Singer-songwriter Albert Hammond speaks to Jason Barnard about his new album, ‘Body Of Work’, and reflects on an illustrious career spanning over 60 years. From his unique musical upbringing in Gibraltar to penning timeless hits like ‘The Air That I Breathe’ and ‘One Moment In Time’, Albert shares intimate stories of his life in music. He goes deep into his songwriting process, collaborations with artists, and the inspirations behind his most loved songs. Beyond his musical achievements, Hammond offers insights into his philosophy on life, emphasising the importance of love, compassion, and unity.
It’s been almost 20 years since your last new album of new material. Why release one at this point?
I went through a bad patch for seven years. I have an autoimmune disease that’s stopping me from touring and singing and all that stuff. I thought, I just want to write some stuff that relates to my life and what’s going on today.
I called my friend John Bettis who I’ve written with before. We started writing and next thing we knew we had 35 or 36 songs. So I said, you know what, I’m going to go into the studio, no matter how long it takes me. I’m going to make a record. It’s what I love doing.
Some of the lyrics are quite reflective. ‘Both Ways’, for example, the nature of how life is.
Yeah, doors open and doors close. You fall many times, you have to get up. So it’s about life.
‘Shake A Bone’ has a great acoustic riff. So you’ve got different shades and sounds across that material.
Some of it was done in Berlin and most of it was done in Nashville. I went to Nashville thinking that I could find what I first found in LA when I got there in the early 70s, the Wrecking Crew. I did, I think, because I’m not a young guy. So they gave me a bit of psychedelic stuff behind me and all kinds of stuff. Because I explained, I’m looking back at my life, and there’s a song called ‘Looking Back’ also.
‘American Flag’, talks about today. ‘Young Llewelyn’, it was probably 200/250 years ago, but it’s still about what’s going on today. So in a way, nothing’s changed, nothing’s new. The marketplace is still the same. So I just wanted to express myself. I’m not very good if I’m doing a podcast on what I think. I’m not a Russell Brand, but I am in song, so I just wanted to let people know my feelings. How important it is to love each other more and to be in harmony with each other, to be aware and conscious of lies that we are told.
The propaganda out there is so vast and crazy. All it’s doing is dividing the whole world. It’s not even a country, it’s the whole world, you know? We’re told how bad these people were for a long time. I’ve been to all these places, they ain’t so bad. So it isn’t like I’m talking without having been there. I actually went to Russia in 1988 with 25 American songwriters.
I was one of the 25 to write with 25 Russian songwriters. So we’ve always been trying. There are a lot of us that keep trying to say that there’s enough room for all of us that we have to help each other. We have to love each other more, we have to have compassion and be empathetic and kind towards each other.
All the beautiful things that when you have them inside you, makes life such a better thing, life becomes beautiful rather than ugly. It’s enough that you’re gonna get old and you’re gonna maybe get a disease like I got. But you deal with it, and then you have friends that help you deal with it. And if somebody has a problem, I can be there to help them out. If we did that and nothing else, it would be a better world.
It comes across as well on ‘Gonna Save The World’, that seems to, not only in its lyrics, which also resonate today, but in its style. It seems to go back into the late 60s. Was that something that you consciously aimed for?
Well, as I was doing the album, the songs were done, but with the backing there was a lot to do. What I said to them was that as I wrote this record, there was such a vast variety of songs, it reminded me of the Beatles’ White Album. So once I said that, I think I got them hooked, and they were enjoying themselves. I performed the song two or three times because we only had a certain amount of sessions.
I think we did everything in nine hours with the rhythm section in Nashville. We went there for a day and a half and we had three, three hour sessions. So like nine hours, and I sang live. So most of my voice is live. There might have been a line here or there that I bettered, but the rest was so even though there wasn’t an audience, it was live there with the musicians.
I was in a separate booth with a guitar. So a lot of it, I couldn’t change because my guitar leaked into my vocal mic, which is what I’ve always done. That’s the way ‘It Never Rains’ was done and ‘The Free Electric Band’. And I love that. I love that live kind of feel that you get. Today with technology, you can change a few things, but you don’t really want to change much. You want to leave it as raw and live as it always was when you were doing it.
Your new album has many influences. Being born in the UK but being raised in Gibraltar, you’ve got a unique mix. That must have shaped your approach to music.
Definitely. All the different kinds of music that I got to hear that most Western countries don’t get to hear. Like Moroccan, Arabic music. I spent a little time as a young kid in Morocco. I had a group called The Diamond Boys, and we went over there and performed. I was always intrigued and always asked, “What are these lyrics about?” Because I didn’t know the language. And they were very much like country and western. They were kind of sad.
In Spain there was Flamenco, Coplas and Zarzuelas. In Gibraltar, my uncles had jukeboxes. All the pubs in Gib had these jukeboxes. I would get all the records. As soon as a new batch came in of Top 40 in America, I would get all the old ones. I did that for a few years. So I got to hear so much music. It was just incredible. So I’m sure all that had an influence on me. Then, from very young, I really felt that everything seemed to be energy. I was an energetic person. I ran everywhere. I never walked. I always ran. And as I learned more about myself, I realised that you can connect to other energies if you realise you are energy. That also helped a lot.
How did you meet Mike Hazelwood, who you wrote a lot of songs with in the first part of your songwriting journey?
Mike died very young, he was only 59. I still miss him, even though we stopped writing together in 1974 because he wanted to do something else. I met him in London. I went to a few publishing companies and I got to this one, which was part of Radio Luxembourg. It was called Shaftesbury Music and a guy called Geoffrey Everett, who ran it, introduced me to Mike when he heard my stuff. He said, “Oh, you should meet this young Englishman. I think you and he could do well together.” Then Mike and I met and we had 10 years of tremendous success.
What about the group, The Family Dogg? What led you to joining them? You did have some success.
Well, The Family Dogg. I didn’t join them. I actually formed them with Steve Rowland. I met Steve in Spain. He was singing and acting. A lot of the movies he would do were filmed in Spain. So then I met him again in London, because we stayed in touch. When I went to London, we called each other, and we met, and we were both lovers of dogs.
We had a Tibetan Terrier each, and we decided to form this band called the Family Dogg with two G’s, just to make a difference. [laughs] It was more or less like a Fifth Dimension kind of thing. It worked. We had a few hits actually. We had a hit with ‘Way Of Life’ written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. There was ‘Arizona’. [Sings ] Now when you climb into your bed tonight. And when you lock and bolt the door. Just think of those out in the cold and dark. ‘Cause there’s not enough love to go round. [Ed: This is ‘Sympathy’ originally by Rare Bird which was also recorded by The Family Dogg]
Is it true with the Family Dogg, you recorded with a lot of amazing session players, including Elton John?
We had Elton on piano, we had Jimmy Page on guitar, we had also the bass player from Led Zeppelin.
Oh, John Paul Jones.
John Paul Jones did a lot of the arrangements and played bass, too. So it was incredible. That’s why I was saying to you that when you connect to energy, it’s almost, you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is you’re grateful that you’re still here. Then life starts. It’s just unbelievable how you just keep walking and you keep meeting people. Now I’m 80, I think of all the people I worked with and all the people that helped me to be what I am today. We have mentioned a few. It’s just unbelievable. I just look at that and I’m just so happy that I’m still here because I feel I’m still going to meet some others.
I want to ask you about some of the songs in your partnership with Mike. One of the hits that you wrote was ‘Little Arrows’, which was a hit in the UK and across Europe for Leapy Lee. That must have been an amazing feeling when your songs were now being picked up by other artists and climbing the charts.
Oh, yeah, I was working at the Chelsea Drugstore on the King’s Road as a dishwasher. Believe it or not, it’s just one of those things, I used to take a little transistor with me. There were three dishwashers. Every time the song came on the BBC, I would tell them, “Oh, that’s my song”. They would laugh at me as they never believed me. But I was telling them the truth!
But anyway, Mike and I wrote a few songs that took a while before they were picked up by the right person. The way ‘Little Arrows’ came to Leapy Lee was when an aunt of mine lived in Shepherd’s Bush. I used to go there sometimes for lunch or dinner because it would help me out. She asked me to go to bingo with her. I said, “Aunt, I really don’t want to go to bingo”, she said “Please.” She was a lot of help to me so I went with her and that’s where I met Leapy Lee. He was calling out the numbers.
Really?
Yeah. I told him I was a songwriter and he said that he was a singer and that he knew Gordon Mills. So he made an appointment and we went to see Gordon.The rest is history on ‘Little Arrows’. Mike and I always tried to write different kinds of love songs, ‘Little Arrows’ was different. Little arrows in your clothing, little arrows in your hair. When you’re in love, you find those little arrows everywhere. I think around that time, we wrote ‘I’m A Train’.
Was that recorded in French first?
What happened with ‘Little Arrows’ was Leapy had a hit in England and he had a hit in the pop charts in America and in the country charts. Then in Spain, a girl called Karina and she went to number one. In France, Richard Anthony did it and he went to number one. In Germany, someone else did it, she went to number one. So it was crazy. The first hit and it had all these covers all over the world. So, it was like, if this is the way it’s going to be, this is gonna be wonderful.
You mentioned different types of love songs, one of your songs that deserves even more credit than it gets is ‘Make Me An Island’ recorded by Joe Dolan. That’s a big song, brass, but it’s got a hint of melancholia that only adds to the drama.
Yeah, the brass behind it is all the Mexican records that I heard, and it’s got the mariachi kind of trumpets. I told Mike about Gibraltar, being an island now because the border had been closed by Franco. We thought, what a great idea, make me an island. We made it into a beautiful love song. I actually sent the song to the Gibraltar Song Festival, but it never made it. But it made it anyway. [laughs] It might not have made it so big, if it had entered the song festival. So I’m glad that Joe Dolan picked it up. It was actually, Geoffrey Everett and Shaftesbury Music, that put that together. Then we wrote, ‘You’re Such a Good Looking Woman’ for him, and another one called ‘Teresa’. We wrote a few for him.
You mentioned that brass and mariachi influence. That comes across on Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch’s version of ‘Time To Take Off’. Do you recognise that in the song?
It’s my melodic influence too, from all these different genres of music that I heard from all these different cultures. I imagine all this grew inside of me and it mixed. Yeah, I can. It’s almost like when Cook and Greenaway wrote ‘Melting Pot’. This is almost what happened to me. I had this melting pot inside of me of all these different music and what came out was a mixture. I don’t know, maybe I did the right thing and it came out the right way. I put the right ingredients together inside of me. I have no idea. But I believe I connect to energies out there and they open the way, they put me on the right path, on the right road. That’s what I believe. As long as you believe that and it works, then that’s fine.
The final song which features heavily on brass, maybe less of the mariachi here, but it’s ‘Broken Hearts Brigade’ that you did as Hammond Hazelwood. Do you remember that song? That’s a cult classic.
People thought we were a couple of lawyers, Hammond Hazlewood. [laughs and recites the lyrics] We’re a handful of boys out to fix broken toys. Has your heart been broken? Does it need first aid? I know!
That was almost like a brass band in the middle. John Burgess was the producer. He was one of the four big producers, George Martin, John Burgess, Peter Sullivan and Ron Richards at Air London.
And arranged by Mike Vickers.
And arranged by Mike Vickers. [laughs] So much fun when you think about this. Look at what we’re talking about. All these are great musicians, great people.One even started practically with them in a way when you think about it. So from the beginning, the greater power put me in the right place.
And that right place seemed to be apparent when, I assume you were asked to write a whole album for Freddie and the Dreamers, Oliver In The Overworld. One of those songs was ‘Gimme Dat Ding’.
Yeah, it became huge.
Broke huge. So that must have been quite a time when you’re piecing together a children’s album and then a song gets taken off that and tops the charts.
Yeah, that was Roger Greenaway and Tony Burrows singing. Burrows was doing, that’s right, that’s right, I’m sad and blue. And Greenaway was doing the high voice. I’m not going to do the high voice now! Great memories. All my life I’ve been trying to get someone to pay attention to ‘Oliver In The Overworld’.
It’s so hard to get hold of. You have to go and find the original final record to hear it. It’s almost been lost and from what I’ve heard, it is a wonderful album.
It’s wonderful and there’s two albums. One with the whole story of Oliver the clock who loses his memory. Then he goes to the overworld with Freddie and to visit the clockwork King to see what’s wrong. It’s such a great story, and I’m still trying to get someone to listen to me on that. The songs are so good today. There’s ‘Harry The Heater’, ‘The Undercog Song’, there’s so many great songs.
It needs to be put on stage.
It’s almost like a musical, isn’t it?
Yeah, it will happen. There’s a couple of songs with freedom in the title. There’s the wonderful Blue Mink, ‘Good Morning Freedom’, and there’s ‘Freedom Come, Freedom Go’ that was a hit for The Fortunes. But those are interesting songs as they are credited to you, Mike Hazelwood and Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook. How did that melding of two of the greatest songwriting partnerships happen?
Well, that was actually Roger Cook and myself.
So it was you and Roger, but then because you were part of…
Because we were partners. When we shook hands in the old days, when we said we’re going to be partners, we shared everything we did. Roger Cook and I had a nice rapport, so he called me up one morning and I lived in Chiswick then and I just went over with this idea [sings hook] bee pow pow pow pow pow pow. That’s basically how the song started, ‘Good Morning Freedom’. We wrote it in an hour or something. Then he had this group called Blue Mink that had ‘Melting Pot’ and a few other hits. They did an incredible version of it. I was so happy.
Then ‘Freedom Come, Freedom Go’ was the same thing. I think it was written on the same day, because one song was written so fast that we said, “Well, we have time, let’s try something else”. Then Fortunes did that, which was great. But I’m just so happy that I’ve done what I’ve done, and that all these songs will outlive me by hundreds of years, I’m sure.
Is it true that ‘It Never Rains In Southern California’ was actually written in London and not California?
In London, on a rainy day in Fulham. I went down to see Mike, we were going to write. I got there, all wet. He threw a towel at me and said, “Dry up. Do you want a cup of tea?” I said, “Yeah”. Then he was making tea. I picked up a guitar that he had there in the living room. I was looking at this library of books. And I’m looking at all these titles and one of them said, The Railways of Southern California. I started to sing this song, this melody that I’d been doing on my upright piano with my daughter there. And it fitted on the railways of Southern California. And Mike shouted from the kitchen, did you say it never rains in Southern California? I said, “No, but it’s a great idea”. So that’s how that song ended up.
But the strange thing with that song was, maybe it was meant for me, because I gave it to Glen Campbell and The Seekers. They both turned the song down. So I never played it again to anyone until I auditioned for Clive Davis in LA. After I played 45 minutes on my guitar, he asked me if I had any other songs. I told him, “Yeah, but that these two wonderful artists had turned it down”. He said, “Play it for me”. As soon as I ended the song, he said, “That’s going to be the title of the album, that’s going to be a big hit.”
Wow.
I kind of laughed inside thinking, I just played ‘Free Electric Band’, ‘The Air That I Breathe’, ‘Down By The River’. But he was right.
‘The Air That I Breathe’, that’s an incredible story, you released your own version. Phil Everly did a version that’s wonderful. Then the Hollies took it into the charts and it’s become a standard. Did you recognise how great it was when you first wrote it?
No, I love everything I do because songs are like my children. I love them all. Some of them do better than others, but it’s okay. I was inspired by a woman with a heart of gold that helped me out in LA when I first got there. She gave me a place to stay. She gave me a car to drive in if I promised I would take her to work and pick her up. One day I just told her that I’m not going to drive the car so she can take it. I came up with 20 minutes of music and I sat with Mike and I told him the story. And ‘The Air That I Breathe’ came up. And probably one of the great, great love songs that we wrote together and maybe one of the great, great love songs in the world today.
What did you think when you heard Phil’s version and then The Hollies’ version?
I loved it. I knew Phil because we’d meet in the studio, when you’re in LA, you meet a lot of people. And he made an album of, you know, 10 songs of nine he wrote, and one he didn’t write. He sent the whole album to The Hollies and said, “I know you love the Everly’s, so choose a song” and they chose. So every time he saw me, he said, “You son of a bitch, you got me!”. [laughs]
The albums and the songs seem to come thick and fast in that period. There’s the album ‘The Free Electric Band’ and the single itself. That seems to be a theme in your music and in that song, the love of creating music and playing it to fans comes out. Is that a theme that you recognise?
When I was growing up, my father and my father were with me, but the rest of the family wasn’t. My father had like four brothers or five that were really against me doing music because they were more business people. So that probably had some influence, in other words, I’m going to do what I want to do and not what you want me to do because I have to love what I do. If I’m going to get up every morning and work on something, I want to love what I’m doing. I don’t want to not get up because I hate what I’m doing. So Mike and I were very good in that sense, that we knew each other so well that we just knew the right things to do and where to go with things.
Then I found in my whole career later on that I was very compatible with other songwriters, because you have to open up, you have to be honest. If you like something, you tell them. And if you don’t like something, you fight for something better, but in a good way. I think both Mike and I learned that. I guess it helped us.
It’s interesting you say that because you wrote some amazing songs with Hal David. How did that work out given he was a lyricist?
Hal David was just a lyricist, so you had to give him more of what he did. Because I sang and I was going to sing the songs, I would tell him about a line that was not that easy to sing so that we could find another. But just to be able to work with someone like Hal David was one of the greatest things, because Mike and I were unknown people. We actually created something and got well known.
But when you start to work with known people and people like Hal David is like a Johnny Mercer, he’s one of the great lyricists of all time. He called me because a friend knew that Mike and I weren’t writing together. He called Hal and told him, and gave him my number. So when Hal called me I couldn’t believe it. We started the next day. He was very straight with me and said, “We start tomorrow at 10.” I’d never worked at 10. It’s too early, but we wrote a lot of songs. Two of them became classics, ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ and ’99 miles from LA’.
‘When I Need You’ is a track that you wrote with Carole Bayer Sager. Did you record that first or was it Leo Sayer?
I recorded it first. I was going to work with her on a few songs for my new record. I did my new record and it had ‘When I Need You’, it had ‘To All The Girls’, ‘Moonlight Lady’. I had what I thought was a great record. But the record company didn’t think there were any hits, so they shelved it. They never put it out. So I started to work on the songs. And I gave ‘When I Need You’ to Richard Perry, he thought it was great for Leo. I was there when we played it to Leo, and he said it reminded him of his wife that he missed, that was in England. I think it was a big song also with the forces abroad.
What about the material that you wrote with Graham Lyle, big hits for Tina Turner.
I love Graham. Today I was listening to three songs that had never been recorded and they are unbelievable. Really incredible. And they’re just demos from the 80s. Maybe I’ll put out the demos, just call it demos.
An EP.
Why not? I can’t sing that way anymore, but it doesn’t matter. Graham and I got together in the 80s and we had a string of hits. Every time we got together, we wrote something that was loved by Tina, ‘I Don’t Wanna Lose You’, for example, or ‘Way Of The World’. It’s just unbelievable how many people I’ve written with and had success.
There’s a thread to it in that you’re involved, Albert. The song of yours that you wrote with Roy Orbison and Diane Warren, ‘Careless Heart’. How did that process work given the trio of you had potentially different approaches to songwriting?
Diane and I were at home in my house, and we were writing. We got a call from Roy’s wife, she said, “Roy is really like, driving me crazy, guys, can you come down and spend a little time here?” So we went down to Malibu. On the way down, I said to Diane, I have this title in my head, ‘Careless Love’. She said, “Oh, I like that. But Careless Heart sounds better.” So before we got there, we already had a title. Then the three of us strummed three different guitars, and just did the song. To hear Roy Orbison singing was such a delight.
I wrote with Leo and with Duffy, these are great singers. So to write songs with great singers is also wonderful because you’re inspired by the voice, too.
My final question relates just to your songwriting partnership with John Bettis, who you worked extensively with on ‘Body Of Work’. One of the best known songs that you both worked on was ‘One Moment in Time’. Was that a song that came together easily?
Yes. I got a phone call from NBC, “Can you write a song for the Olympics in Seoul, Korea representing the US?”. I called John, I asked him, and he said, “Great”. I actually sat down for dinner and I just finished dinner, it took an hour. He called me up and said, what do you think of this? ” He read to me, “Give me one moment in time, when I’m more than I thought I could be, when all of my dreams are a heartbeat away, and the answers are all up to me”. I said, hold on a sec, that sounds great. I went to the piano and I just sang the melody like he read me the lyric, I just sang the melody with the lyric. He said, “Did you just do that?” I said, “Yeah, probably your lyrics”. Also, when they asked me who would sing it, the only name that came to me and he wasn’t around anymore was Elvis. So it was a little inspired by that too. But it’s never been difficult to write songs. The difficulty is sometimes getting them recorded, but writing them is not that difficult.
It’s fantastic to hear that the muse is well and truly there with you Albert on your fantastic new album ‘Body Of Work’. It’s been a pleasure and honour to talk about songs that people will know and songs that people may not know but should know. So thank you.
Thank you very much.
Further information
Albert Hammond – Body Of Work – the new album is out now
Audio podcast of this interview coming soon
