From backing Brian Eno, collaborating with Mick Ronson and songwriting with Kirsty MacColl, singer-songwriter Philip Rambow’s story spans many of the major music scenes of the last fifty years. Philip shares his journey with Jason Barnard in advance of the release of The Rebel Kind, the first retrospective of his music.
Is The Rebel Kind the first compilation of your material that’s been released?
Yes. This is the first anthology anybody’s done.
And it starts from the early 70s, the very start of your solo career.
That’s right. The first time I recorded anything was in 1972. I did a four song demo with a full band, some very good musicians. And that was sponsored by my sort of mentor at the time and was never released, but it certainly made a difference to my life. It introduced me to some record companies and spurred me to come to England.
So you are originally from Canada?
Yes. Born and brought up in Montreal.
And when did you first come to England?
1973 – that period of time. The demo was recorded in 72. I showed the demos to some people in Toronto, but during the early 70s, there were, I think, only two independent labels in Canada at the time. One of them was TrueNorth, which is still around and the other one was Nettwerk.
It was when communication wasn’t that great. I played the demos to Bernie Finkelstein, who owned True North in Toronto. And he was interested and came to a gig. I thought that his interest might lead to a deal. He brought a lot of people to that gig of mine. I thought they didn’t like it.
Years later when we met, I asked “Was there something wrong?” And he said, “Oh, there was nothing wrong. We just thought we were getting Tim Hardin, but we got Tim Buckley instead.”
Artists are very poor manipulators of their own careers. I didn’t have a manager then. I got the signals crossed and decided that I need to leave Toronto in order to get a deal.
Did you form The Winkies as an outlet for your tracks?
It was a conceptual change in what I was doing and the way I was doing it. In Toronto, I was playing in some bands to make a living, I played on electric guitar, as a backing musician. But I started writing songs. It was very much in the folk mold, which is what I grew up in.
I couldn’t get a record deal in Canada and I needed to move to go to a bigger place. And New York wasn’t that. There was nothing going on in New York. I did have an audition with Fantasy Records in Berkeley, California. They wanted me to move there but I’d already got all the musicians I needed in Toronto, and I didn’t fancy living in a place that was famous for being full of hippies, basically. I mean, it sounds a bit silly now, but, you know, L.A.
I said, how about if I live Toronto and it just sort of fell apart. But the guy who introduced me to Fantasy Records was an English PR guy, and he moved back to London to take up his post in PR at Island Records. And he brought the tape and played it to Muff Winwood at Island.
And they kind of liked it. Well, they didn’t like it enough to fly me over and put the band together. But they said I could use the studios in Basing Street. But the conceptual thing was I really wanted to play rock and roll and get out of the folk scene. I mean, there’s so many great writers from Tom Rush to Phil Ochs, you know, the idols of my youth.
And there were people like John Prine coming up, James Taylor. And it seemed very crowded. Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, massive, massive people. I just thought, “I just feel it inside of me. I want to play in a rock band and play rock music.” And when I got to London, it was just exploding. The pub rock scene was happening.
So I got into that and as a result of pub rock bands that I jammed with Ducks Deluxe in the early autumn of 73. And Paul Kennerley, who was the manager of The Winkies, came up and approached me to say “That was pretty good. Would you like to be in a rock and roll band?” I said “Yes, that’s that’s why I’m here!”
So I didn’t put The Winkies together. My Bass player Brian Turrington and I joined Guy Humphrys and Mick Desmarais and we had a manager Paul Kennerley who got us lots of gigs.
Was it through Island Records that you connected with Brian Eno?
No. It was just a coincidence. He had finished Here Come The Warm Jets. He wanted to have a band because he’d had a band for the album and that had worked really well. But he couldn’t use Robert Fripp and a couple of the other players who were in other bands. He wanted a band of his own to record and to tour with. So he famously went looking for a band on the pub rock circuit . We heard that he’d approached Dr. Feelgood because they were happening at the time, The Winkies and maybe a couple of others, maybe Brinsley Schwarz.
He saw all the bands that were around, and came to one of our gigs. And then he came back stage and we met him and we worked out a deal that was beneficial to both of us.
Our manager, Paul, insisted that it would be called Eno and the Winkies we do our own support set. We weren’t giving up our career as The Winkies. And Brian, he’s a fantastic person and had absolutely no problem with that. He understood that he was going to move on and do whatever he wanted to do. And so we did a set as The Winkies, and then we changed our clothes and went on with him.
But that tour was a short one as Brian had a collapsed lung.
Yeah, that’s right. The last time I saw him on that tour was when we dropped him off at his house that night in Maida Vale. Accompanied by three young women that he didn’t know before the gig.
It was like Monday, the tour is cancelled. I went, “Wait a minute. On Saturday night, he was very happily going in his flat in Maida Vale with three girls.” And then the next time I saw him he was in the hospital.
So after you recorded an album with The Winkies you went back to New York?
Yeah. We went into a studio with Eno, he produced a single “Last Chance” . It was just that Chrysalis didn’t like it very much, and didn’t like it at all. And so, it never got released and they didn’t like him as a producer for us. Which is..
Staggering.
Yes, because it represented us. In fact, I put it out on my own label that I started, six years ago. It’s of it’s time, but we really liked it. I didn’t even hear it after we finished it for about three years until my own A&R gave me a copy, here’s “Last Chance”.
We finally got into the studio with Guy Stevens but the band broke up on the day of release.
Chrysalis put me in the studio a couple of times and released one solo single “Dem Eyes”, produced by Guy Stevens which is also on the compilation. So the early works are represented. We decided the three CD anthology was a good idea. It’s three solo albums and all of the tracks around it. “Song Untitled” is the oldest one.
The Winkies broke up on February 14th, 1975. And “Dem Eyes” was released as a single in the spring. I thought it was just exactly what I wanted to do. The Winkies had musical limitations, I was writing songs that weren’t Winkie songs.
It got airplay on John Peel and Radio Luxmbourg. But in those days, English companies were not really in it for the long haul. All the big English record companies were launched on the basis of having a huge hit to start, like Island with My Boy Lollipop.
So I didn’t have a hit with my first solo single and they never released another one. And that’s when I decided to go to New York because of the scene there. The pub rock scene died and nothing took its place until a couple of years later.
I used to go to New York all the time from Montreal before I went there in 1975, I used to get the Village Voice. By 1975 this punk thing was happening. And I just thought, “Well, that sounds interesting.” There was nothing going on in England, the three day week was happening, Chrysalis wouldn’t put out my records. And I thought, “I’ll just I’ll just head on over there. And I did.”
The pub rock scene when I got into London was fantastic. It was friendly and you met musicians. You had opportunities to play on the night. And it was not quite the same in New York because it’s a much tougher environment. But in the end, you know, I could play at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs and then I recorded “Night Out”, which was on the Max’s Kansas City Volume 2 album.
That did well on radio and could have opened some doors. There were other tracks that I recorded in New York during that period of time. John Tiven on his fledgling label, got me to do a couple of Phil Spector tracks for ‘Bionic Gold’ one which is on the anthology as well.
I also got my first cover version when I was in New York, actually via Chrysalis. It was a Chrysalis artist named Nick Gilder. And he recorded something that was a demo that I’d done in London. It was a hit in Canada. So that was good. And a lot of things were going on. And then I got a call from my A&R man, Chris Briggs, at Chrysalis in London.
He rang me up and said, “Hey, listen, you know, come back. You’ve got a record company. And what you’re really into is happening. Punk is happening. I’ll send you a plane ticket. You know, we’ll put you in a studio. Dave Cochran’s here, he plays bass and he’s great.” That seemed a good idea.
New York can be very tough. Like all of America it is very competitive. And hey a free ticket back to London, y’know. And then things took off again.
Was that when you linked up with Mick Ronson?
Correct. So I got back to London just at the end of 76 and into 77. I met a great drummer, Laurie Jellyman. Me, Dave and Laurie were a three piece.
Then we added Maggi Ronson on backing vocals. So when Mick finished the Rolling Thunder review, he got back to town and said to Maggie. “What’s going on in London?” She said, I’m playing with Phil Rambow. He’s really good.” And so she said “Do you mind if our Michael comes to a rehearsal? I was like “Are you kidding?
Maggi said, “I think he might show up.” And he did. And I was expecting him to, come over with a pal and just like, listen. He opened the door, walked in with his guitar case and a Mesa Boogie amp. And I was like, taken aback. I said “Do you want to listen to some tracks before you play?” He said “Nah. fuck that. Let’s play. Plug it in and play.” And he did. And that was it. And so we had a fantastic result, which I have on tape. One of the rehearsal tapes. But it’s really, really rough sound. So it’s not on the anthology.
Was it three demos that you recorded with Mick?
We did four. Those weren’t rehearsals. Mick started playing. We started doing gigs. A lot of people came to those, basically everybody in town. Then we went into the studio. Chris Thomas was the producer and Bill Price was the engineer. That team, Chris and Bill at Wessex Studios had recorded The Sex Pistols.
It was a great set up and the four tracks that we did were fantastic. Chrysalis didn’t like it.
Again..
This was actually me. This is the way I sounded now. It’s really rocky. It’s like a rock band, you know? And they were just not interested.
Which in the end, it caused Chris Briggs to leave Chrysalis and say, listen, “I’ll get you a new deal.” He went to EMI. But because of the way these things go, it took a really long time for that to happen.
So that eventually led to the release of your Shooting Gallery album.
Yes, that’s right. But, when you’re young and active and going forward, timing is really crucial. If things are happening and then they stop happening, it’s kind of hard to get them going again. It’s a year and a half later and things move on. Yeah. So that’s kind of what happened to Shooting Gallery.
I finally got to have a record company who believed in me and got good managers involved. I delivered Shooting Gallery, which was as perfect as I could possibly make it. The whole team was behind me, Chris Briggs, brought me in. Ramon Lopez, the managing director, invited me into his office and said “I think this is a fantastic album. One of the tracks “Privilege”, I think is a classic.” And on Monday, afterwards they all left and went to Phonogram. And that became a fantastic label. But I was left behind with a two album deal at EMI with no one that I knew to push my cause.
Would you say that Mick Ronson pushed your cause when he was producing Ellen Foley?
100%. Mick was an amazing man. He was incredibly honest, funny and very mild mannered. It kind of worked against the idea of how incredibly talented he was. Just look at his work on Lou Reed’s Transformer. All the creative work, the string arrangements, it was Mick and he gets the smallest mention on the album.
So, yes, in his own way. Mick joined my band because he liked my songs and, you know, liked playing. And so when he gets another project (Hunter Ronson), I can’t remember exactly what happened. Maggi might have said, Mick’s producing and if you’re in New York. And I was, I was traveling around a bit. He invited me round to his flat or Ellen’s. He went into CBS because Ellen didn’t write. And they wanted him and Ian Hunter to produce. They said he said, “Well, we need to listen to some contemporary music. Ellen’s been with Meatloaf. She doesn’t really know what’s going on. Give me five hundred dollars so I can go and buy some records.” And that was the amount. So he said we went down to Sam, the Record Man, and bought five hundred dollars worth of albums. Which bought a lot of albums back then.
So I went to meet Ellen and there were albums everywhere. And Mick said “Play Ellen some of your songs.” So obviously at least I played her “Night Out” and “Young Lust”. Both of those were on the album with “Night Out” being the title track.
I was still living in London then and carrying on without Mick. Everything had to be sort of reorganised. It was weird. But, you know, the album came out and that was a good thing. And it helped things along..
I assume in that period you were writing songs and ultimately producing your next album, Jungle Law.
Jungle Law was in the 80s and things had changed. I was stuck with a whole bunch of people at EMI, in a sort of contractual obligation and a different setup, the team that I had signed with disappeared.
But I still had all the songs and I wanted to make some experimental music and wanted to move on with the times of the 80s. With my record advance, I got a guitar-synthesizer and all kinds of stuff and wanted to change up the sound. And not all of the experimentation was successful. And at some point I’m going to release the demos for Jungle Law, which in some instance are better than some of the tracks that were on it.
I wanted to work with Laurie Latham, who had engineered Shooting Gallery and Chris Thomas was still in my camp. He still believed in me. And we did two tracks with Chris. But his career was taking off and the idea of doing a whole album with Chris wasn’t really available. We did “Love is a Hard Time” and “Don’t Come Crying to Me”. And when we finished them and he mixed them at Air, he said, “there are your two singles”.
That was fine. I didn’t expect to work full time with Chris. I wanted to work with Laurie anyway because he was young and more experimental. EMI put out “A Star (In Her Own Right)” as a single as well as I think “Jungle Law” You can’t really see your life objectively, you just feel it.
General, it was about a breakup with my girlfriend. I was pretty depressed most of the time anyway. And then at the end, it was like Jungle Law, it’s not really happening there. Are they buying ads, the singles came out and got a little bit of airplay but they weren’t hits. So you kind of go, “I don’t know what it is, but something’s not right.”
Other things were right. I’d met Kirsty MacColl just when I signed to EMI. We co-wrote “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” and that was a hit for her.
Everything had moved along. I’m a North American, country loving western kind of music guy. The New Romantics wasn’t my scene. I thought, “Well, I’ve had a couple of opportunities to be successful as a recording artist and an artist, you know, talking to young people, getting an audience. This is not happening.” I had enough success to get a publishing deal from Warner Brothers. And I got married. I was happy with the idea of writing songs and recording and getting cover versions and making a living that way. Developing a family and having a more sedate life. I wasn’t selling huge volumes so I had to change my life.
How did you meet Kirsty?
I met her when she just signed to Stiff Records and she hadn’t had any hits yet. She was like: “I used to be in The Drug Addix and now have a solo deal”.
She was 18, absolutely gorgeous, full of talent and wit. And that was obvious. Writing “Chip Shop” had more to do with the fact that she was madly in love with my PR man, Glen. I hadn’t gotten my record advance and I was sleeping on the floor in this front room. The PR man was on the road all the time with all the Stiff Records acts.
He introduced me to her to a party and she was like, “Who are you?” He turned and said “This Philip Rambow, he’s signed to EMI and used to be in The Winkies.” She’s like, “I don’t know.” And then he said “You should just get together and write some songs.” She said “I don’t collaborate.” I said “I don’t either.”
She was sort of forced into it. She would do anything that Glenn said to be nice. So she said “Well, all right. We can do it. Have you got a studio?” I said no, I said I lived in Glenn’s flat. She said “Really? You’re living with Glenn? So if you give me your phone number and I rang is that Glenn’s number?”
I said “Yeah.” so she’s like “OK.” Kirsty had a penchant for picking the wrong guys that would make great records or great songs. Glenn’s flat was in Shepherd’s Bush. She wrote, “You Broke My Heart in 17 places and Shepherds Bush is One of Them” of them. Kirsty and I were friends for a long time and wrote a couple of songs. “Still Life” is another great song that she was inspired her to write. And there were a couple of others.
And also at the end of the 70s and the 80s when I was concentrating on songwriting in order to keep my hand in I formed what you call a pickup band called the Tex Pistols. That was with Pete Thomas and Paul Riley from Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers – rhythm section, and Martin Belmont. We had occasional pedal steel players and Bob Loveday on fiddle. That’s a pretty good unit. We recorded with Kirsty and we did some TV and radio performances and some film things. We were pals and had kids at the same time.
Kirsty was much more famous, but still under appreciated. If you walk around the street today and talk to people and say, “Have you ever heard of Kirsty MacColl to one hundred people, you might get two or three. But if you go to a hundred people and say “Have you heard the girl who sings “Fairytale of New York”?” it will be one hundred percent.
She had married Steve Lillywhite, the great record producer, and because of his connection, she once was at Barbara Streisand’s house for a party. She was a shy person. Once you got to know her she’d take charge, but at Barbra Streisand’s house she kept herself to herself. Barbra Streisand came up to her and said “I know who you are. I love your work.” She was like “Barbara Streisand came up to me.”
So it’s only been in recent years where you’ve been recording again.
I had some health issues in the middle of the millennium, the last 20 years. And then thinking about mortality focused my mind on trying to spend more time playing music. And I’ve managed to do that more and more to the point where there was a Winkies revival in 2006.
But then I started writing again. Basically, it was another good thing to happen from having known Mick Ronson. Maggi told me that there was going to be a RonsonFest. Tom Wilcox was curating weekends at London’s ICA. There’s a BlondieFest, Roxy Fest, IggyFest. And for the Ronson Fest, Maggi said, “Come along and tell some stories about Mick.” Which I did. And Tom who organised it, who had never heard of me ever before, said, “Come on and do the Blondie fest and you can play in the bar and tell some stories about what it was like to be in New York during this during the heyday. And then he continued with that and got me to play support for Holy Holy. In the dress rehearsal I met Malcolm Doherty who was singing. He turned out to be a big fan of Eno & The Winkies. We became great friends and he inspired me to be involved in a songwriting group, which I did. A massive amount of songs flowed from that.
I assume that the plan is to keep writing and recording and hopefully live shows when we can safely escape our homes.
Hopefully. I had quite a few live shows booked but it turns out another false start. My wife said “It’s happened again. All good these reviews for the new album and you have got all these gigs lined up, and now they’re all cancelled” Let’s see. We lived through those problems in the past and hopefully we’ll live through these for who knows how long. I can’t complain.
It’s been great to hear from you. I really enjoyed listening to The Rebel Kind. Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Philip Rambow: The Rebel Kind – Anthology 1972-2020, 3CD, is released on 5 June 2020 and is available to pre-order from Cherry Red.
