With all that was going on, the changes, the difficulties, but also the challenges, I needed a new manager, and Zoe knew a guy called Gerry Black, who first took an interest in my problems, and then took over the papers and negotiations that would eventually disentangle me from Purple, Oyster et al. In fact, it was Gerry who set up the deal with Island Records, and at face value, and at the time, that alone was a strange, almost unlikely, partnership, because the heart and passion of the label’s founder, Chris Blackwell, was in Caribbean-based music and the cultures that went with it. His life story is a tome in its own right, and so I’ll just restate the obvious, and remember that from Island’s base in Jamaica he forged many careers, including those of Grace Jones, Millie Small of ‘My Boy Lollipop’ fame (1964, and No. 1 in the UK, No. 2 in America), plus of course, Bob Marley, with whom I’d often play pool when we were in town and at the studios! Chris’s contribution to the record industry would eventually see him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2001), where he’d be credited as being the ‘single person most responsible for turning the world onto reggae’.
However, that said, our signing to Island looked an unlikely association, although I suppose it came around the time that Chris was diversifying his ‘catalogue’ to include the Spencer Davis Group, with Steve Winwood, as well as signing Robert Palmer, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and, much later, U2. So I suppose that taking in the Ian Gillan Band (for not a lot!) was not totally out of character, and they were great people to be with, including Chris Foss, who designed the bumblebee cover for Clear Air Turbulence. As for the record, well I wanted it to be different from Purple, different even from Child in Time, as everybody knew it, and that came across in the music, where we included brass instruments, including sax, trombone and trumpets, to deliver an aggressive and more jazz/rock set than was expected by some fans!
The album tracks were ‘Clear Air Turbulence’, ‘Five Moons’, ‘Over the Hill’, ‘Goodhand Liza’ and two that dealt with areas of my past, ‘Angel Manchenio’ (Episode Six in Beirut), and, more topically, ‘Money Lender’, which I’ve just explained. The album came out on 5 April 1977, and a short but intensive UK tour was scheduled in the usual way of things, including a gig at the London Rainbow.
| April | |
| 29th | Cardiff University |
| 30th | Bradford University |
| May | |
| 3rd | Sheffield City Hall |
| 4th | Liverpool Empire |
| 6th | Fortune Theatre, Bury St Edmunds |
| 7th | Southampton University |
| 8th | Queensway Hall, Dunstable |
| 10th | Whitla Hall, Belfast |
| 11th | Dublin Stadium |
| 13th | Bristol University |
| 14th | London Rainbow |
| 15th | Middlesbrough Town Hall |
| 17th | Aberdeen Music Hall |
| 18th | Glasgow Playhouse |
| 19th | Edinburgh Playhouse |
| 20th | Newcastle Mayfair |
| 21st | Manchester Apollo |
| 22nd | Birmingham Odeon |
| 23rd | Liverpool Empire |
The songs we played mixed our new material with stuff from Deep Purple days – ‘Child in Time’, ‘Woman from Tokyo’ and ending usually with ‘Smoke on the Water’ as an encore – while, under our own management, things were also fine, although some decisions, made with the best business intentions, did go wrong. One such was my idea/intention to buy a car for the band, because the taxi bill was becoming ridiculous. I mean, they’d use taxis to find cigarettes, go to the clubs or just to go and buy guitar strings, and so I thought we should get something like a Ford Cortina estate, which we could also use to transport gear. After the recording, we could always flog it, so the whole thing seemed to make sense, and I sent Dennis out to find something suitable.
When Dennis returned, he parked the new addition (not a new car) in my space at the studio, and that was fine by me. However, when I went out a few hours later, I thought there was something a bit strange about it, but it wasn’t until I was back in the corridor of the studio that I decided to return outside and take another look. Well, it still seemed all right, but, when I got closer and peered inside, I realised there was nothing there – no seats, no steering wheel, no dashboard, nothing, not a bloody thing! My car was a shell, and the band explained that they didn’t like Dennis’s choice of colour so they’d stripped it, which pretty well summed up how life was in that period.
In fact, they were a great band and we did a short tour of France, going later to Japan, where the album Live at the Budokan (Volumes 1 and 2) was recorded in September 1977, although it would not be released in the UK and mainland Europe until 1983.
So, in this new period of my life, it’s hard, if not impossible, to document all that was going on into an orderly record of times and events, but we were filmed at London’s Rainbow, where songs included ‘Money Lender’, ‘Clear Air Turbulence’, ‘Child in Time’, ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘Woman from Tokyo’. We followed Clear Air Turbulence with Scarabus (again for Island), and it came out in October 1977, to include ‘Mercury High’, ‘Twin Exhausted’ and ‘Slags to Bitches’. The title track would take a ‘deviation’ when my vocals were ‘loaned’ to ‘Disturbing The Priest’ on the Born Again album I recorded with Black Sabbath in 1983, but more of that later on! Scarabus seemed to be popular enough, but by now we’d been tagged with genre styles of jazz fusion and similar such concepts, and that bothered me.
There’s no way you can stop it
You’ve got my heart in your pocket.
It gradually began to dawn on me that although I was with fine musicians and great mates, the one thing they didn’t seem to take seriously was rock ’n’ roll. Mark, in particular, was a great jazz enthusiast, but the whole group seemed to be about making music in a complicated and tricky way, instead of dealing with rock as it should be – simple. I respected them a great deal, but I’d clearly not got back into the swing of things enough to focus minds and take control of direction and the band. But, then, how could I ever get angry with someone like Gus! I mean, I’d admired the man from my earliest days in music, when he was with the Merseybeats, before he recorded ‘Bumper To Bumper’ and ‘Take Me For A Little While’. And then I’ve never forgotten how it came about that I first met him.
It was at a party during the days of Episode Six, when the door opened and this guy came in – unshaven, and looking as if he’d just crawled out from under a park bench. He took himself off to a corner and sat there scowling all night, drinking and clutching a small attaché case – the little brown sort you see the Jewish tailors carrying around. In the end, I went over and spoke to him, but he was very down, and explained that he had some appointment or other the next day. In the end, he slept on the floor and, when he got up in the morning, I peeped from under my covers to see him go into the bathroom with his little brown case.
After about forty-five minutes, he came out, and I just went, ‘Wow!’ Gus had transformed himself from a tramp to a superstar, and it was incredible. He’d shaved, washed his hair and put on these superb clothes that somehow had fitted into his case. My God, he looked so cool, so excessive – so wonderful! Here, then, was the man responsible for the bass line in ‘Love Is the Drug’ by Roxy Music.
Gus made a big impression on me, but I’d come to learn that he’s a complex guy who doesn’t like things to be steady for too long. In fact a lot of people had warned me against getting involved with him at all, with some even saying he just ruins things and so forth, but I’ve never seen it that way. We’re all excessive people in this business, and I just think Gus went about things the same as most of us, except with a bit more style!
He wasn’t with me for very long, but he came to Japan, and is on Live at the Budokan, where we headlined. It’s always nice to creep up the bill, and we all felt pretty good!
The first show was at the Osaka Kōsei Nenkin Hall, where we opened with some music Colin had written for the film Full Circle, starring Mia Farrow. It was an eerie piece, which he’d overdubbed with two hundred voices. We’d then follow with ‘Clear Air Turbulence’, ‘Money Lender’ and ‘Child in Time’. Gus would then do something from his solo project, ‘What’s Your Game’, and we’d carry on with more from Clear Air Turbulence and Scarabus, before ending with a rock-’n’-roll medley. We played the next night at Kyoto Kaiken Dai-Ichi Hall, and took the next day off to go sightseeing, during which Ray was asked to autograph a baby, and we were followed all day by a group of fans who’d hired five taxis!
We spent the next day in Hiroshima, which was a sobering moment, but the gig at the Yūbin Chokin Hall went brilliantly, and brought back memories of the last visit I made with Deep Purple, when things were so different. I say this because, on this new occasion, we’d actually given ourselves time off to enjoy the visit, in contrast with the old days, when we’d lurch from gig to gig without a rest. So we finished at the Budokan, where the promoter, Mr Udo, resplendent in a fine suit and with a constant smile, said he’d have us back any time we wanted; and, after seeing us off, he wandered across to welcome Eric Clapton, who was soon to arrive.
This, then, was another period when it all seemed to be ticking along nicely, but in truth, and again, there were underlying problems, beginning with the manager, Gerry Black, and the fact that Island Records had not taken up on their option after Scarabus. Of course, the band and I should have picked up on the vibes much earlier, but it’s always easy to say this sort of thing with the benefit of hindsight; and I know all about that, because I’ve had to say it here enough times! Anyway, after the Budokan show, Gerry came in and said, ‘Well, lads, that’s Japan. Now the world!’
It was so awful, we just curled up with laughter. I mean, could he not see what a mess we were in? OK, maybe I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t expect the manager to be so naïve. As for Island, the truth is they weren’t too pleased with what we were doing. They were good people to be with, but they couldn’t sell our records, nor could they get us into America. Part of the deal in leaving was that I recovered my catalogue, which I put into my company Clear Air Music Publishing, but we were suddenly exposed with no position; and it all reached boiling point at Birmingham.
I could feel that people were confused by our music, having come to see me for a great night of rock ’n’ roll, but not to get it. With the show over, I met with some fans backstage (as I always do), and, being real fans, they finally got through to me! So I had words with the guys after that, and said, ‘Look, we’re not “getting down”. All this itty-bitty jangly stuff’s really putting people off. Why aren’t we doing rock ’n’ roll? Remind yourselves of “Louie Louie”, for heaven’s sake!’ So I was in the dressing room a short while later when I suddenly heard the song’s intro, and it sounded great, I rushed out thinking, Yes! but only to realise they were taking the piss again.
With the writing on the wall, things came to a head in the studio, where we were working on new material – more fusion shit! Colin came in to see me, and I could hear lots of background laughter and piss-taking going on. So I said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ he said.
But I persisted and, seeing Colin was near to tears, I said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that I’ve got this song…’ at which point the others drifted in, muttering, ‘You just hear this. God Almighty!’ And they were yawning and all of that stuff.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s hear it, then.’
Colin sat down and said, ‘It’s called “Fighting Man”,’ and so he started, ‘There is a man…’
It made me sit up and think, Wow, this guy remembers rock ’n’ roll; and so we set up the studio to record it, except the others weren’t impressed. OK, so now I’d seen and heard enough, and so I gave it to them straight. I said I was sick to death with all this fusion stuff. I said it was crap, we were English, we couldn’t deal with that gear any longer, and, even if we could, who’d want to listen to it, anyway? I reminded them we’d played to only around two hundred people at Slough recently, and added that there was this new energy in town called ‘punk’. I finished by asking if all of that didn’t tell them something about what was going on out there, and why weren’t we paying attention to it all?
I played back a couple of rough tracks to show them what we were going to do, and then I said, ‘Well, guys, that’s it. That’s the end!’ They asked why, and I told them I wasn’t going to do another album with them; in fact, I wasn’t going to carry on with the band. I put the decision down to our working in different directions, and ended by saying, ‘Oh, and by the way, Colin, I think we should start work on the new material this afternoon!’ I said this deliberately, because I figured they’d been giving him a lousy time.
So Colin and I rolled up our sleeves and found musicians to work with on the new project, which we simply called ‘Gillan’. It was August 1978, and the initial line-up was Colin Towns on keyboard, John McCoy (bass), Liam Genocky (drums) – to be replaced by Pete Barnacle soon after – and Steve Byrd on guitar. An early gig was the Reading Festival on 27 August, and between us we looked for a return to ‘roots and rock’, which found itself in songs such as ‘Secret of the Dance’, ‘Fighting Man’, ‘Message In A Bottle’ (which, as the title suggests, deals with booze) and ‘Back in the Game’.
After a while, Pete was replaced by my old mate Mick Underwood, who’d been with Strapps, and, least it be forgotten, we’d also been together in Episode Six! I put the musicians on equal shares, and decided to run the venture under a sort of democratic management, for which I brought in Ted Wood to be our central organiser. Ted had, of course, been with me on the ill-fated Mantis venture, and the idea was that he’d bring some discipline and organisation to the new ‘Gillan’. He took up the challenge, making it clear that he wouldn’t stand for sloppy attitudes, and so it quickly became apparent that Ted was not ideally suited to life in a recording studio, particularly when one or two key technical people left, moaning about the ‘regime’.
While all these people were coming and going in an atmosphere of complete chaos, and for which I had to take responsibility, I came to the decision to part with Zoe, after all our years together. It wasn’t her fault that things hadn’t worked out, but we were simply incompatible, and I think we had been for many years. I honestly believe I gave the relationship every chance, particularly in the bizarre world of rock ’n’ roll, and I’d done this because I desperately wanted stability. However, the idea of settling down and having children was not on Zoe’s agenda, and she’d refused to marry me on several occasions, because she’d seen so many marriages fail in the business. She was forever suspicious of the people I mixed with, and never let me out of her sight, which sometimes caused friction with the musicians and others I associated with. And so came the moment when I sat her down and said, ‘Zoe, I’m going. I’ve finished with the band, and I’ve finished with you. I don’t want this to be a mucky, horrible thing, but I can’t take any more, and I’m going.’ She wouldn’t believe me, and when I left she was in tears. It was very, very sad.
Zoe ended up with the house and contents, which was about all that remained anyway after the collapse of the various projects, but I was left with the table (the one I’d made myself, from scratch)! Because she’d been a director of various companies, she took me to a tribunal on the grounds of unfair dismissal, but it all came to nothing, really, and another chapter of my life closed without glamour or satisfaction.