? It’s worth saying that punk hadn’t happened at this point.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I went there because of the university. I wanted to do English Language and Literature and not many universities did both. The English department had a good reputation and one of my teachers had a daughter who’d done English there a few years before me. I knew nothing about the North whatsoever. But it became like this whole new world. It was amazing because there was stuff happening all the time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You say in the memoir how you’d prefer not to mention the music you were listening to before you got to Liverpool. Why do you think there’s this awkwardness about pre-punk? Was punk such a seismic event because of what happened next, did it follow a period where it was all rather dull – or were there things that you secretly still like?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was a real ‘Ground Zero’ attitude about punk. Everybody threw away lots of their records, or gave them away, or hid them in the back of cupboards, because they were embarrassed. We all had to pretend that we’d only ever liked certain things. I was listening to a mixture of stuff and some of it I would still listen to now, like The Who or Dylan. There was a lot of soft rock stuff that you just listened to because your friends had it. Quite pleasant, but it becomes dull after you’ve heard the Ramones.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

When those Top of the Pops repeats started running on BBC4 [7 April 2011] with the episodes of April 1976, I remember thinking, ‘Okay, so it’s before punk rock, what’s going on?’ Even knowing the state of the charts at the time – lots of oldies and novelty records – doesn’t prepare you for quite how bad an episode is going to be. They had to fill 40 minutes at short notice. And it seemed to be the days before they’d invented onscreen captions, because anonymous bands would start playing with no lead-in from the presenter and you wouldn’t have a clue who they were. It’s a cliché, but ABBA turn up and it’s, ‘Oh, thank god – one we know.’ Even though you’d heard it a billion times.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I still remember the early 70s Top of the Pops era as a ‘golden age’, mainly because of glam rock. But by the mid-70s it had got a bit dire. There was one shown again last week, from ’77, and I was thinking, This is so middle of the road. The entire programme, wall to wall.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Punk rock still hasn’t quite happened, unless you were reading the music press.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The Sex Pistols were having hits, but it didn’t change that culture straight away. All that awful middle of the road stuff carried on for so long because punk didn’t really get mainstream. And at the time, I was probably watching Old Grey Whistle Test, with Bob Harris, more than Top of the Pops.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And Whistle Test didn’t really do punk, did it? You had to make an album to be on that.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It was so serious about everything. And then you’d get something like Alex Harvey on [BBC2, 7 February 1975], and you’d go, ‘What the fuck is this?’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Oh, was that the ‘Next’ clip? I saw that quite a bit later. Terrifying!

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, the Jacques Brel song. I was like 17, 18, and I didn’t really understand it at all. It felt way too grown up for me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Once you know a bit more Alex Harvey, it kind of explains itself, but at the time… It’s so intense. When BBC4 started repeating Top of the Pops, I remember thinking, ‘Why not repeat some Whistle Test in full?’ But when you see one in full, it could often be terribly earnest.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That anniversary programme they did a few years ago was all from the Bob Harris perspective! I got really cross because of Annie Nightingale being sidelined. Obviously, that’s a feminist issue, but also they made it sound like a really dull programme, even duller than it actually was.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I love Annie. People always talk about the Peel show being important for their musical education, but I didn’t really listen to Peel till I was at university. Throughout my teens, I listened to Annie every Sunday night, because even though it was, ostensibly, a request show after the Top 40 show, she would play increasingly left-field music as the evening went on.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The first time I heard ‘Wuthering Heights’ was on her show, when it was a Sunday afternoon programme. A real ‘what is this?’ moment.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Tell me about getting to Liverpool, then, because your experience of music changes dramatically, within weeks.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I arrived autumn ’76, and I went to all the gigs that were on – a huge mix of stuff. The most forward-looking one was Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Students Union [16 October 1976]. I loved that. They’re written out of the picture now, a bit, but I think they were an important link. I mean, that Live at the Marquee EP [recorded July 1976] is brilliant, even though they’re standing there on the cover with terrible flares. The actual music has so much energy.

 

But like you, I didn’t really know about John Peel, he was on past my bedtime when I’d been living at home. You’d read about stuff in the music papers, but you didn’t really hear it. I think there was one boy who lived upstairs in the halls of residence who had ‘Anarchy in the UK’ when that came out [November 1976] but he would play that alongside Jimi Hendrix and it didn’t really seem that different. I guess if you’d seen them live, it would have been an entirely different experience. They did play in Liverpool but hardly anybody went.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It was around this time that you met Pete Wylie.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

We were doing different courses – he was doing French, and I was doing English – but we both did classical literature in translation. That’s how I got to know him, we pretty much hit it off straight away. And Pete told me I should go to Eric’s, this was the beginning of ’77. It was a lot more than a punk club, although that’s what it got known for. The booking policy was pretty broad. It also had a lot of old rockabilly on the jukebox. It gave us all our musical education.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Could you see the potential even then, that Pete was going to be a musical giant? Was the charisma evident?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was definitely charisma. Somebody wrote an article about Liverpool in the Baltimore Sun [‘After the “Merseybeat”, 20 April 1979]. I don’t know why, or how we even saw it. But it mentioned Pete Wylie, and the picture was Pete Wylie walking down the street – and you know, ‘everybody knows him’. Liverpool was a village [in terms of the music scene at the time]. And he was one of the faces at Eric’s. The strapline on his website, even now, is ‘Part-time rock-star, full-time legend!’.

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

How did you get into journalism, then? Had you always been interested in writing?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was five, but I was so obsessed with music, I just wanted to write about that. I knew how to write, and I was reading the music papers. I thought: I could do this. I sat on the idea for a bit, then in my final year, I started writing for the university mag. And then Melody Maker advertised for people, because the NME had some young writers and they thought they’d better get some too. So I became one of their young writers and I think Paolo Hewitt started around the same time as well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Had there been particular journalists you always looked forward to reading, people you made a note of?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There were people at the NME when I was a teenager in the 70s like Charles Shaar Murray, kind of stars in their own right. Obviously, Julie Burchill when she started. There were very few women doing it.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Jumping ahead a little bit, I think I had seen your name in Smash Hits, reviewing concerts – I always made a mental note of who was writing the pieces, not just who they were writing about – but I properly became aware of you when I switched to reading Melody Maker, around late 1985. And you did a piece on Half Man Half Biscuit, who maybe I had heard of but not quite heard. But it was a very funny piece, and so I thought: Oh, must hear some Half Man Half Biscuit, but also: must read more Penny Kiley. 

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Oh, that’s good!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So when you joined the Maker, ’79, Richard Williams was still the editor? An amazing writer and editor, obviously. It goes through a lot of phases between then and when I properly started reading it.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It was always ‘the poor relation’ compared to the NME, and obviously both were produced by the same company (IPC) – so it struggled, really, to find its own identity. When I started writing for it, one of its strengths was that it was very eclectic – it had a folk section and a jazz specialist, and there was (famously) the classified section at the back where musicians found people to be in their bands. It should have stayed with that and just moved everybody over a bit to make space for the new stuff.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I get the feeling you could be quite broad in what you could pitch. Presumably they wanted people outside London to give a flavour of what was going on?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, that’s why Richard hired me. I was in the right place at the right time, there was a lot going on in Liverpool that was worth covering. And when I started out, there were people who gave me the space to learn what I was doing: Richard Williams, and also Ian Birch who was the reviews editor before he moved to Smash Hits. I remember Allan Jones, who became the Maker’s editor, would give me pointers like, ‘You don’t write a 1,000-word review, that’s too long.’ But he would still give me the work. So I was learning my trade as I went along.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I switched to the Maker partly because by ’85, I felt a bit jaded with Smash Hits. I was fifteen, I’d been reading it for five years, and I was also interested by then in what was outside the Top 40. At the time, I figured I’d just slightly lost interest in the music, but when I revisited that patch of issues more recently, I realised, ‘Actually, for me, the writing isn’t as good as it had been either.’ It all got a bit wacky, everybody wanted to be Tom Hibbert. Fine if you’re Tom Hibbert, and there were still a few other great writers (Chris Heath, Sylvia Patterson and Miranda Sawyer a little while later), but if the whole magazine is trying to do that kind of joke, it gets a bit wearing.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

When it first started out, it was a lot straighter, but then it got a bit in-jokey and annoying.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yeah. I got bored with all the brackets and exclamation marks. But you’re right, at the turn of the 80s, they’d have like an indie section, where there’d be a piece on Crass or the Young Marble Giants. And there was a disco page with a club chart.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, they’d cover anybody.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And the rule seemed to be if it was a new band, they would get priority. Whereas an established act that predated the existence of Smash Hits would get a slightly sniffy reception. Like a perfectly alright Paul McCartney album. It was about ‘the new’. In fact, that period must be one of the few in pop history where just about everything of interest, certainly in the mainstream, was coming out of Britain. The US charts in that patch – turn of the 80s – were deathly. But the British charts were really varied.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

There was so much at the time that felt different. And I don’t listen to much new music now, but what comes my way doesn’t feel different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’ve been trying to work out, for a while now, about why the charts were so important to me when I was 10, 11, 12 – and some of that is undoubtedly that I’m a bit of a stat nerd. But it was also that sense of variety. You’d have a Saxon record next to a Soft Cell record in the top 40 and Tony Blackburn would play both of them, right next to each other. And of course loads of great records weren’t charting at all, but that chart show was like an education, every week: ‘There’s some stuff you’re not going to like, but it’s a wide range.’ There was this incredible sense of democracy about it all.

 

But what was it like for you to revisit your journalism from that period? Was writing Atypical Girl the first time in a while you’d read it again?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I still had all the cuttings books in the cupboard, but I hadn’t really done anything with them. I started looking at stuff when I was writing the book and then I looked at them again when I started my Substack of archive cuttings.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading some of the pieces again, they’re quite prescient. There’s that review of OMD when they’re well known in Liverpool but haven’t yet broken through nationally.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I think I said, ‘They’re going to be big.’ You just knew.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Are you reviewing the room, though, as well as the performance? You’re spotting what’s happening.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, there’s all that: OMD, The Teardrop Explodes, the Bunnymen, out of the Eric’s lot. They were all on the verge of breaking through – it was just obvious. They did so many gigs, and the gigs got bigger and bigger and there was more of a buzz about them. And inside, you become aware of that.

 

And I was doing some interviews… I was really lucky, actually, getting The Cramps as my first interview [June 1979]. I mean it sounds nuts, because of that image they had, but actually they were so easy.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s often the way, isn’t it? It belies the image, the idea that the outlandish people might be the most difficult.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

First of all, they are actually quite nice people. But secondly, they had things they wanted to say. So, basically, you press the buttons and off they go, it’s fine, but you are so dependent on people wanting to do it, and play the game. If they don’t do that, you’re a bit screwed.

 

I see some old interviews on the TV and I look at the bands lined up on one side of the table and the interviewer on the other side and the band’s giving them a really hard time and I think, I know what you’re doing there ‘cause I’ve been there. You know: ‘We’re the gang and we’re not comfortable with this situation, so we’re going to just become this tight unit and take the piss out of anybody that wants anything from us.’ Once that dynamic is set up, it’s hard to break.

 

But I was so shy that I hated interviews. So I’m looking back at my cuttings now for Substack and realise, Oh, there’s not really that many interviews. That’s a shame. But they did scare me.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you did… ten years at the Maker?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It petered out in the mid 90s, but there wasn’t any kind of big finish.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

By which time you were working on the Liverpool Echo and the Daily Post, writing about music and arts as well.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The Echo was one of the biggest regional papers in the country then. It turned out to be a bit of a dead end, career-wise, but it felt like the job had my name on, so I went for it. I was freelance, but the contract was to write two columns a week. It changed a lot over time – I won’t say it ‘evolved’ because it wasn’t really me making the changes, but whoever was in charge of the paper at the time. So, I was reviewing records and whichever big name was coming to the Empire Theatre – but quite a lot of grassroots music stuff, which I was most interested in pushing, and was how I developed a name for myself. I had a lot of run-ins with various people at the Echo who didn’t think I should be doing that sort of thing because I was writing about people their children hadn’t heard of.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Which is surely the whole point, though! To introduce readers to new people!

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yes, it’s not about whether you’re famous or not, it’s about supporting what’s going on in your city. So there was a bit of a mismatch of vision for quite a long time. Liverpool was just an amazing place for the arts. It’s kind of embarrassing because I’m living in the shires now, and when I tell people who aren’t from Liverpool how good it is, you can see them thinking, ‘That doesn’t compute.’ They’ve got their image of Liverpool.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s fascinating in your book to see these names of people on the rise, not just the people in music, but names like Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale having plays on at the Everyman.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

We had LOTS of theatres! The Everyman, the Playhouse, the Empire, the Neptune, and the Unity. And little odd venues on top of those.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And having this new serial, Brookside (1982–2001) on the new Channel 4.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

And going back to music, Radio Merseyside, the BBC local station, in the 80s, was a really big part of the music scene’s infrastructure. Janice Long, obviously, and there was a guy called Roger Hill who did the longest running alternative music programme on UK radio – 45 years – and it’s just been axed in the latest BBC cuts.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously, we’re having this conversation just as the BBC is chipping away at its local radio output, seemingly to almost nothing, and one thing that’s undervalued about local radio is discovering new talent. All those stations, commercial and BBC, were uncovering new bands, because there’s more to local radio than phone-ins. Shows like On the Wire on Radio Lancashire. Every station had one of those, but increasingly no longer.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

When I see Top of the Pops, or From the Vaults on Sky Arts, I spot so many Liverpool acts. They just keep coming, and when I was writing for the Echo, it was taken for granted that there’d be a handful of Liverpool acts in the charts at any given time.

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Atypical Girl is also partly the story of your autism diagnosis. How long ago were you diagnosed?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Five years ago now.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m in the early stages of investigating all this myself at the moment, and it really makes you re-examine your life. Has your diagnosis made you review your life in journalism in a different light? Had you already started writing the memoir before it, and did that change your method in writing it?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I can’t remember when I started thinking about writing it. It’s been years. At first, it was going to be ‘woman in a man’s world’, the usual thing. It was a midlife crisis book for a while, because I’ve been doing this blog, Older Than Elvis, about coming to terms with being middle-aged.

 

So I was writing it in stops and starts because of circumstances, and then I went on an Arvon writing course with Laura Barton, one of my favourite music writers, as one of the tutors. (She did the brilliant ‘Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll’ column in The Guardian.) I saved up all my pocket money for it, specifically because it was Laura doing it. (The other tutor was Alexander Masters and he was great, too.) It was hugely expensive, but great fun, and during that week I realised that my book was actually about reinvention. This was still a couple of years before I got the autism diagnosis. One of the things about autism, as you probably know, is about masking and not knowing, not having a solid sense of identity, and of who you are, and trying on different identities.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because you’re trying to emulate other people, or the behaviour of other people, at least.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Partly, you’re trying to fit in; partly, it’s just trying on things for size and seeing what works. And that’s why there are chapters in the book called things like ‘how to be this’, and ‘how to be that’. Because that’s the story of my life. And then alongside the personal stuff, there’s the whole thing about regeneration, the way Liverpool’s changed. So it might not be obvious, but the overall theme is reinvention.

 

When I started pitching it, I wondered if there was enough music in it, or too much music. And it suddenly dawned on me that it’s an autism memoir disguised as a music business book.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The title – it’s a Slits reference, isn’t it? ‘Typical Girls’.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It is. But ‘Atypical Girl’ is still a working title. We’ll see what happens.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Reading it, I was thinking about how books on music written by women have always ‘had’ to be about more than the music. I was thinking about Sylvia Patterson’s book a few years back, I’m With the Band, and she mentioned in an interview that she just wanted it to be a book about being a journalist, and she was persuaded to write about her background and her mother.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I saw a talk that she gave where she said exactly that thing. And her book ended up as a mixture of the personal and the professional and it won an award, so it does work.

 

When I first started reading music journalism memoirs, they were all by men. It all seemed to be ‘rifling through cuttings books’, and it was always people with a really middle-class background, so there was a lot of ‘Oh I’m so self-deprecating…’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, they can afford to be. ‘How did I get here?’

 

 

PENNY KILEY

‘Oh, I just fell into it.’ Yeah yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I liked how unapologetic you are about applying to Melody Maker. That it was a calculated approach.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I didn’t fall into it, no. I wanted to do it. There haven’t been many times in my life where I’ve known what I’ve wanted, but that was one of them.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s also a section about what is punk and what isn’t punk. Blogging is punk, Facebook isn’t. Television isn’t punk, radio is. 

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That list was on my blog. I stole the idea from Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s still so relevant now, even more so perhaps. People used to say that punk was about being yourself, but in those days, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. We live in an age now where actually, it’s much more possible to be yourself than it used to be. Because – sorry to rub this in – but I was too young for punk. In that I don’t really remember the records. I remember new wave, the Boomtown Rats and Blondie, that wave, but my perception of punk itself was ‘blokes with Mohican haircuts and safety pins’, so not about originality.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

No, I hate all that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And hopefully, at a time when there are millions of podcasts, First Last Anything has a punk edge to it.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

It’s DIY.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s DIY! Thank you. How long have you been doing the Older Than Elvis blog, then?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I started to blog on the night before my 50th birthday because I promised myself I would do it before I was 50, and I always meet deadlines. So that’s 15 years now.

—-

LAST: MARGO CILKER: Pohorylle (2021, Margo Cilker/Loose Music)

Extract: ‘That River’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I just checked pronunciation and her surname is apparently pronounced ‘Silker’.  

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I particularly don’t know how you pronounce the name of the LP.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It may be a reference to the birth surname of the war photographer Gerda Taro (1910–37). I’ll pretend I didn’t just Google that. I really liked this record. This seems to be somewhere between country and western, or roots and Americana anyway. Have you liked this kind of music for a long time?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, a long time. I don’t really listen to much new music, but I picked up on this because Allan Jones, who used to be my editor at Melody Maker, is now a Facebook friend, and he goes to gigs all the time. And he posted that he’d been to see her in London. He said, ‘She’s a bit like Lucinda Williams’, and I thought, ‘Well, I really like Lucinda Williams’, so I gave it a listen, and thought, ‘I might buy this. I like it.’

ANYTHING: HANK WILLIAMS: ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’ (1952, single, MGM Records)

PENNY KILEY

I chose this because, like discovering T Rex, it was another pivotal moment: in this case, when I stopped listening to music for work, and started listening to what I chose. Also, I think you have to have lived a bit to ‘get’ country music. I’m reading Lucinda Williams’ memoir at the moment (Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You); she made her breakthrough LP in her mid-thirties (Lucinda Williams, 1988) – and I discovered it a bit later (she’s older than me) in my mid-thirties. Also, when I discovered it, alt-country was big at the time, and someone described that as what punks listen to when they get old.

 

I got into country in a big way when I was going through a divorce in the 1990s. Which is a bit of a cliché. Somebody asked me how I was coping after we separated and I said, ‘A bottle of Jack Daniels and the Hank Williams box set.’ And that was actually the truth. We were talking at the start of this about writing songs, and Hank Williams… he’s such a great songwriter. And the sound is really interesting because it’s on the cusp, it’s hillbilly, but music is about to morph into rockabilly and rock’n’roll and all the rest of it. So he is a bit of a missing link as well, but what a brilliant writer. I just love his writing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And this one in particular, ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’, it’s a funny song in its own way.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, it’s really funny and clever. I chose it because he’s known for sad songs but there’s another side to him.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

But it’s overshadowed by the fact that it’s almost the last thing he recorded.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

And it was a posthumous hit. I mean, with a title like that, it just all falls into place, doesn’t it?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think country music, country and western was almost the last music I got to of the main genres because my dad had a reasonably sizeable but very eclectic record collection, but it lacked country and western – we might have had a Dolly Parton compilation, I think, but that was about it. And obviously with some country music, there is this connection with the Republican Party. Not always the case, of course.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Yeah, going back to Lucinda Williams’ memoir, she’s starts off with: we’re not all racist in the South, you know.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

See also the Chicks, as they’re now called. And a number of others.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

You say ‘country and western’ and I always cringe a bit at that term. I would always say ‘country’.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Funnily enough, I was reading an interview with Margo Cilker, who’s from Oregon, I think, and she describes her music as ‘West’.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

That’s fair enough. Every track’s different on this album – the word ‘different’ keeps coming up. But they’re all her, and they’re all ‘West’ – in a way.

 

 

 

—-

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know that we share a frustration with music documentaries with all the same talking heads on them.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The same men. Because women aren’t supposed to know about music, according to the BBC. I can’t watch that stuff anymore, although Women Who Rock on Sky Arts was an amazing series, because all the talking heads were women. The musicians themselves, a few commentators, music writers, journalists – all women. It was just so refreshing. It was made by women with a woman director, and – okay – it was a bit of a statement, it would be nice if we were just integrated. We’re still not. And every time I write to the BBC about it, they give me stupid replies. They don’t understand the concepts of representation or marginalisation.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

One of your notable interviewees in the first few years of your career was the Marine Girls in 1982, featuring Tracey Thorn.

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Everything But the Girl had done one single, ‘Night and Day’ (1982). Tracey had met Ben at Hull University, they’d done the single together, and the Marine Girls were about to split up (which I didn’t pick up on at the time). I enjoyed doing that piece. I got  this massive spread in the Melody Maker and Janette Beckman took these amazing photographs so it worked out really well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Didn’t it get the front cover?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

I’ve only had two front covers and that was the second one. First one was The Cramps!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In your book, you mention a quote of Tracey’s about the 1980s, and how all the things that are now supposed to sum up the 80s – Royal Wedding, Live Aid, yuppies, Duran Duran – weren’t really relevant to our lives. And I found this interesting – obviously I became a teenager in the 80s, and remember all those things. But the 80s are important to me because they were slightly weird. I wasn’t going out that much – almost no bands came to Swansea and if they did, they’d play an over-18s venue. So I relied on television and the music press and radio, so got close to a lot of this stuff. But the nostalgia of the 80s removes the offbeat and the underground. It just becomes this triumphalist thing about MTV videos. Being that little bit older, and you were going out a lot more, did the 80s feel like a bit of an anti-climax after the late 70s?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

Everything in my entire life has been an anti-climax since then! That makes me sound like a real saddo, and actually I did still get excited about my new favourite bands, like Orange Juice or James. But the thing about the 80s and the way people talk about it, the way it’s portrayed… It’s very dependent on where you were living at the time. So, people who were in London, part of the big financial boom and everything, were having a lovely time, and they cared about Princess Diana’s frock. And those of us who were trapped on the scrapheap by Thatcherism were living in an entirely different country. I have never forgiven the Conservatives for that, and I never will.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Well, we’re still seeing the effects of it, aren’t we?

 

 

PENNY KILEY

The legacy is still there indeed. I don’t want to talk about politics but growing up in Liverpool in the 80s did politicise me, because how could it not? Nobody had any money, but we made our own fun. It was an incredibly bohemian culture. There were people doing music, theatre, or film, or visual art, and a lot of the time, the same people were doing all that stuff. You could sign on and not get hassled too much. And with the Enterprise Allowance Scheme you could actually get money for being in a band. So Liverpool was a very exciting place to be, and I’d much rather have been there than somewhere where everyone was just running around with loads of money.

 

 

—-

Penny Kiley’s memoir, Atypical Girl, will be published by Birlinn on 5 February 2026. Further details here: https://birlinn.co.uk/product/atypical-girl/

She continues to blog at olderthanelvis.blogspot.com

Her Substack, a growing archive of her press work and interviews, can be found at pennykiley.substack.com

 You can also find Penny at various other places via this link: https://linktr.ee/pennykiley

 

FLA PLAYLIST 18

Penny Kiley

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: RICHARD RODGERS AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II: Oklahoma!:

‘The Farmer and the Cowman’

Gordon Macrae, Gloria Grahame etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJLVUTJSF0

Track 2: T REX: ‘Jeepster’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kGuZMHycU

Track 3: T REX: ‘Life’s a Gas’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4z8Wi-5uwY

Track 4: THE SHANGRI-LA’S: ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KLJaoAGXTY

Track 5: FRANKIE LYMON & THE TEENAGERS: ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’

[from That’ll Be the Day soundtrack]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXJ6mo7aeUw

Track 6: MOTT THE HOOPLE: ‘The Golden Age of Rock’n’Roll’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM3T7kT4JI

Track 7: EDDIE AND THE HOT RODS: ‘Gloria (Live at the Marquee)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNI39woKbxY

Track 8: OMD: ‘Electricity’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXNF4KoVyoU

Track 9: THE TEARDROP EXPLODES: ‘Read It in Books’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd3OM4mWSCw

Track 10: ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN: ‘Pictures on My Wall’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2DSO7gYD3Y

Track 11: PETE WYLIE: ‘Hey! Mona Lisa’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-Bs3cHBbw

Track 12: THE CRAMPS: ‘Human Fly’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK5Xe1SK0r8

Track 13: ROBERT GORDON AND LINK WRAY: ‘Red Hot’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNm0IzwKcqs

Track 14: THE MARINE GIRLS: ‘Honey’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPk4sUH6Uf0

Track 15: ORANGE JUICE: ‘Falling and Laughing’ (Postcard Version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Gdj_jOQEc

Track 16: JAMES: ‘Johnny Yen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAg6sI36Rs

Track 17: WACO BROTHERS: ‘Bad Times Are Coming Round Again’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iMOelbLm2M

Track 18: LUCINDA WILLIAMS: ‘Passionate Kisses’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEqXV9hGk-I 

Track 19: MARGO CILKER: ‘That River’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wp1CEExUxo

Track 20: HANK WILLIAMS: ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19vApPwWqh8

Track 21: ELVIS PRESLEY: ‘Blue Moon’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiY5auB3OWg

 

FLA 15: Helen O’Hara (18/09/2022)

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(c) Natacha Horn

In the spring of 1982, the violinist Helen O’Hara had two job offers. One was to join the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra; the other was to join Kevin Rowland’s Dexys Midnight Runners as part of their string trio, the Emerald Express. The release of the single ‘Come On Eileen’ and album Too-Rye-Ay made up her mind; the single alone would sell well over a million copies in Britain, and top the charts all over the world, even in the United States. Helen became Dexys’ musical director for their third album, Don’t Stand Me Down (1985), which received a mixed reception on release but has become widely and justly regarded as a masterpiece.

 

Though best known for her work with Dexys, Helen has had a busy life and career in music both before and after. For five years in the mid-1970s, she was an integral part of the Bristol music scene in bands like Gunner Cade and Uncle Po, but then turned her back on pop to study at the Birmingham School of Music (now the Birmingham Conservatoire). After the dissolution of Dexys, she went on to work extensively with Tanita Tikaram – most famously on her breakthrough single ‘Good Tradition’ – and most recently with Tim Burgess. In the summer of 2022, Helen and Dexys returned to the spotlight, performing ‘Come On Eileen’ at the closing ceremony of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games.

 

Helen has an excellent new memoir published this autumn, entitled What’s She Like, and I was delighted that she accepted my invitation to come on First Last Anything to choose some milestone recordings. As well as talking about her experiences in both the classical and pop worlds, she reveals why she stopped playing music for 20 years – and why she resumed.

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the opening chapter of What’s She Like you mention singles in your house that your siblings had and so on. But what records did your parents have when you were growing up?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Mainly classical records. Nothing unusual – Beethoven, Mozart… Tchaikovsky – whose Piano Concerto No 1 played by Van Cliburn was a particular favourite of mine. Nobody has beaten that version for me. Not just because it was very good, but because I heard it so much, it becomes ingrained in you at a very young age that ‘this is the best’.

 

My brother Tony, seven or eight years older than me, was the one buying the records and a big influence on what I heard. And Top of the Pops was on telly so I was exposed to other pop music which was making a huge impression on me, over classical music.

 

FIRST: PJ PROBY: ‘Maria’ (Liberty Records, single, 1965)

JUSTIN LEWIS

So the first record you bought yourself: PJ Proby. A kind of forgotten name now, really, but in his time, an absolutely massive pop star.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I can see why I was drawn to it. It really stuck out, mainly because of the orchestration but also because of his voice. He’s very theatrical. In fact, he was an actor for a while, I think, so his diction is absolutely amazing, but he’s got this drama in his voice, and he sings it as if he’s in a musical or an opera, telling the story. And of course, the song is from West Side Story.

 

It just blew me away really. Because I hadn’t heard anything like that before. Because my brother was already buying music like the Stones and the Pretty Things, which were my favourites anyway, I could buy this because it was more unusual.

 

I would have been nine, which is quite young to wander down to a record shop that’s about a mile away, with your pocket money and buy a record by yourself. It was just that incredible, proud feeling of owning this record – and he was a very good-looking bloke as well, so maybe that was part of it too! He had his hair in a ponytail, didn’t he? And then he got banned – from TV, radio, theatres – for splitting his trousers onstage, twice.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s a few versions of that story, but I read that apparently it was ‘accidental’ the first time, and perhaps ‘not so accidental’ the second time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

So he was well ahead of his time in terms of ‘how do I get publicity and censure?’

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think it was the ABC theatre chain that threw him off the package tour, but his replacement was some bloke, then unknown, called Tom Jones.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

And Tom was pretty wild, wasn’t he? Probably didn’t deliberately split his trousers, but came close to it!

 

 

—

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So you started playing the violin when you were about nine?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Nine, yeah.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You say in the book that you didn’t find it easy to play early on, indeed, have never found it easy. Presumably part of the appeal with the instrument is that that you can’t really take your eye off the ball. It requires commitment. It requires constant practice.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think I just accepted that it was my instrument, and it was going to be difficult. I was so sure of it. It is a difficult instrument to play well, but I’m also extremely critical of myself. I wish I wasn’t, because I beat myself up an awful lot about any performance I do. And then when I listen to other people, I never have that criticism of them, I can be objective! Because it’s live, it’s human. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Obviously you started in the classical world, and you were in youth orchestras as a teenager. It sounds like you were already interested in ensemble playing, but perhaps individual expression within a group of some kind. Did you ever think you would be a solo violinist, in the classical world?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

No, never. Never thought that. I always thought of myself within a group, preferring to be embedded in the group. I mean, if you’re the leader of an orchestra, as I sometimes was, you might have to take a little solo or something. But I much preferred being part of an ensemble.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And clearly you still love classical music, but I sensed in What’s She Like that the classical world back in the 60s and 70s could be a bit stifling, with little tolerance for any other type of music.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

That’s how it felt, especially later at music college, because nobody seemed to listen to pop music. It was very rigid – it was just classical. Now music colleges, from what I can see, are open to all sorts of music – for example, they might have a jazz department. They recognise that instrumentalists could go in many directions – as much as anything, it’s about getting work, and so you’d be encouraged to play in musicals, or opera, or be a session violinist or whatever. I think they’re a lot more open minded now. I was still at college when I was recording Too-Rye-Ay with Dexys [in spring 1982], and we never mentioned it to the college, partly because they wouldn’t have given us the time off to do it, but another was that they’d have been horrified. Now, it’s very different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s interesting how your memoir reflects these compartments of your life. You’re fully committed to something for two to three years, and then you move on to something else completely different. And that’s the pattern. But there’s still this sense of continuity throughout – you go back to things, to work with people again, after a long period of time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think you’ve got it. Yeah. Hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes, although not intentionally.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What also occurred to me: you come from quite a large family anyway, but all your musical exploits for years came with groups, large groups, orchestras. I might even suggest Dexys was an orchestra, certainly at the point you joined, with all the different sections.

 

And you write a lot about the people in music who have inspired you – some of them famous names, but others are fellow students, teachers… In fact, I don’t know if you remember this, but when you first got into the charts with ‘Come On Eileen’, you did a Q&A with Smash Hits magazine and they asked you your biggest musical inspiration. And most people in those Q&As would say David Bowie or Bryan Ferry or whoever. And you said Andrew Watkinson, your violin teacher. Who’s gone on to quite a career himself.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Oh, that’s really sweet. He was a real inspiration. Yes, he plays with the Endellion String Quartet now.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It really chimed with me at the time because I loved pop music, loved reading Smash Hits, but I also was in orchestras, I was a flautist, and I used to wonder how I could be in a pop group playing an orchestral instrument. But I thought that was such a cool answer – you didn’t choose a pop star, but your teacher. And to see you on Top of the Pops playing an instrument associated with the orchestra, I thought it was so cool.

 

In fact, in your book, you recall being about 13, trying to imitate the violin part on ‘Young Gifted and Black’ by Bob and Marcia. Well, when I was 13, I would – on the flute – try and imitate your violin parts on Dexys records, especially ‘Come on Eileen’ and ‘Let’s Get This Straight From the Start’.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Oh wow, that’s amazing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I would try and bend the notes the way you would, try and work out how to do that. I’ve waited forty years to tell you that!

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Ah, thank you so much, Justin. But it’s a great way to learn, isn’t it? When you play along. I remember playing along to some Roxy Music when Eddie Jobson was on violin.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes! The Country Life album.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I was even doing that in the 80s when The Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues came out, trying to imitate Steve Wickham, who’s a very different player to me. I still do it now, play along, because you can always learn a lot from somebody else’s style, can’t you?

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Absolutely. What also comes across very clearly in What’s She Like is the importance of communality in music. How at secondary school, your music teacher ensured that all 600 pupils took part in the school concert, not just the really musical ones. Do you agree there’s musical potential in everyone?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, I do. We’ve all got a heartbeat. Some people will be more musical than others, but often it’s whether you get the chance. I was also very lucky, when I was growing up, that we had free peripatetic music lessons, and everybody was offered a free lesson on whatever instrument, so that was amazing. My secondary school music teacher was quite young, probably in his mid-20s when he took on the job as head of music and he just seemed to spend all this time at school, encouraging everybody, and he would get cross with us if he thought we weren’t giving 100%. But that was cool, he was showing his passion for the subject. So, everyone had to sing in the concert we did, at the Colston Hall in Bristol. A lot of the boys didn’t like it – but they still all turned up! However, I think everyone admired him, and it felt good in that ensemble. It’s like being at a football match – you feel good when everyone sings together.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

All the while, you were influenced by violinists in bands: Jimmy Lea in Slade, Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris in Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. And when you joined bands in Bristol, in your late teens, long before Dexys, where each album would be radically different from the last, you were already in groups that would change their style a lot. For instance, Uncle Po – with our mutual friend Gavin King… you’re a soul band (under the name Wisper), then you’re jazz rock for a bit, and about 1977 you become a new wave band. Did it feel easy to reinvent the band’s sound like that?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Very easy, very easy. Uncle Po were good musicians, good singers, good harmony singers – and we were very serious about what we did. We rehearsed for long hours, and we played live so much, and if you’re a good musician, you can adapt to different musical styles. I mean, it wasn’t like we had to be outright jazz or something, but within the different genres of pop or rock, we didn’t find that difficult. When punk and new wave happened, it shook everybody up, didn’t it? It was really exciting, people seemed to come out of nowhere, venues were packed and there was a real energy from the crowd. I’m very grateful that I was around at that time, and all that touring with Uncle Po prepared me for what was to come later, with Dexys, and gave me confidence. I would otherwise have been a bit nervous. I also learned a lot from the other guys in these bands, who were older and more experienced than I was.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So then in 1978, you enrol at the Birmingham School of Music. Suddenly you’re back in the classical world. What elements of the classical world do you think have helped you in the pop world, and vice versa?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

From youth orchestras, I learned to work as part of a team, and to listen, but also to take directions from the conductor. I suppose Kevin in Dexys was like a conductor in many respects, with the ideas he was asking us to play. Because as you know, one piece of classical music can sound very different depending on who the conductor is. I’ve just finished making a playlist of all the music mentioned in my book – 209 pieces. What I found fascinating was deciding which version of a Beethoven symphony or violin sonata I should use. I went to Spotify and there are loads of different versions, so finding the ‘right one’ that touched me… It was extraordinary how different they all were, different tempos, different moods. And working with different conductors and different teachers as well also taught me about various approaches, to respect differences, and be open to trying things.

 

Also, in classical music, focusing on detail is absolutely crucial – dynamics, subtleties… and so when I came into the Dexys world, it really was like a pop equivalent of classical music in how they approached rehearsing. Incidentally, I did notice in college that a lot of classical musicians didn’t have a very good sense of rhythm. I remember in violin sections, people speeding up a lot, and finding that quite irritating. I think I probably had a pretty good sense of rhythm – drummers in Uncle Po and before them Gunner Cade helped to solidify that.

 

At the School of Music, I did feel different to the other students. I went in at 21, 22, and I hadn’t played with an orchestra for five years, and that’s quite a long time. I wasn’t feeling very confident, and I was aware of having to do a lot of work beforehand to catch up. I didn’t know what the standard was going to be like, so I was practising for hours and hours – I had this real fear I would be rubbish compared to everybody else. And I was fine, actually, but you don’t know that when you’re going into the unknown. And I hadn’t been reading music for four or five years – I’d been playing by ear. There were things that surprised me there – some musicians found it hard to do things like put chords to a melody. I thought everybody could do that, but obviously not!

 

I learned so much from other students, particularly one called Adrian, who I shared a desk with in my third year, who was the most beautiful player. I was really lucky going to Birmingham – it wasn’t too daunting. I don’t know whether I’d have got into the Royal Academy of Music or the Royal College of Music, but say I had, I think I would have found that quite intimidating, because they apparently had the best players, and the standard might have been so incredible. Birmingham, I felt I could fit in, the staff and students were lovely, so I’m really grateful about that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you felt you could be yourself?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I kept my past very secret, really, because I didn’t think anybody would get it. I really felt I had to be in the classical world to improve, and I didn’t want to be tempted back into pop music. I had made this decision to do three years of hard study.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In your final year, 1981/82, out of the blue, there was a knock on your door, and it was two guys from the Blue Ox Babes, the Birmingham band, and who had an affiliation with Dexys Midnight Runners. Did what happen next, in those two bands, come as a surprise to you? Because presumably you were thinking you might stay in the classical world?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I kept an open mind, but the reality of it was, by that post-graduate year, the fourth year, I hadn’t been playing or even listening to any pop music, and I knew I would have to try and earn a living through music. I didn’t want to teach, and so the obvious course was to get a job in an orchestra. That’s why I started doing auditions. I’d have probably been quite happy doing that, being the sort of musician I am. I would have probably tried to engineer situations where the music was interesting and stimulating. I was offered a job from the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, and had I gone to Spain, it would have been great, I think. I’d have probably played a lot of Spanish music, learned Spanish, seen a bit of the country, and travelled through music. In that fourth year, I bought a Teach Yourself German book. That was my thinking: learn different languages, travel the world playing my violin.

 

But the Blue Ox Babes and then Dexys a little while later just blew everything out of the window. Because I am a pop musician. The music I mostly listen to is pop music. I absolutely love classical music and I go to classical concerts, but in my heart… if I had to choose… it would be pop music.

 

Sometimes I think you put yourself in situations where these things can happen, and the doors open, and you seize the moment and go with your gut feeling. Even if people are saying, ‘Don’t do that’, or ‘I’m not sure’, you listen to your heart and make a reasoned judgement.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And even if things don’t work out the way you expected, or how you wanted, you still learn something along the way.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Exactly, Justin, exactly. For instance, my first teacher at music college was a guy called Felix Kok [1924–2010] who was the leader of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. A great teacher, and he offered me a gig with some members of the CBSO and other players, a freelance gig playing songs from films like Star Wars, at the Town Hall in Birmingham. I accepted. At the rehearsal, I realised I was way out of my depth. It was a three-hour rehearsal, sight-reading the music, and you might remember in those days, music for films and musicals were handwritten, not printed out – so it was very hard to read handwritten music for the first time.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember that very well!

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

After the rehearsal, I stayed on at my music stand to work on the music a bit more, and the conductor came over and said something like, ‘You could do with a bit more practice’. And it was such a horrible way he said it, but he was right, and that was a very hard lesson, but one that made me really think about what I should accept in the future. That is what the professional world was like with orchestras. I grew up a lot that day.

LAST: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS & THE EMERALD EXPRESS: ‘Come On Eileen’ (Mercury/Phonogram, single, 1982)

HELEN O’HARA

Dexys’ record label at the time, Phonogram, was in New Bond Street, in London, and we’d get a bunch of copies of ‘Come On Eileen’ – but I would end up giving them away to friends or family. And then one day I realised I didn’t have any myself! Which I thought was a bit of a shame. I mean, I could have bought one on eBay, I suppose.

 

But one day, recently, I went into my local Oxfam shop in Greenwich, to buy a birthday card. On the way out, I saw this rack of albums and singles and for some reason – because I don’t do it normally – I flicked through them. And halfway through, there was the ‘Come On Eileen’ single sleeve staring at me. And I smiled, it just felt so amazing. I picked it up, it was in perfect condition. And it was weird, because you know, it’s 40 years on, and there’s also a remix of it out now as well. It felt magical. So, I’ve got my ‘Come On Eileen’ single back.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’re so familiar with this song now, but I can distinctly remember when I first saw and heard it. It was on Top of the Pops, 15 July 1982, it was number 31 in the charts, and would soon be number one. I was already aware of Dexys from a previous few hits: ‘Geno’ and ‘Show Me’, although I somehow hadn’t heard ‘Celtic Soul Brothers’, your debut with the group.

 

But I had never heard ‘Come On Eileen’ and that Top of the Pops, in the best possible way, was a complete shock. Years later, one journalist wrote that ‘Come On Eileen’ had now joined the pantheon of songs – like ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – that are so familiar you forget how unusual they are. Was there a moment when you thought, ‘This is it, then’?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

When we got that first Top of the Pops, I think, the one you saw. Everything did happen very fast then, became a bit of a whirlwind. Yeah, it is an extraordinary record when you really start analysing it. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In terms of structure, especially.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

The music is so orchestrated, cleverly written. The use of instruments… it could be a modern piece of classical music. Kevin is a genius, really, and Jim [Paterson] and Billy [Adams] and Mickey [Billingham], they wrote it too. But I don’t think any of us thought it was going to be a hit. We wanted it to be!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know everyone says pop music was brilliant when they were twelve, but I was twelve in 1982, when some fairly leftfield records could become unexpected massive hits. Did you ever think of yourself as a pop star? Because to me, you were one.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

You know, I never really thought of myself as a pop star. I was a musician in a band, that’s always what came first. I’ve always found the issue of clothes and image quite hard, and I was glad that Kevin took control of that.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It actually takes a lot of energy, that side of thinking.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s a huge amount of energy, and I admire people like Kevin and Roxy Music, who come up with these amazing clothes and outfits and things – it’s part of their art.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With pop, it is about the music, but with so many bands I’ve loved over the years, it’s also about the record sleeve and the band’s attitude, and so on. In the book, you mention how you kept sending back the Don’t Stand Me Down album sleeve again and again because it wasn’t quite right, and this kind of thing really does matter, I think. Because you’re making something that people are going to treasure.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Especially in those days, absolutely, Justin – because we were mainly buying albums then, as it was pre-CD. It’s like those covers the Stones did – the 3D cover of Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, or Sticky Fingers with the zip. But yes, it was great to be a part of a band where, as well as the music, all the visual aspects – the clothes, the artwork, the choreography – were very important. Equally, you can play music with somebody who says, just wear what you like – and that’s fine too.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Another thing with Dexys – the mythology. I remember the story that was ‘designed’ for you, that Kevin saw you at a bus stop in Birmingham holding your violin case, and he asked you to join the band. And I bought into that completely at the time.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Did you? Oh, that’s amazing. Brilliant.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And obviously it didn’t happen like that, although the way you joined the Blue Ox Babes the year before was pretty out of the blue. That there was a knock on the door and two guys asking if you’d like to join a band. It’s not what you expect.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

With me resisting initially. 

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What did it feel like to be famous, so suddenly?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I found it very strange. When ‘Come On Eileen’ was number one, I was still living in my student flat in Birmingham, still getting the bus, and you find people talking about you and pointing at you. I felt extremely awkward in that situation.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Because what do you do?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Exactly. Really, all you can do is get out of where you are. It didn’t feel like a threat, but it’s a very different sort of attention to when people are at a concert, listening to you, even if they might be shouting or screaming or whatever… But when it’s ‘real life’ and you just popped out to get some milk… It wasn’t the kind of attention Kevin was getting, but the bits I did experience felt uncomfortable. And I felt it again much later, when my boys were at primary school and I was anonymous. I’d agreed to do this interview for a TV documentary [Young Guns Go for It: Dexys Midnight Runners, BBC2, 13/09/2000]. The next day I went into school, and people were bringing albums in [to be signed]. I was totally shocked they’d found out, and they were also beginning to treat me slightly differently and I just thought, I’m the same as I was yesterday.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It must be weird. There’s a version of you out there that is you, but it kind of isn’t you. It’s not even a distortion… it’s just that you were in that video, but that’s not the full, real you.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s one reason some people can’t cope and why they get out of this business, I suppose. But I liked that theatrical element that Kevin had created – the Emerald Express name for the string section, the fact we had all different names. It was a bit like being in a musical. It was just a slightly different character, but nothing too different.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

People rather like stories like the bus stop story, because of that idea that anything could happen.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

It’s quite romantic, isn’t it, as well. You can meet anyone at the bus stop.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In August this year, you were performing ‘Come On Eileen’ at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. What keeps it fresh, playing it, do you think? You’ve rearranged it a number of times now, right? It’s in a different key, for a start.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, it’s a bit lower, when we did it in Birmingham, we took it down a few tones. ‘Eileen’ is incredibly high originally, something Kevin said he hadn’t considered when he first wrote it. He didn’t really consider the keys for his voice when he wrote anything in the old days, so to suit his voice now, we re-recorded the track. Kevin was the only one performing live, at the Commonwealth Games. I went into a studio to record the three violins for the track. And you know what, Justin? When I played, I felt like I was twentysomething again. When I came home, I sent a message to Kevin and to Pete Schwier, the engineer, telling them I just couldn’t help playing with the same energy and excitement that I felt when I originally recorded it. And it will always be like that. I was on a high after that concert for days afterwards.

 

What’s interesting is that Tanita Tikaram has changed a lot of her keys as well. Exactly like Kevin. They’re mostly lower keys but with one song, she’s moved it up a tone, interestingly.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’ll talk a little bit more about Tanita in a moment, but I wanted to just ask you about Don’t Stand Me Down. And what becomes clear, reading about the making of that album, was despite the length of time it took to make – and obviously your relationship with Kevin ended during its making – it still sounds like there was an immensely harmonious working relationship with that record. And it was completely different to everything else in 1985.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I think a lot of people were probably not surprised that it was a bit different, but it was radically different. And the conversation thing, the talking, having a 12-minute song [‘This Is What She’s Like’]. We knew it was different, but it just felt right. We were so immensely proud of it, and still are. So when it came out, and didn’t get the reaction we’d hoped for, it was disappointing.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And you did a fair bit of promotion too for it. You were on Wogan, big live BBC1 show, 7 o’clock [13/09/1985. Fact! The other guests were Jackie Collins, Penelope Keith, Fascinating Aida and Kenneth Williams].

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

We played ‘Listen to This’ on Wogan, which in hindsight, perhaps should have been the single because it was three minutes, and a great song. I had to count it in to Kevin – I had a little earpiece – because it starts with Kevin singing before the band comes in. I had to give him a count-in, on live television. I remember thinking, I’ve got to get this right!

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And am I right in saying that on Don’t Stand Me Down, you were Dexys’ musical director as well as their violinist? Can you outline what that role entailed?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Apart from co-writing some of the songs with Kevin and Billy [Adams], I would discuss the arrangements with them, and rehearse the band before Kevin came to rehearsals, to go through the basics of each song, to run through the parts and write out parts for musicians. Kevin didn’t have to be there all the time, he was often doing promotion, so the MD could often get a lot of the work done, fine-tuning things. It also meant that Kevin didn’t wear his voice out.

 

Often Billy and I auditioned musicians without Kevin being there. We had problems finding the right drummer for the album. We went to America, to Nashville at one point. After rehearsals, in the evenings, I would listen back to recordings I made that day and pick up on points where I thought we could improve the next day. And because it was a big band, with musicians from America, I would help to answer their queries. I took on a liaising role as well, between musicians and the management, which wasn’t my job, but that was fine. And then with live work, the MD’s job is to make sure everyone’s on it every night. Anything that wasn’t quite right the night before, you might rehearse in the next soundcheck. Kevin gave me a lot of responsibility and trusted me to look after the music.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And how did you start working with Tanita Tikaram, a few years later?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Paul Charles had been Dexys’ agent, and he had discovered Tanita at the Mean Fiddler, in Harlesden, a really great music club. After I left Dexys, he called me up to tell me he’d found this amazing singer/songwriter and they wanted violin on her single called ‘Good Tradition’. I was working on my own album project, and I wasn’t a session player as such, because you just didn’t do that with Dexys, but I thought, This does sound exciting. Paul sent me her demo and I really liked the song. So I agreed to the session. It was recorded at Rod Argent’s studio, he of Argent and the Zombies, who was producing it with Peter Van Hooke, the drummer from Mike and the Mechanics. I played my parts, made up a solo which they liked, and they liked all the other parts I’d written for it. From there, ‘Good Tradition’ became a hit, and then Tanita and Paul put a band together. I was with her for two to three years, and I played on her next two albums.

 

Then after the hiatus of my not playing for 20 odd years, and getting back with Dexys, Tanita asked me if I would be musical director and violinist for her Ancient Heart retrospective show at the Barbican. So it came back full circle. She’s great, it’s like when I work with Tim Burgess now. With both of them, when they walk into the room, the sun comes out. I can be myself when I work with them.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So why did you stop playing for 20 years? Was it a case of ‘all or nothing’?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

There was an element of that. When I had my first son. I was still doing a little bit of playing in the first few months, for example with Graham Parker. And then, quite quickly, a few months later, I was pregnant with my second son, Billy, and I was exhausted. There were only 15 months between my two sons. I was tired, and work had been very intense for many years, but also, I just wanted to be home with them. I didn’t want anyone else looking after them or bringing them up. I didn’t want to tour and be apart from them for weeks on end. The other reason is that when I was in my 30s, I was beginning to feel a bit old being in a group, a weird thing to say now, but it’s how quite a lot of us felt at the time. Also, the violin is difficult, particularly if you’re not practising it a lot, and I felt every day I was losing more and more of my ability.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what was the catalyst that made you go back to the violin?

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Both my sons went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. My elder son Jack studied technical theatre and my younger son Billy was studying the drums. I was going to watch shows that they were involved in. Billy had been in bands at school, so I was seeing teenagers in bands again, which brought back memories, of course. So, I was missing it, but not really admitting it.

 

Then I went with Billy to see a Dexys show at the Barbican, for the One Day I’m Going to Soar album. It was great, but I felt like I could be back on stage because I knew all the old songs. It just made me think, I’m really missing this, my children are doing what I used to do. I heard a song before the gig, The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’. Back at home, I put that CD on and that was the point when it got beyond my control; I got the violin out, and I sort of knew then that I was ready to embark on a slow journey back. But it also felt really exhilarating. I knew I’d be rubbish and I was rusty but, in my heart, I was still that musician. It was about muscle memory and confidence. I don’t regret stopping for a minute. Every second I was with my kids, I just really treasure that, and maybe – as you suggested earlier – I do compartmentalise stuff in my life. Maybe that’s just how I operate. I had been doing other things as well, part-time jobs – and studying a humanities degree for the Open University. That made me come out of my shell a bit more and meet people, as I’d lost confidence with people as well. It was a bit of a slow comeback, but I knew I’d be alright.

 

ANYTHING: PHILIP GLASS: Akhnaten: ‘Hymn to the Sun’ (Decca Gold/UMG, 2018)

Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jonathan Cohen, Les Violons du Roy

HELEN O’HARA

An opera singer I know was singing in the chorus of Akhenaten a few years ago. And she said, it’s really great, I can get you a cheaper ticket in a good seat. I didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded interesting. Within the first few minutes, I was just knocked out, I couldn’t believe this wash of sound. I was just mesmerised, under a spell. But also, this particular production used the Gandini Jugglers. They are part of the rhythm and they’re juggling in interesting ways, in time to the music. And then there are the costumes and the beautiful countertenor voice of Anthony Roth Costanzo. The opera hasn’t got any violins in it – it’s violas, cellos, double basses, so it’s this very dark, rich sound. That’s part of the incredible scoring. Anyway, it’s coming again, early 2023. I thoroughly recommend it, Justin, it’s at the Colosseum, English National Opera. The same production, with jugglers.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

That sounds fantastic, I must make a note of that. And you’ve also selected ‘Belle’ by Al Green, and I believe this was a big influence on how you approached creating and writing Don’t Stand Me Down.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

Yes, in 1983, when Kevin and I were going out together, he played me ‘Belle’ and some other Al Green songs, and I really started to understand the groove, and the sort of drummers that he was using, and that style of playing. There’s a lot of space in the music, and so when we were working on Don’t Stand Me Down, Kevin was saying, ‘Well this is the rhythm section we want, we want that style of drumming.’ It was a real eyeopener for me. I’d always been into drummers – Charlie Watts was one of my favourites, he’s not really an Al Green-type drummer, although he sort of is because he plays behind the beat. I think I had a natural disposition towards that sort of playing, rather than – say – heavy metal drummers which is not really my thing, much as I admire that style of playing.

 

So that’s how that came about. And then we were lucky enough to find Tim Dancy who had played with Al Green, when we saw them at the Royal Albert Hall [13/07/1984, with the London Community Gospel Choir]. I said to Kevin, ‘That’s our drummer’, and Tim came over, recorded a few songs with us, and did the tour as well.

 

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

What’s so clear throughout What’s She Like is you remain a fan. When you remember encounters or meetings with people or collaborations, whether it’s Willie Mitchell or Vincent Crane or Nicky Hopkins, your excitement and awe really comes over.

 

 

HELEN O’HARA

I still can’t believe that Nicky and I worked together. It’s almost like two lives. ‘Did I really play with him?’ I still pinch myself. Now I’m working with Tim Burgess! I’ve never taken it for granted. I still feel the same excitement I felt when I first heard ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ in the sixties, and I hope it continues.

 

 

—

Helen’s memoir, What’s She Like, was published by Route on 1 October 2022.

 

You can access her related 209-song playlist on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/55tJslj4iEEvdX2X4hIgcz?si=0b9498e1cc804c8a

 

To mark the 40th anniversary of Dexys Midnight Runners’ Too-Rye-Ay, a remixed version of the album, subtitled As It Should Have Sounded, was released by Mercury Records on 14 October 2022. 

 

Helen continues to collaborate, on record and live, with both Tim Burgess and Tanita Tikaram.

 

You can follow Helen on Twitter at @oharaviolin, and on Bluesky at @oharaviolin.bsky.com.

FLA PLAYLIST 15

Helen O’Hara

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 23:

Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso

Van Cliburn/Kirill Kondrashin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frxZjSG8lMs

Track 2: PJ PROBY: ‘Maria’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX1wDV3ENF8

Track 3: FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D 810:

‘Death and the Maiden’: I. Allegro

Endellion String Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNULkV5lyHE

Track 4: BOB AND MARCIA: ‘To Be Young Gifted and Black’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yscozSAumgs

Track 5: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Let’s Get This Straight from the Start’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqJlhXcW8X4

Track 6: SLADE: ‘Coz I Luv You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONQPB9HTP5c

Track 7: MOTHERS OF INVENTION: ‘Directly From My Heart to You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB3HdC-Iums

Track 8: UNCLE PO: ‘Screw My Friends’ – Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGNeg0beo4s

Track 9: BLUE OX BABES: ‘Walking on the Line’ – 1981 Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkDGkyLZQI

Track 10: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS AND THE EMERALD EXPRESS: ‘Come On Eileen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BODDyZRF6A

Track 11: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Listen to This’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fRW4g52a7w

Track 12: TANITA TIKARAM: ‘Good Tradition’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAbgrq4TPT8

Track 13: TANITA TIKARAM: ‘Thursday’s Child’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RRCXqO8i9M

Track 14: THE BAND: ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w69ZVHpjYAk

Track 15: PHILIP GLASS: Akhnaten: ‘Hymn to the Sun’

Anthony Roth Costanzo/Jonathan Cohen/Les Violons du Roy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8dEk1KXu0g

Track 16: AL GREEN: ‘Belle’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjEHoz1r3bs

Track 17: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘Old’ (As It Should Have Sounded 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWtJbelz7o

Track 18: DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS: ‘This is What She’s Like’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o94-YJlyCa4