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	BACK DOOR
	A telephone interview with Colin Hodgkinson recorded by Pete Bell on the 9th January 2003 Page 2
	Pete: Was there any pressure from Warners for you to come up with the second album, or was it just natural progression? Colin: No there wasn't, there was no pressure as such ..... it was just, the idea that we did it there ... I think it was probably good. You get a completely different sort of environment from anywhere else. We'd really written everything before anyway, we'd already been playing them, but ... it was the first time we had some vocals on of course, as well, and Felix played on a few of the tracks etc, but it didn't do as well as we hoped. The whole problem with Back Door was that we didn't sell great amounts of records - the amount of records you need to do if you're in the pop business or the rock business. With the way we were being promoted .... we were never really that sort of band. And then because we were going to America and going on these tours with bands like J Geils, ELP, all these sort of things .... we always went down well, but it really wasn't our crowd. And I only thought years later, a few years afterwards, after the band had finished, I went out and started to play with Jan Hammer - we used to go and play the bigger clubs - and I thought it would have been so much nicer, and probably more successful, if we could have done the same. Pete: So was fixing the gigs, was that Warners, did they control all of that, the agency and so on? Colin: The agency we were with was Premier Talent, one of the biggest ones in the States. They had really heavy rockers. They did everything possible that they could have done. People still love the band. They all say, "Wouldn't it be great if the stuff was re-released on CD," and Warners finally put it out…… Pete: It's odd isn't it, because up at Blakey you took everyone by storm, it was all ages of people, wasn't it. And it was people coming up from town, and coming up from Farndale, do you know what I mean? Colin: There was a complete cross-section of people. Pete: You know we've organised dates up there recently. I bumped into a guy there recently, Harry Peacock, from Guisborough, he used to see you a lot in those days, and there were a bunch of people at the bar, and he said, "Pete, come here, tell them what it was like when Back Door played." And I thought ….. erm …. And he said "You can't, can you? You just can't explain it". Colin: No, you can't. ---------------------- 1111111 Pete: And the stories still occur ....... Colin: Like Gordon with his hare curry - we had curry at the end ..... and God knows how many pints of beer we drank, it was unbelievable. I'd gone out one night with Hicksy, and I said "I feel a bit groggy," then I went and threw up. I must have had ten or twelve pints of Newcastle Brown. And he'd had exactly the same, and he looked at me and said, "We've got to stop doing this!" And still we'd go out there and play really well. Pete: And lead conga chains around the pub and all the rest of it. When I saw you the first time up there, the place was packed ... how long were you up at Blakey? Colin: Not very long. I think we started to play there ... it would have either been in 1970 or '71. I think it was probably ... Pete: '71. Colin: '71 possibly. So it would only have been about a year. We'd go up on the Tuesday and do the Tuesday night. By '72, we'd recorded a record, in the autumn we started to play with Chick Corea .... I don't know if we went back again or not. I think maybe we might have done one or two, but by then I think it was "Last Exit" in there, weren't they? Who took over from us. Pete: Yeah, I think the next time I saw you you were at the Coatham Bowl. Colin: That's right. Pete: Do you remember that? Colin: Yes, I do. Pete: By which time, you must have been touring ... was it UK tours initially, how did that work? Colin: They were very good, because there was a very good university circuit in those days, wasn't there? I think a lot of it's gone, unfortunately. That was ideal for us. I'm trying to think who booked us, was it Bron, or ... one of the big agencies we had. That was very very good for us. We also went to Germany and did a couple of tours with Alexis, where we opened for him. Pete: Oh, did you? That was a much better marriage than with, say, ELP. Colin: Yeah. We opened for him, and then we closed with him, if you know what I mean. He played the first set, and then we were the band, and he had Dick Morrissey and Ron on the horns, and Pete Thorup, that was terrific. That went down really well. So I've never been able to understand why ... well, we just never sold those big amounts of records that they were hoping we would. Pete: Was it down to that thing, that in those days they put you into the pop arena, if you like? Because there was no guy with the long hair out front singing, they couldn't market the band? Colin: That's quite possible. There were some very odd acts going round at that time, if you remember, that didn't fit the mould. Pete: Oh yeah. Quite. "Soft Machine" ....... Colin: Yeah, "Soft Machine", things like "The Incredible String Band". There really was some very off the wall things going on. And there was a lot of different music going on as well. But these days, I think the main thing that sells CDs for a band like "Back Door", or any kind of bluesy type band, is actually playing live and selling stuff at gigs, an 'on the night' thing. Or some good promo with the right people. Small organisations who specialise in this stuff. It's not something for the majors, it's not something for the mass market. Pete: The great thing is, you don't have to be dependent on the majors any more. Colin: No you don't. That's right. It was a whole different set-up in those days. That's basically the story of it. The next thing we did of course was an album called "Another Fine Mess", which I liked that a lot. Some of the things on there I think are really good. And by this time we had Dave McCrae on piano. Pete: How did that happen, Colin? Colin: He was a friend of Tony's from when Tony was still in Australia. He was over here then, and he had a place in Chelsea, where we were very grateful to be able to sleep ....on the settee. He was a nice guy, he wrote some of the music for the Goodies.... you know the Goodies? Pete: He did some Hammer movie stuff as well. Colin: He was playing with ... I think it was with Ian Carr's "Nucleus". He was pretty much part of the jazz scene then, and we were just thinking, "We've done a couple of things now with just the trio, so maybe we should expand it, and put another voice in there." Pete: Was it your decision, rather than the record company's? Colin: I think it was ours, we just arrived at it, and it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. So we tried that, and it didn't last a long time. Only a year or so. And then we came to the final album we had in that contract, which was "Activate", and by this time Hicks had gone. We thought we needed a more hard-hitting drummer, we thought we did at the time…. In other words, we'd got rid of the trio thing, and it was really getting away completely from the original idea, which now ... I know it was a mistake, but at the time of course you're ... not looking for someone to blame, but you've got to change it because it seems like it's not working as it is. So we had Adrian Tilbrook in ... Pete: Who was it who produced the album? Colin: It was Carl Palmer. I'd recorded some stuff for him in the studio because we were actually on the road with him for sixteen weeks. We did eight weeks in Europe, then we had a week off and did another eight weeks in the States. So I got to know him pretty well, and he booked me for a couple of sessions with Snuffy Walden, a good guitar player, who was in a band called Stray Dog, and a couple with Joe Walsh. I got to know him pretty well, and we were good friends. And then Ronnie came and played on something .... we did a tune - they had an album out then called "Works", where they each had a side, and then they had one with the band. One of those. So we were on his particular section of it, and it progressed from there. So we went in and made that last one. Now I think there's just too much on it. There are things about those last two records that I like, and others that I don't like so much any more. But it's like, as the Germans say, the zeitgeist. It was just the spirit of the time, and that's what happened at the time with those people. It's one of the most frustrating things about music, but also what makes it great, that when you've said it, you've said it. You can't go back and rewrite it or redraw it, because that's what you've done. Pete: Hindsight is a great thing, isn't it. Colin: Of course it is. After that, we played less and less, and were pretty much disillusioned with it. Pete: Were you? Colin: I think we were. By that time, it had been six years or seven years of doing it, and it really wasn't going anywhere at that time. Pete: The music was. Maybe the finances weren't. Colin: I don't know that the music was either. I think at that time, we probably needed a change. I think we did, because we'd tried everything we could write. We'd written a lot of different ways .... though there was a thread running all through it that was Back Door. Ron started to get a lot more studio work then, I didn't really do much. I actually got married that year, or the year after, and I remember I really wasn't doing anything at all. I actually went and worked in a day job for three or four weeks, which I hadn't done in years. And then I started to play a bit more, and then Hammer phoned, and said he was really sick of playing fusion, and he said "I'd like to get back into just playing some basic rock, something a bit simpler. How do you feel about it?" And I admired him tremendously as a player, he's an incredibly musician, so I said, "I'd love to." So I went out to New York and started to play with him, and that was the other great happy time of my life, with him. o------------------------------------------------- Pete: Some years, wasn't it Colin? Colin: It was '78 till about '82. I'd met him in '75 in Berlin, a wonderful player. And I went out with him and toured all over the place, but mainly doing clubs and stuff. I just spoke to him the other night, we keep in touch. It was the same thing with him. You get labelled as being something - he was part of fusion or jazz fusion, and once you get pigeonholed it's very difficult to break the mould. Pete: No, they put you in that rack and you're not going to get out of it. Colin: Even though he was playing some ... he'd been out with Jeff Beck quite a bit the year before. I don't know if you've heard any of those things, "There and Back" or "Blow by Blow" and "Wired" and all that stuff. It's really great, it's intelligent rock and roll, that's what it is. But they still wouldn't really take him seriously as anything other than a jazz player. In the end, he said to me, "I think we'll have to put it on hold for a bit. They've asked me to write some music for a TV pilot." And I said, "What's that?" and he showed me the script for "Miami Vice". And I said, "Woah, it looks a bit heavy, some of the dialogue and stuff," and he said, "Well, I'll do that, we'll keep in touch". And of course that was it for him. It was absolute magic for him. In the end he was working at nothing else. He'd get a tape from the studio in Los Angeles on the Monday, and he'd have to compose and record up to twenty minutes of original music and have it back by Friday. It's an unbelievable amount of work. Pete: And to keep up that level of creativity ........ Colin: This went on for a year and a half, then he just couldn't take any more, he was going nuts, he had to get out of it. His next thing was called "Escape from Television". It was the making of him. It was just really nice to see somebody who's really talented and such a great player get their just rewards for once. I was very, very happy for him. We've stayed friends ever since, we keep in touch, and keep each other up to date with what we're doing. Pete: When that ran its course, Colin, working with Jan, did you stay in the States, or did you think "That job's over, I'll go back to England"? Colin: Had it worked, I think I would have stayed in America. I wanted to at the time, because I thought that especially around that time, end of the '70s, I think there was more opportunity there, definitely, for that kind of music. You know what was happening in England around that time, the eighties, it wasn't a great decade, was it. Pete: Well, the punks had come through and smashed all preconceptions ..... and then the dance stuff started coming in. Colin: That's right. Anyway, I came back, and that's when Alexis (Korner) said to me ... I'd still played with him just about every year, at some time I'd managed to do something with him ....we'd have a little tour, whatever .....and he said, "I think we ought to go out as a duo." ------------ -------------------------- He was always hugely successful in Germany, so he spoke perfect German. You heard his radio programmes? He was such a lovely guy, a very, very knowledgeable man .... the man who really started the whole blues and r&b thing in England - him and Chris Barber between them in the '50s ...... Pete: Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson ….. Colin: Yeah, they stayed at their houses ...... they more or less did it single-handedly really. So I thought that was fine, we had a couple of years of that, three years of that, and that was terrific. We did things like the Edinburgh Festival, we played around England together ...... There was one thing recorded, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I've got it on video and it was from the Camden Jazz Festival ....... on Channel 4. Pete: I haven't seen that. Colin: That's the only thing I've got of us on film, so it's a nice little memento. A couple of years later, he was dead ...... tragic. Pete: Did you just record it off air or something? How did you get hold of the recording of that thing? Colin: Channel 4 showed it, and I taped it from there. Somebody else gave me a copy as well, just as a safety copy. That was .... I think it was '81. Pete: Just after the start of Channel 4. Colin: The other thing I was doing at this time with him, I was playing with Ian Stewart in his band "Rocket 88" .....Mickey Waller or Charlie Watts on drums, Dick Morrissey and Don Weller on saxes, two great piano players - Bob Hall and George Green, so I played with that as well. That was a kind of in-between period. Pete: That must have been a hell of a band. Colin: Oh, it was super. One of the drummers was Pete York, and he said, "I'm going to move out to Germany next year. I've been playing there for years" - he did with Chris Barber for a long time - "I'm going to get a sort of "Pete York presents" type-thing, and the first person I want to book is Spencer (Davis). Would you play bass with him?" I said, "Yeah." It was actually quite a long tour, it was about six weeks. So I did that and got playing with him, and he had this idea - I think it was called the 'Rock and Blues Circus'. It was a thing with Chris Farlowe, Jon Lord played keys, and he had a couple of horns in there, and that was really nice. I didn't know Jon before that, but I got to know him pretty well, and he said to me, "How would you feel about playing for Whitesnake?" Pete: Oh right. That came after that. Colin: Well, I knew David Coverdale and Mickey Moody of course, they were all mates from the times of the Starlight. Pete: From Teesside. Colin: They used to come and play in there and sing in there. So I said, "I don't know," and in a way, because of what I'd been doing with Hammer and the other genre, that kind of rock thing, I thought, "Well, why not?" Pete: Did you? Colin: Yeah, and they still had that thing where they played quite a bit of r&b type stuff as well. It was nice, Mickey Moody, Cozy Powell played, so I said "Okay." I went and did Cozy's album for him, and that was my audition - I didn't know that at the time. So I just went to meet them and said okay, and that's how I got involved with that. I completely didn't know. Amazing really. I lasted a year with them, but I knew it wasn't for me. Pete: Was it a year of major world touring and stuff like that? Colin: A lot of things in Europe and then a month in Japan ... I enjoyed part of it, but at the same time it was playing the same thing every night. My aims weren't really the same. It wasn't really what I wanted to do, to be honest. I realised it was totally different, to be honest. So that's what it came to. Pete: Good fun for a while. ------------------------ Colin: Yes, it was, especially with Mickey. Mickey was certainly a wonderfully funny bloke, and there were quite a lot of laughs. I'm trying to think what happened after that, that would be about '84 ... Pete: It must be quite a contrast, Colin, working small places with Jan Hammer at that stage, specific dedicated places, to the stadium stuff that I guess you were doing with Whitesnake. Colin: Oh, yeah. I remember we played at the Budokan at Tokyo, which is really the Martial Arts Academy, but it's a fifteen-thousand seater, and it was absolutely sold out. And we were doing one of the heaviest rock things we played, and Mickey Moody comes over to me and looks me in the eye and says, "The Blues!" I absolutely cracked up. So that was the end of that. After that I more or less started to work in Germany all the time. Pete: Did you? Why was that? Colin: It was just the way that things panned out really. Pete was there, and he was still doing things. What we did then was we went out .... we had a really nice trio with Brian Auger for a year, then we did things that ended up with Chris Farlowe singing. And then Miller Anderson was involved with it, Tony Ashton, and Zoot Money and lots of people, and it became the "R&B All-stars", and I did it for a long time really, we still do it even now. We go out like that once in a while. But the other main thing I did I suppose, going now to about '86, I made this record with a German piano player, Bavarian. It was very unusual. He booked some great players, like Charlie Moriano .... Pete was playing the drums, and this guitar player called Frank Diez. I didn't really know him, he was with a big German rock band. We started to play, and I got on really well with him, and odd minutes we'd sit and noodle about. Somebody had asked me if I'd play some duo shows, and I thought, who would I do it with? And when I heard him, I thought, this could be really good. So I said to him, "Would you like to do some duos with me?" He said, "I don't know if I could do that. I've never worked in a band with less than five people." So I said, "Let's play together for a couple of days when we've got this album over," which we did, and we really hit it off. I had quite a lot of stuff that I'd done with Alexis, because I'd been through the duo thing before. So we did about six or seven shows, and they went really well. So we did that ..... and I played with him just before Christmas. And we released four CDs together. He's a really great guitar player, and I wrote a lot of originals for that, and also did some traditional country blues things as well, but that's really what I've been doing since ... you've more or less got it. Apart from the solo bits. This guitar player, Frank, he went to the record company and said, "I want to do two productions, I'd like to do something with Miller Anderson ... " Pete: Is this a German company? Colin: Yes, this is a German company called 'In Acoustic'. They're not brilliant on promotion. They don't spend much on it, the budget's always tight. If you're efficient and you don't mess about, you can come in within the budget. So he said, "I'd like to do that, and I'd like to do a solo one with Colin. Colin, over the years, with Back Door and various other things - he's got a repertoire of solo stuff that I think would be great if we put it out as a separate CD." So they went for it. So I had this out, and what I did was I went and played ... there's a friend of mine called Barry Moorhouse who owns the biggest bass shop in London called the Bass Centre in Wapping, and he's got a shop in Birmingham and one in Manchester. He'd rung me up at the time of "Back Door" and said, "Mr Hodgkinson, do you do bass lessons?" He was at university doing Business Studies. I said no, I'm left-handed and I just don't have the time. I sort of dismissed it all. But he's such a lovely bloke and he's done really well, a friend of all bass players and a smashing guy ....... So he said "Why don't you come down and do something at the Bass Centre?" I said "I don't want to do a clinic because I don't like talking about playing bass and showing people scales that they can get from any video or book .... there's so many of them out." He said, "No, just come and do a performance. Just come down and do forty minutes sitting or standing, play your ragtime and sing your songs……." So I did, and there was a terrific reaction I got from it. So I did that a couple of times. ---------------------- And then Bill Wyman called and said, "Would you like to go on tour with me?" I've known him since '73 or '74 ... Pete: Have you? Colin: Montreux Jazz Festival - we went with "Back Door". That's when I first met him. He told me about this band he had called "The Rhythm Kings", and he said "Do you want to go on tour with me, and do an opening set?" I said, "Do you think it'll work?" Because I'm thinking .. "What kind of audience is this going to be? Are they going to be all Stones fans?" But I went and it was great. I did between twenty-five and thirty minutes. And all those places, like Newcastle City Hall, all the big English venues. It was absolutely great. I'm kind of pleased that people liked it. Pete: How did you feel about that, Colin, when you first did it, that sort of scenario? There you were, the lone bass player, to be followed by a band of, I don't know, superstars? Colin: All great players. I felt a bit odd, really, because in some ways I couldn't face it, but at the same time I felt really proud that I'd pulled it off, that I'd got away with it .... people really liked it. I felt really proud of it. Pete: You were undaunted ..... Colin: It was just great to do it, but I was always very nervous about it. Edgy and impatient to get out and try not to have another drink, and keep sharp. And then the funny thing was, Gary Moore asked me to do the same thing. So I thought okay, and maybe it was the same sort of venues, but this is a different crowd altogether. This is where they take the seats out and put the barriers in front of the stage. But it was the same reaction .... people were writing to his website and saying how much they liked what I was doing, and how nice it was. So there was a very very good feeling for me. I was proud of myself, I really was, that I'd pulled it off.
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