Hank gets a listen of Jeff's material!

HALF AN HOUR WITH HANK

Q: 1970 was one of my favourite years when it comes to music because everything was so melodic. It was the time when you were forming your own group with Shadows member Bruce Welch and John Farrar, who was an Australian who wrote several of Olivia Newton-John's biggest hits. That year, Jeff Christie's group Christie had one of the biggest worldwide hits with Yellow River: Even Cliff Richard sang it on one of his shows. Jeff won an Ivor Novello award for that, which you and The Shadows have won a few times as well. Can you tell me any recollections you have of Jeff or Yellow River?

A: Yes, I remember when Yellow River first came on the radio and I heard it. I thought "what a cracking record". It's a song that I wish I'd written and it's a recording I'd love to have made.
    It was just the right song and the right performance at that time and it made a big impression on me. As you say, Marvin, Welch and Farrar was just starting up, and we were writing a lot of stuff and trying to get all these nice harmonies going. I just thought something like that was a song we could have done very well with!
    Kudos to Jeff, it was a good song, good performance, and a huge hit in many countries.

Q: Jeff tells a story of meeting you and Bruce back when the Shadows played the Grand Theatre in Leeds when Jeff was only 14. He followed you after the show to an artist guest house to tell you what the missing chord was for the Kitty Lester song Love Letters. He said you were kind enough to come out and greet him and his mates and that you were "normal and nice": just like you are now!

A: Obviously we used to meet hundreds of fans, and if we were staying at a guest house, that's got to be around 1961 maybe, possibly '60 the latest, because usually after that there were hotels and things.
    Meeting so many different people on tours over the years, it's hard to pinpoint an exact situation. I've met a lot of young guys, like maybe 13, 14 years old, who are just going to play guitar and their parents have brought them along.
    You say hello to them, trying to give them some encouragement. And I hope I did give Jeff some encouragement. And certainly if I did, maybe that's why he went on to have such success, so that's great to hear.

Q: Jeff does say you did encourage him to stay in the business and that was because a couple of years later his early band, The Outer Limits, appeared on the TV show Jukebox Jury when they were previewing the single Just One More Chance.
    As guest judges, you voted it a hit, but Bruce gave it a thumbs down. Nevertheless, your judgment was a boost of confidence for Jeff, which kept him going in an industry where he might have quit.
    The single became a minor hit and the band was signed up by The Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham for his record label.

A: The Shadows appeared on Jukebox Jury as artists as well, when we stood behind a curtain somewhere and the panel didn't realise you were there and then they'd vote on the record.
    I remember that was when FBI was released and after they voted on it, we appeared and said hello to the audience and went off.
    I think it's important for young artists to, if they have some kind of talent, to be encouraged to try to follow that dream and work hard to try to achieve what they'd like to in the music industry. Clearly Jeff had talent.
    It's so easy to get discouraged, you know, because you can get knocked back so easily by record producers or publishers who don't like your song. And the thing is, of course, with that, if you just get discouraged, you can just pack it all in. And I wonder sometimes how much talent has been lost because of discouragement.
    It could be your family could be discouraged, or saying "you'll never do any of that". Fortunately, Jeff stuck with it and that's great.
    I've met a lot of young guys and even older guys who are trying to write songs. And because I feel I respond to encouragement, I like to give that encouragement to other people.
    I don't like to give false encouragement though. If I think someone just really has no talent or very little talent, I wouldn't encourage them, but when someone has got a guitar, and they can possibly do something, then go for it!

Q: Of course, it wasn't just Jeff who was influenced by you. A lot of major artists have all cited you as their inspiration. I guess because of your status with Cliff as well as The Shadows, you were more hip to follow than, say, Bert Weedon or someone like that.

A: I had a lot of respect for Bert because he kind of brought the electric guitar to the fore in the late 50s when he did some TV shows. I remember one tune he played called Little Red Monkey where he played by damping the strings. I thought it was great and said, "I'd like to play like that".
    Then I heard rock and roll records with Gene Vincent's guitarist, Cliff Gallop, Scotty Moore with Elvis, James Burton, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, all those sounds, and I loved it. And whilst I had been initially more interested in guitar from a traditional jazz and folk blues perspective, when I heard those twanging guitar sounds, that really excited me.
    Obviously Bert wasn't really into that: you know he had a lot of technique and he was a very good player, but he was a bit "square" in the way he played. When The Shadows started happening and we were young, we were very raw and we weren't that good really. But we happened to make some records which caught the imagination of the public and you know and I can understand that the youngsters, your peers, and people even younger than you go "I love this", and they want to be like that. They don't want to look at an older guy.
    It's like me now, I'm an old fart! So maybe young guys, they're looking at their own heroes now, and that's quite normal.
    Here's an interesting thing about Cliff's first single, Move It. We hadn't met Cliff at that point. It was probably about two months before we met him when he recorded it. The guitarist booked for the single originally was Bert Weedon, but he couldn't do the session. So producer Norrie Paramor got in a guy called Ernie Shear, who used to play in the Big Ben Banjo Band, who was a very good banjo player, and a good guitarist. And he played a cracking bit of guitar work on Move It.
    When Ian Samuel wrote the song, the original introduction was on single strings. Ernie was just messing around and saying "what about this" and did the double stopping, which is what you hear on the record. So that's how these things happen, just a little bit of luck. Bert Weedon was supposed to be on this session, but it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good with him.

Hank in his studio in Perth.

Q: So who was your hero, how did you learn the trade? Were you self-taught?

A: Yes, like a lot of my contemporaries. Talking to people over the years like Jeff Beck, Brian May, other guitarists, we listened to records and we tried to copy what we heard on the records. I'm sure that's what Jeff did too.
    I wanted to get that twanging, real rock and roll sound. And when I got the Stratocaster, that helped me develop a different style because I had the, what people now call a whammy bar: Fender called it a tremolo bar, but it was actually a vibrato bar.
    And of course, with really heavy strings in those days, you could barely bend them: the only string you could bend was the second string, a half step, and I used to bend it half, and I used to pull it the rest of the way up, a whole tone step. And then I found I could put a vibrato on, because I was interested in how singers sing, how saxophone players play, and they always use a vibrato, which means it makes the notes sing.
    So I tried to develop that sort of technique using the whammy bar, which worked, and then of course I got the echo box which gave me some more variation, and then suddenly I had a purely accidental sound and an approach to playing which was a little bit different, and it seemed to catch on.
    So that was from listening and trying to copy in the first place, and learning some of the solos from the records, and I didn't really know what I was doing!
    In those days, many of us couldn't afford to get a guitar teacher. In fact, when I started playing, I didn't even know any guitar teachers and I couldn't certainly afford to have lessons. So it was a question of literally listening to records or the radio, trying to remember what was on there, working out the chords and trying to play motifs.
    When we were backing Cliff, it usually fell upon me to come up with an intro to a song. And it was often just a simple motif that was a legacy of listening to those pop records and realising that a lot of them were just simple little tunes, but they're memorable. I think the public in general don't want to be baffled by too many notes, you know, they go for tunes and the feel of the song, the rhythm, etc.

Q: Do you prefer physical products or digital?

A: I personally like things like LPs and CDs. I like to have it in my hand and look at the sleeve notes and all that sort of stuff, you know, and information on the recording process, perhaps the various artists on the CD or the DVD.
    But I know a lot of people just like to download things now. It's a different world and one I'm not entirely happy with. I think a lot of people now have got very short attention spans, just clicking everything and expecting things fast: bang, bang, bang, bang.

Q: You occasionally play with Cliff on his shows. What other music are you involved in?

A: My last conventional album was about four or five years ago, called Without A Word, and it had some lovely tunes on it with some nice compositions by different people, which I really enjoyed interpreting.
    But these days I play what is called gypsy jazz, loosely based on the music that Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli came up in the 1940s and early 50s, and it's a fun style to play. It's very different because you use what is called a gypsy jazz guitar, which is based on the type of guitar that Django used. They've got a longer scale than the normal guitars from nut to the bridge, and I've got smaller hands so that's a bit harder to play, and you have to play with a slightly different technique.
    With modern stuff, if you play acoustic, you just have your hand palm resting pretty much behind the bridge. Well, with a gypsy guitar, you have your hand off the bridge, so your right hand is raised above it: it's not pressing on anything and slightly bent downwards towards the strings. And the gypsies themselves use a lot of downpicking. I enjoy the challenge and the fun of playing.
    I have a little quartet in Perth: we made two CDs which have done very well and we've done a few gigs locally and overseas. I don't want to be doing too many; we find fun enough in some of those shows, where you get some young people in who are into jazz , or who have heard about my reputation or my legacy, and wonder "well, what the hell's he doing now?".
    We improvise on stage: I could go into Rock Around The Clock, you know, and we put that in as if it's part of the arrangement and it always gets a big roar from the audience because they recognise it.

Q: I think you need to do a version of Yellow River!

A: I would love to do it if I could do it justice. But I think a song like that ideally would be nice to do as a vocal with the harmonies and everything, you know?

Q: Jeff himself, when his band Christie split up, helped out a rock band that played flamenco music, named Carmen. A couple of their albums were produced by Tony Visconti. Now I think flamenco has similar origins but is very different from gypsy jazz, with lots of hand claps, foot stomping and emotional intensity, very theatrical.

A: Yeah, I love flamenco too. Not that long ago, we went to see Paco Peña, who I met a couple of times in London. In 1969, when I was doing the TV shows with Cliff on the series, I wanted to try and learn some flamenco guitars. I was introduced to Paco: he was a wonderful player, and we chatted about it and we played a little bit, and I thought this was too hard.
    I didn't have the time to try to get anywhere with this and really play to a reasonable standard. I was playing on stage, we had the TV shows, I'm trying to write stuff and do recordings. So I sadly had to abandon the idea.
    How did Jeff go on playing that style? Did he start learning some flamenco guitar?

Q: Jeff worked with Carmen and also wrote and released a couple of flamenco-type songs.

A: The Spanish have a thing called Nuevo Flamenco, which is really like pop music with a lot of flamenco influence, and some of it's really good because they still have the guitar.
    I wouldn't mind hearing some of Jeff's flamenco music at some point!

Q: There have been quite a few musicians who have made the move from the UK to Australia. People like Leo Sayer, Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, and even dear old Max Bygraves in his final years. But you are probably the trendsetter, having been here for 40 years now. The difference is so drastic from the dynamic UK music scene.

A: We wanted to move out of the UK weather-wise. I feel the cold a lot, you know, and seriously I wanted to get somewhere warmer.
    When you've travelled as much as we did with Cliff and The Shadows around the world, you see a lot of lovely places. There are parts of England as beautiful and I've lived in some of them. But there are also beautiful places in other countries: France, Germany, Spain, Australia, the USA, all over the place.
    My wife and I initially decided to maybe move to Menorca in the Mediterranean, and began building a house there. Unfortunately, we found rather late that they didn't have any English-speaking schools for our two youngest kids, Ben and Tahlia, who were about 10 and 13 at the time. So the options there were quite limited. Either you get a tutor in, which is not as good, or they have to go to a boarding school. We didn't want that.
    So we decided to finish the house, sell it, and I said to my wife Carole, why don't we think about Australia? She'd been a few times with me, but only in the eastern states, and I'd been to Perth numerous times. And I really liked it here. I like the Mediterranean climate as against the big cities of particularly Melbourne and Sydney, which to me, once you live in London, wouldn't want to live in. It's too much.
    I love the feeling of space in Perth. You see a lot of sky, you know. And the weather's great. So we came here, we checked it out, and said let's go for it.
    People did say, oh, it's not going to work. I said we'll give it at least two years because if we didn't do it, we'd always regret not doing it. I always feel if you feel strongly about doing something, do it. And then if it doesn't work, well, you've done your best. Don't just say "I can't do it and I won't try anything".
    So we did it and we've loved it here. We lived up in the Perth hills at first, but we moved to the city about 26 years ago.

Ray and Hank in Perth.

Q: Did the move affect your career?

A: No, because I didn't need to do a fantastic amount of work. We used to tour the UK maybe once every 18 months. And then we go to Europe, or to New Zealand, Australia, maybe parts of Asia like Japan, Malaysia and Singapore every now and again.
    Communications was also getting better, from faxes to mobile phones and the internet and it's just brought the world much closer together.
    For example, when we recorded the Cliff and the Shads album for the Reunited tour that we did together in 2010, I recorded all my bits in my studio in Perth, and the guys did theirs in the UK, and Cliff put his focus on in the USA. For promotion, all I did was fly across the UK, do some TVs, all the radios, magazines, newspapers, you know, everyone that we could to do that kind of promotion.

Q: Your son Ben, also an accomplished guitarist, is in the midst of producing a documentary on your life. Tell me more about that.

A: Ben's doing it from an interesting perspective: as a son looking at my career and also at our relationship over the years.
    He's doing it with a director named Mat de Koning, who has won a slew of awards, including Young Filmmaker of the Year in Australia. After filming a series of interviews with me, Ben and Mat set out on an adventure to talk to some key musical collaborators, including Cliff, Bruce, and (fellow Shadows member) Brian Bennett. It tracks down interviews with musicians like Brian May, Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour, Tony Iommi, and so on.
    The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2026.

Q: Finally, then, what else is in the pipeline for Hank Marvin? You wrote some great songs, like Silvery Rain and Throw Down a Line. Do you still write?

A: No, I haven't written any songs for ages. Although, in the last couple of months I started to write a couple of lyrics for a tune I recorded on a 1983 album that was called All Alone With Friends. It's a very poignant little melody which I played with a nylon strung guitar, and then used a strat for the middles.
    It's a good tune, so I thought maybe one day I could write a few lyrics for it. Sometimes I'm thinking of the words that would work, and I wake up the next morning and I've forgotten what I thought about, because it was in the middle of the night!
    I had another one which I was writing about but I abandoned: I started to write about the situation in the USA with ICE, trying to throw out illegal immigrants and the chaos it was causing. But then I heard that someone else had written a song about it which was already released. Apart from that, there's no writing, I think I've lost my mojo!

>> When Ray and Jeff caught up in Bali! <<