I feel like the work of James Stevenson has been with me as a soundtrack playing in the background pretty much all of my adult life: from Punk sounds of Chelsea and Generation X through to the pop of Kim Wylde to the band that most resonated with me at the time – the wonderful and unique Gene Loves Jezebel. I remember meeting the Cult on one of their Australian Tours a few years back and being more impressed with James touring with them than chatting to Ian or Billy, but I digress. James Stevenson’s journey through the world of rock has been a long and winding one and this year he’s put down a marker in the double album ’40 Years in the Rock and Roll Wilderness’ which tells the tale so far. We caught up with James just prior to the April 27th release to find out all about the story so far…
James: Hi Mark how you doing?
Mark: Not too bad, how’s things with you?
James: Good, same old same old, but going well.
Mark: I’ve had your career compilation ’40 Years in the Rock and Roll Wilderness’ a few weeks now, it’s a great collection and it took me right back.
James: Oh yeah, It was a bit of a bandy project, it took me a long time to get it together, about two years because I had to deal with the major labels and licensing and tracks and all that stuff, but yeah it’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time. There are some hits on there but there are also some obscure tracks that I thought were really good songs but that which really probably hadn’t been heard by that many people. So I just wanted to get them all on there as a history of my career you know. There’s 40 years worth!
Mark: The first time I came across you was through your work with Gene Loves Jezebel, I was a big fan back in the day, still have all the vinyl and absolutely loved the new album last year.
James: We never made it to Australia unfortunately.
Mark: Thankfully I was in the UK back then, I think the first time I saw you would have been on the ‘House of Dolls Tour’ in the late eighties.
James: End of ’87.
Mark: One of the biggest surprises for me about ’40 Years in the Rock and Roll Wilderness’ to give it it’s full title was that I never remembered that you’d played on Kim Wilde’s first album.
James: Yeah, and the second album, it was just coincidence really because Billy Idol had just left Generation X and gone to New York, and Mickie Most, who’s a famous British producer I was friends with his son Calvin and he rang me up and said that his Dad had just signed this new young girl singer and they were making a video for her first song ‘Kids in America’ and they needed a guitarist for the video. So I went down, was in the video, I didn’t actually play on that track, but then she called me in to play on the album, you know.
Mark: I think I read somewhere that you got pretty good at ‘miming’ guitar in those days?
James: Well yes, Kim didn’t play live until about two years in her career so when I was with her for a year all I did was go round the whole of Europe, ‘Kids in America’ was a hit everywhere, and we’d just do these TV shows, ‘cos Mickie Most just wanted her to have a band when she was on TV. So yeah, I was a successful ‘mimer’ for about a year but it was good fun and Kim’s brilliant, I’m still in touch but I don’t see her that often.
Mark: It all started even further back for you though with ‘Chelsea’ your first band and when I heard ‘Urban Kids’ again, the first track on the album, it brought it all back.
James: I was still at school when I joined Chelsea, It was a bit of a baptism by fire, you know. I was into the Punk thing that was exploding in London and that was all I was really into, listening to The Ramones and the New York Dolls and even before that the MC5 and The Stooges. And so when Punk happened I just wanted in so I joined Chelsea, and I still play with Chelsea sometimes. We actually just made a new album called ‘Mission Impossible’ which has had really good reviews. I think it’s the band’s 11th studio album so we’re still at it! Gene October is a bit older but still as good as he ever was!
Mark: In those very early days did you have a grand plan or even an incline that this was what you were going to spend the next 40 years doing?
James: Well not really, I’d been in Chelsea and I was probably about 20 and I’d been in the band a few years and I was sitting in the van driving home from a gig at about 3am and I thought “What the hell am I doing with my life?” When I was at school I’d scraped through a few exams so I had just about enough qualifications to get into University. So I actually applied to a few places thinking that I was going to go to University for a few years and see what happened. So I kind of left Chelsea and then the next think that happened was I got the call from Tony James from Generation X asking if I wanted to be in the band, and I thought “You know what? I think I’d rather do that than go to University” (laughs). So that was the end of my academic career right there.
Mark: Can you remember what you were going to do?
James: Yeah I was going to do this thing called PPE which is Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and I actually got offered a few places, you know, not in the best Universities, but some good courses, I’m not sure if it would have changed my life dramatically but when I got that call from Generation X I thought that being in a band with Billy Idol might be a bit cooler than University! And though that didn’t last long, only about six months, then I was back in the game and then I got the gig with Kim and I’ve been doing it ever since. And Mike Peters who’s the singer in The Alarm, his wife Joolz said to me that if you’re still doing it when you’re 40 then you’re doing it for the rest of your life.
Mark: I think she’s right. So the ‘miming’ with Kim, is that the most unusual thing you’ve ever done in your career?
James: Well it’s all part of the job really especially in those days, there were so many TV shows. When you do TV shows you’re lip-syncing to the track, you’re not actually playing. I remember doing a show with Generation X called the Oxford Roadshow and on that the band had to mime but Billy had to do a live vocal and he came in slightly too early! (laughs) and then at one point the music got to the chorus and he was still singing the verse, I think it’s on YouTube but it’s really funny and he covers himself really well. But yeah, miming is just something you have to do from time to time and even when I was in Gene Loves Jezebel and stuff you’d do a TV show and mime and of course it’s the same in promotional videos, you’re not playing live.
Mark: Talking of Gene Loves Jezebel, I always wondered how that all came about?
James: You know what I’ve been playing with Gene Loves Jezebel since 1985, and I don’t know if people know this but there’s two versions of the band with Jay’s brother Michael with his version in L.A. that we don’t feel has anything to do with us. It’s a complicated situation with Michael – we’re going over to the States to do our first show there in about ten years and he’s already trying to mess it up for us. At the end of the day he’s Jay’s twin brother and I don’t think they’ll ever repair their relationship and that’s such a tragedy. Gene Loves Jezebel was the first ever tour I did where we ended up in America in 1985, it was a bit of an accident because I had the same management as them and their guitarist suddenly left at the end of their European Tour and at the start of the American leg. Jerry said to me ‘James, you’re going to have to go out and save this tour’, and it really was like diving in at the deep end but we got through it – the tour was about two months long and then at the end of it they asked me to stay on. But that period from ’85 to the early ’90’s was such an amazing time. We had a lot of success in America and I remember that we sold out the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles in 1988 which is a 7000 capacity and we sold it out in 15 minutes. But then Michael kind of left or was pushed out of the band, and Jay sang most of the songs anyway and then we made a couple of albums just as a four-piece – 1990’s ‘Kiss of Life’ and then a kind of overlooked album called ‘Heavenly Bodies’ in 1993 and that’s actually my favourite Gene Loves Jezebel album, and then the new album ‘Dance Underwater’. We got together and made that, our first new studio album in 14 years!
Mark: I thought it was a great album, one of those albums that sounded like there had been no time in between releases, it sounded like you’d not missed a beat and was so like the previous release ‘Heavenly Bodies’ sonically.
James: Yeah, I love it! I also do this band called ‘Holy, Holy’ with Toni Visconti and Woody Woodmansey (the Drummer from The Spiders From Mars) which is awesome for me as Mick Ronson is my guitar hero, so to be in a band with the people that made those records and played on them is such an amazing thing. But there’s one song on the new Gene Loves Jezebel album called ‘How Do You Say Goodbye To Someone You Love’ that I was listening to and thinking, this is fantastic but what it really needs is one of Toni’s string arrangements on it. So I was doing a session as Toni has me down on some stuff that he produces and I said look we’ve got this track, it’s Gene Loves Jezebel, we’ve got no budget but it’s really crying out for one of your arrangements on it. So he said send me the track and he got back to me about three days later and said that he absolutely loved the track and he was going to do it. So he did the string arrangement on that and it is absolutely wonderful, especially because he had to do it for nothing (laughs)!
Mark: (laughs) It does sound wonderful but then so does the whole album, it’s a great collection of songs.
James: It does sound good and we got Pete Walsh to produce it who dd Heavenly Bodies, he’s a really good friend of mine and incredibly talented, he produced my solo album as well. So as soon as I knew that I knew that no matter what anyone thought of the songs or my voice at least it was gonna sound good! (laughs) He’s just the best at that.
Mark: I loved the title of your solo record “Everything’s Getting Closer to Being Over”!
James: People said to me “that’s too long you can’t call it that!” (laughs)
Mark: Do you have any plans for anything else, maybe another solo record? I know you’re incredibly busy with various projects.
James: I am gonna do another solo album, but I do want to do something very quickly. I’ve got a few new songs but not enough so I wanted to do something very different and I have spoken to Pete Walsh about this, I’ve got tons and tons of instrumental music so I’m thinking of doing an instrumental album. But I want to make it clear to everyone so I might call it “An album of music without vocals” or something!
Mark: (laughs) another great title.
James: I’ve also been working with Daphne Guinness who Toni Visconti is producing, so I’ve been working with her, then I’ve an American Tour with The Alarm staring in about three weeks so it’s a bit of a juggling act I feel like I’m in so many bands. But the music industry has changed beyond all recognition so to make a living you really have to go out and play live all the time now. Recorded music now is just really promotion for your live shows, it used to be the other way around, now it’s a complete 180 degrees change, you used to lose money on the road but you didn’t care because you’d sell millions of CDs.
Mark: But you seems to have it right, you’re keeping yourself busy and you’ve been managing that for years.
James: Yeah but it’s weird it seems the older I get the busier I seem to get, I don’t understand it really but I’m really glad and I think I’ve always been really, really lucky – when one thing fell apart, like in the mid 90’s when Gene Loves Jezebel’s label in New York called Savage Records, who also had David Bowie in the U.S. they went bust and Jay just said I want a break for a few years, and I thought God what do I do now? And literally a month later Billy Duffy from The Cult called me up and said “Hey we want an extra guitarist for this Cult World Tour, do you feel like doing that?” And I said “Yes!” So I’ve been lucky that something’s always come up when I thought everything had fallen apart.
Mark: And I think that would have been the first time I saw you when you did those Cult shows in Australia.
James: Yeah that was 2013 I think. I played with them twice back in ’94-’95 and then again in 2013-2014.
Mark: You seem to be cropping up with most of my favourite musicians, you also play in the International Swingers with my favourite drummer ever.
James: Oh yeah, Clem’s amazing. That came about completely by accident as well, Gary Twin, a really good friend of mine, he played in a band, an Australian band called Supernaut as he lived over there as a teenager and they had a few hits when he was about 17 and then he moved over to Los Angeles and he had this promoter friend who said, look rather than going out as Supernaut why don’t you put a new band together in L.A. with a few friends and play songs from each of their bands? So he got me, Clem and Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols and the first ever shows we played were in Australia.
Mark: I think I saw you at The Corner Hotel was it?
James: Oh is that in Melbourne? Yeah that sounds right, and we played in Geelong, Sydney and Adelaide but we didn’t get as far as Perth. It’s really good fun playing in that band, sometimes we’ll be in a gig and Clem will do something behind me and I’ll just think “Wow! That was amazing!” There’s a track on the record called Harry’s Room that has one of my all time favourite drum fills on it. Just before the guitar solo he does this drum fill that is absolutely incredible.
Mark: I think my favourite quote about you over the years is the one that says that you’ve played with about 72% of all known bands!
James: (laughs) That was a famous British journalist called Mick Mercer, he was doing a review of an album by The Alarm and it said in there that guitarist James Stevenson and then in brackets “Who has played with 72% of all known bands”. I now have a personalised pic and it has 72% on it! (laughs)
Mark: I guess he’s not too far wrong though, over the years as well as countless sessions you’ve played with artists as diverse as Gary Holton back in the day, Scott Walker which is amazing.
James: Yeah, I’ve played on a few by Scott. I first played with Scott because Pete Walsh produces him and Pete asked me to go down and play on an album called ‘The Drift’ and he has a very very different way of working Scott, he’s quite avant-garde and when you’re doing it, it doesn’t really make sense but when Pete mixes it and it all comes together it just becomes this incredible work of art and the the last one “Bish Bosh” its the same thing. So its been great to play with Scott and just before Gene Loves Jezebel Gary Holton who was the legendary singer with the band Heavy Metal Kids, who I was always a fan of as a kid, we did a few demos, we did about four songs and that track ‘Big Tear’ I’d forgotten all about it and then when I was putting this retrospective album together I just thought that this would be a great track to put on there as no one has ever heard it. It had never been released, only ever recorded as a demo. So a lot of people have come back to me and said that’s amazing, I didn’t know you played with Gary.
Mark: It was amazing because I knew you’d played with Jimmy Nail who starred with Gary in Auf Wiedersehen Pet the TV show.
James: Yeah I’m on Crocodile Shoes II, and all these things come about by chance, the guy who was producing that was a British producer called Steve Robson who I just knew and he said, ‘Look I just want some rock guitar on this album, can you come down’ and I said, ‘Yes’ and ironically I never even met Jimmy, he was never in the studio when I was, and that’s just the way it goes sometimes.
Mark: So how much of your career has been planned would you say?
James: Probably very little, I think this is true of any musician. A lot of it is just luck and chance, who you know and where you are at any given time. Just one example that springs to mind in the early 80’s, I was in the old Marquee Club, I used to be in there pretty much every might and there was this band in there called Fischer Z. They had a lot of success in Europe and their singer John Watts had just started his solo career and was just about to go off on a European Tour and I was drinking with him in the Marquee and he said, You know what, I could really use another guitarist. Would you like to go?’ And it was only because I was there and he saw me that night that gave him the idea, and then three weeks later we were off round Europe for a month.
Mark: Wind it all the way back for us James, when did you first pick up the guitar?
James: Probably when I was about 13, round about 1973, 74. First of all I was really into the Glam Rock thing when I was that young and when I saw David Bowie and Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops, that kind of polarized a whole generation, when they went and kissed each other at the end of that show the next day at school half the people were like, ‘Did you see that it was disgusting’ and the other half were like ‘Wow that’s amazing!’ (laughs). For me it changed my life and at the same time my best friend at school Noel bought an electric guitar and he said, ‘You’ve got to buy one too so that we can be in a band together’. So I bought a guitar and we had lessons together with this young girl student, we were probably 14, she was probably 19. We used to get the bus to her place every Saturday and she used to teach us a few things. Then the Punk thing happened and then that was it – I was off.
Mark: One of the many interesting things about you is that you’re also a ‘Vintage Guitar expert’, I’ve seen your website which is very informative. You’re very much a Gibson man though could you ever be tempted away?
James: (Groans at the thought) You know, I’ve got everything because…I was in the studio once with Gene Loves Jezebel, we were recording the Heavenly Bodies album and on The Beatles White Album there’s this song called ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. There’s this fantastic guitar solo and I couldn’t get that sound no matter what I tried and I realised that you could only get that sound from a Fender Telecaster. So I went out and got a Telecaster, so I do use other guitars, but I’ll always play Les Paul’s live I think. Always have done and probably always will. But you do need an arsenal in the studio to do certain things. I was talking to a guitarist called ‘Little Barry’ (Barry Cadogan who played with Primal Scream) who told me about these Kay Guitars and he said you have to pick one up, they’ve got these ‘Kleenex-box’ pickups and they sound amazing. They were just a lower end guitar but he was right, they sounded amazing. They were made really cheaply back in the day in the US and I’ve used that quite a lot on the new stuff that I’ve been doing with Daphne Guinness. Through the years I’ve always loved old guitars, the sounds, their craftsmanship. I remember the first time I went to New York with Chelsea in 1979, I was walking down 48th Street where all the guitar shops are and I just had enough money for one, so I bought an SG Junior and when I got home I decided I didn’t like it and sold it. I just slowly got to really learn about old guitars and then I had a percentage in a guitar shop here in London called New Kings Road Vintage Guitars’ and then another one called ‘Angel Music.’ But my weakness is that I just want to keep everything (laughs) so I started to put all the stories about my guitars on the website and people seemed to be interested in how you’d got hold of them, and e-bay changed everything. But in the early 90’s either before or after soundcheck I’d just go out into whatever city I was in and jump in a cab and go round all the pawn shops and find old guitars and you could do that then, you could find stuff but e-bay has changed all of that. The internet is both a negative and a positive thing.
Mark: I was reading the story about the trip to Vienna to purchase a certain Gibson.
James: Oh my Gold-top! Yeah. The thing is they can be amazing investments as they do go up in value. I’ve even got my Dad to buy a few old guitars, he had money sat in a savings account making half a percent and I told him he’d be far better off buying this and sitting on it for five years, so we’ve done that a couple of times. But I just want to keep everything, that’s my problem like I said.
Mark: So as the man who’s played in 72% of all known bands do you still have a ‘hit list’? Are there any artists you would love to play with?
James: I really, really would have loved to have played on a David Bowie album. Obviously that could never happen now. I just want to keep playing. My favourite thing is just to get up on stage and play my guitar and as long as I can do that I’m happy.
Mark: I think we’ve still got a few minutes so I’ll round up by asking you a couple of traditional closers we ask everyone. If you could have been a fly on the wall for the creation of any great album from the past, just to see how the magic happened, what’s the album for you? Is it a Bowie one?
James: It could easily have been ‘Hunky Dory’ because I think that’s an amazing record and also Mick Ronson’s sister Maggie who is a good friend of mine told me that was the first time Mick…and he was only 24, they were getting a full orchestra in and Mick had done this score for all the strings and everything for ‘Life on Mars’ which I think is one of the greatest songs ever written. But apparently Mick was very, very nervous especially when this 56 piece orchestra came in and the conductor and everything and he had to go round handing them out this music and they ran through it and the conductor went up to Mick and said “What you have composed is absolutely incredible.” I would have loved to have seen that, he was really, really flattered apparently. But I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Led Zep IV was recorded! That is just such a powerful record and to have seen Bonham in action! I would have loved to have seen that.
Mark: I used to ask old Blues guys what the song was that really ‘lit their fire’ and a song that every time they hear it just brings back memories of why you love music so much and what it means to you. Is there a song that has that power for you?
James: I couldn’t possibly choose just one, but something you do tend to do as you get older is look further and further back to what went one before. So you start listening to people of which you’re the generation below. So when I was young I listened to the whole Glam Rock thing, then as you get older I listened to The Beatles and The Stones and then you think “What did they listen to?” and then you go back and you’re listening to Elmore James and that leads you to Robert Johnson and Leadbelly and all those amazing Black American Blues guys. What they did crystallized what would come later with Levis and Chuck Berry and all those guys, so you do look back and there’s so much to discover there. I would recommend to anyone to look at who they like listening to and do some research about who they liked listening to and you’ll find a lot of good stuff.
Mark: So who sparked it off for you when you dug deeper? And how does that help you when you’re in the studio with bands with very different musical directions?
James: My favourite guitarist is Johnny Guitar Watson, he’s a great songwriter but just one of the most incredible guitar players, I’ve stolen a lot from him and it probably doesn’t show but I have. I like to listen to a lot of different stuff and my approach is always not to think about what I can do but to think what the songs needs and I think that’s come about through playing with lots of different artists from Scott Walker to Gene Loves Jezebel. I think that’s the most important thing, for a musician to understand the song. I hate it when you listen to a great song and then the guitar solo comes in and its just this guy showing off all he can do. It’s ridiculous. Getting back to ‘Life on Mars’ for example, that solo! It’s a simple one to play but it just fits that song so well, it’s genius. Mick Ronson was the king of that, he always came up with the perfect part and he was a virtuoso violinist as well which I think is why such a lot of his guitar parts sound like string arrangements, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that. There’s this little line at the end of ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ (sings part), it’s like a string part! Incredible.
Mark: You mentioned that it took you a while to get all of the rights to get all of the tracks on the retrospective. Was there anything that you couldn’t get on there that you would have liked to have included?
James: Well somethings I didn’t even try to be honest. I mean I went to Beggars Banquet because I had to get permission to use ‘Desire’ and they were just brilliant. A guy there called Steven Webben, because usually they’d want an advance, and he just said “Just have it” he sent me a contract and it just said ‘gratis’ which was amazing. I would have loved to have a Scott Walker track but as he’s on 4AD which is part of the Beggars group I didn’t really want to go back there and ask. (laughs). So I would have liked that but choosing which tracks to go on has led to a lot of debate, so you’re never going to please everyone, but I really wanted it to be just 2 CD’s not a massive box set. Some people have said it should have been a volume 1 and you should do a volume 2. Well maybe? And people have asked why there’s nothing from the new Gene Loves Jezebel or the new Chelsea, but they’re really just too recent to be part of a retrospective.
Mark: You picked some interesting Gene Loves Jezebel selections though – ‘Desire’ is obviously the easy one, the band’s most famous song, but there’s also a lovely acoustic version of ‘Jealous’ on there. But ‘Come Naturally’ was a bit of a surprise pick?
James: Well that’s from the album ‘VII’, the album we did after ‘Heavenly Bodies’, a rather overlooked album. But the main reason I put that on was that it’s my wife’s favourite Gene Loves Jezebel song, she’s a real Rock Chick and she loves it. But I also wanted ‘VII’ represented on there (laughs).
Mark: So what does this year hold for you? What do you have coming up over the next 12 months?
James: I’ve got some Alarm shows in Ireland and Scotland this month then a US Tour with them, part of which is the ‘Totally 80’s Festival’ in Huntington Beach on May 12th and I’m also playing that with Jay’s version of Gene Loves Jezebel, so I’m playing the same Festival with two different bands. It’s our version of Gene Loves Jezebel’s first US date in ten years. So there’s that then some stuff with Daphne Guinness, we’ve got some gigs in Paris in June, then the whole of the Summer with The Alarm in the US. Nothing in Australia coming up sadly! Then some Holy Holy shows in Europe in September. I think that’s as far as my calendar stretches at the moment.
Mark: That should keep you out of trouble for a while.
James: I think so.
Mark: We always end with the really easy question and I’m sure you’ll be the one to come up with the answer we’ve been searching for from the last ten years… What is the meaning of life?
James: (laughs) To walk on stage, play your guitar and have some fun!
Mark: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to The Rockpit today James, it’s been a pleasure to speak to you. Best of luck with the album, it’s an amazing musical journey so far and I’d recommend it to anyone.
James: My pleasure Mark, any time. Hopefully I’ll see you in Perth one of these days. Take care.
Check out James latest album and all news at: http://www.jamesstevenson.info/
