photo credit David Leigh Dodd

Go To The Good Stuff!

 Wendy James currently resides in France; she has no fear of moving on as our conversation demonstrates. The Hot topic now though is her tenth album release and a back to basics approach, the title of this album is The Shape of History and that is where our conversation began.

Dan Reddick “The Shape of History, I like the title, what's behind it, where did it come from?”

Wendy James “Well, in as much that this is my tenth album a lot of my songwriting is very consistent, if you know anything about me, my comfort zone, my favorite type of music is mid-70s to late 70s, new wave, post-punk, New York, downtown, CBGB, Max's Kansas City kind of thing. Even though I grew up with my peers above me as the British punks, the London punks, the Clash and the Pistols, I knew and know those guys and they kind of raised me in their own way. I learnt at their knee, you know, the attitude and the work that is required to power through. But actually my favourite, where I just naturally gravitated toward was the New York scene and that is why I moved to New York in the end.

photo credit David Leigh Dodd

 There is that consistent backbone of steel in my music, running through all of it, from the early days right up until now. But also, it is my tenth album, I've expanded upon themes, I've leapt into different types of music. I lived in LA for a while, Transvision Vamp broke out of California, our record label was based in Hollywood, it was Universal Music, which is part of the Universal Movie Company. Our first gigs in America were West Coast and my first professional memories of America are driving up and down the boulevards.

Tim Roth was there at the time, Gary Oldman was there at the time, there was a kind of an expat scene, and also we made friends with bands like Holly and the Italians who wrote our second single. She was in New York originally but also went to LA, and Holly and I became friends. So I got into the California scene but then I moved to New York.

photo credit David Leigh Dodd

Growing up in Britain, we used to be able to walk everywhere and still to this day  I don't have a driver's license, so even though I could live in LA for a period of time and people would drive me around, friends, whatever, New York is a natural place for me to be because of all the American cities, it's the most European, you know, you walk around, there's a subway, there's an underground network, and there's storefronts, and anyway, blah blah blah, so I moved to New York, but my first experiences of America are California, and so on this album, particularly, perhaps unlike other albums, there's a California sounding music in there, I think in one of my interviews, I don't go as far as saying it's the Laurel Canyon sound of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, I love it, but it's a bit too soft for my taste, for when I'm making music, I love listening to it, I'm more of a CBGB kind of girl, nevertheless, I did live up a canyon for a while in California, I lived up Topanga Canyon, which is a canyon over, and above the Pacific Coast Highway.

I have genuine memories that appear on track 8 and track 9 of my album about driving up Santa Monica Boulevard, listening to Bob Dylan's song New Morning, heading out of Hollywood and seeing fields and fields of wild California poppies.

With Transvision Vamp and Big Audio Dynamite, there was one seminal 10 day period, I guess, I'd say in 1989, but it might be 91, when -because we're both from West London- BAD (Big Audio Dynamite) were booked in to play the Palladium, and we were booked to play the Palace, both two really grand old theatres in Hollywood. We'd been leapfrogging them around the whole of an American tour, we played Washington, and left notes on the dressing room for them to read when they got there two days later. We went around America and Australia like that, the whole tour. There was this particular 10 day period in Hollywood, when Mick (Jones) would play Monday, I'd play Tuesday, Mick would play Wednesday, I'd play Thursday!

All of our bands knew each other of course, and then on top of that all of our road crew knew each other, and then there were all the London expats, like Ian Astbury from The Cult, Steve Jones from the Pistols, Billy Idol that now chose to live in Hollywood, so it was like this massive West London movement. They'd come to our shows, we'd go to their shows, we would all go to the same bar afterwards, shoot pool and drink. That's mentioned in my lyrics as well, one of the songs I sing 'Every night at the Palace Theatre' ”.

photo credit David Leigh Dodd

DR “Yeah, I was going to ask you about that time. When you're successful, in fact not even when you've reached the pinnacle of your success, when you're rising up. Is that the best time do you think?, when you don't know where the top is, you're still rising, you haven't had the view from the top, was that for you, as well as a crazy time, the most fulfilling period in your career?”

WJ “ I wouldn't say out of my whole life the most fulfilling time, because to be honest, recording this album, with the musicians now that are my regular musicians and my regular technicians and engineers, you know, there's such a shorthand there that's developed between the way we can relate to each other, and listen, I've just got so many high points, but that one specific thing that you are describing, I think Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he actually says about that scene, the beatnik and hippie scene in San Francisco, when they thought peace and love be the theme of the future of the world, before Nixon”.

DR “It always disintegrates doesn't it, eventually, every scene seems to”?

WJ “Yeah, riding the crest of the wave, and if it's a clear day you can look out across the bay area, and see where that wave crashed, and fell back, and there endeth the dream……”

DR “So this album, getting back to the “feel”, it does feel laid back,  it's got the California vibe to it”

WJ “Definitely, I mean it's also got my New York punky vibe on it”.

DR “Especially the title track (The Shape of History), I mean that one stood out for me, I wrote in my notes Blondiesque,  I can't give higher praise than that.

Also I sensed quite a sixties feel to some of them, late sixties sort of piano sound, then with track one Sweet Like Love, I don't know why, I got this sort of vision of Cary Grant driving down a California highway. Like one of those fifties B&W films, it was the piano”.

WJ “I think you're right, and a few people have picked up on that, I wanted to write a song with all the budget in the world, I would hire an enormous orchestra, I would write an overture, and I would have the whole thing done by the Royal Philharmonic, so this is my way of doing an opening number to a movie scene, and that's what that piano is. Dave Sherman played that wonderful piano, it's like the old movies, I mean the one I always think of is Rhapsody in Blue with Woody Allen's Manhattan, and you just see the skyline and then the strings, and so I wanted to do my little version of that”.

DR “There's a few that do hark back to the sixties, goes back into the seventies here and there, were you trying for that feel?” 

WJ “No, first of all the track listing on all my albums is always the order in which they were written. I never mess around with that”

DR “No one ever suggests to you to change the running order”

WJ “ Well no, I'm in charge now, it seems to me the most natural order would be the order in which they were created. But I do have funny memories of Transvision Vamp's first album: Pop Art, where we were A&R'd, (Artist and Repertoired) by Dave Ambrose the legendary A&R man, who signed the pistols to EMI and then signed us. He was a fabulous obsessionist too, this is before digital, so this is when you would have enormous 48 track multitracks; I remember him making the poor assistant engineer in the recording studio chop up every track and try out every possible algorithm of a running order. I just remember thinking: whatever order you present it that's the order in which you're going to get acclimatised to hearing it.

 As far as having a plan for the songs, pick up my guitar, I find a little chord, maybe it's a chord unknown to me up until then. When I think I've discovered a new chord and then look it up on the charts, and it's a B minor or something, or an E major, whatever it is, it'll start me off on a melody, it's quite natural for me to start singing over the top of it, I never struggle with melody, and then I look at the enormous mountains of lyrics. I'm always writing that stuff down and something will spring out to me, and then it starts”.

DR “A lot of the songs have a positive outlook, there’s also a couple that look like you’re having a bit of a dig at someone, there's a bit of attitude there?”

WJ “Which ones?”

DR “There is one, “the crack and the boom and the creeps and the goons”, that sounds aimed at maybe people that stand in your way?”

WJ “It's just the tawdriness, for me, the glamor / tawdriness of, you know, tits here, ass there, it's probably like that now too”. 

DR “What do you mean?, you're having to sort of sell yourself, is that it?”

WJ “ Well, not me, but it actually reminds me of that movie, Get Carter. Yeah, it's that kind of Get Carter vibe where the girls are the dolly birds and blokes are the gangsters.

 It's a tough and brutal world. I've also spent time in Tokyo as well. There was one time I was taken around the private stripper clubs of Tokyo by a famous Tokyo pop star who will remain anonymous, he had links to the mafia, the Yakuza I believe they are called?.

 These weren't strip clubs, and I'm not a strip club type of person, but these were the ones that weren't open to Westerners. These were the strip clubs for the Japanese local businessmen. All the girls on the pole were Canadian-American, blonde, light-skinned. And they had fantastic bodies, of course, great pole skills, but as they slid down the poles, their eyes were just like, ugh….

 So, “The Crack and the Boom” isn't about my life, particularly, but it reminds me of Get Carter, it reminds me of those strip joints in Japan”

DR “There is also “Step Aside Roadkill?”

WJ “Ah, that's one of my favourites.

  I heard the phrase maybe in a movie, movies often inform me. Yeah… I just love that idea of that roadkill on the side of the fucking road. It’s get out of the way, I'm coming through. I think the musical arrangement of that song is so... 

It's got that bluesy vibe. But then in the middle eight, it lifts off. When I was working with my engineer, I would describe the middle eight part as the Carly Simon bit because suddenly it goes off into You're So Vain on Nantucket Island.

Yeah. It's got that middle eight piano pass. Yeah, yeah.

 So, my songs, they're never a copy of anything. They are an amalgam, like The Shape of History, of my whole journey through music”.

DR “Grouping all these songs together, as an album, they are all maybe looking back, mostly, at your Hollywood / California times and people you knew and your experiences?”

WJ “ It all comes around that period of time, it's got that sunny vibe to it all, so it feels to me. There's a really great quotation attributed to Dave Davies from The Kinks, and I think it was Dave, not Ray (ed. Josh Shipp) But anyway, one of them said, “you either get bitter or you get better” about all of our journeys through life. Yeah.. and I think I've got better.

 Because there's a lot of downward pressure on daily life. You know, you get cuddled by money, by jobs, by weather, by family, by all the things that get thrown at any of us. And you can get ground down and beaten down, beaten down, beaten down, and it can make you better or bitter. I think if you possibly can summon it within yourself, it's a great thing if you can find the better and not the bitter”.

DR “Nearly all of the songs have got a positive outlook, even though they might be talking about difficult subjects?”

WJ “You're right to say there's a tough underbelly, but I've always been tough. But there is a sensitivity there as well. And when you have survived a few decades, well, not just survived, but thrived a few decades, you realize that being there for yourself spirit is what it always was, even back in the punk days, that DIY ethic, which is you have to believe in yourself”.

order your copy of "The Shape Of History" HERE

DR “Which song on the new album has given you most pleasure writing and maybe means most to you?”

WJ “Well, I've got favourite bits in all of them. But there is one song, there's one song that's markedly different on this album. Because I never write songs that are literal. I mean, I really do write lyrics and music that allows me the space to find what I need in the song.

 The song “A Big Vicious Rumble” I never write songs of an actual occasion or because the weather or something's happened to me. I'm always being a bit more loose and poetic than that. But “A Big Vicious Rumble” I wrote when I saw the first TV footage of all the Ukrainian men having to see their families off at the train station when the invasion first happened.

 All the Ukrainian men were commandeered to sign up to the army, conscripted, and they had to see off their children and their wives or partners off at the train station, not knowing who's going to make it, who's going to come back, what’s going to happen, when you're going to be reunited?. And I'm sure you remember too, we all watched the news as kids were screaming and not knowing what would happen next..

 It was just fucking heartbreaking, wasn't it? And given that times aren't the easiest in Britain, but you can bet your bottom dollar they're tougher in Ukraine, because they have much worse weather to begin with, a much tougher economy, and it's a less evolved democracy, which is the whole point, they want to be a democracy, yeah, and not a satellite of Russia.

 Well that's what the fight's about, isn't it? Yeah, don't force your world on us. You know, if Britain was invaded, if France decided, fuck it, we're going back in to get a bit more Britain back, I don't think England or Britain would take very well to that. No….

 So that's Ukraine, it's an illegal invasion of Ukraine. Absolutely, yeah. But politics aside, the human reading of this was just families, who up until then probably even hadn't had the easiest of lives anyway, absolutely shattered, being split up, pulled apart.

 It's me saying to the imaginary kid, you know, your whole life can, all of our lives can change in a moment, as they say. We don't know what's going to happen when we get up in the morning, and that's actually one of the beauties of life, is not knowing. But your whole life can change suddenly.

Yes...  it was just me trying to say to this imaginary person, we're going to get through it. We're going to get through this.

 I still think that's punk, because punk started when there miner strikes, and bin strikes, and no one had any money, and Johnny Lydon sang No Future, and God Save the Queen, She Ain't No Human Being. You know, times were always tough....

 That's why artists, artists and journalists, and, you know, just regular human beings that believe in the good stuff, whether it's punk or whether it's Mahatma Gandhi, you've got to go to the good stuff.