As part of the SUNSET ON A LEGEND  launch, Alan was interviewed by some bloke for 
 www.getreadytorock.com/features/alan_clayson.htm  It provides an interesting insight into the workings of Alan's psyche, complete with intriguing biographical information.

SAH: Your first band was Ace and the Crescents. Why did you decide 
that rock and roll was the game for you? 

Alan Clayson: Ace and the Crescents consisted of me and other pupils 
at a truly desperate grammar school for boys near Aldershot. Like a 
lot of such establishments in the mid-1960s, it was a cross between an 
army detention barracks and a sort of homosexual dating bureau. Our 
principal motivation for starting the group was because we thought it 
would give us greater licence to talk to girls. 

SAH: You say you learned showmanship from seeing the Mothers of 
Invention. What provoked you so much? 

Alan Clayson: How do such obsessions start? I used to be a fan of The 
Dave Clark Five because a Boy Scout patrol leader I admired said he 
liked them. After that, I followed the Five's chart fortunes as other 
lads would a football team, always ready with a plausible excuse why 
an increasing number of their records weren't hits. 

Then came the day in 1966 when I travelled over the edge of the 
world to Swinging London from a distance measurable in years as 
much as miles from the country town in Hampshire where I was 
raised. In a booth in the HMV record shop along Oxford Street, I heard 
side one of Freak Out! by The Mothers Of Invention, which led me to 
attend their first British concert a year later. 

This was a pivotal event that informed not so much my artistic 
direction as an attitude about presentation. Through received advice 
from Frank Zappa, the Mother Superior, I also became an even more 
"difficult" teenager during a running battle about haircuts, Church 
attendance and other issues with a mother who swore she'd die of 
shame if ever I appeared onstage with as pop group. 

SAH: Somehow you ended up in a folk-rock outfit, Turnpike. What on 
earth possessed you to do that? 

Alan Clayson: I imagined, wrongly, that it might be possible to impose 
my own ideas and personality upon the established status quo of 
Turnpike's stylistic determination and the rhythm guitarist's 
songwriting monopoly. However, it turned out that he and most of the 
others were anxious to be rid of me as soon as someone more suitable 
came to light - such as a girl singer who doubled on flute. 

Turnpike's subsequent history was punctuated with passionate 
menages a trois with consequent punch-ups, walk-outs, malicious 
glee, back-stabbing, constant jockeying for position, primadonna 
tantrums and all the other intrigues and conspiracies that make pop 
groups what they are. 

SAH: Then on to the legendary Billy and the Conquerors, your 
personal favourite of all your bands. Tell us more? 

Alan Clayson: In 1972, Billy and the Conquerors smouldered into form 
as an escape valve from the earnestness of Turnpike, and because 
myself and others of the same passion had started scouring junk 
shops, deletion racks, charity stalls and jumble sales for overlooked 
artefacts from earlier musical eras: anything to keep the ghastly 
"Woodstock Generation" present at arm's length. 

From this evolved attempts at reproducing the outmoded sounds on 
guitar, voice and piano. At some point during the fun and games, we 
mulled over suitable names for a group that could perform these 
numbers, and someone suggested "Billy and the Conquerors". 
However, the consequent story of this astonishing ensemble must wait 
for my autobiography. 

SAH: Then it was (briefly) Average Joe and the Men in the Street 
before you finally arrived at the Argonauts. What were you thinking 
about? 

Alan Clayson: Billy and the Conquerors became so cumbersome that 
preparation for every performance was like a military operation. To 
all intents and purposes, the group was no more when a Melody Maker 
Battle of the Bands tournament was looming. Therefore, I assembled 
a quartet containing the most committed Conquerors to give 'em 
approximations of "The Story Of My Life", "Just Walkin' In The Rain" 
and "Red Sails In The Sunset". Random notes chased up and down 
fretboards to unco-ordinated, relentless drumming. On the spot, one 
of the judges offered us a booking at some funny party he was 
attending in West London the following night. More importantly, Allan 
Jones, then awaiting his destiny as Melody Maker's editor, wanted to 
put us in the finals. Though he was over-ruled, he hadn't forgotten 
Average Joe when I wrote to him a few months later with news of 
Clayson and the Argonauts' London debut at the 100 club on the ninth 
of January 1977. 

SAH: Amazingly, you were actually getting some positive press at the 
time. Did you ever think you would actually make it? 

Alan Clayson: What do you mean, "amazingly"? Very quickly, we'd 
become a very "happening" group, having become too hot for our 
native Berkshire to hold, even if, only a fortnight before the 100 Club 
engagement, we'd been hustled out of a venue in Reading at gunpoint 
by a promoter who'd found the show so "rubbish" that he felt entitled 
not to pay us. On this threshold of eminence too, one Argonaut was 
jailed for fifteen months, and two others quit; one of them fated to 
co-produce Hilda Baker and Arthur Mullard's chartbusting duet of 
"You're The One That I Want", another to father a future member of 
Girls Aloud. 

Nevertheless, after a glowing review in the New Musical Express of a 
performance in Guildford, and a full-page feature in Melody Maker, we 
spent the next three years expecting to be on Top Of The Pops next 
week. 

SAH: You even blagged a Radio 1 In Concert spot. What the...? 

Alan Clayson: See above. The consequent sweep of events also 
embraced headlining at places of legend like the Marquee - where, 
once, a handful of girls screamed non-ironically at me - the 
Roundhouse and Amsterdam's Melkweg as well as any number of 
university hops - such as that at Queen's College, Belfast at the height 
of the Troubles, where an apparently ecstatic audience were still 
demanding more after six encores. In parenthesis, what became The 
Eurythmics warmed up for us at some college ball in the Midlands. 

SAH: This was a time of punk and new wave. How did you manage to 
get booked? 

Alan Clayson: Our stage act defied succinct description, and, crucially, 
I was being written of in the same sentences as the likes of Wreckless 
Eric, John Otway, Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello. I'm not making 
this up, but media folk started flocking round me like friendly if over-
attentive wolfhounds. For the group and I, there were more dates that 
could possibly be kept, always, it seemed, one week after Wreckless 
Eric and one week ahead of The Adverts. 

En route, we experienced the wreckage by an over-excited crowd of a 
Luton auditorium; a near-lynching at Barbarella's in Birmingham; a 
punch-up and correlated car chase after a midnight matinee in 
Canning Town; a season in a red-light district sur le continent (our 
"Hamburg" period); some woman clambering onstage to tear off 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. 

Soon, we were past resistance to the circumstances that had made it 
impossible - for me, anyway - to go back to a previous existence of 
get-up-get to work-get home-get to bed groundhog days. If the van 
had drawn up outside a ballroom on Pluto, it mightn't have seemed all 
that odd. 

SAH: Your recorded output was limited including a cover of Wild Man 
Fischer's 'The Taster', and the B-side actually cracked the Belgian top 
20. Do you ever get invited on to the Belgian equivalent of "Pop 
Years"? 

Alan Clayson: Our recorded output also included an EP (Last 
Respects), an album (What A Difference A Decade Made) and tracks 
on "various artists" compilations, not to mention my solo releases. 

"Landwaster", the B-side you mentioned, spent a fortnight in the 
Belgian Top Twenty as a result of a disc-jockey on a pirate radio 
station in the Netherlands spinning it in error instead of the official A-
side, the Song That Dare Not Speak Its Name. He'd been impressed by 
our show during a tour of Holland in autumn 1977. However, our chart 
placing was so fleeting that it didn't warrant a television appearance. 
Yet, when I was in the country as Dave Berry's keyboard player in the 
mid- to late 1980s, I was interviewed several times about Clayson and 
the Argonauts by journalists from Dutch and Belgian fanzines. 

SAH: Then it was over, bar irregular attempts at comebacks including 
an actual album in 1985. What made you keep coming back for more? 

Alan Clayson: I have been sufficiently famous - if that is the word - 
not to be able to walk away from it. Besides, as a solo attraction I was 
- and am being - paid as if I was a group. Also, some of my 
compositions have since been "covered" and revived by other artists, 
most conspicuously Dave Berry, Stairway (New Age ensemble), Jane 
Relf (ex-Renaissance) and, this very year, Joy Tobing, Indonesian 
winner of Pop Idol. 

SAH: You also kept gigging with the likes of the late Screaming Lord 
Sutch's Savages. Any happy / unhappy / legally prohibited memories 
from your stints on Sounds of the 60s roadshows? 

Alan Clayson: Once, again, much of this will have to wait for my 
autobiography. Generally, it was often a strange experience 
appearing on the boards with people who'd once been only televisual 
figures during my turbulent adolescence. 

Dick Taylor (Pretty Things), Jim McCarty (Yardbirds), Twinkle and 
Dave Berry became friends for life - and so did poor David Sutch, with 
whom I spoke hours before his apparent suicide. 

SAH: Is this the last hurrah, or are you planning more musical activity? 

Alan Clayson: Only a vast amount of money or a charity close to my 
heart will make me reconstitute Clayson and the Argonauts after this 
present flurry of activity. However, there has never been any doubt 
about my continuation as a solo entity. Stay tuned to HYPERLINK 
"http://www.alanclayson.com"http://www.alanclayson.com. The big 
news in 2006 is the recording of a new Clayson album to be produced 
by Wreckless Eric. 

SAH: Any last words for the readers? 

Alan Clayson: Listen to my records. Go to my concerts. Read my books. 

SAH: Thanks to Tanya Reed for arranging the interview, you can order 
the CD from Amazon. 

Interview © 2006 Stuart A Hamilton