4.52am Issue: 008 13th November 2016
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“Half the problem was that there wasn’t<br />
any money. Chris Blackwell had managed<br />
us and was also the owner of the record<br />
company, and we never seemed to see a<br />
penny which is hard enough, but there was<br />
nobody to complain to. To make it worse,<br />
Island sold the worldwide rights to the<br />
albums to MCA for a load of money, which<br />
again we never saw anything of. So it<br />
wasn’t a lot of fun, and of course when we<br />
delivered the album to Island they refused<br />
to sign off on it, and effectively pulled the<br />
plug on the band. We had nowhere to go. I<br />
think that once Island sold the U.S rights,<br />
they lost interest in us and of course MCA<br />
didn’t know us at all. Oddly, listening to the<br />
album now it is really good, but there we<br />
are.”<br />
We have a special on Chris Spedding in a<br />
few weeks time, and of course he went on<br />
to have a fantastic session career, playing<br />
with just about everybody , and Steve went<br />
to play with Ginger Baker in the Baker<br />
Gurvitz Army before spreading his wings<br />
and moving into Film and TV composing,<br />
running his own studio.<br />
Moving forward to 1993, you decided to do<br />
the classic “Get The Band Back Together,”<br />
how did that happen?<br />
“I had been working in film and TV and<br />
was running a studio, and had started to<br />
work with a lot of U.S advert agencies, so I<br />
started working long-distance with Chris<br />
again, hiring him as a guitar player really.<br />
This was until 1983 and then in 1989 he<br />
moved to the U.S and we hooked up<br />
properly. I don’t know why, but meeting up<br />
with Chris again I started to write songs,<br />
and we talked about it until we thought –<br />
why not make another Sharks album?<br />
So, it was really for fun, no big plan, it just<br />
seemed a good idea and we got Pete<br />
Thomas on drums and my missus played<br />
the bass. We did the recording in a week<br />
and decided to do one show.<br />
That was Like a Black Van Parked on a Dark<br />
Curve and it came out in 1995.<br />
It’s funny but watching the film we made of<br />
the gig, at the end somebody says ‘See you<br />
in 20 years’ and that is exactly what has<br />
happened now.”<br />
Which of course brings us to <strong>2016</strong> and the<br />
third incarnation of the Sharks, with the<br />
band looking to see whether they can<br />
pickup where they left off forty years ago<br />
(with a mid-period oddity).<br />
And I have to say having listened to the<br />
new album, it is seriously raw sounding and<br />
vibrant, a quite awesome performance from<br />
a band of any age.<br />
Can you tell us about the album’s recording,<br />
how did it go?<br />
“We really wanted to first of all see whether<br />
we still had it. Whether we could produce<br />
the goods, I mean, let’s be honest I’m 65<br />
and Chris is 72 and we aren’t going to be<br />
doing this forever so there was always<br />
something to be proved. Other than that<br />
though we just wanted it to be five guys<br />
playing together, so we decided that the<br />
recording had to be as live as possible, we<br />
wanted the absolute minimum of overdubs,<br />
we didn’t want to take forever over<br />
everything and lose that freshness.<br />
That is how it went too, none of the tracks<br />
had more than four takes with the first<br />
being a ‘sighter’, two and three all about<br />
getting focussed and then the fourth would<br />
be the one, the devil. It was brilliant really, I