“They coulda been huge if they’d been from America!” is an accusation that we leveled at a few bands from the UK and Europe back in the day when Stateside they were busily ‘polishing up’ the hard rock we loved for the MTV generation and making sure it was all shiny and new and ultimately by the early 90’s all looked and sounded pretty much the same. Heavy Pettin’ could have taken the world by storm back in the early 80’s and now drummer Gary Moat is back with his new band ‘Burnt Out Wreck’ but not holding the sticks – he’s holding the mic (and a guitar), and sounding rather like his fellow countryman Bon Scott. We caught up with Gary to get the lowdown from lock-down UK: after a dodgy line threatens the interview with catch up with Gary live from his car!
Mark: That sounds better! How are you?
Gary: I just climbed in the car to get a bit of peace and quiet
Mark: (laughs) So how’s things over there its crazy isn’t it in the UK?
Gary: Yeah, yeah, but the weather’s miserable too, it’s been raining like crazy today
Mark: But all my mates are telling me about what a wonderful early summer you’re having?
Gary: Oh it’s been great, it’s been smashing up until the last few days, and now we’ve lost the sunshine.
Mark: It’s like that here too, we’ve next to no coronavirus, but its miserable weather. You wouldn’t want to be down under!
Gary: (laughs)
Mark: It’s great to speak to you Gary, I have a confession to make one of my very first concerts ever was seeing you guys open up a very big show. Can you guess when that might have been?
Gary: A very big show? Was it ’83?
Mark: It might have been ‘83
Gary: Was it Kiss?
Mark: It was, and at a venue that I think they used to use as a cattle market when it wasn’t hosting Rock concerts.
Gary: Oh Bingley Hall, yeah. That was a wild gig wasn’t it!
Mark: (Laughing) Yes it was
Gary: My memories of that gig are just going out on stage and looking at the audience moving like a bloody great ocean wave going back and forward and I was shitting it! The stage was made of scaffolding and 8’ by 4’ plywood boards and I just thought “They’re going to pull us all down, this is just crazy!” It was frightening man!
Mark: (laughing) It was and I was there dropped off by the parents a young 13 or 14 year old just getting swept away by it literally, my first experience of a really big show, thinking of it now it’s no wonder I kept going back! It was great.
Gary: (laughs)
Mark: And one thing that made me do was run out and buy your first album.
Gary: Oh did you?
Mark: And I still have it, still play it. But bringing us up to date, I was late to Burnt Out Wreck, I missed the first album ‘Swallow’ I’ve caught up now of course, but ‘This is Hell’ is great! How did you make the transition from being at the back and driving things to getting up front and playing guitar and singing?
Gary: Well, I’ve always written songs from way back you know, since me and Gordon (Bonnar – Heavy Pettin’ guitarist) got together when we went up to secondary school when we were 13. We just started knocking tunes about then and all the way through my life that’s all we’ve ever done. He taught me how to play a few chords on a dodgy old acoustic and that was it as far as I was concerned. So when it got to 1990-91 when Heavy Pettin’ had split up me and Gordon got back together and put a project together called ‘Mother’s Ruin’ and Gordon said to me at the time “We’re not gonna be able to find another vocalist because the way you sing, and the shit that you come out with, you might as well just sing it yourself” because I was still gonna be the drummer, then in ’91 but he said “No, let’s go this way.” And there was this thing in the 80’s where big guys don’t front bands because no one wants to sign you if you’re a big fat guy unless you’re called Meat Loaf, you know (laughs). Really it was shit, but the music world is shit and still is. People are still like that. Bloody Polygram in America, we went there in ’84 walked in there and the biggest, fattest, ugliest head A&R guy, a right scumbag he just looked at me and said “Fuck! Who are you?” He was like, you’re too fat to be in this band, he was standing there saying that to me and he was like an Easter egg with feet for fucks sake! Arseholes! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Gary: Anyway back to song-writing! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Gary: I’ve got a lot of anger in me obviously and it comes out in ’This is Hell’ (laughs)
Mark: But also that wonderful sense of humour too that‘s in there too.
Gary: Yeah, well I’m from Glasgow aren’t I (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Gary: But ‘This is Hell’ is a completely different album to ‘Swallow’, the band all played on it and had their own parts and it just gave it a really good feeling, whereas the first album was just me and the guitar player as was then, Adrian. But recording ‘This is Hell’ was very stressful, it was eleven days of bloody hard work you know. Me cracking the whip and them all falling out with me, looking at me like I’m a complete bastard! I’m not of course, I’ve just had that experience of being in a studio with crazy producers and stuff, who are trying to get the best out of you, you know. So I’ve been singing since 1991 and I don’t play drums, I don’t think I could anymore ‘cos I’ve got shit hip problems, so I don’t think I could sit on a drum stool for an hour and play double bass pedals (Laughs).
Mark: A great album that deserves to be heard live, I find myself saying this to everyone these days, but before this weird stuff happened, what was the next step for ‘Burnt Out Wreck’?
Gary: Well we played at the Skegness Rock and Blues Festival in Butlins over here with a good couple of thousand people in the room, it’s a three day event its really great, and we managed to get on the main stage this year in January. Then we went up to Glasgow and Edinburgh for the weekend in February and then come May we were supposed to be playing back up in Scotland at ‘BonFest’ – it’s a cracking thing they have a statue of Bon Scott there in Kirriemuir. We played it last year
Mark: And just down the road from us here, in Fremantle we have a statue of Bon Scott too.
Gary: And you have his resting place.
Mark: We do and we have our own celebrations, before coronavirus we had a Festival called ‘Highway to Hell’ which had bands playing on the back of Trucks driving down to Fremantle. He was a one of a kind talent, and a nice connection there.
Gary: My favourite front man and voice of all time, you know. I remember seeing him at the Glasgow City Hall when they first came over here and they tore the place apart. It was just mental. You had Thin Lizzy and Status Quo before that and then came AC/DC and they were something else, and that was it for me, I just lost the plot on it. And as soon as I heard him singing I thought he was just up a notch from everybody. And that’s where my voice went to because I started trying to learn all those songs, so he’s my biggest influence obviously. I’m not the only man in the world of course who likes AC/DC and sounds like Bon, but people do keep saying it. I just love that sort of Blues Rock, it’s the best and it’s what keeps me going.
Mark: Great band. I remember as I said, buying that first Heavy Pettin’ album and then eagerly waiting for the second, and then fast forward a few years and there you are doing Eurovision. I did have to ask you about that?
Gary: (laughs)
Mark: Now not many Rock bands got on TV in those days let alone Eurovision, so it’s not a bad thing.
Gary: Eurovision does alright. (laughs)
Mark: Skipping past that then (laughs) I think the next time I saw you was in 1984, there was a bit of a gap?
Gary: Yeah we never really toured ‘Rock Ain’t Dead’
Mark: There were so many great UK bands around at the time, but for us UK Rock fans it just seemed like only the American bands were being pushed? You’d see bands like Bon Jovi everywhere but you guys were equally as good, was it a case that the money wasn’t there?
Gary: Well we did that tour you were taking about up and down the UK in ’84 and after that we went away to America and we were supposed to go out on tour with Scorpions and when we got there and we got to New York the guy that I was telling you about earlier, the knob, he just said “Fuck you, your album sounds like shit.” He chucked it over his shoulder and said “The production is shit on this” so he was having a go at Brian (May), I mean we didn’t produce or mix it! Then he carried on “No Radio Station will play this!” and we said that we were meant to be going on tour with the Scorpions and he just said “No you’re fucking not, Bon Jovi are going, that’s my band, Bon Jovi are going, you’re getting nothing” you know. So we sat in New York for a week, phoning back home, calling London, trying to find out what we were supposed to do. And we ended up on Saxon’s ‘Crusader’ Tour with us and Accept and then we got onto the ‘Shout at The Devil’ Tour with Motley Crue, and we toured for about ten days with Ratt, just us and Ratt, playing clubs to 1000-odd people which was brilliant. So it wasn’t a complete disaster for us, we did have fun and we got to play to a lot of people. We had people turning up at the concerts with Heavy Pettin’ T-Shirts they’d made themselves and it was just a really good time. A long time ago!
Mark: I always thought when I listened to that first album that you were a band out of time. Most bands try and catch a scene when it’s already there and when I listen to them I think “Wow they’re just a couple of years too late”, but I actually think you guys might have been just a couple of years too early the way music went in those days.
Gary: Really we were just in our own little bubble in Glasgow doing what we were doing, you know. A lot of people think that it was all deliberate and that we were trying to be Def Leppard or something, but we weren’t, we were just young guys in a band who were playing energetic rock and roll, and yeah we liked Def Leppard but we had just seen them the year before and this as when ‘Get Your Rocks Off’ came out, but we were in a band playing music like that anyway. Long permed hair and all the tight gear, I suppose we did look a bit the same but that was how bands were starting to look at the time.
Mark: I never saw you as tying to copy Def Leppard, but I did see Def Leppard as trying to be like The Sweet and we had the sad new the other day of Steve Priest from The Sweet’s passing. Did you listen to that 70’s Glam rock?
Gary: Well I used to love The Sweet I had the big picture on the wall up above the bed with them all dressed up as Indians I think from the Top of the Pops studio, and right above the bed I had Suzi Quatro with her in a silver bodysuit with a zip right down it!
Mark: Was that what got you into Rock? Bands like that. I must admit that my favourite Scottish band ever has to be Nazareth.
Gary: Nazareth were brilliant, but then everybody was great. Everyone had such a diverse taste in music in the 70’s we liked everything and it’s so different to what my kids like – my kids, I have four kids are like 28 to 33, what am I doing having kids of that age! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Gary: But I remember Nazareth at the Glasgow Apollo way back in the 70’s and Dan McCafferty shouts into the audience “There’s been a phone call, it’s a bomb scare, everyone look under your chair to see if there’s a bag under there with a bomb in it” (laughs) and everybody did! Two and a half thousand head case Scottish people looking under their chair for a bomb! You couldn’t make it up!
Mark: And that in itself says a lot about the difference between today and years gone by. Where did people’s sense of humour disappear to?
Gary: Aye.
Mark: So in these lock down times are the band writing for a follow up?
Gary: Well I write all the stuff for the band, it’s just me, it comes out of my head. I can’t help that! Some people have sent me stuff in the past but I just don’t latch onto it properly because it didn’t come out of me, so I don’t really ‘get’ what they’re doing. It’s been a while though and I do try but I’ve not been doing much to be honest because this ‘thing’ is just crazy, this virus for the first six weeks or something I think everybody just lost the plot! We didn’t know our arse from our elbow or whether we were coming or going. It was really crazy over here, we were in the house mostly we weren’t going anywhere, and we’d very rarely go to the shops. And then the TV keeps winding you up‘This is Hell you know! (laughs)
Mark: Scarier in the States though, they don’t seem capable of allowing it to die, they’re just not doing any of the things we’re being told we need to do.
Gary: They’re not, and those protests are just going to keep it going while the majority are doing what’s been asked.
Mark: Isolation gives us the chance to catch up on a lot of things from reading to getting those home improvement projects finished, but most importantly listening to some great music, What albums would you recommend people take into isolation, and I’ll give you one AC/DC in there.
Gary: It’s always ‘Powerage’ for me.
Mark: My mate always picks Powerage, so he’d be with you on that, I’m more of a ‘Highway To Hell’ man myself.
Gary: As long as it’s Bon Scott I love ‘em all. And then as soon as Brian took over it’s all about ‘dick’ for some reason. All his songs ‘Let’s Get It Up’; ‘Rising Power’ (laughs)
Mark: I guess you only need one Brian album.
Gary: Oh ‘Back in Black’ is awesome I love ‘Back in Black’ and ‘For Those About To Rock’ but I don’t know, I mean it’s hard to remember what I really did enjoy when I go right the way back. I mean I loved Queen when I was about 12, 13 especially stuff like ‘Black Queen’ and ‘White Queen’ the songs, so maybe the first album, which is awesome. So you can imagine what we were like when Brian May turned up at our rehearsal studio and said “I want to produce the first album.” We were like “We all love you!”
Mark: I can picture that now!
Gary: (laughs) And then I don’t know, do you know who Max Webster were?
Mark: The Canadian band?
Gary: That’s right. They toured with Rush, they came over with Rush and I’d never seen Rush so I went to the Apollo and they came on with all the dry ice and the big white gowns on (laughs) and I was like “No! What is that?’ (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Gary: But you know after I got over the initial shock of course I got over it and thought “Good God these guys are amazing” But definitely Max Webster and Rush, there’s a great couple of bands, and I used to love ‘Heart, I love the album ‘Dog and Butterfly’ I suppose I was about 19 or so at that time. But I loved all sorts of people – Stevie Wonder, Prince.
Mark: I’m a big fan of Prince, a great writer, wonderful guitarist and amazing live.
Mark: Now we’re at the sharp end of the interview and our two traditional closing questions. The first is – If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any great Rock album just to see how the magic happened in the studio what would it be for you? What would you have liked to have seen being made?
Gary: That’s a good question… ‘Screaming for Vengeance.’
Mark: I must admit I’ve not heard any stories about that one.
Gary: Nor me, not a thing, but Rob Halford! I love Rob Halford, I could cry listening to him sing at times you know, he makes me very emotional, just amazing.
Mark: And to close the easiest question of all. What is the meaning of life?
Gary: (laughs) To have fun as far as I’m concerned, that’s all I want to do. Fuck knows what it’s all about, just have a good time. I just want to rock. Don’t leave it till too late.
