UNCUT  February 2004

I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD

WRECKLESS ERIC

The loose cannon in Stiff Records’ notoriously eccentric roster, Eric Goulden epitomised the freewheeling spirit of punk with 1977's raggedly charming “Whole Wide World”. When success proved elusive, he quit the business in 1980, a raging alcohol problem in tow. Resurfacing in the mid-‘80s with Captains Of Industry and The Len Bright Combo, he settled in France before returning to Blighty in 1998. Fresh from a successful tour, Goulden has just published a dryly evocative autobiography, and is due to release a solo album this March.

  “With Stiff Records you felt like part of something very special and ‘now’. Their immediacy was terribly exciting. We were taking the piss out of straight companies like Phonogram and A&M. But post-Jake Riviera the establishment moved in. Suddenly the place was staffed by people who used to work at those companies. It was no longer the vibe I knew or understood. One day I realised I’d turned into this R&B power pop twit. And I didn’t like it. I felt embarrassed by what I was doing.
  “When the Len Bright Combo split, I was having a nervous breakdown. I was splitting with my girlfriend (and mother of my daughter) and even though I’d been off

The thing is I thought Whole Wide World was a really class sounding record – I did plenty of others that could better be described as ‘raggedly charming’.

the booze for a while, everything else was getting strange. I’d decided to quit music and go to teacher training college, which was ridiculous. Luckily I completely cracked up before it really happened. I moved to London, ended up in hospital for a while, and put myself back together.
  “Then I had a French girlfriend who had a semi-derelict house 100km outside Paris and asked if I wanted to move in. I rented that house for seven years, but missed my friends. It wasn’t exactly easy to have a career in Europe and I needed to come back.
  “There’ll probably be another book, taking up where this one left off. That one took me two years to write, because I kept moving house to get away from it. I didn’t want to face it. When you delve into the past you realise that what you thought was truth wasn’t the truth and you have to figure it all out again. But I want to write about how how horrendous it was to crack up, before I went to France and got better.
  “Ambitions? In the corner of my mind – somewhere in brackets – there’s still this idea that I’d be slightly taller and really good-looking. I think now I’m starting to realise it might not happen. But it would be great to survive without getting any horrible illness and to have enough to live on. My ambition might be not to die of hypothermia under a cardboard sheet.

INTERVIEW: ROB HUGHES

My mum says I would have made a great teacher (cringe).

Lived in that house for 2 years, rented another for seven. That’s nine years in France.

I used to think that, but I’m perfectly tall enough as it is and I think I’m better looking than most though you wouldn’t believe it from the 1978 Stiff photo .