‘I’ve never been more inspired than I am now and to be able to say that after 30 years is great’

Embrace – photo by Simon Walker.

This year, West Yorkshire indie-rock outfit Embrace are celebrating their 30th anniversary.

The band (singer Danny McNamara and his brother, guitarist Richard McNamara, bassist Steve Firth, keyboardist Mickey Dale and drummer, Mike Heaton) have released a brand-new studio album called Avalanche – their ninth – which, with its stadium-friendly anthems, skyscraping choruses and big ballads, as well as some darker and edgier touches, is easily up there with their best work.

Album opener, ‘Stop’, is a banger – a euphoric earworm about living in the moment – ‘We don’t live for ever – life’s too short to mess around’;  first single, the pounding ‘Road To Nowhere’ is similarly rousing, with its ringing, U2-like guitars; the poignant ‘Coming Home’ sounds like a country-gospel-meets-Christmas-song; the moody ‘Up In Your Feelings’ has dark disco synths, and the brooding ‘Funny’ is Embrace doing The Cure circa Disintegration.

As well as the new album, there’s also a recently-published book on the group’s early years – Good Good People: The Story of Embrace – Volume 1 – and frontman Danny is about to embark on a spoken word tour of the UK.

‘The moody ‘Up In Your Feelings’ has dark disco synths, and the brooding ‘Funny’ sounds like Embrace doing The Cure circa Disintegration’

In an exclusive interview, Danny spoke to Say It With Garage Flowers about 30 years of Embrace, the inspirations behind the new album, his approach to songwriting, and how he’s looking forward to hitting the road to promote the book.

It’s been a crazy career – a rollercoaster ride, but it’s been amazing. We’ve had so many comebacks,” he tells us.

Q&A

You’re celebrating the band’s 30th anniversary this year – does it feel like 30 years, or does it feel like only yesterday that Embrace started out?

Danny McNamara: It feels like both at the same time. In one way it feels like yesterday, but then in another way, I can’t remember a time before Embrace existed.

Apart from a hiatus between 2006 to 2014, you’ve managed to stay together for 30 years. How have you managed that?

It’s five people – six, if you count our manager. We’ve all been together longer than 30 years, but it’s 30 years since we started releasing records. We were together for a while before that as well. There is a chemistry that works between the five of us, that if there’s one person missing, we all feel it, no matter who it is. Over the years, we’ve come to really respect that and respect each other’s contributions.

We are very different people, but I think that we all play a crucial part, and we all realise that. Also, I think the fact that me and our Rick are brothers means that we don’t have that political thing where you get the keyboard player agreeing with the manager, and the bass player and the drummer feel the same way, and so they start political factions. If me and Rick disagree about something, we’ll argue about it and sort it out, and that’s generally the decision.

A lot of bands featuring brothers fall out. Some big names spring to mind…

There’s a yin and yang element with me and our Rick. We’re both very different people, but we both really respect what the other brings to the table – what I bring is very different to what Rick brings, and both are necessary.

Let’s talk about your new album, Avalanche, which is your ninth – it’s a great record. It feels like a classic Embrace album, but with a slight twist – how did you approach it and what was your mindset when you were making it?

It was completely different from how we normally do things. Normally, I have a big concept or an idea that I want to build an album around, like The Good Will Out or Drawn From Memory, or, more recently, Love Is a Basic Need and How To Be a Person Like Other People – they’re from epiphanies that I had.

Quite often what happens with bands is that that their best work is usually their first or second album, and then they get quickly get into diminishing returns – I honestly think that hasn’t happened with us. Our fourth album [Out of Nothing] was a big album, and I feel like this one [Avalanche] is another big album, and we’re 30 years in…

The reason why it’s the first couple of albums [that are the good ones] is because that’s when you’re having all your epiphanies as a teenager, or when you’re in your twenties and you’ve fallen in love for the first time, and you’re having your heart broken for the first time, or feeling grief… so, these things are when your emotions are running high, and rock ‘n’ roll comes out of that – that spirit and that energy.

‘What happens with bands is that that their best work is usually their first or second album, and then they get quickly get into diminishing returns – I honestly think that hasn’t happened with us’

Most bands get into diminishing returns after that, but the reason why I don’t think we have is because I’m a slow learner, and I’m still having epiphanies now, as a 55-year-old man, as much as I was when I was in my early twenties. I’m still learning shit, and the thing that I’ve learned from this new album is the idea of just being in the moment – all of life is there, because that’s all you’ve got… But the thing is, when you’re being creative, quite often you’re in your own head, so you miss the moments that are going on around you – you’re not living in the moment.

Embrace – photo by Simon Walker.

Because I’ve got two young kids – I’ve got a seven-year-old and a four-year-old – and a wife who won’t let me just be in my head all the time – she wants me to exist and to be in the room – I’ve had to be in the moment, and so, suddenly, as a result of that, all these moments that I’ve missed for the last 50 odd years have suddenly started hitting me, like an avalanche. So, that’s why the album’s called that – it’s me being in the moment and picking up on all these things I’ve never really seen before.

It’s like I’ve been a blind person and suddenly someone’s lifted the veil and I can see again. I’ve never been more inspired than I am now. I feel a lot like I felt before we got a record deal, when I was writing a lot of those early songs that went on those first EPs. I feel as prolific as that and to be able to say that after 30 years is great.

‘The new album is me being in the moment and picking up on all these things I’ve never seen before. It’s like I’ve been a blind person and suddenly someone’s lifted the veil’

There’s a rock ‘n’ roll cliché that a band’s first album is about wanting to be famous, then the second one is about being famous, the third album is written and recorded while the band are high on drugs, and then the fourth album is the bad comedown record, by which time everybody’s lost interest…

It’s kind of a cliché, but that never happened to us because we never got into drugs in that way. There’s that thing where you spend your whole life working on your first album, and then you’ve got a year to sort the second one out. We felt some of that.

The new album opens with ‘Stop’, which is a classic-sounding Embrace anthem – a call-to-arms – and a bit of a banger…

Rick brought the music for that, and it immediately got me on my feet. I imagined having a loudhailer and I was writing all this stream of consciousness stuff about how we’re all spinning on a rock, going one million miles an hour, and how in 100,000 years everything you know and love will just be a thin layer of calcium on that rock, so what are you fucking doing? Get on with your life. The lyrics sort of came out of that.

Rick, and sometimes Mick, will bring me a piece of music, and if I’m buzzing off it, then generally it becomes a song, and if I’m not, then generally it doesn’t – it’s quite hit and miss. They might bring a dozen things, and I might get one verse and then we need a chorus, but it’s a lot more organic, because I hear the music, and I respond to it – the music conjures up something in me. I’m like, ‘what’s this about?’ It’s almost like excavating it rather than imposing on it any sort of preconceived idea of something that I want to write about.

There’s a song called ‘For Kate’ that’s on our last album – it’s about my daughter, but it must’ve taken a week before I figured out what it was about – it wasn’t about a woman, or heartbreak… I started writing the lyrics and talked about going to the moon on a firework, and then it occurred to me that it was about my daughter – that was something I’d never written a song about before. Once I’d figured that out, it came quickly. So, it’s like figuring out what a song’s about is sort of the first part of the process before you start writing it.

And on the new album, you’ve written a song called ‘Emily’ that’s for your other daughter – it’s a song she can listen to when she’s older and going through hard times…

Yeah – that was the idea. I’m an older dad – I’m 55 – and she’s only four. When she’s falling in love, that might be in 15 or 20 years’ time, and I might not be around – I’ll be in my seventies. I wanted to write a song that talked about everything I know about falling in love and having your heart broken, and just to be there for her if I wasn’t around anymore.

The first single from the album was ‘Road To Nowhere’, which, again has an anthemic feel, and guitars that sound like The Edge from U2…

‘Road To Nowhere’ was originally an album filler track called ‘Crumble’, and it really wasn’t going anywhere. It didn’t look like it was going to make it onto the album – it was number 13 on a list of 15, and then we just started jamming it in the studio and I got a different melody for the chorus, and then suddenly it just took off.

It was right at the top of my [vocal] range, and I just remember when I came up with it, thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is another skyscraping chorus, like ‘Come Back To What You Know,’ or something like that’, and just got really excited about it.

It’s uplifting musically, but, lyrically, it’s quite down. Is it about being in a toxic relationship?

Yeah, but I don’t really like the word toxic, because it has implications that I don’t think honour that relationship – turbulent is a better word. It’s about how when you don’t know what love is, you assume that what you’ve got is the real thing, and so you try and make it work.

It’s like in Superman III when they come after him with kryptonite, but the kryptonite has got tobacco in it, and so it’s not quite kryptonite… it’s like bad kryptonite, and it makes Superman turn into a baddie, and he ends up fighting himself.

There’s one Superman in bright blue and red, and with nice hair, and then there’s another Superman that’s scraggy and dark. Well, that’s what like love is like. If it’s not the real thing, you become bad Superman. So, ‘Road To Nowhere’ is about being wholeheartedly on a journey that’s ultimately doomed. You think you’re Superman, but you’re not, your bad Superman.

‘Get Out Of My Own Way’ starts out as one of those classic Embrace piano ballads, but then it builds into a guitar-driven epic. It’s quite a positive song – it’s got a bit of hope to it, hasn’t it?

It’s about me not being in the moment. There’s a line in there, ‘Joy lights up your face, I look the other way / Everything you gave, I gave it all away.’ So, it’s like Lauren, my wife, will be there with our kids, having a moment with the children, and she’ll look over at me to share that moment, and I’ll be away with the fairies, working on a script or the next Embrace song, or whatever it is. I wasn’t there for those moments, and that’s not good enough.

Like I said before, the moment is all we have – the present – and if you’re not engaged in it, you’re not really living life, and what’s the point in great success if you never enjoy it? The song is about me owning up to that and saying I’m going to get out of my own way and do better.

‘Coming Home’ has a country-gospel-meets-Christmas-song feel…

Yeah, yeah… Our Richard wrote that – it was right at the very end of the sessions. He said, ‘This album’s not quite finished’, and I was like, ‘Well, you fucking write something,’ and then he went away and wrote ‘Coming Home.’ That song and ‘Get Out Of My Own Way’ are my two favourites on the album. It [‘Coming Home’] is so powerful – it’s about Richard’s daughter, who is an artist in her own right called Ellur. Her new album is amazing and she’s all over the radio. It really looks like it’s going to happen.

She’s written songs about her mum and her dad, and ‘Coming Home’ is sort of a reply track to the song she wrote about him. It’s not a diss track – he loves her to pieces! It’s got some fantastic lyrics in it: ‘The time that we waste when time’s not a thing… If I’d only known then what I think I know now, I’d have picked you up and never let you down.’

I had a go at writing the lyrics because it’s usually my job… I did write some lyrics for it and it was going to be called ‘Avalanche’, but it was about a completely different thing, and it was clever and it was good, but when Richard came up with his lyrics, I was like, ‘This is what the song wants to be.’ I’m proud of that song – it sounds like quintessential Embrace, but it also sounds fresh and different for us.

‘I now feel powerful and really confident about what I’m able to do as a lyricist and as a songwriter’

I think the new album’s like that – classic Embrace but with some different touches too. The second half of the record is darker than the first. ‘Up In Your Feelings’ is moody, with raw guitar, but it also has a dark disco-synth thing going on…

Yeah, it does. The album definitely gets darker towards the end – that was just instinctive. We had 14 or 15 songs finished and I was listening to them in various orders and trying to pick the best 10. I didn’t come up with the final order until the day before mastering.

It felt right for it to be in that order, and each song kind of sounds a lot better in the setting on the album than it does on its own, which is something that you really strive for when you’re sequencing an album.

‘Deny’ is another classic Embrace ballad: in it you sing: ‘Everybody will hurt you in the end/ You just have to find the one who’s worth your suffering.’  It’s a reflective song.  Some of the lyrics on the album are dark, aren’t they?

I was trying my best to live in the uncomfortableness of not knowing, and not having the answer, because that’s more honest, really. Maybe in the past, I haven’t had the confidence to do that so much. I think I now feel powerful and really confident about what I’m able to do as a lyricist and as a songwriter, and so I’m able to live in the uncomfortableness of not knowing – of not having the answers, of being wrong, or of being the antagonist in the song. Those are all really uncomfortable positions to take, but they’re all really honest positions and I think there’s a lot of really good material that can come as a result of being open to doing that.

So, with ‘Up In Your Feelings’, ‘Deny’, ‘Pure O’ and, to a certain extent, ‘Road To Nowhere’, I wanted to acknowledge that darker side, and not to try and sugarcoat it.

‘Funny’ is dark too – it reminds me of The Cure in their Disintegration era…

Yeah – we thought it had a Fontaines D.C. vibe too. That song is about where you can end up on a night out and how when you wake up the next day, it’s not so funny…

We’ve all been there…

Yeah, exactly. People don’t want to write about it because it’s mea culpa, but I’m 55 and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be on this planet, so, you know, just get on with it.

‘Power’ is the last song on the album – it’s another big ballad, but it ends the record on a hopeful and positive note. Isn’t it about finding someone and being comfortable with them?

It’s about no longer being in control because someone else has that power over you. On ‘Drawn From Memory’, from our second album, I wrote, ‘The girl that I could never hurt had to go and lose all that power over me, and I claim victory.’ It was basically about no longer feeling so strongly about a girl, which was sad.

‘I’m 55 and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be on this planet, so, you know, just get on with it’

This [‘Power’] is the opposite – someone has complete power over me because I’m just floored by them, and they mean everything to me. It’s about my wife – she completely holds sway over me. I can pretty much tell anybody else in the world to fuck off, but I can’t say that to my wife because I care too much.

I’ve always prided myself on being able to be quite self-contained and being able to walk away… I probably could, but it would destroy me more than anything else, and so someone having that power over you… when you love somebody it gives them all your power.

There’s something about the sort of surrender that feels powerful, and there’s a lot of love in that song. My wife used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you write any songs about me?’ And I used to say, ‘Because you haven’t broken my heart yet…’ Most of our songs are usually about heartbreak.

You’re celebrating 30 years of the band with a UK tour this November…

Yeah, and we’ve got a book [Good Good People: The Story of Embrace – Volume 1] coming out. It was written with the five of us getting together. When we did The Good Will Out, we got asked if we wanted to do a book but said no because we only had one album out, so it was crazy, although we already had one hell of a story by then. We got asked again when we did our fourth album, and again we were like no, because we were thinking ahead and we didn’t want to look back.

Embrace – photo by Simon Walker.

Now, it’s 30 years and we want to do it as a trilogy in three volumes – the first book is our early days all the way up to getting dropped by [record label] Hut after If You’ve Never Been. The second one is going to be the big stadium years, when we did Out of Nothing, and the third one will be everything that we’ve done since then. I’m also going out on a spoken word tour to talk about the book and my 30 years in the band, which is amazing.

I never thought that I would ever be able to do something like that. During lockdown, someone asked me if would do a spoken word thing, and I said that it didn’t really sound like me, but it went well.

There was a guy asking me questions and I just took the mic off him and I was almost doing stand-up and taking questions off people in the audience.

I got asked to do a dozen of those and they went well, and then this big company got involved last year and said we could do 30 or 40 of them if I wanted to. So, I was like, ‘well, I’m loving it, so why not?’

‘It’s been a crazy career – a rollercoaster ride, but it’s been amazing. We’ve had so many comebacks…’

There’s only 50 or 100 people there, but they’re like the 50 or 100 most ardent, crazy Embrace fans in that town. Normally we play in front of like 2,000 people, but with 50 it’s like it’s just the craziest, most life-affirming and amazing thing to do.

After that there’s the national tour [with the band], which is selling out quicker than ever. The renaissance thing is amazing. It’s been a crazy career – a rollercoaster ride, but it’s been amazing. We’ve had so many comebacks… The first album was kind of a comeback after the first few EPs, and then the fourth album was a comeback after getting dropped. Now this album kind of feels like a comeback.

Come back to what you know…

Exactly.

Avalanche by Embrace is out now on Cooking Vinyl. 

For tour dates, vist the band’s official website.

For information on An Evening With Danny McNamara, click here.

The book Good Good People: The Story of Embrace – Volume 1 is available now.

‘I’m eloquent, but I like swearing too – I’m an eloquent gobshite’

Damon Minchella

 

Former Ocean Colour Scene bassist and founding member, Damon Minchella, has a ton of great stories to tell, so he’s written his autobiography, You’d Look Good On A Donkey: Britpop, Basslines & Bad(ish) Decisions.

It’s a fun read. In his friendly and chatty style – imagine he’s telling you his rock ‘n’ roll tales over a pint in the pub – he shares anecdotes of ‘90s indie-rock excess, including a close call with the drug squad, and telling Paul McCartney one of his guitar solos was shit!

Minchella, who left Ocean Colour Scene in the early 2000s, is extremely honest about his time with the group – he reveals the highs and the lows – and he also recounts when Leonard Cohen told him to fuck off, reminisces about his time with Paul Weller, shares his memories of playing with The Who at Live 8, and supporting Oasis on their 2025 world tour, as part of Richard Ashcroft’s band.

‘He shares anecdotes of ‘90s indie-rock excess, including a close call with the drug squad, and telling Paul McCartney one of his guitar solos was shit!’

Born and bred on Merseyside, Minchella now divides his time between Wales and Italy. Say It With Garage Flowers spoke to him earlier this month to find out why he decided to write his memoir, and we got him to tell us some of his amusing stories and reflect on his career.

“I’ve never been arsed what people think of me,” he says. “Apart from my closest friends and family, I don’t give a flying fuck what people think. I don’t care – it’s not a book about making friends…”

Q&A

I enjoyed your book – it’s a fun read. Why did you decide it was time to write an autobiography?

Damon Minchella: It was my wife’s fault, to honest. We would be out walking the dogs or in the pub with some friends, and I would just remember a story that I’d never told her. It kept on happening and she said was like, ‘You’ve got to write your book before you forget it all…’

So, there was that, and I was in Italy for an extended period, doing my citizenship and getting my passport – I had to be there for a specific amount of time, with nothing really to do, so, I thought: ‘I’ll just write – I’ll start and see what happens…’

So, I started it, and it was like, ‘bang!’ All these things just came out… The process of writing just released loads of memories, but not in a linear fashion, obviously…

I want to talk about that because you haven’t approached the book in the traditional way. It doesn’t start at the beginning, with when and where you were born, etc. It begins with Leonard Cohen telling you to fuck off, in a hotel in New York, in the early 2000s…

Yeah – as soon as I started writing, that was the first thing I wrote – ‘Once upon a time, Leonard Cohen told me to fuck off….’ and I thought, ‘Oh – that’s good, I’ll have that as the start.’ And then I started thinking of chapter titles… It’s a bit like writing a song – if you come up with a good title, then that kind of informs what it might be about.

All the chapter titles were sort of random memories, so I started putting them in some sort of order, that wasn’t chronological, and then I just wrote the book from there. After about three months, I had to come back to Wales for a couple of weeks, and I was in and out doing gigs with Richard [Ashcroft]… I thought, ‘Well – I’ve got half the book done already…’ So, then I finished it off.

Are you a natural writer? Does it come easily to you?

Yeah – I think so. It’s because I read a lot as well – I’m an obsessive reader. Obviously writing a book is different from reading what someone else has written, but I like to think I’m reasonably eloquent, but I like swearing as well. So, it’s a nice collision – I’m an eloquent gobshite.

Your writing style is very chatty – it’s as if you’re telling the stories to someone over a pint in the pub. Going back to Leonard Cohen – you started to speak to him when he was sat in a hotel dining room…

And he immediately told me to fuck off – before I’d even finished the sentence. As I say in the book, a lot of people might’ve been offended by that, but I thought it was genius. I wanted Leonard Cohen to be Leonard Cohen, and he nailed it…

Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth told you to fuck off too, didn’t she?

Yeah – weirdly, they were supporting us [Ocean Colour Scene], which was wrong – we should’ve been supporting them… It was an outdoor gig, and I was in the portacabin dressing room. She walked past and I just went: ‘Kim!’ She went, ‘Fuck off!’ and carried on walking – she didn’t even break her stride. That’s what I wanted from her.

That’s pretty cool. How are you when people who aren’t famous recognise you and ask for an autograph or a chat etc?

If people want to come up and talk to you because they like your music, to be rude to them is terrible. I was having dinner with Chad Smith from the Chili Peppers once, who’s a lovely fella. Dustin Hoffman was sitting at the table next to us – someone wanted his autograph, but he was so fucking rude to them… Those people are why you’ve got a nice house…

You did once tell Paul McCartney one of his guitar solos was shit! It’s mentioned in the book… It was in Studio Two at Abbey Road, when he, Paul Weller and Noel Gallager were recording a version of Come Together, as The Smokin’ Mojo Filters, for The Help Album – for War Child – in 1995. You were joking, but how did he take it? Did he see the funny side?

He did – after the initial shock. He’s not used to anybody around him saying anything apart from: ‘Yes, Paul, no Paul, three bags full, Paul…’

What were you thinking?

I just thought, ‘I’ve got to say it…’ I do have social airs and graces, but I also have the ability to go, ‘Oh, come on!’

Your family has a link to The Beatles – your mum went to school with George Harrison, and your dad was almost the tour manager and van driver for The Silver Beatles, before they became The Beatles…

Yeah, but Neil Aspinall go the job instead. When I saw Neil [at Abbey Road], I said: ‘You’ve got my dad’s job…’ It was amazing that McCartney even knew what my last name was, and he remembered my dad as well. That’s probably why he didn’t mind me telling him his guitar solo was shit…

The title of the book, You’d Look Good On A Donkey, comes from something Ian Brown from The Stone Roses said to you. The Roses were a big influence on Ocean Colour Scene in the early days, weren’t they?

It’s safe to say that without The Roses, you wouldn’t have had my band, The Verve or Oasis – what people labelled ‘Britpop.’ I know it’s on the front of my book, but ‘Britpop’ didn’t really exist for the musicians doing it… Five or six years before, The Roses paved the way for it on a commercial level, but they were more of an influence on our attitude and style – they blew us all away. They were in their mid-twenties and me, Ashcroft, Noel and Liam were in our late teens. We saw this band who had it all but were cool as fuck. We were like, ‘shit – we can do that.’

Damon Minchella

‘I’ve never been arsed what people think of me. Apart from my closest friends and family, I don’t give a flying fuck!’

You used to live near Ian Brown, in Notting Hill, didn’t you? And Brett Anderson from Suede lived nearby too you call him ‘a plonker’ in the book…

Yeah – he lived round the corner, and so did Justine Frischmann – when Damon Albarn was seeing her. Me and him [Damon] never got on, but I always got on with her, which annoyed the fuck out of him. She’d always come and talk to me, but he’d be looking the other way.

The book’s very honest – you don’t mind who you upset, do you? Are you not worried about some people coming back to you over what you’ve written?

Not in the slightest – I’ve never been arsed what people think of me. Apart from my closest friends and family, I don’t give a flying fuck what people think. I don’t care – it’s not a book about making friends…

I was interested to read that when you were young, you didn’t have any interest in music – you were into football, messing around on your bike and watching war films – but one morning you heard The Cutter by Echo & The Bunnymen on the radio, and it changed your life…

Yeah – totally. Prior to that, music was always on – my mum had a good record collection – but I wasn’t particularly arsed. It was always the shit my sister was listening to, which was pop music. I’d never thought ‘Wow – this is incredible! – until The Cutter came on breakfast radio. It was like a sound from another world. I was like, ‘What the fuck? I need to know what this is.’

‘The first gig I ever saw was The Bunnymen on the Ocean Rain tour –  at Birmingham Odeon. I got down to the front, they came on and I was like, ‘Well – this is it: I’m gonna do that!’

Weirdly, The Bunnymen were in Smash Hits and my sister had every copy, so then I saw what they looked like – they looked as otherworldly as their music. So, that was it – I went and got the single.

You didn’t have a record player – you borrowed your sister’s

I probably never gave it back. The first gig I ever saw was The Bunnymen on the Ocean Rain tour – I’d moved from Merseyside to the Midlands, and I went to see them at Birmingham Odeon. I queued up on me own, I got down to the front, they came on and I was like, ‘Well – this is it: I’m gonna do that!’ I thought the guy on the right, Les Pattinson, who was on bass, was the coolest, so I wanted to do that.

Later on in your career, Ian McCulloch asked you to join The Bunnymen, didn’t he?

It was like a weird circular thing in my life. By that point, I’d obviously done loads of music and I’d met Mac a few times… He’s a character – let’s put it that way…

But you turned down the opportunity….

Yeah. I’m mates with Les Pattinson, who is the reason why I became a bass player. I told him and he said, ‘Nice one – you’ve dodged a bullet there…’ It’s not the easiest touring environment.

In the book, you write about the early days of Ocean Colour Scene, and the struggles you had making your first album – you had to re-record it a few times. You were signed to the Fontana label but, after hearing the demos for the second album, which, funnily enough, included future hit, The Day We Caught The Train, they didn’t want to work with you anymore…

It was crazy – they hated us so much that they just wanted to get rid of us. There was another song [on the demo] that ended up being on Moseley Shoals too. I can’t remember what it was… It took a year to end the relationship – we couldn’t do gigs because of all the legal bullshit.

‘The hellscape of making the first album had sucked all the life out of what we wanted to do’

So, we got ourselves the best sort of space we could afford, which was a horrendous sort of little backroom in a studio. But that’s when we just thought, ‘Right, let’s just fucking be us now..’ The hellscape of making the first album had sucked all the life out of what we wanted to do – we kept changing producers…

It was the typical major record label thing – they sign a band that sounds like something, you start making a record and then some other music scene happens, so they want a different producer to fit in with that. And then another scene breaks, and they want another producer to fit in with that. By the end of it, you’ve ended up with a very expensive pile of shit.

It was a struggle financially, wasn’t it? You were on the dole right up until The Riverboat Song was successful, weren’t you?

Yeah – apart from me and Steve [Cradock – Ocean Colour Scene guitarist] touring with Weller, we had nothing. All our mates who weren’t in the band had proper jobs and had bought flats and had proper cars, and we were struggling to get the bus fare to get to the studio.

People say we were really lucky because of TFI Friday and the Weller connection – he liked the band – but that wasn’t luck, it was self-belief and stubbornness that got us to that position. Everyone else who’d been dropped by a major label would say, ‘we’ve got no money – let’s pack it in…’

I didn’t realise how much Andy Macdonald, who had the Go Discs! label, helped you out ahead of you making Moseley Sboals...

Yeah – he’s an amazing person and I talk about him in the book. He loved our demos and what we were doing, and he wanted to sign us, but he’d just signed Travis, and it was quite a small label. He had Weller, who was exploding, and Portishead, who were doing well. He signed some other dancey stuff too, so he couldn’t take us on, but he said: ‘Here’s some studio equipment and £10,000 in cash.’ We were like, ‘What the fuck?’ Ten grand in 1995 was a fortune.

You mentioned not being able to afford the bus fare to get to the studio, but how was it when you suddenly found yourself in the spotlight and making serious money. How was fame? Was it a bit of a headfuck?

Not really – it doesn’t happen in a huge explosion, it’s day-to-day. As it was incremental, it was easier to deal with. It’s not like you’ve suddenly won The X Factor...

And you’d put the effort in early on…

Yeah, but I think it was also because we’d spent so long in the wilderness. We’d already done the first album on a major label thing, and that all went wrong. We stuck to our guns, so it was more validation really – it was like, ‘Okay – people like our music…’ It wasn’t just the four of us, our manager, a few friends and Andy Macdonald anymore…

You go from being flat broke to looking at your bank account and going, ‘Jesus Christ!’ And, instead of everyone around you saying, ‘You’re shit, split up’ – everyone’s saying, ‘Wow – you guys are amazing!’ That’s going to inflate anybody’s ego, but it’s how you deal with it is the test.

Ocean Colour Scene were a band that were liked by the people but disliked by the music press, who called you ‘Dadrock.’ Why did the media hate you so much and did it bother you?

I know why they hated us… The first time round the music press said Ocean Colour Scene were going to be the biggest band in the world – they hyped us up and then we had the disaster of making the first album, which took three years rather than three months, by which point they’d moved on – they were like ‘You guys are dead to us…’ So, we came from nowhere – it was completely unexpected.

They presumed we’d split up and then suddenly we’re on Top of the Pops and daytime Radio 1 – and they, the purveyors of good taste, were like, ‘How dare you.’ We circumvented them and became massive, so they had to slag us off.

Then there was Britpop and then Britrock, which I suppose, were positive terms – everyone was talking about it – but we got called ‘Dadrock, which was supposed to be really insulting, because it was the music your dad listened to. Well, my dad had really good music taste…

Do you think Ocean Colour Scene have gained critical acclaim as time’s gone on?

I think so. I hate the word ‘authentic’, but we were true to ourselves, we had talent, quality, and great songs. At the time it had a label, but then, years later, people go: ‘This is really good…’

It’s like Free – they’re only really known by the vast majority of the general public for All Right Now because it was in a chewing gum advert. It’s by far their worst song – their second, third and fourth albums are astonishing. They were never cool, but, over time, people are like, ‘We should listen to Free…’ Things that are written off and labelled as X, Y, Z… Now those labels don’t matter…

‘We didn’t like the closed-mindedness of the whole mod thing. It was supposed to be modernism – looking to the future – rather than thinking it’s all about 1967’

In the book you write about how Ocean Colour Scene were often labelled as a mod band, but, other than Steve, you weren’t mods, were you? Simon [Fowler – singer] was into folk music, and, like you, The Velvet Underground, and Oscar [Harrison – drummer] liked lovers rock and dub. You did embrace the mod look, though…

Yeah, and on the artwork, and it didn’t help that we had scooters… The look is good, and the clothes are great, but we didn’t like the closed-mindedness of the whole mod thing. It was supposed to be modernism – looking to the future – rather than thinking it’s all about 1967.

You played bass in Weller’s band, but you weren’t a fan of The Jam, were you? You prefer The Style Council – although you don’t like some of the ‘80s production on their songs…

I think it stems from when I was at school. Once I discovered The Bunnymen, I got into The Velvet Underground, The Stooges and Suicide – all that kind of stuff. You get into all this weird, cool-as-fuck music where nothing is straightforward, like the lyrics and the look.

When I moved from Merseyside to the Midlands, my mates at school were all into The Jam, but you’d hear the music and it was too obvious – they looked boring and you knew what every word meant… There was nothing to unravel in your mind – there was no mystique.

Obviously, Weller wrote some fantastic songs in The Jam, but I think the songs he wrote in The Style Council are way more interesting, but the problem with a lot of The Style Council stuff is the production, which is very ’80s…

What did playing with Weller teach you? Did you develop as a musician and learn to improvise?

Yeah – I learnt to improvise a lot, and to be really committed – not that I wasn’t committed, as I’d been through the wilderness of being on the dole and making tunes in a really shit studio… It was more about playing live – the sheer attitude of it and how it was the most important thing right now… It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s onto the next bit and give it your all.

One of the main things Paul gave me was the chance to explore loads of music that I wouldn’t have thought of listening to, like Free and Traffic. The first time I listened seriously to The Verve was when he gave me a cassette which had History on it.

I saw The Verve when they did their first album. Me and Simon [Fowler] saw them at some tiny venue in London – they were good, but it was when they were doing that sort of psychedelic sonic space jam stuff… So, Paul opened my eyes to The Verve, which is kind of weird, because I would go on to work with Richard. That’s not to say that Paul was open-minded about all kinds of music – I’d play him some stuff and he just refused to listen to it.

‘One of the main things Paul Weller gave me was the chance to explore loads of music that I wouldn’t have thought of listening to, like Free and Traffic’

We talked earlier about how honest the book is. You’re very candid about the bad times in Ocean Colour Scene as well as the good times. When the band got a lot of money, that led to a lot of drugs too, which, ultimately, caused a rift between some of the members, didn’t it?

Yeah – it happens to every single band, if they’re inclined to go that way. You’ve suddenly gone from no money to shitloads of it, and, if you’re in a band, you tend to do drugs anyway… And now no one’s telling you you can’t, and you’ve got lots of money, so you can afford it. You also then got extra people involved, like partners…

And all the hangers-on…

Yes – you’ve got a lot of people talking and also lot of pressure to follow up the next record, to make sure you have another hit. All of a sudden, it’s rare that all four people in the band and their manager are together on their own – all of a sudden, you get a little fracture.

Half the band are doing uppers and half are doing downers, so that immediately creates a sort of energy rift, and as soon as that starts, when you’re in the band, small things become big. People – particularly blokes – don’t tend to talk about how they’re feeling. So, you get the two who are smoking a lot of weed [Simon and Oscar] and won’t go into the studio because they think the other two are just going to have a go at them…

‘I can’t listen to One From The Modern now, because I know how it was made…’

That all came to a head on One From The Modern, which was basically mine and Steve’s record. If we hadn’t pushed it, it would never have got done. It wasn’t the record that me and Steve wanted to make, but it’s still a very good record. I can’t listen to that record now, because I know how it was made… I was talking to someone for a podcast yesterday, and they said One From The Modern is their favourite album. I was like, well, good for you, but it’s not mine…

Since you left Ocean Colour Scene, in the early 2000s, you’ve seen Steve and you’ve seen Simon, but you haven’t spoken to Oscar, who you fell out with in a big way, leading to you leaving the band. Would you like them to read the book?

I know they will… Oscar won’t like any of it… I think if Steve and Simon get to the end of it, they’ll be like, ‘All right, fair play…’ because I’ve got a lot of love and respect for the band and particularly for Steve and Simon. If they only get halfway through it, I’m expecting my phone to be quite hot…But if they get to the end, they’ll go: ‘We get it…’ They were there as well – they know what happened. It’s not like I’ve invented some sort of Stalin-esque re-reading of our lives.

We talked about drugs… There’s a good bit in the book where Ocean Colour Scene accidentally join a drug cartel…

(Laughs). That was a very bizarre time – it was when we were finishing off One For The Modern, which was sort of the pinnacle of the band being at their most excessive. We were all doing a lot of drugs and we had a tried and tested dealer, but we didn’t know the police were keeping tabs on him…

They see him going into a big studio in an industrial part of Birmingham, where loads of trucks go, and they think the band is being used as a transportation front for an international drug cartel, which we didn’t know the guy was part of.

Bizarrely, the other three guys in the band were buying their drugs with cheques… so the police found that out as well…

Ocean Colour Scene

There was a paper trail…

I’m not being funny, but just go to the cashpoint… I’d moved to London, so when I was in Birmingham, I stayed at a hotel – the police never saw the guy come to my house, but they saw him go to the other guys’ houses as well, not just the studio… Obviously, we weren’t a drug cartel, but, you know, the studio got raided by the armed drug squad…

‘We were all doing a lot of drugs and we had a tried and tested dealer, but we didn’t know the police were keeping tabs on him…’

And your manager, Steve’s dad, was an ex-copper…

Yeah – and fortunately he was able to sort of deal with it without anyone having a heart attack. He understood who we needed to talk to. Obviously, there were going to be some arrests and cautions, but then eventually they were going to say, ‘ Okay, it’s not you guys…’

It made the TV news and you had to distract your mum when she saw the story on the telly…

Yeah – she’d come in from the kitchen, turned on the telly, and it panned across a picture of the band… then it was just a picture of me on screen, with the news anchor saying, ‘What next for Ocean Colour Scene?’

There’s another police-related story that didn’t make the book. You once signed autographs for the police when you had some drugs hidden in the glove compartment of your car…

Yeah – I’d bought a sports car, I’d been working late in the studio, and I was driving back with the top down, playing Public Enemy at full blast. It was when I was renting an apartment not too far from the studio, and the police had cordoned off the road for some reason.

I was thinking, ‘shit…’ They’d blocked the road and they were obviously going to search the car, so I immediately turned off Public Enemy, stopped the car and took my hat off.

A copper came up to me and said [adopts a Brummie accent]: ‘Fucking hell – it’s Damon from Ocean Colour Scene!’ He called his mate over – another copper – and they said: ‘Can we have your autograph?’ They asked me where I lived, opened the roadblock, and let me go. Meanwhile, my heart was pounding…

The Family Silver: Matt Deighton, Steve White and Damon Minchella

You were in a great band with singer-songwriter /guitarist, Matt Deighton, and drummer, Steve White, called The Family Silver. It’s now just over 10 years since your debut album, Electric Blend, came out. Is there talk of reissuing it and playing some gigs?

Yeah – there is. It kind of depends on Matt, and also if there’s enough desire for it – not just from the three of us. We’re all of a certain age now… It’s not like when you’re younger, and and it’s like, ‘Great, let’s get in a van and eat frozen pizza, and we can all share a room on tour…’ No chance!

It was a great band – and a pure band. It’s nice when it’s just three people as well, because it just makes everything incredibly important – what each person’s playing. And I do like that stripped-down side of music a lot. It’s a possibility – it’s definitely not a shut book.

 

I like the bit in the book where you talk about how Steve White calls you on a Wednesday in 2005 and asks you if you want to play a gig with him on Saturday – it turns out to be The Who at Live 8, in Hyde Park…

When anyone asked me to do something, particularly in London, my stock answer was always ‘no’ – I was living in Warwickshire, out in the countryside – but when Steve told me what it was, I was like, ‘Fuck – it’s The Who!’ I went to a little pub just around the corner from my house, and thought, ‘Fuck – I need to learn some Who songs, but I haven’t got any of their records…’

You weren’t a Who afficionado…

No, but obviously they’re brilliant… Apart from a greatest hits album, I didn’t have any of their records, so I didn’t know any esoteric tracks. By the time we’d eventually found out what the setlist was, I’d kind of worked the songs out, and we rehearsed for one hour on the Friday…

That’s crazy… Only one hour?

Yeah – we played Won’t Get Fooled Again twice…

Well, that’s almost half an hour already…

(Laughs) Yeah. We went on stage after Robbie Williams, who’d heroically overrun – everything was running behind and it was insane backstage. Me and Steve weren’t even having a beer because we needed to keep our shit together.

As you both walked towards the stage, Steve said to you: ‘If we fuck this up, our careers are over…’

Yeah – brilliant! And we had to push past Sting and Bob Geldof to get on stage – they were in the way. We didn’t fuck it up – thank God.

I watched a clip of it on YouTube – you can’t see a lot of you because of where the cameras are positioned…

Yeah. I’ve got really short hair for some reason. Clearly, I wasn’t planning on doing the world’s biggest gig ever…

You wrote some of the book while you were on tour with Richard Ashcroft, including the dates supporting Oasis last year – how were those shows?

I think Oasis did 42 shows – we did 24 of them. I’d easily done over 100 gigs with them the first time round. It was a lot more organised this time – it was like clockwork.

What was amazing about it was the euphoria from the audience – even more than the first time round. I think it was that people couldn’t quite believe it was actually happening.

Richard Ashcroft: photo by Dean Chalkley

 

‘Richard Ashcroft is the last of the singer-songwriter rock stars’

And walking out on stage with Richard… We’re the special guests, but we weren’t seen as the support band… We were our own world within the Oasis world and, for those 45 minutes, people were losing their shit and crying – before we’d even played a note…

It was amazing to see so many young people there – there was a whole new respect for Richard, and Oasis and Cast. You’ve got this entire new audience, which is millions of people, who didn’t get it the first time around. Maybe their parents played them the tunes when they were growing up, or an older brother or sister. A lot of the kids in the audience had parents who weren’t even born the first time round…

It culminated for me at the gig in the Chile, which was the best gig I’ve ever done – it was in the old National Stadium [Estadio Nacional in Santiago], which is where the Chilean government used to execute people in the ‘70s.

There’s a monument at the far end of the stadium, but you can see it from the stage – there were 90,000 Chileans and it was like a biblical experience for them. It was utterly incredible – an amazing, life-affirming experience.

Is Richard your favourite musician you’ve ever worked with?

Yeah – he’s the best performer and best singer, and a great songwriter. If you combine everything together… People might say, ‘Oh – Weller is a better guitarist than Richard…’ Yeah, of course he is, but he’s not a better singer than him – that’s for sure – and he’s not a better frontman… And if you combine it with Richard’s fucking aura… He’s the last of the singer-songwriter rock stars.

So, what’s next? Would you like to write another book?

It’s in the back of my head – I’ve got an idea. I left it open in this book that I might do a follow up. It’s going to be music-related, but it might not be part two of a memoir… but then again it might… That sounds really mysterious… I think I probably will do one. 

It could be a book about going on tour with Wendy James from Transvision Vamp…

Christ – what an experience that was.

I didn’t know you’d done that, until I read a brief mention of it at the end of the book…

I wish I hadn’t done it. It was Steve White’s fault. We were playing a gig with Weller in L.A. and Wendy James came in, because she knew Steve and Paul.

She was like, ‘I’m putting a band together…’ and Steve said: ‘Ask Damon – he’ll play bass for you…’ And I was like, ‘Yeah – cool…’

So, I went on tour… and oh my fucking God… It was hell. It wasn’t a fun experience at all – it was the second time I’d left a tour halfway through. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I think I left the tour in Madrid, and I didn’t tell anyone.

I remember Wendy sending me an email that said: ‘You will never work with me again.’ I just replied: ‘Obviously.’

 

You’d Look Good On A Donkey: Britpop, Basslines & Bad(ish) Decisions by Damon Minchella is out now, published by Backstage Books.

For more information, visit: www.backstagebooks.com.