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	Interview with Manfat Voodoo page 1
	Pete: Interesting times, prior to the launch of a box set, no less, down at Vivaz at the end of the month. Dav: Are you going to say who's in the room? Paul ... Pete: Oh yeah, there's Paul here ... Dav: There's you ... there's me ... and there's him. Damo: I am Damo. Dav: I'm White ... and Bell. Damo: Fire away. Pete: When did you first get into music. Dav: What have you got for this one? Pete: I knew I shouldn't have sent you these questions in advance. ------------------------- Dav: What have you got for this? Damo: It'll give me time if you go first. Have you made notes? Dav: Question 1. When you first got into music. (refers to notes) Pete: Playing of it, you know. Dav: Playing of it…. well. When did I first get into music? Probably when I was at The Dene in Thornaby. Which is a school that isn't there any more because it got demolished. They had a music teacher there that was into good musical performance... Outside his classroom he had in big ten-foot letters, "ATTACK!" And he was into that. When you sang or played or whatever that is what he expected….ATTACK!……. And if you didn't do it, you had penance, he kicked off. (laughs) And in later years of school he had this thing called 'Practical Music'. A class that didn't have any kind of thing at the end of it, like a certficate and shit, it was just a course. And you'd have to get on stage, "There's a mic, I'm going to play, you've got a crowd, whatever you want, now sing!!". And it was top. He stuck me on stage and he'd go "right, sing this!". He started with "House of the Rising Sun", da-na-na-na-na, (House of the Rising Sun).I loved singing it. And it stuck. And then my brother came after me cause he was a year younger and said that he'd have to sing that to , and he'd do nothing but "House of the Rising Sun". My brother after that (I have four brothers) - "House of the Rising Sun", brother after that, "House of the Rising Sun". All the White kids, all the White family had to get on stage and sing this song. I didn't know why. We were fucking ace. Hahahaha. Pete: How old were you then? Dav: Thirteen, fourteen. And he'd do things like that. He'd do mad things - like I'd be playing outside at break time, and then he'd collar me and bring me in. And he was a really strict teacher, so it was like…. you were concerned why he was going to bring you in. And he brought us in in front of about two hundred kids, and he stood us on a big black grand piano, stood me on it, and he goes, "RIGHT! WHITE! HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN! DA-NA-NA-NA-NA ..." without a microphone or anything like that, in a big hall, stood on a grand piano. And really belting it, belting the piano so you could feel it in your legs, and he's shouting, "ATTACK! SING!" Like that. And I'm going "There is a house ..." And later on I'd get people going, "There's that fucking cunt, who was stood on that piano. Get him!" (laughs) But it was all right, it was a good thing. It was liberating, being liberated stood on this grand piano singing to the rafters. It was all right. So that was my first ... Pete: Gig. Dav: Yeah. That was my first way into music. From then, I thought, "I want to do that". But I didn't think, "I want to be a singer" or anything. I just wanted to feel like that again. Pete: Get involved. White: Have that feeling again of performing and thinking, "This is top". --------------------------------- Pete: Damo, what about you? Damo: Well, I don't know really. I got a keyboard for Christmas when I was about ten, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't play it at all. So I forgot about it for a while. I just left it. It was a stupid little keyboard, and I got this book with it ... a bit of Lionel Richie in and a bit of Irene Cara. Pete: Bontempi or something? Casio? Damo: Yeah, we use it, it's that keyboard that we used on the album. Dav: Top one. Damo: Yeah. I thought, "Well this is nonsense, what do I want to learn how to play this for." So I just ignored it, just put it away. It wasn't until I was about thirteen or fourteen, and a mate of mine said that he'd got a new pedal for his guitar. I didn't really know what he was talking about, but he said to come along and have a listen to it. So he stood there and he plugged all these things in, and I didn't know what they were at the time, and he started playing the A-Team theme tune. You know, the bit that goes dah-da-dah dang dang dang da da-da-dah, all that. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life. So about two weeks later I bought his guitar off him, and his pedal and everything that he was plugging in, and that was it really. I just cracked on from there. It was just a matter of….. I was so impressed, and I thought if I did that, other people could watch me and they'd be impressed as well. So I thought, "I'll have a knock with that," and that was that really. I cracked on from there. It was a cherry red Columbus electric guitar. With a JHS amp. Two humbuckers. And it was awful. I bought this Boss Metalzone off him, or whatever it was. .And I used to just hit it, just make loads of noise, and that was the first thing I had. I've had lots since then, but that was the first one. Pete: And you were about fourteen, fifteen. Damo: I was fourteen, I think. Fourteen. Dav: Mine was a Marlin Sidewinder. A white one. Pete: Your first instrument? Dav: I couldn't tune it. Pete: When did that happen with you, then? Dav: My first guitar was about sixteen, seventeen, just because I wanted to learn an instrument, and the guitar seemed the right thing. And it just wasn't. It was like, "What the hell am I doing?" Barking. I liked all that old blues music, Dr Ross, banging hell out something, doing something to an instrument you shouldn't be doing, making a fucking mint noise. I wanted to go down there. And then for some reason I thought, "Why not buy a Marlin Sidewinder? Damo: Mind you, there were a few kids with Marlins actually. Was it active? Dav: Fuck it, I don't know. Pete: So what other instruments, subsequently to your Marlin Sidewinder? Dav: I play a bit of harmonica, I just like to go for the cheaper instruments, because I like that. Pete: It goes straight in your pocket. Dav: Yeah, "Straight in your pocket, man". Things like that. Just easy, fucking easy things. Not easy things, but things where you can just fucking hit them or ... do you know what I mean? Just do really basic things, and getting barking sounds from them. I like stuff like that. Pete: You play guitar as well, though, don't you? Dav: Yeah, I play guitar as well. Pete: Have you still got one? Dav: I've still got a ... Damo: Eko Ranger. Dav: Eko Ranger. Damo: Top guitar. It smells a bit weird. Dav: It does smell a bit weird. Like Brian Mancini said, what did he say? "This is made by a bloke. It's not little fiddly nasty things. It's made by a man with big hands, this guitar." (laughs) I thought, "Well all right then, I'll have that, Brian." So I play a bit of slide and stuff like that, because I like all that sound, and off we go, yeah. Pete: Do you use it much gigging now? Dav: No, not at all, just concentrating on vocals at the minute. Damo: We won't let him near a guitar. Dav: They won't let me near a guitar at the minute. Pete: What about yours, Damo? Have you always stuck with guitar? Damo: Yeah, yeah, just guitar. Once I got my first one, that was it really. Because I put so much time in to learn it, it became quite easy. But I've had a lot of guitars, all electric for the first, what, six or seven years when I was playing, it was all electric guitars. And I used to just go back to Mancinis and trade them in all the time. Get bored of one and go and get another. Pete: Try something else. Damo: Yeah, but all electric guitars. And they were all rubbish. I got this fluorescent pink - what was it called? A GTX Applause. No idea, it was awful. I got so much stick for that…. that got traded in. All sorts of really awful cheap guitars. I think the best cheap one I had was an Ibanez Roadster. Really nice actually, but it had a dodgy fret so I had to get rid of that. But yeah, a few, I had a good dozen I think, just while I was learning. Until I found one I liked. Pete: What about learning? How did you do that? Damo: Oh, just listening to tapes. I didn't take any lessons or anything, I don't read music or anything. I'd just listen to tapes and copy stuff. And the stuff I was listening to at the time was kind of big hair rock, lots of widdly-woo. So to be able to play that I had to learn quite quickly, get my chops up quite quick. That's how I learnt really, just listen to stuff and copying it. Occasionally I'd buy a score book, if I liked an album or something…… tabulature. Pete: Did you buy chord books? Damo: I bought one chord book which I've still got somewhere, with every chord in the universe in it. But that one's not really much good, because …..there's no tunes is there? Dav: There's no tunes. Damo: "There's no tunes in this chord book". Take it back. (laughs) Pete: So then, first bands. What was the first outfit that you ...? Dav: I don't know. What was the first band I was in? The very first band I was in was a band called The Vikings at Junior School, I must have been about ten. We painted our faces blue, and I was the bass player. But there were no instruments, it was just made instruments out of bits of wood. And we'd smash up the speakers, which were cardboard boxes. And the singer was a mate called Christian Pearson, who will crop up later when we talk about something else. But we were all into this heavy metal ten-year-old kind of, "Yeah man" …doing all that. Early ACDC, Black Sabbath sort of thing, that we shouldn't have been into, but maybe we should, because you're were ten years old. Pete: Was this at school? Dav: Yeah, that was at school, that was at Junior School, and then I went on to, I was in a band in Secondary School, but the singer out of that was Ste's cousin, called 'Taler' Damo: Not Marcus. Dav: I don't know. Damo: Because Marcus does the Big Brother voice. Dav: Does he? Maybe it's him. Damo: "Who goes? You decide." And all that. Pete: Is that him? Damo: Yeah, that's Ste's cousin, Marcus. Dav: It might be a different cousin. Taler. Damo: Taler? Dav: Taler was the one that borrowed him, all the big double-bass and stuff like that. And he was the singer in it, and he got me into the band. I couldn't play anything. And we played a gig, and he said, "Just play bass". And I said, "I can't play bass". He said, "It doesn't matter, here's a bass guitar." And it wasn't plugged in. And it was mint, because I stood there, and I copped off. It was mint. Damo: You copped off? (laughs) Dav: Because I was the fucking bass player, and it wasn't plugged in. Rock and roll, baby. And Taler said I used to turn up to rehearsals and play piano with my arse, because I couldn't play piano, I just made a racket. Pete: Just like Little Richard. Dav: Yeah. Just like little fucking Richard Pete: What was the name of that band? Dav: That was Onanism. It was the eighties. (laughs) Damo: Bloody hell. Dav: I didn't call it, it was nowt to do with me, I was just the unplugged, the not-plugged-in bass player. Damo: Is that why you were wank? Dav: And then what happened then, we were at sixth form, and we made a band called One Big Onion where I met Ste, and we did a handful of gigs in Teesside, and it was just that. It was getting into bands and growing up, and stuff like that. Pete: What sort of places were you playing? Dav: We played Lazenby Social Club, we played Marton Sixth Form a lot, I can't remember where else we played. We didn't play that many places, but wherever we played we had a laugh. Then we went our separate ways, me and Ste made another band called The Sperm of Zeus in Scarborough, just faffing about. And then The Sperm of Zeus then went into Manfat Voodoo, which is the sperm of Zeus - Manfat Voodoo. Can you see the connection? (laughs) Damo: No, can you just run that by me again? (laughs) Dav:So... it's all to do with ... Damo: Sex and religion. Dav: Yeah. Jizzy magic, innit? Spunky magic. It's all Spunky magic. (Born from an egg on a mountain top) Pete: What about you, Damo? First band. Damo: First band, here we go. It wasn't long after I got my guitar, it was a band called Resurrected Groove we were called…. from a Prince lyric. Dav: Is that from a Prince lyric? Damo: Yeah, something about resurrecting a groove, in a lyric. I don't know what song it's from. But yeah, that was just at school, we used to organise a battle of the bands at lunchtime at school, with kids that were in a band in the first year, so we knew we'd kick their arses. (laughs). But often they were better than us, but we'd just have more mates in the crowd that would cheer for us. We changed singers, and the same band became a band called Blackjack, and we played a couple of pubs and stuff, we played The Stage Door. Ah, The Stage Door. Pete: Where was this? Damo: Oh, in Scarborough.This'll be sixth form time now, So I'll be about sixteen or seventeen, we played The Stage Door in Scarborough. We practised more than played, to be honest. They were called Blackjack. It kind of came out of our school band. Then that all kind of ended, and I got in a band called Click, with a lad called Jason, Jason Goodwin, who ran a screen printing business. He still is a very fine artist, but we were awful. We were really bad. I played bass for them, and I just used to go mad on this bass. I just played it like a guitar, and I just went absolutely nuts on it. We were awful, we were really really terrible. But after that, I didn't do anything for ages, until I got a phone call off James Potts, asking me to be in Manfat Voodoo, and that was that really. So I didn't have a ton of bands behind me or anything. Dav: Weren't you in This Garden, or didn't you do something with This Garden? Damo: No, I played bass at one gig for This Garden. They rang me up, you know Shiny Phil, the bass player, was on holiday. I don't know why they called him Shiny Phil, he was a nice lad. Smiling all the time. And they rang me up, "We've got a gig tomorrow night, can you come down and play?" "Oh, okay." So I had to learn all these songs in an afternoon, and then play that night. And that was quite fun. That was the first time I played at the Talbot. There you go, eh? Dav: What are the chances. Damo: Scary Mary. Pete: So you were living in Teesside, early stage, then moved to Scarborough, around the time that Damo's just been talking about I guess? Damo: Probably. Dav: Yeah. Pete: Whereas you were brought up in Scarborough? Damo: Oh yeah, totally. But you must have been in Scarborough a few years before I met you? Dav: Yeah, I moved to Scarborough in about 91, 92, I think. Damo: Really? That early? Dav: Yeah, because Mel had gone ... Damo: I was still at school then. God, you're old. (laughs) Dav: I am old. I am. She went to university, at that teacher training university, so we moved here, and I was at Art College at Leeds then. I lived here, and I commuted backwards and forwards, and then she finished her course, and we stayed here, stayed in Scarborough. Pete: Which college? Dav: The teacher training thing on Filey Road. North Riding, I think. Pete: No, the one you were at. Dav: Oh, I was at Leeds Poly, which miraculously changed into a university while I was there. Which was terrible, because I wanted a degree from a poly. Damo: It's like North Riding College, where I've just finished, isn't it? Dav: Yeah. Damo: Which is now the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus. Dav: What are the chances. Damo: What are the chances! Dav: So it's all cosmic. (laughs) Pete: Alright then. Earliest musical influences. Dav: What have you got for this? You first. Pete: You know, when you were a kid, or early teens, or whatever. Damo: Damo leaves the room for a wee. Dav: I don't know. I was into ... what have I got here? I was into ... Paul: I'm going to pretend to be you. Damo: You what? Paul: I'm going to pretend to be you. Dav: Will you pretend to be him? I don't know. Teenagers and stuff, were into the normal bullshit teenage stuff like ... I don't know. Everybody in secondary school was into skins, and mod stuff……. punk had died off. Pete: Two-tone? Dav: Yeah, kind of like The Specials ... no, not really the The Specials, they weren't that clever. They were into Madness or The Jam or something like that, and they were all into fighting and shit like that. And I thought, "I don't want to do that". Everybody was doing that, I wanted to do something different. So embarrassingly enough, I was into sparkly bands like Prince and things like that. "Purple Rain" was alright, and "Around the World in a Day" was alright and "Parade" was alright, and then he was shit. And he was shit before that. Well, he was pretty shit, but I was fourteen. Fuck off. I'm a twat, and I don't give a shit. So there's honesty for you. And then going through to sixth form where you're supposed to start learning a bit more, pretending to be into deeper bands…. listening to U2 and things like that, which is another fucking pile of shit, but at the same time…. that awful film "Crossroads" was out. Damo: Oh, "Crossroads"! Dav: And I watched that, and I thought, fucking hell, I love that. I love the sound of that. And it was another pile of shit. But, by listening to all this crap, you end up listening to good stuff, by accident, know what I mean? Like Ry Cooder and stuff. We went to see Ry Cooder, and it was mint. All this mad stuff, all blues music. Pete: Yeah, you mentioned Dr Ross earlier, when did that start coming in? Dav: That was just going through all that, starting listening to blues stuff and then thinking, "God, I really like that." Like 1920's…old Lomax recordings of prisons and stuff, I'd think, "Fucking hell, it's brilliant." I'd want to listen to more, then you'd listen to ... You're listening to Lightning Hopkins and stuff… it's just fucking mint. So off you go. So on one hand, you're going, "With or without you ..." and then going home and putting on, I don't know, a bit of Robert Johnson, or putting on a bit of Elmore James or stuff like that. Fucking amazing. Damo: What, out of Sesame Street? Dav: Elmore James? No, that's thing, isn't it. Is that a joke? (laughs)So yeah. Pete: Right Damo, your earliest ... what did you listen to, who influenced ...? Damo: Ah well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you. Let me tell you. (laughs) I was talking about this the other day, after you sent me those questions and that. Pete: And you worried about it three o'clock in the morning. Damo: Shocking. I was up all night thinking about this. I was little when I got into my music, but I didn't really ... I just liked it because it was fun, I didn't think, "Wow, cool music." I used to listen to Barry Manilow a lot when I was little, and my mum and dad had this tape. I used to get up before school every morning and put Barry Manilow on, and I thought it was just the best thing ever. And I wore their tape out and they had to buy it on vinyl, because I knackered it. And my dad was really into gunfighter ballads, so I used to listen to a lot of Marty Robbins. Me and my mate, he used to come over in the summer holidays, and we used to close all the curtains in the room, and we used to put Marty Robbins on and turn all the lights off, and we had torches and lamps and stuff, and we used to put Marty Robbins on and then act out the scenes that he was playing, like "Big Iron" and "El Paso" and things like that. It was fantastic, we used to do that. That was the earliest thing I remember. But when I started playing, at the time I was listening to loads of big-haired rock. So I was listening to loads of Guns N Roses, and I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but Slash is just a really cool blues player really, at heart. And that's the first thing I picked up. So I learnt my blues scale…… like every other guitarist, as soon as you discover the blues scale you think you're the only person that has discovered the blues scale ever, and you can play anything and it sounds really cool. So that's what I did. And that's what I still do now to be honest. (laughs) So yeah, big hair rock was my main influence. It influenced me to learn how to play, and that kind of subsided into a few other things that were happening at the same time, so it's like early 90s now. Grunge started going on, which is kind of totally anti big hair rock. So I'd been studying for years and learning all these widdly-widdly-woo things, and then there's all these really cool bands coming out going, "Oh no, none of that. Let's just play as if we can't play, and make it as basic and as raw as possible." Pete: Outfits like who? Damo: I used to listen to a lot of Stone Temple Pilots, which kind of led me into all the rest, like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and bands like that. But at the same time I was also getting quite into funk, and I was listening to a lot of George Clinton. Which got me listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. So at the same time as I was learning my chops and stuff, I was getting into more rhythmical funk stuff. But yeah, it's all very electric and quite hard, quite harsh kind of sounding music. It's only after that that you realise that the people you were influenced by, were influenced by other people, and then you start listening to what they were influenced by, and then you go back to all the blues stuff, you always seem to go back to all the blues music. And only recently now, now that I've started playing acoustic a lot more, I've started thinking about the old Marty Robbins gunfighter ballads that I used to listen to all the time. So it's come full circle now. Quite a mad source, it probably explains why I don't know what the hell I'm doing most of the time. So there you go, loads of stuff. But I think mainly, that first stage with all the widdly big hair rock, and Satriani and Steve Vai and stuff like that, that's what really made me want to learn how to play. Pete: Well in a sense they were quite a good example, I mean you've really got to really get limbered up to play that. Damo: Yeah, I suppose you have. I wouldn't think about listening to it now, I don't think. I'm much more into songs and songwriting rather than playing. Funny. Funny thing, isn't it. Pete: Was there any family, mums and dads or uncles or owt like that, either of your families, was there any encouragement or any inspiration coming that way? Dav: Yeah, my uncle tried to learn his guitar, and he had a big Gibson 335. It was really nice, he let us play that. And he had an Eko Ranger as well. Damo: You've got to have an Eko Ranger, haven't you. Dav: I don't know, guitarists, I don't know…. I didn't play guitar like that. Damo said I've got fingers like pigs' tits. Damo: That's about right. Dav: But you know, I like that. It's the way that I want to play. So I like that kind of stuff, but I like singing, and farting around a lot on stage, I like all that shit. Guitars get in the way of that, don't they. Damo: Family-wise, nothing. Nothing at all. My folks bought me a keyboard when I was like ten, and because I didn't play it, when I turned round and said, "I want a guitar," they were just horrified. I had to beg them and plead with them, because they didn't see anything in it at all. My mum used to sing though, she used to sing a lot when she was a kid, but that was it. Pete: What, choirs and stuff? Damo: No, she used to do little things at the town hall or whatever, little public performances, just on her own. She never used to sing in choirs. She used to sing with a bloke…. what was his name? Is it John Meade? Who went on to be the producer of Countdown? Now that is rock and roll. (laughs) Dav: That is rock and roll. Damo: He's dead now though, sadly. But no, it's not as if I grew up surrounded by it or anything like that. It was just me raiding whatever music was in the house. But there was never any kind of, "Oh listen to this, do this." Definitely no family thing. My brother was never into it, my folks, my grandparents, nothing, nothing at all. It was just me, I think. Pete: What about guitar - we've sort of mentioned this, covered this already in a sense Damo, guitar influences? People who you particularly like. Damo: I don't know. Specifically….. I mentioned Slash earlier on, because he's basically just a blues player, and he is quite good. (laughs) And I mentioned Satriani and Steve Vai, but I can't say they really influenced me, because I didn't really like the songs and their idea of a song. It was just all guitar, worship the guitar…. And stuff like that. But I just liked what they could do with it. But I got massively into The Smashing Pumpkins, and I really liked Billy Corgan's guitar playing. Because it's just nuts. Maybe even not his playing so much but just his sound, just this massive kind of dirgey, grungey sound that I really got into. But as far as playing…..nothing really. Just bluesy stuff. It's only recently that I started listening to a lot of Sun House, I've been listening to a lot of Sun House records. But nothing ever really grabbed me and made me go one way, I was always being pulled ... like I say, I was quite heavily into funk as well at the same time. It's difficult to pin anybody down. But I would say Billy Corgan definitely, especially when I was playing with Manfat Voodoo a lot, just trying to make that one guitar sound as big as possible. But definitely not anything technical or like that, just more of the sound rather than any kind of playing style. Dav: I liked it when you turned up, and you had a sound. And we were pre-warned that you were a bit widdly. That was somebody else's words. Damo: Who said I was widdly?
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