A Conversation with The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling – HuffPost 6.20.14

Mike Ragogna: Dave, you’re doing a pledge campaign tied into your new album?

Dave Wakeling: We are, indeed. This pledge campaign is to attract Medicci-like benefactors who pledge to buy the album in advance for any of the exciting premiums we put in, like you can shred guitars with Dave for an afternoon or you can go for dinner with me or you can travel on the tour bus for a couple of days or travel in the van in California. We’ve always been quite close to the people who come to our concerts, we’re pretty easy to get hold of, but this takes it a step further, now. It’s quite been fun. People can come to the studio and sing on the chorus of a song, for example, and depending on how good their voice is that’s how loud it will be in the mix.

MR: What is it that you’re expecting ultimately from this?

DW: We’ve got demos of about twenty songs and we’re feeling thoroughly confident, I must say, that we’ll use those demos and play them and put the lyrics up on the pledge page. It’s a way of trying to attract people to pledging for the project by giving them access to the behind the scenes, warts and all. Well, hopefully no warts. I think it’s really quite interesting because the record company largesse is taken out in a way, isn’t it? Everybody pledges to buy an album for ten bucks and that actually pays for the studio to make the record. I like it. It’s another different thing that’s happening with the twenty-first century, isn’t it. The record industry has turned on its head somewhat. It’s still the same thing, it’s not completely different, it’s just a hundred eighty degrees different.

MR: What do you think about that? What do you think about being a band in this environment versus when you had a different recording and marketing paradigm?

DW: I prefer it. Don’t get me wrong, the record company business was terrific, but then you realized you were paying for everything a couple of years later. So that part of it wasn’t that much fun. But there was something charming about a young executive being willing to lend four alcoholics half-a-million dollars to see if they could remember any of their tunes when they get to the studio. That was very decent of them. So they did have their role, but there’s something clean about this that’s nice. It’s not all bribery and money under the table; it’s pretty straightforward. I think it’s a little bit like working live on the road, I’m now doing the traditional ceremony of playing, going home to the tour bus and I’m now at Wal-Mart buying myself flour, soup and a pair of dumb bells. I’m thinking of getting some of these kettle bells. They’re new, aren’t they? Have you ever used them?

MR: Yeah.

DW: What do you think? Do you like them?

MR: You have to be very careful to do it right, otherwise you can hit yourself in a very bad spot.

DW: [laughs] I was just trying it as you said that, it’s not good. I’m sticking with the regular blue ten-pounders and such. You can’t do that in the back of the bus. You can’t swing a cat in the back of the bus. In fact, there’s a sign, “No logs in the bog and no swinging cats,” or something like that.

MR: Are there rituals that you don’t want to violate after all these years?

DW: There are rituals, yes, but they’re all mainly to do with violation. That’s why we all end up in groups. Let’s cut to the chase here: Anybody in a group, anybody who works with groups, deals with groups, writes about groups or even goes to watch groups and listens to music are basically a sociopath. Something happened at a very young age that made us run to music from the awful pressures to whatever it was that was going on outside. Take all that with a pinch of salt. That’s all we risk now, is a pinch of salt. We can’t risk anything stronger than that now.

MR: The English Beat is considered one of the great ska bands, though your music has other influences like punk and reggae.

DW: We wanted to mix it up, you know? We wanted a punky reggae party and it came out very similar to a ska beat, sort of up-four peppy beat with an equal off beat hitting with the on beat. On this new album I’m to try to see if I can get what I originally wanted: I wanted the Velvet Underground jamming with Toots & The Maytals. That’s what I wanted. I wanted the urban angst that I felt from Birmingham, but I wanted the uplifting sense of life and joy and survival from Toots & The Maytals’ rhythm section. I wanted those two bands jamming together and then I would sing over the top of course like Bryan Ferry or Van Morrisson or one of those.

MR: In the United States, your music was featured in High Fidelity, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…

DW: …and Clueless, that’s the big one. “Tenderness” was in Clueless, and then you’ve got Gross Pointe Blank and then the Scooby Doo episode entitled “Dance Of The Undead,” which is probably my greatest artistic creation to date, frankly. There are two songs in this battle of the bands and the songs are so well-matched against each other it takes Scooby Doo to come in on all fours–or the two back ones, anyway–shredding guitar to win it for the Hex Girls versus the power of the song we wrote. That was really one of my proudest moments.

MR: There’s something about The English Beat meeting Scooby Doo that just seems right.

DW: I met one of the original writers who drew me a very nice picture and he told me a lot of stories about those original sessions at Hanna-Barbara in the valley, and I’m right on the same page. I knew it even as a kid, but when I checked, yep, I knew it.

MR: When you look at The English Beat now versus when you started it, what are the differences?

DW: I never guessed that I would write a song that anybody would hear other than the other people who were stupid enough to join a pop group with me. So for them to come out and for people to like the songs and it goes on for a few years and then really famous people cover your songs and it’s still on the radio when it’s twenty or thirty years later, it really is the greatest gift that a troubadour could ever hope for. You hope to wander round the world singing your odes or whatever they are and you hope that you touch hearts along the way. I’m honored and sort of humbled, which is weird for me. I don’t get humbled that often. Only by women. They’re very good at humbling me.

MR: Are any of the songs in particular that you love to play live?

DW: Yeah! Especially these last couple of weeks, because I just started talking to a producer called Dubmatix, out of Toronto. We started working up some versions from the demos and I’m just on fire with it. He’s a great musician and he’s got a ton of really good samples. I heard stuff while I was writing the songs and I wanted to include it to set the mood and the atmosphere. There’s a song called “Said We Would Never Die,” and in my head as I was singing it, I could hear a breathing machine in an ICU and I heard an old-fashioned sixties black and white English movie ambulance siren and the beep-beep of the machines, and it made an orchestra of medical emergency sounds. We’ve been working on that this last couple of days and he’s done a fantastic job. I told him, “Black and white English movie rainy day ambulance siren” and it was just the absolute perfect one. You could almost see the film. [siren noises] “I say, sir, are you having some trouble? Tally-ho! White Hall double two, double two!”

MR: Do you feel like modern technology has actually enhanced The Beats’ sound or creativity?

DW: I think it’s enhanced everything. It’s allowed the classic songs to get more life and breath and radio stations with wider and deeper playlists have ended up championing some of the songs. They weren’t always top forty monsters at the time, IRS records hadn’t really joined that game. We were college darlings and we made top two hundred on the billboard chart quite often, so we felt jealous at the time, I’ll be honest, because a lot of songs that were getting that top forty push weren’t as good. The massive hits rode more on the strength of their haircuts than their lyrics I thought. But anyway, you soaked it up, and the shows did well and our albums did well, but we never made any singles business. Now I feel happier with each year because I get to hear more and more of our songs on classic rock radio and I hear less and less of the ones that seemed like they were just trying it on at the time. “Wear this shirt, it should sound like this shirt.” “Okay, I’ve got it.” It just seemed a little slavish. Certainly I was jealous and now I don’t feel so bad about it because our songs have prevailed and of course I got a couple of really nice mentions. I always thought I was going to have to pay somebody to say it, but they brought out a best-of box set, a very nicely done job by Shout! Factory. Rolling Stone gave it a smashing review and said, “Wittily savage as Costello.” It was like, “Hello, there we go, me and Declan on the same page. Exactly. We just did a tour in England and a fellow from The Quietus magazine enjoyed the show, thank heavens, and said I was to be spoken of in the same breath as the greats of the genre; Weller, Strummer, Wakeling, which sounds like a company of accountants, doesn’t it? But it had a ring to me. Weller, Strummer, Costello, Wakeling. Yeah, there you go, that’s what I always thought. [laughs]

So here we are, I’m really glad that I still have both knees operating, I can still skank, I’m singing better than ever, which is remarkable, and enjoying myself on stage more than ever. The band is tighter than it’s ever been, there’s a really nice vibe. I just got on the bus today and everybody’s thrilled because they got a big wide bunk bed instead of a narrow one, so they’re all thrilled. I’m nearly at the end of my Wal-Mart ritual, I didn’t really buy much, some soup, some fruit, some almonds and walnuts, a kettle, an ab-roller. I have some remedial work to do, to be honest. I stopped drinking rather abruptly last September–again. I lost an enormous amount of weight, but sadly the weight didn’t send a message to my skin that it wasn’t needed so I’ve got to work on my tummy next. it’s a shame, it was just the right size when I was overweight from the beer, When I had a pot belly, the skin was just perfectly formed around it and quite soft. Now, oh dear, no. So I’ve given myself a challenge, frankly, there’s a lot of stuff going on between now and the record coming out in February and one of the things is I’m going to get this stomach looking great or else I’m going to get it made to look great. The challenge is on, I’m going to see what I can do.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

DW: Well, you have to work on a song all night until the hairs go up on your neck. If the hairs don’t go up on your neck, don’t put any more time into that one. If you’re going to try and write something that moves other people, you have to write something that has quite a dramatic effect on yourself. It has to give you quite a jolt when you write it, “Whoa, blimey! That’s a little edgy, Dave!” Or it makes you cry or you might be crying when you write it. So it has to be loaded with emotion. You don’t want to waste a word in a song, really. One bad line’s enough to take away the power of the two around it. You have to weigh every word. It takes me about ten minutes to write a song and then about nine months to finish it. That can include a week, really, of wondering if something should be sung as a semi colon or a comma, and I just drive myself nuts over it. You can’t sleep, you’re wandering around chain-smoking, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing!” You don’t dare tell them it’s because you don’t know whether to use the word “yet” or “but.” [laughs] But it seems important at the time. I just think the nicest things are complicated things that come across as simple. What I really dislike is really simple things that are all tarted-up to look really complicated. That’s something I think you need to do. You need to put an enormous amount of work into it to make it feel effortless. That’s probably true for everything, but it’s definitely true for writing a song.

MR: What does the future look like for David Wakeling and for The English Beat?

DW: I’m doing everything that I want, I can’t imagine doing anything else. At the moment, I think I’m just intrigued by, “How do we make this record?” How do you make a statement that resonates with people who liked your records thirty years ago and still might but are different? And at the same time, how do you make a record that sounds like it’s this year? In the same way as in 1979, I didn’t want to sound like it was 1963 from Kingston, Jamaica. Now I don’t want to sound like Birmingham in 1979 because I want to be from California in 2014, so that’s the challenge–how to finesse that. That’s keeping me excited at the moment. One of the funniest bits of songwriting is the presentation. You’ve got somebody who’s got every sound in the world as a sample at their fingertips and they say, “Right, 1963 ambulance with a Boeing jet and two eggs frying,” and he can just do that and sing over the top of it. With the more options you’ve got the more diligence you’ve got to have. With each new idea for a song, on goes the headphoens and you’ve got to try and feel what that part does to me whilst I’m singing it and carefully think about instrumentation. I think with this record I wanted to try and make it so the vocals and the melodies are what come straight at you and everything else is around it dramatically to support and project. I think there are some really great pop records being made at the moment that manage to do that quite well and not necessarily having a whole band going, “One, two, three, four,” and everybody just starts at the beginning and stops at the end. They’re going to be constructive songs that have the minimum amount of support to make it appear effortless. It’s going to take an enormous amount of hard work to get to that point but we’ll get it. “Let the songs lead the way,” is what we normally say. “Does that make the hair go up on your neck more, or less?” If it makes the hair go up more you’re probably on the right track.

MR: Nice. We talked about a lot of things, is there something we didn’t cover?

DW: No, I’ve been busily going down the cleaning aisle and there’s not much controversy there. You’ll be pleased to know that Wal-Marts are starting to get a number of more organic and planetary options. I managed to get some surface wipes that are just made of lemongrass and thyme. Even at Wal-Mart they’re starting to be different.

MR: Guess everything evolves.

DW: You know, apart from me, sometimes. I get stuck. But yeah, just like Huffington Post, I remember when that started I was like, “Oh, that’s quite a good idea!” Now, it’s like the biggest news thing in the world. It’s kind of nice with all those correspondents and people being able to get involved and connect. It’s a bit like this pledge thing. They’re early days yet but I think it’s a sign of new society. To be honest, I don’t know whether we’ll have a chance to see it through. Some of the naysayers would rather stand in the jolly-good circle and execute each other. Shoot some sense into each other, that’s the only language some people understand. We might have to deal with that bunch, but there are some very interesting evolutionary changes going on. But my kids in California, for example, I find them very interesting because they don’t refer to any of their friends by what color they are. They don’t notice. It’s not a point of reference now. For my parents, it was a point of reference on who you didn’t speak to. “Oh, is that your black friend, then?” But now they don’t notice. They’re in the California sunshine so they’re all kind of the same color anyway, but they don’t notice. I just think that’s amazing. You sit in and listen sometimes, and the contents of their character is more important than the color of their skin. That’s how teenagers are now in America, that’s evolution.

MR: It’s a great thing. It seems like the people who will just go down swinging on stuff like that are people who were born in a certain era and they’ve seemed to all gravitated to these paranoid, fringe associations.

DW: I think you’re right. But things are moving generally in the right direction, though like you say, some people are afraid of social change. Most often, they’re people who have been brainwashed by their parents in one way or the other. I think they’re fascinating times and thank heavens we’ve got stuff like Pledge Music and stuff like Huffington Post and all sorts of different ways now to share and create information, which I think is all for the good. I’m pleasantly excited. And I’m pleased that I’ve done a very specific Wal-Mart run. I haven’t bought any junk food. I used to have somebody come to Wal-Mart with me and we always used to end up with four hundred bucks worth of junk food, but I haven’t got any junk food at all tonight, I’ve got fruit and nuts and healthy organic soups, I even bought a box of green tea but we’ll see about that. Only if all the rest of the tea and the coffee’s run out. But no, we’re going to try it, come on.

MR: I wish you luck with everything. The album’s coming in February?

DW: Yes, but if you go onto the pledge site we’re going to start putting up demos of the songs and lyrics of the songs and we’ll be showing little bits from the studio. From now, anybody who wants to pledge to buy the album or any of the other fancy prizes get to watch an inside scoop as it were on the making of the record and the demos and even interviews.

MR: This has been wonderful. I really appreciate your time, and let’s chat again in February when the album comes out!

DW: That would be great, man! It’s going to come out ostensibly the seventeenth, which is equidistant between my birthday on the nineteenth and Valentine’s on the fourteenth. I thought that was an auspicious week, so that’s what we’re aiming for. Who knows when it really comes out? When it’s done. That’s the plan, some time around then.

MR: Thank you so much for your time, Dave!

DW: Absolutely perfect timing, all the stuff’s being put into the Wal-Mart bag. That was good, I managed to do all my shopping and I spoke to a very nice fellow who contributes to one of the most powerful news media organizations in the world. You get to do some good things when you’re a singer.

MR: Oh, you…

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne