Brian Cadd’s name may not be familiar to younger music fans,
but it should be. As you’ll read in the following interview, Cadd has had about
ten careers’ worth of experience in music - including being a member of one of Australia's first country rock bands - and a fascinating amount of knowledge
and perspective. Recently Cadd and his Bootleg Family Band released an album, Bulletproof, and they are playing dates
through the start of 2017. Visit www.briancadd.com
for information.
You’ve worked across
most aspects of the music industry – you’ve been in A&R, a label head,
songwriter, producer and performer. I’m curious as to whether the business
things you learnt along the way influenced your creative work.
I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that – that’s a great
question. And now that I think about it – really on my front foot because I’ve
never answered it before – I think probably they colour your decisions. They
can’t help it. If you happen to know the business well enough to know that you
need to need to move there and do one of those and have two of those, one of
those, then that will help you way ahead of time to make decisions that will
ensure that you try to get that happening. This goes everywhere from ‘What label
do I sign to?’ to ‘When do I release a single before the album, or do I?’ All
those sorts of things. If you didn’t know the industry you would obviously
sometimes make the wrong choice. And I think that that’s indicative of some
really great young acts – and we were the same when we were young. You do the
thing that at the time appeals to you. Here’s the best example I can give you:
when Axiom was ready to go overseas – Axiom, along with Gypsy Queen Flying
Circus, we were Australia’s only two country rock acts – and we’d had hit as a
country rock act. And where did we go? Because we all wanted to go to England –
because that’s where the Stones and the Beatles were from – we went there and
they hated country rock music. If we had have gone to Los Angeles, right then
was the beginning of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and just before
The Eagles, so we would have fitted in perfectly there, but because we loved
The Beatles we went to England. So that’s an amazing example of being at the
wrong place in the wrong time [laughs].
Except I guess that
every decision you make along the way influences the next decision or the next
opportunity, and your career has been so extraordinary, one wonders if you’d
gone to Los Angeles and had success there whether you would have ended up
writing for so many different people, amongst other things.
I think you’re right – in fact, I know you’re right because
what happened was that Axiom didn’t make it America and broke up. And I came
back and I’d been on the road with bands for quite a number of years at that
point and that’s when I went into the studio and learned to be a producer, and
eventually Ron Tudor kept saying to me, ‘Why don’t you make an album?’ and I’d
say, ‘No, I don’t want to make an album.’ But finally I did make an album and
that album contained ‘Ginger Man’ and that went up the charts, and there I was
back on the road again. But I was on the road as a solo artist, something that
I may not have had the courage to do in any other set of circumstances. If I look
through my life I can find other instances of where that happened, you know.
For instance, at exactly the same time as I came back from England, Russell
Morris asked me to go on the road with him and the Bee Gees. We did this whole
tour of Australia and New Zealand, and at the end of it the Bee Gees asked me
to join their band, and they were the biggest act in the world at that point. I
would have lived in London but I would have been just one of the Bee Gees’
band. I can remember the phone ringing in my kitchen and it was Dick Ashby, the
tour manager, and they were in Singapore, and he said to me, ‘Come on, one more
chance. Join the band.’ And I was so close to saying yes, but I said, ‘No, I
don’t think I will, mate. I think I’d like to do some recording.’ And then I
went in and cut ‘Ginger Man’. That would have been an opportunity to really
spectacularly fail and not do ‘Ginger Man’.
And if you’d been in
the Bee Gees, Barry Gibbs’s creativity would have dominated – whereas what I
see in your career is this incredible ongoing creativity: writing songs,
performing, any way you can find to create music, you’ve found it. If you’d
been in that band, who knows, you might have been tamped down a little bit
because Barry would have necessarily been the boss.
That’s right. I was definitely going into a subservient kind
of situation, albeit a rather grand one. And I guess there’s just a little bit
of instinct in all of us that says, ‘Something tells me I shouldn’t say yes.’
And I didn’t. As soon as I hung up the phone I sat there and thought, What have I done? You’re an idiot!
[laughs]
What you’d done was
open up all that creativity. So I’m really interested, given that you have
written so many songs for so many different people, when did that creative
spark start for you? What was your first memory of feeling that impetus to
create something?
I’d have to take you back to the early and mid ’60s when
most people didn’t write – most songs that you got you copped off an English
album or an American album, and the whole thing was playing live. It was all
chicks-and-beer sort of stuff – nobody expected it to last more than a year.
But at that point in time was when the first people started thinking about
writing, and I was really lucky because I was in a band called the Jackson
Kings and had a great lead singer, Ronnie Charles, and they poached Ronnie and
me when a couple of members of the group had gone to England. Now, the group
had already had hits so it was a fantastic on ramp for us: pow, there we were
in a hit band, and I’d only just turned twenty. And here’s the story: we were
going to be recording and CBS – in those days – said, ‘You’ve got two weeks and
then [the producer] is going to come down to Sydney and we’re going to do an
album, so get your songs ready.’ We already had a couple of songwriters in the
band – I’d never written a song before – so I got with the drummer, who had
never written a song before. ‘You can have the drummer’ – ‘Oh, good.’ So the
blind leading the deaf. And the others were all writing away with their songs
and Richard and I were in the garage having a bit of think about it all, and
really he just came up with a beat and I played a chord and we thought, ‘That’s
not bad.’ We finished the song and it sounded a bit nursery-rhymish to us. So the
guy comes down and everybody’s playing the songs and talking about stuff on the
album, and he says, ‘So, anyone else got a song?’ And we said, ‘Oh, we’ve got
one’, and we played it, and he said, ‘That’s it! That’s the single!’ So we went
in and recorded it, and it was a big hit, and it was the first song I ever
wrote and I thought, Wow! How long has
this been going on? It did take me a long time to get another one. But it
was that kind of era, wasn’t it, when things happened almost immediately. I
remember when the record came out we physically took a copy to Stan Rofe, who
was Stan the Man, number one jock on 3KZ. He ruled Melbourne. We walked in, and
it was just us and the news, and we sat down and he played it right there and
then, and he played it five times in that hour he loved it so much. In those
days you really needed champions like that to go to bat for you.
What do you think has
been the best development in music since that time, and what’s been the worst?
If we’re talking about Australian music – and let’s talk
about Australian music – to go back to the ’60s, people like us were starting
to have original songs, and we did covers and stuff but we’d write a few, and
by the end of the ’60s people were writing albums. Daddy Cool arrived on the scene
and it was all Ross Wilson songs. Russell Morris had had ‘Bloodstone’, and
Axiom was pretty much all original stuff as well. So what happened was that we
were throwing the coils, if you like, of English and American influences off
and we were becoming our own people. So we were a sort of hybrid of English and
American influences but gradually they faded and the thing that became
Australian music happened then, and I was so lucky to be around at that point.
And then all through the ’70s then on to the ’80s and up to now. There will
always be an argument to say that Australian music grew up right then – or
started growing – and by the time it got to the end of the century there was no
such thing as ‘It’s a good record for an Australian record’, which is what
people used to say. Now they don’t say that, and that’s fantastic. But if you
want to look at the other side of that coin, we’ve lost a lot of the Stan Rofes
and the pathways for young music to get on a major playing field. The argument
is with the internet everyone can get their music heard, and that is true – it can
go out to 150 people and they might like it. But it’s very difficult for young
people to penetrate the real main market and to have the support of a record
company and tour support, and go out and get on tours. There’s not an easy path
now and that’s one thing that I don’t think is as good as it was. And the other
thing is that we’ve managed to dumb down the process of making records, in the
sense that – and this is not criticising across the board, it’s just that it
has become over the last ten years the ability for almost anyone with a computer
and a cupboard and a keyboard and a microphone to make records that sound far
beyond their capabilities. They can get in time, they can be put in key, and
they virtually never make records together, which is one of the tricks about
this new Bootleg album – we were determined to go into the studio and recreate
those days when everyone was playing in real time and everyone was in the
studio at the same time. And to make it even more realistic, we determined –
and this was something we all agreed on – that we were never going to do more
than three takes for anything. So the idea of doing the same song for two days
wasn’t going to happen. The girls were there and they sang as well. So the idea
was that it was all ready from the first time we ran through the song. It was
the recording tension that you need to make it exciting – tension is used there
in a good way. You need that tension. You need to be really on your game and concentrating
on what everyone else is playing, and reacting to them and them reacting to you.
That is an ingredient is sort of missed nowadays a lot of times. We were
determined to have it and I think you can hear it in the record – there’s an excitement
in the record that maybe wouldn’t have happened if we’d all sat around in different
rooms doing different things at different times.
How did you choose
the songs for the album? Because you obviously would have had a few in the
drawer, and a few that other people have already covered.
The basic thrust to it was that because I was always reasonably
known for songs like ‘Ginger Man’ and ‘Let Go’ and ‘Sunshine’, things that were
predominantly ballads or mid-tempo things or quite pop, I was at heart, deep
down where I live, I’m a rock ’n’ roller, I always have been, and the band was.
And the thing that people don’t necessarily remember about that era is that we
were a big, loud rock ’n’ roll band that was full on, and we wanted to make
sure that we captured that in the studio. And I had a drawerful, as you say – a
metaphorical drawerful – of rock songs that I’d always wanted to do, and every
time I made a record the record company would say, ‘Yeah, but we want another “Ginger
Man”.’ So we got them on our terms. I got all these songs that I’d always
wanted to record, plus I picked three songs that I’d written for other people
that I’d always wanted to record. I never wrote them for me, I wrote them
specifically for them, but after they recorded it I’d play it and think, I’d love to do that [laughs]. I might do that one day. So of course that
day arrived. It was a bit like having a metaphorical basket of tunes and we
picked them out and we’d play them, and sometimes we’d get halfway through and
say, ‘Nah – doesn’t fit.’ There’s a lot of songs that didn’t make the cut but the
ones that do marry together perfectly. There’s not a song on the album that
lets down anything near it. They’re all basically the same band and that’s how
I wanted it.
No comments:
Post a Comment