John Tucker Interview
Having penned many sleeve notes, articles and reviews on the NWOBHM, John Tucker is a well-known figure in the field. He is the author of the excellent Suzie Smiled…The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (IMP) and he also co-wrote Biff Byford’s entertaining autobiography Never Surrender Or Nearly Good Looking (IP.) He writes regularly for the popular fanzine Fireworks. His website is www.johntuckeronline.com.
When did you first get into heavy metal?
The early Seventies. There was always music played at home – my father was a big music fan, particularly big band stuff – and somehow I got heavily into two of my Dad’s records – The Planet Suite and West Side Story. Then I started listening to the Top Twenty on a Sunday night and heard Rock ‘N’ Roll Parts 1 & 2 and ditched the all-singing, all-dancing juvenile delinquents of New York for a bewigged kiddie-fiddler dressed in tinfoil. That was the first record I bought, and Gary Glitter became the first artist I collected everything by. GG led me to David Bowie, Bowie to Mott The Hoople, MTH to Bad Co and the first real album I bought was Bad Co’s self-titled debut.
Can you tell me about your writing career so far?
I’ve always written something or another, stuff for school magazines and what-have-you. I went to University and decided that the in-house magazine needed a metal column, and while I was there I answered an ad in Kerrang! and started writing for US magazine Metal Rendez-Vous. I then started the Neat Records’ promo magazine Lead Weight, just by writing to the label and telling them they needed it, joined the crew of Brazil’s Rock Brigade, wrote for Forearm Smash (Paul Miller, the loveliest guy and one of the best writers I’ve ever come across, RIP), wrote for a Portuguese magazine whose name I forget and joined the wonderful Joel Griggs at Marshall Stack. ’83 to ’87 was a lot of fun! After I left London things went pretty quiet. But I’d kept in touch with Neat and periodically bombarded them with ideas, so when Sanctuary bought the company they came across all my ramblings and approached me to write some CD booklet notes for NWOBHM re-issues, and as I began to collect stories I felt there was a book there somewhere. And the rest, as they say, is history The opportunity to write Biff Byford’s autobiography fell into my lap, and at the same time I was lucky enough to work on the ProgPower UK festivals, writing the programmes, photographing the bands, writing the webzine, doing general PR etc, etc. I have to say that I don’t really see it as a career though; I’m just interested in metal music… As far as I am concerned, it’s all about the music, and I’m just pleased to be able to do things to promote it; the writing is just a part of that, really.
Have you been involved in any fan clubs?
I never really joined many fan clubs, except to get hold of any particular merchandise. Before the prevalence of credit cards, to join a US run fan club meant getting an International Money Order, which cost a tenner before you’d even added the cost of the fan club and merchandise. Pricey business, and money was tight back then… Anyway, I started Blitzkrieg’s fan club and ran it from 1985 or so when Brian Ross reformed the band and they recorded A Time Of Changes, but that did kind of fizzle out as the band slumped back into inactivity after that. I ran Hellion’s fan club and also established the Queensryche fan club here in the UK. I started running a fan club for a great UK band called Playn Crazy for a while, and then started managing them until they split up. They had one phenomenal song – ‘Purity & Pride’ – which I’d steal and record tomorrow if I had a band and an ounce of talent!
Your book Suzie Smiled is a very personal account of the NWOBHM; what is it about that period that interests you so much?
A number of reasons… All of a sudden it was possible to discover new bands rather than the ones that everyone had heard of. And it was so exciting, all these new bands coming through using the punk do-it-yourself ethos but actually being able to play and sing. The way it grew though, I can’t really think of anything more recently that compares with it. Plus I was 17, and could afford – by pocketing the money I was given for school dinners, and then getting a holiday job – to buy records and the music papers, and I devoured everything I could find and went to as many gigs as I could. Seeing Iron Maiden in 1979 was about as good as it gets, you know? No gimmicks, just great songs and a real energy. I guess it became like an addiction after that, as the record collection began to spiral out of control. It’s no wonder I was a skinny little bugger though – for 40 weeks a year I hardly ate anything!
How long did it take you to write Suzie Smiled?
I started Suzie Smiled… in 2003 and it finally appeared in 2006 but, as you know, there can be many delays in the process. It probably took about two years or so, but grew into a massive piece of work at one stage. As it was my first book I had no real idea about word count, and every week I’d interview someone new and add more to it. If I were to sort it all out, there’s probably a ‘Suzie 2’ on the cutting room floor!
Why is the NWOBHM still so popular and collectable?
Well, don’t forget that the likes of Kerrang! were pretty quick to take the piss out of it once they’d hitched up to the US metal bandwagon and for a long time the NWOBHM was largely derided in the UK. Which is a great shame, because without it the likes of Metallica wouldn’t have got off the ground. So it went from hero to zero pretty quickly in the mid-Eighties here in the UK. But I think it’s still popular now because the songs have stood the test of twenty-five to thirty years and come through holding their own. Listen to someone like Trespass now and it still sounds great. And of course bands like Witchfynde and Diamond Head kept plugging away, keeping things alive. Go to something like the British Steel festival now, or Headbangers-Open-Air and there’s a really mixed audience from people like me who were there first time around (i.e. oldies!) to younger fans who have really got into the NWOBHM. Plus, the bands and the music continued to be revered abroad which kept the scene alive in people’s minds; it’s no co-incidence that books like Malc Macmillan’s NWOBHM Encyclopedia was published by Iron Pages in Germany.
How did you get to co-write Biff Byford’s autobiography?
That was one of those ‘right-place-right-time’ sort of moments. Matthias Mader from Iron Pages – another really good bloke – expressed an interest in Suzie Smiled… but it was way too late by this time as contracts had been signed. By pure chance I’d booked a holiday in Berlin, and asked if he fancied meeting up; his reputation went before him and I was really keen to meet him. This must have been March 2005. Anyway, we got on well, and compared notes on whom we’d like to write about. Saxon was on both of our lists, and at the end of the evening he asked, if he could get a deal with Biff, if I would write it. A few months later we got the go-ahead.
How did you approach the Biffography in terms of research? Was Biff very forthcoming…or not?
I did a vast amount of research before I met him, for a number of reasons. The work I’d done on Suzie Smiled… made me realise that although fans can be completely anal about what happened when, how and why, for the bands it was just another gig or whatever and without memory prompts everything blurs into one. I thought Saxon were absolutely fantastic at Torquay Town Hall, but from the band’s point of view it was just another gig on the Wheels Of Steel tour with nothing to mark it out as anything special. Besides, Biff had lost all his memorabilia in the house fire, so anything he would have had would have been destroyed then. Plus, you know, image is everything, and I felt it was important to look like I knew the band back-to-front. Biff and I would argue, say, about who supported them on what tour, but once I’d proved I was right a couple of times by producing a press cutting to back me up I began to be more, uh, trusted, for the want of a better word. I left some of my material with them (chart placings, etc.,) for their archives. Biff was very forthcoming, no problems there at all, but was clear that he wanted a narrative that started with being born and then worked through his life in strict chronological order: I had something completely different planned, but at the end of the day it was his book so…
Who are your favourite bands?
Deep Purple is the obvious answer, as there are more Purple records and CDs in the collection than anything else. I must have got every album at least three times or so it seems, and if I’m at a loss for something to play it’s an old Purple album, or a Blue Oyster Cult album that gets dragged out. Or a Sabbath album. Or something NWOBHM. Or Metal Female Voices. See, already I’m contradicting myself! It all depends on mood, and my tastes are very broad so long as it’s metal: outside of the metal genre I am a complete musical bigot
Who has been your best and worst interviewee?
Maybe I’ve just been plain lucky so far in that I haven’t really had many nightmares. It’s been more disappointments than bad interviewees, really. I think the first disappointment was interviewing King Diamond when Abigail came out in 1987; I thought I had a great set of questions and came back from London with a tape full of really good tape full of material. When Kerrang! came out about two weeks later, I realised they’d got exactly the same answers: that was my first encounter with someone working almost entirely to a mental script – ‘whatever the question, here’s the answer’ – and that taught me a lesson. A couple of months later I moved house and in the midst of the chaos I took time out to go up to London to interview Lizzy Borden. When I got to the hotel he cancelled it – too tired, poor lamb – and to cap it all the gig that night at the Marquee was terrible; so the whole thing was a complete waste of my time. More recently, Kamelot really didn’t want to bother with an interview for the ProgPower UK programme, and it was like pulling teeth getting them to respond. Oh yes, and I’ve sat by the phone on two separate occasions waiting to Tarja to call. Obviously she couldn’t be arsed…
Best interviewees? – there are hundreds of ’em! Lemmy and Jon Oliva are great story-tellers and always a pleasure to talk to. Liv Kristine of Leaves’ Eyes and Arjen Lucassen are always a pleasure to talk to. Chris Johnsson of Therion, everyone in Xandria, Circus Maximus, the guys in Andromeda… And that’s before I start on the people who gave up their time for Suzie Smiled… I think my favourite interview would be Mark Sutcliffe and Dave Crawte of Trespass, because even though they had some real horror stories to tell, they way they told them, and the way they would finish each other’s sentences, was just so funny. Just thinking about still makes me laugh, even now. Martin Roach from Independent Music Press told me he was reading the manuscript in Starbucks somewhere laughing his head off, much to the rest of the café’s amusement.
What are your favourite rock books?
Hmmm… This is a bit like the favourite artists question earlier… So, without looking at the bookshelves to prompt or skew my thoughts, the ones that spring to mind are the Mick Ronson biography Spider With The Platinum Hair by Weird and Gilly, the Mark Paytress book on Marc Bolan and I guess the one I read and re-read is Ian Hunter’s Diary Of A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star. It’s kind of interesting that they’re all non-metal, thinking about it… Anything by Martin Popoff is always great value; choc full of detail and anecdotes. I’ve got a substantial number of his books: any more and they’re going to have a shelf of their own!
What have you got planned for the future?
I guess my problem is that I tend to over-analyse things. Whereas I just wrote Suzie Smiled… blind, just sat down and got on with it, and then was commissioned to write Never Surrender, since then everything I think about goes through a painful evaluation process. And to be fair I have had a number of health problems in my family. But I have got a number of ideas; I just need to pick a topic and knuckle down to it!
Anything else?
Metal it’s not – well, I guess it is, actually – but I have been working with Dutch band The Dreamside on a short story as part of a CD/video/book release. That’s been a lot of fun to do. They’re a great band, really nice people too, and to draft a story from the lyrics of a song and some video storyboards was (a) quite different and (b) quite a challenge really. It certainly made a change!
Interview by Neil Daniels 2008
