By Jason Barnard
Peter Mills is the lyricist and lead vocalist of Innocents Abroad, a Liverpool band who accumulated a modest cult following in the mid-eighties, turned down CBS, and then more or less vanished for thirty years. He teaches Cultural Studies in Leeds now, and somewhere in the intervening years, he got into jazz and opera, which he says changed how he thinks about what a voice is actually for. The group’s new album, The Long Beyond, is being recorded this autumn in Berlin and Belfast. There is a song on it called ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us.’ I don’t ask about it yet. Some questions you hold back.
Take me back to Liverpool in ’84. How did it all start for Innocents Abroad?
Martin Malone and I met as students at the University of Liverpool – we knew each other vaguely from the beginning but didn’t actually start hanging out until nearly the very end of our time there. This was a good thing as far as the band went as we had no notions of what we’d do after graduation and we struck up a friendship through our mutual interests. We’d both been involved with bands before – he’d made a single with Some Day Blue and I’d been in Leeds band Equivalent VIII, who were signed to indie label Alien in London, alongside acts like Rexy and The Tronics.
We decided we’d stay in Liverpool and try to get something going musically. Round about that time we moved into flats in a newly converted house near Sefton Park so that became Innocents Abroad Central. We invited Dave Skidmore to join us on bass in bedsit rehearsals and our mutual friend Steve Godrich joined in on keyboards shortly after that. Martin knew a drummer who sat in when we needed one at first, and later Stuart Hilton joined as permanent drummer. That was the start of it all really – the music came out of the friendship and the conversations flowing around that social scene.
What was Liverpool like as a music scene for a group like yours back then?
Liverpool is always a great city for music. That’s hardly news but having grown up in Leeds the proliferation of bands, venues and gigs available when I landed there flipped my lid. The Royal Court was the favourite venue for touring acts, but for a band just starting out there were lots of places to play, pubs, clubs, the student circuit, festivals in the summer time. One major difference between the music scene in Liverpool and Leeds was its homegrown nature – bands who had emerged from Leeds in the late 70s, such as Gang Of Four, The Mekons, Delta 5, were all students, relatively new arrivals in the city. I’d say 90% of the bands on the scene in Liverpool in the mid 1980s were Scousers. So we were a little bit on the outside of things as a consequence.
We were a guitar, bass and drum band in the era of Synth Pop and while Liverpool had some good examples of those types of act it also had a very vigorous ‘indie’ scene, centred around the Probe Records shop in town and the enduring influence of the Zoo Records set-up of a few years previous. Virtually the first gig I went to after arriving in the city was Club Zoo at The Pyramid, what you’d now call a ‘pop-up’ club I suppose, where The Teardrop Explodes were effectively rehearsing in public in advance of their would-be breakthrough tour in support of Wilder. I recalled this with quiet pleasure when we played at the same club in 1985. Martin was at Club Zoo as well, although I didn’t find that out until years later.
Later we crossed paths with Half Man Half Biscuit – Nigel Blackwell was the doorman at the rehearsal studios we used – and The La’s, who were about as Scouse as it’s scientifically possible for a band to be. So there was always something interesting happening.
What stands out from those first few years, the highlights that still mean something to you when you think back?
It was exciting to be doing it every day, living it in that way. We moved over to Lark Lane, then as now a real centre for the creative community, and started regular gigs Upstairs at The Albert, the big old pub on Lark Lane. They were great nights, all our friends and peers coming out to see us, very buzzy. We had sort-of residences at clubs and bars around town, also straying out to Widnes to play at a venue run by our friends Great and Lady Soul, a band who had some excellent singles out on Virgin. That was the regular stuff. Memorable individual gigs too – our debut was outside the Liverpool Empire and St George’s Hall right on Lime Street, we liked playing The Flying Picket on Hardman Street, and a truly marvellous if bizarre experience playing a set for a Festival on a floating stage at The Albert Dock on the River Mersey.
I understand that Martin Malone, the group’s guitarist, has been irritated by REM comparisons over the years. So who were you listening to and were influenced by at the time?
Haha well there was a reason for the REM comparisons! Martin and I bonded over them as we discovered them at the same time when they came to Liverpool in late ’84. They played to a one-third full Royal Court on the Reckoning tour. We were knocked out. He hadn’t really heard The Byrds et al at that point so we listened to my Byrds and Lovin’ Spoonful albums and we started to join the dots a bit. Linking the Rickenbacker 12-string thing with the driving force of post-punk. So that became a kind of template. And yes we did absorb the first three or four REM albums, intravenously.
What became tiring was the repetition of the R word as the sole point of reference when people asked or wrote about the music, not least because there were all manner of influences going into the music. I loved – and still love – folk music, and what I suppose you’d call ‘folk rock’ is a secret vice so I would push for more acoustic textures – there’s great fiddle playing on several Slow Time tracks and we used to encore on early gigs with an a capella version of ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’. But I also loved the Gang Of Four, that combination of volume with melody and control. Meanwhile Dave was a real blues and jazz man, Steve was a trained classical player with jazz chops. Martin was and remains a driving, inventive guitar player with a strong melodic instinct and was definitely the one who linked Innocents Abroad up to the Liverpool scene of the time – The Bunnymen, Icicle Works, Wah! Heat, all of that. Stuart was and is an amazing drummer, who loved Bill Bruford as much as Tommy Ramone. And we all loved The Monkees!
There was plenty going on in the mid 80s that we soaked up too – Prefab Sprout, Lloyd Cole and The Commotions, Shelleyan Orphan, even outliers like Virginia Astley’s beauteous and bucolic From Gardens Where We Feel Secure or the last Skids album, Joy, a strange mash-up of Scottish folk music and poetry. It all went in there and I can still hear it. Having said all that I now welcome the REM, Husker Du and 10,000 Maniacs badges being pinned on our lapel; a recent Italian review of Late Spring was titled ‘Sulle orme dei REM’(‘In the footsteps of REM’) and I thought ‘I’ll take that, thanks’ – I mean, who makes music like that anymore?
When you heard the tapes for the Quaker City and Eleven records, what was your first thought, release them or leave them alone?
I’d kind of filed the early albums down into a six track compilation; some of the other tunes I hadn’t heard for years. So I had some mixed feelings at first, to be looking back so soon after starting anew. The fact that we were able to revive the tracks at all is a minor miracle – the Masters went west sometime in the 90s when Martin moved flats, but a guy who had been our live sound engineer and who really liked the band had hung on to a DAT of the albums. He also had some cassettes of gigs he’d recorded through the desk for his own listening. So we used the DAT as Master but it turns out that DATs have a tendency to decay and be unstable as sources for remastering. So it was touch and go for a while but they were saved.
Martin got the files remastered in Edinburgh and we became acquainted with our digitised former selves. In retrospect the original vinyl pressings weren’t so hot, so hearing the songs come up fresh as a daisy was a revelation. So it is great that they are out in the sun now.
The compilation pulls in material that didn’t make it out at the time. What was sitting in the vaults that you’re glad is finally out, and is there anything you’d rather had stayed there?
I’m happy what’s out is out – it is good to know one didn’t simply dream it, and I can’t quite recall how a song as good as ‘Devotee’ didn’t see the light of day before now. There are several covers – Nick Drake, Tracey Thorn, Randy Newman – outtakes and sketches which might find their way out somehow. There were several songs we never got round to recording which showed the musical development we were undergoing – ‘September Fifth’ on Slow Time was caught live and shows a very different side to Innocents Abroad. Other post – Eleven songs like ‘Battery Park’ and ‘Favourite Painting’, alongside earlier ones like ‘Fifth Sense’ and ‘All Things’, are lost to the ages it seems. Unless…
There’s a version of history where you sign with a major label off the back of those albums and everything goes differently. Listening to them now do they sound to you like records that deserved that shot?
That’s a good question. In places, for sure. If you consider what was in the field in the mid-to-late 80s I think much of the music competes with that and stands up very well. I think tracks like ‘Papa Westray’, ‘Slow Time’ and ‘Sundial’ could have been recorded yesterday and would sound fine on BBC 6 Music or wherever. Funnily enough we came within a contract draft of signing to CBS in 1988; we had a manager who was very old school, he’d worked with the Small Faces and a slew of other Don Arden acts, so he was no pushover. No doubt using his persuasive charms he’d got us through the office door, but CBS wanted to own the masters, the publishing, all of it. Apparently they had ‘Holy Island’ earmarked for Paul Young, which always makes me laugh for some reason. But we turned it down as, naïve as we were, we understood if you signed everything away you’d have nothing left. We were no doubt optimistic that an Island, Chrysalis or Blanco y Negro would come knocking on our door, and they may well have done had we kept together and kept pushing, but the world beyond Liverpool started to beckon. So life was indeed what happened while we were making other plans.
Hearing your own voice on those recordings now, is it recognisably you, or does it feel like someone else?
What I hear, which may or may not be evident to anyone else listening, is how my vocal style developed and how I became a better singer by putting in the 10,000 hours back then. I can hear the influences for sure but there’s an original sound too. I like the vocals on ‘Holy Island’, ‘Papa Westray’ and ‘Sundial’ very much, and probably my most accomplished vocal is on ‘Slow Time’. Despite the title the song is exceedingly fast and the vocal rides it beautifully. I don’t know if I could do it now. ‘September Fifth’ was caught live by our friendly sound engineer and the vocal startled me when I heard it again – who is that young man?
Given the reformation of Innocents Abroad, talk us through what it was like singing again with the group. How did you approach that?
It was an odd situation – Martin and Stuart had been playing throughout the intervening period, both very successfully, so I had a lot of catching up to do. One great thing was that Jane Breen, Innocents Abroad’s bass player, was new to her instrument so we were learning quickly together. The other thing is the clock on the wall – singing is a physiological thing and over time the body changes, the voice changes. So starting from scratch material-wise was advantageous for me in getting going. Writing lyrics again has been a real voyage of discovery. Innocents Abroad songs are often like little postcards, snapshots of a passing moment that is captured in a phrase or two, often prompted by travel. That’s still the case and I’m always receptive to experience and observation– it’s the raw material for a lyric.
Musically speaking, Jane and Martin live together so they work up ideas and send them over to me; we are quite scattered geographically these days so these ideas arrive, often as very sophisticated demos, and I’ll come up with a topline, lyric and title and we go from there. Jane is now an amazing bass player. It all seems to be working well and the songs sound unmistakably like Innocents Abroad. As for playing together and the renewal of my efforts as a vocalist, we learned and played a set of a dozen songs at the XTC Fan Festival in Swindon in June 2025; that was great fun, but a real challenge for me as a singer. It went very well in the end; the band were so tight it made it easy for me.
After completing a PhD and teaching in Leeds, how did it sit when the music started up again? Was it a clean separation or did the two worlds knock against each other?
Well I teach on a Cultural Studies degree and my particular emphasis is on Music so I understand a lot more now than I did about how music works as a creative human response to life and matters arising, and also as a brutal business. I also try to put less into the songs now, to leave more room for things to happen – the lyrics are clearer and more concise I think. What happens is that the singing, recording and performing informs the way I talk and write about music at least as much as the theory informs the way I write and sing. It’s two- way traffic.
Living abroad really added something too – different musical styles, different social and cultural roles for music. I really got interested in jazz, classical and opera while I was living in Hungary, the three major musical forms that I’d never been able to find a way into in the UK. There just seemed to be less separation among music lovers there – people would go to a rave, then to an orchestral recital then a rock show, all in the same week. So far as jazz is concerned the vocal can be an occasional extra element rather than being the focus, where in opera it literally carries the story and embodies the emotion. So all this has had an impact on the way I sing and the way I write.
Mind you, Martin’s son overheard a test pressing of Slow Time and couldn’t believe it was nearly 40 years old – ‘it sounds just like Late Spring !’ he said. So maybe we haven’t changed that much after all.
You mentioned losing a close friend while the songs for Late Spring were coming together. How much did that feed into the record?
Not so much into Late Spring as most of the songs were on the way when Chris passed; the existence of the record, however, is a kind of consequence of what happened. It certainly made us determined to finish it and get it released. Some of the songs planned for The Long Beyond have the touch of it though, such as ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us’. Late Spring was recorded in Berlin so there are traces of that extraordinary experience in there too. Traveller that he was, Chris would have liked that.
With Slow Time out now and The Long Beyond on the horizon, is The Long Beyond the album you should have made forty years ago, or something you couldn’t have made then?
We couldn’t have made The Long Beyond forty years ago – all the experience of the intervening years is in the melodies, the lyrics and the groove. It will sound like Innocents Abroad – it’s us – and the lyrics will reflect on time, place and love as all our songs have done, but the light passes through those prisms very differently this far down the line.
