Punk
pioneer Wreckless Eric has lost none of his riotous, righteous anger
26 years after shooting to fame with debut hit Whole Wide World.
The Newhaven-born singer, real name Eric Goulden, is planning a triumphant
Brighton home-coming gig next month. He is half-way through writing and recording
a new album, is about to re-release two of his LPs and has just published his
autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success. A compilation of sessions he recorded
for the BBC has also just hit the shops.But
Wreckless Eric remains restless Eric as he revealed during an interview with
The Argus from his Norfolk home.
Among
the targets of his scattergun fury were modern culture heroes Harry
Potter and Robbie Williams, Seventies pop bands, former label-mate
Elvis Costello and the town of Lewes.
Eric returned to his South
Coast roots while writing the autobiography and remains proud of being “a
Newhaven boy” despite moving to Peacehaven aged four.
He developed his love of pop
music while scouring Brighton’s record shops during the Sixties,
spending his evenings at rock clubs, entranced by the likes of David
Bowie and Pink Floyd.
But Peacehaven and Lewes occupy
less fond places in his memory. In his book, just published by The
Do Not Press, he writes, “I wanted jeans. But jeans were common – Newhaven
boys wore jeans. Newhaven boys didn’t talk properly – they
didn’t pronounce their Ts … They said words like ‘bugger’ in
public. ..And they dropped their aitches. They did these things because
they were common. The trouble was, I was born in Newhaven, I was a
Newhaven boy. You can take the boy out of Newhaven, but don’t
ever take the p***.”
Eric, now 49, told The Argus “I
used to hate living in Peacehaven. It was boring, though I suppose
when you’re a kid you always hate where you live. You think everyone’s
having a good time somewhere else.”
Eric’s parents sent
him to a private Catholic school, Xavarian College in Queen’s
Park, Brighton, run by an order of monks. He returned recently to where
the school used to stand, now a set of Barratt homes, and was surprised
by the affection he had felt for the place. It was only when he passed
his 11+ and was offered a place at Lewes County Grammar School for
Boys that his “devastating unhappiness” began. He described
being bullied by teachers and fellow pupils for his lack of height
and his glasses, surrounded by a town he despised. He said, “I
still think Lewes is a ghastly place, full of people who think it’s
the cultural epicentre of the world. It isn’t and they’d
do well to remember that.”
It was pop music that offered
Eric an escape, with a crucial part played by the opening of a Virgin
record store opposite the Clock Tower in Brighton, the first outside
London. He said “Virgin was the first record shop I ever went
into where you could hear whatever you wanted and listen to music all
day.
“ Brighton was just fantastic
for music. The Brighton Dome put on loads of really good concerts and
there were great clubs like Jimmy’s in Steine Street and The
Bird’s Nest.”
Aged 14, Eric began attending
Saturday morning classes at the Art School in Brighton because his
heroes Ray Davies, John Lennon and Pete Townsend had all been to art
school.
A decade later, his puck contemporaries
The Clash would famously declare: “No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling
Stones”. Eric, while a great admirer and friend of The Clash,
did not share their trashing of such Sixties icons. He was devoted
to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks and The Yardbirds
and had what he describes as “an unhealthy obsession with Dusty
Springfield”.
He did, however, suffer a
childhood trauma when his dreams of having The Beatles to tea were
dashed. Ahead of their gig at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1963, he wrote
to the Fab Four explaining he lived nearby and asked them to pop by.
He said: “Being only about nine at the time, I convinced myself
that when I arrived home they’d all be sitting there. I was devastated
when they weren’t.”
Having decided from a young
age that he was going to be a musician, he took up the guitar and began
jamming with local bands. He made his on-stage debut as a 15 year old
playing between trad jazz acts at a pub called The Gay Highlander in
Peacehaven, now The Sussex Coaster.
“ It actually went all
right. Being 15, I got the sympathy vote. It was later on that I realised
it was more difficult than I thought. When I went to college in Hull
and began playing in bands there, you definitely didn’t get the
sympathy vote. You’d get people wanting to beat you up.”
He gained confidence after
watching Kilburn and the High Roads perform at Hove Town hall in 1974. “I
realised you didn’t have to be the most accomplished musician
in the world. What was more important was a kind of honesty.”
That rough-and-ready approach
chimed perfectly with the emerging punk movement. After an apprenticeship
in failed bands such as Addis and the Flip Tops, Eric’s breakthrough
came when he walked into the offices of the newly-formed Stiff Records
in 1976. He said: “I just walked in off the street gave them
a cassette of my songs and they signed me up.”
That cassette included Whole
Wide World, which begins with Eric bawling: “When I was a young
boy my mama said to me, there’s only one girl in the world for
you and she probably lives in Tahiti.”
His mother Dorothy really
told him that. The song was released as his debut single in August
1977 and topped the alternative charts. It has since been covered by
The Monkees, The Lightning Seeds and many garage bands, while Sir Cliff
Richard also wanted to record a version.
Eric cannot recall who gave
him the Wreckless tag, but remembers: “You never did anything
under your real name because you were signing on the dole and they’d
get you for it”.
The B-side to Whole Wide World
was Semaphore Signals, produced by Ian Dury who also played drums on
it. The pair remained friends until Dury’s death from cancer
three years ago and Eric has performed many gigs with The Blockheads
in memory of their late singer.
A contemporary he has much
less time for is Elvis Costello who was also signed to Stiff and was
teamed up with Eric for a tour in 1977. Eric said: “I think he’s
just completely boring. I’ve never seen songwriting as a habit.
I stopped for about four years and only started again when I felt I
really wanted to. I remember when he said he’d written 40 songs
in two weeks.”
Eric does not like to be pigeonholed
as part of the punk package and believes the era is often misinterpreted.
He said “I don’t really feel I had much to do with punk
as a musical style, at least not as it developed. What I saw myself
as part of was that whole new DIY approach which came in and shook
things up.
I used to love soul music,
R&B and a lot of old pop music. What we were reacting against were
the most pompous progressive rock bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer,
Genesis and Yes. I always loved David Bowie and Slade but then you
also got these horrible glam bands like Showaddywaddy and the The Rubetttes
and the old hideous pastiche stuff like Manhatten Transfer.
Among his biggest supporters
is Brighton-based Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale, who stole a life-sized
cardboard cut-out of Eric from an in-store record company display.
Despite having minor hits
with 1978 album Wreckless Eric and 1980s Big Smash, as music tastes
changed and the once trendy Stiff became derided, Eric’s star
began to fade.
Time Out magazine constantly
referred to him as “Stiff’s loveable small person”,
while the NME described his as “a belligerent, alcoholic dwarf” and
handed him a special “dead but won’t like down” award.
His dependence on drink and
drugs accelerated his decline, culminating in a disastrous drunken
performance in Scotland in the mid-Eighties which convinced him to
give up alcohol. He clashed with a band called the Brighton Bottle
Orchestra, who were also on the bill, urinated in their bottles and
was thrown out of the venue.
“ It took me 12 years
of supposedly being adult to realise drinking isn’t very cool.” During
the Eighties he formed a band called The Len Bright Combo and is about
to re-release their two albums on his own record label, Southern Domestic.<
He has a recording studio
at home and is working on a new Wreckless Eric album. And if his fans
were worried the approach of his half-century might have mellowed him,
a Wreckless Eric rant would suggest otherwise. He said: “All
the stuff I’ve been writing for this new album is really about
quality of life because things are pretty cr***y at the moment. I’m
looking for a better life. I don’t want to be bombarded with
Robbie Williams, Harry Potter books and films and Lord of the F***ing
Rings. I don’t need Steps. I don’t need S Club F***ing
Seven. I don’t need the Big Brother house. I don’t need
several choices of places to buy food, f***ing vegetables that are
grown in unreal, plastic conditions in Holland.”
All of which promises a barnstorming
performance when he takes the stage of The Albert in Brighton on November
13.
INTERVIEW: AIDAN RADNEDGE
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