AN UNEDITED INTERVIEW
FOR "YOUR DOVER"
(10th OCTOBER 2007),
A NEWSPAPER LOCAL TO ALAN'S PLACE OF BIRTH

1       You were born in Dover in the 1950’s . Have you been back at all over the years?

When I was five, my family uprooted far inland to Fleet, a north Hampshire satellite of Aldershot, 'home of the British army'. However, until I was well into my teens, we always spent an August fortnight in the house where I was born along Union Road, where my Uncle John still dwells.
      Unless it was bucketing down, we spent most days amongst other holidaymakers on the pebbled beach near the Life Guard hut. Indeed, in 1960, aged nine, I was awarded a Dover Life Guard Club certificate for swimming 1,000 yards across the harbour.
       As an adult, one particularly poignant visit to Dover took place in spring 1986, on the day before a tour of Holland as keyboard player with Dave Berry and the Cruisers. That afternoon, I saw the cover of What A Difference A Decade Made, my just-released debut album, in a record shop window in the town centre. It was one of the most historic moments of my life. 
      In parenthesis, various cousins live in Deal and Whitstable - as a close friend does in Littlebourne, near Canterbury. I'm also an acquaintance of  Billy Childish, who is to Chatham what The Troggs are to Andover.

2.       How much do you think Dover has changed?

The harbour is more crowded by buildings. Certainly, the breakwater seems nearer than it did when I were a lad.
      Streets fanning out from the gasworks appear far less run-down - and, while Union Road, the principal thoroughfare, has been Coombe Valley Road for decades, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "A road by any other name would smell just as sweet.'
      Finally, the bomb sites that served as unofficial playgrounds and car parks have long gone - as has that lingering post-war sense of aftershock resulting from the port being half-blown out of existence by the Luftwaffe. It's possible that my interest in music is traceable to those Remembrance Day parades along the front, all the more proudly dignified since Dover started paying for the war, what with my mother, then a pram-pushing young housewife, having to negotiate a network of queues during the tightest period of the rationing that was to persist even after we moved in 1954 from an East Cliff flat to Forge Cottage opposite the Crown - which my paternal grandparents used to run  - in Eythorne, which remains as quiet a village now as it was then.

3. What made you go into the music industry?

Someone,  I forget who, wrote, "A dreamer is a madman in quiescence; a madman is a dreamer in action." The first indications of me putting action over dreaming was, I suppose, that time-honoured adolescent ritual of miming to records in front of a mirror to the delight of thousands of ecstatic females that only I could see.
      To cut to the chase, I'd bought into the myth that a kind of droit de seigneur prevailed if you were a pop star, a licence to to make contact with girls ogling with unmaidenly eagerness the enigma of untouchable boys-next-door. In other words, like most teenagers, I was motivated chiefly by self-love and sex.

4.       You’re famous for your books as well as your music and have written for many journals ranging from The Guardian and The Times to publications such as Mojo and Record Collector. Do you enjoy writing as much as you enjoy making music?

The answer to this question has to be 'I dunno' - because it depends upon so many variables - the mood of the hour; the degree of self-denial, self-motivation and hard graft a specific task requires; how many tedious mechanical processes accompany every creative act, and whether the result is worth it. Performing is no longer a case of 'enjoyment', but perhaps it never was. Instead, it's like being addicted as surely as a junkie is to heroin. Writing generates more income, and, sometimes, being hunched in front of a word-processor for hours on end is as much my idea of a good time as going up the pub might be to someone else. It's the same with composition.
 

5.       There are still people around today who say that Clayson and the Argonauts is one of the greatest groups ever formed. Can you describe what it was like to lead the legendary group?

Where do I begin?  The tip of an enormous iceberg embraces being hustled out of a palais in Reading at gunpoint because the promoter found our show so "rubbish" that he felt entitled not to pay us; on the point of national breakthrough, one key member being gaoled for fifteen months, and two others quitting, one of them fated to co-produce Hilda Baker and Arthur Ballard's chartbusting duet of "You're The One That I Want", and the other to father one of Girls Aloud; important media and music industry folk flocking round me like friendly if over-attentive wolfhounds; being spoken of and written about in the same sentences as Wreckless Eric, John Otway, Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello; three years of expecting to be on Top Of The Pops next week; a BBC Radio One In Concert and headlining at venues such as the Marquee, the 100 Club, Amsterdam's Melkweg and any number of university hops; taking the stage at Queen's College Belfast at the height of the Troubles, where an ecstatic audience was still demanding more after no less than six encores; being supported by what became The Eurythmics at some college function in the Midlands; more dates than could possibly be kept, always, so it seemed, one week after Wreckless Eric and one week before The Adverts; being catalysts in the wreckage of a Luton auditorium, a near-lynching at Barbarella's in Birmingham, and fisticuffs and a consequent car chase following a midnight matinee in Canning Town; a season in a red-light district sur le continent; a woman clambering on stage to tear off all her clothes at Islington's celebrated Hope-and-Anchor, and a bloke doing the same during almost-but-not-quite a riot at the Granary in Bristol; being in a premier position on rock's lunatic fringe" (Melody Maker) while running a provincial outfit most of the time from a telephone kiosk down the road; the van mutating into a travelling asylum with the drip-drip of those antagonisms, discords and intrigues that make pop groups what they are; a godawful one-shot single issued on Virgin Records against my better judgement; its B-side entering Belgium's Top Twenty fleetingly after a pirate radio presenter in the Netherlands began spinning it by mistake; a voyage to a lower circle of hell for me and an Argonauts in gradually more constant flux; rave reviews for What A Difference A Decade Made in both Folk Roots (!) and The Observer; receiving an agitated call from our road manager to say that, while he was loading up the previous night, £500-worth of borrowed microphones had been stolen, and lastly, with our very name a millstone round our necks, making a seemingly final public appearance on 20th January 1986 after ten years as a working band. By then, we were like a soldier that had been fatally wounded, but kept fighting, not knowing how severe the injury was. To all intents and purposes, we'd been over for ages, a faded memory, a tattered newspaper cutting. Thus we scattered like vermin disturbed in a granary. All that was left - until now - were some scratched vinyl and the sound of our aural junk-sculptures as a spooky drift from the shadows in some lonely back-of-beyond dance hall, maybe one refurbishment away from demolition...

6. What made you want to reform in 2005?

A telephone call from out of the blue that summer from Damaged Goods, a London record company, resulted in the release before the year was out of Sunset On A Legend, a double-CD retrospective. This exhumation of a chapter in my life that I imagined was dead and buried also involved a regrouping of key personnel for what amounted to a belated 'farewell performance' at the Metro, an ultra-trendy West End venue. While it was hardly Pink Floyd at Live 8, we fired on all cylinders to a capacity crowd of all ages. The president of my long-defunct US fan club flew in from Minnesota with her niece. Other parties arrived from as far away as Scotland and France. Since then, there's been more 'farewell performances' than Frank Sinatra - and an in-concert DVD will be in the shops in the New Year.

7. You have worked with many different artists. Do you have a particular favourite experience.

I've a particularly peculiar one, although it didn't involve any of the more famous artists with whom I've worked. These, incidentally, have included Screaming Lord Sutch, Dave Berry, The Yardbirds, Twinkle, The Troggs and Dartford's own Dick Taylor, founder member of both The Rolling Stones and The Pretty Things - and the most accomplished guitarist with whom I've ever trodden the boards - plus others whom I'd known first as figures on a television screen when I was still at school.
      In spring 2003, Bob Taylor, a former member of The Downliners Sect, summoned me to a studio in Brompton to assist with his hitherto unreleased 'concept album' of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Attending too were Art Wood - brother of Rolling Stone Ronnie - Dick Heckstall-Smith of Colosseum and two of a still-functional Downliners Sect. The five of us were required to congregate round an omni-directional microphone to re-enact the Battle of Hastings by bawling scripted lines actually in Anglo-Saxon. It got very frenzied and degenerated into chaos, but Bob - who videoed our efforts - seemed pleased with the outcome, and, in licensed premises afterwards, Art spoke for all of us when he calculated that it had been the strangest session in which he'd ever participated during a long, if sporadic, career as a recording artist.
  
PS: I'd like to say a big 'hello' to The Record Players, a combo from Thanet, who supported Clayson and the Argonauts on a memorable 1977 night at Margate's Dreamland.

8. What do you think lies ahead for you now?

As a performance artist, my working life has been so unpredictable and eye-stretching that if I was engaged to play at a ballroom on Pluto tomorrow, it might not seem all that odd. At present, I'm preparing material for another solo album to be produced by Wreckless Eric.
      I'm also working on a commissioned autobiography with the working title Nut Rocker . Another publisher is "interested" in a Clayson novel written about ten years ago, which gathered consequent dust until I re-read it a few weeks ago.